Author's Note: Title and italicized lines from the song "C'mon Baby" by Bob Schneider. If you've never heard this song, hie thee to a download place and get it. It's a superlative rock song, with lyrics like a poem, but better.
So, 'tis the season for a little slice of moral ambiguity and bitterness to go with that holiday meal, do you not agree? I knew you would.
And What About the Girl Who Ran?
Kikyou senses him long before she sees him, senses the shard of the jewel she hates. She hates most things, now. She hates day and night; hates sun and moon, hates wet and dry. Most of all, she hates the hanyou and the girl who now holds most of her soul. Them, with their hot breath and their faces glowing with vitality and their eyes alight with love for each other…
Satisfaction twists its way through her. She always suspected Inuyasha's love for her was finite, and is blind to the irony that he is betraying her with… her. She doesn't understand, or perhaps she refuses to, that Kagome is Kikyou in the way that you can pour water from one bowl to another, and the molecules become mixed and rearranged, but it is still the same water.
"I'm an old clay bowl," she thinks sometimes, and sometimes she smiles when she thinks it, as if it were funny.
she ran so far away she could never find her way back home again
Expecting evil, she is surprised— no, shocked— to find that Suikotsu is good and kind and gentle. Things she used to be, before she died and became nothing at all. He is like her, just like her. He is dead, yet lives; in defiance of all the laws of the universe, flesh that has perished moves and walks and speaks, yet there is no evil in him.
Throughout that first day she often finds herself pleased by his countenance and his demeanour, and feels a strange gratitude to Naraku for bringing this decent man back to life where he can do good.
At the same time, there is deep suspicion, for she knows that Naraku does nothing for the sake of good. Just the contrary. And so she watches Suikotsu, waiting and breathless, for the slip, the falter, the moment she can throw back her head and laugh in triumph that she was right. It is all she has to feel joy over anymore, after all.
But the slip does not come, and the first night, Kikyou is discomfited as she lays on her mat, watching him sleep with the dying firelight flickering over his handsome face. The world used to make sense, she thinks wistfully, and wonders how it came to pass that up is down, ugly is beautiful, clean is dirty…
she tripped and fell and broke her heart
The second night, after a day-long debate of should I/shouldn't I, she surprises him with her advances. He resists at first, but Urasue's craft holds her in good stead. He cannot long resist the supple form of her body as she winds arms and legs around him, the small wet bow of her mouth as she kisses him.
"Welcome," she says as he enters, the fly to her spider, and the friction of his movement is soon joined by the heat of his release. She feels alive for the first time since her death, and so places cold fingers on the back of his neck, urging him to continue. "More," she says.
They couple again, and again. At some point, he murmurs his concern that she will get with child, and does not understand her laughter.
The third night he comes to her, prevents her from entering the house where all the children lay curled under their blankets like beans wrapped in damp cotton, one day to send out a single slender shoot of life. Against the side of the house, in the last blue minutes of dusk, he fills her once more, fills her body with his, fills her nose with his scent of earth. Not the green smell from digging in a garden, honest work for honest hands, but the dry and lonely odor of dirt that has not helped anything grow in a long, long time.
She knows this smell, because it is her own. Can he tell, that they are alike in this way as well? She hasn't mentioned the shard in his throat, as all their time without the children near is spent rutting.
In the back of her head, she wonders if she should feel guilt or shame for taking Suikotsu as her lover when just a single thin wall separates them from all that slumbering innocence. But then the moment passes and she doesn't care anymore.
She wonders, while watching them at play, if the children realize that they are still orphans, since their new caretakers are just as dead as their parents. She wonders if they would care if they knew, or if the affection they receive from Suikotsu and herself is all that matters.
"Cold comfort," she says, and smiles. "Cold as the grave." But the children don't understand, and see only that she is smiling, and wave to her as they play and help Suikotsu pick herbs. She waves back, and thinks that she might have been a good mother, once upon a time.
and now the only thing she does well is fall apart
But like all pleasant things in her life, her time with him there is over almost before it has begun, and Kikyou stands beside him as he faces others, dead like they are. They know him, it seems, and want him to return to them.
But dear good Suikotsu is horrified. It takes a harsh blow, received in protecting the children with his own body, to clear away the haze of civility and decency that had clouded his mind. All too soon, he is one of them, all casual brutality and gleeful malice, and she is glad for the suddenly outlandish appearance that marks him as visibly different from the old Suikotsu.
She waits for the tide of contentment that her prediction of his eventual downfall has come to pass. It never comes. Instead there is just this sense of hollowness, and the knowledge that she'd have rather lost than win, just this once. Victory, she has learned, is not all it is reputed to be.
Another blast from one of his brethren, and Kikyou is flung backward. The last time she lay on her back, Suikotsu had been labouring over her, and she recalls the distant pleasure he had brought her with his efforts. She feels the accumulated souls seep from her, feels the weakness grip her bones and weight her eyelids, feels a marrow-deep sorrow for Suikotsu and the children and herself.
In another lifetime, or maybe another universe, perhaps they could have met in other circumstances. That could have been their little house, their little children, their little life together. But instead, there is just this little death.
Kikyou hears Inuyasha hollering Kagome's name in the distance, and lets herself fade away.