moody discontented fury
by Bethany Ten
If Miroku touches me one more time I'm going to have to kill him, and I mean that with love.
Bury me in memory; I'm six feet underground. Why are you holding my hand?
Because when she first taught Kagome to fling a sickle, she nicked her own thumbs while guiding a pair of naked bones she could crush in her open, trembling hands. She'd say, sometimes, that I reminded her of her people, and that comrades are never truer when the curve of their backs fit, like a shard of the Shikon, without a breath of space between them. That every sweeter and gentler girl within every rung of hell would hear me cry someday, and that they would all fumble to reach me, but the only one capable of fisting her hands in my robes is as broken as the jewel… (Seems a crying shame.)
…that every great love story is a tragedy, and we'll both lose something terribly important and we won't realize it until it's too late… (Then she'll pause, because it is too late, and if she's in a good mood, she'll let me hold her hand.) That the choices we've made will always affect the choices we will make: which words we'll share, and which words will be caught forever in the thick atmosphere between our separate throats and our separate lips.
(Then she'll stop, because it is too late, and if she's in a good mood, she'll let me hold her hand.)
But it's not just about your choices, because there are some circumstances that are beyond your control. It's when your fellow prisoner of war suddenly weaves her way out of your peripherals and becomes a person in her own right.
We couldn't look at each other for long eternities after Naraku fell. But it's when you wake up and you let yourself smile, a smile that is nothing like the smiles you've experienced before, but is something new and wise (though you should never give yourself too much credit), because she has a kettle on the fire and her tea's getting better every day, she's singing to herself because all broken birds can do is sing. Sometimes she leaves because she wants the wind in her hair and dead flesh spattering her kimono, but slowly the time in which she leaves is getting shorter and shorter. You thought things could never be like this, but they are, and you and she both think you're losing your minds.
(There's a little red handkerchief that serves as a homely addition to a cradle of memoirs. Five hundred and five-some years from now, a girl has to repurchase a piece of her school uniform. That's okay. It's always okay.)
Oddly enough, she doesn't know that I squeeze her hand to reassure her. Her callused wrists don't perceive the sharp intake of pressure, but her eyes watch my knuckles bob and she feels her own fingers contract slightly. I'll always wonder when it was we stopped kissing because it was just something we had to do…when it was that I looked at her, and noticed for the first time that her hair was long and didn't arc to the side or cascade over her waist, that she didn't tie her hair with a white ribbon anymore, that this—she—is the only home I have ever known.