(AN)---hope nobody is too squeamish! ^_^
I promise there will be Sesshoumaru/Kagome action, but I need to establish the story before I get into that. I'm trying to keep them in character, and with their personalities...it is a delicate dance.
Review and make me feel loved, mina-san!
Juxtaposition
Chapter One:
Binary Star
The water reflected black. Unblemished, perfect. For one long moment it was all she could focus on. Then, a single white feather drifted into her line of vision. Down, side to side. It gently glided through the air as if flowing through different levels of time and sound.
Touch, and the water rippled. The ripples casting out farther and farther, beyond sight. And, when all disruptions had run their course, the feather floated on and endless sea of stillness.
Her senses stretched out, through her hands, her eyes. She was on her hands and knees, in a nest of white feathers identical to the first. She couldn't see the ground she rested on, but she could feel it through the fingers that delved deep below the blanket of soft feathers. Cold, metal. It was rounded, cupped around her like an open hand, and any movement threatened to spill feathers over the sides. Three gold chains, her as their centre as they converged far above her head. Lifting her face to peer above stirred the already fragile air currents. Spider-silk threads of hair blew across her lips, then settled. Another lone feather fell from its precarious balance and lazily drifted toward the flat, black water. The chains met a ring. The ring hooked over a long gold branch. Stylized and curved, grooved in darker shadows and a light that subtly shifted over its edge...
There was an image forming in her mind, similar so much to what she saw that the two sights almost over-lapped. The branch would be attached to a vertical column and...
A scale. She was on a scale. But that couldn't be right, it was much too large. She sat back on her knees, her newly exposed hands flat on her thighs. Stray feathers caught beneathe her palms. The scene became clearer, though its edges fell into such a distance that they gave the illusion of being endless. Everything had its end.
No more debate, she indeed rested in the hollow of one great scale. And it rocked, oh so gently, to the rhythm of her breathing. Slight and soothing, like a huge cradle. Another feather fell, and another. They didn't hold her attention quite so much anymore. Her eyes followed the line of the scale, the perfect symmetry, until they passed the apex and soon descended again. Perception made the other side smaller, position made it less distinct.
The other pan was a shallow depression of gold, and in its heart knelt a girl that wore her face, though less expressively. She raised dark, passionless eyes, and they did not pause at anything, but instantly met hers. No interest, no spark of recognition. Her blue-grey eyes blinked, unthreatening and unwelcoming. She sat back on her knees, spine straighter, head higher. And though she seemed hard-contained within herself, her very presence filled the scale.
The floor that had been beneathe her hands was bare, polished yellow that cast warm light-shadows over her cold face.
Kagome didn't feel her steady calmness, or quiet disregard. Her breath was full to hitching, confused and desperate to recall what was going on. They seemed deep underground, and light came in halfs, flickering over them. The scale held them both, one on each side swinging over a horizon-less expanse of black water---though calm it smoothed over and shone like an obsidian mirror, losing all semblance to water.
A knife-edge balance, but they weren't equal. Kagome wondered why her pan was filled with feathers, their weight nothing, but enough to keep her still. Too deep a breath seemed to disrupt the world around her.
She bowed her head and one smooth lock of hair swept forward, a graceful line, swinging like the curved blade of a scythe. Another feather was cast out to float on that sea and disappear. She stared at her hands, and the more she looked at them the less she saw. Her mind was this blackened stage...where the props and actors moved behind a great tasseled curtain, and the audience was left to interpreting snatches of disembodied voices and constantly changing shadows.
But there. She raised her head. A name was coming to her lips, falling formed though she could not think it. "Inuyasha," she cried. And the other girl turned her head, dark hair falling all around her in still coils.
"Inuyasha," she whispered, and it carried over Kagome's echo like a scream.
Called and contained within those four syllables. A spell twice spoken, and thrice---
"Inuyasha!"
Given form.
Her eyes swung to the thickest shadows, registering first a flashing glint of white-silver, and then a face. Kagome's stare narrowed and she felt something chase through her body, something...
She knew suddenly, like some great wind had come and swept the curtain aside. Recognition crashed through her, and her previously slow-moved mind filled with countless memories, thoughts, feelings. Inuyasha...why doesn't he...Her eyes turned with his, stared at the still nameless girl...see me...
She blinked.
Me...?
She was one point in a line, a line that fed into itself and had no end. She felt it pulling through her like a knotted-rope in her gut, grating through flesh bloodlessly. There were sparks of pain, widening through her eyes and squeezing her breath down into tiny panic-filled pants. She distantly felt herself falling, but didn't hit ground. The air around her was thick with white, she was lost in a storm of feathers, dropping through them like a stone. They fluttered across her face, and one after the other caressed her, soft edges that drew shallow lines of blood.
She twisted about like a ribbon ripped through by the wind, the sudden movement streaming her hair back from her face. She was too startled to scream, but her face was contorted with the desire. In contrast, the face reflected back from that deep black water was still, calm, its cold, dark-tinted lips parted in pseudo-anticipation.
Time slowed down so that the world was mute and hypersensitive and numb. And just as Kagome hurtled break-neck toward that smooth, mirror-like surface, the reflection opened wide its arms and smiled, welcoming.
She was seeing it again. Pressed so tightly against the tree that odd edges of bark stabbed into her shallowly. Not drawing blood. Not that it mattered. Like the memory of a recent dream, the more she thought about it the more she saw. And...she was seeing it again. Though the word 'again' conveyed a sense of familiarity, lack of surprise, and even some measure of reluctant acceptance. Again, but it felt like the first time. The tired surprise, the berating anger, the desire to just curl up in the lap of pain and let it soothe away her thoughts. Dissolve the lines that were cutting themselves a permanent place in her mind, with deep grooves that would bleed and bleed and bleed into everything.
Her left hand tightened through its own volition, as if trying to drag at her riveted attention, save her from the scene unfolding---When it only succeeded in spicing her palm with splinters. A minor, physical pain, easily lost in the folds of so many others. And, though she was suffocating under the press of a thousand or more feelings, she really didn't feel anything at all.
For all that had been done, and she had done---she still lost existence in his eyes. Second to a dead woman, a creature formed of ash, bone, and dirt. A demon that carried a small, hateful piece of her own soul. A curse that they shared the same face! Seeing them together again under the deep shadow of the goshinboku...seeing him hold her so lovingly, even knowing that she had killed him there, and meant to kill him again...
They kissed, such a tender moment, and Kagome felt nothing. Not shock, not betrayal. The tension unraveled from her body like a ragged thread, and she seemed to settle more against the tree, just as Kikyou's body relaxed into the line of Inuyasha's.
So much that the dead miko had that would never be hers. So much that she threw away. The pain that came with her soul's past incarnation never lessened, nor did it ever fully swallow her empathy, pity---that part of her that embraced Kikyou and her tragedy. It made her wish better things for them both, even at her own expense. Let Kikyou come to peace, she sometimes prayed. Let her move beyond her hatred, even knowing that Kikyou's hate was the only thing keeping her and Inuyasha apart. She certainly wasn't.
The kiss continued, one long, wet line of possible memories. His clawed hand gripped desperately at her right shoulder, holding her more tightly against him and unconsciously mirroring her killing wound. His right arm was hooked around her neck, pressed between them and the jagged bark of the tree. Protecting her. Still protecting her.
Such a passionate embrace, and she could see finality. There was no part of him that belonged to her anymore. Every possible corner and scratch was being bled clean, purged and drained between their lips.
What piece of her soul he carried with him was dying in that kiss.
Kikyou whimpered into his mouth, and her small, human-like hands fisted in the cloth of his kimono, then relaxed. One stroked up his back, so heavy that the fire-rat fur gathered and smoothed. The other, the left raised away from him, up and up as if she meant to brace herself against the tree. Instead, a pale, almost white-pink light gathered between her fingers, solidifying into an arrow. Kagome's pain-numbed eyes widened as the still-glowing shaft was on the down-stroke.
Inuyasha grunted, his arms tightening around Kikyou as the arrow bit through flesh in a wash of blood, ripping through the fire-rat fur and melting it away.
Kikyou staggered back into the goshinboku, the impact of her strike driving through her as well. Just as she had intended. The arrow cut through his back and into Inuyasha's heart from behind, bursting through it and into her. Pinning him to her, pinning her to that sacred tree.
Kagome reached a hand out, a futile hand, as if the pathetic gesture alone could stop what was already in motion. She was suddenly jolted forward with a rush of fire on her back, and then liquid and night air. She collapsed, falling half to the uneven ground. Hot growling in her ear and her shoulder grating painfully against the side of the tree. The sound that came out of her mouth was too abrupt to be a scream, pulled from the breath she was exhaling and sucking the next one from her. in a fluttering, almost obscenely soft caress, she felt the cloth of her school uniform settle around her in scraps. There was a bitter arc of some dark liquid; it pattered down on her head and the grass around her like rain, more pooled beneathe her.
Moving made her nauseous, made her feel as if the meat of her back was pulling apart slightly. Another slash and she rocked on her hands and knees, almost buckled, but something wet and hard caught her around the waist and jerked, sending her half-spinning onto her back.
A flash of white chased across her suddenly blurred eyes, white and just a trail of crimson. She felt air move over her body and instinctively threw up an all-too tender arm. Pushing desperately with her hands and legs, she felt claws scrape through flesh, dragging against bone in a sickeningly muted screech. Her arm was ribboned and reduced to a horrible red ruin, but the attack didn't stop, or even pause. The next slash came down on the side of her face, narrowly missing the eye. Blood poured in blinding rivulets into both her eyes. Her long, dark hair was soaked with it, heavy and clinging to her skin and the ground beneathe her.
Her body was going numb in places she knew there should be pain, telling her in no uncertain terms that the wounds were deep enough to sever nerves...maybe even fatal.
Another impact and she felt her head jerk to the side. More growling, more tearing sounds, too thick and saturated to be cloth. She took one last gurgling breath---and screamed.
TBC...