A/N: AAAIIGGHH! This sucks!! I was typing up this fic when I stopped for a while to eat, and then my friend came over to my house, so I decided to show her some other things on Microsoft Word, and then I accidentally closed out of Word WITHOUT SAVING THE DAMN STORY!!! –sobs- So now I have to start ALL OVER AGAIN and try to remember what I wrote!
Okay, so here goes… this fic was originally based on an AMV I was watching with nekoluver, my part-time co-authoress. The song was by ICP (though I don't remember the name of the song) and the video made it look like Hiei was the bogeyman. (It made me smile. :3) so nekoluver and I had a conversation about it, and this is what sprang up from it. I'm pretty sure it merits AU, and Mukuro is probably WAY OOC (and the fact that she works under Koenma for some reason… XD), but it's fanfiction, and I'm supposed to have fun with it. ;P
A shadow rose up in the entrance to the hallway. It moved too quickly for human eyes to see, but that didn't matter, seeing as none of the beings around it were human. Even to the other supernatural beings, the shadow moving down the hall was still just a blur. It darted down the corridor, heedless of the ogres calling to it.
"Hey, did you know that Boss Mukuro was looking for y—"
"Shut up." The shadow rudely whizzed past the ogre, the force of his going past the ogre so fast blowing the stack of paperwork out of his hands.
The shadow rushed down to a closed door and stopped, brooding and scowling. The shadow was finally fully visible. He stood before the doorway, so short he could have been mistaken for a child. He wore a black cloak, loose black pants, and black boots along with a white scarf and headband, which concealed a blue third eye in contrast to his other eyes, which were blazing red. His jet black hair stood on end, all except for his bangs, making his hair a flame shape. There was a flare of white hair in the front above his bangs. He was also a demon.
He scrunched up his face and opened the door, raging into the room and slamming the door behind him.
"All right, Mukuro, tell me what this is all about," the boy asked rudely to the back of a rotating armchair. There was a chuckle from the armchair and it turned, revealing a woman—or, half of one.
The woman sitting in the chair smirked at him, though only half of her face could do it. Her entire right side was made completely of machines, and in her right eye socket she wore a glass eye much too large for her. The boy largely considered her a freak show.
This woman—Mukuro—was in charge of assigning and deploying special agents called "bogeymen" from Spirit World to the Living World for protection. Sometimes, a human child's spiritual power would grow too large, and the child and its family would become a target for demons that happened to slip through the barrier separating the two worlds. The bogeymen would get assigned to a child with immense power and trigger a reaction in the child to lock away the power and lay it dormant until it died down to a normal level. The child was researched and the bogeyman would be chosen to "scare" the spirit power out of the child to protect the humans near it.
Which was exactly why the boy in front of Mukuro was so annoyed. He wasn't a bogeyman, although Mukuro did call him down to her office to do her random errands she never wanted to do. Some way or another, he always ended up doing her errands, though he did not take kindly to being given orders, let alone following them. However, somehow she always got him to do the things she wanted.
"You should be more polite, Hiei," Mukuro said, addressing the boy in front of her. Hiei scowled and glared at her, demanding an answer. Mukuro chuckled at him again. "You've been assigned," she said humorously. Hiei looked at her blankly.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Hiei asked roughly. Mukuro's smirk widened.
"Just what I said. I mean you've been assigned. As a boogeyman," she said simply.
Hiei growled at her. "I'm not a boogeyman, Mukuro. You know that. I'm not going to Living World and slither around trying to scare some filthy human kid just so they can live. For all I care, they can go extinct," he said fiercely. Mukuro's never-ending smirk tightened.
"You will go, Hiei. Even our best boogeymen couldn't handle this kid, and you're scary looking, so I assigned you to the job. I'm sure you can get this over with quickly if you pull a few tricks with that freaky eye of yours."
"Talk about freaks! Why can't you go yourself; I bet your eye could scare a crowd to death, you wretch." Hiei had his shoulders hunched and his arms crossed. He wasn't about to go to the Ningenkai, or the human world, just to save the humans that he hated, not without a fight, anyway.
Mukuro ignored him and produced an image of a small, red-haired boy on a large screen behind her. "This is your assignment. He doesn't look like much, but he's got something that just makes it impossible for my agents to work on him the right way. You will start immediately after leaving. You can track him with your freak eye, I'm sure, so I don't need to tell you all the details of his residence, just that he lives with his mother. Now, I expect you to get this done within the month, do you understand?" she said.
"God damn it, woman! I don't want to go down there—it's all just a waste of time; they're all going to die anyway, why do we have to protect them?!" Hiei shouted back.
Mukuro stood, her smirk gone, replaced by a frightful glare that could even have the prince of Spirit World, Koenma, cringing. Hiei stood under the gaze, unblinking. "Hiei, you are going to Ningenkai whether you like it or not, so I suggest you get used to the idea and accept it, or else you'll be doing penance labor for the next three years!" Mukuro yelled.
Outside the door, the ogres were listening to the argument eagerly. None of them liked having Hiei around (mostly because he scared them), and listening to him getting chewed out by Mukuro was always entertaining. Listening to anyone getting chewed out by Mukuro was always entertaining.
The shouting match lasted for about twenty more minutes before a fuming Hiei wrenched open the door and stormed out, slamming the door behind him again. The ogres scattered out of the way of the little demon, knowing he could (and readily would) blast them all into oblivion if provoked in the slightest, even when he wasn't completely pissed off.
Hiei growled under his breath, ignoring the ogres shooting him frightened glances. He'd lost the fight, which meant he had to go and take care of this kid before he could come back.
The kid—Shuichi Minamino was his name—didn't even look like he could hold a blade of grass in the air with his spirit energy, so why did Hiei have to go and turn his power down? Hiei stomped out to the entrance of the castle and ventured out into Spirit World to find the nearest portal to Ningenkai. If he was going to go down there, he might as well scare the damn kid so bad that he'd never be able to sleep with the light off again. That thought gave Hiei a chuckle.