chiaroscuro
Inuyasha drabble
Genre: pre-series, horror, gen
Characters: Onigumo, Kaede, Kikyou
Rating: G (K)
Word Count: roughly 200
Notes: Editing, re-reading, or thinking while writing is for the weak! :F For Ippoddity's Alphabet Meme Challenge, "Opaque," for Naraku (Inuyasha). Not 'Naraku,' per se, but close enough? Having not read any canon/fic for this series in...four years, I don't remember Naraku. But I will always remember Onigumo.
Black.
White on black.
Kaede chan is such a little girl, and these are the colors her eyes see. Onigumo tilts his head, feels black skin cracking under white bandages, and sees those eyes burn fire around him. Such a little girl. A little stupid girl.
Pious Kikyou quells the (only half-imagined) flames with a cool touch and a wet cloth; sits beside him in the rushes, listens to his wheezing stories, half memory and half lie. (All fantasy.) She loves him as she loves everything, because her world is one void of gradations, layers, transparencies.
She sees these things (her eyes, sharp indigo; Onigumo's favorite), dismisses them. She is a healer, a priestess, and a certain selective blindness is something she must accept if she is going to succeed at all.
Kaede chan is not and will never be full miko, not the way dear sister Kikyou is. But she, too, has inherited a world without gradation--Kikyou is very white, and Onigumo is very black, and to see them together all but admits that grey exists. And if grey exists, then so too does gradation, and translucence. Facades, veneers, uncertainties.
This cannot pass. So black, white on black, it will always be, 'til the day Onigumo lives and Kikyou dies and everything burns to cinders.
end.
28 May 2009