Embrace the Darkness

Disclaimer: I still don't own anything...And I still wish I did...Life really isn't fair sometimes...




Hiei was already awake when the woman returned the next morning, and he watched her calculatingly. However, she made no indication of having noticed this at all, instead examining him, prodding his skin gently, noting, with apparent satisfaction, that his wounds had almost completely healed.

Her weapon of choice today? A switchblade, picked up off the trolley like the whip had been the day before, again preceded by a flash of light which furthered Hiei's conclusion that the woman was somehow materializing items into the room. The blade was extended by a quflicflick of the Goddess' wrist, the flat of the blade running up and down Hiei's bare chest, arousing him, much to his own dismay. In a desperate attempt to fend off the Goddess, he spat in her face.

She only laughed and wiped the saliva off her face as Hiei watched in shock. "By all means, keep resisting," she told him with a rather pleased smile. "It only makes it all the more fun when I finally break you." The blade pressed against Hiei's chest, a steady pressure behind it, but just before it broke the skin, he spoke.

"Why?" The pressure eased, but the blade remained resting against his skin.

"Why what?"

"Why are you doing this?" Hiei clarified. "What do you gain from all this?" The knife left his body as the woman took a step back to look him in the face.

"My purpose is to kill the Rekai Tantei," she told him. He opened his mouth, but she held up her hand.

"I will explain why," she continued, "by means of a little story. It may sound familiar, but I ask you not to interrupt, for, while you may know the tale, you do not know the ending." She proceded to tell him her story, punctuating the more emotional moments with slashes from the knife, so that, when she finished, Hiei hung limply above a pool of his own blood.

"This tale begins, as all good ones should, with 'Once upon a time'. However, from there, it strays from the norm, for, instead of happening in a land far, far, away, this story takes place right here, in the Makai. You see, Hiei, there was once a demon, who ran a respectful and prosperous business. Well, some people might not think it was so respectful, for this demon dealt in the business of selling weapons and whores."

Hiei's head jerked up, but a quick swipe of the blade, a new line of blood, cleared his mind of anything he had wanted to say.

"Didn't I tell you not to interrupt?" she scolded. "Now, where was I? Ah, yes. The demon's business. Prosperous, I did mention, didn't I? And why not? For who can deny that those are two basic needs of life?" Hiei cut in with a rather rude noise of disbelief, prompting an angry glance from the Goddess and a particularly nasty cut from the knife.

"Do you disagree? If you do, you'd be the only one. Customers were never lacking at this business. Oh, it was a sight to behold. Just imagine: any weapon you could possibly want or need, from the most modern and technologically advanced, to something as simple as an ordinary kitchen knife; the widest selection of whores available anywhere: men, women, children, humans, demons...the works. And the money this demon made...Enough to live life in the lap of luxury."

The Goddess paused reflectively, gazing at the tarnished knife in her hand, angling it to allow a single drop of blood to roll slowly down the blade, light flashing as she turned it this way and that. When the drop hit the hilt and pooled there, she raised her eyes again, and now they were filled with rage and hate, and the wounds she inflicted on Hiei grew deeper as her anger increased.

"Well, enough until high-and-mighty Prince Koenma decided that he didn't want businesses of that sort to be run anymore, not now that he was in charge. He sent his Spirit Detective and his little friends to shut it down. But that wasn't enough. Oh, no. They had to-"

"-burn it to the ground," Hiei finished, feeling as if he was going to bek. Sk. She spared him a bitter smile.

"Yes, you would know, wouldn't you? After all, it was your flame that lit the pyre, was it not?" Hiei avoided her eyes, trying everything in his power to keep from angering her any more. He failed miserably.

"Everyone died that night," she informed him, the knife making its deepest mostmost painful slash yet. "Or, so the Rekai Tantei thought, for it turns out that the actual owner of the business was gone on a trip to purchase more supplies." A single tear ran, unbidden and unnoticed, down the Goddess' cheek as she whispered her next words. "Imagine her surprise when she returned, and found her world, her entire life, destroyed."

With this tiny slip of the tongue, everything clicked into place for Hiei, and he looked up in amazement. "You," he breathed. "You ran that brothel."

The woman's eyes steeled. "It was no brothel," she growled angrily. "It was home."

"'Home'?" Hiei spat scornfully. "Maybe for you, but I'm sure your merchandise had a very different view."

"They were more than just merchandise!" the Goddess cried. "Those people were my family. The women were as close as sisters; the men could have been mistaken for my older brothers, the way we got along."

"And the children?!" Hiei expelled violently. "What about them? Don't lie to me and say you carer thr them. You defiled them, their youth, their innocence!"

"No!" She turned away painfully. "I saved them! They had nothing, no families, no one to care for them, they needed work. I took them in. I gave them three full meals a day, clean clothes, warm beds. I treated them as if they were my own. I loved them."

Hiei snarled. "Love? Love is a fragile concept, too weak to prove anything. Demons do not love. They are not capable of loving."

The Goddess whirled on him, her hate seething stronger than ever before. "I was fully capable of love! I am not now, for that night, you killed everyone who had ever meant anything to me. When I returned and found nothing but a smoldering pile of ashes where my life had once stood, I swore that I would never love again. I swore that I would not rest until my losses had been fully repaid. I embraced that waiting darkness, and I vowed to kill the Rekai Tantei, those murderers who had taken my heart from me." The knife began flashing again, and the blood ran.

"Had you left but one alive, you would not be here, for that would have given me someone to cling to, someone to hold me close, to keep my heart alive. But you did not, and so I will pick you off, one by one, starting, unlike the others, with the strongest." Here, the woman smiled, perhaps marvelling at her own cunning.

"If I take the strongest first, you see, the rest will be weakened, perhaps even enough so that they will fall prey to those moronic, lower-class demons. And who knows? If that happens, my job just becomes that much easier. If not, I will find great pleasure in bringing you all here and killing you slowly, making sure that you have every opportunity to experience the pain that my heart felt that night."

For once, perhaps the only time in his entire life, Hiei had nothing to say, had nothing to even think, as the point of the blade, in the Goddess' careless anger, had somehow found its way to his jugular, and was now poised to bury itself deep into his neck. Visibly, the woman shook herself and drew the knife away.

"No," she murmured, more to herself than anything. "To kill him now would be doing him too great a service. There must be more pain before he is allowed to rest." She dropped the knife to clatter on the floor, spun on her heel, and stalked out of the room.


Well, what do you think, guys? I didn't get any angry reviews for the last chapter (in fact, I didn't get any reviews at all...), so I decided it would be safe to write some more...Please, please, please review and tell me if you liked it...In fact, you're welcome to review and tell me that it sucked, I just want to know what people think...A flame might even be appreciated at this point...Nah...Thanks a lot for anyone who's read this...It means a lot to me...