I'll Race You for It…
A/N: wow. So I went on a loooong hiatus. I doubt any of you are still reading this/remembered what the heck even happened in this. All I can say is that I'm back. And I'm pretty sure its for the rest of the summer.
And I yeah, I still love you guys and your reviews. Please let me know if you feel that I've lost it. Because I probably need to think about wrapping this story up.
Disclaimer: Any recognizable material does not belong to me.
(Somewhere else… during the day)
'Kagura!'
"Augh! Ah-!"
She screamed.
"Kagura?" Rin turned around, struck with surprise. When she saw the sorceress fall, she leapt forward to help. "Kagura!"
She was fifteen now…
Kagura reminded herself of this as she watched Rin start to approach her. An almost sixteen year old girl now… not a child. Not anymore. Though… nothing much had changed about her. Except that she was beautiful, and tall, and she looked like a girl. Moved gracefully, like a girl. A young, gorgeous, beautiful girl.
Rin's hair was still long, choppy and layered into feathery halos around her face. She had grown a gentleness to compliment her raw energy, her raw feelings that she never tried to hide… like the fear and the worry that was painted all over her heart-shaped face. Yes, she was beautiful now. Just as beautiful as she had once been cute. And still just as willing to follow Sesshomaru to the ends of the Earth. Even if that meant leaving the rest of the world behind. Everything behind. Even if it meant dying for it.
And he… he was still just as willing to let her. Even more so.
"Kagura! What happened?"
Kagura had always been jealous of those two. And the stupid, unconditional, inexplicable loyalty that they shared for each other… only each other. They were all each other had… and they lived together, apart from everyone else in that damn little world of theirs. With Jaken – the annoying toad – and even the dragons. Kagura knew that no matter how hard she tried, she could never ever–
'Kagura!' The voice screamed inside her entire body again, making her world bleed white with pain. She had fallen to the ground before, and now she curled her body together into the grass, trying to squeeze it out of her skin, while Rin's flowers for Sesshomaru were dashed to the ground. The young girl dropped to her knees beside the curled body, laying her hands over the witch.
"Kagura!"
'Kagura!'
'KAGURA!'
Kagura shut her eyes tight, trying to will herself that this wasn't real. "No…" She said softly into the grass, so softly that no one could hear. …She knew the voice inside her head.
"Kagura!" Rin's voice fell into an unknowing harmony with the one inside her head, although the girl didn't realize what she was doing, "Kagura!" she was only making it worse.
Kagura's world was spinning painfully, her stomach pinned to the center of a circle while her body spun around it. Hot knives sliced up and under her skin, ripping it open… and her heart… oh God, her heart.
"I have-" the wind-witch gasped out in pain when she tried to sit up. "I have – ! To go back!" She shouted, shaking badly as she tried to stand.
Rin jumped to support her, throwing her body – which was only slightly smaller than Kagura's own– under the unsteady one.
"Sesshomaru!"
Kagura's crimson eyes flitted up, and for a moment she caught gold. They were cold, and hard, and emotionless and they regarded the sorceress. She couldn't blame Rin for calling out to the Demon Lord. The girl had done what she had always done as a child… reached out for the man she loved.
Kagura felt the pain in her heart grow fiercer, though she couldn't exactly tell the cause now. Whether the source was far away and had slate blue eyes, or was right in front of her, smoldering in icy gold.
"I… must go." She choked out, looking at him, for some sort of reaction, anything at all, while Rin still held her up.
He didn't even blink.
He just continued to regard her stoically, his face blank as it had always been. As it always would be.
Kagura bit her lip hard, the pain in her body becoming unbearable. She cried out when she reached into her hair and drew out a feather, relieved only when the wind reached out and cradeled her body, trying to sooth her.
"Rin." She said, her breathing heavy, her voice a little rougher than normal. "Take me… to it."
Rin bit her lip too, torn, and lifted her hazel eyes to look up at Sesshomaru "I… I don't…" She said, uncertainly.
"If she wishes to go. We shall not hinder her." Sesshomaru told the Rin evenly.
The girl made a small noise of surprise. "But… S-sesshomaru-sama -"
"Rin." He looked at her.
If she were a young child again, innocent and not a threat, he would have said to her, "do as you are told".
But she wasn't a little girl anymore.
And he didn't talk to her that way anymore.
Now, they only had to communicate with their eyes. Showing that blatant connection that he shared with her, fostered with her. Sesshomaru, the man who always severed his ties, bonds or any kind of relationship with everyone, even his own father and half-brother… was maintaining, nurturing even, this one he shared with this young, mortal girl.
Suddenly Kagura needed to go.
"Rin!" She snapped, haggardly. "What's taking you so long?"
The golden eyes that shot to her garnet ones, were smoldering and on fire, piercing right through her.
'Don't you ever dare to raise your voice at her.' He seemed to say. 'Don't you ever dare to talk to her that way.'
Kagura looked at the ground, her grip on Rin's shoulder tightening as she bit a scarlet lip. "Rin… I need to go. I'm being… called by Naraku." 'That bastard…'
Rin looked up at her with big hazel eyes, worried and concerned and so naïvely pure… Kagura looked away to keep herself from slapping her.
Maybe Rin wasn't dangerous, wasn't a fighter, wasn't even remarkably smarter than Kagura was… but for some reason, she always won.
Rin was a now the only person that Kagura would never be able to touch. Couldn't even come close to hurting. She was the biggest threat.
Finally the younger girl seemed to give in, leaning forward and moving as best she could. She slowly hauled Kagura to the feather, and put her body on it.
The sorceress held her upper body up with shaky arms and looked at the gossamer between her fingers, making a point of not meeting Rin's eyes… or his.
"Farewell, then." She said darkly, hating him. Hating him even more, for once, than she had ever hated Naraku.
And as usual. He said nothing in return.
Just when she was ready to look up at him and scream, a pair of long, lithe arms wrapped around her and held her too tightly.
She tried to keep herself from gasping. Especially when she looked up and saw that the girl who was cradling her so supportively was Rin. Didn't she know what she was doing?
"I hope you'll be okay." Rin said, her voice sad and scared. And sincere.
For the first time, in a long time, Kagura felt something for her. The sorceress's heart, still raw and throbbing, did a little clench of guilt. She was jealous of Rin… jealous of the little, oblivious, mortal. Because she was so ignorant of the world. Of everything bad that went on… of pain. And also…
Her crimson eyes moved upward and fixed on his armor, because she couldn't look him in the face.
"I promise I'll be fine." She said, her voice sounding very strange…
'She has him.'
"Now let go." Kagura said, using her weak strength to shove Rin away. The girl stumbled backwards a little in surprise, and gently bumped into Sesshomaru, whose strong chest was there for her, his hand to steady her.
Rin looked up and smiled at him, for being there. And then stood up straight.
Kagura was sick.
Rushing so fast that even her stomach turned funnily, she rose up into the air. But even then, looking down, seeing all of them – even that bug-eyed, toady, sad excuse for a pathetic demon, Jaken - staring up at her, their eyes only trained on her… she suddenly felt so alone. The stood there together, looking up at her, putting her apart. And she was on the outside of their world… staring back at them. There might has well have been a glass wall between them.
And the way that Rin was standing with him, so close, a little in front, right under his right shoulder, so much nearer to his chest and the thing that was beating inside it than when she had been a little girl, standing at his knee…
But now it was so obvious …. The two of them.
Kagura bit her tongue and clutched her fingers into the gossamer until she felt her finger nails cut into her palms…. it hurt. But then… callings always hurt.
She tried to forget about it. She tried very hard. But things like that never worked out for her.
'Damn it.' She said bitterly, trying to ignore the weakness she heard in her own voice, even when she didn't speak aloud. 'How the hell did I allow myself to become so jealous… of someone like her?'
Maybe it was because the girl was someone… that she would never be. And the love that she shared was something that Kagura could never have, would never be warm enough, pure enough… to share such a simple, unconditional, clean… love.
She would never have that. Not with him. And not with anyone else in the world.
(Somewhere else… dead of night)
Kagome's heart was racing.
Inuyasha's mind was numbing.
Her breath was ragged.
Koga's muscles clenched.
Inuyasha's teeth bared.
Miroku's hands were clutching.
Claws tensing.
Eyes set hard with dead on focus. Their hearts… lost.
It was a race against time. And those never really went all that well. Time had this annoying habit of setting the pace, and that was pretty damn hard to beat. But that didn't keep them from trying.
The pressure.
By now the pressure was stringing along their veins, pumping through, cutting in the end. The pressure was pressing down around them… you're running out of time… he's running out of time… she's running out of time.
'We're running out of time.'
Inuyasha and Miroku were racing through the forest, chasing after the women they loved.
Koga was running against the doubt. The kind that would sink in as soon as he really, truly, allowed himself to realize what he was doing. Chasing after a dead girl. He loved her. Of course he loved her. But she was dead. And he raced desperately against the time before the doubt caught up to him again – because it always caught up to him – that there was no way he would be able to find her at the end.
And Kagome… she was running from everything.
Okay so mostly she was running from the snakes. It was mainly about the snakes. But under the surface, there was the fear… her very own… over them, over herself, the past, Inuyasha, Naraku… everything. She couldn't let that catch up with her. She wouldn't let it catch up with her.
And she had known that this was a bad idea. Allowing, no more like agreeing, agreeing to travel with them while they tried to help her regain her memory. She had thought that maybe if they were on the move it would have been easier for her to run away… but then why hadn't she tried it yet?
'Don't think about that' She said, knowing somewhere inside herself that she was just trying to preoccupy herself with thoughts so she wouldn't have to have a panic attack. 'The point was that you knew this was a bad idea.' Oh. Right. Of course.
So she had known. She had known it two days ago when she'd first crawled out of the bushes and asked them to tell her what was going on.
Wet, stained, and bruised and completely vulnerable. She still couldn't believe she'd done that. And the things that Miroku and Inuyasha had said to her that day… were they all lies? No… she didn't really think they were. So then why couldn't she bring herself to believe them?
'Because… how could they be real?'
Their story hadn't been like Naraku's story, easy to grasp and easy to believe… with proof and backup and everything to make her believe that she was with friends. Miroku's and Inuyasha's had been all complicated. So hard to understand, so hard to trust... she hated it.
But at least she'd realized that somehow, she was connected to them. Inuyasha and his friends, whether they were her family or her blood enemies, (and she couldn't tell those apart anyway these days) they all had admitted that they were connected. Something strong, and something deep. Unbreakable. Like those dreams she kept having, no matter how hard she tried to stop.
And as for her feelings for Inuyasha… sometimes she couldn't tell if she wanted to throw herself into his arms, or push him off a cliff. It was so hard, and so confusing. But her connection to him was the only thing she had now, the only thing she knew. So she'd made up her mind. She was going to hold on to it. Until the end.
Whether she hated him or… loved him. Because… maybe there was a chance… that she'd loved him. Once.
Even he'd admitted to it. Sort of.
So two days ago, she'd decided to call a truce with Inuyasha.
And now she was seriously doubting it was the smartest thing to do.
