PROLOGUE (Hiei POV)
'It's cold out tonight...it can't be fucking winter already...' I let the familiar cold sink into my bones as I stare out at a blackening moon, grasping the box of Parliaments that I've had sitting in my coat pocket for the last year now. Never in that year or in the future would I open them; they served as a solid reminder of him, after all. I sigh, watch my breath float out in a shapeless cloud as the train rattles the windows of the old apartment. "Hiei..." my sister calls out, carefully. I cringe; she's scared of me, scared of the violent mood swings, of the bouts of depression that have plagued me since that afternoon. An ironically warm and otherwise happy day when...I don't let the word slip into my mind again.
"I'll be inside before sunrise" I promise her. I feel her eyes blaze into the back of my head a moment more before the sliding glass door whispers shut. 'Sorry Yukina' I whisper to her from the place in my mind 'Sorry for all the empty promises'. I throw a stone down to the empty traintracks, hear it bounce off the graffiti-scarred cement, far from my target.
Habitually, my fingers slip into my coat pocket to finger the pack of cigarettes, half empty for six months, and which I would never use. They weren't mine after all. They belonged to someone with hopeless eyes, and red hair bleached brightly at the tips, in locks of hair I had learned to braid. 2 years ago, his eyes had begun to shine again.
A year ago, we were eighteen.
Six months ago...
...it was about surviving.