Author's Note: Kikyou/Kagura, finding intimate solace in each other's presence. MA. Adults only.
Liminal Embrace
You stand before me, the manifestation of feminine perfection. I watch, mesmerized as you remove one beautiful kimono after the other. Soft silk and satin of rich colors slip to your delicate feet as your fingers nimbly unwrap and discard them in graceful display. Each layer accentuates a facet of your radiant beauty—the cherry-brightness of your eyes, the black sheen of your ornately fashioned hair, the pale glow of your porcelain cheek. Oh Kagura, I cannot take my eyes away: you are everything I desire, all I once longed to be.
Though your beauty far surpasses mine, I suffer no jealousy. You compel me like no other because I know that beneath the surface you are as tainted and grotesque as I. When I have looked my fill upon your lush breasts and softly rounded hips, I come to you from behind. As I rouse and plunder you, I caress and claw the ropey spider that scars your back. And after I have brought you a fleeting glimpse of ecstasy, I hold your quivering body to mine and feel the hollowness in your heartless chest.
I treasure all you allow me to give you, lovely Kagura, because I am far more scarred and more hollow than you. That you dance for me, that you accept my gratitude and treasure my body, is more than I dreamed possible the day Urasue brought me back to life. I suffered so in my rebirthing, and so much worse when I faced the truth of my refashioned body and its wretched excess. Yes, I am bones, earth, ash. True, I depend upon the souls of others to keep me animate. But this does not touch the depth of my anguish, my horror. Urasue had far more devious intent for me than simple servitude. My purpose was to be that which she could never otherwise attain with her infirmities of both appearance and temperament. Because no one would have her, Urasue wrought me as her lover.
When I gained consciousness in my new form, I knew immediately that my creator must die for her transgression. I did not ask for resurrection; I had suffered enough in one life to seek only the bliss of oblivion. Nor did I wish to know my reincarnation this way, to touch my soul after it came to fill the miko who even now seeks to reap the warmth I sowed within Inuyasha's soul. But such complex reasoning was beyond my newborn mind as I came to myself in this body of refuse, death, and magic. In that moment of renewal, my outrage flared only at the one true, unforgivable wrong she had done me, at the misshapen mass between my legs that Urasue had formed in a selfish, savage impulse of twisted lust.
The coarse appendage she fashioned with gnarled fingers from dirt, ginger, and what I came to know only after later investigation of her cave was the moldered remains of a wandering monk's severed penis was never meant for a woman's body—for any body. With casual cruelty, the witch made me something far worse than demon or hanyou, and I could not detest her any more than myself. I took her life because she succeeded in far worse than the unlawful and unwarranted reviving of life. Urasue achieved far more than Inuyasha and the miko will ever know in making me something apart, a monstrous other, my body as liminal as my soul-borrowed life.
Only you have shown me another self, Kagura. Lovely and cursed, you dance for me. You grasp and hold me. You whisper my name. You take my knotted phallus and coat it with your liquid pleasure. You cherish my thick, alien root in your every orifice and cry out your bliss for me.
My thanks run to deep for words as, time and again, we come together to defeat our despair in each other's ruined embrace and emerge as more than the sum of our deviant parts.