The Spider and the Fly
"You call this saving me?"
Onigumo made a purposely pathetic attempt at sitting up. His body rejected the effort by seizing painfully, and Kikyou frowned. Her hands pushed him back onto the straw mat and held him there until his trembling stopped.
"I can't move," the bandit said, breathing heavily. His eyes squeezed shut. "And I can't leave this fucking cave, but even if I could, what kind of life waits for me? I'm an invalid and a freak, a hideous monster who—"
"Don't say that," Kikyou protested.
The bandit chuckled. "There you go again."
"I just hate it when you talk like that. You're not a freak."
Onigumo snorted, then peeled his lips back in a hideous grimace that displayed his charred gums and yellowed teeth. He chortled at her barely suppressed shudder.
"Then what am I, priestess?" he challenged. "Beautiful?"
"To someone. Maybe. Once upon a time?"
"Whatever. Leave me."
"I'm sorry. I've made you feel worse, haven't I?"
"You know what would make me feel better?"
In her innocence, Kikyou hovered at the opening of the cave, eyeing his wicked grin without a trace of suspicion.
"What?"
"Show me your tits."
…...
"You are beautiful," she one day whispered, probably thinking him asleep. He felt her fingers flutter butterfly soft across his lashes. Only pretending to be asleep for the last hour or so, the bandit's brow wrinkled beneath the layers of band-aids Kikyou slowly peeled off of him. His eyes opened when she removed the last covering and he groaned, nearly blinded by the firelight illuminating his cave. Kikyou frowned down at him.
The look in her priestess eyes always revolted him, but today he found himself fascinated by their intensity as they swept over his burnt and broken body. Nothing—not his hideous appearance after she'd stripped him bare of his band-aids, or the cruel words he spat at her daily—seemed to repel her from this cave. Every day she came back and then today, she whispered something so unbelievable that despite himself, he had to know...
"Why would you say something like that?" He wasn't touched. If anything, the way she said it should have offended him. Kikyou looked confused by her own words, her brows knit together and fists clenched by her sides. She had said it with conviction, but looked anything but sure as her eyes locked onto Onigumo's narrowed glare.
When he'd been handsome, whores spat compliments at him because they hoped to earn his favor. Oh bandit, you're so beautiful, as she greedily eyed the sack of gold on his lap; another raking long fingernails through his hair, giggling when he grabbed her wrist painfully, as if his intent were to break it. You really are a thief. You've stolen my heart!
And his mother, once upon a time so long ago that the memory seemed more like a mirage, had once said something equally as nice to him before—stinking of alcohol and sex—she slipped into his futon and whispered drunkenly in his ear: You're beautiful. You look just like your father.
She was more deserving of her own word for him, and he despised her for it. He glared hatred and fury at her while she busied herself with a salve for his burns.
Kikyou answered him, finally, while smoothing medicine over his arms.
"Every living creature is beautiful," she said quietly. "Even you. Even though you say ugly things. Even though you've done them."
"A pretty thing to think, but you don't believe that, do you?"
She took even longer this time to answer and the silence spoke volumes.
"I have to."
...and there was the bitterness, the bit of blackness in her heart that he hadn't realized he'd been hoping for. Her impurity.
He fell in love with her then. A fly caught in his web, waiting to be devoured and she had dared to call him beautiful. The thought made him want to laugh and cry all at once.
Underneath all that glittering pink priestess aura, she was bitter and blackhearted, waiting to be broken.
"You'rethe beautiful one," he said to her back.
"That's why one day, I will have to kill you."
…...