Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha.
"You're alone."
It wasn't a question or a lingering statement, but the truth; loaded and flying so high up in the air. She would never come down, he decided, right then and there. Never.
But she smiled nevertheless as her legs trembled at that unnamable, damnable emotion. "Not at all. You're here, aren't you?"
Indeed.
He had her, the little toy, and he so dearly loved to play.
'T' is for Treasure
Day One:
Shippo cried.
Kagome left him all of her chocolate pocky, a thick, shiny bundle of her hair, primly cut, and a crumpled note with a picture of the yellow, shining sun.
Day Two:
Sesshomaru destroyed the well.
It was necessary, he told her. Absolutely required, because loyal bitches were tied up and dragged around until they forgot that they weren't given a choice. They were trash made treasures.
"Is that what I am?" She braved, eyes red from tears and brown from all the total, unmitigated shit that her life had been, from the moment he failed to kill her and finally discovered something worse-
Human trash.
And suddenly, it wasn't his fault at all.
Day Three:
"Where is she?"
His lips lifted and curled into the beginnings of a snarl. Distractedly, aimlessly, not caring, Kagome noticed that the canine tooth that poked out was shiny, like marble.
Pretty almost.
She waited a few more moments before she realized that he was never going to ask what she meant.
"You know, the little girl you always traveled with? Rin," she quipped, and had she been Kagome, truly Kagome with her heartfelt smiles and cracking heart, she might have snapped her fingers at it.
But she could only stare.
To her surprise, he spoke for the first time since the well's destruction.
"She is… safe."
"From you?"
A sharp look, and eyes that revealed nothing, felt nothing, saw nothing. "From all of us."
Day Four:
He killed her with silence.
Angrily, then sorrowfully, then musically – she tried humming to forget the future and the present, the present and the past, whatever made sense, but when he paused to run his claws down the bark of a nearby tree and gouged the living crap out of it, Kagome got the point: stop – and finally, listlessly, she followed him.
Day Five:
Inuyasha, Sango, and Kirara showed up.
Kagome jumped for joy. And as her breasts bounced uncomfortably within her uniform top, Kagome thought about bras.
She thought about how she didn't have one anymore (due to very innocent "accidents", all Miroku's fault), how the future, when they were made, was currently out of reach (but she would find a way to go back, damn it all), how she longed for Sango to teach her how to bind her chest, and how it would finally happen because her saviors had come.
She blinked to clear her thoughts, and suddenly it –
happened faster than she could scream.
Kirara was huge and lithe, running on the wind, darting on the heavy breeze and light drifts of air, and then she was just a big cat, curling in on herself and licking her wounds until her tongue turned red and her intestines spilled out like the great mess of the world.
Sango, her faithful master, was luckier yet, but only by a small, small margin. She sat, half sprawled on the ground, the epitome of angry chaos, with her ponytail falling loose and out to reveal a woman scorned, and hurt, and cut down without thought. She clasped her heavily-bleeding right wrist tightly, her face blotchy and drowning in furious tears.
Her Hirakotsu and the hand that held it lay several feet away.
But Inuyasha, Kagome thought, tearing her watering eyes away from Sango's weeping over the stump on her right hand. Surely he would -
She turned in horror just in time to see Sesshomaru plunge his own hand, green and acidic and foul, into his half-brother's stomach.
"Is that what I am? H-Human trash?"
"Worthless."
Kirara's pained growls slowly tapered off into silence. Sango's muffled tears and shocked gasps of pain faded into oblivion.
Too much too much too much, I can't touch this blood, I can't make it go away –
Certainly not worth this.
Inuyasha gurgled.
Kagome ran.
Day Six:
Sesshomaru waited. The chase was the kill, and she wasn't meant to die.
Day Seven:
He found her dead.
There were four deep gashing against her left breast, where the jewel – hnnn, had he really forgotten about that? – used to lay protected, pure, and utterly warm. Next to her heart.
How… like her.
The gorged wound, jagged and cruel, went so deep that it tore through the beating organ therein, and exposed part of her ribcage to demons like himself that truly appreciated the carnage.
Her bones were off white under the red, he noted. Like pearls that lost their sheen.
And she had lost her sheen, had she not? Hadn't she been silent and golden and wonderfully low and unbreakable in all the ways that mattered?
She wasn't meant to die. She couldn't die. She was the one true servant – human, regrettably – that could not and would not fall to her demise under his hand or his sword.
Didn't he try to kill her numerous times already?
And didn't the bitch always get away?
…Did she think, now, that she had finally succeeded?
His lips curled into an unforgivable smirk.
"But how could you forget miko?" He murmured, unsheathing the Tenseiga in a fluid, reverent motion. "The Killing Perfection gives life too."
"One man's trash is another man's treasure." But a demon's trash is his treasure, and it is as easily discarded as it is cherished.