Diclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha
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Once...She awoke to the sound of her metal spine clattering upon a stone floor, long ago. As she sat up and screeched, her long, manicured nails went straight for the tangles of dead hair caught between her teeth.
With a curse she spat out the mess, fixed her prim and proper hair, and surveyed the area.
Skulls, everywhere. Dried and bleached, teetering in piles.
"La?" she questioned, tracking her echoing voice as if she could see the waves scurrying about through the air. Only the smooth walls sang back to her in ripples, and skullpiles crumbled.
La laaaaaaaa... She turned with a shiver. La laaaaaaaa? An aching, voracious chill clawed and tingled at the steel of her spine.
A glance downward- it showed her snarls still snagged in her nails, hanging by bare strands and yet firmly secured. Delving her fingers into the mess that swayed with her grasping movements, the strands became a luminescent, cruel burgundy as she mindlessly wove, stretched, and numbly knitted the knotted hairs into a structure, a coherency. "La la," she sang to herself, smiling as her creation grew row by threaded row.
Cat's cradle. Woven threaded ladders. Crow's feet. Cat's whiskers. Unraveled whips, and spindles, and tassels, and glistening webs of ugly silk, the designs appeared, stitch after invisible and unmindful stitch. Nets upon nimble fingers' hooks grew as she worked her magic into the naughty, knotty, tangled hairs of the dead, and soon she had spawned enough to cover her frame.
Yura of the Hair clothed herself in a black dress woven from the black hair of the dead and smoothed out the wrinkles, feeling the magic fabric take on her form as if she had peeled off her skin, cleansed herself -itself- and then stepped back into the shed shreds.
A few threads of unruly hair remained caught beneath a nail, and with a curse she bit upon them and pulled like the Deaths Comb that she was, choking at the vile taste of dead hair, then spat out the strands like cherry pits, all the while her lips twisted in disgust.
It was with a charmed, smug cackle that she twirled in place and raised her hand high into the air, curling -unfurling- her fingers as a sword hilt materialized in her grasp. A wiped away spitshine upon the unsheathed blade, and she smiled -purred- back at herself. She smacked her lips and winked, and with a cock of her head-
She glared and nearly hissed at the hand upon the hilt.
There was still a strand of hair lodged beneath a nail. No, not lodged. Attached, like a silken strand from a spider's arse. Trailing down her arm, snaking around it like vines about a branch, shimmering in spots as she twisted -angled- her arm to travel its length with her burning, fierce eyes.
Switching the hand upon the sword, she tugged with frustrated growls at the source of her ire. It was long before she released her bite upon the taunting thread, her finger in howls. No amount of tugging would sever or snap the quickly grown hair.
And soon, under her watchful stare…
Strands sprouted from beneath her other fingernails, and she quickly and furiously twisted the threads together, knotting them and snagging them into a mussy nest, stretching the new weaving taut between her fingers, snarling at the hideous results.
"Why won't you filthy hairs snap!" she snarled. "I can't snip you! I can't snap you! I can't get rid of you!"
With a forceful tug, the newly knotted knitting formed an oval ring between her contorted fingers, the smoky silvering of a mirror filling itself inside the obsidian rim of hair. The hairs glowed like embers and snapped from her fingers, leaving little growths that quickly spat out more hair, and Yura stepped back, stunned. The clouds beyond the upright, charcoal encircled mirror became grey.
She reached out inquisitively, the unavoidable, irremovable -endlessly growing- strandlets shoved aside for the moment. The water of the surface dribbled in rivulets from each spot a nail tip tapped. A screeching groan signaled the sudden swelling outward of the mirror in size, and as she stepped back again, uncertain of the strange, almost breathing monstrosity before her, she stepped blindly upon a skull, losing her footing as well as her balance.
Her sword shot out accusingly as she fell. The floating mirror teetered forward and crashed upon her, swallowing her up within its silver smoke before she hit the bone cold stone.
It shattered into pieces upon impact.
-
Once…As Hiten eyed the barely ornate weapon his father held out to him, he flared his nostrils with disdain. A hand me down. Father dared to give him a hand me down with the expectation that he would appreciate it the way he would a newly forged-
"Hiten," Kouten thundered dangerously, his brow heavily creased.
Hiten haughtily snatched the Raigekijin from his father with a gimme-that elbow snap. He grumbled unintelligible murmurs as he spun on his heel and kicked off from the ground.
Kouten's vexed gaze followed his young son's path upward and away from him, the spoiled youkai flying through invisible gusts, long bladed rod in hand. Sparks floated in a noisy haze as Hiten paused in place, hovering in a cloud of his own contempt, and pointed his new-old weapon toward a half rotted stump meters off to his father's left.
A searing blast of fire and electricity reduced the targeted tree stump to a small, charred crater. Smoke rose in curling, heavenward vines as the blackened earth smoldered. Hiten's amused laughter rang out over the skies like the cawing of crows. "I suppose this twig is useful after all, Father. I'm impressed it didn't blow up from all the lightning it conducted."
Ignoring the elder youkai's annoyed grimace, Hiten flew eastward, passing swollen and angry grey clouds and relishing in the whipping of wind upon his hakama. Wisps of fog-like smoke around him, the moist, muggy scent of the humid rain-heavy air, and the whistle in the winds as he shot onward-
He grinned smugly, allowing one fang to become visible.
All of it. All of it was bliss.
Now, it was time for more target practice. His little toy would prove its usefulness.
-
She yanks playfully at the strands. The threads of hair interlaced between her fingers glow as she varies the distance from palm to palm. Her fingers hook rigidly, and she nearly cackles.Back against a tree and nigh in boredom, Yura taunts the silver haired hanyou on the other end, flicking her fingertips once before reining him in.
The line goes slack, and she pouts.
It is a while before she sees the strange girl from before riding the hanyou's back as the two approach her lair. Sneaky as can be, she strikes first, and the hanyou is strung up like a fly in her web, the ratty haired girl helpless and annoying upon the ground.
She doesn't remember where everything went wrong, though.
Where she'd lost control. Where she'd lost power.
The shard should have protected her, made her immortal. Even without it, the hanyou could jam his claws into her anywhere or even slice her into pieces and never possibly hope to render her unpatchable, unmendable, unstoppable.
She's hidden her heart, her essence, inside an empty skull. She remembers, long ago, plunging her hand into her chest and curling her fingers around the steel cable of her spine. A tug and a yank had ripped out a bloody metal comb. This, this she had placed within the bone confines of her favorite, most prized dead haired head, like gold into a secret treasure box.
The skull had since become stained with the blood dripping from the teeth of her heart.
Yura sights the girl hacking upon the red skull. She screams silently, allowing her breath to whoosh past her painted lips in a deadly hiss. There's no time. She gives commands to her cursed hair, her steel fibers. She wishes for the girl's demise.
She hadn't burnt like insects engulfed in a conflagration. She hadn't garnered a single scratch from her skinslicing coils.
And Yura is a moment too late. The arrow tip has cracked the skull, and the comb spine is split.
Yura freezes in midair with anguished and angry eyes widened, then fades into the invisible mirror of the sky.
A ratty haired human girl and her pet inu hanyou… had defeated her.
A damning whisper of a moan creeps between her lips as Yura of the Hair becomes less than smoke. Her empty dress falls to the ground.
-
Kneeling before Manten's still form, Hiten tastes the bile in his throat as his stomach churns. He's eaten his brother's heart directly from his chest, in chunks. It's a few broken moments before the high of the shards -new and old, but all five- masks the vileness and numbs him to everything but the mourning of his fallen sibling.The girl had disabled his wheels, the hanyou had sent a sword through his brother's middle, and the kit-
A murderous outcry forms in his throat at the thought of the kit. Hiten's eyes flicker with rage. Instead of a scream of outrage, though, Manten's glowing lightning spittle charges up in its place, and Hiten turns to glare at the trio of shard holders.
To hell with target practice. It's time for revenge.
Hiten no longer remembers, as blood films over his eyes, how the hanyou had sliced his Raigekijin. He half expects the giant blade to be repelled, but when it sinks through his rod, he doesn't feel wonder at being defeated by a hanyou.
He feels shame and idiocy for his overconfidence.
-
When Hiten wakes, he hacks up the bloody pulp of his brother's heart. It burns on its way up, and the shards, gone, no longer numb him to the taste and the flames. His entire frame aches with the sickness of death. When he finishes retching and stands on his own, he turns and surveys his surroundings.A vast, dry wasteland greets him with a cool, wafting chill. Scraggly skeletons of trees claw at the sky with needled fingers, and a lake of half frozen ice borders the entire west as far as he can see. The sky itself is a poisoned lavender.
Soundlessly, someone has approached him- his neck's snapped backward with the downward tug upon his braid, and Hiten turns with a growl to scuffle with the attacker upon the ground- but halts.
A woman.
She speaks before he does.
"You know, it's pathetic," she chirps playfully, and Hiten instantly advances a step.
"Says who?" he rasps, his throat not fully healed. He doesn't stop to wonder if it will heal. The female before him merely fingers a long toothed red comb.
"Only those with youkai blood have the nicest hair," she supplies in a mournful tone before sticking the comb between her breasts -her heart where it belongs- and pulls a sword from behind her. "And once they die, it gets all brittle and stringy and lifeless."
He glares and grabs her by the throat, squeezing tightly- and yet she has no difficulty in breathing. She doesn't even squirm or tug at his fingers for escape. Instead, she smiles at him and laughs heartily, and a quirked brow accents her amusement.
"You're dead and so am I," she explains, steel tip to his throat, once he removes his crushing grip upon her useless windpipe. His confused stare prompts her subsequent introduction, as it's been a while since she last saw any others here in Death.
Yura wishes to finally be free from her curse, but the hairs still sprout from her fingertips, no matter how often she attempts to sever them. Even in death, they continue to grow. Severance often prompts immediate regrowth to replace what was lost, and Yura-
Yura simply weaves more clothes to wear.
"And you are?"
"No one who answers to you, woman."
It is days before Hiten speaks to Yura, before he gives her his name.
It is weeks before he admits to her his downfall, and only after she admits hers.
It is months in this stasis of unchange, months of staring into the freezing, boiling, fluctuating, drowning, suffocating waters of the lake, months of sitting upon an ice floe-
The increments for the passage of time are lost on him, finally, when he takes Yura's hand first, and he no longer feels like he is the only one who has lost to a human and a hanyou.
Hiten, heartless as he was, had eaten his own brother's to replace it. It had been a poor substitute, and his own body had rejected it.
Yura, feeling no need for her heart, had set it aside where she hoped no one could find it. Instead of hiding it from others, it had left a trail for others to follow.
Hiten wipes the blood from his eyes and no longer glares. He accepts that a lesser blooded creature had sent him here. He looks at Yura and has no desire to electrocute her, even were she alive.
Yura makes him kneel, then stands behind him as she runs the teeth of her heart through his hair. She is surprised - his hair hasn't become brittle and lifeless as she had taunted and teased it would.
Neither notices when the floe upon which they are afloat slowly sinks into the beckoning waters of Death.