Theme: Resolutions
Word Count: 531
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kagome will never again land at the bottom of that well.
Don't let them know it hurts. Don't let them see the decay inside.
She falls back onto the sweat drenched sheets, heart pounding in her chest. She's panting openly, head thrown back, legs spread wide.
Inuyasha.
Even after all these years, his name comes first in her mind, the first touch of reality to draw her from the chasm of nothingness. It saves her each time she threatens to fall over–no, to leapt over–and disappear forever after spilling over her own swell of pleasure. But the man that falls gasping to her breasts, smothering her body with his own is someone else. Always someone else.
Inuyasha.
She never experienced the touch of his body and yet she knows he would have been the best. So she settles for what must be second best but is mostly mediocre. After all, an imitation like her could never experience the best. The irony threatens to choke her. At least she gets what she deserves. Suddenly she is all too dry and wants nothing more than to clean up, to scald her traitorous skin and wash away his memories.
That's right, he's dead to her now, confined to dreams and fleeting memories. Forever lost to the sands of time, each passing second another granule in the growing desert that separates them. All of them. Sometimes she weeps for them, but if she is honest with herself, she knows that she hasn't in years. She weeps only for him; only for the one who doesn't deserve it.
Inuyasha.
She clenches her fists, dropping to her knees in the shower. Now she will have bruises, but she doesn't care. Somehow, they feel familiar.
He never came for her. It was then that she stopped believing in fairy tales, stopped pretending that such a thing as a happy ending could exist. It was then that she abandoned the little girl inside of her. Time to put childish things away.
She feels her fingernails scrape the hard plastic of the shower floor. How did she end up like this? Houjou opens the shower curtain then. "Are you okay?"
His gentle eyes are always full of concern, and she can't bear to tell him the truth. He wouldn't understand. He wouldn't believe. She looks up at him slowly, head tilted to the side, water running down her face in rivulets. "I dropped the soap."
He smiles, face bright and innocent. But she had seen that face darken with need. "Do I need to help you?"
He is joking, and she struggles to smile. "No."
He was the one who found her that day, crying in the well. She hates that well. She remembers the time she tried to burn it to the ground.
Inuyasha!
It's been years since she flung herself over the lip of the well, night after night, willing the darkness to swallow her whole, skinned knees, bruised palms and a broken heart causing her to eventually give up.
But she will never again land at the bottom of that well. She made that resolution long ago.