“She burned like an apparition amid solid objects. Pure fire exploding suddenly in the claustrophobic gloom.”

—Anne Rice, Belinda

 

Hirokin could only assume Saitou would ask Kagome about him at the first opportunity. To have learned at long last of such an unlikely acquaintance of hers was more, Hirokin knew, than Saitou’s burning curiosity could endure. That Sesshoumaru’s heir was fixated upon his lady mother had been clear to Hirokin from the start.

A double-edged sword, Saitou’s singular devotion to her. Both edges of which Hirokin must skirt with care.

And so he spoke no more to Saitou of her, though he sensed from the prince’s insinuations that this was precisely the subject about which he most yearned to speak. Oh, my beloved prince, Hirokin sighed to himself. In many ways you are still untried. Would that I could teach you better. But you will learn soon enough for yourself.

Somewhere in the back of Hirokin’s mind the hours of reckoning were yet ticking down.

Despite this, he remained resolute in his detachment. He was the clear stream, which flowed heedless on, reflecting light and shadow both, yet availing himself to neither. An outside observer to the drama unfolding around him.

Or so he convinced himself at least.

But when he happened to venture upon Saitou dozing in the gardens, amidst the cumbersome old tomes which had laid him flat, when he approached him to brush back the silver hair that had fallen into his face, Hirokin glimpsed before he could stop himself the very image he’d determined not to see.

Saitou’s mind was like a mountain lake, clear and deep beyond its precipitous defenses. Within it, she was ever-present. At the surface, Hirokin saw her as her present self. Strangely garbed, in a clinging sheath of a dress which fastened high at a slant to its red silken collar, yet other than this she was precisely as he remembered. The most mundane of revelations, this specter of her. Yet it stole his breath to see her there, enshrined amongst the bamboo woods and misty temple that rose from them, half a world away.

“Hirokin?” he heard her say to her eldest son. Her starry eyes glittered, her lips curved in a furtive smile which seemed to Hirokin to be for him alone. “He’s like a brother to me.”

A sharp bite of laughter burst from his chest. Saitou started awake at this, bristling—as startled by Hirokin’s laugh as by the expression of wistful irony that transfigured him.

“…Sensei?” the prince called warily after him, as Hirokin swept away, laughing still.

---

 

THE FEUDAL ERA

To say that Hirokin dreaded how Sesshoumaru would receive him would be the understatement of the age.

Procrastination had made him tireless. But not Kagome. Bathing cool water over her flushed, swollen sex, Hirokin had been inflamed for her yet again. He’d managed to seduce her into a third round of fucking, but when he’d bent his mouth to her to incite another, she’d shoved him harshly away. The severity of her look told Hirokin she’d seen through him, to the desperation which underscored his advances. Perhaps she had seen this from the onset, not that this had discouraged her until now, the lascivious wench.

“Just leave him alone,” she’d advised Hirokin as she’d rebuffed him, as messy and raw between the legs as he still felt within. “He’d have confronted you then if that’s what he intended to do. It’s not like he’s shy.” Indelicately, she’d snorted. “But your prodding at him might make him change his mind about rearranging your pretty face.”

“Kagome-sama,” Hirokin had remarked with a faint trace of smile, “I’m touched by your concern for it.” Slick and sinuous, he’d leaned into her, rubbing his cock against her thigh as he’d murmured, “See how you move me?”

Kagome’s red cheeks had flared afresh. Hope had flared within Hirokin afresh. But then her reiki-limned finger had slashed forth, pointing to the door behind them as she’d glared. 

“Out. Now.”

Sighing, Hirokin had gotten the fuck out. 

She’d had a fair point of course. But Hirokin had learned to trust his better instincts when it came to Sesshoumaru. And those instincts were telling him that he must get ahead of this chafing encounter before it had the chance to fester into something worse.

A point of advice he would later wish he’d imparted to her, for all their sakes.

Cleaning himself up, he sought out Sesshoumaru straightaway. He was in his palace, in his sleeping quarters. Actually asleep, to Hirokin’s chagrin. But there was an expectant quality to the way Sesshoumaru’s eyes cracked open a sliver, as Hirokin approached to kneel at his bedside.

“What do you want? I’m resting.”

“Sesshoumaru-sama,” Hirokin began humbly, directly, “about what you saw earlier—”

Sesshoumaru made a sound of dismissive disgust, as he rolled onto his back in his billowing fur. Beneath his skewed collar, a stony swathe of his chest glared through the gap. His eyes were closed, the red tint of his lowered lids dark as dusted blood.

“Your gross little games with her interest me not. Spare me the details of how she tortures your cock.”

Hirokin grimaced. “There is more to it than that, my lord.”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes slid open to him, at a slant. Hirokin thought best how to say it. But there was no good way to say it, except to say it plainly—

“I’m in love with her.”

Sesshoumaru’s golden gaze pinned him, unrelenting in its stab. In the skewering silence of his regard, Hirokin suffered gladly, for there was a certain catharsis in the admission, damning though it was. At length, Sesshoumaru scoffed, closing his eyes again. 

“Of course you are.”

Hirokin’s aura spiked as he frowned. “My lord?”

“Always, since we were boys, you must have what I have. My toys, my home, my mother, even. It made no difference to me that she had no other children, for you have been a little brother to me in truth, forever nipping at my heels, slavering to lap up my seconds—which had they been your own from the start you would have abhorred.”

Hirokin glowered. Little brother? True they were of an age, but he was older than Sesshoumaru, and resented the condescension. In Hirokin’s mind, he had ever been the one to look out for him.

“Glower at me all you like.” Sesshoumaru’s eyes cut open to him again as he sat up, the snowy folds of his sleeping robe gaping full down his chiseled front. “It is no different now. Only the object has changed. You covet my wife because she is mine. You desire her only because I do. Maybe you would not be so covetous if I would give myself to you, but I won’t, and so you must have all else to fill the void of my absence within you.

“But I do not begrudge it of you. Have I ever begrudged you what is mine?”

Hirokin shook his head. Not least of all for the fact that Sesshoumaru railed at him continually not to infringe on his campaigns, reallocate his tributes or otherwise appropriate his forces and outposts for any reason, no matter how well-advised.

“No, my lord,” Hirokin said tactfully nonetheless. “But this is different. I wanted her before she was yours.”

“But did you take her?” Sesshoumaru pressed him ruthlessly. “Or did you only begin to fuck her after I shared her with you?”

Hirokin was incensed. “You threatened me not to touch her!”

Of course, this sort of threat had not dissuaded him entirely, as it never did. Hirokin was ever overstepping the line. But there was a limit to this, and he was not so mad as to cross it with wholesale abandon. 

Sesshoumaru smiled cruelly. “For one so shrewd, you can be such a pathetic fool. We laugh at you together, she and I. Do you think she doesn’t tell me everything that you do? When I’m in her, she tells me how you like for her to spread you, so that you can pretend my cock might actually breach you. How she slaps your balls so you can imagine they’re being struck by mine.”

Hirokin ground his teeth. He hated it, yet Sesshoumaru’s filthy demeaning stirred him. He was aroused—hatefully and shamefully so. 

Worst of all Sesshoumaru could sense it. Through the contemptuous curl of his lip, a glint of fang showed. His voice was low as he spoke, scarcely above a rumble.

“Did you come here hoping I would punish you for your insolence, Hirokin?” Sesshoumaru leaned toward him, letting the smoldering heat of his youki graze against Hirokin’s. In a dark, baleful shiver, all the thwarted desire Hirokin had ever felt for him came cringing back, like a beaten dog to the bone. “Slither off to my wife’s bed if you want a whipping. I’ll give you none.”

Heavily, Hirokin breathed, steeped in a misery that stifled him to the core. He was a kinslayer, a cold-blooded conniver. Even so, was this what his sins had earned him, to be forever scraping to cobble together anything but wretchedness from the gods’ bitter leavings? Kou was not dominant. Kagome was not male, and Sesshoumaru did not love him. 

Between the three of them he was torn, irreconcilably.

Because he was in cold hell already, because he was more than half-mad from a lifetime of want unfulfilled, because he saw no end to the bleak, interminable loom of such an existence, he reached out sure and swift through the dense fur and silk that pooled at Sesshoumaru’s hip. Only because it was the last thing Sesshoumaru had ever expected of him, furor or otherwise, was Hirokin able to wrap his hand around Sesshoumaru’s bare cock for the first time in his long, misbegotten life.

In the instant before Sesshoumaru’s clawed, blazing fist came smashing into his skull, Hirokin felt the sultry smoothness of his prize. His eyes flared wide in that fraught instant between blinding agony and not—

Because in that same instant, Hirokin felt that Sesshoumaru was hard.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Originally there was supposed to be more, but this seemed like a good place to pause. So there’ll be a second part to this one 😉

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