There were times when I thought I would never finish this. Today, after what? Eight years? It has finally come to an end.

Thanks to all that bore with my very low updating, and who despite all followed this one to the end.

Yoru Inu

Shiraishi Akina was not what one would call exactly normal.

She had an unhealthy amount of arrogance, was aloof, kept mostly to herself, carried a no-nonsense aura and never in her twenty one years of life had she been seen with a boyfriend. Or shown interest in a man.

She had always her nose in a book, most likely a novel with werewolves, or was drawing a wolf. She specially favored white ones.

But Blue, the dark-skinned, blue-eyed beauty who considered herself her closest friend and partner in crime during those long teenage years of pranks, had stopped worrying over her red hared friend's lack of love-life long since.

She remembers that one conversation a little too well.

"Hey, Kina." She had asked nonchalantly once, when they were on their last year of high school. "Are you, by any chance, gay?"

Akina had looked at her with her typical apathic face, but confusion shined in the depths of her icy blue eyes. "No, why?"

Blue shrugged, smiling slightly. "I just wondered. You've never had a boyfriend, or shown interest in a boy."

Akina blinked, then raised an eyebrow. "I've liked boys."

Her friend didn't know if she should have laughed or snorted, instead she gently punched the red's shoulder. "For what? Two weeks at the most, then you never mention them again."

Akina didn't say anything for a long while, she simply returned to reading her book. Blue had thought the topic forgotten until Akina looked up again and her gaze locked with hers. "I think… I'm waiting."

"For what?"

For a moment, Akina's eyes went far away. For that single moment she had the eyes of another person; wilder, stronger. More passionate, less hesitant. Then it faded as quick as it had come, and Akina was left looking quite confused. "I'm not sure. The right guy, I suppose?"

If Blue had known her friend less, she would have believed Kina a romantic. The type that spluttered such non-sense as "meant to be", or "love at first sight". But she did not have a single romantic bone in her slender body.

Akina had always had a kind of eerie feel to her; as children, when they played about being something else, Blue usually picked a human thing: being a nurse, a mother, policewoman, model. But not Kina, there was a sole thing she always wanted to be; a wolf.

As teens, when those games had been long forgotten, she started to dream of wolves, specially a white one, and of a man she could never summon the look of his face when awake.

But she never forgot the feel of his arms around her, the weight of his lips upon her own.

Nor the cold, untrusting gaze that both, man and wolf, shared.

"It's raining again." Blue's soft voice broke the red haired woman's thoughts as she came to stand next to her, looking through the opened doors to the cloudy day that met them after their classes had ended for the day.

"Indeed." Akina answered, lost in her own thoughts. That part of her that was wild, that thirsted for freedom as if it was water, loved the rain. It tried to remind her of things lost forgotten, things that the human Akina did not know, but longed to learn.

The two females left the building and the campus, running through the rain. Blue had her coat over her head, but Akina was careless if her hair ended up soaked. It's brilliant red shade turned as dark and spilled blood as it fell in plastered waves over her neck, shoulders, cheeks and forehead.

They arrived at the local Coffee shop and headed to the counter to ask for two cups of hot chocolate. While Blue talked to the woman behind the counter, who possessed hair a similar shade to Akina's own, Akina's own icy eyes focused once more on the portrait on the far wall in front of her.

It consisted of one couple, and even though the photo was certainly old and faded by then, and in black and white, Akina found the woman's resemblance to her oddly painful.

Blue, who had noted the fact that her friend was once more in her own little world, nuddged with one elbow. When Akina turned to her the blue-eyed, dark-skinned beauty held her cup of chocolate to her.

As they turned towards the table, something in the corner of her eye caught the red-haired young woman's attention. It was a boy, no more than thirteen years old, walking outside. An umbrella in one hand, and the thing that had caught her attention on the other; it was a bouquet of flowers. White as snow, as the wolf in her dreams, and with long curling petals.

They made something twist in her stomach, a ghost of a memory that fought back to the surface of her mind just to sink again.

She never saw the young man looking at the same boy with the bouquet of flowers.

The crash was unavoidable. Her cup of hot chocolate went tumbling into the man as the impact nearly sent Akina on her behind to the floor. Her fall was stopped by a strong, long hand that wrapped about her wrist.

She opened her eyes, which she never noted had closed in the first time, and looked at the stranger that had broken her fall. The first thing she noted was the dark, dripping stain in his jacket.

Akina blushed, righted herself and bowed lowly. "I'm so sorry, I did not look where I was going."

The man in question looked at her with clear, nearly turquoise eyes. They were filled with laughter. "Neither was I."

"Please, let me make it up to you!" Akina said, looking at his face, then at the stain.

The man seemed to think it over. "What about a cup of coffee and some company until the rain passes?" He said slowly, gently. In his chest, his heart was doing summersaults.

Kina smiled, a bit shyly. "Sure."

The man held his hand to shake. "I'm Kiba, by the way."

"Akina." She answered, shaking his hand.

Outside, the rain continued to fall, whispering; a promise, long made, had finally been fulfilled.