Temporal Fray by quirkyslayer
Temporal Fray
Thank you to Fieryfaerie86 with help with those messy typos and grammar issues. HUGS!
Requested by Shoomy2003
Temporal Fray
When Sesshoumaru found her, she was lying in an alleyway in Kyoto, and blood poured from her chest and mixed with bile and entrails from a gaping wound.
For such a dire tug on death, the human girl should have been dead, but instead she gazed forward, somber and with a pensive face.
And in such a time, she should have been dead anyway. It must have been 150 years since he'd last seen her. How could she be alive, anyway?
----
For Kagome, being human was something in which she took pride. Often times, she felt humanity was her strength – and that no evil could crawl past her defenses without the human heart strongly encasing her as a shield.
And though she still looked human and felt human, she was a living fallacy – a cocooned entity glazed in a prolonged sense of time.
She stared at the blood pouring from her breast and hoped that maybe she would die today. And Kagome hoped and hoped – and wished that the shadow standing over her were Death itself.
When she looked up, she gasped as she fell into gold.
----
She seemed mildly surprised, and in seconds after recognizing him, she seemed irritated, almost disappointed that he was not who she was waiting for.
And then he chewed on silence and they stared at one another in a shared moment.
Skipping past formalities, she coughed on her own blood and groaned. "Don't worry." As if he would. "This happens all the time."
"How can you be alive?" Sesshoumaru remembered this girl was and had been human. She had been always special in a miniscule human way, but how could she have lived past her prime and still appear young? How could she survive and heal with the ability of a demon as her own organs were laid at her feet?
And why did she smell like magic and his brother when he could detect neither one within the entire city?
----
"The men, they come here and try to kill me because they think I'm a witch, or a demon, or something dangerous. I've thought about escaping –" She looked down at her chest and the wound was almost gone. She sighed. It had only been about three hours since the incident had happened and she was already regenerating. "I don't know what the point is anymore."
Kagome avoided his eyes and seemed to look through him as he stared at her, wanting her to go on with her story by the urgency of silence.
"Maybe I should leave Kyoto. A thirty year stay is long enough, don't you think?" She looked up to him finally. Kagome couldn't believe he was here, a shining stab from her past in front of her, still impassive as ever and evoking wonderment of her condition.
If he only knew...
She could tell him, but she'd doubt he'd rather care much. Just like every person she met, he'd leave her life soon enough. She hated to think that meeting him gave her some sort of hope – that maybe extended mortality couldn't be so painful after all, and that just maybe she could delight in meeting someone who already knew her – someone who actually knew she'd been human once.
"Tell me, girl, how can you be alive?"
"Would you really care to know?" Kagome shot back at him a little more tersely than intended. She shifted her body to sit more comfortably against the wall. She sighed, and suddenly she felt very hungry. He watched her as she took several minutes without saying anything to dig into her tattered yellow pack and fish out an apple. She glared at it momentarily before tearing her teeth into the skin.
With a mouth full of bad manners, she sighed again and answered him, "You know it's funny – a simple act of protection and love is really beautiful in its bare meaning, and if the world were absent of vengeful gods, wishes would be perfect."
Kagome's lip quivered as she paused, and her eyes filled with emotion and stubborn unshed tears. Her clenched hand quivered around the apple and squeezed in sync with her agony. Soon, her strength burst open and she crushed it, its fruit splattered and fragmented between her fingers. She looked at the mess in disdain, not for what she did, but what she was.
"Wishes should be what we mean them to be."
----
"The Shikon Jewel – you remember it don't you?" Kagome was standing now, leaning against the wooden wall as she regained her strength. Sesshoumaru watched her intently with parts of her phrases filtering beyond his ears. As a human, after being stabbed so many times she ought to be dead, but Kagome was a box of mysteries indeed. Those mysteries became less vague after she brought up the jewel and piqued his interest.
Sesshoumaru met her gaze and nodded, waiting for her to continue.
"I've been alive and young since that one day, the day we made it whole."
"Naraku's destruction..."
"Mmmhmm," she murmured with her eyes steadfast and looking forward through him again. The past must have seemed so clear to her still... even as the present stood in front of her.
Finally, she turned to him and with a small girlish pout she then shrugged listlessly. "Inuyasha made a wish on it."
Sesshoumaru scoffed. What fool put his brother in charge of such an abomination? Kagome made a noise in agreement to Sesshoumaru's cynical disposition.
"Well, he no longer wanted to be a full demon, anyway." Her tone of voice turned from placid to heartbroken quickly, and he saw the color drain from her face. Too empty to shed tears, all she could do was quiver her lip and suck in the snot and phlegm that corroded her throat. "It's true that I wanted him to be with me, and I was sure that he wanted to be with me too." Several decades of a long-ago love had left emotional strain in her face. She looked to the ground, lost again, and he watched her as she slipped in and out of time again, trading hands with past pain and present numbness. "But it wasn't like that, really. It had all been about protection and not so much love. They're different you know."
Kagome stared at him, her eyes pleading but hardly clinging to hope. She was strong. She believed, but she hurt too – and he wondered if anyone could save her.
"He made a wish to give you protection, didn't he?"
She nodded slowly. She almost choked on her words. "At first, it was a good life. We were happy as if we hardly traded anything. He looked the same, but he wasn't the same. He couldn't heal faster and he wasn't as strong. But if I were in danger, his protection, the shield that the jewel took from him and gave to me, would always ensure that I would live no matter what.
"And when we tried to go home, to my time, it wouldn't work. The magic had been tampered with – changed and transformed – and time would not allow us passage."
She sighed and closed her eyes in pain. Memories flashed through her and hovered like buzzing hornets. "Over time I came to accept that I'd go home again, soon, if I waited it out. But Inuyasha would not be with me. His extended life was now mine, and he instead lived a natural life of a human." Despairingly she added, "He left me alone."
She looked again into Sesshoumaru's golden eyes. Familiarity stung at her nerves and heated her blood. It had been so long since she'd seen a youkai. It had been so long since she had seen any resemblance to Inuyasha. Kagome's stomach churned, and she almost retched.
She hated the feelings that were rising from her – physical and nostalgic – fake and unfair to Sesshoumaru. She rather hoped he would leave soon. Kagome was very close to clinging to him – following him to freeze herself further into her own fractured past.
"I – I need to go now," she said, wrapping herself up in a battered old shawl and gathering her things. She averted her eyes from him and began to hurry away. Sesshoumaru watched her go impassively, and noticed she was still weak from being stabbed, and she wobbled on her feet.
"You are ill." Sesshoumaru's voice was still stern yet to Kagome it echoed smoothly in her ears.
She was about to retort, say something sarcastic to him, but she felt her world spinning. Her stomach reeled, and she felt her own weight become heavy. The sunlight that filtered throughout Kyoto seemed grayer, fading to black as if caught in an untimely eclipse.
When she fell backwards, he caught her – despite his raw character.
Why should he care? He could just leave her in the street.
He didn't care – but he was so bored – curious and intrigued that a face from his past had stumbled into his life again. And when he looked at her face, she reminded him of his brother and then his brother reminded him of his father.
A past nerve of disdain made his lip curl. His brother had always looked more like his father than he.
----
Kagome woke in a place in which she was not familiar – yet she didn't see this as an abnormal thing. She had lived so long every place started to look the same.
She looked around and realized she was inside a cave. Sesshoumaru was sitting against the opposite wall staring into a dying fire – there was no little girl, no two headed dragon, and no annoying green imp with him.
They were alone.
----
"Why didn't you leave me there?" She wanted to know why he felt the need to even regard her. Sesshoumaru had never done so in the past. His behavior was strange, and she had an errant thought, wondering if he ever got lonely.
The look he gave her indicated that he didn't want her to think him so unkind. However, the real reason was not so compassionate.
"You never finished your story."
"Huh?" She felt confused. What story did he mean?
"About my brother. What happened to him? Did he die fighting or withering as an old man? And why did this jewel do such a thing with your wish?"
"Of course he didn't die fighting. By the time Inuyasha was 40 his muscles were so scarred and his bones so brittle he could barely stand. He had always over exerted himself because he could not get used to the fact that he was human. He was strong, but he was stricken with some disease. It attacked his muscles, and with this time period's lack of medicine, he couldn't have healed from that.
"He was fifty when he died. At least he was fifty years from when I first met him, so he was a little older than that." Pausing, Kagome looked at him curiously. For the first time in many years, she felt more alive – she was finally having a conversation with someone who knew her. Suddenly, she felt her nerves tense. She hated to think she'd get attached to Sesshoumaru now that he was here.
She feared the delusion of a comfort he could provide her – a comfort as a beacon from her treasured past.
"And the wish?" Sesshoumaru broke her out of her reverie.
Kagome shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. I would like to think there was some reason the wish kept me alive and stole the healing abilities from Inuyasha for me. I'd like to think it was a good thing." She dropped her eyes to her lap and her shoulders slumped. "But I can't be positive anymore. I've been alone and alive for too long. It's tiresome. It's boring, and most of all – it's just very depressing."
He was about to retort, but then she looked him sternly in the eyes. "Hey, you know what? You, better than anyone, used to claim how wonderful it was to be a demon, and I agree that it may have its good things. But living forever – to see your loved ones pass before you –" Her face contorted in agony. "It's awful! It's –"
" ... It's unsettling." His voice was calm when he said that, and now he was the one looking through her to the wall.
She just had to know ...
"Did Rin live a full life?" Kagome was sure the girl was dead by now, but it was strange that his other demon companions were gone as well.
"No." He looked away from her, staring outside the cave. "Neither did the others. They all died, not more than four years after we defeated Naraku. An old enemy of my father's took me off guard, then captured and slaughtered them."
Kagome lifted her hands to cover her mouth and let out a cry of shock. 'That poor little girl... Those poor creatures...'
Then Sesshoumaru looked at her and he saw pity – not for him, but for the ones he treasured and lost. She understood tragedy. She understood what he was going though. She understood how prolonged time hurt.
"I'm sorry," she said. Then, wiping her tears away and inhaling a huge breath, she groaned callously, "This extended mortality thing is a real bitch."
He could not resist the urge to smirk.
----
"I appreciate what you did for me, but I have to go." She got up from her bedding in the cave and prepared to leave. The silence between them was stifling. Kagome just thought they had very little in common – nothing to talk about when the past was already rusting and fading away.
There was really no point in her staying.
She wanted to stay – to stare at him all day – into those golden eyes of his that made a snag in her fractured time. Kagome would even go as far as wanting to run her fingers through his hair, and tracing her fingers over his crimson stripes.
But she couldn't.
"Why must you go?" It was a simple question, but slight annoyance and disappointment flickered in his tone.
She looked at him earnestly and frowned. He really did have beautiful eyes.
"I have to. If I don't, I'll get too attached to you." It was blunt, but he still wavered slightly in effect.
To him, with her here with her understanding, extended life, and face that reminded of his better-days – it wasn't the worst of ideas.
----
And many times, throughout present and into succeeding days of future, they crossed paths – sat down and spoke or didn't speak – enjoying each other company as what they were beyond everyone else – those ragged frays of the spindle of Fate.
----
Kagome started to like sake. It was an acquired taste, and she had many centuries to acquire a taste for it. By the time she was about to turn a little over 400, the sake tasted sweet, like cherry juice that soaked a bowl of dried rice.
If anything the sake still made her drunk – and she was pleased, of course, that she had at least one tie to humanity left – that her tolerance for alcohol was still that of a blushing geisha with her first customer.
The consequences of a drunken Kagome on cherry tasting sake were also not that bad. Whether she ended up in an alley that day or in someone's bed, it really didn't matter. The sun would rise again and she'd have to live another 400 years or more.
And she'd never remember the night before. She blacked out and lost pieces of time.
It pleased her.
----
When Sesshoumaru had run into her again, twenty years after he had seen her last, she was in Hiroshima. The air was gray, tensions were high, and the sky seemed to be dying.
Now, over the course of time, Sesshoumaru felt it necessary to blend in with the humans as their population grew. He only did so when he even went around them at all, and thought he tried to avoid them, their rising population made it difficult.
So when he approached Kagome, she did not recognize him right away in his military uniform.
That, and she was horribly drunk.
"Oh, it's you!" She seemed very excited and she even slapped him on the chest while taking a sip of sake. Some of the sake fell dribbled out of her mouth and onto her dirty white coat. "Isn't this exciting?"
People were running away as the sky turned from gray to a sickly color of green. War sirens were buzzing and bombs were being set off all over the place.
"I read about this when I was a girl in school when I lived in the future. I never imagined that I'd get to experience it." She turned away from him and looked to the East. "The Americans will be here soon."
Kagome was strange indeed, but he trusted her word about the future. If there was one thing they talked about in several of their meetings, it was what he should look forward to as far as 'history' was concerned. "Didn't I tell you the Tokugawa government would be messy?" she once told him during the Meiji period when Tokyo was brand new and peaceful. Now it was the 1940s and Japan was in chaos again.
She turned around and gave him a hopeful smile. "So, if you don't want to be totally obliterated, I'd suggest you'd leave now. Go to Hokkaido for awhile, the farthest north you can go the better." She smiled. "It'll all be over soon, and then Japan will be reborn again." She turned to the green sky, spitting out human machines of destruction and buzzing with howls of mechanical terror. Then she added, "It will be reborn, just like I will be."
And at that point in time, he felt as though he turned around inside himself. He grabbed her hand and pulled her away.
---
As soon as he grabbed her hand in his, the world stood still. Sesshoumaru felt like he was floating in a groundless space. The physical world sped by rapidly, flying past his eyes in a colorful linear blur.
And with his skin against hers, they fused together and stretched like elastic over the universe.
Kagome ...
She was the girl from the future and miko from the past. He knew her – youthful and full of mystery – intriguing when normal humans were not.
She was human but she was not.
He was a demon but yet he was not.
They no longer stood grounded, their physical signature in time no longer streaming in a straight line. Together – they could glide back and forth – shape memory into absolute existence.
In his arms, his hands braided with hers, and they could open their eyes and exist anywhere.
– as enemies
– as individuals
– as lovers
– as something beyond flesh
With first touch, sigh, kiss, and consummation, time submitted to them. Time transformed within them – and two strings of Fate unraveled and floated through space now as masters – no longer slaves to temporal subjugation.
Then, as he pulled her from the bombs of Hiroshima, he took her against his chest protectively – to save her, the last existing piece of himself – the proof that it was natural and right for him to breathe.
And as soon as she blinked – he was within her and she was over him, panting and encompassing – satisfied.
They shed their mortality like dry, old skins – and together connected they were beyond all else.
----
"Do you remember that time you saved me in Hiroshima?" Kagome said after he pulled away from their kiss and their sweat began to dry. The afternoon California air was dry and cool against their heated skin, and following their strenuous activity, a bit of breeze was a great precursor to some relaxation. Kagome began playing with his hair idly as she continued to speak. "And after all I did to try to avoid you and to find my rest, you suddenly pulled it away."
"I apologize," he said earnestly. She giggled at him and when she did that, he could not resist his eyes to travel down over her bouncy chest.
"Mmmhmmm," she said smiling and shaking her head. "It's okay. I'm certainly not mad." She traced her finger over a crimson stripe over his calf. He watched as her eyes brightened to motion – a motion so common and trite that she had done it so often yet still seemed fascinated with it.
"I was thinking –"
"Hrmm..." he made a sad face. "Should I be leery of what you're going to say next?"
Kagome pouted and made a growling noise in her throat. "I'm serious, no joke." She put her hands up in surrender, and seemed surprised when he took them. He looked at her and his attention became hers.
"Like I said, I was thinking about the wish the other day – the wish that made me like this. For a long time I thought the jewel was teaching me a lesson, which I should learn something from having to live longer – to live like Inuyasha was supposed to.
"But now, when I think about it, it really wasn't about a lesson at all – the Shikon jewel was more about a gift than a lesson or even a wish itself."
"A gift?"
"Yes, my gift was that I spent time with Inuyasha until he died, just like I always wished for. Inuyasha's gift from the jewel was my safety. He was always worried about me – he truly wanted to protect me – and in another sense, he wanted to be with me too, but he was afraid of dying before me. He wanted to be there for me until the end, and I think he was happy."
Her eyes seemed somber now, but they were radiating with hope. She then added, "I'd also like to think the jewel gave me another gift besides the gift I wanted."
Sesshoumaru leaned back against their bed, and watched her as she continued. She leaned into him and traced circles over his chest.
"My other gift was understanding – a intricate understanding about what it is to be like Inuyasha – to have extended time. And in that understanding I can also know how you feel – how all demons must feel when they've lived this long." Kagome laid her head down over his bare chest and listened to his heartbeat. She whispered finally, "I think that this it's a wonderful gift."
Without a response, Sesshoumaru regarded her words as his own – and he thought that her 'gift' also allowed him to have understanding as well – to share that stilled sense of time with another – to move through life with someone and not lose them or ever be alone.
Yes, he thought it was a wonderful gift indeed.
END
AN: If you have any favorite stories you'd like to nominate for awards, check out the Shikon Awards on Livejournal for your favorite Inuyasha stories. http://community.livejournal.com/shikon_awards/profile