Title - Sunrise Alchemy
Pairing - Kikyou/Kagome
Theme- Soul
Genre - General
Rating - G
Length - Drabblish
Squicks - Nope
Summary - The best lessons aren't necessarily those that are carved into the flesh.
Sunrise Alchemy
Sometimes Kagome wonders if he is aware of her scrutiny.
Like long lines of disease, his senses thread the cold air, splicing shadows, cleaving scents and murmurs and the first light of dawn into a hundred thousand pieces. Tasting. Touching. Prowling, even when he seems to sleep. She can see it most clearly when he does not think she is watching; the fractured planes and angles of demonic perception reaching outward, claiming the world and cracking it, edge from edge, sky from earth, leaf from petal from human skin.
Nothing escapes his notice. She knows this. She has seen him wrap the dark web of his senses around his enemies, probing soft skin and old scars and the swollen, watery spaces between failing joints. Weaknesses draw him. His demon side pulls, drags, twists his limbs through dirt and fire to lay hands on flesh that will yield the most blood.
But is he aware of her?
At night, when his demon is particularly restless, he often settles on the ground and stares at her until he falls asleep. His senses snap about her, writhing like a nest of snakes over her skin. Through them, she feels his guilt and the violence of his dreams. He wants to eat her throat out. He thinks she does not know this, thinks that he harbours a dreadful, frenzied hunger in his heart she would never be able to understand. He thinks of her face, and her long fingers, and her dark hair – and, as always, all thoughts lead back to Kikyou, because she is the mother of his discontent. She taught him that human lives should not be taken lightly. She calls softly to him from the corner of Kagome's expressive mouth. Kikyou-Kagome, the soul he loves, has been split by his destructive senses, its gleaming pieces forced into a pair of ill-fitting bodies. And that – they, she – is all he seems to think about.
But is he aware of her?
Overcome by curiosity, she rises early one frigid, black morning and decides to find out.
The moon has set. The stars burn in the darkness like unpleasant laughter. There is enough light to let her see the first gloss of dew, shining on the grass and in his long, matted hair.
Smiling, she rolls to her feet and begins to dance with his senses.
They reach; she diverts. They follow; she evades. They have hunted prey far more nimble than she, these demon-keen tendrils combing the night, but she is not afraid. Though her shadow flickers alone across the ashen ground, Kagome feels a slender body pressed against her back, and cool fingers clasp her hands, moving her arms as though she is a wooden marionette. She dances without knowing the proper steps. She wheels and plunges, dressed in midnight silks, driven by someone else's will. Familiar hands guide her, touching wrist, ankle, and throat, harshly and critically; not like that, like this.
She draws close to the sleeping demon, kneels before him, peers up into his closed, incautious face.
Unaware. He is unaware of her, and a voice that belongs to Kikyou and to Kagome says: Now.
She twitches forward, thrusts out a soft, harmless hand, feels the slow burn of purifying power spread across her palm. Pallid light surges like a starving animal, illuminating the demon, the quarry, the one-that-must-not-escape –
Wait.
The wind lifts a wisp of his colourless hair, but she does not recoil. She knows that he has not felt her. Her hand has fallen to rest on her bent knees, cupped as if to catch the sky, fingers curled inward like the legs of a dead spider.
We know this one.
True. She knows him. She is aware of him always. And she understands more than he can possibly imagine.
Demons lean over downed prey with bloody lips and glistening eyes. InuYasha has bent above her in the middle of the night many times, no doubt imagining that he had finally allowed himself to bleed her, no doubt certain that she was asleep and ignorant of his presence. It happened not so long ago, on a smug, silent night like this one; he loomed like a black cloud, blocking out the moon; his claws twitched; his eyes shone with the leaping, quivering eagerness of reflected flames. She remembers that, though she never looked up – the fire in him, nibbling away at the dry husk of his humanity.
But he would always – always – slink away to burn alone.
And now. Here she crouches, doubled over like a slinking cat, her flexing paw still sore with the memory of power. She could have killed him. She nearly did. Summoning power, tempering it, focusing it on a single target – she does not know how to do any of that, but it happened nonetheless. As InuYasha suffers his demonic instinct, she suffers this.
What is this?
Silently, following the slivered pattern of starlight and shadows painted across the ground, she makes her way back to her blankets. For the first time she recognizes that she is cold. That she is exhausted.
Still, she does not let herself stumble. The guiding hands slap her just before she steps on a dried flower stem. InuYasha turns his ear toward her, briefly, then lapses back into his dreams of Kikyou's death.
As she settles back into dreams of her own, she too thinks of Kikyou. Of her cool fingers, her fierceness, and the wealth of knowledge she possessed – all as sleek and sure as the shaft of her finest arrow. At the base of her spine, Kagome feels an icy point of pain, a puncture wound struck from the inside. It aches and never heals; it pulses with fury when demons draw near. It is a lesson stitched into the fabric of her spirit, a lesson so well learned that her flesh will answer to it without her consent.
It is Kikyou's only gift to her.
The alchemy spells of the rising sun paint dusky, golden crowns on the tallest of the trees. Kagome lies on her side, watching gilded leaves rush along the slope of a crisp breeze, flailing at the sky like a hundred tiny hands. And, as her eyes slip shut, she feels someone curl close against her back, press chill fingers over her phantom-wounds.
Balanced on the edge of a dream, she hears a voice that belongs to Kikyou and to Kagome say: The scars of some lessons reach straight to your soul.