Blossom
I'm no Rumiko.
xx
She held you in her mirror - arms, cold limbs of broken glass, tendrils of lunar flower brush violet-tinged cheeks. Heart of Darkness. Cradled in the lap of her kimono. Held aloft against her prepubescent breast and doll-like body - corrupted with your eyes - and silence, innocence. Malice. We were meant to be separated.
We were meant to be 'half'. Inside, I thrashed against the wind.
Snake-eyed, red-lipped, soul whispers through the translucent paper of soft skin - mine - like when we were one: now I can see the veins inside you, blue and purple, black, like pages of unspoken words, and secrets darker flowing deeper running than the haunt blood-rivers of our linked subconscious, childlike intertwined. I saw him in you; long fingers like spider-legs running through in every moistened breath and heave of your so tiny, perfect form, possessive claim, his heart, his black heart; you. But akago was hakudoshi and hakudoshi was akago, and we were both Naraku the deepest darkest part of him expelled but we would never belong to him.
When one was ripped in half and became two, you didn't need to speak. I heard you, and so the silence became theirs.
You read their minds. You twisted them to your vicious, corrupted will: latched on to the blackness in their souls because that sin was all you knew.
You made puppets of them. You were his pawn. The mirror - child cradled you and spoke to you in soft, unfeeling hushes like a sigh of wind, like ghosts and memories, seething reaching through the seams of time to haunt you. Death caressing your round infant cheek with mermaid fingers.
But you were so small, so small.
So far from my arms.
I grew - cruel violet eyed and white rose petal hair - and you remained as you had been before. 'Half'. A faint, smooth-skinned shadow with aching skin-cells, black heart, and sharp little teeth, denting the plum of infant-lip: so fragile, even in bottomless darkness, broken. . .
I made him for you. I gave him a soul. Naraku's, yours - you - and so you were powerful, were strong. No longer the tiniest white perfect evil thing with soft clouds of dusky hair and reaching fingers, my akago, but moryomaru, who was a part of something once, who was you but he was not you, who would be the destruction of Naraku, Him, by the weather of his own tormented soul: his own Heart of Abysmal Hell, Naraku - you. I gave you a shell that would sustain you.
The words faded to buzzing whispers in my head. Entei bore the streaks of claws upon its back, flame tendrils of ashy hair, flaring dank breath, gusts of heaving pain, of labored breathing. Little fingernails digging digging beneath the skull below the ache to hear your echo-voice again, your black deep swimming around my bones like silver ropes binding me tightening me and cooing mine mine mine because we were never meant to be more than one. We were part of him but we weren't his.
He tried.
He was itching without himself, his soul, his hate-love, his betrayal, his black magic. The spider burned and branded on his back stretched its gnarled, rope-like legs across his shoulder blades like wings. He wanted to claw himself, to reach inside, draw it all out across the floor until he was unrecognizable lumps of throbbing flesh and bleeding loss desire curse. Sometimes he did.
Severed every vein with pinprick prodding - seraphim claws, demon fingers - and let it bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and recoil into darkness, and then the skin thickly re-generate with a grotesque squelch and then, the burn, the crackling of rotting flesh. It both enticed and disgusted him. A lot of times it was her name. Still hers. And maybe she'd been branded into the earth and dirt and soil and dark that was him, every demon he'd absorbed, and he resented you more than he had before you ever were akago, expelled: because you were incomplete, and so was he.
His limbs arched and went sprawling as he crouched above me. Hell-monster, lust-darkness. Flesh and scales. Tendrils of ink-black hair that brushed the slim sharp hips, the milk-white curve and boyish flesh, his own. Mine. He would have devoured you. Instead, he took me, and as he clutched the bird-bone heads of my shoulders, tiny cradle of my criss-crossed shell, I could feel his heart and yours beating through every flaw, and hated him, and wished that it wasn't you.
When he pulled out - thick, heavy absence like swallowing miasma - he would sneer, and I would reflect it with a cold, malicious, mirrored smile: because every time he touched me, taste like cold still water and hot fiery spider tongue scraping scathing bleeding skin, he took back a little more of you into himself, blossom . . . And, torn apart, I was closer to one than I was when I was alone, hating him, and scheming.
Running small hands across Moryomaru's spine, searching for the place where the puppet ended
and my other half began.
xx
