Seven days, with twice as many hours of sleep between them.
Kagome braced her chin in her hand and sighed. It was bizarre. She should be passing out cold by now, but here she was, sitting wide awake watching Kanako snore.
After cleaning her up, Kagome had bedded the girl down in her own mussed-up futon, as if such a gesture could even begin to make up for the horrible way she had permitted Sesshoumaru to use her. Even if Kanako hadn’t seemed distressed by this—even if she’d seemed the opposite really, after all the attention Kagome had given her—the fact that she had allowed it made the miko feel distinctly ill.
Maybe Kohaku was right—maybe she really was sick in the head.
Sighing again, Kagome rubbed at her temples as she frowned. Kohaku…
The miko stared down at the dark lines of blood trapped beneath her nails. She couldn’t leave things the way they were between them. At the very least, she had to try to make amends. Though her tired joints groaned in protest, she picked herself up off the tatami mat and went out into the night.
A sharp icy wind tore straight through the shawl around her shoulders. In a matter of minutes sleet drenched her down to the bone. Her yukata and leg wrappings might as well have been painted on, as she crossed the half-frozen rice fields and arrived at the dark little cabin that lay alone among them. With the frail light of her lantern threatening to sputter out, Kagome pushed the brittle reed curtain aside and entered into a place of even deeper gloom.
The hearth was unlit. Padding over, Kagome spent a few minutes charging it to a muted glow, before she lifted her eyes to the dark gaze glinting back at her from the shadows near the door. She hadn’t known precisely where he was in the room, yet she had known that this hut was the place where he would be. Like a wolf with a thorn in its paw, he’d slunk off here to lick his wounds in secret. And it was like a wild, wounded creature that Kohaku glared warily at her now.
Patiently, Kagome waited for him to speak, as she dried herself by the fire.
“What did Sesshoumaru-sama have to say?” he asked, after a while.
“Nothing, really,” the miko answered, prodding a little more at the crackling logs. “Don’t worry. He isn’t angry with you.”
—Only with me, she added ruefully to herself.
Kohaku was silent for a time. “I didn’t think you would come here.”
Kagome looked up at him. He hadn’t thought she would, but had he hoped for it? Her eyes fell once more to the dancing flames.
“I’m sorry I scratched you,” she said.
“I deserved it.” Kohaku shook his head, self-loathing saturating his tone. “I deserved far worse than that. It was so out of line, what I did to you—what I tried to do. I ask you to trust me, then I go and attempt something like that. It makes me wonder if I’m any different than I was the first time we met.”
Kagome blinked. “…What do you mean?”
“You know,” Kohaku said, frowning, “that time in the cave, when I nearly killed you on Naraku’s command?”
Kagome’s fingers bit into her sleeve. She didn’t remember any cave, or any attempt by Kohaku to kill her for that matter. All she remembered from their earliest days together was how shy and cute he was, if unfortunately grim for his young age.
“What if I am no different,” the taijiya continued bitterly on. “What if the monstrousness he brought out in me has been there from the start? Lurking within me, all along…”
Kagome’s trembling hands clasped together as she lowered her eyes upon them.
“Do you think,” she asked softly, “that some things are unforgivable?”
“Certainly,” Kohaku replied, with a bluntness and severity that make Kagome glance up at him as if struck. “But it’s people we forgive, not the things that they’ve done.”
“This is true,” Kagome murmured, her heart heavy all the same as she smiled without humor. “Does that mean you’ve forgiven Naraku, then?”
Kohaku’s eyes were the thinnest shards of slate. “I hate Naraku.”
Kagome’s smile crooked. “I guess some people are unforgivable, too.”
“Some,” Kohaku admitted. “But if it’s a person I love, I could forgive them anything.”
Kagome rose. Crossing over to the wall where he leaned, she crouched down beside him in the cool, close darkness, and had the strangest fleeting sense of déjà vu.
“No, Kohaku-kun, I don’t trust you.” Her head fell back against the wooden boards, and she realized she was too tired to lie. “I don’t trust anyone, anymore. I’m not so sure I even trust myself. There’s something broken in me, something preventing me from trusting people even if I want to. Even if I feel like I should. Even Inuyasha…” Trailing off, she bit her lip against the pangs of heart that assailed her. “…Even with Inuyasha, I came to feel this way. Deep down in me, I just can’t lower my guard. But, if there was anyone I could trust, I think…I think it would be you.”
Kohaku gazed at her in open longing. “I want to trust you, too.”
Wistfully, Kagome smiled. Now here was the face of his she remembered best, earnest and unassuming. How strange, that only a few hours ago, he had seemed another person to her entirely. One who was all sharp edges and shadowed glances.
“Come here,” she said, opening her arms to him now.
Kohaku came to her and embraced her. His hands slipped around her waist. His face crushed to her cheek. Resting against him, Kagome tugged loose the string holding back his hair. Her fingers ran soothingly through the cool flowing silk of it.
She wanted to comfort him. She wanted to be of comfort to him. Once, they had been like this—only like this. The whole of their bond had consisted of this purity of feeling, a mutual affection untainted by base desire.
But now, it was only a fleeting thing. A memory, an illusion of the past. His grip tightened around her. His breathing roughened, and as the spell of nostalgia lifted, Kagome could feel Kohaku returning to himself. Disconcerted, she frowned. It was somewhere between the boy he had been and the man he was that she presently struggled. Against her, he hardened and matured in the span of a moment, and she was as powerless to stop it as she was to stop the press of time itself.
It saddened her, enraged her.
“Kagome,” he groaned against her heated skin, and when he drew back to take her earlobe between his teeth, it was only the anger that she felt.
Why…
Why?
Sharply, she wrenched his hand from her hip to her breast, crushing it to her tender flesh with a vehemence that startled him briefly back to his better senses. Her ear popped from his mouth as he frowned down at her, his fingers curved slackly at her chest.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, but Kagome’s glare only sharpened further.
She knew exactly where the trouble lay. And as her fist closed around it, his pleasured gasp stirred at the rancor within her.
“This,” she said vindictively, squeezing harder as he continued to stiffen. “This is what’s wrong. With you, and all the rest.”
Kohaku’s brows drew together, his expression strained. His fingers pried at hers.
“Kagome…you don’t have to do this.”
Her eyes snapped to his, and his hand stilled around hers. “No,” she said, “I don’t.”
As she yanked loose the ties of his hakama, Kohaku offered no further resistance. Lewdly and eagerly, his bare cock sprang free, and when she took hold of it again, his hand returned to her breast with greedy insistence. Harshly, he kneaded her through the still-damp fabric, until the raw point of her nipple was chafing through it, tormenting them both. With growl of impatience, he ripped the collar of her yukata open. His hot, calloused touch set her clammy flesh aflame.
“Gods, you feel so good,” he rasped, scoring his nail over her nipple so keenly that she felt the pierce of it between her legs. “Don’t stop, don’t ever fucking stop…”
Kagome had no intention of stopping. Her palm pumped over him hard and fast, a relentless circuit that only seemed to stoke him with its increasing brutality. No matter how much friction she built between them, the taut muscles of his stomach cinched tighter and tighter beneath the hand she was using to brace her. In its sleek, satiny casing, his cock burned hot to the touch, more fiercely erect than ever before.
She hated it just as fiercely, this wicked thing that turned men into beasts. She hated how vulgar and shameless it was, how demanding it was in its carnality. All the venom in a man was born here, and here it collected, waiting to erupt in violence. A torrent of lust which could never be stanched, but only temporarily purged to prevent disaster.
Though she resented it, though she lamented it, Kagome would do this for him. To some extent she even envied him. In herself, it was far harder to tell where the source of her own venom lay.
“I want you so badly,” he said, panting and shaking as he released her breast to grope between her thighs instead. Unhindered by her yukata, by her underwear and the soft, absorbent cloth layered within it, he pawed hungrily at the folds of her sex, his fingers slicking wet with more than just her blood. “Let me have you—please.”
Kagome’s features twisted—at the words and the sensation both. Without releasing him, she smacked his offending hand away.
“You can’t have me,” she seethed, seizing at him with both hands. “No one can.”
Kohaku gazed at her as if she’d just laid him open again. But his look of stunned disappointment didn’t last long, as Kagome’s fists clamped and thrust in renewed animosity, and he threw back his head with a guttural shout. Hollowly, she watched his release pulse from him in sluggish rivulets of white, watched him lift the fingers grimed with her and suck them clean with an expression that was almost demonic in its cast of gruesome, dark delight.
Her thighs clenched at the image, reiki heating her blood. Then, just as quickly as she’d glimpsed it, his sharp features slackened into an expression of glazed content, and he was pulling her to him, nuzzling at her again. Minutes passed before Kagome could wrestle free of him. The beaten, boyish look on his face as she finally shoved him off filled her with fresh remorse. Tenderly, she reached back for him, brushing his bangs from his eyes.
“Go clean yourself up,” she said, “and I’ll make you something to eat.”
In the mostly spare cupboards of the seldom-used dwelling, Kagome discovered a bit of rice and dried meat. While she waited for it to cook, she shook the dust off the folded bedroll and made it up with the least musty set of sheets she could find. Kohaku’s own task took him less than a minute. As Kagome bustled around the hut, he sat quietly by the fire, his eyes following her almost dreamily. Still gazing at her in this way, he ate what she gave him and let her lead him to the bed after he was through.
Ushering him in, Kagome ignored the way his look had darkened and pressed a cloth daubed with antiseptic to his cheek instead. Kohaku hissed at the unexpected sting. Shushing him idly, Kagome cleaned the crusted blood from his cuts, though she didn’t heal them. By the time she was finished, his eyes were half-lidded, perhaps only sheer stubbornness keeping them open at all.
“Go to sleep now, Kohaku-kun,” Kagome said softly as she began to rise.
Despite his drowsiness, the taijiya caught her by the wrist with disturbing ease. “…I love you,” he said, before his eyes drifted shut at last.
Frozen, Kagome remained at his side, his hand still holding loosely to her. Icy claws seemed to bury themselves in her heart. With a shiver and a start, she jerkily stood, stumbling back out into the cold that was frighteningly warm in comparison.
Blinded as much by the sheen in her eyes as the moonlit snow flurrying around her, she didn’t know where she was going until she’d arrived. The central brazier of the shrinehouse seared her eyes with its brightness. Dripping frigid tears from every inch of her, Kagome knelt before it as if in prayer, and pressed her numb hands to the shining golden bowl of its base.
Her skin scorched on contact. After a few seconds, every nerve in her palms and fingers was screaming in white-hot distress. Still, she held to it with bitter tenacity, until unconsciousness released her abruptly from both the pain and its source, and she slept there open-eyed and red-handed on the shrine floor for seven days straight.
Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi