Author's Note: This is a fic I wrote for dawnsama for the lj community iyflashfic. She requested Naraku/young!Kaede. It was supposed to be written in August, actually got posted in November, and now I'm getting it up here in December. Me + deadlines...not so good. Some AU elements, although I tried to keep it to a minimum. I couldn't find an age for Kaede around Kikyou's death; sites said anything from seven to ten, and I don't think it ever says in the manga. So I left the passage of years a bit vague in parts, though I pegged her as ten at the youngest in my head while writing this. Rated for creepiness (this is a Naraku pairing, so that's pretty much par for the course) and some sexuality.
Onigumo was…well, hideous; burned and ruined beyond all hopes of pleasing the eye, or even leaving it unmoved, even through shadows, even when she squinted. He croaked at her, calling for water or food or, most often, her sister.
"Good day," she said pleasantly, though (because) she knew his eyes would darken to hear it. No day was good for him. She had been bent over nearly in half, the better to haul her basket, brimming with bandages and salves and a water jug. Now she flung it down the moment she'd cleared the entrance.
"I suppose," he said to her. "When is your sister coming to me, little girl? You trouble me; she doesn't."
She eyed him. She savored her words a moment. "She's in love you know," she said. The words landed on him like blows. He loved her sister, she could feel it. This horrified her, because Kikyou was good and beautiful and perfect, all the things he wasn't. It also seemed intolerable—he was ugly and broken and an extra burden, and she hated him, but he was the only man aside from Inuyasha that she had not breathed in since she was old enough to toddle around the village. By default she was halfway in love with him too, at least when she hadn't seen him for a few days.
"And between that and her other duties, well..." she trailed off, shrugging.
She knelt to strip bandages from his arms and legs and face; Kikyou tended to his body and told her not to. Kaede understood why. "The priestess has lost her purity?" he asked.
Kaede looked up sharply. Her eyes caught on his. They were dark brown, deep and rich, the only thing that would have been bearable (more than bearable, she thought, shivering) to look at for longer than a moment, only they seemed to strip her naked and then worse, dismiss her. She jumped up and frowned at him. "You're disgusting."
"Perhaps I spoke too hastily," he said, drawing his gaze away from her. His voice was humble. Kaede relished it. He should be humble. After all, she could tell Kikyou just how foul he was—though, she thought with dismay, it wouldn't make any difference. She'd tried before. Kikyou was good and kind and perfect, and she would still tend to him the best she could. He didn't know that, though, and anyway, Kaede decided, she could tell Inuyasha. He wasn't anything like good or kind. "I was only concerned for the safety of this village of yours."
She had to laugh. "Oh, Kikyou can still protect us," she said, and added, "And anyway, if she couldn't, then I would." She tugged her yukata's skirt up, smiling all devil-may-care, ostensibly to kneel without getting it dirty(er), really just to show the ankle and muscle of her legs. It felt like walking in the forest, unarmed and terrified, knowing too well that here were youkai that liked to do terrible things to little girls, but only in a way. Now and here, he was the man, weak and should-be-fearful, and she the youkai: young and whole, and strong, her shoulders thick and broad from archery.
"Your knees are scraped," he said. "What else have you been doing, kneeling, to scrape them so?" and she knew from the tone that his words were disgusting somehow, though she couldn't figure out the innuendo. She liked it, in a way.
There was something predator in him, something that could find the right words and the right looks, the ones that would leave her feeling dirty, like a whore (she wasn't supposed to know what that was), and yet secretly thrilled by it. She thought, maybe Inuyasha is like this for Kikyou (only she hoped not). Maybe he knocked her off her pedestal and brought her down into the mud with the rest of the world, let her feel dirty and ugly and unperfect. God she hoped not, because someone as wonderful as Kikyou should never feel that way.
The whole world tasted like ash. She thought she should want to scream, holler, shout, but it all got lost somewhere between intention and action. She didn't know where. Aside from her shoulders, she was a small girl. There wasn't much space to lose all that in. There was grief and anger and guilt (because she should have been able to save her sister, she was a priestess, not a great one but still a priestess), but it all seemed a distance away, as if she were looking over someone else's emotions to catalog them.
It was probably for the best anyway. If she screamed, it might be the blow to break her villagers. (hers, they were hers, she didn't want them, what was she supposed to do with an entire village, and in that moment the dam nearly broke, but – and this was the only important thing -- it held, and then the torrent was gone again and she didn't know where it had gone). They were all looking at her (to her), so many emotions in their faces, which had always been dear if too familiar, but were now nothing but faces and far too many of them.
For a moment, she imagined something hungry and slick on the horizon of her senses, slinking through them without them seeing it at all, coming for Kikyou or for her, little lost priestess; they never saw because their faces were all on her, on Kikyou, and they would not see the enemy themselves until it killed her; why couldn't they save themselves?
---They should be looking at her, she thought, after she had blinked aside the moment of helplessness. She wasn't angry but she thought that she might be, if only she wasn't losing feelings by the second. Kikyou was pale and beautiful, and she looked so solemn and competent too, even with the fire lapping at her lovely face and the blood still spattered here and there, announcing her only, fatal mistake. Why weren't they looking at her?---
And in her mind, she ran then, ran away from whatever-might-come until her chest was properly afire and she wanted to die, until her feet were lacerated to shreds and she left bloody footprints wherever she went, and she hurt so badly that it half-killed her. And, here's the thing: in that place, she was could-be-happy-again. Could-be-happy, after she had mourned. That was another thing she could do in this place, another thing that she could not in her village, surrounded by those familiar strangers of her sister's.
When Kaede came back from that place inside, she had not moved an inch, the villagers were still looking at her, and she still felt quite faraway and cold. She thought, this is good, this is what Kikyou was, I can be another Kikyou. Then she wondered if Kikyou would have (could have) cried for her. Immediately after, she disliked the thought for its selfishness. It would have been hated the thought, but where was that emotion when she needed it? She could not even hate Inuyasha. In a way, though, she could hate Kikyou.
At the first thought she had of Onigumo still laying in his cave, waiting forever for her sister, she put it to the back of her mind. There was so much else to do, she told herself. In the secret hole in her heart, she knew it was because she did not care to remember that she had loved him for a time, in the way children love—which is at once horribly desperate and terribly trivial. That love only scared her now. There was no feeling of power over him left in her. Ironic, perhaps, since she had the power of life and death over him in full now.
Kikyou's death—Kikyou, and the blood, and the ash—had left her with only hate for him, once she regained sensation. She thought he might have done much the same (or worse) as Inuyasha had he had the strength. She remembered how he looked at Kikyou. She thought she might vomit if she had to touch him. She thought she might kill him if she had to see him. It was for his own safety that she ignored him.
Still, she did not mean to neglect him for longer than a day or two, and certainly not for weeks on end. When the bile in her throat had at last subsided enough that she could think of him, she remembered and realized that he must have died of thirst. Even if there had been a little runoff from the rains he could reach with his mouth, then starvation had taken his life. It was a relief, in a way, that he was safely dead.
He could never be her Inuyasha.
But it did shame her—it was her first real failure, though by no means her last or her worst—and this was the first reason why she put off going up there after his body and retrieving it. After that, there was the first truly bad youkai attack, from a spider clan that must not have realized the Shikon no tama had gone from the world with Kikyou, and after that there was a hard winter and a harder fever that left a third of her village dead.
By then she could be honest with herself: she did not care. Could not care. And she was not Kikyou, who could be detached and kind in the same cool lovely breath.
She left his body, or what must be only his bones by now, for the elements and the animals to do with as either saw fit.
For a time after that first winter without Kikyou, things were quiet. Kaede was able to wake in the morning and roll over and sleep a time longer, sometimes. She could go for the occasional walk, her bow hanging from her back, without needing to bring back any particular herb or dead predator. These always took her past Inuyasha's tree, out of a vague desire to make sure he was still there, and sometimes by Onigumo's cave, although never near to the mouth.
Because—
Well. It started as a vague nagging at the back of her mind. She hadn't been made for quiet, never had lived in it before, so she figured her head was putting something together to relieve it.
But she still thought it, even if she thought it with the smile of one humoring something (in this case oneself). Because there was this:
She dreamed of Inuyasha killing Kikyou, and each time he killed her, he felt different in her thoughts than he ever had before, or that the boy-pinned-to-the-tree did. The one in her dreams was more slippery, cleverer; the sort who could keep up an act for months.
Well, she told herself, the one she'd known had been the act, hadn't he? And maybe he looked angry and betrayed and just a little…well, stupid…in the pinned half-death state he occupied now. Still, it was really just anger in his face. Her own thoughts putting the rest there.
But the one in her dreams felt a little like she supposed Onigumo might, had he ever been anything of consequence at all; felt too like the thing she had imagined coming for her the day they burned her sister.
And she felt that particular slick predatory want sliding against her body in the dark, in her mouth and between her thighs. It came to her most often between sleep and that moment when she woke, heart pounding and body soaked with sweat. Sometimes her bedclothes were wet where she had clenched her thighs around a wad of the cloth. That wasn't sweat.
She pretended it was.
She thought, this is madness: Inuyasha killed her. Inuyasha is dead, or close enough to it. But she went by his tree once a week, and then once a day, to make sure he was still there and that the thing on the tree was really Inuyasha. There were bloodstains on his shirt and on his hands. Kikyou's, she thought, hard and sure, but after she had left, she could never be as certain that it wasn't all his own.
Even when the quiet time had passed, she still thought it often. At least the dreams came less and less frequently, until they had gone entirely. But her walks led her by Inuyasha's tree once a day, even when she could not spare the time. Usually, on those days, she went late, when her duties were through for the day and the sun was setting, though it wasn't wise to be in the forest past dusk. It seemed less wise to let a day go without making sure he still hung there.
He'd be there through wind and rains; she could burn the damn forest and he'd still be there. She still went to check, once a day on schedule.
Her villagers thought their miko had a lover. It frightened them. Though no one had ever said it, everyone knew that Inuyasha had been Kikyou's. Of course no one said it frightened them, either; they said things like, she's so young. She was, but no one had ever said that when she began picking up Kikyou's duties. She thought she was old enough to have a lover, if she'd wanted one. Not that she could imagine wanting one. The thought made her skin crawl.
She went into Onigumo's cave at last two years later, nearly to the day when Kikyou had died. There was nothing there but ash. It was too late to do anything but guess, but she saw the turned over lamp that she had left there for him the night before Kikyou died, when he begged her to:
(There are things in the dark, little girl, he said. His voice was heavy and shaded dark. His tongue flicked out over his lips.
They're things like you, she said, laughing to show she wasn't scared. She was, was sideways twisted delighted by it too.
No, he said. He smiled like a secret, like a promise, like a hiss in the dark against her skin. I'm worse.
She snorted. Bullshit, she said. She loved to swear when Kikyou wasn't there to catch her and make her feel bad. Bullshit, because you are broken; there is nothing you are worse than; I am worse than you.
Then leave the light, he said, so she did.
Don't burn yourself again, she said as she ducked out the entryway.)
—And she supposed she should feel guilty, but she couldn't. She could only feel relief and a bit of thrill. It was almost as if she had killed him herself, instead of letting negligence do it for her (though she thought, reasoning with her darker side, he probably hadn't died that first night the lamp had been there, but perhaps had moved his head, flailing for water or food, and managed to bump it over).
Later, when she knelt by the place Kikyou's ashes had been buried, knees pressing little hollows into the ground—that was when the guilt came. Then she edited it carefully in her mind so that she had gone there a few days after his death. i After /i she had been consumed by her duties and forgotten, but it didn't really matter, did it? There was nothing left but ash, which was a shame in a way but really for the best.
A girl met a man once, when she went walking past a cave years after another man died there. She really ought to give the cave up, and limit her walks to just the tree where a third man hung. From time to time she did, in the way she couldn't give up the tree, but it always came back. She felt some mild guilt that she had taken her precious time (two full days) after Kikyou's death to come here. He hadn't deserved to live but Kikyou would have gone there if it had been Kaede that died, so in failing him she had failed Kikyou. Guilt draws a person back, same as fear. Other women drank or killed themselves or never talked. She walked and figured it wasn't too bad of a coping device, all things considered.
This man had two long blades crisscrossed over his spine; he had long dark hair drawn up into a wavy ponytail; he wore armor made from dead youkai on his chest and thighs. His eyes were black and hard: predator's eyes. All the men in her life had had predator eyes. His sort of predator was cousin to her kind, though. Her one eye looked the same way, these days. She was fourteen.
He was beautiful, Kaede thought. "Taijiya," she said. "Welcome. What brings you this way?"
His name was Haru. A youkai had killed his brother, and he was hard on its trail. Kaede looked at him sadly and did not say a word, because she knew words never made a difference. Beneath the sorrow there was—was something hot and furious. Damn him, she thought before she caught herself. Damn him and his revenge that was all he had to live for. She hadn't gotten to live for only revenge. Hard and fast and free. Something in her ached for that. In her life, real life, the dead were dead and the living went on.
But then she felt bad. Then he smiled at her when he asked her if he could stay the night in her village. Between the two, the thought got lost as if it had never been.
That night, he bought some food supplies and talked over a cup of sake with Kaede. Their talk mostly concerned the movement of youkai packs in the area; he also expressed an interest in her herbs. He called her Kaede-sama. Plenty of people had, but on his tongue, it was as heady as the sake on hers. She flushed when he told her she was beautiful, and was charmed when he laughed and apologized. "I must've left my manners at the bottom," he said, peering into his cup. One of his eyes was squinted shut and his grin was lopsided and sheepish. Kaede's whole body was warm.
She had mentioned to him earlier that she had once had a sister, Kikyou, and he had nodded and said that she had visited his village. But after that, they did not once talk about their siblings. She found it so much better than if they had. Too many people wanted to talk about Kikyou.
When the sun had set, the sky gray and sliding to dark, she showed him to her herb shed, where he spread his bedroll and wished her good night and farewell. "Farewell if I don't see you before I go. I'll leave before dawn," he said. "When I'm done, I'll pass through this village of yours again."
His words hung in the air, unmistakably a promise. Kaede didn't speak for a moment, for fear…of something. "I…I would like that," she said, her heart pounding with her own daring.
Back in her bed, Kaede lay twisting in the sheets for hours, heart pounding, first with excitement, then with fear, then with excitement again. She thought, I'm in love in the giggly not-serious-but-maybe way she imagined not-miko girls thought the words. Shuddering, she ducked her head under her sheets. No-no-no-no. She clutched fistfuls of her blanket, chewing on her bottom lip. Then she thought yes.
Yes, because—she trembled on the thought, hardly daring to think it, and plunged right on ahead anyway—what harm was there in wanting a taijiya? She was…well, she was… She wrinkled her nose to think it, but it was true: she was a mediocre miko. But then, she didn't have to be anything more; the shikon no tama was gone. Kikyou had given her that. He was a taijiya, her sort, safe in a way Kikyou's ill-fated romance had never been. He wasn't a hanyou (wasn't a bandit either). Maybe she could get him to stay here with her. They could defend the village together.
That night she dreamed a quiet-times dream and shivered herself awake from it. It wasn't from the cold, though her blankets had been kicked away. Immediately, she noticed her hand was tucked between her thighs. Her fingers were slick.
Her second thought was that, though her heart was supposed to be in her chest, she could feel it in her throat and her toes and her fingers. It beat furiously, just barely contained by her skin.
It was deep night, inky black. She couldn't make out anything in the dark. It felt like drowning in night. She hopped up from the bed and snapped, "What are you doing here?" She snapped because it was best to sound certain if you talk to dead men.
One of them answered. "I apologize, Kaede-sama. It's only that I heard you scream." But then she realized that it was Haru's voice. It was like a blanket thrown over her fear. Her heart quieted a little in her chest—only a little because she immediately thought:
She wore just her under-robe, and it was thin. If there were light, he could see the way her nipples were hard from the cold and the fear.
"Oh, I see," she said. She shivered with the (horrible wonderful) thrill of what-might-have-happened. She thought, what if she had dreamed a little more towards the morning, and screamed when there was a little light to see by? Of course she would have to cover herself with her hands, but she would be a little slow. Then she would definitely have to send him away with a harsh word, so he understood he couldn't see her like that, she wouldn't allow it, but still he would have seen. She squirmed a little in the dark.
Oh, she supposed she should do that: send him away. "You should go now," she said stiffly.
"I—I'm sorry," he said awkwardly. She could imagine him blushing and smiled.
"Thank you for worrying," she said. She couldn't help but say it gently, despite herself.
His hand came to close on her right shoulder. Automatically, she had her hands up to defend herself, but then she let herself relax. It was the first time since Kikyou's death that someone had touched her just to touch her. Her villagers touched her, but those were matter of course touches while she was working alongside them or caring for them. In the beginning, there had been touches from some motherly sort wanting to be kind, but those too had gone.
Of course one touch could so easily change to another, and she was prepared to kill him if she had to. She figured taijiya who stammered and called her Kaede-sama so that it made her shiver and had eyes like hers and dead brothers could do things, same as any other man.
"I hope you get some sleep," he said, his grip tightening. It was good grip, like a brother's hand on her shoulder. She smiled again, the other thoughts vanishing as he turned away and left. When he'd gone, her skin shivered for his hand back on her shoulder.
It occurred to her that she had never cried out before when she dreamed.
A year went by, summer to autumn to winter, to spring again. By then she had put Haru to the back of her mind.
By the second summer (which felt like another decade flattened to fit in a year, so really it was no wonder she could not remember), she had forgotten to feel anything at all on the subject. By then he was nothing but a vague idea of something that could have been, could have been wonderful or disastrous, but wasn't either and wouldn't be.
It came upon her in degrees. Her dreams had waxed after Haru, then waned to almost nothing at all, then waxed again. This time they seemed more horrible than ever. Perhaps it was this age; she was the age Kikyou had been when she died. She shuddered herself awake each night and stared into the dark. Sometimes she would speak out the way she had the night Haru had been there, heart-deep sure that there would be a reply, until the words had come out. Then she felt silly.
At first she welcomed her dreams, in a perverse kind of way, because they kept her on her guard. But they wore on too long. Her fitful nights became sleepless ones. She saw the world in grains like salt. Her one eye was red; there were shadows beneath both sockets. No one said anything to her, but she could see the concern in their faces when they looked at her.
(Concern for her? she wondered in a secret part of herself, where she kept things like self-pity. Or worry for themselves?)
That summer was a hot one. The air was heavy and thick, and it never did light air-like things, like waft or breeze or blow. Instead it wrapped around her like a replacement blanket for the ones she threw off. Cocooned in dark and air, Kaede remembered horrible things. These things had not happened to her, of course; they had not even existed to her until Kikyou was dead and bleeding in her arms.
"This should be gone," she said to the dark. Then her whole body tensed, terrified, ready to fight if there came a reply. There was none, of course.
Of course. She laughed at herself, to prove she could.
Soon she dozed off, for the first time in three nights. She let herself go into it with relief. There would be no dreams, not now. After she had worn herself long past exhaustion, her body took over from her mind.
Someone stroked her jaw, the way only Kikyou ever had. "Kikyou," she mumbled in her sleep. "Sister." Perhaps she had to wake. Perhaps it was already dawn, though she felt so tired. She did not want to open her eye and see the light, so she kept it tightly closed.
She jumped, abruptly awake. Her hands flew to her jaw. Oh, only a spider, she thought and slapped it away. Then she squished it where it had landed on her mattress. It was only fair. "Sleep is too precious to me," she said. Grumbling, she rolled over and tried to submerge herself back in it.
The second time, she had dangled her foot to the floor so that it touched the blankets she had thrown there. She imagined them into someone's finger, drawing a light line down the center of the sole, and woke in fear. She kicked them further away and tried again to sleep; when an imagined shadow kept her awake, she struck a lamp.
The third time, it was a soft sound, much like a footfall. For the third time, her heart beat furiously in fear until she had sorted it out into a night sound. Then it was fury she felt. She wanted to goddamn sleep, she thought, her hands clenching. She slammed her fists into the mattress beneath her. It was wet. Sweat, she thought. As if she needed another damn thing to keep her awake. Her nightclothes were soaked through, too.
She rose in a storm, and paused only to collect the lamp and her bow and sling her arrows across her back. She didn't think to string the bow. She didn't think to grab her knife.
By the time those two things dawned on her, her feet had, unfaltering in the small yellow circle of lamplight, found the way to Inuyasha's tree. Her bow dropped from her other hand as she raised the lamp above her head, so it fell on his face. He was still the same as the day when Kikyou's beauty had burned away. She stood there, just looking at him for a long time, fixing it in her mind: he was here and she was safe. It was in the past. What had she thought about Haru?
Oh yes: In her life, real life, the dead were dead and the living went on.
Time she did. Hear that, stupid dreams, stupid thoughts, stupid stupid sounds and shadows and spiders in the night?
The world blurred and faded in-out in her vision. But she saw him through the dark and lamp-bright: his face twisted in a smirk, his teeth bared, his hand reaching out for her. He moved, and she saw that his feet had been at the base of the tree, not dangling above the roots the way they had always been before. It was a lurching, awkward movement, not youkai-deft or youkai-swift, but he did not fall over the roots. Kikyou's arrow was still in his chest. Kikyou's blood dripped, black, from his claws. "You're such a fool, little girl," he said. It wasn't Inuyasha's voice.
She stumbled backwards, reaching for her bow (unstrungunstrung, oh hell, Kikyou had taught her better than this—experience had taught her better than this.)
But as she stumbled backwards, cradling the lamp with her body, she jolted awake—and realized:
Inuyasha was still there, harmless as he had been since Kikyou's death. And she had been asleep. If she had been snug in her bed, she might have stayed that way. She glared at him, even angrier now; leftover-afraid too, and her fear fueled her anger.
Kaede strung her bow, to be safe. Lamp held high, she began her walk back through the forest-brush towards her home. Soon though, her steps turned quick, brimming with anger; soon they took her farther and farther from home. She could feel something on her heels: a stray sound, a whisper, a promise, a hand tracing her spine. It made something build in her chest, something hot and afraid and cold and angry. She thought, distantly, good. I hadn't thought I would ever be cold again.
Her feet went unerring beneath her. She did not know where she was going until she was there. Then she knew she'd lied to herself: she'd known her final destination since she left her bed. Her hand braced against the cave's entrance; she leaned over and peered in, the lamp in her hand. "I burned you out once before," she said. "I can do it again."
(Her imagination conjured up a reply: Wasn't you that burned me out, little girl. Her memory for Onigumo's voice was so precise that she spun around. Her hands were sweat slippery on her bow. What have you been doing, to sweat so? she half-remembered, half-created. This time she understood the meaning. Because it's so hot, she thought back at herself, furious. Goddamn you, it's hot and I'm burning up and don't—
Don't say things like that. Just don't.
Becauseitthrillsme.)
"Little girl." She backed away from the cave's opening, where she had imagined the voice this time. Setting down the lamp carefully, she reached behind her for an arrow. Even though his voice was all in her thoughts, her creation, hers, and she could kill him or let him kill her, whichever, it was all her power here: she loosed the arrow into the dark. There was the soft sound of dirt giving way before an arrowhead, nothing more. Still she had another arrow to the bow and loosed before she could think; a third trembled against the string.
"You killed her, didn't you," she said. It was irrational. He was dead. He might as well have been dead all those weeks she and Kikyou had tended him. But her words felt right and real.
Someone was in the shadows, now. Now? No, he'd always been there. These shadows were thicker and hotter than they'd ever been but she could see him now. This time it wasn't just her memory. "Finally," she said crossly.
"I had hoped you would come to look like her," he replied. Here and now he was pretty, face slim and unmarred, hair a riot of waves around his face. There was nothing of Onigumo left in him, except for something clever and cruel in the eyes. When he spoke though, he spoke with Onigumo's voice. It hit her hard in the gut, like it was just yesterday Kikyou was alive. "But no, you're ugly," he said. "So goddamn ugly."
And she liked it when he called her that. She was so glad to spite him. She was short and sturdy where Kikyou had been tall and willowy. Her nose was broader, jaw stronger. And yes, she looked very little like Kikyou. She reveled in it for the first time.
Her arrow still trembled on the string, even though she felt so right and good. Better than she'd felt since Kikyou died, even if it was so very hot out. Her skin was flushed and pouring sweat. But she had the son of a bitch out in the light (dim yellow lamplight, but light) where she'd always wanted him. She was going to kill him.
(Sheisgoingtoenjoyitsomuch.)
She didn't speak. She figured she'd talked enough in the dark to dead men, or men who should be dead. Whichever. Both. Instead her third arrow flew from her bow. The next one was on her bow and drawn back to her ear, humming for release.
She exhausted them all but the last. Each shot flew cool and measured, but hardly true. He dodged like a youkai, which she assumed he must be. Now he is the youkai in the forest and I am…I am…here, she thought. Why hadn't she killed him then? It would've been so easy. Perhaps Kikyou wouldn't even have had to know if she had smothered him. After all, he had been so horribly right then; Inuyasha had distracted Kikyou from her duties. She thought about the breath going out of him. Youkai were monsters but some men were worse; better to be predator of a predator than prey. She imagined him saying, eyes glittering, if Kikyou had been like you, she would have stained the jewel clear through. Or perhaps he really said it. She wasn't sure. It was such a hot blur.
"And I would have saved us all if I'd done it," she said aloud. She thought about saving Kikyou the way she couldn't then, not with all the stitches in the world. Saving the boy on the tree (he was really just a boy, because someday she'd be so much older and healed while he'd never move past that place). He'd haunted her so long, but she still wanted to have saved him. Maybe she even would have saved Onigumo, at least enough that she could pretend she'd done him a favor so guilt wouldn't eat up Kaede-that-she-had-been. Kaede of then had had a thing for guilt. Kaede of now was much more sensible: this is this and that is that. I am going mad, so to fix it I will do a mad thing, because those are the only things that can. Some things have to be done. Shit happens.
She sagged back against a tree, letting him approach her. The last arrow was hidden behind her back. Her hand gripped it so tightly that her nails cut into her palm. The pain was good, something to feel aside from the heat.
He ran a finger along her jaw. She shivered, and loved how cold his hand was as it cupped her chin. She thought, there is something wrong with me. (and that was that). Things horrified her and thrilled her at the same time. She wanted to kill him for touching her, her anger hot in the throbbing of her head. She wanted him to slide his hand down the curve of her neck. (and this is this: you're screwed up. Oh well. Move past it.)
When he pressed his body flush to hers, she set her jaw. Held still awhile longer. He pressed his mouth to hers. "I wonder if you taste like she did," he said.
She snorted. "No." A pause. Her free hand grabbed hold of his wrist when he trailed a line between her jaw and her throat. His thumb made a light little circle behind her ear, and her skin prickled. "You're an awful lot prettier this time around," she said, wrinkling her nose critically. "Don't smell quite so bad, either."
"You're still a brat," he said. "Kikyou understood quiet."
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. Damn you." She couldn't stand to hear him say her name one more time. The hand on his wrist flew to his shoulder; the other fist came up, quick and sure. She gripped his collar and brought her arrow down hard at his throat.
"Bitch," he said. Then the heat flushed beneath her skin and roared in her ears. She sagged back against the tree covered in black blood (so hot). "This game is getting boring," he said through the gurgle in his throat. "If only you had looked like her."
When she came to, her head was throbbing. She sat, and a spinning started up to match the pounding. "This isn't my home," she said to the woman sweeping dirt out of the room.
"Of course not, dear," she replied absently.
Kaede thought, bemused: no one had called her dear in a very long time.
"Oh!" the woman cried out. She was Sadae, a large woman with far too many children who all got into far too many scrapes and accidents. Kaede had given her the odd lesson in the basics of mending people when she had the time; "So's that I can make sure my boys…and that girl of mine, too, heh…get healed up all right without bothering you too often," she'd said.
Now she said, "Oh, Kaede-sama, good. You're awake. Though sitting up may not have been the smartest thing you ever done." She nodded wisely.
"Yes," Kaede agreed, through her teeth. She wondered why she was in Sadae's home, of all places, instead of curled up in her own. She asked the other woman, who shook her head.
"It was the luckiest thing in the world. Haru-sama, you remember him? That nice taijiya boy from a long time ago." Kaede did remember. It filled her with a sinking feeling and she wasn't sure why.
"He found you in the forest—and damn it," and the curse sounded so nice from Sadae's mouth, like Sadae thought she was talking to another human instead of someone sacred, "Damn it, we'd been so worried about you. Two days you'd been gone. It was so, so good that boy came back through with his tracking skills." She knelt down next to Kaede and tried to put a cup, filled with water, to her lips.
But Kaede pushed it aside. She swallowed. Her throat was thick and dry; her tongue scraped the roof of her mouth. She needed water, but…but her chest was brimming with urgency. "Where…where did he find me?" she asked. The answer was important. She could feel it.
"A ways to the south. At least a day's walk away," she said, clicking her tongue.
"Oh," she said. That wasn't right. "Not by Onigumo's—not by the caves to the north, by the foothills?"
"No? I don't think so." Her round face showed concern. "No, now that I think about it, he definitely said south. It's no wonder you were confused, though. I mean, that big ol' bite on your shoulder was something nasty, to hear him talk about it."
"What bite?" she said. Oh god, he had bitten her, she thought. She fumbled beneath her shirt and found a bandage. Anxiously, she tugged her neckline down around her shoulder and ripped the cloth away—
Sadae stilled her hands. "Hush," she said. "He said he had to cut it open; it was swelled up so bad. You were delirious for days since, but always getting better."
He had bitten her? Kaede wondered at her earlier thought. She shook her head. Men didn't bite, not like this. "Spider," she said, after she had pulled aside Sadae's hand coolly. "Uncharacteristically severe reaction to it." She made herself clinical, removed. Beneath the cold, she was still anxious. She had to get the taijiya out of her village, she thought. Had to. Now. Damned if she knew why.
"That's what he said," Sadae said. "Perhaps it was a spider-youkai to cause the fever. We think it bit you and then you must've gone wandering in your delirium."
"Perhaps," said Kaede. "I don't really remember." She remembered vague shapes and wants and fears that kept sliding just out of her reach. It felt like the morning after a nightmare, only she rarely cared to recall nightmares, which were best put aside and forgotten.
When she set her feet on the floor and stood, she cringed. Sadae gave her an intent look of concern. "Oh, I forgot. Your feet were cut to shreds, near about. Like you'd run all that ways you got to."
She left Sadae's home, making her way through the village with the help of a thick walking stick Sadae made her wait for her to fetch. Sadae followed along behind her, making upset little noises periodically, so that Kaede didn't forget she had advised against this trip. She could thank Haru-sama later, Sadae had suggested. He wouldn't mind if she did, surely.
Kaede wasn't going to thank him. Fortunately, there'd been a bow resting by her sleeping mat. A bow, not hers, not the one that had felt made for her hands. Haru had found that one broken at her side. This one was a spare of Kikyou's; they had found it in the shrine and set it by her side, because it seemed like the thing to do. She held it in her right hand, her best hand, and used the walking staff with her left as well as she could.
She didn't believe…Well, she believed Sadae. She surely didn't believe Haru. She could feel it, mad beneath her skin. When she tried to gather the memory of the night up in a pile, it scattered and fled. Another nightmare, she thought again. She should have felt relief. She didn't. It was an important nightmare, because…because. And important dreams ought to be remembered, especially the bad ones.
It might've been true and she might've been mad through and through, but you did what you had to for some kind of peace of mind. So there she was, bow in hand and walking stick dropped to the side, her face set determinedly as she flung aside the door. Matsuo wasn't there, though it was nearly dark. There was only Haru, and he was only Haru at that, not some demon out of a nightmare. He was whistling, badly. It would have been endearing but for the fear that had slunk deep inside and curled in around her heart. His youkai-skin breastplate lay across his lap, and he was mending a strap.
He looked up at her as she entered. His eyes glittered, bright and hard. Predator eyes. She felt them move from her face to her toes in a quick flick, with nothing vulgar or dirty to his gaze. The way her body felt hot and cold at once, though, was a kind of familiar. She thought, I could go to him now and he would put his mouth on my mouth and push his body up against mine, and it would feel so good that my skin would crawl.
"Kaede-sama," he said, smiling a little. "It's so good to see you again."
"Get out," she said. Behind her, she heard Sadae's surprised intake of breath.
His smile did not falter. "You're delirious," he said. So understanding. It made her furious.
"No," she said. "Then I was," and she did not know what she meant by then, "but I am hardly now. Get out of my village." She reached behind her and drew an arrow from her sling by the fletching.
He stood slowly, as if appeasing her, but he held onto one of his swords by the sheath. His hand on it was broad of palm, his fingers long and elegant. Familiar, perhaps only from the nights she had imagined them on her (and her stomach turned and the muscles between her thighs clenched), but perhaps from the night he had found her. She jerked her chin at them pointedly. "Lay that aside."
He rested it against the wall and spread his hands wide. "What game are you playing at, priestess?"
Game. She shivered. "It's not a game. I mean exactly what I say."
"I will not hurt you," he said, moving to her. She imagined that he smiled a sly smile that was nearly imperceptible. She drew back on the string, muscles quivering; the shot was too close for comfort. "But I'll go. Trust me, you will hear from the taijiya head on this, priestess."
She let her bow relax. When she did, he passed by her, close enough that their arms brushed. Again he smiled. Perhaps he knew how she wanted to drag him to her, mouth coming down violently on his. This place is mine, she wanted to say, her body shoving to fit against his. Her fingers would trail on his skin. He would want it even though he hated it. He would want it because he hated it.
She swallowed. "You may take your things," she said quickly, so he would move away from her. It had the opposite effect, bringing him back by her when he had just passed, but perhaps she had intended that too. "Go pick them up."
So she chased Haru the taijiya from her village at arrowpoint, even though she could barely stand to walk then. Her villagers were at her back, gathered up by Sadae, and armed with farming implements (they thought she was mad, but they stood by her, and she thought for the first time, I love this village, this beautiful prison-village of mine). She thought she saw him smirk as he left, but she couldn't be sure if that was the sun in her eyes; after all, the leader of his village sent her a very formal complaint within a fortnight.
Kaede flung the last of the brush she'd gathered into the cave.
Add a spark from her torch, and then it was all alight, flame dancing in the entrance, smoke pouring out, black against the black of sky. This is gone, she thought and held her hands out to warm them until they blistered. At last, it's gone.
Later, she had scars left on her palms. She shrugged at them most of the time, since she could still move her hands just fine. When she looked at them in peculiar hours, they looked like spiders to match the long-gone spider bite on her shoulder. Then she shivered, hot and cold at once. Sometimes after she had thought the old tangled wants and fears slunk inside, between her ribs and between her thighs. But it was only sometimes, which was a damn sight better than it had been, and rarely did it stay with her into unconsciousness. So she shivered at herself and forgot about it in the morning, and it worked more often than not.
(She dreams his dreams and wears his brand, but she is not dead. Perhaps she wins. Perhaps she loses. Most likely, it's a draw.)