Disclaimer: The series Inuyasha does not belong to me in any way, shape, or form.

Rated for: Sexuality and adult situations.

Notes: Response to challenge issued by Morbidity (whose wonderful works you all ought to go and read and leave her a nice review).


Arachne
©2005 by Kei

She'll get him back this way, Sango thinks. By permitting eight toxic jointed legs to scuttle through her mind, over her body, she will win back all that she has lost and perhaps then the monolithic guilt on her back, in her heart, will dissolve and she will be free. By becoming the silk-cocooned fly she will be granted precious absolution.

The voice in her head is red-eyed and dangerously slinky. The hands on her crawling skin are colder than the grave and twice as lonely and thrice as full of ravenous worms. The long black waves that enshroud her simultaneously choke and caress her pale, trembling neck. Inside her his length is repulsive so that bile rises to her mouth, acidic as she swallows it back down, as abrasive as his fast, dry thrusts meant to hurt her – and they do.

Here there is no loving demon cat, nor is there a silly-grin groping cursed monk. There is no earnest fox cub, no fierce dog-boy, no companionable woman-child to comfort her. Here there is the web and its many (inwardly) malformed denizens. Here there is her beloved damaged brother who she will mend, who will mend her, who she thinks can be mended. And here there is the weaver of the web, who glories in her painful, unwilling release and laughs at the affection she lavishes on the unresponsive Kohaku like her love will melt the perfect impurity in his back and resurrect him.

She joined him in the springtime. When the pink vernal buds begin wilting and the leaves begin dying and falling off skeletal branches, she gives premature birth to a child she names Akiko – autumn child – and then strangles the abomination as no tears rise to her eyes. Holding the wretched, lifeless body to her empty breast, she understands that she is not getting him back. Kohaku is dead like her baby is dead, and o gods! she has lost, she has lost, she is lost, she is impossibly tangled in Naraku's web.

-finis-