Dressing Wounds
AN: Wow! ^_^ I'm glad to see that a whole seven people read and liked my story. (And no, that wasn't sarcasm.) I actually want' expecting so many, what with the vast amounts of Kagome and Inuyasha fan fics. (Somehow the end up popping up in our chapter of the story.) I hope you guys like this one as much as the last one. I decided to change my style, and I might go back and retype the first chapter, making it suit, but I think that the third person suits the set-up of the story better. I apologize that this chapter is so short, but hopefully the fluff won't be compromised by its incredible four-page length. -_-
Lily: Aw, I love you. ^^ With reviews that energetic, I don't think I'll run out of inspiration for a long time. (Incidentally, this whole story was actually inspired by the fact that at one point Sang touches his back. -_- What can I say? I'm a fluff freak. The slightest thing sets me off.)
Aamalie: Please do send me any more gaping plot holes or clichés you can think of! ^^ They will be greatly appreciated, although I'm ashamed to admit that I have kept some of clichés in the story. Others I beat like they were someone one my 'I want to maim' hit list. (For your information, it only has three people on it. I love everyone.)
Zephor: *giggles* You're sweet. I'm going to do my best to avoid the cliché you mentioned –about Sango getting jealous- although it's so easy to write! I'll have to watch myself on that one. ^-^ I'm planning on the children thing right now. It'll be in around chapter 14. Yes, that's right, I do actually have fourteen chapters of this story planned. I'm bored and have no life, and three hours of a geology lecture make for lots of crazy ideas.
Abhilasha: Good! Get addicted! If I have to be addicted to fan fics, someone else has to join me in that endeavor! I can't be the only rabid fan fic author/reader on this whole site!! (And, frankly, the fact that it's my fic you'd get addicted to just makes me feel all uber fuzzy on the inside!)
Saikono: I'm glad you find people in character. I was actually kind of afraid that people might not find them that way. ^^ And ah… -_-' If your comment on grammer was regarding this particular story, I apologize. I'm getting better at it though! I swear on Inuyasha's puppy ears that I am!
e. Thompson: Dude, if you thought that was cute, wait until you see what else I have planned. Though I think I need to focus on the cute a lot more. I like cute, and so far some of the chapters I've planned out have been leading more towards comedy or just random things I would like to see happen to develop their relationship.
Miri: Short and too the point… maybe you should teach me that trick.
As I said, enjoy!!
Chapter Two: Trees
Kagome had gone back home, as she so often needs to do. I can understand the need for schooling, and how she needs to take a break from hunting for jewel shards. It's tasking, hunting them down like this. We can walk for weeks and not find anything, and yet we will be attacked nonstop.
No. Let me rephrase that: I will be attacked nonstop. Inuyasha somehow manages to find trouble wherever he goes, but trouble is always at my side… okay, it's behind me usually, no doubt looking somewhere it shouldn't be. Miroku of course. The stupid, lecherous monk….
Oh, I know he's not really stupid. He's quite intelligent after all, but you would think after I slap him for the first time for groping me that he would learn to stop. Kagome has, when we're drifting off to sleep and talking, remarked that maybe he's just determined. Obviously he's determined! All of us have to be, for trying to find shards that can be scattered all over Japan and be the size of a sliver of wood!
Sorry. Every once in awhile, even I need to vent. I can't remain Sango the composed forever. I can't be Sango, the girl who kills demons to relieve anger, or Sango the rational, or Sango… Sango the man hater, even! Everyone seems to have gotten it in their head that I always have to be this way, that I always have to be unemotional and strong and…
And it's not true! I'm not always that way. Plus… Sango the man hater? When did I ever say that? Oh, okay, there may have been one or two occasions where I said it in the midst of anger but… I understand and respect Inuyasha and he's both a male and half demon!
I suppose that's why I like Miroku. Yes, I'll admit it. He's my friend, so of course I have to like him. Miroku is a man with many layers. I've known him for almost two years now, and I still haven't quite figured him out all the way. He's a puzzle and quite frankly, I like it that way. I'm never one to back down from a challenge!
For instance, the time when he asked me to bear his children, which he never really got to finish. I can't seem to recall now why I didn't let him finish the question. Hearing it did make me mad. He was grouping me with everyone else, when I'm not like everyone else. I'm Sango. He had even asked Kagome that question! It took me along time to realize that up until then, he had been treating me differently. I was the one girl he didn't ask. In fact, I practically invited him to ask me by pointing it out to him. It took me even longer to figure out why he treated me differently.
He respected me. I've encountered that a lot. I don't mean to brag, but there are not a lot of people out there that I can't beat. Fighting is what I've been trained to do. People see I'm a woman, though, and they forget that I'm a slayer. They ask me how a girl like me could defeat demons, or carry around my haraikotsu, or walk around unescorted. Miroku never asked me that because right from the start he respected me.
You know, sometimes I even wonder how lecherous he is.
Let's face it: there's conflicting evidence. Sure, he waited to grope me until after I was fully healed, so obviously he has some constraint. On the other hand, there's that fourteen year old girl he asked to bear his children when she was only eleven. Mind you, at the time, he would have been fifteen or sixteen depending on what time of year it was. Besides, Miroku was trying to find Naraku! There's a chance he thought at the time that he would never go to that village again, so what's a question like that to make a girl feel like she has someone out there wanting to take her away from her captive life? When Kohaku got taken away from me….
Besides, there's a chance that wind tunnel could have expanded and he wouldn't have gotten the time to go and find her because….
The same thing could go for that girl…
And the other one…
How do I know he'd come back to me?
No, Sango! Don't you dare start thinking like that!
That's really the problem right there. How can I allow myself to feel anything more for him? It must be so hard on him, knowing that he's going to die and that by fighting with us he might only be speeding up the inevitable end. I can not burden him with the guilt of leaving behind someone he loves. The guilt he has from knowing he will be leaving friends must already be enough. How can I let myself feel anything more, when it would hurt me as well?
On the other hand…. Why are there always too many hands? He wants a child so much. I should just stop being his friend and tell him to go off and get married and have a kid with some woman who'll have him and not care he'll leave once the kid is conceived! Then he can have the heir he wants!
And be completely and utterly trapped once we win, especially if he doesn't love her.
So what! This day in age lots of people are wedded to people they don't love! This wouldn't be anything new. The woman would get a doting father, and Miroku would no doubt get someone pretty who finds him attractive and doesn't mind his lecherous ways.
I certainly couldn't have his child! I'm a demon slayer! I can't help Kohaku and be pregnant with a child at the same time! Hell, and Naraku! What would he do if he found out about it? Come to think of it, with Naraku and Kanna watching our every move, Miroku can't have any kid at all, can he? As soon as conception occurred, the child would be in danger, and the mother as well.
"Which is why I would want to have a fighter as the mother of my child."
"Houshi-sama!" I spun around, my surprised face melting into one of anger. He had been listening to me talking to myself? How completely humiliating! Yet he didn't appear amused or patronizing. Miroku sat across from me, his arm folded on his knee and his chin resting on his arm and his staff held in his ungloved hand.
A tiny smirk appeared and vanished at the corner of her lips, his dark eyes lowered. "Sango, you were just referring to me by my name. Can't you please stop all the 'monk' talk? As you pointed out, I'm your friend, and it is just us here."
My body relaxed and I sat back down on my rock, my face still. "You've been listening for that long?" I folded my hands in my lap, watching him through balefully lowered eyelashes. He wasn't smiling, just sitting there across from me and looking serious. It always surprises me how he can float between being the most light-hearted of my companions, and the most sobering. The glove on his hand is a constant reminder of our own mortality.
"You need to stop thinking sometimes, Sango," he said gently, ignoring it as I shot him an angered expression. "Logic can only take you so far. There are so many choices in life, Sango, that if you rationalize everything, eventually your mind will snap. Nature itself shows us that. Look at the trees around you. They may seem to be tall and inflexible, but in fact they move to the winds and reach for the sun and entangle together in the ground to search for water. However, no matter how tall they get, or how deep the roots that wind can still snap them in two if the tree can't bend now and then."
"Are you saying I need to get bent?"
Miroku laughed. He has such a charming laugh, one that makes you want to smile in return. It hasn't made me smile yet, though it's threatened to make me do so on more than a few occasions. "Yes, although it doesn't sound quite so appealing when you put it so bluntly."
"You know, I really should throttle you for eavesdropping," I grumbled, glaring at him briefly.
"I merely came out to tell you that Inuyasha returned with our supper and Kaede's currently cooking it. It should be done within the hour." He stood to leave, but sat back down, watching the same flowing stream and twitching grass that I had stared at when I had been talking to myself. "It certainly is confusing, isn't it? There are so many conflicting desires, and yet so many amicable opinions."
I leaned forward a little, my voice soft as I watched him, trying to understand how he acts and thinks the way he does. "What do you think about it?" He glanced at me, arching an eyebrow. "About us, Miroku."
He smiled fleetingly, scratching the back of his head nervously. "Actually, I try not to think about us at all. If I do, I start sounding like you with over analyzing everything. Or else I get lost in fantasies of what could be, had you and I met under different circumstances, without Naraku and without this curse. Still, you had some very interesting points I had never thought of. If I did have a child, Naraku would use them the same way he used Inuyasha and Kikyo. I just…." He stared down at the hand, and then went back to his original position. I knew why he wanted a child, he didn't need to explain.
"I wouldn't…." He stopped, thinking, and then started again, turning to look at me. "I guess I wasn't thinking all those times I ask you to bear my child, Sango. This is your fight too. I can't expect you to stop because I ask you a question. I won't ask you again…."
"Thank you."
"…Until after the fight is over."
Rolling my eyes, I felt my cheeks grow red and heard Miroku chuckle again. When I looked over at him, his dark eyes sparkled. "You always turn such a lovely shade of red, Sango."
See? That was what I meant when I said I like him. No one else ever says that kind of stuff to me. Miroku, I fear, may have spouted it off to half the female population of this island, however. Oh, would that I was the only person to have heard that! I crossed my own arms. "Your words are too practiced, Houshi-sama. Can't you come up with anything new?"
"You're beautiful."
I opened my eyes and stared at him, my frame losing its hardness. That I had never heard before either. Not even from my father. Maybe that was part of the reason why I always tried so hard to hide my scars from him, up until that night a few weeks ago. If I wasn't beautiful, then I had to be ugly. Maybe I had used them as a scapegoat. I was beautiful? And to hear it said with such frankness. There hadn't been any of usual prose, just two words: 'you're beautiful'. He was staring at me, watching my cheeks turn even darker than before.
"What's the matter? You look as if you'd never heard that before." I remained silent. "Oh." He slowly lowered his staff and uncurled on the rock, relaxing. Miroku's dark eyes remained affixed on me, and he was quiet for a long while, trying to figure out what to say as I waited for my blush to subside. He snapped his fingers when he thought of what to say, his face turning deeply serious, minus the twinkle in his eye. "Sango, all the males in your village must have been blind if they could not see the scope and breadth of your beauty."
Arching an eyebrow, I had to pour all my effort into not smiling. "You're getting rusty, Miroku. That didn't sound nearly so eloquent. Laying it on a little thick, aren't you?"
"You're right, of course. So, I will just have to wait until we get a moment or two alone and then I can tell you that you're pretty again, without any other flattery."
I nodded and rose to go back to the village. Miroku still kept staring at me, the way a hunter watches his prey. It made me feel strange inside. I didn't like being prey, the intensity of his eyes scared me, and yet at the same time, it was almost somewhat flattering to think that I had caught his attention to the point that he would look at me and only me.
"Since we last talked, I've been trying to not grope you as much. I know I slip up a lot, but I wanted you to know that I am trying."
Nodding, I reached over and placed my hand on his shoulder. "I know you are, Miroku. Thank you." I didn't move or flinch away when he reached up and patted my hand, silent thanks for my own acknowledgement of what he was doing to try and make me like him. I offered him my hand. "Come on, Houshi-sama. Let's get back to the village before Inuyasha has to come out looking for us."
He grinned and stood up, taking my hand off of his shoulder and raising my hand to his knuckles, kissing them tenderly with his warm mouth. I felt my jaw drop slightly, surprised by his action. He let my hand fall away. "I will accompany you in a moment, Lady Sango. I have a few things to think about first."
Respecting his wish for privacy, I turned and left, leaving Miroku to think about whatever was on his mind. I only hoped that he would remember his own advice and he wouldn't end up breaking in two at the next heavy gust of wind.