Kenshin's eyes fluttered open as he felt a shift in the room. He supposed he had fallen asleep. He sat up and saw a shadowy shape on the far side of the room. He knew her shape, the art of her curvature was as familiar to him as the feel of his own sword. She had pulled a chair to the far side of the room and sat in her strange way, a sort of perching sprawl, that left her legs dangling at odd angles and her wings twisted strangely. He had to blink a couple of times before he noticed the sword across her lap.

"If you want out that badly, I won't keep you here." Her voice was a strained whisper. She was looking at the floor, he knew, because he couldn't see her eyes.

Kenshin inhaled, as if to sigh, but let the breath out quietly, "What do you intend to do?"

She shook her head, it was a vague and indistinct movement, like her answer, "Whatever you need me to."

"Look at me."

She complied, and Kenshin could barely see the narrowed slits of her eyes as she peered through the darkness at him. He waved his hand to the curtain next to her and it moved, letting in enough light for him to see her.

"I've been talking to people," he told her.

"I know."

"I've learned a great deal."

"I know."

She was now a vague shape of colors and lines, the harshness in her features was exaggerated by the shadows in the room, the golden light was muffled and only dusted her skin with its pallor. It seemed to miss the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Her lips were a thin twisted shape, slightly darker than her skin. She looked at him, blinking against the new light.

Blood stained his wings and hands and legs, but he still seemed so ethereally beautiful to her. His lips pressed together in thought. His shape was so slim and thin, as if he were wisp of something more than she could have ever have hoped to be. His hair slipped from the shadows, seeking the light to bask in, and its brilliance always astonished her. His gentleness and strength always left her breathless in his grasp.

He moved closer the edge of the bed, the fabric moving aside in sighs of her desperation, which she so carefully concealed from him. She wanted nothing more than to crawl onto the bed with him and hold him and make him feel the safeness he had felt with her so many times before. She wanted to be rid of the barriers between them, and to melt into him, to drown her fears in the fiery rivers of his hair and cool her passions in the depths of his gaze. But all of that was masked behind the coolness of her withdrawal. She wouldn't let him in.

Kenshin didn't like this. He couldn't feel her, she was a distant cold thing that wanted neither to be seen nor felt. He couldn't tell if it was her shame that caused this, or her tendency to withdraw into herself when she was working. Was she working? Was she deciding what was just? He shifted uncomfortably and inhaled again, as if getting ready to say something, but the words left him as quickly as he had thought of them, and he let the air out again, not able to wrap his mind around the right words.

"What are you going to do with you knowledge?" She saved him the trouble. She could see his discomfort.

Kenshin shook his head, "I don't know."

"Do you hate me now?"

"No more than I did before."

"You do tend to hate things that challenge your perceptions."

"No," Kenshin said, "You can't just rename the lie and make it acceptable. This isn't a great struggle of good versus evil. I don't know what it is, but…" he halted, trying to find the right words.

"I never said it was good or evil. In fact," she unfurled herself from the chair, leaning forward on the edge, "I said exactly the opposite. I said that there is no good or evil. When are you going to understand that? When will it be clear to you that killing and raping and stealing are not wrong because they are evil, but because people don't like to have those things happen to them?"

Kenshin's jaw set against her tone, which washed over him only raising the hackles of his building anger. His Japanese nature quelled the urge to fight back, and after tensing he relaxed, "Why do I have to understand that at all? This is my job. I should approach it from the angle I see fit."

"Then prepare yourself for more disappointments. I am not perfect, Rurouni. Neither are you. You can not die and wash those things away. Perfection is a nameless faceless place where you are divided and sorted into the parts of you that are liked and the parts of you that are not. In order to serve, and the infernals serve as much as we do, you must be whole. That means you must be flawed. I am flawed, and if you cannot accept that, then go."

The last sentence was so utterly cold and dismissive that Kenshin spoke before he thought, "If it makes so little difference to you."

Hikari blinked, a little surprised by the change in tempo, "What am I supposed to say? I follow you for a large part of your life, to keep a promise. A promise that will not be broken no matter what you think of me or I of you. But in the end, Kenshin, you are a fleeting instant compared to the years. I have long since grown accustomed to outliving most everything, including myself. Including you."

Kenshin's jaw was set tightly, and he shook his head, his building anger bringing her more into focus. He hated how detached she seemed. That was how she fit in so well with most Japanese, she epitomized that sense of emotional control. It was a hateful and cold thing, her gaze wasn't just detached, to him it seemed cruel and cutting. Her voice was passionless and flat. "A passing shadow." He muttered.

"I'm glad you understand," she said. She hated doing this to him. It had taken her nearly a thousand years to learn to love, and in an instant Firrin had shattered her hopes for a love that was not hinged upon her past. Firrin had shown Kenshin a different truth, he had taken over his heart, and his desire for this "truth" was really a desire for anything that wasn't pretty, as if beauty were a lie and the truth were an ugly thing.

"I don't," he replied, "What is all of this? All of the things Firrin told me about you. It wasn't just the telling, I felt what you were like. And I'm not sure who was worse. You for being you or him for loving you for it."

Hikari's head popped up, her near slouching perch had moved forward once, but now she sat straight up, If her wings hadn't been in the way, Kenshin got the impression that she might have sat back. Since they prevented her from leaning back, she seemed to shoot out of the chair crossing the space between them and leaning in so very close to Kenshin that he could actually see the malice in her features. Her eyes were passionless, but her lips were drawn tight and created little lines around the corners. Her nostrils flared. He could hear her breath being drawn in before she spoke, and there, in that instant of anger, the wall between them failed, and Kenshin felt the shame before she even spoke the words, "You murdering hypocritical little curr. Is this redemption? One who ignores his past so thoroughly that he persecutes others for theirs?" She straightened, adding an imperious tone, "Despite anything that was in my nature in my youth, Himura-san," oh the sarcasm in that name, "there is no blood on my hands. I did not murder people in my mortality. I was the tool of no man, and you, you pandering little toady, have the gall to look upon me with bloodstained hands crying out for goodness and truth and condemn me? Back down, little man, I made you, and I will break you." The last was so quietly spoken that the menace seemed to hang in the air with an almost metallic taste behind it.

He had almost been ashamed. Up until she threatened him. "Threats are the tools of the weak, Hikari," he said quietly, pulling himself from the bed to stand on the floor.

"Would you like for me to make it a promise?" Kenshin couldn't help but feel it now. She was so angry she didn't know what to do with herself. He felt the twinges of regret eating at her as her words took her down a path she had not meant to go, but the pride swallowed them quickly and she would see this through to the end.

"No," Kenshin said. Her anger had left her defenseless, and once Kenshin had seen that, he took the verbal upper hand, lower the tone of his voice to a soothing drone. "I cannot help but feel lied to," he said, "I have always been honest with you about who I am…"

She interrupted him, "I have never lied to you about who I am. You just seem more interested in who I was. Damn Firrin for telling you and damn you for wanting to know."

"Does your past not shape your present?" Kenshin asked.

"Does yours?"

"Yes."

"Damn you."

He felt the powerlessness of her rage, a piling of energy within her that left her eyes burning with unspent tears. They were both right in their own way, and both wrong. Kenshin inhaled and actually released the sigh this time. He couldn't reason with her like this, this was Justice as a force against the wrongs of men, and Redemption took the upper hand. Temper Justice with mercy, she had once said, Justice delivered in anger isn't Justice, she had explained. It is revenge, and hurts everyone and teaches nothing.

What could he do to quell her? He could make himself as vulnerable as she was right then. If he surrendered the upper hand in this argument, she might act instead of react. How could he make himself vulnerable?

She looked at him then, and he realized that he had been thinking in sequence, and with no barrier between them, she had felt his thoughts. She softened under the eight of his trying to find a way to stop the argument.

"I suppose I should have asked how much you hated me before."

"I would have told you that I have never hated you. I have been angry with you, but I have never hated you."

Her shoulders sagged, "I didn't mean to get angry."

"I know."

She shook her head, "Damn you still for being understanding."

He half smiled, "I've dealt with worse. I didn't mean to seem as if I were judging you for your past. I only felt as if you had hidden it from me."

She nodded, "I did. But for a good reason. Honesty isn't always the best thing, nor is it always the right thing."

"It is a good thing. I like honesty," he said, "and no matter what it was you had done, I could never think your sins greater than mine."

She smirked, "You have to be able to wallow in your own self-pity."

He shook his head, "I have to respect the severity of my past to build my future. What I have done has been done, and there is no way to reverse it. What I will do is the testament to my existence. What I can and will be is what will shape the world around me. I must respect my past to build a good future. I want to do the same for you."

She sat down on the bed, "You're very good at your job."

He said nothing, only moved to stand in front of her.

"But if you really do want out of this, I'll do it for you."

He stayed silent and moved closer to her, and hugged her head to his chest, putting his chin there and smelling her hair. He felt her shift against him, and the heat of a gingerly placed kiss on his breastbone send a shock through him. He looked down at her, the first time he could remember doing so, and she raised her eyes to him. He lifted her chin and closed the distance between them, tasting unshed tears in her kiss.

The touch deepened, and he fell into her, the coolness of her breasts drew his hands there to find solace in the soft fullness of them, the neat fit into the palm of his hand. The feel of her skin against his, tiny minute adjustments shifted against him, provoking him further to find his place inside her. She was a dizzying panorama of skin and curves, soft places and firm places, fingers that searched as if feeling their way around in the darkness of the passion rising within and between them as a bridge between their bodies.

The fullness of feeling was disorienting, he felt her leg over his hip, her hand seeking out the small of his back, her lips searching his neckline. He looked for her as well, his hand roving the curve of her hip and up her waist, stuttering over her rib cage to find the soft resting place of her breast again. His other arm braced him over her, his hand tangled in the cold stygian void of her hair, his fingers gripping it as if it were the rope that saved him from drowning in her. He fought his head around to meet her kisses so that then he would have two anchors in her instead of the one. The one shifting, moving, thrusting anchor that bound him inexorably to her. His tongue sought the depths of her mouth, once filled with bile and anger at him, a lost tossing sea of mindless abandon. His body moved, tossed on the roiling seas of the moment, the roiling sea of her.

She moved beneath him, a stirring, an awakening, a breathless dance like water, raging seas and boiling rapids. Her fingers lost themselves in the depths of that voluminous and sinfully red hair, and her fingers thought they might be burned by the heat of him. There was no hesitation to him, there was no playful talk beforehand, this was an act between two minds where the bodies could only ride alongside with no idea of the true destination.

In a sudden movement, his anchor lost its hold, and she swallowed his cry down the depths of her throat. He moaned into her mouth, he eyes shut tightly against the delightful discomfort of the moment, and he felt her relax against him, the sea becoming calm and allowing him to find his way.

When he opened his eyes again, he was on his side; she was in front of him, her hand draped lazily over his hip as she watched him. He visibly tensed under gaze, and closed his eyes again and sighed in contentment.

"This doesn't make up for anything, you know."