A/N: While I'd label this story as explicit dub-con as a whole, I'm going to warn everyone that this might also venture to non-con territory in this particular chapter.

how can the fragrance of intimacy

be as sweet as the rain

but grow dour over time

Lady Hitomi comes to him in the night in all her heavy ostentations.

"Wipe your face, wife," Naraku frowns at the sight of her.

"Am I not desirable like this?" she asks, unaffected.

"If you aren't, I wouldn't bed you."

For a gratuitous interval, she is taken by surprise, but she is far too clever to soften from his words.

"Then I'm undesirable," her head cocks to the side, tentative in her patience. There is no disappointment in her eyes or her mouth, silent and smothered in red.

He smirks. His hand tilts her chin up, daring to touch what is untouchable, to spoil what is blue and pristine, once his thumb slides up to her lower lip and smears himself with the lingering memory of her blood licked by his tongue. Oolong becomes a far cry to the taste of a widow's resentment.

"Do you wish to know?" Naraku drawls out and it echoes to the flesh beneath her robes through a shiver. When she refuses to answer, he gives her one in a low languorous drawl: "Undress."

She blinks at him. Once, twice. He revels on the disbelief of her face, a crack to the stoic façade.

"I won't repeat myself."

With this, she cringes at his tone. She abides, but never succumbing to the resignation of the act.

Shrugging off the first two of her brazen-colored robes, she proceeds with the third one. From the red-amber light of the candle, her skin glows like a moonbeam from her slender fingers to the delicate arch of her neck. Tsubomi is beautiful, though he finds the superficiality of beauty something more lucrative and dispensable for a mere glance alone. He is an old creature. He has seen plenty of it in his lifetime and has long since watched it rot with age and tragedy.

When the silver-white sash drops from her hips, he searches for the subtlety of her bearings, the controlled grace of each motion of her hands, the intelligence of her words. She is in many ways a shrewd wench, but that aspect of herself does not make her undesirable.

"There is a saying that beauty is a woman's armor and her wiles are her weapon. If I remove her of these things, what is a woman?"

Her fingers brush against the side of her mouth, wiping the smear like blood on her skin. "Then what is a man stripped of his pride," she pushes out the words, clenched behind her teeth, "and his honor."

Picking up on the contempt in her inflections, he cocks his head at her. "In the end, he is still a man, she a woman. Finally unbound from the delusion of such grandeurs both are unable but stupidly willing to bear, those hindrances. Weakness."

She stares back at him. "Do your kind breed from apathy?"

Naraku only takes a step closer. "Desire."

There is a wry upturn of her lips; too condescending and lofty to be a sneer.

"That is a distinctly human vice, is it not?"

"However, I'm not weak," he reminds her from the dark edge of his tone, from the ice-cold hand that clutches at her wrist.

"You are not," she tells him, and her hand slips from his hold. Her fingers, soft as rose petals, brush against his knuckles. The warmth of her flesh leaves, but his skin tingles still.

Only then do the words that fall on her mouth rebelliously form into a question.

Tsubomi sheds the last layer, pale silk wilting down her arms. Her chest is bare, and even in the dark of her chambers, he remembers the softness of her skin, imbued with fragrance and a delicateness he can tear with but a nail. In such state of undress, she does not flush. She refuses to submit to it, but she hardly keeps up a glance with him. Concealing herself again, it seems.

He decides that he will not have any of it. When her hands flit to her underpants, he stops her at the final pull of a thread and untangles them himself with a rough tug. The fabric slips like water, and it pools down her ankles as with the remaining vestiges of her modesty. His hand rests on her thigh, holding her in her place. She tenses at the touch.

"Stay still," he orders, soothing her from the lulling caress of his fingers, as he considers kneeling to the level of her crotch. In wry interest, he slowly, intriguingly, nestles his nose over its thatch of trim hair and inhales.

A breath of protest is stuck at the hinge of her throat. She shifts uncomfortably.

Naraku draws in deep at its trenches. She may conceal herself behind her oils and fragrances, but her scent is a telling thing. Body heat, sweat, and here, at the core of her unbidden desires. She can never hide it from him. Lust trails after humans like a foul smell. Hers, however, is sweeter, he supposes. Soft and supple and shameful.

"Open your legs," he demands, knowing that his lips are brushing and fanning over feverish skin. He revels that it evokes another delicious shudder and an anxious compliance. The threshold greets him and he smiles at the wanton sight of her compromise once he invites himself in with a long indulgent lick.

She gasps. Her leg almost jerks a step back, but his hand roots her in place and the other reaches up for her rear, squeezing unchastely, pressing her close to his mouth. He kisses her there, full and deep and unrepentant, until sweet weakness rips through her throat and she clutches onto his hair in a painful grip, almost ripping a few strands from his scalp.

A smirk curls at the inside of her thigh. He has not even taken her yet, but she is already panting, arched in the provocative manner cheap harlots flaunt out their breasts, her dark long hair bedraggled and sticking on her arms. It is a tantalizing sight. The image of her wounded, bleeding out arousal from the tip of his tongue.

Clouded they may be, her eyes do not reflect that of a broken woman's. "My lord," she hisses out, and her cunt sings aching wet praises once he sinks his fingers inside her, ". . . you m-must disdain me," she trembles at the final note, trembles as violently as her unsteady legs.

"And you desire me," he almost lets out a wisp of a chuckle. Her hands tangle onto his locks in snares. It makes him muse whether she claws at him for dear life or attempts to scar his mortality. "Can you still stand, wife?" it must have stung, throbbing in her veins as thoroughly as lust and indignation and guilt.

Tsubomi bites down a sigh. Bites down her pride. "No," she whispers, her lashes lowered and her eyes despondent. She averts them away from him, seeming to appear dignified when she is burning away layers over the crook of a finger. "Not like this."

Unclasping his outer robe, he tells her to lie down and he unravels her.

There he meets an epiphany in their intercourse and the seldom nights that follow.

When Naraku lusts after her, it is not that of flesh.

It is her undoing; on the wrinkled sheets of her bed, beneath the length of his frame, where she writhes and wallows in sin when he is inside her, skin sliding on skin, shoulder against shoulder, a sigh and another. How can he not savor the sight of her when she is so breathless for him?

From the far recess of his soul, he mulls over the bandit Onigumo and the screaming women he has raped in the past; all of which are pursuits from the heat of his loins. Purposeless, he thinks, because the need for carnal pleasure is no more but a lowly human weakness. However, it is not entirely a sentiment he cannot comprehend, as he remains half a man and half a demon.

Perhaps, it is the manner she sighs.

How there is so much unsung satisfaction in a wisp of hot breath. Pure and virtuous, she is not, and he can never lay claim on her maidenhead for her child-husband has taken it before him. Though when she pants out in pleasure, he realizes he can have this.

It is beautiful, he thinks, to witness her desires destroy her so intimately.

Lady Hitomi is a woman, and she is his woman in the end.

". . .because you desire me," he whispers to her ear. "Tell me, Tsubomi, you desire me alone."

No other creature can say it as exquisitely as she does.

Perhaps, it is his innate promiscuity or a wretched perversion of his own avarice, but it takes the opportune moment to growl whenever he refuses to take her as a lady; not in the manner how he rides her, her back against him, his cock driven inside of her. She is smothered underneath him with her face buried against the pillow, muffling cries of her elation from his ears, from hers.

So he pulls back, hauling her in front of him, sinking deeper by the hilt. He feels her so close to the brink of euphoric madness. "Turn," she forces out, grappling on his shoulders, arching at the edge with him. "T-turn me back . . ."

"Naraku."

He stares at her. For an interval, enamored.

"You've never cried out my name."

"Spare me," of this shame. She pleads and pleads, words lost to desperate sighs, hands lost to pallid flesh. He only hoists up her leg, drawing her closer, faster, rougher. Moaning, she clenches to him. "Please. Turn me back, please."

A selfish monster, a cruel man, that is he. He never listens. He never makes amends.

"Say it again."

She must be cursing him. She must be adoring him. Please, please, please, she goes on and on, until her throat is sore and the afterglow of her regret is fresh and raw and scarred on her soul. She always aches.

Naraku thinks how much she tries to see her husband in his eyes when she rakes over his semblance and lets him move inside of her. Whenever he kisses her, he tastes the pleasant raptures of denial. Then she shudders beneath him, naked chests rubbing to the other, hair clinging to her neck and shoulders like a hideous web. They are wrought over in each other's darkness.

He commits this image of her to memory: not the regal lady, not the stoic wife, but this woman that completes him in a way. A half, or what do those great daiyokai call it, a mate?

None of that. He scoffs at the thought, when he captures her lower lip between his teeth. He does not need an equal.

This is but the thrall of pleasure and pretence after all. Although the promises of love are far too foolish and far too doubtful, he leans onto this passion, anyway. Under his half-lidded gaze, he realizes how much they look alike, with their dark hair and their sweat-ridden bodies and their fragmented affections for distant ghosts. Broken wretched pieces, that is what they are.

He hates himself for being half-human, however for a night, he does not mind.

Here, he joins them together on the bed and what a monstrous pair they are underneath the moonlight. There is no dream in their union that can ever resemble the likeness of tangled lovers in wisteria.