InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity 10: Anomaly ❯ Broken ( Chapter 23 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

� �Okay, let me see . . .”

Frowning as he gently pulled Madison’s blood-smeared hands away from her chest, Mikio winced inwardly at the broken and ragged claws, the torn skin of her delicate fingertips.  Her blood had dried, crusted around the cuticles, smeared all over her hands, her blouse, her skirt . . .

She hadn’t said a thing since he’d found her, had barely seemed to understand him when he’d tried to get her to tell him, just what was going on.  In the end, all he could do was call a taxi for the trip back across town to the penthouse.  She’d sat in silence during the half-hour ride, staring out the window into the darkness, her hand, trembling in his, her fingers, icy cold.

Now, in the quiet of the penthouse, she was shivering, despite the light blanket he’d dropped over her shoulders just before he’d gone, looking for the prerequisite first aid kit that his family was infamous for keeping well-stocked.

Carefully dampening a cotton ball with a tincture of witch hazel and other herbs that had been steeped into an antiseptic, he shot her a quick half-grimace, half-smile that she didn’t see.  “This, uh . . . This might sting a little,” he told her.  “Sorry . . .”

She didn’t even flinch as he carefully cleaned her fingers, wiping away the dried blood, taking his time, trying to be as gentle as he could.

“You . . . You really messed up your fingers, you know,” he said, debating with himself, whether or not he ought to try to wrap her hands, at least, until they healed a little bit more.  Glancing over at the clock, he sighed.  It was almost five in the morning now, but if he could get her to lie down, to get some sleep, her body would heal itself a lot faster.  “You want to tell me what happened?”

It didn’t surprise him when she remained silent.  For that matter, he had to wonder if she really could hear him, at all.  The wan and vacant sort of expression in her eyes hadn’t lessened, the underlying sense of sadness, still just as visible, just as prevalent.  She could easily be a million miles away instead of sitting there beside him . . .

He winced inwardly, slowly and carefully wrapping gauze around her injured, but clean, hands.  He really didn’t have any idea, how to reach her, did he?  But he couldn’t stand the excruciating thought that he just couldn’t reach her, either.  He had no idea what had happened to her, and she didn’t appear to be in any kind of condition to talk, but he couldn’t help the sense of desperation that he felt, either.  Somehow, he had to bring her back, didn’t he?  He had to reach her, to break through the numbing cocoon she’d managed to surround herself with . . . Even if he had no idea, just how to do it . . .

“You . . . You know, when I was a . . . a pup—just a little pup—four or so, I guess . . . I saw this bicycle in a shop on the way home from school.  It was . . .” He uttered a soft chuckle, hating the knowledge that he really couldn’t tell if he was getting through to her or not, but he still had to try.  “It was, uh, really nice . . . bright blue with lime green stripes all the way down the body . . . blue and green streamers on the handle bars . . . shiny chrome and . . . It was just really pretty . . . So, I begged Mama for it, and she . . . She didn’t want me to have it.  She said that I wasn’t ready for a bike that big, which was probably true.  I still had one with trainers on it . . . But I begged, you know?  Mama and Papa . . . “ He sighed, but when Madison finally blinked, he made himself go on.  “They . . . They fought one night.  I mean, I heard it.  Mama was . . . was scared, I guess.  Scared I’d wreck the bike, that I’d hurt myself, but Papa said that . . . that all pups got scraped knees, fell down, that that’s how they learned how to get up again.  In the end, Papa got the bike, and I . . . I fell off of it a few times, and I . . . I scraped my knees, banged up my hands . . . cried a little bit a time or two . . . Mama insisted that she knew that it was a mistake, but she never tried to stop me from trying to ride it . . . But Papa was right, too.  I . . . I did learn how to stand up again.  I . . . I learned to brush myself off and do better the next time . . .” She still didn’t seem to have heard him, and he stifled a sigh.  “Madison . . .”

She blinked slowly.  And then, she uttered a terse little sound, almost a whine, almost a sigh, but entirely too close to a whimper for his liking.  A moment later, the scent of her tears was back in full force, and he grimaced, reaching over, pulling her against him, rather awkwardly trying to soothe her while feeling wholly inept at the same time.

He didn’t know how long she cried, didn’t have any idea, just how long he held her, smoothing her hair, trying his best to let her know that she wasn’t alone . . . Maybe if he had any idea, just what was bothering her, he could figure out the best way to calm her, but as it was, he felt just as lost as she was, albeit in a wholly different kind of way . . . She cried as though her very soul was shattering, as though every truth she’d ever believed had somehow been rent asunder, but he just didn’t have the heart to even try to get answers out of her, and he winced, ground his teeth together, acutely aware that he was fighting against something that he had no idea about, that he couldn’t touch or see or even begin to understand.

She slowly wound down to sniffles, hiccups, but the shivering didn’t wane.  Leaning quietly against his chest, she made no move to sit up, and the otherwise silence fell over them, occasionally broken by her hitching breaths, a quiet sigh . . .

Letting out a deep breath, sensing that the worst of it might have passed, Mikio idly rubbed her back in small circles, allowing her to react on her own time.

“She . . . She killed herself,” Madison finally whispered.  “Her mother showed up, and . . .” Smashing her face more solidly against Mikio’s chest, she shivered almost violently.  “Jazz . . .”

He frowned.  The name sounded familiar, but it took him a moment to place it: the girl from the club—the transgender young woman with the bright eyes and the engaging smile . . . But . . . “Jazz?  From . . . From that club?”

She nodded, too miserable to utter confirmation out loud.  A sob escaped her before she rather brutally cut it off, but it was hoarse, dry, as though she’d cried all the tears she had, and Mikio sighed.

“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” he said, understanding just how weak it sounded, even as the words tumbled from his lips.  “Damn . . .”

She tried to draw a deep breath, but it was stunted and shallow, punctuated by a couple stuttered stops.  “If . . . If I had known . . .”

“If you had known?” he repeated, almost more to himself than to her, when she trailed off.  “If you had known, what?  You . . . You could have stopped her?”

“Maybe . . . Yes . . . No . . . I . . . I don’t know . . .” she muttered miserably, brokenly—almost angrily.

He grimaced, his arms tightening around her a little more.  “Don’t,” he countered quietly, but no less forcefully.  “Don’t do that to yourself.”

“But—”

“No,” he interrupted, his voice a little harsher than he intended.  “How could you have done anything when you didn’t even know till . . . till tonight?”

“But I should have!” she screamed, rearing back, eyes ablaze with unspent rage.  “I should have known!  I should have checked on her!  I should have stopped her!  I could have, but I—”

Letting go of her when she pushed against him, Mikio grasped her upper arms, turned her to face him, unable to control the stern look on his face, giving her just a little shake, he stubbornly shook his head.  “You’re telling yourself that, but it’s not true!  It’s awful, it’s terrible, and it fucking sucks, but there’s not a damn thing you could have done . . .” Trailing off, he drew a deep breath, struggled for a calm that he was far from attaining.  “Do you think Jazz would have blamed you?  Do you think she . . .? Do you think she would want you to blame yourself?  Because I don’t.  She was your friend, right?  And friends don’t ever want their friends to feel that way.”

Her outrage didn’t wane right away.  Those violet eyes of hers seemed to burn right through him, but he didn’t back down, either.  “Is that right?  We’ll never know, now will we?  Because Jazz isn’t here to tell me a thing!  Her mother showed up!  Her mother, who wanted nothing to do with her daughter, but just had to control her son!  That woman—That woman . . .!”

Mikio winced.  As far as he was concerned, Madison had spelled it out very plainly, to the point that it all made sense to him.  Jazz’ mother?  He sighed.

“Give me just five minutes alone with her,” Madison went on, the mayhem in her tone leaving nothing at all to the imagination, as far as what, exactly, Madison wanted to accomplish in those hypothetic minutes.  “She killed her—killed her!  Her hate and her inability to accept Jazz for who she was!  Her own mother!”  Suddenly, Madison choked out a little yelp, and she squeezed her eyes closed tight, but just as fast as the anger had come, it drained out of her just as fast.  Maybe she was just too exhausted to hold onto it.  Her shoulders slumped, her chin dropped, and she slowly shook her head.  “Her own mother . . .” she whispered, scowling at the gauze that enclosed her hands, her tone, thick with the bewilderment, the confusion she held so tightly.  “I know Jazz wouldn’t want . . . I just . . .”

Letting out a deep breath, Mikio let go of her, rubbed his face with weary hands.  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be sad,” he said, his voice muffled.  “Just try not to blame yourself, all right?”

She gave one terse nod, but Mikio knew well enough.  She might not want to blame herself.  She might even realize on some level that she really held no culpability in the situation.  But what she knew and what she believed could easily be two completely different beasts, especially within the confines of her own mind . . . Did that really matter, though?  He understood, probably better than anyone else, that sometimes, the mind and the heart were harder to convince . . .


Miki o dropped Madison’s cell phone onto the coffee table as he let out a deep breath and raked his hands through his hair.  The salon manager had called to ask when she’d be in, and Mikio had told her that she wouldn’t be coming in, not today.  It did needle at his conscience that the manager—Brit—had told him that she had a meeting with the agent dealing with her LA expansion, but given the last few hours, he knew better than anyone that Madison simply wasn’t in any shape to meet with anyone.  Eleven in the morning, and he hadn’t been to bed yet, finding that he couldn’t sleep once he’d managed to get Madison settled in, and he’d given up on the endeavor long ago.  The last time he’d checked on her maybe half an hour ago, she was sleeping rather fitfully, but she was sleeping, and if he had it his way, she’d do so for a while longer.

Giving his head a quick shake to brush off the slight fogginess that slowed his mind due, he was certain, to his own lack of sleep, he let his hands drop, blinked a few times before his eyes managed to focus on the laptop monitor again.

He’d located Jazz’s obituary.  It had taken a little bit of patience since he’d had to comb through quite a few of them, only to realize that the actual write up in the news was for Jeffery Whelan, but it had actually mentioned that Jeff worked at ‘a nightclub’.  The details, while vague, were consistent enough that he figured it had to be Jazz, and he’d also been able to find the public records, too.

According to the police report he’d also located, Jazz had been found in her apartment—the address given was where he’d found Madison last night—by one of her co-workers at Luscious—one Elizabeth (Beth) Curry—officially Daniel Curry—who had unofficially identified the body.  Nearby were six empty pill bottles, all legally prescribed to Jeffery Whelan, but there was no way of telling, just how many of each had been ingested.  An ambulance was not called since it was clear that Jeffery had been dead for anywhere between six to ten hours at that point, and by the time the authorities reached Jeffery’s mother, Helena Whelan, they had already deemed the death suicide, pending the results of an autopsy—standard practice in a situation like this.  Somehow, though, Helena Whelan had managed to talk them into allowing her to bury Jeffery without waiting for the autopsy—she’d stated that she needed to get back to her home, citing extenuating circumstances due to the loss of her husband just a month before Jeffery’s incident.

Mikio frowned.  Sometimes, being a lawyer made it hard to accept things at surface value, he supposed, but he still felt as though the entire thing was dealt with in a very rushed way.  But then, it could very easily be the way his brain was trained to think, and maybe it simply was a suicide, after all . . .

‘Don’t read too much into it, Mikio.  Your brain automatically jumps to conspiracy theories and coverups, but in this case—in this case—do you really think there could have been more to it than that?’

He sighed.  No, he really didn’t think there was more to it.  It wasn’t really that far from the realm of feasibility that the police had seen enough cases of suicide over the years to be able to easily ascertain when that’s what they were dealing with, even without the need for a full-blown investigation.  In truth, he’d only looked into the whole thing so that he had a better understanding of the things that Madison hadn’t said.  All in all, it was a damn mess . . .

‘But the whole story isn’t contained in that police report,’ his youkai-voice remarked.

‘Maybe not, but I’ve got enough of it now to help Madison,’ he replied.  ‘She’ll . . . She’ll be fine.’

‘Eventually, yes, but right now?  She’s not okay.  You can help her, though.’

Help her?  Of course, he would.

That sense of panic, the fear that had gripped him just as soon as he had realized that the unsettled feeling he’d had that woke him in the middle of the night . . . The memory of it alone was enough to send a very distinct shiver down his spine, and he closed his eyes against the late, but resurgent, trepidation that was just as potent as it was then.

He’d never been more worried in his life, and then, when he’d found her, when she’d stepped out of those shadows of the alley, her entire body, shaking, a misery in her that was physically painful to him . . . He had no idea, just what had happened before he got there, but the sight of her hands, of her claws, had told him enough.  After all, how often had he seen members of his own family, unleash their emotions on whatever was close by.  She’d be fine in a day, maybe two, and hopefully, she’d talk to him a little more, too.  Even if she didn’t, he supposed that would be all right.  Some things were personal, and he understood that.  But . . .

Hauling himself off the sofa, he shuffled off toward the kitchen to make a cup of tea.  Now that things had calmed down a little, he couldn’t help the darker thoughts that still settled in his mind—things that he hadn’t considered last night, but now, in the bright light of day, it was all too clear once more.

“She has the heart of a tai-youkai.”

Frowning thoughtfully as he measured tea leaves into a fine porcelain mug, Gunnar’s words echoed in his head.  There was a definite truth in that statement.  But the rest of what he’d said . . .

“. . . I know, too, that you’ve always avoided women, and I know why.  Just because you’ve never talked about it doesn’t mean that we were unaware.”

His youkai-voice uttered a heavy sigh.  ‘He had a point, you know . . . Your thoughts, your worries . . . I get it, but . . . but what are you thinking?  Fix her all up then turn away from her?  Is that the master plan?’

‘It . . . It can’t be any other way . . .’

‘You say, but surely you’re not so foolish?  Mikio, just why do you think that you were able to find her last night?  Without her scent to track, without knowing where she was, and yet . . .’

‘Don’t,’ he cut in, unable to consider the scope of what his youkai was trying to say.  There were too many moments in his memory, too many times when he just . . . just wasn’t . . . Falling without any real warning when his balance simply slipped away from him, being made to sit out on sports days at school, saying that they needed a scorekeeper or whatever . . . Days spent, watching as his contemporaries trained, as they grew better and faster, and he fell farther and farther behind . . .

Maybe that wouldn’t matter to Madison, maybe it would, but . . . ‘It . . . It matters to me . . .’

And therein lay the crux of it.   If he didn’t feel like a real man, then how in the world could he even think about asking someone else to see him that way?


Madi son opened her eyes slowly, blinking in muddled confusion as the room came into focus.  In the evening light that was casting the blinds in a sheen of fiery orange, she pushed herself up and sighed, staring down at her wrapped hands in a blank and almost dumb kind of way.

She felt so empty, so incredibly empty, like a part of her had been completely stripped away, and all that was left behind was a nothingness so vast that it might have hurt if she could feel anything at all.

Crawling off the bed, she sighed.  She was still wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday, including Jazz’s pink scarf, and her body ached, like someone had beaten her or something . . .

Still, she padded across the room, down the hallway, toward the stairs, wincing slightly when she grasped the gauze in her teeth and tried to rip it off.  Her fingertips still throbbed, as though each of them held a heart of their own in the very tips.  She felt like hell warmed over, and yet . . .

“Oh, hey,” Mikio said, glancing up from the files he was looking through.  He set them aside and stood up, reaching for her as he stepped closer, as he helped her over to the sofa.  “I was going to come up and check on you,” he told her.  “Do you . . .? Do you want a cup of tea?”

She stared at him blankly for a long moment, and he sighed, but nodded, hurrying away to fetch a cup of tea for her.  It only took him a few minutes to come back, and he set the tea on the table before kneeling in front of her, quickly but carefully removing the gauze.

He sighed.  “I’ll, uh, clean your hands again in a little bit,” he said, his expression, concerned, despite the calm demeanor that seemed to reverberate off of him.  “Can you hold the cup?”

“Yeah,” she replied, her voice, harsh and hoarse—like she hadn’t used it in a long, long time.  She didn’t reach for the mug, however, staring at her hands without really seeing them at all.  Then, she sighed.  She owed Mikio, didn’t she?  At least, owed him as much of an explanation as she could give, even if she still didn’t quite grasp the entirety of it all.  “It . . . It just . . . caught me off guard,” she heard herself saying without bothering to elaborate on just what she was talking about.  “I didn’t know . . . So, I went to Luscious last night, and Sin told me . . . everything . . .”

He nodded, leaning forward, hooking her hair, gently tucking it behind her ear.  “I’m really sorry,” he told her softly.

She shook her head.  “Don’t be,” she said, struggling to smile, but he winced, and she sighed.  “I mean . . .”

“She was your friend.  Of course, you care.”

Madison flinched.  “Her . . . Her mother . . . She cut off her hair and . . . and buried her as her son,” she whispered, and, to her horror, tears filled her eyes, slipped down her cheeks before she could angrily swat them away.

Mikio nodded.  “That’s . . . That’s really horrible,” he said.  “I, um . . . I found the police report and . . . and the obituary.  For what it’s worth, she didn’t deserve that.”

Madison opened her mouth to reply, but an ugly, screechy and weak kind of sob escaped instead, and Mikio slipped up onto the sofa beside her, pulled her gently, maybe a little clumsily, against his chest.  “I’m sorry,” she choked out between sobs.  “I . . . I don’t mean . . . to bother y-you . . . I just . . . I . . .”

“You’re hardly that,” he told her.

“Aren’t I?” she challenged, but the anger he could hear in her voice . . . He had a feeling that she was far more irritated at herself, at her perceived weakness, and he sighed.

“You’re not,” he insisted.  “You . . . You couldn’t be.”

And she sighed, but her body relaxed, seemed to sort of melt against his, and she allowed him to offer her the comfort he freely gave.  “I’m sorry,” she said again, but this time, her voice was softer, almost resigned.  “If you hadn’t showed up, I . . . Well, I . . .” He could feel her flinch: the tightening of her forehead, the flutter of her eyelids, against his chest.  “I . . . don’t know what I would have done . . .”

That made sense, too, and Mikio nodded slowly, idly stroking her hair, wishing that he could take away her pain, yet knowing that he simply couldn’t do that.  “It’s . . . It’s okay . . . I went and found you, right?  So, you’re not . . . not a bother to me.”

“W-Why?” she stuttered, sniffling as she leaned away, as her gaze finally met his, her tears still slipping down her face.

He sighed, carefully, a little clumsily, wiping her cheeks with his fingertips as he managed a half-hearted smile that was almost contrite.  “Because,” he told her with a helpless shrug, and maybe that spoke volumes, too.  “You . . . You needed me.”

She blinked, stared at him for another long moment, and then, she sighed, too, and let her temple fall against his chest once more, her breathing, still stunted and stuttering, but her aura felt a little more peaceful than it had since he’d found her.  She said nothing more, but she didn’t have to, and neither did he.

The silence that grew was soothing, welcome, even if the two of them were separated by the unvoiced thoughts in their own heads.