After all, there's not much else you can see over that damn mask. Just the eyes. The cool, confident, narrow violet eyes.

Reptile eyes.

Most would call that an exaggeration bordering on an untruth, but they don't see what I see in those cold, cruel eyes.

Oh, I could hate him for himself, don't doubt that. The taunts, the teasing, the touching....

And it certainly doesn't help anything knowing that if I were in my real body, my true form, I wouldn't have to put up with this, that he wouldn't dare to do the things he does; mocking my enforced weakness, dwelling over my looks with an almost lascivious pleasure, stroking my hair.

I couldn't take the touching. That was the last straw. If he'd never touched me....

Too many bad memories. I hate him for who he is, black, sadistic bird of death and decay.

Karasu. Crow.

But there's more to it than that, for me.

There are those eyes.

And all the memories entangled in the sight of them.

They say that eyes are the windows to the soul, and they're right. But sometimes they can be windows that open back into your own soul, and show you things you'd rather not see, that you had wishfully thought you'd forgotten.

He looked at me with those eyes, and brought all the badness flooding back.

And in my new ningen body, with my new ningen emotions, I was even less ready to deal with the memory than I was at the time it happened.

Well, perhaps that is not true.

I was young then. So young and inexperienced. I had no idea how cruel life in the Makai, my world, my only home at the time, could be. A young, stupid kit who still trusted, who was still willing to open his heart.

Baka.

Time took care of that. Time and treachery, and betrayal. Being hurt over and over again will teach you to kill what emotions you can, and hide any that are left behind a thick wall of your own making.

It took one ningen woman to bring all that crashing down, to teach me all over again that I could trust, that I could love.... But the Ningenkai, for all its hidden darkness, is a much softer place than the Makai. And now I am grown and can protect myself... even if certain self-satisfied, sadistic youkai think I cannot.

But before 'Kaasan... in the time before 'Kaasan....

I have to get back to that time. Return to the power that is rightfully mine. The body that is tall and strong and, above all, masculine. The heart that does not love, does not hurt.

Is that too great a price to pay?

There's no rationality to it any longer. Is it rational to make one annoying bastard of a youkai pay for the sins of another, lost in the passage of time? Is it rational to hate so thickly that you can taste it for a sake of a memory that should have died, should have stayed forgotten?

Is it rational that one silver youko kit was stripped of all innocence under the cold gaze of a pair of narrow, violet eyes?

It's those eyes. The eyes that stare back from above the mask, that smile mockingly at me from the mists of my memory. They are one and the same.

And rational or not, for those eyes....

For the sake of those eyes, he will die.

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