Title: The Mason
Summary: Miroku has built carefully constructed walls. Miroku/Kagome, one-shot.
Word Count: 329
Disclaimer: I never.
Notes: OK, if you're a fan of this pairing, there are some people you should read: Kei the Incarnadine Goddess, Rurouni Star, Elementary Magpie. They do not get enough love, and they are beautiful authors.
Miroku has built carefully constructed walls, the work of eighteen years, one lifetime. They sit firmly under his ribcage, and not even a boomerang made of bone has managed to take them down. He thinks he is safe the first time she comes to him. (They meet beneath blossoms and moonlight.)
Sometimes Kagome runs her fingers down his arm and stiffens in surprise when she traces across round blunt nails instead of claws, but sometimes she presses her lips to his neck and whispers Miroku Miroku Miroku into his skin and they both forget that her mouth and his flesh do not make up existence. (He cups her jaw and kisses her eyelids and the leaves clatter together in the wind.)
Sometimes he thinks of Sango and regrets what he can no longer change, but sometimes when Kagome's hands track fissures of sensation across his chest, he regrets only that morning will come. (She places a palm over his heart and smiles as though she is certain.)
He always breathes her in and wonders how he ever thought, when this started, that he could be with her just once and it would be enough. It's never enough, because Kagome shines with life and Miroku has had so little of it in his own. (Their bodies connect and it seeps into his bones.)
When she lays under him belly to belly and trembles, he collapses into her because she has no barriers to keep him out. When he holds her and she is still with sleep he feels the earth moving around them and he thinks of the future. He imagines tomorrow, and when he is ambitious, twenty-five, and always Kagome is beside him. (Delicate, innocent hands capable of destroying a jewel embrace him and everything shatters.)
In the night when they move together he can feel something high under his ribs cracking. (And to him it sounds like a delicate string snapping and prayer beads falling to the earth.)
end.