Disclaimer: The rights to the series Inuyasha do not belong to me. The following is a work of fanfiction and was written for entertainment purposes only. No profit is made from the writing or reading of this work.
Rated for: Adult situations and imagery.
Notes: Response to a challenge issued by Miko-Hime. Edited on 8 January 2007 to change certain elements.
The Wrongness of It All
©2006 by Kei
It's said that the third time's the charm.
x.x.x
The first time he killed her.
Oh, he let her tame him let her think she had tamed him but at the first sign of betrayal he became the cornered dog that turns and bites and so much for the transformative power of love.
Well. She killed him, too, of course; killed him for fifty years pinned to a god-tree with a numinous arrow.
x.x.x
The second time he let her die.
He tried masquerading as a human and living with her as her husband. It was discovered she could not bear children, but their semblance of happiness was such that sometimes even they believed in their contentedness.
On a walk one day she chased across the street a flower the singing wind had tugged from her plait. He continued the stroll and heard her scream and thought nothing much of it because when was she not shrieking about one thing or another?
When he finally turned to appease the first's voice in the back of his head, Kagome did not smile nor greet him nor shout. She lay in a spreading puddle of blood, eyes empty as the sky they reflected, body mangled like a frustrated child's ragdoll. A car with bloodstained tires was already speeding away too fast even for Inuyasha.
Well. She let him die, too, of course; let him die for five hundred years in a well in the blink of an eye.
x.x.x
The third time he watches her.
He peers out of shadows in her bedroom at night; perches in trees outside her classroom window and stares and stares, even when she catches him. When she attempts to alert others to his presence, though, he disappears. Nothing works if it's not just the two of them and nobody else.
Sometimes over the holidays he kidnaps her and keeps her in a ramshackle old well-house that hasn't seen any use in a hundred years (since Higurashi Souta died alone, his decrepit body riddled with cancer). There he binds her in the timelessness of their love and loves her time and time again despite her weeping. She was always too much given to emotion.
Each and every time after he releases her she tries to convince someone anyone of the situation because he is there and why can't they see? He stalks her like she's a crippled nestling fallen to the ground too soon and he's the ravenous predator whose eye she's caught he's caught her, you know. He watches her the way the moon watches the earth, waxing and waning and going around and around but always always there.
Well. She watches him, too, of course; watches him even when everybody around her thinks she's only watching her sanity crumbling to white dust. But everything is white now so it matches well. She lives in a soft white room and constricting white clothes and tells whoever she can about her white dog that follows her wherever she goes.
He steals in through the single barred window at night so they are completely alone, so he may love her properly, as he failed to do the first two times.
x.x.x
Lapping her tears up from her cheeks, he smiles.
The third time's the charm.
-finis-