Summary: He murmured, "I want you to rule the skies with me." Only a whimper was her reply; he had her racked with so much pleasure, she knew that she would've done anything he said, as long as he kept making her feel so good...
Black Ice: Ugh. I hate myself.
Blood Rain: This actually was intended to be an original fic set in ancient Greece, with all sorts of awesome ancient Greek names and characters and everything... But ever since we got back into the swing of things, we decided that this would be a perfect fanfic. The reason Ice hates herself is that she's trying to get out of fanfiction and get into originality. This doesn't help. At all.
Black Ice: Neither are you! Shut up, Rain!
Even though it was rather late in the day, the sun remained a murky red and the clouds purple and yellow, bathing the skies and the world beneath them in an eerie, dim light.
Since Kouga, the god of speed, took over the skies and took power from Inuyasha, the night god and previous ruler, the sky had been like this, and who suffered? Certainly not the deities on high, but rather, the humans on earth. Because of the sunlight deficiency, very few plants or crops had grown, threatening many agricultural societies, and predators ran rampant, unhindered by the borderline darkness.
In a large girls' academy on the island of Hokkaido, Kagome stared at this sky. It was as though something inside of her yearned for difference; as though she knew this was not right somehow...but what could she do? For the entirety of her nineteen years, this was the only thing she'd known, this sky.
"Exactly how long do you plan to stare out of the window, Kagome?" The cool voice of the headmistress, Kaede, startled her. She whirled around, her face red with embarrassment at being caught shirking her duties.
"My sincerest apologies, Headmistress..." Kagome mumbled.
"Keep them for someone who cares." Hagen pursed her lips, staring coolly down her nose at Kagome.
In her eyes—in all of their eyes, Kagome was nothing but orphan trash. This school was located in Honshu, whereas Kagome had the looks and accent of her dead Ainu parents. "Why are you not washing clothes, as I ordered you?"
"I...have not yet gathered the water to be boiled, Headmistress Kaede." Kagome said timidly, shuffling her feet.
"And why is that?" Her condescending tone was even colder than the weather.
"Ice falls from the sky, madam...the streams are frozen." It was like a bolt of lightning, the force with which Kaede struck her.
"Moronic twit." She scoffed, disgusted. "What is to stop you from collecting the hail in a tub and bringing it back to melt over a fire?"
"I hadn't thought o—"
"That is because you don't think. Sesshoumaru didn't freeze the rain for nothing, fool. Now go!" Face burning with embarrassment and pain as the other girls snickered, Kagome grabbed the large metal washtub at her feet and dashed out of the commons area.
Her stride slowed as she went down five spiraling staircases, until she reached the entrance room. The young students were huddled around a fire, wrapped in blankets and chattering away, and as soon as Kagome opened the door, the girls protested rather loudly.
"Close the door, Kagome!"
"What are you, stupid?!"
"It's cold, you halfwit!" Kagome ignored them, delaying her departure as long as possible. When she finally closed the door back, she was annoyed to see that Sesshoumaru—the god of weather, particularly cold weather—had ceased the hail, and this time, Kagome dared not return without a full container of something, and much to her disappointment, her bladder was too empty to take back what she thought they deserved. So with a sigh, she walked to the stream, quite a distance away.
Why did the Honshuans hate her, or rather, her people? Simple. A very long time ago, Honshuans were a skeptical bunch, refusing to believe in the gods, and instead chose the path of atheism. For this reasons, terrible punishments befell their lands: unbearable weather, relentless animal attacks, failing crops—anything you could think of.
Not far away lived the Hokkaidans, a very opposite society who respected and honored the gods where it was due. The celestial ruler of that time was a wind goddess named Ayame, a beautiful woman with pointed ears, bright green eyes, and a perfect bronze complexion that mirrored that of Akakaji, the goddess of the sun.
She liked and admired the people of Hakodate for their unfailing piety, and thus developed them in her likeness, as well as made their land a prosperous and wealthy one.
Though they envied the Hokkaidans for their "luckiness", Honshu followed the Hokkaidan example, feeling that they didn't deserve Ayame' blessings nearly as much. It took many decades, but their misfortune was eventually lifted, though they never quite attained Hakodate's successfulness.
Thus, the Honshuans' hate progressed throughout many years and five different deities, fueled for two reasons: they were unable to declare war, a futile attempt since the gods always favored Hokkaidans; the other was that weapon suppliers in Honshu saw no reason to forge new weapons against a society that had never threatened Honshu in any way. Such was the Hokkaidan way: mind one's own affairs and there shall be none to speak of.
Kagome idly touched the tips of her ears, thinking on the other girls and their rounded ones. These ears, as well as her different appearance, commonly made her the object of their scorn. They often teased her about her longer hair ("centaur") and slightly sharper teeth ("vampire"), and it saddened her sometimes that she didn't quite fit in this Honshuan society.
With a small grunt, she got down to her knees before the frozen-over stream, flipping her long brown hair out of her face. She had to figure out a way to chip this ice effectively enough to appease Kaede...before she froze to death, anyway.
As Kagome mused, her eyes drifted over to the opposite side of the stream, where, if she wasn't mistaken, it actually looked darker as the forest began.
She stared at that orange spot, trying to see deeper into the forest without getting up and actually moving, but despite her traditional Hokkaidan curiosity, she was "balanced out" with inbred short-sightedness.
"Hm." She pouted, disgruntled, and turned back to the ice, but her mind couldn't fully concentrate on this task, primarily concerned with that abnormal orange perverting Kouga's yellow environment.
Growling slightly, Kagome forced it out of her mind, just as another idea wormed its way in. Hoping she wouldn't break or bend the tub, she banged it against the moderately thin ice, smiling brightly when the cold water below was revealed.
She dipped the pot in, feeling excited—not because she'd fulfilled Kaede's command and "finally done something right for once", as the irritable witch might say, but because somehow, she was of the idea that now that she had, she could investigate that orange light. She was so excited, in fact, that she barely noticed the cuts inflicted on the backs of her hands by the jagged ice as she set the filled tub on the ground.
Carefully, she moved towards the orange, moving through it when she saw that there was no danger in it. As she walked, she realized that she was traveling through a steadily darkening color spectrum; from the natural murky yellow, to orange, to brown, and now to the red she was warily traveling through. Her race were notably superstitious, but even skeptics knew that red symbolized death, and the misty crimson surrounding her wasn't doing much to appease her fear.
Kagome wanted to turn back, but she could no longer see brown, too deep into the red, so she could only move forward. Kagome stopped when only pure blackness was ahead, punctuated by two sharp lights. A conversation seemed to be taking place; Kagome hid behind a red tree, squinting into the darkness.
"This is unnatural, Inuyasha." The voice was soft and feminine, and appeared to be coming from a rather statuesque woman who seemed to be glowing a calm ivory.
Actually, Kagome thought to herself, knowing she'd recognized this woman somewhere, I think I have seen her from a statue! It was true: in her youth, she'd gone to temples in which this very woman had been immortalized within stone. But Kagome couldn't, for the life of her, remember this woman's name...
A short distance away from her was a somewhat dimly illuminated man, who said in a lilting, yet still masculine, voice, "Kikyou is right. Miroku refuses to do anything about the horrid state of things, and the days are passing by far too quickly for my liking."
Kagome was stricken dumb, staring agape at these people. Kikyou, the goddess of the moon? Miroku, the god of the sun? Could it be that she was actually witnessing a conversation between deities?
Her heart hammered in her chest. She would've turned back, knowing this had to be disrespectful in some way, but she couldn't find her way to the lighter colors, and she was afraid to go blindly. Taking a silent, deep breath, Kagome just watched on.
"There's nothing I can do." Another man, who the further flabbergasted Kagome could only realize was the god of night himself, murmured. Indeed, now that she looked more closely, she could see his form sitting against what seemed to be a tree.
Now she really felt she shouldn't be there, but now she was captivated by the scene unfolding before her.
"So that's it? You're just giving up? You'll let the world fall to pieces at Kouga's hands?" The younger male remarked a bit hotly.
"Shippou..." Kikyou shook her bright head, placing a hand on the irritated star god's shoulder. "Let's leave him be." Shippou started to protest, but then seemed to think better of it. Kikyou kneeled down and held Inuyasha's chin in her hand.
"Don't be so downhearted, love. We'll find a way." Inuyasha made a noncommittal sigh, and in a flash of light, Kikyou and Shippou were gone.
Now it's time to go, Kagome thought, as the different colors began to fade back into yellow, and as soon as she could see a clear path back to the stream, she ran as though she were Kouga himself, with devils nipping at her heels.
Once she had the tub back in her possession, she had to walk, but she did so rather briskly, sweating a bit. She felt guilty, as though she'd been eavesdropping on something she shouldn't've been seeing, but adrenaline raced through her veins.
She'd just seen not one, not two, but three different deities! With her own eyes! She almost wished she could tell someone, but those snobby academy girls would just sneer at her and write what she'd seen off as imbecile fantasy or something.
These were the moments in which she sorely missed her mother. They would've believed her, and quite avidly, to boot; Kagome knew that Honshuans had nothing but fake faith, worshipping gods they didn't even think existed, and Kouga barely cared. Kagome knew the stories about him: Kouga was a young, arrogant braggart who was frequented Earth in search of maidens to deflower.
Few other gods liked his constant absence from the skies, feeling that he wasn't correctly fulfilling his duties, but what could they do? Oh, they could challenge him for the metaphorical throne atop the clouds, but because he was the champion of the world, they had to challenge him on his terms. Him being the god of speed, it wasn't hard to guess what those terms were.
Kagome took the servant's entrance back into the school building, and wormed her way through the narrow hallway, which led to the washroom. The tub of water—now solid ice from being left out for so long—slipped from Kagome's grasp when she saw that no fire was burning. The stone room was ice-cold, as always, but what irked her is that she had at least assumed Kaede would have another of the maidservants get a fire going.
One of them, a haughty girl named Yumi, came into the room, and Kagome rounded on her immediately.
"Yumi, why didn't someone start a fire?" The girl stared scornfully at Kagome, as though she'd spoken a different language, and retorted coolly, "Isn't that your job?"
"What?! I got the water! Someone else could have had the fire going while I was gone!"
"Water for what, pray tell?" Yumi gave a long-suffering sigh that made Kagome want to yank out every strand of her annoying black hair.
"Water for the laundering," Kagome enunciated, her grating teeth muffling the words somewhat. A small smirk lit Yumi's pretty face, and Kagome almost instantly knew what had happened.
"Oh, you took entirely too long," Yumi said dramatically, "so the headmistress had Juniko do it." The emotions running through Kagome at that moment all but pushed the previous events from her mind. She was half-tempted to attack Yumi, but that would more than likely mean she'd be thrown out, and there was nowhere else for Kagome to go. She was hanging by a thread as is, and she suspected she was only kept around to be ridiculed.
"Okay...so what am I to do with this water?" Kagome forced herself to say.
"I don't know. Why don't you thaw it out and bathe in it? I don't see how you could possibly get any dirtier than you already are." Yumi's cackling laughter as she left was like poison-tipped darts being shot into Kagome's very soul. That one had hurt.
She dragged her feet out of the room and up the stone stairs from the ground floor, to a long, carpeted hallway. There was no one else around. Kagome opened the door to a small closet in which there was no light, except for the dark yellow of Kouga's unnatural night filtered in through the grimy window.
"Unnatural". That was what Kikyou called it. And Shippou had said "the days were too long" for his liking. But why? Had Kouga changed the way of things so that the younger generations would believe this to be natural?
Things weren't making much sense to her anymore.
Black Ice: (flatly) I hope this made enough sense. I was mainly doing a lot of finding-and-replacing to change the names and places. If not, oh, well.