Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ My Downfall ❯ The Complications ( Chapter 12 )

A/N: I don't own Yu Yu Hakusho or any of the characters herein, they are all the property of Yoshihiro Togashi.

 

For those who don't already know, in Japan, Valentine's Day is celebrated by girls giving gifts to boys, and the boys give gifts on White Day (March 14th).

 

Recap: The gang found a clue in demon world, Koenma ordered Botan to find a new spirit detective and Hiei caught Botan dreaming about him

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

Chapter 12: The Complications

 

“Are you guys sure that this is the right way?” Kuwabara asked.

 

“Not entirely,” Kurama confessed.

 

“Where the hell is Hiei?” Yusuke demanded. “He's supposed to be here! He said he was on our side and now he's left us here, we're completely lost, and without him here with us we're as good as trespassing!”

 

“Maybe he's playing both sides,” Kuwabara suggested. “Maybe he only told us he was on our side. Maybe he's reporting everything back to Mukuro, and she's sending out some of her guards to kill us.”

 

“Hiei isn't the sort to back out of an agreement,” Kurama insisted.

 

“I would normally agree, but we're going round in circles here, and I'm starting to have my doubts,” Yusuke muttered.

 

“Hey you guys?” Kuwabara said. “What's Mukuro like?”

 

“Really powerful,” Yusuke answered him. “She could rip you apart in half a second. She kicked Hiei's ass at the last demon world tournament.”

 

“Oh yeah?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“What does she look like?”

 

“Why does that matter?”

 

“Well she's Hiei's girlfriend, right? I'm curious. Is she really short and aggressive too?”

 

“Nah, she's more cool and collected than Hiei. She's taller than him, but I guess that's not exactly hard. And the really funny thing is, she only has one eye, so between them, they still have a total of four eyes!”

 

Kuwabara and Yusuke began laughing and Kurama rolled his eyes.

 

“Mukuro has two eyes,” he pointed out.

 

“Are you sure?” Yusuke asked.

 

“Aw, really?” Kuwabara asked.

 

“Yes, really,” Kurama insisted.

 

“One of them is kinda messed up though,” Yusuke whispered to Kuwabara.

 

“So they both have a messed up eye?” Kuwabara whispered back.

 

“Yeah!”

 

“And she's bigger and stronger than him too? So who do you reckon goes on t-”

 

“Shut-up, here he comes!”

 

The trio all turned to watch as Hiei raced towards them, coming to a halt in front of them in a cloud of dust. As the dust settled Kuwabara's face twisted, his eyes coming to rest on Hiei's hip.

 

“Why do you have an umbrella in your belt?” he asked, pointing at the object in question.

 

“Stay away from that!” Hiei snapped.

 

Yusuke and Kurama exchanged confused looks before both shrugging.

 

“Hiei, we're a little bit lost,” Kurama explained, turning back to Hiei. “Are we perhaps on the wrong side of this river?”

 

Kurama pointed over his shoulder at the wide, deep river of water thundering past them.

 

“Yes,” Hiei replied. “We need to cross it.”

 

“There aren't any bridges,” Yusuke said. “We've walked both directions and can't find one anywhere. We didn't want to make a bridge in case it got us unwanted attention, and we weren't even sure we needed to cross in the first place.”

 

“You do need to cross,” Hiei confirmed.

 

“Maybe we should build a raft,” Kuwabara suggested.

 

“You idiot!” Yusuke scoffed. “Have you seen the speed of the current? You'd be washed away in seconds!”

 

“We can use my boat.”

 

The others all turned to Hiei.

 

“I'll use it first,” he said, approaching the riverbank. “When I get to the other side, I'll throw it back over. I don't think it can hold more than one person, we'll just have to take turns.”

 

The others exchanged confused looks.

 

“Um… You'll do what?” Yusuke asked.

 

“It's quite simple,” Hiei snapped irritably, pulling the umbrella from his belt. “I will use this device in its boat form to travel across the river. When I get to the other side, I'll change it back into this spear form and throw it back over to you all.”

 

“You're gonna… Use an umbrella to get across the river?” Kuwabara asked.

 

“Yes, it's quite simple, fool!” Hiei snorted.

 

“Who are you, Mary Poppins?” Kuwabara asked. “Heh, I guess you do kinda look like her in that coat and those pointy little boots.”

 

“Idiot!” Hiei cursed, snapping open the umbrella.

 

“This… Can't be for real…” Yusuke said slowly. “Can it?”

 

He turned his question to Kurama, who was frowning and showing concern in his eyes, but his mouth was twitching in and out of an amused smirk.

 

“He's not seriously…?” Kuwabara muttered.

 

“Oh dear,” Kurama whispered as Hiei dropped the umbrella into the rapids upside-down and leapt in after it.

 

Kurama, Yusuke and Kuwabara watched with wide eyes as Hiei attempted to drop himself into the underside of the umbrella, and in an instant it snapped beneath his weight, and both Hiei and the umbrella were dragged under the raging current of the river.

 

“Oh… My… God!” Kuwabara cried. “This is the funniest thing I have ever seen!”

 

Yusuke began to smile too, but Kurama began to grow concerned as Hiei and the umbrella took off down the river.

 

“I don't know that Hiei knows how to swim,” he commented.

 

“Seriously?” Yusuke asked.

 

“He'll be fine,” Kuwabara said dismissively. “He's a fire demon, right? And fire is strong against water, right?”

 

“No you idiot!” Yusuke snapped. “It's the other way around! Water puts out fire, remember? Gees, it's no wonder my body nearly got burned that time I was dead! Lucky for me it was Keiko that found me and not you, otherwise I wouldn't even be here right now! And probably neither would you!”

 

“Hey gimme a break, it's still funny, right? He thought the umbrella was a boat!”

 

“Yeah I know, that was awesome!”

 

“Let's talk about this all the time and laugh at him.”

 

“Okay, but let's go help Kurama rescue him first, okay?”

 

“Huh? Oh, right, yeah.”

 

Yusuke and Kuwabara began running after Kurama, who was already sprinting along the riverbank. Ahead of Kurama, flashes of black and white tumbled over in the water, interspersed with angry, choking snarls. Before Yusuke and Kuwabara had caught up to Kurama they saw him pull something from his hair and throw it forwards. A few seconds later a tree shot out of the middle of the river, rapidly growing tall and thick at a sloped angle, tangling Hiei in its branches and dragging him out of the water.

 

All three stopped as they drew level with the slanted tree, watching the branches pulling Hiei higher into the air. He was trashing about and cursing so badly that even Yusuke learned a few new words to use the next time he was angry, but somehow between his long coat, the branches of the tree and the frame of the now mangled umbrella, Hiei had become stuck fast.

 

“Shouldn't we go up there and cut him down or something?” Yusuke asked.

 

“Are you crazy, Urameshi?” Kuwabara echoed. “I'm not going anywhere near that little shrimp when he's as mad as that! He'll probably kill us all!”

 

“I'll go,” Kurama said, before launching himself from the riverbank.

 

“We'll wait here, Kurama!” Kuwabara called after him.

 

“I still can't believe he thought an umbrella was a boat,” Yusuke muttered as Kurama scaled the tree. “Where the hell did he even get a stupid idea like that from?”

 

Kuwabara gasped.

 

“What are you looking at me for?” he demanded.

 

“You shouldn't play jokes on Hiei, dumbass,” Yusuke scolded him. “He really might kill you. Look at what happened when he thought you'd got Yukina pregnant.”

 

“Okay first of all, I didn't tell Hiei umbrellas were boats,” Kuwabara defended himself. “And secondly, my love for Yukina has nothing to do with Hiei. Though between you and me, I think Hiei has the hots for Yukina. I've seen the way he looks at her when he thinks nobody else is around.”

 

“That is sick on so many levels…” Yusuke muttered.

 

“Maybe that vine of the guilty caught him because he's the guilty one.”

 

“What?”

 

“Maybe he's the one who's been interfering with Yukina.”

 

Yusuke's face dropped. He almost wished that he could tell Kuwabara the truth about Yukina's relationship to Hiei, but as he heard Hiei greeting Kurama with the most violent verbal outburst he had ever heard - both in and outside of his imagination - he decided against it.

 

“You've lost the right to talk for the rest of the day,” he said instead, turning away from Kuwabara.

 

Up the tree, Kurama had crawled out onto the branch Hiei was tangled amongst, though Hiei seemed even more annoyed by his presence than he had been when he was left tangled on his own.

 

“Let me guess: I have to stop struggling and let some self-righteous bastard untangle me?” Hiei hissed up at Kurama.

 

“Not quite,” Kurama calmly replied. “First of all, you should probably take off your coat. It's your coat that's caught, not you.”

 

Hiei called Kurama a few unrepeatable names and then suggested that after he remove his coat, Kurama should shove it somewhere anatomically improbable, but removed his coat all the same, finding himself almost entirely freed. He tugged one leg up sharply, tearing his clothing a little but managing to free himself entirely. He then dragged himself up onto the topside of the branch, where he paused to angrily kick the tangled remains of the umbrella from his left foot.

 

“It must have been malfunctioning,” he spat out when he caught Kurama eying him with a slight air of amusement. “Probably because I took it demon world. It's probably ensorcelled by some sort of spirit world barrier.”

 

“Hiei, it was an umbrella,” Kurama flatly replied.

 

“Call it what you will, it was working fine when I found it in the human world,” Hiei sneered.

 

“No, Hiei, it's an umbrella,” Kurama patiently repeated. “It's used to protect against the rain.”

 

“It's what?”

 

“Humans use umbrellas to shelter themselves from the rain.”

 

Hiei glanced downwards as though he expected to still see the umbrella, despite having kicked it into the water, where it had been rapidly carried off.

 

“Are you sure?” he asked, turning back to Kurama.

 

“Yes, Hiei, I'm positive,” Kurama replied.

 

Hiei looked down again, looking towards the point the umbrella had disappeared.

 

“Then why did that woman have it?” he asked, turning to Kurama.

 

“Probably to shelter herself from the rain,” Kurama replied. “More to the point, why did you take somebody else's umbrella?”

 

“I thought it was a spirit world weapon,” Hiei muttered.

 

“No, it's just something humans use to shelter themselves from the rain. Surely you've seen them before during your time in the living world?”

 

“But…”

 

Hiei muttered a few indecipherable curses before reaching down and tugging at his coat. When it did not come free after several failed attempts, Hiei grabbed out his sword and swung it at the smaller branches wrapped around his coat, hacking away until his coat was free. He then stood up and turned around, surprised to see that Kurama had leapt back onto the body of the tree.

 

“You cut too much, the whole branch is going to fall,” Kurama called to him.

 

Hiei heard a crack and he took off at his top speed to avoid landing in the water again. He joined Kurama halfway down the tree and together they leapt to the ground again by Yusuke and Kuwabara.

 

“Hey Hiei,” Yusuke said with a grin. “What happened to your boat?”

 

“Hey, he sunk his battleship!” Kuwabara said.

 

“That's not funny,” Yusuke muttered.

 

Hiei opened his mouth to tell them both exactly what he thought of them but stopped short as a strange beeping sound started emanating from his coat.

 

“That sounds like a communicator, but it's not mine,” Yusuke said.

 

Hiei's face shifted into a look of curious interest and he shoved a hand into the fold of his coat, producing a communicator a second later.

 

“Hey, that's my communicator!” Kuwabara said. “You took it from me last night! Give it back, someone must be looking for me!”

 

Hiei eyed Kuwabara over before flipping open the device, finding a familiar face looking out of it at him.

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

“Kuwabara!” Botan said. “What took you so long to… Wait… Hiei?”

 

Botan stopped and lowered herself to the ground as the distinct sensation that she would fall off her oar if she did not go down hit her. For some unfathomable reason, Hiei had answered Kuwabara's communicator, and he looked absurd. His hair was plastered flat against his head and down the sides of his face, and even as she stared at him she could see water dripping off the end of his nose, eyelashes and chin.

 

“Hiei, are you alright?” she asked cautiously. “I didn't get you out of the bath, did I?”

 

Hiei's eyes widened a little and Botan realised what she had just said. She felt her face grow hot and silently cursed the communicator for being a video one. She tried to cover her mistake, but one part of her mind decided to be rebellious, and images of Hiei lying naked in a bathtub began consuming her thoughts.

 

“What do you want?” he asked, his tone every bit as biting and unpleasant as ever.

 

“Oh, well, I was looking for Kuwabara, actually,” she replied, glad that he was ignoring both her suggestion and her obvious embarrassment.

 

“You shouldn't be calling us here, it's dangerous,” Hiei said. “What if we were to be seen speaking to a spirit world pawn like you?”

 

Botan felt the heat drain from her face: nothing like a deeply personal insult to sober the mood and focus the mind, she thought bitterly.

 

“Could you please let me speak to Kuwabara?” she asked sweetly. “I won't take much of his time, I promise.”

 

Botan saw Kuwabara's head appear in the top part of the communicator screen.

 

“Hey Botan!” he called to her. “I'm over here!”

 

“Yes, she'll just jump through the screen now and get to you,” Hiei drawled, a pained expression rising on his face.

 

“Kuwabara, I need you to come back to the living world!” Botan called back to him. “It's very important! Just you, nobody else!”

 

“Okay, Botan!” Kuwabara called to her.

 

“What sort of underhanded trickery is this?” Hiei asked Botan.

 

“It's not a trick, Hiei,” Botan replied. “It's something very important. I don't want to talk about it right now, not if you say I might be overheard. I'll tell you all later tonight when you get back.”

 

“Hn, that won't be necessary,” Hiei said. “You've been replaced. Your infantile superior sent us another ferry girl to take care of our menial tasks. She seems more intelligent and sensible than you, she probably knows more about what's going on than you do too.”

 

“Hiei, that's very rude.”

 

“It was a statement of fact.”

 

“That other ferry girl has a name, you know. It's Ayame. And you're right, she is very intelligent and sensible, and she probably does know a lot more than I do.”

 

Botan saw one of Hiei's eyes twitch and his expression shift slightly as though she had just said something that had severely displeased him and he was struggling to hide his reaction. His face remained tight for several seconds before he managed to cover his mood with an arrogant smirk.

 

“Hn, but I suppose the useful one will be taken away now that you're back,” he said. “I despised her greatly, but I did much prefer her to you.”

 

Botan felt a slight sting in her eyes as though she wanted to cry. Was it her imagination or was Hiei being particularly cruel?

 

“You don't have to worry about that,” she said, forcing a brilliant smile. “I'm not coming back. I have something else I have to take care of, and after that I'm going back to spirit world. You probably won't see me again until the demon world tournament.”

 

“Too soon by far.”

 

Botan's smile slipped and tears began to threaten.

 

“Tell Kuwabara to meet me at Genkai's,” she said sharply, before snapping the communicator shut to terminate the link.

 

She sighed, clenching a fist around the communicator as she began to shake. She told herself that it was anger and frustration making her upset, and nothing more. Hiei had always been rude and offensive towards her and it had never upset her before: it was a part of his nature that she had simply accepted without question. During her many years ferrying souls Botan had encountered a wide variety of personalities, and working for a petulant child like Koenma had made patience and understanding necessary attributes for her to possess.

 

But something felt different.

 

Botan rarely cried, and she was determined that she was not about to cry over a few harsh words from a typically harsh demon; instead she whipped out her oar and leapt onto it, taking off as fast as she could, redirecting her emotional energy into powering her flight back to Genkai's. It was hard for her not to think of Hiei though, she had been thinking about him the night before when she had decided to try sleeping in a tree - she had been curious to know how it felt, but regretted her decision in the morning as she had woken up with a sore neck and back. And when she had awoken, Hiei had been the first thought on her mind. She suspected that she had been dreaming about him, though as always she could not remember her dreams on waking. She had woken up with such a strong sense of his presence that she had almost believed that he had been there with her: a breeze had blown over her from nowhere on waking, and she could have sworn that it carried Hiei's unique scent.

 

That was, of course, a ridiculous notion, Botan told herself. She had awoken quite early in the day, but she was sure that Hiei had probably already left for demon world by then. And even if he had still been in the living world, he would not have been anywhere near the remote location she had spent the night in.

 

As Botan neared Genkai's temple in what she was sure was record timing, she was almost relieved to hear her communicator beeping at her side. She slowed and brought herself down at the top of the temple steps before flipping open her communicator, slightly surprised to see Koenma looking back at her.

 

“Lord Koenma,” she greeted him.

 

“Botan, why haven't you found me a new spirit detective yet?” he yelled back at her.

 

“Sir, you called me an hour ago and asked me to stop looking for a new spirit detective,” she pointed out. “You said I could just recall Kuwabara from demon world and use him for this mission.”

 

“That doesn't sound like something I would say,” Koenma replied.

 

“But you did, Sir,” Botan insisted. “You spoke to Yusuke, and he told you the team have located the territory the troublemakers are hiding in, and you said that they were so close to finding answers they no longer needed to keep Kuwabara in demon world with them, so he could come back here to help me with my task.”

 

Koenma tapped a finger against his desk a little impatiently.

 

“Are you alright, Sir?” Botan asked him gently.

 

“No I'm not alright, Botan!” he snapped back. “I sent that ogre out to get me breakfast twenty minutes ago, and I'm still waiting!”

 

Botan smiled.

 

“Don't worry Sir, I'm sure George is taking longer because he's making sure he gets the very best for you,” she said.

 

“That's one way of looking at it,” Koenma muttered. “I think the ogre is just lazy. He's probably fallen asleep somewhere! How am I supposed to concentrate on all this work on an empty stomach?”

 

“Cheer up Lord Koenma!” Botan insisted. “I can see Kuwabara coming back here already, that means we can set off today and by tonight we might have already found what we're looking for. Won't that be super?”

 

“Super? How can you use a word like that when I just told you I'm suffering from starvation?”

 

“I'm… Not quite sure I understand, Sir…”

 

“Super? Sounds like soup?”

 

Botan laughed nervously, waving a hand at Kuwabara, who was on his way up the temple steps, hoping to hurry his progress.

 

“Take heart Lord Koenma, soon you'll be enjoying a wonderful breakfast,” she tried.

 

“Stop talking about food and start finding me a new spirit detective!” Koenma yelled back at her.

 

“We don't need the new spirit detective any more­-”

 

“Right, stop talking about a new spirit detective and start finding me that artefact!”

 

“Okay dokay, Sir!”

 

Koenma terminated the link abruptly, and though ordinarily Botan would be offended by his rudeness, she was more relieved that he had simply hung up on her rather than sentenced her to some sort of punishment: she had narrowly avoided unfair punishments on more than a few occasions because she had caught Koenma in a bad mood, so she considered herself especially lucky this time.

 

“Hey Botan, what's up?” Kuwabara asked as he joined her by the gate.

 

“I have good news and I have bad news, Kuwabara,” she replied.

 

“Okay, tell me the bad news first,” he groaned.

 

“The bad news is, we have to make a long journey,” she said. “We're going back to the portal in the south where we discovered people had been going missing.”

 

“Why didn't you ask me to meet you there? I had to travel across demon world to get through the portal nearest here, I could have been at that other site in minutes!”

 

“Really? Oh dear, I am sorry!”

 

“Well since we're here, I'm going to check on Yukina.”

 

Botan opened her mouth to protest, but decided that it was best she let Kuwabara enjoy himself whilst he still could: the task that lay ahead of them that day was going to be extremely physically and spiritually trying on him, and Botan was keenly aware that she was going to have to be as sweet and motivating towards him as possible.

 

“Alrighty!” she agreed, heading towards the temple. “I suppose a short tea-break won't do us any harm!”

 

Kuwabara, who was already ahead of her, appeared not to even have heard her: apparently he had already decided that they were having a break regardless of her opinion on the matter. Botan followed after him, entering the temple. She left him to thunder around the building hollering for Yukina in a most ungainly manner, taking herself to the kitchen and preparing a bowl of tea. As she waited for the tea to stew, Botan found her mind wandering off topic again, and she began to tense.

 

Botan was unsure when or how it had happened, but she did now know that her feelings for Hiei had changed. When she thought about it, she was not really sure that she had felt anything for him before, except perhaps worry and fascination when she watched him fight. But recently that had changed. Hiei himself had not changed and Botan was almost certain that she had not changed either, but there was no denying that things between them had changed. She could not shake the idea that the physical contact they had shared over the past several days was indicative of Hiei having deeper feelings for her too. He had not exactly been tender and loving in his gestures, but he was Hiei, and Botan doubted that Hiei even understood the definition of the words tender and loving, let alone how to put them into practise.

 

Botan peered into her bowl of tea to check on its progress, seeing a watery image of her own face reflected back at her. She had a wry smile on her face, one that she had not been aware of until she saw it looking back out of the bowl at her. She knew why it was there though: the sensible part of her mind was laughing at her for even thinking that someone like Hiei could have feelings for someone like her. She was almost sure that he did have feelings for her, but she had no idea how to draw them out, and no amount of advice from Shizuru or Keiko had helped her with that. She was not the sort of girl who could confidently approach a man, least of all one who happened to be a powerful demon, and Hiei was a particularly difficult person to discuss feelings with since he always denied having any. Hiei denied himself a relationship with Yukina, despite his love for her being obvious to anyone who saw them together, so, as frustrating as it was for her, Botan had to admit that Hiei would probably never let himself love anyone in a romantic sense.

 

“Love is an illusion. A worthless and wasted ideal,” she said quietly in her best Hiei voice. “Nothing but a word invented by humans.”

 

Botan let out a short, bitter laugh as she wondered if Hiei had ever experienced Valentine's Day during his time in the living world. She then saw her face droop in her reflection as she realised that she had never experienced Valentine's Day or White Day, for that matter: at least not in the sense that most human girls did. She had observed both taking place, become caught up in the excitement Keiko experienced every year, but Botan herself had never given or received a single card or flower.

 

Botan narrowed her eyes. Keiko enjoyed White Day. Yusuke was more romantic than Hiei: and typically Yusuke forgot all about White Day (despite Keiko always gifting him with something the month before on Valentine's Day), and he usually ended up calling Botan or Kuwabara to cover for him whilst he threw something together to hide his own forgetfulness. And he complained for days afterwards about the expense and silliness of it all.

 

Botan loved the expense and silliness of Valentine's Day and White Day, and she longed to be a part of them, even just once. A glance at a calendar hanging on a nearby wall reminded her that it was February again, and she had not even thought about giving a gift to anyone, and looked set to miss it that year. Not that this was surprising to her, as she had, the year before, completely missed both days, which had gone by without her seeing or hearing about them at all; Yusuke must have employed Kuwabara's services to cover his tracks the year before, or perhaps he had arranged for Kurama to plant a field of enchanted roses somewhere. It went without question that Hiei would despise Valentine's Day, since he despised the concepts of romance and love. He would probably have some sort of fit if he was made to go to a nice restaurant in a tuxedo and eat fine foods before dancing to the music of a string quartet and then going home to lie on a bed covered with rose petals for…

 

Botan dropped her spoon into the bowl of tea with a clatter, her eyes growing wide. She had found other males attractive in the past, but those feelings had never been more than a fleeting fancy, and certainly they had never occupied her thoughts like her feelings for Hiei were starting to do.

 

And more importantly, her thoughts had never wandered to the ultimate acts of physical intimacy like they did whenever she spent longer than a few minutes thinking about Hiei.

 

Botan grabbed one hand at the kitchen worktop and the other at her chest as that rushing, prickling feeling of bursting bubbles burned in her chest again. She was not even thinking about anything specific, and yet her legs were growing weak beneath her. This was madness!

 

“Think rational thoughts, Botan,” she quietly told herself.

 

Hiei is a demon, and he lives in demon world, she told herself. He has a job and an obligation there. I am a ferry girl and I live in spirit world. I have a job and an obligation there. Even if we both wanted it, it could never happen.

 

And getting Hiei to admit his feelings or even to truly confess hers would be impossible. There was no way to even begin such an arduous task. It was over before it even began.

 

Botan looked at the calendar again. It was actually February 13th, she realised miserably, which would probably explain why she had seen Yukina fabricating something secretly in her room, and why Keiko had vanished: they would both be giving gifts to their loved ones the next day. Botan found her wry smile again as she remembered that Yukina did not even understand what Valentine's Day was, and she did not understand romance at all. But, unlike her miserable twin brother, Yukina was at least kind enough to make the effort to please her friend who she knew cared for her.

 

“Hey Botan, let's go.”

 

Botan turned in surprise, finding Kuwabara standing by the doorway, looking exceptionally pale.

 

“Goodness Kuwabara, you look terrible!” she gasped. “Are you alright?”

 

“Yukina won't let me in her room,” he replied, hanging his head sorrowfully. “She got really upset when I tried to go in.”

 

Botan began to grind her teeth - which was interesting because it was something that she had never done before - because apparently her suspicions were correct: all the other girls were preparing for Valentine's Day. That sentimental fool Koenma would probably even let them all have the day off from their investigations to celebrate, and Botan would only be made all the more aware that she had nobody to give a gift too. And she was sure that she had so many better gift ideas than any of the other girls too: she had certainly spent many years planning it out.

 

“Kuwabara?” she said abruptly.

 

“Yeah?” he responded.

 

“When you graduate, do not, no matter how tempting it may seem at the time, do not, I repeat do not, take on a career as a ferry girl! A soft-hearted boy like you couldn't bear the lifestyle!”

 

Kuwabara slowly narrowed his eyes.

 

“Okay…”

 

“Right then, let's be off.”

 

Botan marched past Kuwabara, summoning her oar as she navigated the hallways for the front door.

 

“Hey Botan?” Kuwabara called after her. “What's the good news?”

 

“What's the what?”

 

Botan did not stop until she was outside, whereupon she hopped onto her oar and turned to Kuwabara expectantly.

 

“When I got here you said you had good news and bad news,” he said, giving her a faint sense of déjà vu. “I got the bad news, so what's the good news?”

 

“Oh right, of course, silly me!”

 

Botan smiled, glad of the distraction her answer was going to give her.

 

“Lord Koenma had some spirit world scholars study that document you found in demon world,” she said, patting her oar to indicate that Kuwabara should climb on behind her. “It was a diagram of an ancient spirit world artefact known as “The Stolen Moment”.”

 

Kuwabara jumped on behind Botan and her oar dipped a little under his weight before she righted it and hoisted them up into the air.

 

“Wow, the guys we're looking for really are in Mukuro's territory then, huh?” Kuwabara asked.

 

Botan turned her head to stare at him in disbelief.

 

“Hey, face forward!” he argued.

 

Botan jerked them up higher to be sure that they would not collide with anything and to allow her to keep her pink eyes intensely fixed onto Kuwabara's worried black ones.

 

“Why are you not shocked, Mister Kuwabara?” she asked sternly.

 

“Huh?” he echoed. “Shocked about what? The Stolen Moment is the whole reason we're doing this, right? The last person who tried to destroy it failed, so they tried to hide it here in the living world, some criminals from demon world found out about it somehow and now they're trying to get it for themselves. They've been abducting humans because they're looking for the person who knows how to use it.”

 

Botan turned her head so sharply her ponytail lashed Kuwabara across the face with enough force to make him moan in complaint. Damn Koenma, keeping secrets from her like she was some sort of untrustworthy, loud-mouthed fool! Botan bared her teeth and pushed on faster, ignoring Kuwabara's complaints behind her. This mission was turning into a complete disaster: she almost wished Ayame had been the mission manager instead of her from the start. Botan began to think that she was not actually the mission manager, that she never had been. In fact, all she had been was a messenger girl, and all the mission had done so far was teach her that she was attracted to Hiei.

 

Kuwabara cried out as Botan's oar shuddered in the air.

 

“Oopsie!” she called over her shoulder. “A little turbulence!”

 

Botan decided not to think about Hiei again while they were still airborne. In fact, she thought, she might not ever be able to think about Hiei when she was airborne again. She decided to conclude him out of her thoughts for that day with one simple idea. Her idea was a little unorthodox, but then again, so was having romantic feelings for a man like Hiei. It was begging to be criticised, ridiculed and possibly set alight or else consumed by the dragon of the darkness flame: but it was also perhaps Botan's only chance to convey her feelings.

 

She was going to give him a gift the next day. That, she decided, would let him know that she did care, and if he cared even in the slightest, it gave him a chance to express himself back. She was braver than him in this one aspect, and so she would lay her feelings bare before him and let him decide what should happen next.

 

“Hold on tightly, Kuwabara!” she called, before forcing herself on faster still.

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

Yusuke crouched lower behind a rock, nodding at Kurama, who was a short way behind him, concealed behind another rock. Kurama looked up at the roof of a nearby abandoned building, where Hiei was barely visible by the guttering. Hiei drew out his sword and nodded, and Kurama produced a rose, nodding at Yusuke. Yusuke pounced out from behind the rock and charged at the underground bunker ahead of them, kicking down the door and scurrying down the internal stairs two steps at a time. Within a matter of seconds Kurama was at his heels and Hiei had shot past them.

 

Thanks to his speed and impetuousness, Hiei was first into the belly of the bunker, landing hard onto a stack of boxes facing a battered old table, around which sat five demons, all playing some sort of card game. They all stopped and glared at him with varying looks of interest, but none of them moved to attack or said anything about the intrusion. The moment dragged on a little but was eventually interrupted by the arrival of Kurama and Yusuke.

 

“Alright you bastards, which one of you is in charge?” Yusuke demanded.

 

The demons all glanced at Yusuke, glanced at Kurama and then settled their eyes back on Hiei.

 

“Hey Hiei,” a panther demon called to them. “Who are your friends?”

 

Yusuke and Kurama turned sharply to Hiei, who looked a little surprised.

 

“Do I know you?” Hiei demanded.

 

“Sure you do,” the panther replied with a shrug. “If you're looking for The Stolen Moment, we haven't found it yet. To be honest, we weren't sure when exactly to start looking. It's not meant to appear until later tonight, right? Unless your old lady got it wrong, of course.”

 

“What?” Hiei snapped, his eyes flashing impatiently.

 

“Maybe the little guy doesn't remember us,” a horned demon whispered to the panther demon.

 

“Hiei?” Yusuke hissed, leaning closer to him. “Anything you want to tell us?”

 

Hiei glared at him.

 

“Are you questioning my loyalty?” Hiei growled. “Again?”

 

“Hiei, we all trust you,” Kurama gently assured him. “I hope that trust has not been misplaced.”

 

“How dare you?” Hiei snarled, rounding on Kurama.

 

“So Hiei, who are your friends?” the panther asked. “And hey, how's that twin sister of yours? What was her name? Yukina?”

 

Hiei's face slowly dropped. Yusuke looked over the top of Hiei's head at Kurama and the two exchanged uncertain looks and shrugs of confusion.

 

“Hiei, you need to start explaining why these guys know you,” Yusuke warned him.

 

“We're old friends,” the panther answered. “We decided to stay here to search the living world, since Hiei is Mukuro's uh… “Partner”. We thought we'd be safe here. We've had a few problems with humans appearing around here, but we've been taking care of that - for obvious reasons. We needed them out of the way on the other side too, right?”

 

Yusuke looked over at Kurama again, finding that even the cool and calm fox demon looked a little ruffled by what he was hearing.

 

“Well shit,” Yusuke grumbled.

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

Kuwabara was complaining. A lot. Botan was tired of reminding him that he was wasting energy that would be better channelled into the task at hand, so she ignored him as best she could. They were high on the hill by the lake where she had been bitten by a snake: the thought of which kept invoking images of Hiei, his arms entangled in her legs and his lips on her inner thigh. Botan had to fight to suppress the thoughts, if only because they were making her sweat, despite the temperature being substantially lower at the altitude they had reached.

 

Botan cleared her throat and concentrated on the task she had set herself. She had not seen the alleged illustration of The Stolen Moment the others had recovered from demon world, but she knew enough of the artefact to know that she had her own information on it. She had studied it during her ferry girl training many centuries ago, and even then it had been considered a possible legend as nobody had seen or heard of it in so long that it made them question its very existence. It was, as she recalled, a simple device, that basically granted one wish before self-destructing; but the potential effect of that wish was what made it arguably the most powerful and sought-after item ever produced by spirit world.

 

“Bingo, Botan, you've won the prize!” Botan muttered to herself as she found the relevant page in her notebook.

 

Unfortunately, the notes she had made were pretty old and shabby. Her notebook had been well-handled over the years - so much so in fact that she had been forced to place a protection spell upon it long ago to prevent it from falling into complete decay - and some of her older writings were almost entirely illegible. Although her writing around The Stolen Moment was not entirely clear, she had conveniently drawn a sketch of it that had remained quite clear. She could still see the characters that patterned the surface of the artefact itself, which were in fact a cryptic riddle explaining the instructions of use.

 

“Light the fuse, don't hold your breath, for just eight seconds, be life or death, The Stolen Moment is just one hour, therein lies the secret power,” Botan whispered to herself. “Oh dear. I think I forgot everything else I learned in class without checking books or asking Ayame, but I remembered that silly little rhyme.”

 

Botan sighed, wondering why her brain had chosen to remember it so clearly. She could even clearly remember being told exactly what it meant: anyone wishing to use The Stolen Moment had to light the fuse, and then they had exactly eight seconds to communicate the moment they wished to steal. After eight seconds, the fuse reached the body of The Stolen Moment, which was said to then explode, transporting the person holding it to wherever they had wished to be. It was essentially a time travel device, but it only worked once, it only did exactly what the person asked of it during those eight seconds, and it only let the user stay in their chosen time period for one hour. After that, the person was thrown back through time to a split second after they had made the wish, and they were left to figure out the consequences of their actions.

 

And, Botan had been taught, there would always be consequences.

 

A truly dangerous item indeed, Botan thought. She had once spoken to Ayame about it, and even the level-headed Ayame had admitted that she would go mad if she ever held The Stolen Moment. The temptation to use it, Ayame had said, was simply too great for any soul, no matter how pure and righteous. But the madness would come from trying to pick the right moment to steal. The Stolen Moment only worked once, it only gave its user one chance, one moment and one hour to change history. Or not, as Ayame had also pointed out. Even if ruining history and sending yourself back into a new dimension where you might not even exist was not your aim, who could resist the opportunity to go back and time and witness some of the great events of the past?

 

But Koenma's instructions to Botan had been clear: find The Stolen Moment and destroy it as soon as possible. He had wanted her to recruit a new spirit detective for the task because a new, open mind that had no knowledge of spirit world and their affairs would not ask any awkward questions or possibly take The Stolen Moment for their own use. But, as Yusuke had reported back that demon world had detailed knowledge of the artefact through an ancient sketch of it that had been found there, Koenma had become desperate and asked Botan to take Kuwabara to find it. Truthfully they had no idea where the artefact was - it might be in demon world after all - but Koenma was hoping that Kuwabara might be able to sense it, after he had experienced such a strong reaction to seeing the image of it.

 

And so it was that Botan was sat on the hillside by an apparently abandoned farm, watching Kuwabara dig up a field.

 

But as she watched him dig, Botan was starting to have her doubts.

 

Koenma had paid her one compliment recently, despite his hiding information from her and being more bossy than usual lately: he had told her that he trusted her, and her alone, to destroy The Stolen Moment. He had told her that a soul as honest and content as hers had no regrets and no arrogant ideals about going back in time to rewrite history. She would be able to hold The Stolen Moment, light the fuse, and think of nothing for eight seconds, after which it would detonate with no effect.

 

But Koenma had been wrong. There was something Botan wanted to change, and it involved a little three-eyed fire demon.

 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

 

Next Chapter: (Takes a deep breath) Hiei's connection to the demons looking for The Stolen Moment is revealed, Ayame reports an important discovery to Koenma, the race is on the find the artefact before it is misused, but when something tragic happens it appears the gang may already be too late. (Well that wasn't so bad, but seriously, loads of action in the next chapter!) Chapter 13: The Thief.