Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha.

"Come. Now."

The voice issuing from the speaker was harsh, broken, with a sick quality. It did not surprise Kagome very much; in the weeks since she had last seen Naraku, she had been training her mind to expect such a call. The days when she had believed in the infallibility of promises and good intentions were long past. Who she was now was a woman who understood well that an evil man had decided to curb himself, and also that he was finding it difficult.

She was now a woman who knew quite well the failures that difficulty can birth. Some of them, she felt, could be excused. Some should not.

She wasn't quite sure which category to place this one under. If Naraku had been content to call himself Kichirou for the rest of his life, she would have known how to judge him. She would not have committed the hypocrisy of equating him with his former incarnation – hadn't she spent her entire adolescence fighting Kikyo's face and fate?

But Naraku was so adamant about being Naraku, without care for the passage of time and people, that she had to hold him up to his past. Even if she didn't want to, because he was her only link to what she had once thought would be the rest of her life. And because he was beautiful in a way few men can be – his was not just physical beauty, though he possessed that in abandon too; his was the beauty of honesty. He was – had always been – brutally truthful. Not about his doings or his motivations, or even his feelings – but about what he was.

He had called himself a power-mad monster, then and now. Well, perhaps not quite power-man now…he was the sort who enjoyed plotting far more than he enjoyed hard work. In today's age, he would have to work very hard indeed, if his special brand of evil was to succeed on a grand scale. Kagome believed she could safely say that Naraku would not be engaging in any attempts to dominate the world, or even to destroy it in one feel swoop.

One by one, now? That was a method she was less trusting of. He had admitted to homicidal urges, admitted to the impossibility of keeping them suppressed forever unless she offered herself to him as a lifelong morality chain.

She turned all this over in her head as she drove to his house in her rickety little car, careful of traffic though she should have been speeding there in panic. But what was the use, she thought to herself. Whatever it was in his voice that had churned her gut when she had heard his summons, it told her that he had done something, that it was too late to stop him.

Dear heaven, I hope he's not expecting me to help him clean up whatever mess he's made!

He probably did. What else could a killer do, except clean up the mess of blood and gore? What further would this killer do, except ask her, maybe even beg her, to stick to his side so that she could prevent him from doing it again?

Kagome did not want to consider that he might refuse to stop; if that had been the case, he wouldn't have called her with such a pathetic, lost, guilty voice.

All the same, I'm not going to help clean his mess.

The kindest thing Kagome could say about Naraku's mess was that it was widespread.

Fortunately, she was not expected to be the housemaid.

Just the nurse. He even had the outfit.

Kagome had promptly thrown a large bottle of cough syrup at her "patient's" head, which (thankfully) ruined the extremely skimpy nurse's uniform he'd procured from places she didn't wish to know about, and (jury was divided on this one) had him stripping so that he could clean off all the sticky medicine and remaining stripped with just a towel around his hips because all his clothes were currently acting as carpet.

"Here," she growled, tossing him a freshly laundered blanket, which he promptly wrapped himself in and huddled on his bed, shivering.

If he didn't look so miserably ill and feverish, Kagome would have hanged the consequences and murdered him herself. When she had rushed in, expecting a horrorhouse of gore, and found instead a sniffly, croaky, literally sick former evil overlord, something within her had blown. Her temper, at first, and then something else.

She didn't know what to call it. It had been a spark of pure relief, followed by that unnameable sensation which had taken away her fear of his psychosis and would-be-murderous hands. He was there, cold and needy and human – and wanting someone to take care of him. And he had called her, his enemy, because he had no one else to call. She had looked him in the eye and wondered what sort of man calls his enemy to fuss over him when he's got the flu. The cold loneliness that had looked back at her was what had touched her heart. He hadn't said anything about what he felt; she did not believe he even knew what he had revealed, being fuzzy from medication.

But that wasn't important right now. She'd sort it out later. What was important was that someone finally needed her, and whether she responded was entirely up to her.

But I already have, she thought with dry humour. What else was she doing here, sorting out his pyjamas and laundering his sheets and organising his medicine if not responding to his silent plea?

And to think I'd given up on people. On the best…no, on their feelings.

She met his eyes, red-brown in the dim light of the chandelier, watching her from within his blanket-cave. The smile she gave him, the one he returned – they felt natural.

What are you doing to me…you, are you my enemy?

D'awww? No?