Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha.

"All right then, I'll go. Just don't hold it against me when you read about it in the papers tomorrow."

Kagome paused in the middle of shooing her uninvited and entirely unwelcome guest out of her apartment. "Excuse me?"

"You must remember the girl – short ponytail, pretty eyes, looked like a student…?"

She frowned in confusion.

"The one who was making sheep's eyes at me all through lunch."

Her face cleared. "Ah. What about her…you're planning on marrying her or something?"

Naraku shrugged. "I was planning to make the front page, anyway."

Kagome raised her eyebrows, faintly impressed. "That lavish? She must have made quite the appeal if you're running into marriage like this!" A distant part of her shook a warning finger, advising her against such flippancy. You don't know what he's been up to, it whispered. She told it to shut up. As long as he wasn't planning to take over the world again – and she didn't see how he could without a conveniently powerful magical jewel to hand – what Naraku did with his time was none of her business. It was disturbing enough to have him pop up at inopportune moments to pay her seemingly random visits. So far, his purpose eluded her. He couldn't seriously be considering that she grant him forgiveness; men like him…

Kagome didn't really know any other men like him, but she was willing to bet that their egos precluded the simplicity of penance. They wore their guilt as a badge of honour; their conversation was lively with self-serving hedonism.

The only thing wrong with this Naraku was the latter. It was absent. Not in the way he spoke or moved. Not even in his irreverent humour and casual disregard for the past even as he embraced it.

The trouble was, it just didn't look sincere to her eyes.

Kagome had often been hailed as the worst judge of character in the world simply because she liked to give people a couple more chances than they deserved. In truth, she had often felt that Inuyasha should have had that title. After all, he was the one with the never-ending crush on a golem that had almost taken him on a one-way trip to hell.

But I had the sense to break away from him when it got too much for me.

Yet, she was the only one who had noticed that. Everyone else had just called her a fool for throwing away her adolescence on a taken boy. She had been a fool, but not forever, and no one had given her any credit for that little bit.

It wasn't that she had stopped loving him – that had come much later, with the advent of adulthood and unpaid bills upon unpaid bills. It was simply that Kagome had recognised that the boy she loved was a lost cause. He had run out of chances with her, even if he had taken years to do it. Therefore, contrary to most accusations, she was a rather good judge of character. A priestess, no matter how untrained, had had to be, in order to sense hidden motivations of evil.

Those same senses were awake now, stabbing at her consciousness every time Naraku showed his face to her, every time he spoke to her, even the times he wasn't speaking.

He's making it up! He's making it up! He's making it up! they screamed.

But why would he? she asked, keeping a watchful eye on the former hellspawn as he snagged an apple from the basket on the table. He reached for the knife, holding his hand over it for a suspended moment.

Kagome shivered, sensing danger, sensing dread and death and sorrow.

Then he took his hand back and settled for using his teeth instead.

Almost instantly, the sense of terror was gone, but she remained alert. Something was badly wrong with this man. She had always known it, but that was a former life.

Why didn't I think that he'd be the same sort of creature now? Is it because he's so good at acting human?

But that did her no good. Humans were capable of evil on the same scale as demons. If anything, they were even more base about it, because they weren't even acting on a natural instinct for power.

She wondered why she had not seen his young man as harmful before he had reached for that knife.

He seemed to be thinking the same thing, for he remarked, "Loosen your shoulders. It's not your throat I want to carve up."

Horrified, Kagome sat down on her sofa with a muffled thump. "...the front page!"

His eyes were faintly red in the dim light of a table lamp. He looked smooth, beautiful, lethal. Then he smiled, and she found herself disarmed, yet buzzing with apprehension. He was pushing all the wrong buttons, she realised. He was telling her that he wanted to kill someone, that he was going to…he had told her that he would do it if she made him leave her flat.

"Are you holding me hostage for her life?" she whispered, her throat choked with fear and fury at herself. How could I have let myself relax around this creature for even a second?!

"Just tonight," he said. There was a note of apology in his voice. "I'm sorry."

"Why?" was all she could ask, and she didn't even know what she was asking about.

He took the closest association. "Because I need a leash. If I don't sit here and look at you, and remember how I destroyed people once, I'll find myself doing it again." He paused, closing his eyes briefly at the frozen look of revulsion and denial on her face. "This time it will be worse. This time my humanity isn't keeping me in check, Kagome. It's egging me on. I have to stay here tonight…delay the time of the kill till the desire has passed."

She listened, mute, listening to her instincts scream at her for an arrow in is chest, for her arms around his body, holding him in tight comfort, for his death and his safety all at once.

It was his humanity messing with her, she realised. Her power still remembered Naraku as a half-demon, and then an amalgamated full demon. He was human now, and it was swaying her into wanting to save him, even as it condemned his blood.

"Won't you let me stay tonight?" he found himself pleading.

Kagome wondered. Give evil a chance? He was – had always been – pure evil, just as she was simply pure. He hadn't ever been worthy of a chance.

But then, he had never come to her asking her to make him worthy, either.

Now he was, and she felt herself getting angry with them both for this repeated conflict. Vanquishing evil was never this complicated in all the legends!

"Please, Kagome." His face was turned away, his fingers drumming restlessly on the table, sticky with apple juice.

Blood is sticky too, they seemed to be telling her.

"I really wish I'd roasted you properly back at the final battle! And Kanna too!" she snarled, but got up and locked the door, implicitly agreeing to his request.

"I'm glad you didn't. But you should have."

If there was a grateful smile in his voice, she didn't let herself recognise it. And if it tilted his lips, turning to warmth on his face, she turned away before she had to see it.

I wish Kagome would make up her mind about this man already! By the way, what do you think of the way I'm characterising Naraku? I want to keep his essence true…and I want to redeem him and give him a proper ending without changing the fact that he is evil incarnate and always will be. Am I doing it right?