InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Yume ❯ action ( Chapter 2 )

[i/k/k Dreams are fantasies, wishes, jealousies, yearnings, the darkest and most desperate secrets of the heart. And when we wake, they are gone, chased away for another night. Or are they? What if dreams are something a little more...real?]

yume

(dream)

[a darker inuyasha/kagome/kikyou]

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There are footfalls in the distance, but from where...?

Left, right, forward, back; the whole forest is suddenly filled with the sleepy crackle of leaves unmercifully awoken from their dying rest. Eddies of wind whisper up, and as the gold-rust-amber skeletons whirl up in a dance of color and splendor, the taste of decay settles into the air. Foul, putrid, rotting, and despite the vibrant display before my eyes, I can sense the death that is encroaching, inexorable, here.

Right there.

Death, in the startled-deer eyes of the girl before me, crumbling leaves still clinging tenaciously to her clothes and hair. The same skeletal leaves that whispered to me, death, now enclose her in an ethereal shroud that, as she stands backlit against the sun, glows red-gold and vivid and shouts of life.

And I, in the sullen shadow of her brilliance, can taste only decay on the air.

And oh, this girl, how I...

Love her. Yes, love her, for she carries a part of me within her. A face at once strange and familiar, flushed pink now with vivacious energy and astonishment. The heart that beats out a rhythm almost forgotten to me, and which cherishes a hanyou that even the dirt-clogged pit of my own cannot hope to relinquish. How can I not love her, this girl who could almost be me?

Hate her. She has what should be mine by right, has stolen from me the only thing worth having, and still she pretends. Hides behind a flimsy façade of sympathy and girlish kindness that rips at the tattered fragments of my much-battered soul. Makes a mockery of her inherited power, for which I worked and sacrificed and died. Oh, this girl who has everything without losing anything, who takes and takes and pretends to give...

Love. Hate. Struggling side-by-side, twisting and destroying and recreating in their endless battle until both are hopelessly intertwined. Their combat leaves little room for humanity to slip in.

For even mindless spirits, the vengeful dead, can subsist on love and hate. They need nothing more than that raw power to continue their tortured existence, and while everything else is lost, one or the other remains. One needs not even the barest sliver of humanity to be dead, but to be alive—!

—with cheeks that flush rosy-red and hair that tangles and snarls in the wind. With rushing blood and warm limbs and a heart that can change, can expand, can escape from fixed, eternal immobility.

And so as she stands there, startled-deer eyes with the subtle cast of light that mine can never hold, can you blame me? Lit with the glow of autumn leaves that bathe her in life and give me naught but the bitter aftertaste—can you blame me? Standing here, knowing myself to be nothing but her dark dying dead shadow, can you blame me? That I should quiver and point to and desire that beating, beating heart—can you blame me? I do it not out of hate, but out of love for her life. Her life/my life; I am only taking what is already mine—so can you blame me?

I send my arrow to her with a blessing and a kiss.

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A hella weird, but hopefully tantalizing little interlude-chapter-thing. It's 12:04 AM, and I just wrote this without any backtracking whatsoever. Tada!

I lied. There's DEFINTELY about to be a part three. You didn't really think Inu was going to escape from this warped little triangle, did you?

And...haha. Some reviewer said that my way of organizing Inu/Kik/Kag in the summary was misleading, but hey...I think this at least partially fulfills the promised pairing. :x