Ribbons and Pearls

"I'll Never Understand Her"

Women are capricious. Hiei knows this. It is simply a fact of life. Even Mukuro, who one would think above such unreasonableness, will on a whim change her mind depending on the most absurd and arbitrary conditions. But Hiei had never met a woman as capricious or flighty as the baka onna.

She tells the idiot ningen males who ask her to be theirs that she doesn't want a boyfriend. The next day, she tells Yukina how much she wishes for someone she could spend the rest of her life with.

"They were cute, but none of them made my heart race," he knew she would say if he asked. "And honestly, who could love Death?"

She yells at him that he is a lazy, horrible person, yet she defends him when the idiot Kuwabara calls him into question.

"He's a very good person under all that cold and cynical attitude," she had said on a number of occasions. "And he's probably the most loyal and honorable person you'll ever meet."

She quivers in fear at the thought of his wrath, but she glares at him in challenge if he tries to frighten her face to face, and even then she will only stand up for herself if there are no witnesses, which is stupid because that is when she should be most afraid. Occasionally, she will face him unflinching in front of Kurama, but only occasionally.

"He threatens to kill me, but he never would. He's got a lot of pride, so I try not to force him to lose face by not following through when the threats have no effect. Pride is very important to youkai and to a man, Yusuke," she had said once.

She happily flies that stupid oar of hers out in the rain, but she will not walk anywhere in the rain without an umbrella.

"When you fly, you're part of the rain, but when you walk, it's like the sky is crying on you," he heard in her thoughts one day.

She loves cats, but refuses to have anything to do with kittens, even though she says she wants one very badly.

"I can't take care of a kitten!" she told the oaf when he offered her one. "I wouldn't have time to love it, or talk to it, or even feed it. They only live about seven years on average anyway. Who wants that heartache again?"

She buys sweet snow, the pink strawberry flavor, and will leave it sitting in the freezer for months, while she buys vanilla or chocolate sweet snow in those strange cones from the vendor down the street.

"I wonder if anyone will visit today," she murmured to her houseplants every day. "That strawberry ice cream's been sitting in there forever. I can't eat it by myself."

She will change her outfit twice a day when she isn't working.

"Maybe he'll talk to me if I look like this," she told her reflection every time. "Too happy-go-lucky you think?"

He's never seen her fly the same way home or to work twice in a row.

"Who wants to see the same sights all the time?" she asked herself absently after each flight decision. "How boring. Besides, maybe I'll catch a glimpse of him. That would be nice."

He's seen her draw straws to decide what she will do on her days off, and if she didn't like what she chose for whatever reason, she will pick something else as if she knew all along what she wanted to do in the first place.

"You never know how much you want to do something until you can't do it anymore," she told him once, on one of those rare occasions they were alone and she was holding her own against him. "You should tell Yukina, Hiei. Preferably before you're really dead, you big liar."

It was simply impossible to pin her down. Capricious to her very core, she made absolutely no sense to him.

"Botan-san! Please help!" her next door neighbor yells while banging on her door, a view he can see quite well from the sinfully comfortable tree in her front yard. (He would never forgive that tree for growing so close to her dwelling.)

The door opens immediately, the baka onna having dropped whatever she was doing to help the poor, unfortunate soul outside her door.

"What is it, Hina-chan?"

"It's my puppy! I can't find him anywhere! He's not in the house and the window was left open! I don't know what to do!"

"Calm down, Hina-chan," the blue-haired woman says calmly. "He can't have gone far. He's probably out in the yard somewhere or wandered over to someone else's apartment. You start knocking on doors and I'll search the yard, okay? What does he look like?"

"He's black, with big blue eyes, and the cutest nose and…and I just have to find him!"

"Okay, okay, we'll find him," Botan says soothingly to avoid the tears in the other woman's eyes from spilling over. "But we have to start looking first, right?"

"Right," the other woman sniffs.

"Then lets get started."

The two split up and Hiei watches while the neighbor turns the corner to start knocking on doors and Botan starts to call for the puppy and look through the thick foliage in her yard.

He searches with his cursed eye and sees that the stupid dog has somehow made it to the roof. Just as he locates it, the puppy lets out a bark and alerts Botan to its whereabouts.

"How did you get up there, silly-billy?" she asks the puppy in a sickeningly sweet tone while she makes for the stairs.

She reaches the roof, but the stupid pup has climbed up onto the ledge and keeps backing away from the baka onna. It reaches the edge just when she is close enough to touch it, all the while trying to calm it down by whispering sweet nothings to it. It refuses to be calm and eventually slips off the two-story roof. The baka onna jumps after it.

She catches the puppy mid-flight and turns in the air so that she will bear the brunt of the impact. This means that Hiei catches her bridal style. The three of them hit the ground with the slightest jolt, a meter and a half from the place that would have surely been the baka onna's grave.

She holds her eyes tightly shut still, the puppy securely in her arms and struggling to get free.

"Baka onna," he growls at her.

She opens her eye just the slightest sliver and then they are thrown wide as she stares at him in astonishment.

"Hiei?"

He drops her to the ground, the puppy getting free and turning the same corner its master went just minutes ago. The onna lets out a groan and glares up at him.

"What did you do that for?"

"You're an idiot. Are you seriously willing to die for a dog?" he asks tersely and condescendingly.

"I wouldn't have died," she says with a frowning pout. "It just would have hurt a lot. Hina loves that dog so much, I couldn't just let it die!"

He doesn't say anything, just glares at her. She gets nervous and starts to fidget at his feet.

"Sorry for making you save me again. Thank you," she says quietly, fiddling with her fingers.

"I didn't do it for you," he tells her, turning his back on her. "Yukina would be upset if you died."

He disappears to his favorite tree quickly, just in time to see her smile fondly at the place he had been standing just moments ago. It makes him blush.

She quickly picks herself up, rubbing the spot where she had hit the ground when he dropped her, and follows the puppy to find her neighbor.

The baka onna would do anything for someone who she considered a friend. She may have been the most capricious person he had ever met, but she was also the most loyal.

"You may think we're really random, but we have our own type of honor code, what we call our principles. Never forget that a woman always has her reasons, Yusuke," she said once, with a warm and welcoming smile. "And here's a hint, since you look so totally lost. If you're precious to her, she'd rather die than let you down."

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Author's Note:

This is more along the lines of my personal ship, but I had nowhere else to put it. I apologize. The title of this chapter gave me trouble. How well does it fit?