Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ A Change of Pace ❯ Splash! ( Chapter 1 )

A Change of Pace

Disclaimer: Yu Yu Hakusho and Ranma 1/2 do not belong to me, and I make no money from this fanfiction at all.

A/N: This is a fusion with Ranma ½, and there will most likely be rampant OOC. This will also tie in with my other YYH fic, Junior. Yaoi, weirdness and lots of other crud will be associated with this.

Kuwabara Kazuma was staring up at the sky, thinking about his life.

Well, he'd just been helped there by Yuusuke Urameshi actually, in one of the squabbles, and now all he could do until he got feeling back into his legs was wait and think.

He needed to get stronger, something. Somehow.

He had to beat Urameshi, had to prove himself to the other Reikai Tentai. The tall boy had to- he knew no other way. There was a lot in his way- that was a given. As a human, he was the weakest member of the team, he wasn't always wanted, and he was afraid of being a burden.

Hiei and Kurama had given him some training- and he had gotten stronger for it. Okay- that means he had to get more training. Where? Asking for help from Yuusuke or any of the others would defeat the purpose; he wanted to surprise them.

So- find a place to train, or a person to train him.

This meant research.

This caused the breathless Kazuma to groan faintly. He HATED anything associated with studying...

~*~*~*~*~

Computers had become, for the most part, more user friendly.

This did not mean they liked humans, or anyone who tried to use them. Kuwabara was about to smash the damned possessed heap of junk out of sheer frustration. It had been giving him the blue screen of death every ten minutes, meaning he had to reboot it, over and over again, and that meant he had gotten only a little bit of information in the past five hours of being in the library.

(What Kuwabara DIDN'T know was that his spirit abilities caused hell with the electrical current, even the programming, of any computer he used. He also didn't know about the gremlin that had been setting up all the computers in the area to crash at the slightest nudge. Thus- bad luck for the Mighty Kuwabara.)

His labors were bringing him little fruit. For one thing, libraries really weren't equipped with the kind of esoteric information he wanted, and he really wasn't a very good researcher. A general, irrational nervousness about being called an idiot for being there meant he had little practice, and he was still on the jumpy side. That, plus the dirty looks he was getting from the woman behind the librarian's desk...

"What are you doing here?" asked a quiet voice in his ear, and Kuwabara jumped about three feet out of the tiny chair he'd sat in to whirl around.

The person who had verbally goosed him, all four feet with the extra foot of spiky hair, was Hiei.

"What the hell are YOU doing here? Trying to kill me without the others around?" the orange haired warrior snapped loudly, earning a hissed "quiet" from the librarian.

"Had I wanted you dead, you would be," Hiei stated, calmly. "Your guard was down."

Kuwabara's answer to that was to turn a furious red and implode his face- before Hiei went on.

"There is a mission. Botan found me first, so I came to find you. Why is an idiot in a place of knowledge?"

Kuwabara flushed again, this time out of embarassment. He didn't want to tell Hiei what he had been up to-

"Training grounds?" the fire demon muttered, not changing his tone but raising an eyebrow, and looked at his team mate. "Trying to get stronger?"

All the taller boy could do was growl.

"Why don't you try Jusenkyo?" Hiei finally said, after a pause, face expressionless. He winked out, before Kuwabara could answer him, leaving the confused human behind.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Kazuma Kuwabara stared out over the rather puny looking Training Ground in front of him, vaguely disappointed. All he saw was a bunch of poles stuck in the water.

Okay, so his senses were telling him there was something BAD about this place, but it was nothing he could see, hear, or smell. Not that he could see much in this fog...

Why had Hiei told him about this place? Was he joking with him? Had he been serious?

Hiei really didn't seem to have a sense of humor.

Shrugging, thinking that if he was there, he might as well try it, he leapt up to the closest of the poles.

A shout made Kuwabara wobble on the pole he had perched on. He nearly pitched over, but managed to leap to another pole at the last moment. The shout came again.

"What the hell are you doing here?" someone screamed again, and Kuwabara saw Hiei materialize on one of the poles opposite him. The red head blinked in bewilderment.

"What am I doing here? You told me to come!"

"I didn't think you would be so stupid as to actually-"

"I don't see what the prob-"

This was when fate decided to be its normally bitchy self. The pole beneath Hiei decided to shatter, scattering debris all over the waters below, sending the small demon plunging down. Now- for Hiei, this shouldn't have been a problem. He could have winked out.

What fate decided to screw with that day was Kuwabara- who had seen his teammate fall, and instinctively dived after him, shoving him away from the pool, and hopefully to dry land.

Of course, it didn't work this way.

Kuwabara instead hit the pool Hiei had NOT been going to fall in to- and Hiei, surprised by the rather strong slap, sailed into the nearby murky waters.

~*~*~*~*~

Kuwabara's resurfacing was rather... unspectacular. His head found air, he breathed, choked, sputtered, and dragged himself ashore, knees and elbows slogging through the sandy mud.

Gods, what had happened? He felt like shit. His sixth sense had gone berserk when he'd fallen. Now he had a headache like Koenma had uses his pacifier on his skull.

Looking around, he didn't notice at first that his hands were... smaller. It was in the midst of his musings and mutters about his headache, and all speculation screeched to a halt when he did.

The hand was almost delicate, the bones very fine. Sitting up, Kuwabara looked at her other hand, and it matched the first.

Then, she looked at her chest.

Her scream rocked the valley.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Some time later...

Yukina smiled, watching the birds bathe in puddles on the grounds of Genkai's temple after the recent rain, sipping her tea contentedly. The day had broken clear, though, and a breeze was blowing to balance the humidity. All in all, it was a lovely-

A bedraggled girl, dressed in a blue uniform holding a small black kitten with a star on its forehead appeared-

-Day.

Startled, the ice maiden nearly spilled her tea. This young woman looked oddly familiar, but she couldn't place her, and her bedraggled appearance sparked her sympathy. So did the adorable kitten she held.

"You poor thing!" the demoness nearly shrieked, and immediately stood. She grabbed hold of the smaller girl and started to drag her away, when she was interrupted by a sharp, older voice.

"Who's there?"

"Master Genkai," Yukina answered. "This person just showed up and she looks awful! We have to help her!"

There was a pause as Genkai sized up the newcomer. She was just shorter than Yukina, with curly black hair that was cut short but fell over one of her blue eyes in the front. Her high, sharp cheekbones and slightly rounder chin made her look familiar, for some reason. And her ki... A wry quirk appeared in the old master's mouth.

"I would like to talk to this young one," she said, and the girl's hands tightened, then immediately loosened, around the kitten she was holding. Yukina looked confused.

"If you would please make some tea?" Genkai said, and Yukina nodded, walking away, looking nervously at the old master. Once the ice demon had left the room, Genkai smiled faintly and shook her head.

"What shit have you gotten yourself into this time, Kuwabara?"

The girl's reaction was the last thing that Genkai would have expected from the young man- she burst into nearly hysterical tears.

~*~*~*~*~

"A-an then, I found Hoshi-chan off the shore and I hope Hiei got out alright and didn't turn into a girl too but that would be sort of funny but then I found out that I turn back with hot water but it rained almost the entire trip back and I couldn't stay dry long enough to be a guy at all and that was a month ago and now I feel all weird and achy and I can't seem to stop crying! Its awful master Genkai!" snuffled the boy turned girl, who was drinking the tea that Yukina had made and placed in front of them, before leaving.

Genkai wondered if she should smack the poor confused idiot or just send her for a bath. The elderly warrior had to resist the laughter that was just beneath the surface… Of course, considering that the kitten she was holding so lovingly had the same energy as Hiei was not something she was going to tell. Oh no, this was the most entertainment she'd had in ages.

"Did you find out that there is no cure, other than the temporary reversal of hot water?" Genkai questioned, as Kuwabara's eyes filled up with tears again. The kitten looked rather distressed, like he had seen this far too often lately, and climbed up on to his shoulder to bite the crying human's ear.

"Sorry Hoshi-chan," she sniffled more, petting the kitten. Kuwabara had insisted the kitten be given some ice cream, and was rather sticky now. The little cat looked extremely pleased with himself.

"You realize you could have asked anyone of the Reikai Tentai for training," Genkai stated flatly, still trying to not laugh.

Kuwabara sighed miserably. "I wanted to, you know… Get stronger so I could, you know, work better for the team…"

Genkai pinched the bridge of her nose. "Kuwabara, if you weren't so anal about being a fighter, I'd suggest you try healing. Your awareness and gifts would work well for that and you are going to hit the limits of your strength when it comes to fighting. Kurama can do a lot with his plants but not everything. Besides, nitwit, your going to have to learn how to deal with being a girl. Unless you WANT to tell everyone you were an idiot and went to Jusenkyou and let yourself get cursed."

The look of horror on her face answered that.

"By the way, those aches and emotional upheavals you feel? You're starting your period. Go take a hot bath and we'll try to work things out."

Kuwabara nodded, wiping her nose on her sleeve, shuddering as she remembered how her sister got on her period. That was another thing she didn't want to think about. Heading towards the bathhouse, the kitten leapt down from her shoulder, and trotted towards Genkai. With a quick jump, it leapt into a cup of hot tea-

Leaving a very nude and very annoyed looking Hiei sitting in front of the warrior woman.

"Nice view," Genkai said blandly, then smirked. Hiei realized he was sitting in front of a woman, without clothes, suddenly flitted out of sight to return, now wrapped in one of his usual black robes sans pants and boots. He scowled at the old woman.

"I'm old, not dead, Hiei," she said calmly, continuing to sip her tea. "I take it there is a reason you keep posing as Kuwabara's new pet?"

Hiei's expression turned faintly thoughtful, sipping a fresh cup of tea.

"I didn't know he trusted me enough to take my advice," he finally answered, after a long pause for thought.

"That doesn't explain why you let him pet you like you were actually at cat."

Or why you were purring when he did it, the woman thought, but didn't say. She really didn't want to have a Black Dragon Wave aimed at her.

"He was trying to help me… though I didn't need it. Plus, he… when he found me… I was being chased by something and… nearly eaten. Kuwabara will do just about anything to save a cat," Hiei muttered, his face turning the oddest shade of red.

Genkai did not ask him to elaborate.

"We weren't able to get to hot water for a long time."

Hiei knew the legends of the place, and when he had suggested Jusenkyo, it had been an insult to Kuwabara's intelligence. He was surprised that Kuwabara had actually tried to go there, and a nagging fear of getting Yukina mad at him had made him try to stop the idiot human.

He'd had to depend of Kuwabara to get them out of there- as a kitten he was nearly helpless. What he'd learned was that Kuwabara was really worried about him… It was an odd feeling. It was also pleasant, in an odd way, to be someone or something else for a while…

With a look of disgust, he splashed himself with the now cold tea and climbed out of his robe- the baka ningen had returned, his proper self and with wet hair. He'd come to expect being suddenly scooped up and cuddled to the muscled (or softly rounded, depending on Kuwabara's state of dryness) chest. This time was no exception.

"What do I do now, Genkai?" Kuwabara asked, looking like a whipped puppy.

"I was thinking about that… I would suggest you become Yukina's student in healing. She would give you an excuse to be here, no matter your form- and you need to tell your sister. She would know who you are anyways…"

While this was going on, Hiei had climbed up Kuwabara's shirt again- and was draped around his neck, unconsciously purring… and he fell asleep.

To be continued!