Title - Abracadaver
Pairing - Kikyou/Kagome
Theme - Magic
Genre - General
Rating - 13+
Length - Drabblish
Squicks - Character deaths
Summary - There is no magic in the world that can save us from cold logic.
Abracadaver
The water holds her like a great, cold hand; a fisted embrace. She is cupped in its smooth palm, she is slowly draining through the spaces between its fingers toward the deep darkness below. Far from breath. Far from light. So far that she can hardly hear the beating of her own heart.
Above, the surface gleams like a phantom sky, alive with luminosity. Flecks of colour tint the undersides of tiny waves and ripples – gold and green and a tremor of violet darker than rim of a bone-rending wound. She can see herself there. She can see her reflection, though she may only be imagining it; her hair has lifted from her shoulders with the slow, patient purpose of a serpent, and it rears and sways, and it fills her eyes with shadows; she may only be imagining it.
She is not. At the centre of the pool – at the centre of all things – Kagome finds her reflection in the water.
Kikyou is a thing of glass and ivory, wrapped in silk. Breathless. Weightless. Her eyes are closed, her lips are still, she is waiting for something. Waiting, and trapped here, and waiting.
"You shouldn't have come," she says.
We're underwater, Kagome wants to reply. Don't speak; we can't. We're underwater.
Encased in crystal, Kikyou laughs. A cold current toys with the edge of her sleeve. Her lips are still.
"What happened?" she asks.
Naraku killed you. He killed you.
"He can't kill me. I am already dead."
Kagome drifts. Somewhere, in a far away place, her lungs are burning, her throat is beginning to spasm, her body is sinking and she cannot stop it. She falls. The deep darkness leaps to greet her. Kikyou comes between them both, and suddenly Kagome is resting on her like a child – safe and settled – slipping in and out of a frightening sense of peace.
I'm sorry.
"I know that. I've always known that, and it never helps."
With filmy, unwilling eyes, Kagome looks up at the surface and all of the broken colours rushing across the inside of its belly. It is far away, so astoundingly far, but she sees every shape, every flicker of bronze, of yellow, of brilliant blue. They fit together, she realizes. The pieces. The shapes and shades. They make a picture when she looks at them all.
"Why did you come here?"
I had to come. I had no other choice. Could I leave you?
"You could have."
No.
Lines of crimson lace the water like blood, and there is a whiteness brighter than sunshine. Kagome peers close, fighting with a creeping numbness in her limbs, and recognizes InuYasha. She is looking at a picture of him, taken in a long-ago time.
"I will take him if you heal me," Kikyou says softly, and her blue lips part. There is no air inside her, no soul or hope or love, so nothing leaves. The cold, dark water beneath her begins to pluck at the tips of her fingers. "Heal me."
Kagome is looking at a picture of InuYasha. On the silvery side of a delicate wave, she is watching him fall in love with Kikyou.
"You have the magic. Heal me."
Kikyou is sinking. Her lovely hands lift, only because the rest of her body is falling away. She seems to reach upward – not to touch the light, but to grasp the image of InuYasha, to clutch him in her fingers and hold him in this terrible stillness until the flesh falls from their bones and they settle on the rocks below; sleeping, speaking, trapped here forever.
"You have the magic; you cannot leave me."
And I won't.
And she does not.
It occurs to Kagome, briefly, that she must be dying. The waves flicker as though in pain; a sigh of lazy, quiet denial churns the air to water and the water to blood. But, as she and Kikyou slowly descend, the darkness shields them from all the bright accusation lancing downward, from the crowding warmth of the world above and the impossible happy endings calling after them, calling for a second chance, another day. There is serenity. There is escape, for herself, and her soul, and even for the half-demon who will never understand that she has done this for his own good.
The shattered colours waver uncertainly, then swim away. Soon, the vision of InuYasha is gone, and Kikyou follows him, and Kagome will not leave her. In Kagome's mind, they all vanish together.
Like magic.