Ice Shatters
by vexatively
How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
Leading you down into my core
Where I've become so numb
Without a soul
My spirit sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home.
Snowflakes blanket rationality like a whisper.
There is no Higher Power here, neither Heaven nor Hell nor the In-Between. Instead of thinking or planning, there is acting and feeling and teasing and biting and gouging and feasting; only Fear and Instinct in endless white.
Delight.
And it is here she wanders, the glittering Purgatory, her playground.
The Deathbringer's footsteps are slow but sure, every step achingly lonely with neither shadow nor reflection for company— entities such as she, the closest thing to mythology and bloodsucking and things that go bump in the night.
Eyes narrow as someone dares enter her domain in the form of not-quite-a-woman wrapped in furs. Kikyou almost feels westbound fists steadily pounding through the layers and chill seeping through to bone and marrow.
Almost.
Wake me up inside
Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
But feeling is synonymous to nothing, except when Kikyou relishes the screams of those who do not know any better.
Her fingers tingle, aching in a reminder that she must feed soon. This is reason and Good. Death exists to only correct the Good, following the Laws of Nature (of Balance).
She contemplates the girl, making her way through snow as virgin as she, oblivious.
Kikyou's laughter rings through the clearing like a thousand ice fragments falling and tinkling and shattering as easily as the wills of a thousand souls.
Today, tomorrow, yesterday; time had no meaning for her and never will so what was one life taken today when none but Death will claim it anyway?
As though the girl can hear some semblance of Kikyou's existence, she shivers.
That would be the last time.
(Save me from the nothing I've become.)
Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life
Her soul was ripped from her possession as if sucked from the corpse of her body that remained, shrieking all the while. The Deathbringer is thirsty (but not with blood), and that lone soul must do.
"Kikyou?"
She stops, for once as still as the dead should be.
Wake me up inside
Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become
(frozen inside without your touch without your love darling only you are the life among the dead—
"Inuyasha?"
Her voice breaks, brittle and icy. She thinks of a thousand things to say. It's funny how you never know the things you want to say… the right things you want to say… until you're finally…
—I miss you I love you I need you this isn't me I wish I'd never been woken up again please don't leave me please)
He draws up enough courage to approach her, the shell that was once his heart. To see closely how much she has changed and how the not-Kikyou was right. Even now, she can hear the shrill voice of her other half. The part of her soul dark, tarnished by embracing mortality.
Lightly, his claws ghost over the side of her face, tracing the arch of her brow, the prominence of her cheekbones, the whiteness of her lips, the arch of her neck, the all-too-breakable clay skin.
All. Of. It.
And she's never felt more vulnerable than in her immortality.
All this time I can't believe I couldn't see
Kept in the dark but you were there in front of me
I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems
Got to open my eyes to everything
"I'm sorry," Inuyasha whispers into the precarious silence. "I'm sorry for calling your name. And…"
He stops and she suppresses the urge to wrench his soul from his possession as easily as she had done the girl's. The only thing stopping her was the fact that his soul was so very evil as well. Poisoned by an acceptance of what he was, even as doubt clouded his mind.
Without a thought
Without a voice
Without a soul
"I shouldn't have come back to you." His face is anguished and Inuyasha's ears twitch, obviously hearing the sorrow his love was making. Loudly and repeatedly. She casts the thought of her reincarnation away in annoyance.
"Go then."
Don't let me die here
There must be something more
He hasn't taken more than a few steps when she adds, "Don't forget though, that your soul is mine. It knows its master, and you will always come back."
He runs away, and she's expected this.
(As surely as the snow falls.)
Bring me to life.
She laughs again and walks on, dancing pirouettes on powder that never show her footprints and waters that stir not.
She approaches a village now and the entity indulges, clapping her hands in delight. Kikyou has always known she was meant to be better. Her soul would join the stars, little pinpoints of light that shine almost as brightly as she.
Wake me up inside
Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become
The moon glows full and crimson, reflecting the Deathbringer's playground awash with blood.
Even after the snow melts into too-green spring, Instinct remains.
They say that Death was nothing to be feared. That it was a Beautiful Path and that it was Inevitable and that All Things Must Come To An End.
(Ice shatters once again, brilliantly, and the birds fly as one into the glorious sunset, into the fire that is their eternal damnation.)
They were wrong.
She had Eternity in her grasp, after all.
Disclaimer: Inuyasha doesn't belong to me.
Author's Note: Don't you just love it when you find old stories you forgot to upload? It makes you feel like you're doing something, rather than being hopelessly blocked. :)