Age Difference

It was the most awkward thing.

Shippo had thought that the hardest part of the day would be getting Kagome to accept this date which would not be taking place in a restaurant or gourmet coffee joint or the shrine or the main inu family home, but in Shippo's very own Tokyo apartment.

Not that he had thought she would refuse. It was more a case of his not wanting her to imagine that he was asking her over to "his place" in that Western sense of the phrase, along with all its psychological weight relating to getting physically intimate with someone who could either be a casual fling, or a potential significant other.

What made it trickier was that he was truly keen to make more physical contact with her, to go beyond hand-holding and pecks on the cheek. But it was difficult, because he liked her – he really liked her – and even more than that, he wanted her in his life. If this shift towards something more romantic would jeopardise their closeness in any way, then he was ready to wait another month, another year, another ten years, just to be sure she wouldn't panic, or change her mind and back away, leaving them stiff and awkward with one another.

But she had welcomed the idea of seeing his apartment with every bit of her usual openness and cheerfulness, and everything had been going like a breeze. The sushi he prepared, the tea he brewed, the conversation... everything was fine and normal and not the least bit awkward.

And then she had admired the pattern of the fine tea set, and he had failed to dissemble about its origins.

"It was a present from a fox demoness I used to be close to, Akane," he said without thinking.

"You're not close to her any more?" Kagome asked in genuine surprise. "It's an exquisite tea set, not a casual gift. You must have been very close at the time she gave it to you."

"We meet occasionally when the different packs we are on peaceable terms with meet up. But things are different now."

"What happened?"

"Well, she wanted to be my mate about three hundred years ago. I wasn't so keen. Things got rather chilly for a while because of that. But in the end, we parted on good terms."

"You've never had a mate?" she asked curiously.

"No," he admitted.

"All your inu siblings do, though?"

"Yes. They've all mated and had children of their own. And I'm the eldest too. They think I'm really picky."

"Are you? Is that the reason you've never chosen a mate? Through five hundred and seventy years of living?"

He flinched a little when she put it that way. Good heaven, he was five hundred and seventy years old, and she was... nineteen. Kami, she was an infant compared with him. It was so hard to imagine that the first Kagome had come into his life when she was only fifteen, and she had seemed so mature and tall and motherly to him then. What would his perception of her be like now if he had the chance to go back in time?

This girl was four years older than her predecessor had been then, yet she seemed so young beside him. But then humans and demons had such different rates of maturing, and such different lifespans, you couldn't really look at it in calendar years alone.

"I guess five hundred and seventy sounds positively ancient to you," he sighed. "But in demon years – especially in our pack, which is full of powerful youkai who can be expected to live for... oh, I don't know... another two thousand years... I'm considered quite young."

"You said before that demon, half-demon and human children grow at about the same rate for about the first four years of life?" she asked. "Then everything slows for the demons and half-demons? How much slower, exactly?"

"After the first four years, while our human friends keep growing into late childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, we're stuck at about the same size for decades. It's not an absolutely precise conversion, but roughly, a demon child after the age of four grows very little, sometimes not at all, for the next forty-six years or so. In other words, it takes a demon child about fifty years to get through the kind of growth that a human child would get through in four or five years. The species makes a difference. Kitsune youkai tend to be exceptionally small until they mature – I think I was the size of a toddler from the age of two till seventy-five! Anyway, it's very approximate, but it's safe to say that we age about four or five human years every fifty calendar years. At about two hundred years of age, a demon or powerful half-demon would be the equivalent of a sixteen-to-twenty-year-old human."

"Then it slows again."

"Yes. It varies with the species and youki strength of the demon or part-demon, but in our pack so far, what we've seen is that everyone from the age of about two hundred or so till about three hundred or so would seem about twenty to twenty-two in human years, and from three hundred or so till seven hundred or thereabouts – at least from Sesshomaru's experience – would be about twenty-five to thirty in human years. I'm still apparently at the twenty-five-year mark. Apparently. Although to you, I guess I would seem..."

"Oh, no, no, no," she said quickly. "You look very young to me. Kind of like how people think of several-hundred-year-old vampires as still really hot and youthful, you know?"

"Vampires?" Shippo echoed, seeing her logic in some way, but nonetheless a little thrown by the comparison between youkai and vampires. He marvelled at the way the popular image of seductive Western vampires had pervaded the consciousness of the fashionable young all over the world for decades now, starting from glossy Hollywood remakes of Bram Stoker's classic, to the Anne Rice series of novels, to much more recent teen fiction featuring the high-school-going undead.

That fleeting second in which he looked ever so slightly flummoxed did not escape her. "I suppose we're shallow, aren't we?" she asked ruefully. "Humans, I mean. If someone looks young, we perceive them as young, even when someone tacks on an absurdly impossible age to a youthful face, like 'two hundred and eighty'."

"Or five hundred and seventy."

"You're really not old at all – by demon standards – now that you've explained it to me more fully," she smiled warmly.

"It's a matter of perspective, isn't it?" he said. "Akane was about six hundred when she took an interest in me. She thought me dreadfully young at two hundred and seventy, but I didn't think it mattered that she was quite a lot older. I was every bit as experienced as she was, after all."

"Experienced?" Kagome asked. "You mean, as in...?"

That was when Shippo got the uneasy feeling that perhaps he should never have mentioned Akane, or any other female he had ever had a romantic liaison with.

"Well," he began slightly defensively. "I was two hundred and seventy, and I had spent most of my life in human villages. Human girls mature fast. You can't expect me not to have had some of that sort of experience."

"N-noooo," she said a little hesitantly, her cheeks hinting at the start of a blush. "No, I didn't expect that you'd be totally inexperienced. I guess it's only just occurred to me what a vast number of opportunities can be packed into five hundred and seventy years. I suppose that once you matured, you had your pick of both human and demon females?"

He couldn't be sure, but he thought there was an edge to her voice which hadn't been there before.

"Look, Kagome, it's not like I was sleeping with every female within a fifty-mile radius."

"Purely out of interest – roughly how many females might you have been, uhm, intimate with over the last... oh, four hundred years, give or take a few decades?" she asked, looking straight at him out of those huge brown eyes that he had never been able to resist – either in her predecessor, or in her.

"Oh, I don't know – it's not as if I keep a count!" he hedged. It really was the most awkward thing.

"I'm sure you have a rough idea," she pressed.

"Come on, Kagome, I don't have notches on my bedposts!"

"A ballpark figure."

"I'd really rather not."

"Indulge me, please."

"Kagome–"

"Just tell me."

"Maybe about a hundred, I don't know..."

She stared, blinked, and stared some more. "One hundred?"

"What do you honestly expect, Kagome? I've been on this earth almost six centuries. I had this wild adolescent spurt stretching over more than fifty years, during which I more or less jumped at the chance to engage in physical exploration with anyone who was remotely interested. That was the period when I chalked up most of that count, which is hardly staggering by the standards of unmated demons. In the last three hundred years, there's only been Akane, one very brief encounter with a wolf demoness I don't know any more, and two humans."

"Do you still see those two humans?"

"They died of old age decades ago."

"Oh."

In their first interactions with one another, he had wished she was more confident, self-assured and feisty. Well, those shades of the first Kagome were certainly surfacing now, but the context in which they were emerging really was, well, awkward.

"I'm sorry if my past seems sordid to you," he sighed. "I'm not perfect, you know."

"No, you're not," she agreed, looking directly at him.

"I know that. Which is why–"

"Which is why I'm glad you've told me about your women... or females, or whatever you call them," she said lightly. "I'm so glad to know that you're not perfect."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Because I've felt so very imperfect next to you since the moment we met," she smiled. "And I am so pleased to know that you have warts and all."

Oh.

"Hmm... did you know that I do in fact have an actual wart on my foot?" he asked, matching his tone to her subtle level of playfulness.

"Demons get warts?" she asked, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows.

"We certainly do. Except Sesshomaru-sama, of course. He's flawless."

"He's stripey."

"I have a couple of stripes too, which didn't show up until I matured. They're not on my face like his are, though."

"Oh? Where are they?"

"Wouldn't you like to find out?"

"If that's the line you used on your ex-girlfriends as a prelude to 'physical exploration', you'd better know here and now that it's not going to work on me."

"Damn," he said softly, with a mischievous smile, even as he leaned towards her over Akane's tea set and kissed her on the mouth.

Her eyes opened wide for a moment, then she lowered her eyelids and kissed him back, going by pure instinct and hoping she wasn't coming across as too naive, for she had never kissed a boy on the mouth before.

Shippo liked the taste of her lips, with their hints of vinegar from the rice, and the mellow warmth of green tea, and he didn't mind at all that she wasn't really sure how to proceed. She was so very young, and he would give her all the time she wanted and needed. He didn't mind taking it very, very slow.

Neither did he mind at all when, even while focusing on kissing him back, her left hand deftly reached out for a napkin and draped it over the tea set, blocking out anything that might possibly, at this juncture, give him a visual reminder of his ex-girlfriend, Akane the fox demoness.