Kagome had taken herself off to be melancholy. Hirokin knew this well before he found her, standing alone atop a treacherous, windblown ridge. She was perched at the razor edge of the crags, staring off into the pale churning gloom far below. As Hirokin approached her, her profile may as well have been etched in stone. Her long lashes glittered, her dark hair whipped about her in the icy gales that railed and howled, unceasing.

How she had reached such a precipitous place was no small mystery. On his own, even Hirokin would have struggled with the ascent. The wispy lattices of ice entrained in the whirling winds were no sound footholds, to say the least. He had summoned Ohana to ferry him upward instead. 

Stepping down from her shimmering emerald wing, he approached Kagome. “You might have picked a less remote place to sulk, my lady.”

Through the fringe of silvery fur that wreathed her, she shot him a glare. “Maybe I picked this spot on purpose.” As Ohana soared off into boiling white mists, Kagome’s blue eyes followed after her, darkly gleaming. “Maybe I didn’t want to be found.”

“I think you only wanted to make it difficult.”

Kagome’s lips thinned as she turned from him. “I don’t care what you think. Go away.”

Ignoring this, Hirokin stepped closer to her. “How did you get up here?”

“I flew, same as you,” she answered tartly.

Hirokin smiled. “Keep your little secrets, my lady, if you wish. It’ll only be the more satisfying when I tease them out.”

Kagome leveled him a look. “You might be the most aggravating person I’ve ever met.”

“Your professions of love leave much to be desired, Kagome-sama. Nevertheless, I’m inclined to oblige you.”

“Oh, you’re ‘inclined’, all right.” Kagome rolled her eyes. “You really do love it, don’t you? The meaner I am to you, the more excited you get.”

He did love it, but that was beside the point.

“Have you considered that I’m merely trying to rile you out of your pathetic moping?” As her cheeks flushed with heat, he added slyly, “I daresay it’s working.”

Kagome’s jaw clenched as she glanced aside. “Do you know what day it is?”

To this rhetorical question, Hirokin responded blithely, “Surely you don’t think me as old as that. It’s the first of—”

“It’s my anniversary,” she said woodenly, cutting him off. 

“Anniversary,” Hirokin echoed, cutting his teeth on the unfamiliar word. 

Kagome nodded, somewhat absently. “I was married on this day.” Before Hirokin could correct her, she amended tersely, “Not to him. To Inuyasha, I mean.”

Hirokin gave an elegant shrug. “What of it?”

“What of it,” Kagome seethed, rounding upon him.

Hirokin was unfazed. “Inuyasha is dead, your mating bond is severed. Whatever day you ‘married’ him is irrelevant.”

“I still remember it,” Kagome said fiercely, the flash of her eyes almost blindingly bright. “I still remember him. My memories might be irrelevant to you, but they aren’t to me.”

“Trust me, Kagome-sama,” Hirokin said to her, soft and dark, “nothing concerns me more.”

But lost in her grim ruminations as she was, Kagome didn’t seem to hear him. “I loved him,” she spoke into the bitter wind, the lashing tumult which swallowed up her words uncaring. “I loved him, and I killed him anyway.”

A bit warily, Hirokin replied, “You didn’t mean to kill him.”

Kagome shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s still dead.”

“Yes,” Hirokin said briskly, “and there is nothing you can do about it. Why torment yourself with what you cannot change? The dead are beyond us, for better or worse. There is more than enough to grapple with in the world of the living, I assure you.” At Kagome’s mulish look, Hirokin sighed. “The longer you live, Kagome-sama, the more death you will see. The more deaths you’ll cause too, I wager. Some humans might be lucky enough to wick out of this life without killing, but this is not your fate. That primeval soul of yours should inform you of this, even if you won’t believe it of me.”

“That’s just it,” Kagome whispered, a truly haunted look entering her eyes, “in every life of mine, I’ve killed him—or as good as killed him. Every one…it’s like I’m doomed. Or he is. Or we both are…or maybe it’s our love that dooms us, like a curse we can’t escape.”

A chill spread like cold fire through Hirokin’s veins. Dismissing it, he waved.

“All the more reason not to despair. You are mated to Sesshoumaru-sama now. You have returned to an immortal state, as once you were in ages past. You have escaped.”

Kagome’s eyes glimmered, pale and obscure. “Well,” she murmured, after a moment, “Inuyasha has, anyway.”

This observation was not particularly reassuring to either of them. Perhaps hoping now to distract himself as much as her, Hirokin mused aloud, “I killed my eldest brother. It was no accident, and I don’t regret it. I have only one other brother, and if the two of us live long enough, I don’t doubt that I’ll kill him one day, too.”

Kagome grimaced. “That’s horrible. Truly. But maybe you’re just incapable of it.”

“What’s that, my lady?”

“Regret.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he replied ruefully, taking in the sight of her in a long, lingering glance. “Inured to it, perhaps. In time, I think, you might become inured to it yourself.” As Kagome turned up her chin in defiance, he said in his most silvery tones, “Whom do you love more, my lady—Saitou, or Inuyasha?” When her eyes cut back to him in affront, Hirokin chuckled. “If Inuyasha were still alive, you wouldn’t have your son, now would you?”

Kagome gave him a look of pure loathing. “Even for a demon, you’re demented.”

Hirokin laughed again, lustily. “Am I?”

“Yes,” she said ruthlessly, advancing on him. “If I didn’t know it’d just be a mercy to you, I would kill you where you stand.” 

Her reiki crackled around her, a ghostly flame. Against the raging winds, the jagged rock and frothing abyss below, she blazed. Hirokin’s breath caught, his black heart pounded—she had never looked more beautiful to him than she did in her present fury. When he fell to his knees before her, Kagome recoiled from him in disgust.

“Are you—you’re hard right now, aren’t you?”

Hirokin curved a tepid smile. “…Terribly.”

Kagome pinched the bridge of her nose as she drew in a breath. “Up. Get up—get the fuck up.”

Hirokin got the fuck up, still painfully hard. Visibly too, no doubt. Kagome turned away. As Ohana appeared before them suddenly, sailing like a green arrow through the swirling haze, Kagome’s expression grew wistful. Distant.

“She’s beautiful, your dragon.”

“She was born from me, in part.”

“Well,” Kagome said, smiling dryly, “that would explain it.”

Hirokin crossed over to her. When he took her by the waist and drew her to him, she didn’t resist. The silk of her dress was cool like water under his hands, the fur pelt that draped her soft and yielding as snow. He brought his face close to hers, so close that the warmth of his breath melted the glitter of ice from her lashes. The water dripped down her face like tears before he burned it away.

“I am sorry,” he said.

Kagome’s eyes searched his, deep and bluely grey. “It’s strange,” she said to him softly, “I almost believe you.”

Hirokin leaned down and kissed her then, giving himself over willingly to his doom.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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