"They'll know we're coming now. We can't sneak attack again."
"No way, Urameshi! I can get you in anywhere. Name a place. I'll open the portal. They'll never predict—"
"Enough drivel, fool."
Kalanie hesitated in the temple's back hallway. She'd wanted to find a quiet room, somewhere to ride out the storm raging outside. Instead, it seemed she'd stumbled on a war meeting.
The door of the room the detectives had huddled in was propped open, a green jacket balled on the floor caught in the jamb. Through the gap, she spotted a map hung on the wall. Pins were stuck across its surface. She recognized the locations instantly—the Forest of Fools, the Wailing Waters, the Shattered Sands. Her breath caught in her teeth, she stepped closer, peering through the gap.
A handful of blue tacks peppered the map, no more than half a dozen. In the capitals of the once great territories, atop the Haunted Hills, and deep in the murkiest reaches of the Forest of Fools. The only Demon World holdouts against the minions of the Fall.
In contrast, red pins dominated the terrain. There were those she expected—cities and villages she'd named when the detectives interrogated her—but many others, too. Places she never would have dreamed would give in to the likes of him.
"You know, you're a shit spy."
She startled, jerking away from the door when Yusuke shoved his face into the crack. He stuck out his tongue, but tugged the door open and gestured her inside. "Come on. Enough standing around. You know more than any of us. Get in here and tell us something."
Hesitant, knowing she might be overstepping her bounds, she crossed the threshold. The room was no better furnished than her own, but as Urameshi shoved her to the bed, she spotted a black cloak hanging in the closet and a spare scabbard propped in the corner. The Jaganshi's bedroom.
It had been four days since he'd announced his changed opinion of her—and in turn, four days since she'd seen him in the trees beyond her room watching her sleep with hawk-like intensity. Perhaps he'd actually slept in his own bed.
That would make one of them.
Settling uneasily onto the mattress, she surveyed their map. "I didn't realize so many places had fallen."
"They killed Enki yesterday," Yusuke said, glaring at a red pin stuck in the palace the demon king had once ruled from. "Can't believe the damn bastard lost."
Kuwabara stuck out a finger. "Stop moping. He'd stopped responding to our messages anyway. We don't need him."
"Not true, Kuwabara." Kurama was pensive, even by his usual standards. No trace of the gentle smile she'd grown used to clung about his lips. "We need every number we can get. Every ally. No matter how tenuous the connection. If we're to seal off the worlds, we need help on both sides of the barrier."
"Seal off the worlds?" The question fell from her lips unbidden. A panic she hadn't intended tinged the words, and Kurama looked to her with curious eyes. Try though she might, she couldn't find an excuse to cover her slip.
To return the barrier could mean only one thing: the destruction of Project Shell.
"I don't think that's possible," she said, nearly breathless.
Kurama's brow creased. "We believe you're wrong. You see, Hiei and I did not go to the Wailing Waters simply to fight Masaru's puppets. We went for these." He pulled a folder off the top of the Jaganshi's bureau and handed it to her. "Project Shell is a machine, and machines can malfunction. Be taken offline. Terminated. Once it is, we have every reason to believe the barrier will return."
Numb, barely managing to go through the motions, Kalanie thumbed through the pages. Schematics. Diagrams. Operation manuals. Strings of code. Everything. They had everything.
But not the piece that mattered to her.
She needed to leave this place, to get back to Nomi. Now. There could be no more delay. She had only six days to get to the meeting place. Then she could make the deal. She'd do whatever they wanted. Anything if she could get him back.
She shoved off the bed. "I can't do this. Help you. Not if you're going to destroy Project Shell."
"The hell?" Yusuke whirled on her, his hands clenching into fists. "That damn machine destroyed the world. Scratch that, it destroyed the worlds. Because it isn't just Human World they jacked up. Yeah, we're screwed here, but Demon World is just as fucked. It needs to be destroyed—"
"I'm sorry. I can't."
"Why?" The Jaganshi had stepped forward, at last leaving the corner where he'd hunkered against the wall.
How to explain?
She'd wanted to avoid the truth, to keep this biggest of secrets hers forever, but maybe that wasn't possible. Maybe in trying to protect him, she was doing Nomi a disservice, because if she didn't escape this shrine, she'd have failed him.
Which meant it was time to lay her cards on the table. Best she could, at least.
"They have my brother."
It was as though the air had been sucked from the room. No one moved. No one breathed. There was only stillness, the truth hanging in the spaces between her heartbeats, drumming along with her pulse.
They had Nomi. Masaru and whatever monster he worked for, the unnamed fiend she'd never met. Some secrets had been kept even from her.
"For years," she said when she couldn't handle the silence any longer. "As long as Masaru had me. And terminating Project Shell… It's not just killing a machine. You'd kill him, too."
Yusuke whistled, low and quiet. "Well damn. Your whole sulky, brooding deal always smacked of Hiei, but this… Damn. Seriously."
She had no idea what that meant. Judging by Kuwabara's bewildered expression, neither did he. But the Jaganshi had stiffened, his demon energy sparking across his skin as he glared the detective down. "Shut up."
Kurama held up a hand, silencing them all. "Why would your brother die? It's a machine, Kalanie. We wouldn't kill him, not if we didn't have to. Even if Masaru pits him against us. I promise you that. "
He didn't understand.
"He's not under the Sovereign Binds. He won't be fighting you." Iron writhed across her arms. It crept higher, sliding over her shoulders, skimming up her neck—a protective shield ensconcing her against this final truth. "Destroying Project Shell would be destroying him. Literally. Because he's it. He's the Shell."
In the ensuing quiet, all she could think of was Nomi—of the last time she'd seen him, hooked into that hellish machine, wired and intubated until she could hardly recognize him. And she'd been helpless—powerless—to protect him. He hadn't let her. Instead, he'd made her smile. Wave. Walk away from her brother without so much as looking back.
On the darkest nights, she still heard Nomi sobbing.
The detectives called a meeting.
Every last one of their inner circle appeared, flooding into the shrine, their shoulders splattered with rain. Seated at the kitchen table, Kalanie watched them file down the hall.
All these souls she hardly knew, intending to pass judgment on Nomi's life, to decide whether she deserved the chance to save him. Despite all their claims of trusting her, their assurances that keeping her within the barrier was as much to keep her from him as it was to protect themselves, reality remained unchanged—she was still their prisoner.
She'd laid out the rest of the pieces for the men. Not about Nomi's role in Project Shell—the compulsions guarding the secrets she knew were too strong for that—but about the meeting she was meant to have in just six short days.
Mazou—the demon who'd contacted her a week before Kalanie abandoned the human city in favor of the mountains—had been an old friend. From before. Before he took her. Before the Fall. Kalanie hadn't seen her in years, until one day she walked into a Human World bar—ransacked and controlled by low-strength scum—and suddenly Mazou had been there.
She'd ushered Kalanie into a booth and in halting whispers offered her an opportunity she'd never expected to surface. One she wasn't ready for. Not then.
Mazou's employer was planning a heist of a vault in Gandara. They needed four months to get together the necessary demons, and they wanted Kalanie to be part of their team. Her ability to manipulate iron would let her melt through any vault in the three worlds—or so Mazou seemed convinced.
In exchange, they'd get her into the stronghold housing Project Shell.
Mazou knew Nomi. He'd practically been her little brother, too. Hearing her say his name had broken Kalanie. It had been so long. She'd nearly forgotten what it sounded like said aloud.
But it had been little more than days since she'd escaped him. The thought of reentering Demon World, let along attempting to breach one of their strongholds had been more than her shattered mind could handle. She'd barely begun to find the pieces of herself again.
So she'd turned them down.
Mazou had insisted she not make her final decision yet. She set a deadline, a day for them to meet in the abandoned train station at the base of these mountains. Then she'd disappeared, stalking into the night as if she'd been little more than a dream.
For a while, Kalanie convinced herself Mazou was exactly that—a figment of her ravaged, ruined mind. But she wasn't, and the opportunity she presented was one Kalanie couldn't turn down. No matter how certain her likelihood of failure.
Outside, thunder cracked. A streak of lightning forked past the window, turned green by the distant barrier's shimmering blue energy.
Kalanie fiddled with her candlestick. It was little more than a rusted rod now, all the details flaked away after days clutched in her hungry grip. A flash of black in the corner of her vision stilled her hands.
"Does this brother of yours have a name?"
"Shouldn't you be busy plotting my fate?"
The Jaganshi yanked back the chair to her left, its legs squealing against the floor. He slouched into it and crossed his arms over his chest. "I already know what they're going to decide."
"Oh, do you?"
"What's his name? If he exists, surely he has a name."
"Listen, Jaganshi—"
"Hn. Hiei."
His tone was flat and calm. Emotionless. Yet there was something in it she couldn't put a name to, something that drew her eyes to his.
"Hiei," she said slowly, testing its feel on her tongue. It was bizarre to call him by no title. This demon she'd been coerced to hate for six long years.
His primary objective in the months before the Fall was the dissemination of information throughout Alaric, sewing rumors amongst the common apparitions living near the border between worlds, a job made immensely more difficult by the border patrol the Jaganshi—Hiei—commanded. He had fantasized of killing the fire demon endlessly. Or better yet, seizing his mind as he had seized Kalanie's.
"He hated you," she said after a moment. "More than Mukuro. More than Yusuke or Yomi. The patrols you led made his—our—task nearly impossible." She glanced sidelong at him, taking in the angles of his face, the handsome cut of his jaw, the strong planes of his cheeks. "You caught one of his puppets once. Xien. He was an old fool, half-senile, even before he took his mind. One day, Xien left for his assignment, same as any morning. Two weeks later, I watched you execute him on a public stage. For weeks, I dreamed it was me you killed instead. I dreamed I was the one who'd been set free."
Hiei remained silent. Something had clouded his eyes, but like the emotion that had hidden in his voice, she could put no name to it. Pity? Disgust? Or, dare she think it, understanding?
Now that she'd started talking, it seemed she couldn't stop. "That was before they took—" A compulsion choked Nomi's name into silence. She snarled and started again. "That was before they took my brother. Separated us. I'd thought if I were dead, he'd have no use for him. I never realized they planned for him to be the Shell."
Hiei's fingers flexed into a fist. Relaxed. Then flexed again. "You've still not said his name."
"I can't. He forbade me to."
"To speak it?"
Wordlessly, she nodded.
In three powerful strides, Hiei crossed to the counter. He yanked open a door and produced a pen and pad of paper. Returning to his seat, he slapped the notepad down in front of her and uncapped the pen.
She needed no instruction. His intent was clear.
Her hand trembled as she set the ballpoint to the paper. Her scrawl was shaky, well out of practice, but legible nonetheless.
"Nomi," Hiei read, saying it in much the same way she'd said his name, as if testing out the fit.
Her heartbeat drummed in her temples, throbbed in her chest. Without thinking, she grabbed his wrist and urged, "Say it again."
His gaze flitted up to hers. He didn't look away as he said it. "Nomi."
It was music to her ears—that sound more like home than anything she'd felt in years. A single, desperate sob worked its way into her throat, tumbled from her lips.
She was still holding his wrist, his flesh hot against hers, and he'd yet to release her gaze. Whatever this was, this understanding passing between them—because she knew now that the emotion in his eyes was understanding—rattled her to her core.
She sucked down a ragged breath. "What Yusuke said earlier, comparing us… You have… a sibling?"
He dragged the paper to him. Her fingers still gripped his wrist as he wrote a name of his own. She felt every muscle flex beneath her touch, every tendon pull and release. She focused on the sensation, needing something to cling to, something to help hold her pieces together.
Nothing would have prepared her for the name he'd written.
Yukina.
"What? That's not possible—"
"Quiet." A command, but a gentle one. More habitual than forceful.
But she didn't understand. None of the files she'd read had referenced a connection between him and the ice apparition. If he had known, she would have, too. How could something like this have remained secret?
"She doesn't know," Hiei said. "She never will. Nor will the fool."
The fool meaning Kuwabara. Which explained his confusion early.
And suddenly other pieces fit together, too. Why Hiei hadn't struck her down after she broke the spirit cuffs. She'd saved Yukina. If someone saved Nomi now, she'd forgive them for nearly anything.
A sudden burst of voices down the hall shattered the stillness between them. Hiei jerked his arm from her grip and seized the pad of paper. It went up in smoke in his fist. By the time Yusuke marched into the kitchen, it was little more than ash spilling from his fingers.
The cinders fluttered to the floor like so much nothing.
But when she met Hiei's gaze once more, she knew something had changed. And she could still hear it—Nomi's name on his tongue, in her ears. Her reminder. Her rock to hold on to.
Because she wouldn't stop fighting for him.
Not ever.
AN: How's that for answers? I hope that clears up a lot about who Nomi is and his role in everything. The exchange between Kalanie and Hiei at the end actually caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting them to bond quite so thoroughly, but at the same time, as soon as I started writing it, I knew this was the right moment for it happen. With any luck, y'all will feel the same! (I know Hiei doesn't like to reveal Yukina, but it feels like he would do so here, especially in light of the truth about Nomi.)
So I've been rewatching the anime, and I'm nearly done now (which makes me so unbearably sad!), and as a result, I've realized all the way my memory of YYH's ending was faulty. So I know that some pieces of this fic are AU. If I were to start over again, I'd try to fix them, but I'm not going to do that. Some pieces that I know may be off: the gang's roles in Demon World post-show, the way Kuwabara uses his dimension sword (I need to alter this for my plot, so I'm keeping it, even if it's wrong), and demons (especially Kalanie) having a heartbeat. I hope you can forgive those little manipulations of canon!