"So I'm to remain here—like some powerless nuisance—while you all gallivant off to save the worlds?"
Kalanie stood in the cramped living room where the detectives had once questioned her, her fingers curled like claws into the upholstery of an armchair. A dull headache pounded inside her skull, drumming like a second heartbeat. It had shadowed her ever since she'd woken up, haunting her through her debriefing with Kurama, nearly ruining her ability to shovel down a small breakfast, and now stalking her here.
Across from her, Yusuke lounged on one of the battered couches, his legs crossed at the ankle, an arm thrown over his eyes as if to block out the light. "Sounds about right."
"I will not—"
"Actually, I'm pretty sure you will. See, we need people here. Kuwabara's staying. And Genkai. You can help them. Make sure the shrine stays standing while we're gone."
"They're humans."
Yusuke shifted his arm, cracking one dark eye open. "So?"
"Not a single demon of worth will remain behind except me." She leaned forward, the armchair's backing jabbing into her ribcage. "You're treating me like a liability."
"Well… I mean, you sort of are." At her answering snarl, he flapped a hand wildly, as if trying to shoo away his own words. "All I'm saying is that Masaru's probably going to be there, right? You've said yourself a hundred times—and I mean, seriously, at least a hundred—that if he gets near you, you're a lost cause."
True, in theory. Her eyes fluttered shut, and for a perilous moment, she was back in Mazou's grip, flickering between the abandoned train station and his newfound hideout. The armchair's upholstery tore beneath her fingers as she whispered, "He's here. In Human World."
That, at last, drew Yusuke's full attention. He struggled upright. "Come again?"
"I saw him. When Mazou attempted to teleport me. He was waiting on the other end."
"And he was here? How the heck could you know that?"
"The room, the furniture… They were from Human World. I've no doubt."
Yusuke rubbed the back of his neck. A yawn burst from his lips. "I'm way too damn tired for this shit," he muttered. Then more loudly, he added, "Look, that doesn't change anything. Maybe he was in Human World two days ago, but do you really think he'll hang around here when he could be in Demon World helping to move your brother? Because I don't." He lurched to his feet and strode past her, pausing in the doorway. "We can't risk messing this up. Not for your pride. Sorry."
She stared after his retreating back, frustration coiling in her gut. The plan Kurama had detailed to her that morning was nothing like what she'd anticipated. She'd expected all out war. A battle to end all of this. A killing of every puppeteer employed by Project Shell's creators.
After all, when she'd woken, she'd felt the presence of Koenma, the demigod standing just feet outside her room, embroiled in the strategy talks that had consumed the shrine for hours. It had seemed a given that with him would come the full might of Spirit World. The Spirit Defense Force. A second army to bring behind Yusuke's own.
Except that seemed not to be the case.
Instead, they intended a singular, planned strike. Directly at the heart of the transport moving Nomi. The how of it all remained nebulous, too dependent on details they didn't yet know for it to be fully finalized, and they had only twelve days to get that information. Hardly any time at all.
It seemed so weak. Such a cowed, pathetic response. She understood needing to strike down the leaders of Project Shell and certainly there was nothing more important than getting to Nomi, but with their combined strengths, the detectives and SDF could easily wipe out hundreds of lower class demons.
It would be so easy. So simple. Because as much as it pained her to admit, there was no denying that most puppets were weak. Rarely breaching past C Class power levels. Without iron, she was far weaker even than that. And even at her most powerful, when the iron around her was nearly limitless, she barely scraped the middle of B Class.
The puppeteers' powers were limited, and the greater the strength of their targets, the harder it was for a compulsion to take hold. If she had to guess, he might manage to control a demon of Hiei or Kurama's strength, but only if he had no other puppets and only for a time, not indefinitely like he could her.
All of which made their plan all the more vexing.
Unless she was missing something.
With that thought in mind, she abandoned the living room and stalked deeper into the temple. In its back hallway, she stopped and rapped her knuckles against a door. No one answered. She knocked again. "I know you're in there. I can feel you."
The door jerked open.
Hiei stood on the threshold, shirtless, a belt dangling from one hand. Bandages wrapped around his right arm, gloving him from fingertips to elbow. "What do you want?"
Her gaze flicked to the map tacked upon the far wall. "Information. Explanations."
"Hn. I've no time. The fox and I are heading to Demon World. Ask someone else."
"No." She pushed past him, so sudden and swift he didn't have time to fend her off. His room remained unchanged from the last time she'd been here. Empty. Devoid of any personal items. The only difference this time was the rumpled blanket strewn at the foot of his bed.
He growled.
The sound sent a shiver twisting down her spine.
"Twenty minutes. That's all I need." She drew to a halt at the map, tracking the pins across its surface, trying to fit together the pieces of a puzzle she'd only just begun to grasp. "I imagine your mission can wait that long."
The door rattled closed. A moment later, she felt his blazing heat at her side, warming her arm, sinking into the iron gloving her hand. "Ask your damn questions."
"I have… many." She crossed her arms about her middle, pinching her fingers into her hipbones. "I know much of him and of Project Shell, but very little else. The big picture of the Fall escapes me."
"Kurama explained that to you days ago—or were you not listening?"
"He explained in generalities. What happened to Human World and your allies in Demon World. He didn't explain how it came about. Nor why Spirit World has seemingly forsaken us. Nor whom you're fighting. I'd always assumed it was just the puppeteers, but it's not, is it?"
In their first interrogation of her, she'd thought she'd given them so much information they hadn't had before. Regarding Project Shell, she had, but about the rest… She was beginning to see it had been her knowledge that was limited, not theirs. The sheer volume of red pins tacked across Hiei's map seemed evidence of that.
"Hn, no. They are but a piece of the enemy's forces."
Kalanie turned to face him, studying the contours of his chin, the sharp profile of his nose. He stared back, a heat smoldering in his eyes that set her toes curling in her boots.
"And who is that enemy? Who commands him?"
A muscle ticked in Hiei's jaw. His hands balled into fists. "We've heard only rumors. A name that continues to surface—" He cut himself off. "I must start at the beginning. Give me your hand."
Surprise blossomed within her, deepening to outright shock as he seized her fingers in his. The scalding heat of his palm sent fresh shivers down her spine, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. Instead, without a word of explanation, he raised her hand and pressed her fingers squarely against his closed Jagan. Purple light flared beneath his skin, leaking from the Jagan's crease.
"What are you—"
"Quiet."
She felt it then—a hook tugging at her navel, pulling some fractured piece of her soul from her body and into his. For a moment, she tried to fight it, struggling to find the strength to fend him off, but then heat like nothing she'd ever felt enveloped her and acceptance swept in on its wake.
Hiei's voice sounded deep within her mind. –Stop resisting. Watch.–
When the barrier fell, he was with Mukuro. He felt it—they all felt it—when the shield went down. It was an implosion of energy. All that power, the great net that had once divided the Demon and Human Worlds, sucking in on itself until it no longer existed at all.
The void it left in its wake was like a vacuum.
And he let it take him.
The vortex spit him out deep in a human city. Apparitions roved everywhere—some weak, little more than pests, but many stronger, a few he might have even enjoyed pitting himself against. But he left their destruction behind, ignoring the pitiful screams of the humans dying at their claws, drawn on by the need to make sure she had survived.
Guided by instinct, he went to the shrine.
He reached it last of all. The others had been in Human World already. Kurama tending to his mother. Yusuke crafting a nonsense double-life alongside his human woman. The oaf studying for some sort of master degree Hiei could make no sense of.
Even the Spirit World princeling joined them.
But Koenma had no more answers than anyone else. The barrier was gone, and there was no telling why.
The days and weeks and months blurred into each other.
Human World was nothing but rubble, a vast hell pit of human slaves and ragtag psychics. For a time, they'd thought they could hold out. Fight back. Perhaps even secure the human country of Japan.
They were wrong.
Likewise, Spirit World crumbled before the loss of human life. Its gates flooded with more souls than it had ever processed. Not even the great human wars of years past had wrought such a loss of life. Before that crush of souls, Koenma retreated.
Even Demon World fared little better. The territories were falling apart. Alliances between Yusuke, Mukuro, and Yomi wore thin. Enki pulled away, focusing on staving off claims to his title.
Bands of demons began to emerge. They chipped away at the three great territories, claiming land as their own. No common thread seemed to connect them—packs of shapeshifters, tribes of giants, clans of elementals. Others, too. Gangs of mixed breeds and no names.
When exactly the puppets first appeared, he couldn't be sure. But he became aware of them when the fighting began in earnest along Alaric's eastern border.
He'd been splitting his time between the shrine—protecting Yukina—and Mukuro's stronghold. It had been her orders that took him to the battle at the base of the Mountains of Mourning. That was the first time the disparate groups they'd been fighting had worked as allies. Shapeshifters and giants and elementals alike, all charging to their deaths against the combined might of Hiei and Mukuro's power.
It was the clans' leaders who'd born the Sovereign Binds across their arms, though at that time, he'd no name for the markings.
Soon, similarly united armies emerged throughout Demon World. The rabble that formed their ranks were unmarked, but their leaders all bore that swirling black ink.
It was the beginning of the end.
In the disarray, Mukuro saw opportunity. A chance to widen the sphere of her influence beyond Alaric's failing borders.
Even fourteen months after the barrier went down, no one had come forward to directly claim the Fall. There were rumors. Murmurs about machines hidden deep beneath the crust of the Plains of Peril. Mukuro ran with those mutterings, declared herself the engineer of the Fall.
Hiei knew it for the lie it was. As did his old teammates. But the Demon World rabble believed her claims, rallied to them.
For a time, Alaric grew stronger. Murmurs of the demons losing control of their own bodies had begun to take root, and weak apparitions flocked to a master they thought might protect them.
In her foolishness, Mukuro didn't test her followers. Hidden in their ranks came puppeteers. They were like a sickness, sinking their poisonous claws deep into Alaric's weakened defenses. Blind to it all, Mukuro clung to her new power, to the broadening ranks of her subjects.
By the time Hiei realized how treacherous her mistakes had proven, it was too late to fight back. The minions far outnumbered Mukuro's loyal forces. Her hold on Alaric crumbled until she remained lord of nothing but a single stronghold.
Hiei abandoned her, forsaking his title. Yukina was waiting for him in Human World, though she might not know it.
He wouldn't let her brother die.
Not for Mukuro's folly.
The oaf had played a different game. He'd become Human World's de facto savior, its only hope as the rest of them grew tangled in Demon World's knotted web. Together with Genkai, he led the construction of the barrier around the old woman's temple. Perhaps it was absurd to replace one barrier with another, but it had held. Longer than anything had in Demon World if nothing else.
It wasn't until ten months after the Fall that Urameshi left Hokushin in charge of Tourin, commanding the demon to keep him in the loop of Demon World activity but otherwise trusting him to run Tourin in his stead. Kurama, too, spent nearly a year fighting the war in Demon World, sparing only enough time after the barrier fell to save his human mother before returning to the demon plane.
Through it all, the oaf kept the shrine standing. A safe haven for those who needed it. Yukina. Urameshi's woman. Kuwabara's own sister. The fox's mother.
Freed of Mukuro, Hiei found a more permanent place amongst his old team and the motley crew of allies they'd accrued over the years. He joined their strategy meetings in a way he hadn't previously, and the alliance he'd forged with Kurama years ago reemerged in full. Together with Yusuke, they became Kuwabara's Demon World envoys, traveling beyond the ravaged barrier to collect new allies or fend off incoming attacks.
Above all else, they all agreed the demons marked with that black ink could not be allowed to take hold in Human World.
Nineteen months after the Fall, Hokushin sent word of a large force marching on his fortress in Tourin. He requested help, and Yusuke and Hiei dispatched to assist him.
The battle was a bloody massacre.
For the first time, the enemy ranks seemed composed of the marked. It was not just their leaders darting amongst the fray who wore that nightmarish ink across their skin, but rather the common soldiers, too.
As the dust settled, Hiei stalked the battlefield. Through the acrid smoke, he spotted a fallen foe who had not yet passed on, but as he readied to plunge his katana through the beast's throat and end its miserable life, the apparition had grabbed his cloak. Around the blood upon which it choked, it managed to speak—not a plea for its life, but a name.
Taku.
Hiei had heard it before. Like a whisper through the collective consciousness of demonkind.
Without the barrier between worlds, it was only too easy for the Jagan to find Kurama in Human World. –We've a name. Taku.–
–Can you learn more?–
–I can try.–
Try he did.
Hiei watched Yusuke return to Human World, depleted of energy but content knowing Tourin remained a holdout against the marked armies. In the wake of his departure, Hiei roved deeper into Demon World. He pressed at the minds of all those he encountered, digging into the darkest corners of their souls, scraping at their hidden secrets.
But lowly apparitions were a stupid bunch. He found nothing within them more than the name he already knew.
Taku.
It waited for him in every demon he examined.
After a week, he gave up.
His return to Human World brought new surprises. A captured puppet.
It was only as he'd searched for her mind, his Jagan closing on nothing but emptiness that he realized what he never had before—in all this time fighting them since the Fall, he'd never felt the mind of a marked one. Even his recent scouring of Demon World's darkest pits hadn't brought him into contact with one.
Except it most likely had.
And he'd never realized it.
He wanted her dead. This girl he could not sense. This girl who proclaimed herself a threat as loudly as Hiei did himself.
The others didn't listen.
And so he watched her. He waited for the moment she would turn on them. Only it never came. What he saw instead drew him, as if he were a moth and she the flame—
The memories fractured.
Kalanie returned to herself with a forcefulness she wasn't ready for. Her body felt wrong. Too short. Too lithe. Too cold. It took her a moment to place why, to realize that she'd grown used to the feel of Hiei's skin, the flex of his muscles and smoldering burn of his power.
She staggered backward, her hand slipping from the fire demon's grip, falling away from his Jagan. The back of her knees collided with his bed, and she collapsed onto the mattress.
Beneath her breastbone, her heart pounded erratically. She pressed a hand over it, willing it to slow and recalling the lack of sensation in Hiei's own chest—or rather, its utter slowness, his heartbeat far more infrequent than Kalanie's had ever been. One beat a minute instead of dozens.
"How did you—" Her words trailed off, her muddied thoughts getting away from her tongue, but she shook her head and started again. "I thought you couldn't find my mind. How did you do that?"
"Hn, I opened my mind to yours rather than the other way around."
Her fingers fisted in the fabric of his bedding. Being in his thoughts had felt personal, like some boundary between them had been forever shattered. How was she meant to be only Kalanie now that she had been Hiei, too?
He strode to his dresser, jerked open a drawer, and pulled forth a red tunic. As he tugged it over his head, he asked, "Did you get the answers you needed?"
Yes. And no.
The questions he'd raised in turn far outnumbered any revelations she'd gleaned. About this mysterious Taku. About the detectives' plans. About Spirit World's failings. And, perhaps most pressing of all, what it meant that he felt as drawn to her as she did to him.
"Where are you going?" she asked. When his sharp gaze cut to her, she added, "With Kurama. I thought the transport was still twelve days off."
"It is. But there are details to work out. Whether Taku will be present. What route they might take." He settled his katana's sheath at his hip then turned to her, the sleek muscles of his arms flexing beneath his tanned skin. "We're to search the Plains of Peril. If our guesses are right, we'll be able to spot their intended route. Likely they've begun to prepare it already."
"Will you come back before the fight?"
"Hn. Obviously."
A stillness fell over them. He was watching her, an emotion tucked within his eyes that she could lay no name to, and despite herself, she was staring straight back, unable to look away.
Distractedly, she clawed for a topic. Anything to end the quiet. The question she settled on was perhaps not the wisest. "Why haven't you told Yukina who you are?"
He stiffened, but she did not take the question back.
After all, his love for the ice demon had burned through every frame of his memories, the sole thread that tied them together. Other emotions flickered at their edges—a constant worry about her well-being, annoyance at her affection for Kuwabara, pride in her adept ability to heal—but through it all, persistent and unshakable, ran the sort of love that drove Kalanie forward, the only thing that fueled her will to live anymore.
The love of a sibling.
Why then did Hiei keep the full depth of that bond from himself and Yukina?
His lips twisted into a frown. "She's happier without me. Without the baggage I carry. The crimes writ across my soul."
Kalanie looked down at her hands. Her reflection peered back at her from the surface of her iron gloves. "She told me she's lonely. That she wishes her brother were here."
"There are some burdens that weigh far heavier than others. Missing the brother she has never known is nothing compared to the disgust she would feel if she knew the truth."
A hollow laugh worked free of Kalanie's throat. "What was it that you said to me? That my Binds are my leash and my collar? My chains? At least I did not choose them for myself as you seem to have chosen yours."
He moved too quickly for her to spot. One second, he leaned against his dresser. The next, he stood between her knees, so close his heat warmed her cheeks. He curled a finger beneath her chin, titling her head back until their gazes met. "Break your leash. Perhaps then I'll break mine."
With that, he was gone.
How long she remained in his bed she could not say. Minutes? Hours? For a time, she felt nothing but the burning stretch of flesh where he'd held her chin. Eventually, the heat faded, leaving her with only the smell of him, a musky mix of charcoal and recent rain. It lived in his sheets, in the cloak he had left hanging from his dresser, in every square inch of this most private of his spaces. She breathed it deep into her lungs.
When at last she stood, an ache in her bones told her that his challenge was one she could not lose.
AN: Happy holidays, everyone!
This chapter was a fun one to write. I got to reveal a bit of how the Fall happened for our detective friends, play around a bit in Hiei's mind, and toy with some concepts about telepathy that I think are rather fun. Since Kalanie had never experienced someone else's memories, I thought it was cool to explore how the ramifications of the experience might after her (hence the lingering sense of actually being Hiei). I also touched on the idea that demon heartbeats don't work like humans'. In my version of the world, the stronger the demon, the less their heart beats, which is why Hiei's beats much less than Kalanie's.
I hope you guys enjoyed this one! Thank you to everyone who reviewed! More soon!
(P.s. Apparently there's a limit on chapter title length, so I had to amend this Hamilton line in order to fit. Properly, it should be 'Meddling in the Middle of a Military Mess.')