Author Notes: Yes, the next chaper has arrived!

Thank you so much to all who reviewed! I may not have been able to reply to you all, but I still love you guys! Especially to those who gave me suggestions as to editing my sometimes excessive use of detail. -cough- I shall be editing the previous chapters as well, but it will be a slow proces, so be patient please. XD

disclaimer: disclaim'd.

warnings/notes: the usual; unbetaed.

And without further ado...

Thy Soul of Sin
by scelerus animus

Chapter Ten
Trust Means Little to the Soulless

Tormented voices and screams and the distorted faces of people frantically scratched and clawed at the edges of her mind, but Kagome did not bother with them, for soon enough she would have answers. In due time, she would know and not simply have to uselessly prod and question and guess from neither the ambiguous, splintered pieces that had continuously plagued her nor addictive scarlet eyes that ensnared her in game from which she was afraid she would someday never want to escape.

And, nevertheless, even if she never truly knew the whole truth (wasn't it fascinating how her priorities had changed, how everything changed like the careless turn of a page in book), those amber gold eyes would be dead, never to roam this unholy era again with his greedy lies and selfish claws. Never to haunt her. Never to torment her. Never to betray her again.

(and now that was what mattered most to this soulless doll; she did not need an identity; she did not need the truth, for the truth would still be a semi-lie anyway; all she needed was that one last chance of revenge, of white hair and gold eyes deaddeaddead before her)

Not that these people knew. Kagome had not told them yet. For a logical reason of course (not that logic had even been one of her strong points, Naraku had once pointed out, but then again they didn't live in a logical world, did they?). Because if they had lived in a world where logic flourished, then Kagome would have been able to tell them, the houshi, the taijiya, and the old miko, that she intended to kill those damned golden eyes.

However, she could not, because they would not understand. They, in the deluded self-righteous beliefs, would try to stop her (not that Kagome herself could comprehend why they would; the taijiya, Kagome remembered, once had someone important taken away, a nameless boy in one of Kagome's dreams, and the taijiya sought revenge for that, did she not?), and Kagome could not allow that.

Though she had a vague suspicion that the houshi had already speculated over some of her intentions, Kagome was not concerned with it, because in the end he would not stop her either.

Steadily the group (a ragtag group, Kagome remembered, that title echoing irritatingly in her head, but now the group was a couple people short) trekked through a dense forest, occasionally passing beneath slender shafts of glittering light that the brilliant mid-morning sun managed to radiate between the above canopy of thick twining branches and lush green leaves that in some bizarre way bared a crude resemblance to a vast spider web.

Despite the fact that it was the houshi and the taijiya who were supposedly leading her—albeit reluctantly, not that Kagome particularly cared—to Inuyasha, Kagome was at the head of the group heedlessly traveling through the complex sticky forest with ease as if she knew the unknown destination toward which they traveled.

And perhaps she did, another cracked whisper of her past, a trivial background at the hazy edges of her mind vividly highlighted with crimson blood and tortured screams and endless death.

Shifting her lean bow (which the taijiya had apparently saved in that battle against the horned demon and had finally returned to her) across her back, a frown momentarily marred the flawless mask of a doll's coldly serene chiseled face that she had perfected.

Although she no longer paid much actual attention to those disjointed pieces of an exceedingly futile, fragmented past, it did not mean they weren't a nuisance.

Around her the atmosphere was annoyingly heavy, moist, and warm.

In fact, it was too heavy, almost grossly opaque, and too moist and warm, tremendously humid, sickly, stuffy (how can life breathe properly in this, Kagome distractedly wondered),a stark contrast to the usual cool, fresh air that pleasantly wafted through the Shrine Castle (her true home, her mind whispered secretly, another fact these people would, could never grasp) comfortably nestled deep in the heart of snow-capped mountains.

Then again, Kagome idly mused, piercing icy eyes briefly flickering back to her silent companions (the taijiya was silent for now, but Kagome knew the fight wasn't out of her yet), she was only speaking of the weather while the rest of them were sweating under the tension they ignorantly had placed upon themselves.

After all, other than the slight thumping curiosity the rocked periodically against her ribcage like a telltale clock counting down the hours of one's life, Kagome was completely at ease.

"Tell me a story," Kagome lightly after a few more heavy (not to her, of course) moments of silence, effortlessly slicing through the palpable tension like razors claws through soft flesh, and she nonchalantly smiled her perfidiously perfect grin.

Presently, the houshi (Miroku, Kagome distantly recalled, from another mindless flash of blood and screams and death) wordlessly surveyed her, wary of the duplicitous games she played far too well. As a nod of approval Kagome lazily met those sagacious brown eyes and briefly her seamless synthetic smile transformed into something equally disturbing in Miroku's eyes, an almost sinister, calculating smirk that undoubtedly will forever be imprinted upon his mind like a foul engraving behind closed eyelids.

"How about you, houshi-sama," Kagome suggested in a trained, saccharine voice as she glided like a feather light ghost in her glossy silvers and wispy blues around another blossoming green bush. "You claim to know of a past I lived as your companion, so why don't you tell me a story to pass the time. A story about a miko and a hanyou and—"

"Kagome—" the taijiya, Sango, tentatively interrupted.

"—and a kitsune. Because there was a little kitsune, wasn't there?" Kagome continued with that same brutally blasé tone, though the slight widening of her red lips belied otherwise.

Oh, yes, she knew. There had been a little kitsune, once upon a time. And when that particular image had shot unexpectedly through her mind like an arrow in the bleeding heart that she no longer possessed, it had been accompanied with another gaudy flare of tortured shrieks and freshly spilt blood glinting such a vibrant crimson in the sunlight.

"I wonder what happened to him. Can you tell me, houshi-sama? Taijiya-sama?" Kagome mocked in such a sweetly serene voice that sent forbidding chills down Miroku and Sango's spines.

Sango stared, mouth opening and shutting wordlessly like a helpless fish stranded on land. Her face seemed to be infinitely contorted into a expression of complete despair and horror. It was bittersweet and piteous to Kagome but she could feel nothing more than a vague sense of sympathy for these people.

After all, it was not her fault that they had yet to realize that a cultured miko—a soulless doll—who had a hollow black hole where her heart should be could feel nothing more for them.

Nor what is it her fault that she had learned to the play the duplicitous game in an equally adulterous world so well.

"Why don't you first tell us more about… Naraku-sama," Miroku proposed with swift thinking.

Clever one, Kagome conceded mutely as that all too familiar name—the only familiar name in her world—as smooth and darkly enticing even on the superficially polite tongue of the houshi sank bitterly into the very marrow of her bones, causing her muscles once again to tense even as a faint, perplexing sensation of anticipation well up inside of that fathomless void she once called a heart.

Surely, Miroku and Sango noticed the change, however slight, merely the sound of Naraku's name always caused in her.

At the sheer utterance of Naraku's name, a bloody scarlet glowed intensely in Kagome's normally jeweled sapphire eyes, something other than an endless hollowness or a vindictive fire flashed in Kagome's sapphire eyes, and both Miroku and Sango took dual note of it, now that they recognized it. It was a poignant mesh of various shades of reds that swirled tantalizingly and disturbingly around her contracted pupil like the first stages of a brutal storm, and it was distinctively different from the fiery blaze that appeared at the mention of Inuyasha.

"Naraku-sama…" murmured Kagome in a curiously languid voice, rolling the name across her tongue like a succulent chocolate to savor. "He is the Lord of the Shrine Castle."

"Indeed?" Miroku responded with collected politeness while an air of outrage started to materialize on Sango's flushed face. "He hasn't… held you captive against your will or hurt you in any way?"

Subtly, hidden beneath the silvery white sleeves of her haori, Kagome clenched her right hand and responded with a trace of disdainful amusement, "No, not in the sense you are thinking, houshi-sama. Despite my lack of reliable memories, I do know that the most thing accurate thing I remember is the sensation of pain and blood and betrayal. Don't you think so, houshi-sama?"

"And what of the mark upon your hand," Miroku questioned shrewdly. "Kaede-sama mentioned it before we left. And I also saw it. Naraku did—"

"That," Kagome interjected fiercely, "is none of your concern. Another matter that you will never be able to understand."

Brows furrowing noticeably, Miroku began to reply when like a weatherworn tree teetering precariously on the edge of a disintegrating cliff Sango burst, "Don't you understand Kagome? It was Naraku—"

"He tried to kill you," Kagome disrupted imperturbably. It was a callous, deliberate shot of the proverbial arrow, and Kagome did not even waver with the vaguest sign of sentiment as it struck Sango straight in the heart.

Instantly Sango quieted, stared, and wordlessly realized how much Kagome looked so out of place bathed in one of the sparkling golden shafts of sunlight that streamed onto the lush forest floor. Everything around Kagome was so warm, so vivacious in a tender, amiable ambience while she contrasted vividly against the charmingly tepid atmospheres with her wintry features and delicate, almost translucent appearance like an odd specter intruding upon the land.

"Yes," Sango agreed hoarsely.

"He took someone important from you, and you want revenge for that," Kagome continued impassively, milky white features schooled into a chillingly emotionless mask upon which not even a devious faux smile graced. "And you, houshi-sama, seek revenge for that curse in your right hand, which you know has not truly disappeared because Naraku-sama is alive. Don't you?"

"But Kagome," Miroku tried to reason steadily, "before your memory loss, you loathed Naraku like all of us. And you wanted to find the shards of the Shikon no Tama and hunt and kill him, too. However, the final battle did not turn out like we had… hoped."

"But you presumed you had destroyed Naraku-sama, as foolish as that assumption was," Kagome derided, toneless voice still distressingly formal. "Thus whatever may have existed between us, whether camaraderie or friendship that supposedly outlasted time, was destroyed and not by Naraku-sama."

"But why…" the taijiya hesitantly spoke, broke off, and then spoke again. "Why do you stay with Naraku?"

"I had no one else. I trusted no one else," Kagome replied, unperturbed, and effortlessly ignored Sango's flinch.

Again, the houshi tried, and Kagome stifled the urge to scoff.

"So… you trust Naraku?" the houshislowly questioned with ostensible cordiality, but Kagome could easily hear the spike of pain beneath his gracious words, stabbing and stabbing like an incessant sword, a reopened wound that the disappearance of the kazaana had only temporarily closed.

For a moment Kagome tensed and didn't answer, mulling that notion around head, a conflict on which she had dwelled previously for days on end, all nail-biting and hair-pulling and frustration, so truthfully she had never found a definite answer.

Trust.

The idea was sugary and tantalizing in her mouth, a succulent sweet that possessed a chewy toxic center, and Kagome she knew she would be a hypocrite if she said yes.

Trust was something which she claimed to scorn, and she did, but Naraku was a whole different matter, a whole different game. And that was another thing to add to a rapidly mounting list of things they would never understand.

"Yes," she said, and now both Miroku and Sango cringed.

Suddenly Sango lurched in front of Kagome and grabbed her forearms, whitened skeleton fingers coiling into sleek silvery fabric not purposely harsh but a desperate reaction, as if despite everything Sango wasn't sure that Kagome was truly there.

Kagome barely repressed the automatic reaction to fight back (a stab through the eye with a chopstick and it would be over, how heartless).

"He's playing with you, Kagome. He only wants the Shikon no Tama," Sango protested, voice hoarse, eyes frantically searching Kagome's liquid pools only to find that scarlet swirls steadily raged in them and they didn't burn so much like fire as they did like ice.

"Again you speak about something that doesn't have meaning to me," Kagome replied and then she continued, wrenching herself out of Sango's death grip.

"It should," Miroku cautioned with an ominous tone that doubtlessly carried some cryptic meaning that Kagome easily ignored with a soundless scoff.

Presently, she paused in her curiously methodical, leisure pace and angled her head back slightly so now they saw her chiseled, milky white profile juxtaposed harshly against the dazzling rays of the sun in a unnervingly crystal clear indigo sky.

"Either way, it comes down to a simple fact which you seem unable to understand—"

In the leafy verdant green canopy above, a few birds merrily chirped a sweetly amiable tune that forebodingly sounded in Miroku and Sango's pounding ears like a mournful melody played at a burial ceremony.

Kagome was dead to them. And they hadn't been able to say goodbye.

"—I don't care. Except for the contentment I seek. But first… first I need my vengeance upon traitorous golden eyes, and you will not stop me."

Kagome had thrown whatever diminutive caution she may have had reserved to the wind.

There was that bloody glimmer in her eyes again, a pinprick of scarlet, an addicting taste of sin that led down the final bleak stretch of the complete corruption of an innocent fifteen-year-old that once had dreamed of a fairy-tale ending.

Ultimately, both they (Miroku, Sango, their names a fading echo in Kagome's mind) and that fictitious fairy-tale ending were unimportant, trifling doubled-edged pieces to a jigsaw of a past that she would never discover entirely, and she would not allow them to prevent her from attaining her goal.

Curtly, Kagome turned once more and in another fluid, sinuous movement she entered a painfully familiar clearing beyond another cluster of twining trees while as if unwillingly mesmerized by her, this exotically beautiful paradoxical being, Miroku and Sango wordlessly followed her with equal expressions of dread and misery.

"You will not stop me as I destroy him…"

Before them, a white-haired hanyou in a ragged firerat kimono was pinned lifelessly to a massive tree (the God Tree, Goshinboku, once an eminent symbol of a past that now had reduced to a meaningless haze of colors and sounds) by several weathered arrows.

"…Inuyasha."

End Notes: Only two more chapters left! Yay! Review, tell me what you think, and I'll love you forever. C'mon, comments and constructive criticism are food for the starving author.

Hope you enjoyed! Till next time...

Ja ne!

– scelerus animus o.O