Just a drabble I'd appreciate read.
Her Garden
Kaede knows many things. She was not ten when her training as a priestess began; she was not fifteen when a demon took her eye. She was not sixteen when her sister died, presumably at the claws of the hanyou she loved.
Kaede watches, fifty years later, when her hair is gray and her back is stooped, as the girl found in the forest proves to be her sister reborn, and she does not know what to feel. She watches as InuYasha is revived and almost wishes she could hate him.
She watches as the jewel is shattered; she sees the open dismay in Kagome's unguarded, innocent face and thinks that she might actually be happy her sister received a second chance.
She watches as the strange pair travel in and out of her hut, watches as InuYasha's cold eyes melt like precious gold over fire. She takes care of her people, she works in her garden, she watches.
She sees the warmth shared between Kagome and the fox kit; she also sees the way InuYasha restrains himself unconsciously when he hits Shippo, and some of her bitterness towards him fades.
Kaede watches as her beloved sister is resurrected a monster, as lies are unveiled and spider burns revealed. She hears of her sister's second death and cannot bring herself to cry. She knows without looking how Kagome's eyes dim when InuYasha shuns her, and for all her years, she does not know who to pity more as she tends to the fire in her hut.
Kaede watches as the trio swells to a quartet. They go in and out of her hut while she does her best to treat their inevitable ailments, ones seen and ones unseen. The strange little group slowly mends each other, awkwardly, hesitantly, a tango of recovery with two left feet.
Her dead sister comes to her hut while she sleeps, desiring information of Naraku. Kaede watches her sister's cruel eyes and the desperation lurking below them, and Kaede tells her everything she knows, and knows it is not enough.
Not enough to turn back time, not enough to efface the gown of misery worn by the present and passed through a well into the future. Though it is soft, Kaede hears the words of her sister as she leaves the hut, the what if, had her heart continued beating all those years ago.
Kaede wonders if maybe it is just as much her life as her death that embitters Kikyo.
She is the older sibling now, she thinks as she weeds, up to her elbows in dirt as her old knees protest, she lived, and Kikyo died, and the god's greatest joke was time.
When her poor sister died, Kaede became priestess; she took up the obligation to the village and the mantle of solitude that accompanied it. She did not marry; she did not love. Alone in her hut, Kaede grew herbs as her friends grew families, and her heart aged the fastest of all of her body.
Kaede lived what had tormented her sister, and Kaede with her lone eye, given a second chance, would not do it again. She remembers the blood she spilled and the lives she could not save, and she wonders that she can get up in the morning, for there's a grey hair on her head for each regret.
Kaede watches as her sister wanders in perpetual torment, and wonders if she would be any less tormented had not a spider snared her and her love.
She sees as Sango comes; she knows that all these outcasts have found a home in each other. Company overcomes the hurt in the marrow of their beings, they laugh and cry and fight and love with glorious intensity and abandon.
So many go in and out of her hut through the years, and she watches them all, and she lives through them and their tales and their determination.
Kaede goes outside one morning, her hair now white as the clouds above, and her garden has never been more beautiful.
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I 'd love any feedback. Thank you for reading.
