It should be strange, that casual contact - so unfamiliar in the prim and proper Japanese culture - but it isn't. It's warm and familiar and it fills a void in Kurama's heart that he has been achingly aware of for years.

He finds a smile for her, somewhere, and brushes his fingers gently over the delicate bones of her hand.

"I think you may be even more beautiful than I remember," he says, and the words are not just empty flattery. They are some of the truest words he has ever spoken, not just because the years have made her memory fade from his mind, but because there is age and wisdom in her face now that was missing when she was younger.