Author's Notes: So the second to last chapter. Wow. Hope you guys enjoy! Thank you so much to all those who reviewed! You guys make my day, seriously. You don't know how much those mean to me. :D

disclaimer: Hah.

warnings/notes: the usual; unbetaed.

And without further ado...

Thy Soul of Sin
by scelerus animus

Chapter Eleven
Lies Don't Last Forever, My Love

"What is it that you want, Kagura?"

Suppressing the natural urge to lash out viciously, Kagura stood stiff as her narrowed ruby eyes warily searched the murky chamber in which no light permeated except for the few stark slivers from the muted silvery light of the waning moon that filtered through the slightly ajar shoji door behind her.

Like the contemptible spider that he was, Naraku undoubtedly lurked like a crude silhouette of a spider web stretched across the familiar sakura-patterned walls in the many shadows that crisscrossed the room in various shades of blackness.

Not that Kagura would state that aloud. No, at least not at the current moment. While she would take gluttonous pleasure in further inciting his blatant displeasure, the Wind Sorceress had no present desire for personal injury.

All the same, Naraku was rather irritated about something, Kagura noted with a vague sense of sadistic amusement. Perhaps he missed his precious miko? Kagura savored those thoughts like luscious honey sliding sensuously down her throat. Now wouldn't that be perfectly ironic? Or was she his pretty little doll, born of hate and raised by vengeance?

Kagura mentally scoffed.

That haunting sapphire-eyed girl… she had indisputably transformed into something not entirely human but certainly not anything demonic… and what intrigued Kagura the most was how she had changed Naraku as well, as blind as they both were to that obvious fact.

In Naraku's vile scarlet eyes, Kagura knew that the girl Kagome was more to him than merely a toy, an obsession, a doll, no matter how much both liked to determinedly deny it.

In truth, Kagome was more to him than that lifeless corpse Kikyo ever was.

"Don't make me repeat myself, Kagura."

A tempered sneer defiantly painting her blood ruby lips (though they would never be as wickedly bloody as Naraku's, and she smirked triumphantly at that), Kagura acquiesced and reported in a craftily even tone: "The houshi and the taijiya are bringing her back to the Goshinboku where Inuyasha's lies, just as you expected."

In a darkly sinuous movement, the shadows seemed to shift. Kagura dimly perceived an absolutely malicious smirk treacherously accompanied by a fiendish flash of gleaming pointed fangs that threatened to send a prickly wave of chills down her spine like a scurry of spider legs across her flesh,

"I believe I should pay my lovely doll a visit."

"I would be careful about that presumption, Naraku. That girl is not Kikyo," Kagura warned disdainfully, aware that she was taunting with an abnormally perilous fire but also secure with her part in their duplicitous game. "Besides you wouldn't want it to appear that she is more to you than merely a doll, though obsessions are all too dangerous themselves."

Although Kagura didn't know she was echoing unwanted thoughts that had disturbed Naraku's mind previously, twining themselves across his reason and logic like sticky strings of gossamer, they still were deliciously effective.

For a piercing moment, everything stilled, slithery shadows immobile, darkness infinite but stale, as if there was an unseen war between two omnipotent forces, opinions juxtaposed, and reason and logic and purpose fickle and clashing. Through this Naraku remained markedly silent, and Kagura smirked in a soundless victory.

That girl Kagome, whom Naraku had thought to easily manipulate into his paramount plan like a helpless puppet to his spindly web of puppeteer strings, had come like this ghostly, fragile-looking being and dismantled his games and schemes and rebuilt a ultimately more warped one of her own, spitefully dragging Naraku into a parade of wild raven hair and ethereally pale porcelain hands and eerie sapphire eyes.

It was a tantalizing collision of powers that precariously balanced on a thin line of love and hate, lust and blood, and Kagura would be almost sick of their melodramatic game if it hadn't been so fascinating to watch these two drag each other down into their own sinfully created hell.

"Do you miss her?" Kagura tauntingly questioned in a smooth, cloyingly innocent voice, fear of Naraku's volatile wrath having melted beneath the honeyed mockery in her words.

In the next moment, starlit bursts of a hideous scarlet erupted agonizingly before her glazed ruby eyes, and she barely choked back a flaming shriek of pain as she was ruthlessly slammed into the waterless stone fountain situated in the center of the dead rose courtyard.

For a long period, Kagura merely gasped difficult breaths into her burning throat amongst a sizeable cloud of upturned soil and debris, the shattered, jagged remnants of the stone fountain lying in unsalvageable disarray around her trembling, bleeding form.

When the dusty haze settled and she finally raised her head in a sluggish, aching movement, irately blinking dirt and coppery blood from her stinging ruby eyes, Naraku was no longer there.

.
. ... .
.

Dark crimson blood stained the ground in massive coagulated splatters around the Goshinboku like a frozen lake disrupted by sickening red icebergs. The immense trunk was also dyed the dark crimson of dried blood, and as Kagome mindlessly stepped closer to the prone hanyou pinned against the timeless God Tree she noticed that Inuyasha's firerat kimono was now merely a bloodied, filthy mass of tattered material and once lustrous silvery white hair was matted and tangled with numerous clots of more dried blood.

He was the epitome of wretchedness, Kagome sardonically concluded. This weak, pathetic hanyou pinned helplessly to a tree. How had she ever allowed such a pitiable thing to betray her?

(and how she had seen him in this exact position in another time before time and thought him a beautiful angel, she dryly wondered)

In fact, now that she took more curious note of it, the whole area surrounding the Goshinboku was nearly demolished, uprooted trees and withered flora, the blackened remains of countless fires, deep gorges where the more violent attacks had viciously taken place.

Then there was the blood. More of it. Oceans more of it. Dried and cracked streaking vilely across the verdant land and the dead earth like old scars that would never fade. Though, undoubtedly, the majority of it was nauseatingly centered around the Goshinboku, caked on like acrylic paint on canvas.

Except this macabre portrait of a life long forgotten was reality, although to Kagome it was a detached reality in which she did not exist. A past places of existence that held no meaning for her any longer. Like a grain of sand in an hourglass, falling, falling, falling, merely a passage of insignificant time, a flutter of a butterfly's wing, a blink of an eye.

Evidently a battle, vicious and brutal and decisive, had taken place here. Ostensibly, it had been the crucial Final Battle, which would decide anything and everything. In a time before time, Kagome could recall in hazy crimson blurs that these people (and she) had placed their entire lives upon the outcome of this battle.

How foolish of them. The lucky ones had lost their lives while the rest had lost so much more.

You can give and give and it will never be enough, Kagome mused as—like predator that had finally caught its prey in her grinning razor teeth—she agilely climbed the thick, bloodstained roots of the Goshinboku toward the motionless hanyou.

After all, as nature was immune to the sufferings of humanity and devoured all that was given without any sort of miniscule reparation in return, Kagome would therefore take what she wanted—what she deserved—what was her inherent right to have and to possess in her bloodied hands, to free or to kill.

It was her right, and she would seize it. Caress it in slender porcelain hands. Crush it beneath nimble, lily-white fingers.

("…you will take what is yours," Naraku whispered in his wickedly silky voice, a brush of velvet lips against her ears, a euphoric taste of sin and temptation, "and you will rule this wretched world.")

Kagome could taste that memory, so temptingly prominent against the distant flashes of a past filled blood and screaming, on her tongue, sweet and tangy and oh so satisfying.

She dreamed of peace and contentment, and if the path to that was paved with Naraku and games of power, then she could, would do that.

Because she trusted Naraku (a fool, wasn't she?— she knew, she didn't care), and she had vowed the day that she had awoken with memories gone except for occasional splash of blood and screams and death that she would never trust the golden-eyed hanyou Inuyasha ever again.

As she continued to climb the tainted roots of the Goshinboku at a curiously leisure pace the rough stained bark was peculiarly warm and contrasted so vividly against her ghostly pale hands. Although that sinful burgundy blood was several weeks old and crusty beneath her fingers, Kagome could almost feel the ungodly sensation of slick, freshly spilt blood sliding generously between her fingers, and she found she was not repulsed at all.

Absently, she wondered whose blood it was now at this moment. And then the next as she climbed a little higher. Because this was the wondrously blasphemous portrait of the life she couldn't remember, and it included the blood of all those she had loved and those she had hated.

And of course who was in the middle but the golden-eyed hanyou himself.

The one who had ripped out her heart, leaving a gaping black void in its place, and hadn't even cared enough to give it back to her in a bloody mass of fleshy shreds.

Soon Kagome reached the top and paused crouching on all fours barely an inch away from the bright, glaring red Inuyasha's hakama. Around her, everything stilled as if suddenly caught in another timeless vacuum; the unmoving air was stale and drab; the distant voices of the houshi and taijiya fall deaf upon her ears.

With a soft, sibilant sound between red lips, Kagome breathed.

Deeply. Elatedly. Hungrily.

Poignant bursts of copper wafted lavishly through the air, filling her mind and exploding in abundant spurts of garish crimson before her eyes like a lovely display of fireworks. She could taste it as well, a salty concentration of life that teetered on coppery death.

Unhurriedly, she rose, crawling over Inuyasha's immobile form, her hands ghosting over tattered fabric like fluttering moths encircling a beguiling flame.

Again, through moist red lips, Kagome sucked in a shallow breath and breathed.

Everything culminated into this one single, succinct moment, a mere speck of menial time to an omnipotent, omnipresent universe, but it didn't matter because after this she would be the goddess of her universe, her own future controlled by her own slender hands, the past a forgotten memory buried in a time capsule that would never be dug up.

Through mindless days of witty barb and twisted webs of devious scarlet that still clung to the edges of her eyes in spidery veins, her view of the happenings around her had gradually morphed into the simplistic convictions of a doll's, where all else was meaningless, living and breathing solely for one single purpose. It was a jerky, mechanized dance of revenge and bloodlust that she had warped into a wickedly artful purpose.

"Inuyasha, Inuyasha," Kagome murmured coyly, laughingly, as her hands slid through filthy, knotted, blood-encrusted white hair. "I used to wonder why you betrayed me, how you betrayed me. I used to burn and bleed with a desperate craving to know my past, my identity."

Porcelain hands, scarred and beautiful and timelessly dangerous, dug fiercely into his battered red haori as Kagome gracefully leaned up; lips twisted into a bittersweet smile, whispered with mock affection against strangely warm, pallid flesh.

How appropriate, Kagome sardonically mused, that he remained so vivaciously warm while she had become so deathly cold.

"But I don't care anymore," Kagome murmured almost seductively. "Are you finally listening to me, Inuyasha? I don't care. I don't need to know my past, my fabricated identity, my supposed purpose, because I already have one and it doesn't include you, Inuyasha. And once you're dead, you won't hold anymore power over me ever again."

Then she kissed him, inhumanly icy lips pressed to his warm lips, a meaningless final gesture, and took a step back, fluidly pulling out one of the arrows embedded into his arm at the same time.

With meticulous precision she firmly grasped the arrow in her slender hands and pointed it, the tip beginning to blaze with an incandescent blue as she deftly pressed it into the flesh directly above Inuyasha's heart.

"This time I won't miss," Kagome whispered, a mocking smile on her stretched ruby lips, a hollow reminiscence of a girl Kagome had forgotten long ago, an innocent girl that this hanyou, Inuyasha, had mercilessly killed no matter how indirectly.

So she smiled that cruel soulless smile—

"We've finally completed the Shikon no Tama and defeated Naraku! And I'm going to give it to you, Inuyasha, but you better know I trust you to think about what you're going to wish for, mister—"

—her grip tightening decisively around the blazing arrow—

"So what is it will you choose as your wish, Inuyasha? The kazaana has already disappeared from my hand, so my goal is complete, but what about you Inuyasha?"

"Yeah, you dummy head, stop staring at the jewel and make a wish! It can't be that hard—"

"Shut up, you little brat!"

"Oww, Kagome! Inuyasha's being mean!"

"Was not! Stop complaining you little—"

"C'mon we've gotten this far, can't you two stop it for a moment? But really what are you going to wish for? Inuyasha? …Inuyasha… please… don't tell me you still want to be a full demon… Inuyasha? …Answer me please…"

—shoulders stiffening resolutely—

"Run, Kagome, run!"

"No! Sango, Miroku! Shippo…"

"Kago—argghhh—"

"Shippo, no! In–Inuyasha please, please you're not your self—Inuyasha, listen to me! This—this is not you! Ca–can't you hear? I know you're in there! Inuyasha, please! Listen! …no… no… no! Inuyasha, please—no, Inu—"

—sapphire eyes shot through with unearthly strains of scarlet glittering victoriously, and—

Vicious razor-sharp claws already stained with the blood of her comrades and friends plunged ruthlessly through her abdomen, blood splashing, splattering upon the green earth like a vile sin for which one can never repent, her life gushing out of her at an inexorable rate.

Ravenous fangs clashed and snarled, dripping red-tinged saliva, while hot breath seared across her suddenly cold, clammy flesh.

Kagome helplessly stared, sickened, transfixed by Inuyasha's once gorgeous golden eyes now warped into a predatory, demon-like slits surrounded by a beguiling crimson, harsh and cruel, like a swirling ocean of blood in which she would forever drown.

She stared at him with dying eyes of fathomless sapphire and whispered, "Please… Inuyasha, I love…"

Then Kagome breathed no more, utterly broken beyond repair.

—collapsed on her knees in a sinuous flutter of shimmering silver and blue fabric, her grasp on the arrow slack as it hit the wood with a definite slap.

"I can't do it, can I?" Kagome muttered hoarsely to herself, nails scraping furiously into the rough, bloodstained bark of the Goshinboku until her thin fingers started to bleed fresh, vibrant blood. "Why can't I do it? Why can't I kill him?"

And a voice, velvet and sin wrapped addictively together in a sticky spider web of a devious trap, replied:

"Don't tell me you still love him, my lovely china doll."

Then from behind Naraku thrust a razor-clawed hand into her back and chest.

End Notes: There you go! How was it? Still exciting, I hope...? Per usual comments and constructive criticism are food for the starving author.

Anyway only one more chapter to go! Whee. XD

Hope you enjoyed! Till next time...

Ja ne!

– scelerus animus o.O