This was written a little over a year ago for Anie (mintyfreshsocks) through a request meme in my lj, and I'm only just getting around to posting it to ff.n. The request was made for a Sango/Kikyou ficlet, with the title 'What Was Destined' and the line "like the wind that flows".

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Her father lay underground in a makeshift grave, buried by deceived servants and a false lord. They'd laid her alongside him, but her anger and hurt and hate had dragged her back up into life.

(She had been torn from her grave into a world of hurt and hate and anger.)

Her brother walked on borrowed time, supplied by a shard of the Shikon. And maybe someday, she would have to kill him.

Death owned her heart.

Miroku was life. He carried death in his hand and he'd watched his father die and death clung to him like a tether, but there was something indescribably alive about him. His humor, the enjoyment he tried to take in simple things, his longing for an heir.

She loved him for it.

But death had a prior claim on her.

(And maybe that was why she was here.)

And maybe she was here because she was a fool.

Kikyo's soul stealers entwined around their mistress, their brilliance throwing part of her face into light and leaving the other half veiled in thick black.

Sango wondered if Kikyo might have taken her soul, if she had died that night in Naraku's courtyard. She knew she ought to feel distaste, tempered perhaps by pity for the unfortunate priestess.

(Instead, there was the wild-violent-need-thrill between her legs.)

Instead, there was something like kinship, something like fascination.

"Like the wind that flows," Kikyo mused, holding up one hand to stroke one of her youkai. "Prone to changing direction but not without its pattern. You came to me."

"You don't sound surprised," Sango said warily, her hands instinctively going to Hiraikotsu.

"Did you come to hunt me, taijiya?" Kikyo asked, voice never changing in inflection.

"No…"

"I thought not." The miko inclined her head, and shifting white light and shadow played across her features. She was beautiful, in the way Sango's memories of her father and brother were. Both made her feel raw and wrenched and empty. "Why did you come, then?"

Because.

Because sometimes you loved someone with all you were and it didn't matter one bit because you were both damned anyway. It was a story Sango knew well, one that Kohaku had cut into her skin with his chain blade that night the world fell to pieces in her hand.

(She wondered if Kikyo's clay flesh wore the scars her living one would've had from false-Inuyasha's claws if she had lived long enough for the wounds to close over. She wondered what it would be like to trace them, calloused fingers running over smooth cold curves.)

Because Kikyo was pretty and because Sango wanted to know what death tasted like, to see if death was too terrible for her to send her little brother out into it, and because she wanted to ask if Kikyo had left her heart in the grave when she came out of it.

"May I?" she said softly instead.

Maybe some things had been made inevitable the day Naraku had killed her everyone. Maybe she was too rooted in the dead to completely love the living. Maybe…

( Kikyo tasted of cold, and death, and dignity that endured, and loneliness.)