My body feels like it falls into eons worth of ocean leagues, suspended in the weight of marine trenches, yet simultaneously feeling like I am floating through the air the way a leaf does – falling through the sky to and fro, then settling lightly on the ground.
I reach out to rub my face hard, feeling like I'd been awake for months. I sigh heavily, then suddenly remember the fact I'd pretty much just committed suicide in the waking world beyond the well. Inuyasha is no longer behind me, and when I look around in all directions, everything is just black. It seems there are some beginnings of stars on the horizon, but I can't tell for sure with my rest-deprived eyes.
I feel a cough escape my throat as the searing pain of where the arrow had stabbed me comes back, full force. I stare down as I choke up a good mouthful of my own blood, and it sends me into a panic attack instantly.
"…Inuyasha," My mind cries out desperately. "Inuyasha!"
He's not here…no one is here. The jewel I'd stabbed through is gone, as well. Is this what death is? No, if that were the case, I wouldn't even be conscious or aware of anything…what was this then? Purgatory?
I would laugh at that, if I wasn't in so much pain.
I look down at the floor, or wherever I am, beneath me, watching the blood drip out from my chest further. This was so incredibly scary. I hate gore. Even if I'd gotten used to all the death in the sengoku jidai it didn't make me any less averse to blood and guts and all of that unpleasant…nonsense.
So of course with all the blood loss, I start to feel even weaker.
Before my hazy eyes though…a figure starts to appear before me. The sound of a man gasping for air briefly fills my ears, and I blink a few times, startled. Who was that…? It looks like his silhouette is just a shadow, then as if a light turns on, he is revealed to me.
Ah. I would be in much more fear if I'd had the adrenalin left in my body, but with the blood loss and all, I can't. Naraku is now just a few yards away, with the exact same wound in his chest, too.
His eyes stare into mine – bitterly. Hatefully. I narrow mine a little bit, but at this point I'm just too tired to care.
"Why not have just listened to Kikyou?" He taunts me, in spite of the heavy flow of blood dripping from the side of his mouth. Like he's too strong to bother, he doesn't hold the big gaping wound in his chest like I have to, merely to support myself. "You could have lived safely in your pathetic little world."
I glare at him for what feels like eternity. I cough a bit more, feeling even weaker. I want to roll my eyes at how many times I'd heard that phrase now, but I don't have it in me. How was I not dead yet, anyway…? I then notice the jewel right in the middle of our distance from each other. It's shifting between colors, and I'm concerned by how it flickers between black and white while also giving off powerful, loud sparks like it's charged with electricity.
This is it. This is the one that belongs to him. No longer is Kikyou's cursed apparition of a jewel, the sham it was, bearing any weight on our fate or the outcome.
This was it. This was really it.
I swallow hard…bringing my eyes back up to meet the ones belonging to my worst enemy.
"Haven't you had enough?" I ask him, sighing it out, feeling too tired to really even care anymore. The feeling of the blood still leaving my body is taking its toll…
"…Enough?" He repeats, like he's never heard this word.
"You say we could have stayed in my pathetic world…s-so what," I find it becoming more and more difficult to talk with every word that manages to escape my lips. I pant for air for a moment, before I can even try to continue. "…so…what, then? You have your dark planet five hundred years time before mine, so you can still have nothing?"
His eyes widen at me, then his brows meet in the middle, but he remains silent. The bloodflow from the cavity in his body seems to intensify too, but I also don't have it in me to smirk at noticing. It's hard enough not paying attention to him dying right in front of me.
The shikon no tama lets off sparks that are making audible sounds, now.
"All you wanted was Kikyou, wasn't it?" I now feel tears coming to my eyes, realizing she's gone forever now. "You…essentially…killed her. I guess I get how…how she felt about Inuyasha, now…if…if you can't have them in life, then…then you can have them…in death. Am I right…?"
He doesn't say anything, his eyes just lower to stare at the jewel before us. His forearms twitch like he's ready to reach forward and snatch it, but then the curling up his lip in pain from the blood-loss tells me he reconsiders.
"Aren't I?" I cry out, for her sake, for Inuyasha's, for my own sake, for no one's…
"Enough." He repeats this word again, more like a question than a statement. Oh, now he wants to use it like it's not unfamiliar anymore.
"Enough is enough," I mutter, feeling fed up now because nothing can reach him, even when we're alone, weaponless, on the verge of death, in the middle of some unknown dimension…nothing will reach him. Nothing at all. It never would've, wouldn't it? I mean, who am I kidding, I can't purify the heart of someone whose name literally means Hell…
I lash my hands out and snatch the jewel in my fingers, and he looks at me in horror before reaching right back out to try and take it from me. I sob with the effort of wrestling it out of his arms once he's gotten a hold of it, trying to ignore our blood pooling in the middle and combining to the point you can't tell who got blood on whom anymore, and I now understand in some ways how the miko who created the jewel in the first place, also must have felt.
"This has to stop," I shout, gasping for breath. "All we do is repeat the cycle and don't you think that this is enough?! Haven't you…had…ENOUGH?!"
He says nothing in return; my voice echoes into the black hole for a while, reverberating and making my ears hurt at how desperate I sound. He just looks angrier, he just keeps trying to steal the gem back from my grasp, like a child who wants its stolen plaything back. But his trembling hands are obvious to me, even with the blurring vision.
"I know for a fact…Kikyou has," I somehow am able to wrestle it away from him, and I begin to purify it with everything in me, even though it somehow hurts infinity times more than before. The lightning of conflict within the shikon no tama electrocutes me with centuries worth of priestesses and demons fighting to be understood, begging for the endless cycle of misery to stop. "And I know…for a fact…that I have…as well."
I wait for him to pounce again. Even through my eyes are blurred with blood and tears, I know when the moment will be right. And he makes an opening for me. As he lunges towards me once more to try and take the jewel back, I shove it hard into the opening in his chest cavity, yet I can't even feel satisfied at the horrid choking sound he makes as the purified jewel sears through him like molten iron. I try to not mind the first time I've smelled burning flesh so up close. I can't find any way to gain any satisfaction out of murdering my enemy like this. Murder. What an awful word. But shouldn't it be fair when he's murdered Kikyou, and her spirit, too?
There is no rationalizing something that doesn't make sense, I try to tell myself.
"Haven't you, too, Naraku?" I see my tears fall down onto his cheeks as I've pinned down those evil hands. The purified jewel is returning its energy into me, as it saps it from him. And I notice within the beautiful orb, it's begun to crack. He is looking at me now with this disgusting mix of rage entwined with horror. "Haven't you…had enough?"
"Haven't…I…" He repeats yet again, like he's forgotten how to even speak. And to my life's surprise his eyes almost look like they are welling up with tears, too. We both know this is it. This is the end. I am surprised at the fact I now feel more guilty, than less.
"The truth is," I cry one more time as I plunge the jewel into him so deep, it starts burning my own hands, "…I feel more sad for you than for anyone else," I choke on my words. "You tried to separate us all and we only grew closer. But you...you will be alone in hell forever for what you've done!"
And with that…it's over. I keep screaming and shouting and crying and forcing all my weight down onto the jewel down into his chest, but when I finally open my eyes after the intense explosion of hot white light has dissipated, his form is completely gone…
…The jewel is still there, in my hands. I blink back more tears and try to bring it closer to get a good look at it, but I watch in terror as it disintegrates into diamond-dust and pulls me in towards it without my even trying. I scream as it drags me forward with the force of gravity, feeling like I'm plunging even deeper into blackness, everything moving so fast my eyes can't even focus.
"Kagome…"
My ears alight at the sound of a soft voice happily saying my name. Ah, it's Kikyou's voice…yet, I can't see her anywhere as the speed at which I'm falling slows a little, and now it's like a calm descent instead.
"Kagome…!"
Inuyasha's voice. My body fills with warmth and I reach a hand to my eyes to wipe away my tears, just like he would.
"I hope I did the right thing for you," I say softly into the void, not even knowing who I'm saying it to.
You did, I hear my own voice reply.
I finally feel like I can let go, and so I close my eyes.
Enough. Enough and no more. That is how the world is made.
