Long after Saitou had left, Hirokin remained ensconced in the quiet darkness of his study. It felt a close darkness to him now as he glared about. Yet he languished in it still. The bottle was empty. There was not a drop left. He cast it aside to the stones where it shattered and brooded himself drunk on reminiscence instead.

It had not done him well, to speak of Kagome. It was like speaking of the dead. Not with regards to her, for she was very much alive and well, he knew—but with regards to himself. Speaking of Kagome was like prodding at a deaded limb. It brought to mind those thoughts which had lain numb within him for more than a century. It was like dredging the floor of some deep long forsaken, stirring the still waters murky with the mire of grim recollection.

The dark surface of the table before him shone like obsidian. His own glowing reflection was muddled to his eyes. He peered down into it, holding his face in his hands. The vision blurred further. He was not looking into the table now so much as the past.

And the image he beheld was etched piercingly clear.

Her eyes, shining and mirrored. The pinpricks of light in them were like the points of distant stars.

“Help me, Hirokin. Please.”

Hirokin set his nails, grit his teeth. There was a reason Sesshoumaru forbid the mention of her. Saitou assumed that this was purely out of spite. But Hirokin knew the truth: Sesshoumaru forbid her for practicality’s sake.

It was painful and pointless, to speak of her here.

Because she was gone, and gods knew when she would return, if ever. Part of Hirokin wondered if Sesshoumaru even cared to have her back. The wound she had dealt him had calcified over, layer upon layer. Perhaps what he felt for her had turned to stone along with it.

But the shrewder part of Hirokin knew that this was only wishful thinking.

Sesshoumaru’s stoniness toward her was merely a façade, immense and implacable though it seemed. One firm lead on her, and it would break. What festered beneath was what Hirokin truly feared.

It was this fear which had compelled him to guard Kagome’s secret, though it rankled him. Her whereabouts were only one part of it. That bastard girl… A fresh wave of rancor swept over Hirokin at the thought of her.

“Damn you, Kagome,” he muttered to the black and empty air.

A high lord he might be. From all outward appearances, he lacked for nothing. All that his younger self had envisioned, he had achieved. Yet he was desolate despite this.

Because when Kagome had left, she had left him bereft. In one fell stroke she had beggared and burdened him both. Hirokin had been living in exile ever since. Bleak, yet bearable, this existence to which she’d sentenced him. She had trapped him with her freedom. So long as she remained free, Hirokin could tell himself there had at least been some point to it all. But Saitou’s discovery had shaken everything. It threatened everything.

Against the simmer of his resentments, Hirokin restrained himself with a glower.

He wanted to fly across the sea. He wanted to storm into her supposed sanctum and wrap his hands around her whorish throat. He wanted to shake her, to berate her, to hurt her for what he’d lost and to damn her for what she’d reduced him to. But he knew what she would do. What she would say.

She would only smile at him in the face of his suffering. She would only tell him he’d gotten exactly what he deserved.

Between his legs Hirokin throbbed miserably. His dim gaze strayed to the viewing crystal he kept near at hand. The crystal lay dormant. Its depths were obscure. It would be nothing for him to apply his youki to the crystal. Nothing for him to activate it and view her through it once more, across the voids of space and time that had divided them.

But Hirokin resisted the impulse, as he always did. The furious throb of his arousal subsided to a dull ache. He could not trust what he would do, if he were to see her again.

Hating her, hating Sesshoumaru, yet hating himself the most, Hirokin tore his bitter gaze away.

“…Gods fucking damn it all.”

…

Hirokin found Sesshoumaru in the dark, storm-veiled valley that served as his personal sparring grounds. Eons ago, a river had run through it, but now only a silver scar remained. One of the ancient dragonlords had burned the river up in his grief for the loss of a beloved daughter. The boiling clouds that had arisen from this had never ceased their mournful churning. Now long-since petrified, he slept at the bottom of the sacred Lake, a mountainous corpse of living stone. Ryuutarou visited him there from time to time. He had always been fond of his grandfather.

When Hirokin approached, Sesshoumaru was sparring with Touma still. The others, beaten and exhausted, had drawn back to watch the match with baleful, glinting eyes. The half-breed was a fierce combatant, Hirokin must admit. With Tessaiga, Touma was that much more formidable. Watching him, Hirokin saw as through a mirror strange, what sort of warrior Inuyasha might have made, had he not lived so outcast from demonkind.

What Inuyasha lacked in form and tactic, Touma wielded in deadly combination with his human combustivity. He was as much Kagome’s son as Sesshoumaru’s. If this were not glaring enough already, it seared plain as day across the gloom of the valley, when Bakusaiga’s virulence slammed into Tessaiga with splintering force. In the wake of the elder sword’s breaking, Touma’s eyes flashed violet with the same clarifying light that ripped from his claws to slash Sesshoumaru full across the face.

Sesshoumaru flinched aside. Blood streamed from the cuts that scored him from temple to jaw. Dark rivulets flowed down his graven chest, threading through the stony ridges in his flesh to pit the barren ground below. When his face turned slowly back upon his paling son, his eyes glowed with hell’s own vengeance. Bakusaiga returned to its sheath with a fuming hiss. Deathly stillness fell over the valley, deepening its grave silence. Hirokin grimaced. Now you’ve done it you little fool, he thought with dread.

“Reiki,” Sesshoumaru seethed, bleeding still as he advanced upon his younger son. To his credit, Touma held his ground, even as Sesshoumaru’s noxious claws shot toward him. “You insolent wretch…”

Touma snarled a curse as Sesshoumaru snatched him up by the nape, as though his grown son were a wayward pup in want of scolding. He slammed Touma down. The flinty riverbed cracked under him like so much cheap crockery. Touma’s silver ears crushed flat to his skull. His hair spilled over the shattered ground in a watery gleam—a phantom illusion of the dead river returned to waving life. Sesshoumaru’s knee ground viciously into his son’s defenseless spine.

“Try your low tricks on me now, I dare you.” The Western Lord’s features were dark and twisted. From the shadowed periphery, the others snickered at Touma’s humiliation. Many were his own friends, but that did not matter. “No?” Sesshoumaru removed his knee with scathing contempt, kicking his dusty son over as he rose. “Then pick yourself up, you cringing worm, and remember whose son you are.”

Sesshoumaru turned his back to the panting, grimy sprawl that was Touma. The sparring session was over, but the air remained sour with its aftertaste. Quietly, the other demons slinked from the valley. Hirokin, too, thought now to make his escape, and call upon his lord some other time. But Sesshoumaru’s voice skewered through the stale silence—

“Hirokin, come.”

Sesshoumaru had already started for the castle that lay at the valley’s end. Hirokin stepped forward after him, sighing in resignation. Reaching Touma, he paused briefly. The hanyou was by now sitting upright. Scowling, he swiped at the dirt which coated his face, clinging like a second skin in that ever-present damp. Fissured to the point of fracture, Tessaiga lay dully beside him.

Hirokin had no special love for his lord’s second son. Genial, yet brutish, Touma reminded Hirokin too strongly of Touga. A crescent moon might mark his brow, but he would forever be a bastard in Hirokin’s eyes. It was for Kagome’s sake that he paused.

“The fang used to repair Tessaiga was inferior to the task. If you wish to stand against your lord father, you must do so upon your own strength. Take the blade to the swordsmith Toutousai, and have him reforge it with a fang of your own.”

“Toutousai…” The hanyou shook his tousled head. “No, it’s no good. Saitou visited him once before, and was told his fangs were as useless for sword-making as Father’s.”

Hirokin’s tone was withering. “Did I advise you to use your brother’s fang? I said your own.”

Touma glanced up at him with furrowed brow. “I just assumed…”

“Don’t,” Hirokin said curtly, stepping past him.

“How,” Touma called after him, hope straining his voice, “how can you be so certain?”

Hirokin gave no answer. If Kagome had told her sons nothing of Tenseiga, then why should he?

…

The tower room lay open to the encroaching night. Lofty and airy as it was, Sesshoumaru’s youki stifled the space as he stalked about it, pacing and glaring. Touma’s display in the valley had riled him intensely. Though Hirokin had taken his time in following, Sesshoumaru’s agitation was still searing when he entered. The silver streak of Sesshoumaru’s bound hair lashed behind him. Still half-naked to the waist, he’d taken no trouble to cleanse himself of the ordeal. Dried blood flaked down from his chiseled front, to drift like rusted snowflakes to the darkly gleaming floor. In the center of it, Hirokin drew to a stop.

Sesshoumaru’s blistering gaze cut toward him. “Well,” he demanded, “what did you have to tell me?”

Hirokin told him, in succinct detail. Yet it was clear to him that Sesshoumaru wasn’t listening. His eyes had returned to glare murder upon the yawning, indifferent dark.

“I am at my limit with that whelp,” he bit out, the moment Hirokin had finished speaking. “He exists only to infuriate me.”

Hirokin could not recall a time when Sesshoumaru had not been at his limit with his sons, the younger in particular. Hirokin need not point out that Touma existed only because Sesshoumaru could not keep his cock out of Kagome. There was no question in Hirokin’s mind that Touma’s conception had been forced on her. How many times had she insisted to him that she wished to bear no more of Sesshoumaru’s children? Her ready womb was her own fault, however, Hirokin reflected with scorn.

Touma was like a scabbed wound which Sesshoumaru could not refrain from clawing at, which he reviled though it be his own flesh and blood. Sesshoumaru was drawn to Touma as much as he was repelled by him. And this tore at Sesshoumaru endlessly.

“He is your son,” Hirokin demurred, as he always did, when Sesshoumaru was in the grips of such impotent, inexhaustible fury.

It was the right response. Before his eyes, Sesshoumaru calmed. Cooled, rather.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, he is mine.” His chill gaze flicked back to Hirokin. “Come closer to me. You are too far away.”

Hirokin came closer. Sesshoumaru turned as he did. He gripped Hirokin under the jaw. His eyes were dark gold, as he pressed his clawed thumb to the seal of Hirokin’s lips, and past them, into Hirokin’s yielding mouth.

“I have need of you,” Sesshoumaru said.

But Hirokin knew this already. This was the burden Kagome had placed upon him, when she had absconded. It was this burden Hirokin bowed beneath, as he sank to his knees before his liege lord and master.

…

Masaki was not abed when Hirokin returned. He was late, yes. But then he often was. Her absence this night filled him with inexplicable foreboding.  His jaw still ached as he found her at last, dragonless, standing at the foot of the roaring falls. This too, Hirokin saw as a fell sign.

“My love,” he said.

Masaki turned toward him. Her expression was as forlorn as Hirokin had ever seen.

“Don’t,” she said to him, turning her gaze away. “Please, Hirokin. Don’t address me as such. Not now—I can’t bear it.”

Her attitude angered him. Hirokin found himself grateful for it, this sudden anger.

“I’ll address you however I like,” he said coldly, closing the distance between them. When he took her by the shoulder and turned her toward him, her gaze remained averted from him still. “Look at me.”

Masaki raised her face to him then. It was a lovely face, perhaps lovelier now than it had ever been, in the muted glow of her melancholy. But Hirokin was too annoyed to appreciate this. All he saw was the lurid green of his brother’s mating mark carved upon her cheek. It was ugly to him. Its ugliness incensed him. His mother’s mark had been beautiful, a flourish of the purest silver.

“Good,” Hirokin said ruthlessly. “You remember then, that you are my mistress by your own contrivance. That though I needn’t have bothered, I have yet cared for you—not only as the mother of my nephew and ward, but as my most intimate companion.”

“I have not forgotten,” Masaki said quietly, now meeting his gaze once more. “It is only that I have been reminded of the ways in which you do not care for me, nor ever will.”

Hirokin’s jaw clenched. “Masaki…”

She raised her slender hands to him. Her touch rested light and cool upon his cheeks. “I do not blame you, Hirokin. How could I? I’m only lonesome, that’s all.”

“How can you be lonesome when I am here with you?”

“I think I am even more lonesome now that you are here. Because the distance is in your eyes, and I can see it. But more even than that, my heart aches for you. Because I know that in the same way you use me, he uses you. It is all so empty, this charade between us. How long must we go on like this?”

Hirokin broke from her hold, which felt suddenly so heavy upon him. “Return to the Lake then, if I’ve made you so wretched. Your son is grown; you need not linger. I’m sure my lord brother will be thrilled to receive you, after you’ve cuckolded him for decades upon end.”

Masaki ignored the jibe. “I would only be more wretched there. At least here, I can be near you. Isn’t that pathetic?” She gave her head a rueful shake. “Oh, I wish you hadn’t found me. I will be better by the morning, my lord, I promise.”

Hirokin felt abashed for having intruded upon her. “I shall leave you then.”

“No.” Masaki shook her head again. “No, now that I’ve begun, I might as well say the rest. All that has been weighing on my heart these long years. And tomorrow we will carry on as we were. 

“But tonight I must say it, that you are determined, Hirokin, to be forever discontented. That you only find contentment in being such. You create complications for yourself purely for the sport of it. But I fear you have gone too far. 

“You sensed, didn’t you, that we should have been mated? But you gave me to your brother instead. You arranged things so that I couldn’t be your wife in truth. I love my son, but it grieves me you are not his father. Even more, that I cannot bear you a child of your own.”

Hirokin grimaced. Would his trials this day never end?

“Yes,” he snapped. “Perhaps I did sense it. Are you saying you resent me, Masaki? If you do, you understand me far less than you presume.”

“I don’t resent you, Hirokin. But I do regret it.”

“And do you think I do not? Don’t you think that if I could change myself, I would? I cannot change my nature any more than you can. But I suspect you knew this beforehand—both my inclinations and their immutability. Yet you chose to hang your hopes upon me. If you are disappointed, dear cousin, you have only yourself to blame.”

Masaki’s eyes shone, light welling bright and trembling in their amethyst facets. “I’m only disappointed when you lie to me. I had hoped by now you would love me better than that.”

“Gods above,” Hirokin muttered, sighing tersely. Taking a clever mistress would be his undoing. “How much more honest with you can I be? If sordid details are what you want, Masaki, I can describe to you precisely where he lands inside my—”

“That’s not what I meant.” As Hirokin fell silent, Masaki frowned. “It’s her you keep from me.”

“Her?” Hirokin asked irritably. “Who is ‘she’?”

“Would that I knew,” Masaki replied, the sadness in her voice suggesting she suspected well enough. “But whoever she is, her curse is upon you. It is upon you and Sesshoumaru-sama both. What I fear is that only she can lift it.”

Hirokin feared much the same. His eyes lifted to the cold, unfeeling stars, lording over them from on high, as remote and omniscient as the gods themselves.

“Once there was a priestess,” he began, although he might have begun anywhere. With his mother. With Sesshoumaru’s. With the fiery being that had first possessed Kagome’s soul. “She was young and beautiful and powerful beyond reckoning. Sesshoumaru took her to be his wife, and in my jealousy, I killed her…”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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