InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Patience ❯ Patience ( Chapter 1 )

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The air is rank with the scent of smoke though the pyre has long since ceased burning. The villagers have long since returned to their daily lives. Smoke and soot seem to cling to the leaves of nearby trees like black dew. The funeral pit is but lifeless ash. Its embers no longer glow and have cooled. The surrounding area is still warm despite the chill in everyone’s hearts.

He does not like fire. He has waited until its life had breathed its last before daring to step forward, taking yet another form like the chameleon spider that he is. And even then, he is hesitant.

The miko’s remains are black. It is not what he wished of hers to be such a sordid, dark hue. Her soul should have become tainted and slowly, quickly turned the Shikon no Tama to a beauteous onyx. Something so deep and dark that it is almost a poisonous indigo.

The fire is out, and he still takes short steps. It is irrational, and he knows this, and even then he does it without thought. The white-grey-black that dapples where she burned is disturbed by uncaring breezes.

There should be a glint somewhere in the rubble. A small sphere. How can something like fire remove the existence of something so powerful? How can fire melt the bone-metal walls of that prison of Four Souls?

But he doesn’t sense its presence.

He thinks he is being deceived.

Down he goes at the edge of the pit, and he slowly sifts through the mottled softness that almost makes him cough as he breathes it in. It is slow for only a few short moments. It becomes more insistent. His hands are soon covered in black soot, the skin smudged and stained the same way he desired Kikyou’s soul to gradually become. It’s just not the same. Frantic in disbelief and denial, his pawings become diggings and scrapings become shiftings and siftings become scoopings.

He can barely breathe, there is so much of Kikyou in the air. It dapples his hair, his long black hair, too dark, too black to be further tainted by the darkness of what she became simply through incineration. It spots his clothes. It coats his arms. It is like ink beneath his nails, like her blood had been beneath his stolen hanyou claws.

And Naraku is dissatisfied as he takes Kikyou deep into his lungs again, the remnants of her essence lining his veins.

Her soot passes through that thief’s heart that is not his, and Naraku stills as he examines the blacker than black hands coated with Kikyou. The Jewel is not to be found, and so instead he licks his hands dirty.

It had to go somewhere. He’d just sit back and wait.