The memory still feels uncomfortably fresh: waking up in that fortress, pinned to that bed like some exotic insect on display, completely at her mercy. Her weight on me, her hands, her mouth... it's enough to make me want to retch, even now.

*"I'll get what I want, sooner or later."*

Bound, held virtually motionless by those wards -- hardly able to move, much less fight her off -- begging her to stop, to no avail... feeling my body respond to her unwanted touch, no matter how much I tried to resist...

*"Seiki, are you still playing with your new toy?"*

Reduced to a plaything, existing only to satisfy her whims...

*"Stop it... STOP IT!"*

She didn't listen, didn't care. Only a summons from her master compelled her to abandon her "new toy," with a parting promise of "later." Left me shaking and crying and horribly, shamefully aroused, tied to that miserable bed.

She actually managed to reduce me to tears. Were she not already dead, I could kill her for that alone. And again for *daring* to violate me as she did.

I suppose I should be grateful she didn't hit me with a lust spell while she had me. But no, that 'pleasure' went to Hiei, taking the brunt of a spell meant for me.

Hiei... I'm so sorry...

*"You'll be MINE... he can't have you!"*

That's the worst part, I think -- that even in death, she's actually managed to steal part of me from him.

Oh, not my heart... never my heart. I love him with all my soul and that love will never fade. No, Seiki's theft was far more insidious.

*"He doesn't love you, you know."*

I know now that that's not true; Hiei has proved it time and again. But then... even without that spell reinforcing her words, I half-believed them. After all, our first night together was in the wake of her lust spell. I couldn't be sure if Hiei had come to me out of true desire or out of compulsion. I didn't dare ask him; instead I kept my fears to myself and in so doing sealed my fate.

*Losing consciousness in her arms, her fires almost as dark as Hiei's...*

Why did she have to be a *fire* adept?!

I love Hiei. I want to be able to give myself to him freely. It's what he deserves, what he needs -- what I need.

It's the fire, I think. It reminds me of her.

Sometimes we'll be making love, and I'll be reveling in his every touch, on the verge of complete surrender to him, only suddenly it's not him anymore -- it's *her* and I'm tied to that bed and she's using me and I can't stop her and I want to scream or vomit or -- or just *die* -- and it's all I can do not to beg him to stop, to hurl him away from me and flee into the night. But I don't.

Instead, I crawl into that place in my mind where nothing touches me and hide there, leaving my body to seek its own pleasure with him. After all, my body knows what it wants.

It just doesn't give a damn what I want.

If Hiei notices, he doesn't say. I'm not sure whether I want him to or not. And I won't -- I *can't* tell him. I can't burden him with this. This is *my* problem, *my* shame, even though part of me whispers that my pain will become his as I continue to flee from it. Still, I say nothing. There is nothing he can really do to "fix" things, anyway... This is a dilemma without a ready solution, and he has never been comfortable with such things.

Telling anyone else, of course, is entirely out of the question.

I wish I could erase her from my memory. But she is bound so inextricably with the beginning of my life with Hiei that this is completely impossible. My greatest joy forever linked to one of my worst shames.

Sometimes memory is a curse.

~owari~

Yu Yu Hakusho property of Yoshihiro Togashi, Studio Pierrot, et. al.

Hino Seiki and Blood Call property of Talya Firedancer