Perpetual Motion, an inuyasha fanfic

There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over.

-Jack Bergman

The first time he meets her they are children, and the world is shiny and new.

The second time they meet she is a warrior reborn and he is evil personified, and the world is rotting and falling apart around them.

Well, he muses, it was nice while it lasted, and he dodges another swipe of her companion's sword. Two against one was a tad unfair, but they were such an odd-interesting pair, the would-be youkai and the priestess whose soul was not entirely her own, and he decided not to hold it against them. He discovers that it is surprisingly easy to try and kill her, considering the still lingering memories of sunlight and bare feet and laughter at the dawn of the world, although that might be because she is trying to kill him too. Fair's fair, after all.

But somehow he isn't quite fast enough.

Her purity burns him and his tentacles close sticky and black over the place she had been standing only moments before.

Damn, he thinks, as another arrow sears him into nothingness.

They meet again.

The next time is on the subway, when he offers her his seat without really seeing her and she takes it blithely, sipping her coffee and mumbling a thanks, without really seeing him. Then, after a second, purely accidental glance, he remembers. It's a good thing, really, that he is a rather unshakable person; otherwise he might have done something embarrassing. Like fainting. Like lunging forward and kissing her, or strangling her, or holding her against the sliding doors and demanding that she explain. It takes him fifteen minutes of deliberation before he turns and asks her out, thirty seconds for her to accept, and a little over two days before he finally takes her home. It takes him twelve more of these scenarios to decide to make things official, five months (and six days) to propose, just over seven months to get married.

Three years later he is kneeling over her body— the upper half, the rest is somewhere in the kitchen— in a thoughtful attitude, pondering how best to go about getting the stains out of the carpet.

He figures it was probably inevitable.

And then, depressingly soon after he has met his own untimely end (death by electric chair— he doesn't recommend it) it begins again, in a remarkably similar situation. This time he recognizes her much quicker, and with a sinking feeling realizes that this isn't going to be stopping anytime soon.

Maybe never.

She is made of words.

Words that form phrases like please save me and that is not my name and I have forgotten you. They swim about in her belly, slippery and blind, waiting to be spoken. Just as he waits to hear them, because they are his excuse. His invitation. She coaxes him forward with but I don't talk to strangers and her hissed let me go feels like ice water down his spine, like fingers on his shirt buttons. We shouldn't, she says, and he slithers closer, thinking wasn't it a pity that over so many lifetimes these phrases had become clichéd? Over and over, the same sentences, not really spoken as much as born. They slip-spill from her mouth, wet and formless. Stay away and I will never forgive you and maybe just this once.

Sometimes stop it, that hurts but only occasionally, at the very beginning. Or the very end.

If she is made of words, then he is formed of promises.

Promises like yes, we'll get new curtains and that jewel will be mine and this won't hurt a bit. Sordid and amiable, ordinary and obscene. They sour his blood and crawl under his skin. Like worms, parasitic, they consume his pulp-flesh until they are all that's left, and he is a writhing lump of candied tones and strands of untruths. Still, he is unbothered, because what could be more indestructible than a walking lie? And so they feed each other; she gives him words and he speaks her promises.

He never keeps them, of course, but that's exactly the point.

He finds it strange that no matter what, they always seem to find each other. In every lifetime, in every endless cycle of rebirth. He isn't sure if it's some sort of fate, or happenstance, or if the strings of their karma have become hopelessly twisted together. Perhaps it was simply irony. But it was like clockwork. They would be living their mutually exclusive lives, sometimes terrible and sometimes good and sometimes mundane, and then at some unspecified point they would be tossed together again like two unwilling children on a playdate. It felt that way, certainly, the understanding that this whatever it was was being orchestrated beyond their control and the wondering if they should try to make nice and play along or let it go to hell.

Most often, they chose hell. It was kind of predestined.

They always manage to compliment each other— a matched set.

She is an addict; he is a supplier.

She is a madman; he is the hostage.

She is the housewife bored with her soaps; he is the milkman setting down the bottles with a clink.

She is the shivering woman making her way down the side of the highway; he is the lone car slowing down to roll down his widow and offer a ride.

She is a nervous young businessman with a briefcase and a hard-on; he is a whore leaning out from an alley with a crooked finger and a garish red smile.

She comes and fills him with a dark-slick sorrow, and he bends and bleeds her dry.

Things always end in disaster. It's their trademark.

Sometimes he kills her and sometimes she kills him but it doesn't really matter how it happens because in the end they are always dead, both of them, dead and falling apart in the dank earth and to be honest, after a few millennia he finds he doesn't mind anymore.

It's nice to rest awhile, before they start again.