All "InuYasha" characters belong to Rumiko Takahashi and associated copyright holders. No money is being made from this fan fiction. No infringement is intended. Nor do I make claim on "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" by Pink Floyd, but lord I wish I could. I lost my father as well and going through his audiophile stashes were enlightening and sad, just like the flavor of this fic.
"I never knew your father had this much shit.", Kagome's friend bitched half-heartedly as he flipped through the old, well-worn LP's.
"InuYasha… this is hard enough, OK? Please just help me get it all together.", the quiet, sad girl mumbled and closed her eyes in irritation for the fifth time. Maybe asking InuYasha to help her clean out her father's "junk" after his death six weeks prior had been a very poor choice.
His nearly-constant whining was starting to get on her last nerve. She was too emotionally worn thin to cleanse her irritation with out-right anger at the dust-covered hanyou, at this point and so, she tried to think of a different strategy to shut him up.
Maybe if InuYasha could identify with her absent father a bit, he'd be just a little more considerate.
"InuYasha, dig out that turntable we got down off the back shelf; I'm sure it still works if he saved it – he never threw out anything that still worked.", Kagome choked back the huddling sob in the back of her throat just in time. She didn't want to make InuYasha any more uncomfortable; she knew he hated to see her cry.
"Uh…right. Where do you want to plug it in at?"
"Over here's good – set it on that big box of books; I'm sure it's solid enough, don't you? It weighs enough, right?" she aimed for a good-natured joke that immediately fell flat when the undeniable sob finally broke at the end of her words.
"Ah…shit, Kagome. I'm sorry. You know I don't mean anything, this is just boring dusty work is all." The embarrassed hanyou put the old machine down and gracefully skirting the various piles and stacks of her Dad's inner life, put a companionable arm around the girl who bowed her head to hide her tears – again.
Sniffing and wiping her dusty eyes, Kagome threw her long hair back out of her red face and tried to get herself together. Smiling in spite of herself, it did make her happy that the inu-hanyou with his arm around her did indeed care about her, probably more than he'd ever admit. Well – this would go faster with some music anyway.
"Pick your poison InuYasha; I think I remember how to make this thing work."
Shaking even-longer dusty hair out of his eyes, InuYasha scanned around the piles of vinyl around him. Settling on one that had a very bright cover and seemed to have a happy-ish scene of, well, four guys sitting around looking bored and stoned – sold! He'd never really been much a music fan but if it made Kagome happy, he'd run naked through a mile of ass-deep snow. One of these days, he'd get up enough courage to tell her how much he really did lover her – hopefully, before someone else did. That Hojo kid was beginning to come around far too often for his liking – so when his girl (who was also his friend and so far he'd not been able to put two and two together, dammit!) asked him to help her pack her recently-deceased father's crap up to get rid of, well InuYasha thought he'd beat his rival to it and said yes.
"This one – here. I've never seen it before. You're dad had some strange taste in music."
"I've never heard this one either. It looks like some of these records haven't been played since before I was born. Those covers are pretty wild, huh?" she mused with a watery smile and kneeling over by the turntable began to set the thing in motion.
"The names of these songs are weird. When in the world did he pick this up?" she wondered out-loud, flipping the cover back and forth and looking hard at it.
"Looks like a bunch of weirdoes to me. There's four guys and only two names – that's weird. Which one do you think is Pink?" came a puzzled voice very close behind her shoulder. InuYasha was kneeling right behind her, squinting at the strange group on the outside of the sleeve.
"That's pretty funny, huh? Must be the guy wearing the pink tie-dye shirt. I don't know. But you know what's weird? They look like they're our age, InuYasha – but how old do you think this album is - 35 years? 40 years old? Where will we be in 40 years, do you think?", Kagome wondered aloud at the transience of life as she flipped the cover back over and picked a song that sounded, well – weird.
"I don't know, but…hell, I don't know. I don't think of it much, really." InuYasha replied after a second's deliberation, nearly outing himself in the process. Biting the inside of his cheek, he resisted the urge to run his fingers through the mass of black shining hair before him. He needed to get up, get moving and do less thinking – right now. But maybe, it wouldn't hurt anything…just once…
"We better get back to work, huh? Otherwise we'll still be here, years from now – trapped in your father's stuff like a bug in amber.", the hanyou said softly into her hair as he leaned forward on his knees and stole the record cover from her dreamy fingers. The scent of her hair, of her, was like steel shot that tumbled faster and faster in his mind, ever polishing his hidden need for the girl before him. Chucking the sleeve onto a nearby box, the love-sick hanyou got up and tried to get back to the business at hand.
Placing the needle as softly as she could on the disk, the fuzzy sound of dead air brought back very distant memories of her father when he used to play records for her as a very young girl – before she even had any inkling of what music was or could be, her father used to DJ for her on lazy afternoons when her mother was gone somewhere, out of the house. She remembered his huge stereo – the many different components a mish-mash of nascent electronic wonder. Kagome also remembered a few times he'd plunk the huge soft head phones over her tiny ears to hear something her father just had to share with his two or maybe three-year old daughter. Far-away eyes lost in the distance of memory, Kagome never heard the slow rumbling crescendo of a gong as it beat out of the ancient speaker.
InuYasha heard it and turned around. He hadn't heard a gong in ages, literally. Gongs meant two things: battle and death. What kind of music was this?
"Kagome…are you ok?" he asked the back of her head; still kneeling, the girl had not moved a muscle.
"He used to play this a lot. I didn't know that's what it was called or anything else, but this was one of his favorites." She said to him back over a shoulder, over the hypnotic building and strangely throbbing rhythms of the song.
Little by little the night turns around
Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn
A slithering voice began chanting out of the dusty air and it grabbed hold of their brains and yanked hard. Kagome felt like she was slowly being immersed in a strange ancient rite somewhere, a bare-foot celebrant twirling in billows of silk. Weaving her head slightly to the hypnotic purr of deep guitar and inescapable drums, she remembered.
Novices lean on each other in yearning
Under the leaves the swallow is resting
She saw her father lying on his back, on the couch, headphones on, staring into the eternal void of their living-room ceiling. The room stank of something burning, something rank and resinous, but there was no smoke and no fire that she could see. She vaguely remembered it tickled her nose and she sneezed. He must have seen her out of the corner of his eye, because she'd hardly ever seen the man move so fast: he'd had the headphones off, and was carrying her swiftly out of the room before she even knew what was happening. Weird. What the hell had he been doing?
Sometimes, she felt like she'd never really known her father at all. Now that she was old enough to understand him, one adult to another – he was gone. Everything was so very temporary! Seeming to understand this all too well, the whispering rasp of the voice in her ear begged her to make the most of it, somehow… the hissing need within the chant spoke to her of gathering rosebuds while she may; time was always flying.
Set the controls for the heart of the sun…
InuYasha had never heard anything like the music slowly twisting and sliding within his fuzzy ears. It was one of the strangest things he'd ever willingly listened to. The slow whispering echo of the arcane lyrics felt like strange hands pushing him towards an altar of death, life, epiphany, ecstasy… where had that come from? Somehow, the strange chant brought up weird flashbacks and strange memories of much, much earlier days – days the inu-hanyou preferred would stay dead and buried within his own long and dusty past.
"Kagome – turn this off; it's fucking weird." He asked her with a smirk in his voice.
"I like it." Kagome continued to follow the winding, dervish-like organ as the band wound themselves out in apparent heady reconstruction of altered states. The whispering sibilance of the voice made her think of beings with forked tongues, beings that wanted her, body and soul… and somehow, she was overwhelmed by the feeling of wanting to shed her skin and join that pleading, strangely seductive voice, one that seemed just this side of evil, wicked…
The heart of the sun….
The heart of the sun…
The spiraling rhythms made Kagome want to get up and dance, and so she did. Unfolding herself, Kagome allowed her waking yet emotionally exhausted mind to happily fuck off in a corner somewhere and simply was. Swaying, turning, arms twisting like lazy snakes, she closed her eyes and let the sound scratching at her soul, in.
InuYasha was transfixed by what he was seeing. He'd never thought quiet, restrained Kagome would move like this, in strange abandon – if she'd had any idea what the sight of her limber form, swirling hair and goddammit, her rolling hips were doing to him right now, she'd be too shocked and embarrassed to ever talk to him again; he had no doubt.
The rising music was making it worse – the strange echoing chants, screeches, and a host of other sounds even his ears couldn't quite name were running hot fingers across his inner demon, which was making it shift within him in a way that he'd last felt over 500 years ago. Ages had passed , but some things could never be forgotten.
It cared nothing for the decades of personal conditioning InuYasha had built around him – when you lived forever, you had to come back in a different hat a couple times a century or people got nervous, and nervous people were dangerous. It was better not to let anyone too close – strike that, it wasn't better, it was terrible. He hated it, but it was necessity.
This goddamn music was making him want to do things. If he didn't get out of earshot, he was going to regret it. After centuries alone, the force of nature that was InuYasha yearned for its compliment, and he knew it rested within the entranced, swaying girl before him. He knew it, had known it for a very long time now. Up until this moment, however – it had been easy to evade. But the strange processional seemed to be leading him to an unseen fate, like a chain around his neck. Kagome may have felt like a willing concubine, but InuYasha felt like a sacrifice being dragged before dark and bloody gods.
Over the mountain watching the watcher
Breaking the darkness waking the grapevine
One inch of love is one inch of shadow
Pleading, whispering, seducing – he couldn't get the damn voice out of his ears!
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
The heart of the sun…
Kagome turned faster as the music turned faster, becoming more chaotic and ecstatic as it did. Looking up for the first time, she was further mystified by the look on InuYasha's drawn, lean face. He appeared to be struggling against something, claws clenched hard at his heaving sides. Ancient fire burned in his eyes and she basked in its heat, the heart of his soul's eternal sun.
The heart of the sun…
The bottom dropped out of the spinning, furious driving beat as strange swirls and swoops of feed-back and echo dissolved down into slow, throbbing trance once more. A slithering bass wove through the swaying reeds of rhythm and curled itself in cold whispers around her racing heart.
Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his question to heaven
Whether the sun will fall in the evening
Will he remember the lesson of giving
Set the controls for the heart of the sun
She was drifting on the cold, lonely shore of death. He was stranded on a solitary island of never-ending life. How long would they dance around it? Holding her hands out in supplication to her fellow lonely traveler, Kagome stared up at the transfixed statue that was InuYasha. The spectral voice drifted away across ages to caress the cold stone of his heart.
The heart of the sun…
Shaking off aeons of cold, empty loneliness, InuYasha's heart flared to life in a thunderclap of longing, blasting his inner darkness with flares of limitless light.
The heart of the sun…
Let his new-found love burn his soul to ash, it was far better to burn and rage than turn in dead orbits forever.
Kagome's father had great taste in music; it was InuYasha's last thought before he too lost himself to the drifting echoes.