Title: Brevity
Started: 5/12/06
Disclaimer: I just play with them.
Author's Ramblings: ANGST! abounds, folks.
Sometimes I want to set fire to that fucking well.
I don't like to think it, but it's true. Sometimes I want to destroy that thing for doing this to me. For doing this to her, to them. It's so cruel. It's like something's fucking toying with me, with us. The well is always the thing I blame first. Sometimes I go back further and curse my parents for creating me. Then I feel guilty, because the old man would've been having these same feelings had he lived.
I didn't notice it at first. Believe it or not, I hadn't even really thought of it before. But I noticed by the time Hotaru, our fifth, came. I was holding my Kagome, cherishing her and protecting her as she struggled anew to birth another of our pups, and as I kissed her left temple I saw them. Two stark white hairs, right next to her ear.
I wanted to rip them out.
She's dying, I wailed in my head. She is bringing forth life but she is dying! I panicked, I held her more tightly. Then Hotaru came, crying and whimpering, and suddenly those pup sounds I was so accustomed to took on an entirely new meaning; Pup's mourning… Her mother will leave us while we're still young and new. Yasuo, Mamoru, Hisa, and Kane gathered around us excitedly, scenting and greeting their new sister, and for the first time it hit me that all their fingernails were blunt.
I strangled a sob in my throat.
I will lose my… My pups will…they will leave me!
Something broke inside of me that day.
It splintered beyond repair when Kagome…when she…fuck. She was still so beautiful, even after giving me all nine pups (Kaede, Haru, Akina, and Hana came later), but her beauty and intensity did nothing to stop her brevity. A goddamned fucking disease stole her from me before she was even half a century old. So fleeting, my sweet Kagome. Her breath gurgled in her chest at the end, but she smiled and said she loved me, she'd wait for me wherever once-living things went next. I cradled her closer, told her she might be waiting a really long time. She smiled again and then… And then.
The pups aged. Slower than their mother, but faster than me. I had no fucking choice but to watch as their ash-colored hair became peppered with white. All nine of them were gone seemingly as soon as they came, leaving behind only their own even more human pups. Their more brief pups. In the blink of an eye my grandpups' hair shifted from charcoal to snow, and sometimes I think my great grandpups were born already old. At some point, a few generations later, the youkai in them was completely gone.
I have been erased from them, as though I had never contributed to their existence at all.
Sometimes I want to set fire to that fucking well. And cremate myself in it so that my too-brief Kagome won't have to wait so long.