Soul Food

Aki's body was darting through the trees without the full attention of her brain. She was still trying really hard not to think about how her day had been developing. So much had happened her brain had refused to understand it all as it happened and she was putting off looking back in favor of not thinking at all and physical movement.

It was a very freeing feeling to just run without destination, to feel the wind rushing past her skin and through her hair without hindrance. Even better was the feeling that the wind could sweep all the bad things from her mind so that she could escape them, if only for a little while.

Aki ran until she ran out of land and was forced to stop or swim in the freezing cold waters. She stared out at the choppy waters; incomprehension shimmered in her eyes. It was clear she wasn't really seeing what was in front of her.

Abruptly she let out an incoherent yell, expelling the sound from her soul with a force that echoed across the waves. When she ran out of breath the sound faded from hearing leaving her panting in the static sounds of the waves and wind.

A blast of moisture filled icy air whipped her frozen hair around her face as she turned and started to run in the opposite direction. Again she ran until the land ran out, this time the cry she let out robbed her of her voice. She fell tiredly back in the snow and stared up at the fathomless sky, simply focusing on slowing her heart rate and catching her breath until there was nothing but stillness within and without to cradle her softly.

Sadly the stillness could not guard against actual thought and memory. The moment both attempted to shatter the small comfort Aki had derived from her physical exertion, she was back on her feet and running again.

This time she stopped before the ground did for the sudden desire to cuddle up with her teddy bear in her apartment struck her strongly. Aki would have turned to run straight there despite her breath coming out in gasps or her muscles twitching with fatigue and chill but for the realization that her bag was back where she started and she would not go home without it.

With a sigh Aki turned in the direction that would take her back to where she started.

In the home of the mole youkai, Fred was explaining why Aki was bound to come back, once again.

"I still don't understand why Ai would come back here just for a stupid bag," Shippou declared with a shake of his head.

Fred rolled his eyes in frustration bordering on rage. The kitsune refused to accept the very basic concept that certain things could be held more precious than life for some people.

"If Sango were to accidentally leave Hiraikotsu behind," Miroku tried to use an example to better explain it to the kit, "You would expect her to return to retrieve it, wouldn't you?"

"Well yeah," Shippou replied. "Sango is a human and her life depends on her weapons sometimes, but Aki isn't human anymore and her bag isn't a weapon."

"Don't be too sure about that,' Fred muttered darkly, growing exceedingly weary of the conversation.

"Perhaps Kagome were to accidentally leave the shards behind," Sango tried only to be drowned out by Kagome and Inuyasha.

"I would never let that happen!"

"That wouldn't happen!" Their shouts completely derailed the example and Sango sighed at the wasted effort.

"I said perhaps," Sango protested. "I just don't want to listen to Fred explain it one more time when it makes perfect sense to me."

"I still don't get it!" Shippou whined Illustrating Sango's point for her.

"I don't see why the boy has to understand why Aki will return,' Kikyou declared coolly. "Is it not enough that her usual stalker understands her behavior well enough to give a reliable predication as o what she will do next?"

"I am not her stalker," Fred rolled his eyes. "The only reason you say that is because you're jealous your stalker isn't as cool as me."

"I don't have a stalker," Kikyou scoffed.

"Sure you do," Fred smugly replied. "Let me give you a hint, he's hairy and full of himself and has been fixated on you for over fifty years."

"Well that's one way to look at it," Kagome laughed. "I mean if you take out the part with the Shikon no Tama, it's pretty standard stalking."

"With a serial killer twist," the ghost shrugged. "Hence the trying to kill her three times."

"When did Inuyasha try to kill Kikyou three times?" Azusa asked, unfamiliar with the finer details of the history between Kikyou and the birth of Naraku.

"I'm not her stalker!" Inuyasha bellowed.

"At least not on Tuesdays," Fred smirked. "Or every other Thursday."

"But the rest of the time is a different matter all together," Kagome added, half jokingly. She didn't want to seem too serious else someone might point out that she could potentially fit the description herself.

"What was that?" Inuyasha demanded.

Kagome beamed innocent as can be as Sango quickly replied for her. "Nothing!" the taijiya smiled brightly. "Just a little joke."

"It didn't sound that funny," the hanyou grumbled.

"Because the joke was on you," Miroku muttered to the side and smiled innocently when Inuyasha's suspicious gaze landed on him.

"I asked a simple question and no one has answered! When did Inuyasha try to kill Kikyou three times?" Azusa demanded.

"The person they were originally talking about in reference to Kikyou being killed was Naraku," Sango explained to the little girl.

"The bad man?" Azusa gasped.

"He tired to hurt Rin too," Rin patted the miko's cold clay hand. "But Kohaku was Aki's friend and didn't want to do it."

"Aki knows Kohaku?" Sango gaped.

"Aki knows everybody," Fred scoffed. "There is no way you haven't already figured that out yet."

"She didn't know Ayame," Kagome pointed out.

"Everybody connected with Naraku," Fred amended.

"So she knows his mom and dad and his neighbors and the guy who built the house he was born in…" Shippou listed.

"Fine, Aki doesn't know anybody and I'm exaggerating, happy now?" Fred grumbled.

"No, I still don't get why Aki would come back here for that stupid bag!" Shippou shouted.

"Not that again," Inuyasha groaned.

"Shippou, lets say you accidentally left behind part of that fabulous outfit," Fred steamrolled over the kit's interruptions. "Nothing important like pant or anything, but maybe you left behind something small that you would notice was missing. And say you knew almost exactly where it was when you noticed it was missing. Wouldn't you go back for it?"

"Of course," Shippou replied. "My mom made this."

"That's why," Fred nodded.

"Aki's mom made the bag?" Shippou asked.

"No, Aki's grandmother made some of the things in the bag," the ghost replied.

"Oh, well that makes sense then," Shippou shrugged.

Fred wanted nothing more than to bash the little inquisitive fluff ball's head in, or at least make him really uncomfortable. Miroku gave him a look that was both commiserating and warning in one. The monk certainly understood where the dead man was coming from.

Kikyou distracted them by picking up the forlorn bag in question, carefully concealing the effort to heft the obscenely heavy thing.

"What are you doing?" Fred demanded.

"What will Aki do once she retrieves this bag?" the miko asked a question of her own.

"Probably go home," the ghost crossed his arms.

"And then what?" Kikyou demanded. "She was wounded. Will she seek the aid of a healer?"

"Probably not right away," Fred replied. Depending on the seriousness of the damage, it was likely she wouldn't go at all.

"Unacceptable," Kikyou declared beginning to disperse some of the items from the bag. "Aki will not leave without this bag and it's contents, so we will simply have to hide them all."

"What? Why?" Inuyasha demanded.

"If she will not leave, then she will stay," Sango pointed out.

"Thereby allowing us to ensure she is properly cared for," Miroku finished. "You are quite devious when you choose to be." This was great! He wasn't the only manipulative holy figure of their acquaintance. Even better, the next time Inuyasha tried to resort to his "Kikyou was so great" spiel, he could interrupt for Kagome's sake with the facts of reality, which would of course score him points with Sango.

"Some just require extra effort to see reason," the miko scoffed.

"Well Aki is one of those sometimes," Miroku agreed.

Fred laughed at that. "Aki sees reason better than most you people. She's not tangled up in triangles and high drama, epic battles between good and evil or family disputes. She's completely free of all those things that get in the way of reason. Why can't she be allowed to nurse her wounds in private?"

"Because she won't do it," Kikyou replied shortly.

"Aki went two years between the death of her family and meting you," Fred declared. "In that time you don't think she was never hurt or injured? She can't even go one day without hurting herself in some way shape or form!"

"You mean to tell me that Aki intentionally hurts herself?" Kagome gasped in horror.

"No! Aki's just accident prone, you dunce!" Fred exclaimed. "She's the queen of paper cuts! Czarina of bruises and broken nails! Empress of random office injuries!"

"Aki is not suffering from a paper cut!" Kagome protested.

"What's a paper cut?" Shippou asked.

"Hell if I know," Inuyasha replied absently as he watched Kagome argue with Fred.

"I didn't say a paper cut was the worst she'd suffered," Fred corrected the teenager. "I was just illustrating the injuries Aki would collect before people decided she was the root of all evil. The she would end up playing chicken with anonymous cars while she was on foot. She was thrown down the stairs a couple times and there was that one stalker that tried to shoot her. Good thing that happened after I died, otherwise he would have succeeded."

"What?" Kagome couldn't believe it.

"Yeah she packed up and moved to Japan after that," the ghost shrugged. "She was kind of leaning that direction any way."

"Poor Aki," Kagome sniffed.

"People suck," Fred lounged boredly in mid air, his being all dead made it rather easy. "Stupid people, most especially."

"What's a car?" Shippou demanded.

"Something a lot bigger, heavier and faster than a human," Inuyasha replied.

"Why would they want to hurt Aki?" Rin asked with worry.

"Doesn't matte," Fred smirked. "She lived through it and it's over now. Ai made it through everything all on her own, she can handle a few scratches and a little more blind ignorance."

"Yeah Youta," Yumi scoffed and smacked her brother on the back of his head. The boy had been trying really hard not to draw attention to himself once Yumi had first laid into him about his behavior.

No amount of protesting was going to exonerate hi in the eyes of his sister, nor in the eyes of anyone else, he feared. He couldn't help it if they weren't smart enough to figure out what he had. Aki was the boogieman that would kill you painfully with one touch. She could call the blood from your veins until there was nothing left.

Youta knew what he'd seen and nobody could change that. The truth was real. His dad would agree, if the old mole still had the means with which to agree.

The adult mole youkai was nothing more than a happy, drooling, humming, barely conscious vegetable and Youta very much believed that was Aki's fault too. That rotten no good, horrible monster! Everything had just gone wrong from the moment they first heard about her, and Yumi was already so deeply under that bad woman's spell there was almost no hope for her.

When her bratty brother failed to respond to her taunting or her violence on his person, Yumi just shrugged and went back to chatting with her friends and listening to the grown ups conversing about Aki. Boys were weird on the best of days and her brother was the strangest of them all.

"If Aki is coming back," Inuyasha broke into the inane babble the others had fallen into, "when is she coming?'

"Well here, let me do some arcane calculations and pull an answer from the grim reaper's hat," Fred began sarcastically. "Aki isn't that predictable. You might be, but most women aren't."

"I am not predictable!" Inuyasha protested, while his friends pointedly looked everywhere but at him. He did sort of have this three-day limit thing, then there was the PMS like grouchiness once a month, and that was pretty regular. That's not even mentioning his fighting words, style and defense mechanisms, eating habits, etc. Inuyasha was as predictable as Kagome's timer and about as obnoxious.

"Who cares about when?" Kikyou ignored Inuyasha's noise. "Worrying about when gets nothing done."

"So?" Inuyasha huffed.

"So stash these somewhere," Kagome ordered the hanyou as she shoved something in his hands.

Inuyasha dropped the item like it burned him. "No way! I won't do anything with Aki's stuff!" he growled. "Aki will skin you guys alive for messin' with her stuff!"

"Don't be silly," Kagome reproved him.

"It's not silly," Inuyasha retorted. "You mess with Aki's stuff, you mess with Aki's family."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Shippou scoffed. "Nobody can be family with a bunch of stuff that's not even alive!"

Inuyasha bashed the kit on the head. Kagome immediately invoked the spell around his neck for the hanyou's lapse in behavior.

"What Inuyasha means," Sango attempted to translate, "is that Aki associates memories of her family with the items in her bag, the same way Yumi associates her mother's pots and pans with the memory of her mother, or the way you associate the tricks you know with whomever taught them to you."

"I don't think Aki-sama would actually hurt us for hiding her things," Yumi declared with Rin and Azusa in agreement.

"Well, maybe she wouldn't hurt you," Fred rolled his eyes, "but everybody else is game for violence. Especially if Aki knows they had prior knowledge of how she would feel about people rifling through her things."

Sesshoumaru raised an eyebrow at the sudden pregnant silence. Apparently the ghost's subtle threat had sunk in without serious need to be reinforced as Kagome instantly scooped up the items Inuyasha had dropped and put them back in Aki's bag.

"I'm still hiding the bag," Kikyou insisted stubbornly.

"Fine, but you take your not life in your hands that way," Fred shrugged.

The undead miko rolled her eyes mockingly. "I fear nothing to do with Aki."

"Well that is very clear," Sango muttered. "The question is, do you respect her?" The conversation aroused by this question was interrupted by the spontaneous disappearance of the resident ghost partaking in it.

Sesshoumaru glided gracefully to the door to open it. Before he stepped out into the snow, he glanced back at the miko speakingly. It was clear he expected her to keep the rest of the group inside.

Aki sat curled up in the snow at the edge of the red stain left by the beast. Her pale gold hair glistened with ice crystals and her face appeared to be carved from marble. The open wounds on her shoulder, face and chest had frozen closed, the red ice hardly standing out against her overall ice-like stillness.

She seemed to contemplate the red puddle of snow as though it contained a serious meaning beyond simply indicating the death of something defeated.

"Aki?" the semi-transparent human asked softly for her attention.

"I'm sorry Fred," she answered, her voice eerily empty.

"For what?" the ghost wasn't accepting anything until he was certain what the apology was about.

"For not dying," Aki replied. "For the curse my friendship brought to you. If I had just died, the curse would have ended with me." Her eyes turned glassy with tears she refused to shed. "And none of you would have died in so much pain."

"I didn't die like that Aki," Fred reminded her. "There was no screaming or writhing or blood seeping through my pores, remember?"

"Maybe not you, but they – " Aki shook her head before Fred cut her off.

"They probably didn't die as painfully as that either," the ghost wouldn't let her finish the thought. "You weren't related by blood."

"But what about the blood?"

"What about it?" Fred demanded insistently. "There's no proof that they suffered."

"Maybe not, but if I had died they wouldn't have!" Aki growled. "You wouldn't have."

"Don't be too sure about that," Fred scoffed. "If you had died, who would have kept me awake on all those late night road trips? And what about all the people you've saved because you didn't die? You think Azusa would have lived if you hadn't chased Naraku off? What about Shippou and Rin? Nobody else would have even realized they were in danger until it was too late. There's an entire youkai community that would still be starving to death if you hadn't been there."

"What of this Sesshoumaru had not you been there to tend him in his weakness?" the inu youkai knelt in the snow beside her and brushed her hair behind her ear tenderly. "You think your family, who loved you so much, would trade your life for even a moment more of their own? I think you know them very ill if you believe they would sacrifice you to protect themselves, even if it were painful. This Sesshoumaru knows he would not."

Aki's tears finally broke free of her control and spilled down her cheeks. Sesshoumaru drew her close to let her tears soak into the silk over his heart.

The taiyoukai glanced up at the ghost intending to direct him towards the warm indoors only to find the dead human gesturing with his thumb and already most of the way inside.

"All right guys," Fred clapped his hands soundlessly. "Time to disperse."

"What?" Kagome demanded.

"Shut up, Kagome," Inuyasha growled gently. "After the last few days, Sesshoumaru is going to demand that he be allowed to tend all of her wounds personally."

"You mean he – " Sango began with a bit of a notion as to what Inuyasha could mean. Inu youkai had a special way to heal their mates, and while Aki was not currently Sesshoumaru's mate his instincts still viewed her as such.

"Yep," Inuyasha cut her off shortly.

"Come on Kagome, we need to pack fast," the demon slayer dragged the teenager in to action.

"We can only be thankful that the wolves have already left," Miroku commented earning agreement from the hanyou.

"What about us?" Yumi asked. It was quite clear to her, home was not the place for them anymore.

"You could try contacting the youkai community Aki helped out a while back," Fred suggested. "It's kind of near Kaede's village.

"We could probably take you," Kagome added.

"What?" Inuyasha bellowed sharply.

"I don't see why not," Miroku began blandly. "Inuyasha only said we couldn't return until we found Naraku."

"We found Naraku, so we can take a break," Sango nodded.

"That is not what I said!" Inuyasha growled.

"So it's settled then," Kagome nodded. "Come on Yumi, I'll help you pack." Inuyasha's further protests were disregarded and ineffectual.

Kikyou was ready to leave long before the shard hunters and approached Kagome with her hand held out. "Wake these before Aki accuses me of holding Childish prejudices and inane fears of change and the future or something."

Kagome gaped at the pile of Shikon shards sparkling in her palm, and then she shook her head of her surprise. Seriously, where did she think those five shards of Aki's torment had got to? Outer space? The dead miko promptly turned and left without further words.

"Come on already," Inuyasha growled impatient to leave the place, even with the added aggravation of the mole youkai.

"What about Rin and Azusa?" Yumi asked. Inuyasha blinked at the two little girls watching them from beside Sesshoumaru's servant.

"Bring them too," he shrugged. It would be no place for children once Sesshoumaru brought Aki inside.

"You most certainly will not!" Jaken squawked before finding himself trussed up and gagged.

"All right then," Inuyasha sighed. "Let's go."

Sesshoumaru watched as the others began to disappear from sight. It surprised him how quickly they had all managed to grasp the situation.

He lifted Aki into his arms and stood up carefully.

"What happens now?" Aki sniffled, well aware that their company had deserted them, but too tired to be suspicious.

"Now we go inside and warm you up," he answered mildly. "Then I will look to your wounds."

Aki sighed and closed her eye in exhaustion. She knew what he meant. "Sesshoumaru," she began as sternly as she could manage.

"A small reprieve," he cut her off. "Nothing to completely break with our promise. Before you drive me crazy with yet another injury on your person."

"All right," she let it go, it was for his sanity after all.

mH I meant to post this morning before I had to be into work, but apparently my note from last yesterday just didn't take so I had to wait until after work because I didn't have time to re-type one this morning. Stupid bots!

So yeah, I'm changing things up a little. The Author's note is at the end of the chapter. Go ahead and skip it if you think you can stand being in the dark about my interrupted schedule.

That's right, there will be a break again... and it will be at least through Valentines day (inventory at work) because I still haven't finished chapter 5 of The Bindings of Conscience (part 6). and there's still one more chapter after that at least before It's done. In total, that will be cahpter 57 and 58 if you're counting. But guess what, WE're heading into the home stretch. Part 7, Flying Nonsense is all about wrapping things up and should be something of a breeze to write. It's always easier to tie up loose ends than to build up to a climactic event.

I'm pretty sure you guys are happy about that... and if you're not then at least Sesshoumaru is. (for the moment) He just got some. I bet he just loves me since Rumiko Takahashi never let him get any when she was in control.

In any case, until next time (whenever the hell that may be...) enjoy rereading things!