Disclaimer: Refer to Chapter One.

Author's Note: Since Kikyou and Kohaku occupied a full half of the chapter, they deserved one of these as well. Odd how the titles for these two stories ("Inflection" and "Reflection") turned out to match a bit.


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Reflection


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Mere months ago, Kohaku had an elder sister.

She was compassion, was understanding, was the strength he wished to one day attain. She was more important to him than he knew to express, because no matter the circumstances, her presence always spoke overwhelmingly of home.

He attempts to kill her, stabbing her in the back with a chain scythe that, in the end, wounds him even more.

He looks back and feels that no time has passed at all, and yet here he is, captive by debts etched in blood, puppet to a fragment of stone. He travels with a strong-spirited miko who is vengeance personified. In her, he finds an echo of the sister he lost.

Lady Kikyou is kind. Like any one of the former taijiya when she sustains him in battle. Like aneue on the rare occasions when, to the best of her ability, she offers him an outlet for grief. But he knows that she knows that their journey will ultimately be denied the luxury of an optimistic closure. Even as he cherishes her kindness he is still followed by The Face That Will Not Go Away, and others that, although perished, are not quite forgotten, not yet.

Thus, he knows that at the core of their association, Lady Kikyou is to him much, much more than only consolation. In her living death she provides him the very manifestation of purpose, an anchor to the duty strewn entreatingly at his feet. An anchor by which he must abide, lest he become the source of even more suffering.

He thinks this even as the fiery, familiar form soars overhead, a blur of movement and desperation. He thinks this even as Lady Kikyou rests a comforting hand on his shoulder, as placid and as intrinsically sad as the shimmering pool below.

I'm sorry, aneue.


Fifty years ago, Kikyou had a younger sister.

She was innocence, was sympathy, was childish exuberance that brought out the maternal in people otherwise deeply reserved. For a long time she was the only one capable of looking through her sister's impassiveness, accepting and admiring the passionate, sensitive young woman at its core.

Kikyou leaves her to fend for herself when she dies. Later, much, much later, she returns to find that Kaede is now the older sister, and that hostility looms, barely concealed, in wake of admiration. She does not visit her old village again.

It seems that since then time has transposed itself in gallops and reams, and yet here she is, meandering the land in all her unnatural glory, a conglomeration of dirt and clay that bore scars of its fragility. She gains a disillusioned servitor who has all the outward appearance of a boy playing games of war. In him, she finds a shadow of the sister she left behind.

Kohaku is good-hearted, uncertain and cautious, a moth that has been scorched one too many times by flame. The residue of the sanctified and i>living /i> miko within her knows that she ought to take him in tow, and, if unable to heal his scars, then to soothe them at least.

Except that, pragmatically, she knows she must kill him to claim from his ashes a fragment of stone. How different does that make her from Naraku? Not very, she thinks. But she would do it just the same.

Except that, in treating him as anything more than a follower, a means to her end, she has already delved, however tentatively, into a vault of forbidden philosophy. So volatile are the contents that have spilled forth that she finds it impossible to slam the lid shut again. Once bonds born of sympathy have been laid down and allowed to take root, they would have to be severed, later, at the price of pain.

Staring at her own jaded reflection, she rages inwardly.

I'm sorry, Kohaku.


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