Author Notes: So, finally, the last chapter arrives! Hurray! This story has taken me nearly three long years to finish, and now that it is done, I'm rather content. I would once again like to give a colossal THANK YOU to all those who reviewed, read, and kept supporting this story no matter how many trials it went through and how long it took me to write it. Your encouragement is largely why this story ever got finish, so once again, thank you!

Hope you enjoy the last chapter!

warnings: some sexual situations/lime; the usual norm.

dislcaimer: disclaim'd.

Without further ado...

Thy Soul of Sin
by scelerus animus

Chapter Twelve
Sin Never Tasted So Sweet and So Deadly

"Do you still love him, my lovely doll?"

A lascivious kiss to her swollen cherry red lips, and Kagome drank it all in, knowing that she was poisoning herself with his honeyed lies and cruel taunts but didn't care because that hanyou named Inuyasha had slowly been killing her for years.

"No," she whispered in return, legs encircling his waist as he brutally slammed her against the wall. Naraku had never been nice—deceptively amiable, yes but never truly nice—and she didn't expect, didn't want him to be.

"And you will kill him?" he murmured, more of an amused, derisive statement than an actual question.

With long elegant fingers that tapered into lethal razor claws, Naraku slid the silvery white haori off her shoulder as his lips—velvet, pleasurable sin—traced the curvature of her jaw in a moment of faux gentleness.

But Kagome didn't want gentleness, so she hissed between her teeth and bucked fervidly against Naraku's lean body. Naraku laughed against her skin and lethal claws weaved into chaotic raven locks, pulling viciously.

As her hands fervently slid through his midnight hair, soft and silky like the web of a spider, a secure cocoon of blackness that enclosed her, tickling her flushed skin like smooth feathers, Kagome replied in a breathless tone, "Yes."

As the panted words left her puffy lips, Naraku viciously bit into the tender junction between her neck and collarbone, and Kagome cried out, a pleading sound that seemed all too much like a moan. Kagome knew there was a gleeful smirk gracing Naraku's darkly alluring features, and she also had the faint inkling that this was somehow familiar, though she didn't bother to dwell on the vague thought, too enraptured by the agile hand that presently slid down her chest across all too receptive skin and teased perk nipples.

"And then you will kill me?"

The question was uttered almost innocently, if it weren't for the sultry undercurrent under which Kagome seemed to melt inescapably. Fanatically, her hands traveled across hot skin, as if in a hopeless attempt to absorb some of that warmth into her icy cold body as she too loosened and untied clothing.

Naraku grinded against her, teeth scrapping violently against delicate flesh, vibrant red marks and bloody gashes left in their wake, and Kagome whimpered, bucking again, needy.

Then with a feral growl and splash of scarlet on the tatami in a sickly splat, Naraku forcibly pinned her wrists (all jutting bones and taut ashen white skin) above her head and kissed her, licking the blood from her lips. If sin and immorality had taste (and maybe it did, Kagome thought numbly), Naraku was it, coppery and salty like blood, bitter but so tantalizingly luscious—a kiss of death, if she hadn't felt so lifeless already.

As abrupt and as brutal as it began, the kiss ended and with another far from gentle jerk, Naraku positioned himself, wet heat pressing into wet heat but still not quite there.

A shiny string of saliva linked their lips, and all at once Kagome seemed to be aware of the numerous dribbles of slick blood that oozed down her humming body. She shuddered in (desperate) anticipation and stared—lustfully, she wondered, or simply trying to fill that hollow place in her heart?—into blazing whirlpools of scarlet.

"So, Kagome?" he murmured inquiringly, rolling her name between his fanged teeth (blinding white stained with scarlet) and talented tongue (she had thought it forked, but that had been her imagination).

And as she answered with a firm, unwavering "Yes" Naraku hungrily entered her.

Whispered. "We shall see if you are a liar, Kagome."

Any semblance of coherency or rationality Kagome might have retained was lost into the delicious red haze of pain and ecstasy that instantly overwhelmed her.

.
. ... .
.

One moment, she knew nothing, her life precariously pieced together by fragile jagged fragments and veiled uncertainties, and in the next she remembered everything and realized she was a fool.

Yet it didn't matter, because those precious memories—priceless pearls in a fathomless black sea—for which she had ardently (bloodily, painstakingly) searched washed over her like a burst of the cool, mountain breeze, leaving her pleasantly refreshed and calm but otherwise unchanged.

In fact, it was a divine relief to have that burden (like listlessly sinking into a sand pit, no idea when you will drown) off her road-weary shoulders once and for all.

For she knew all—her past, her identity, everything, everything—and it did not matter in the slightest.

"Don't tell me you still love him, my lovely china doll."

"No, I don't," Kagome answered softly, as to not choke on the thick blood that gurgled in her throat and steadily trickled down her chin, garish scarlet beads of life spilling from her in a mocking rhythm.

Hand still thrust into her chest, claws flexing and ripping at the tender meat of her insides, Naraku callously lifted her body like some kind of meaningless doll to be controlled then thrown aside when one became bored and pressed her against his unnaturally warm body.

Lips ghosting across the sensitive shell of her ear (in a motion so familiar, Kagome knew there was a conniving smirk twisting that acerbic mouth) Naraku acidly whispered, "So why can't you kill him, Kagome? I thought you hated him?"

"I do," she replied and afterward coughed hoarsely, blood spewing from her abnormally colorless lips in a shimmering spray of scarlet (like the fireworks in the future, she dazedly mused, but they were meaningless to her now).

Indeed, she despised Inuyasha with all of the black, black scraps of her heart that still feebly thrived, but that did not mean she could kill him.

In her foolishness, her twisted, vengeful idealism (it still fluttered in her hollow heart like a lost butterfly, Kagome realized, and it would never die), she had thought she could kill him.

Kagome couldn't, however.

She had the ability, certainly. She was dangerously powerful and hauntingly icy and so close to heartless that it scared all others, especially the houshi and the taijya, people whom she had once called friends but whom currently were utterly insignificant.

Yet she wouldn't, couldn't kill this hanyou, her once beloved Inuyasha, who had ripped out her heart, leaving a gaping black wound that would neither heal nor scar, simply bleeding and bleeding for eternity or at least until she gave up on life completely—and he hadn't even deigned it important enough to return it in fleshy, ruined shreds.

"So why can't you kill him, Kagome?"

Just because she was no longer sentimental didn't mean she still wasn't human.

"Because I'm human, Naraku, I'm human," Kagome muttered, a bizarre, sardonic smile twisting colorless lips (their ghostly pallor accentuated more by the luminous scarlet blood), "and that is something you will never understand."

Although he had heard these self-righteous words previously, Naraku paused, scarlet eyes darkening, flickering, as if disturbed by their own impious demons, a hauntingly ethereal ghost that bared a forbidding resemblance to a sapphire-eyed, raven-haired miko that had distorted his own devious game and ruthlessly turned it back on him.

"Will you kill me?" Naraku queried, his velvet voice once again treacherous, scorn filling its intoxicating tenor, like a silk ribbon that wrapped around Kagome's fragile neck in a suffocating spider web.

As if to reaffirm the scathing question, he again flexed his claws buried deeply in Kagome's ribcage, slicing through vital organs like mere rice paper, and Kagome wasn't able to suppress the shrill, tormented cry that escaped her bloodless but blood-smeared lips.

"We shall see if you are a liar, Kagome."

"No."

"Why not?" Another vicious clench of razor claws and a sickly, blood-choked whimper because Kagome had become immune to pain emotionally, not physically.

"Because I expected it of you."

"And that excuses me, my all-knowing miko?" A velvet, mirthless laugh.

"No. I think I could"—a strangled gasp, blood a wet, sickening squelch—"learn to love again through you."

"You're a foolish, albeit lovely hypocrite."

A smile stretched over perfectly aligned, bloodstained teeth.

"So are you, Naraku-sama. But you need me, don't you? And I… I think I need you too."

At this, Naraku paused again, realizations of a fearful, entirely foreign kind gleaming behind poisoned scarlet, and suddenly he withdrew his claws from Kagome, a sneer twisting his lips, an all too apparent mask of malice to obscure the confusion behind it as he assessed the situation.

With a sibilant hiss of wheezy breath between clenched teeth, Kagome swayed dizzily on the blood-encrusted roots of the Goshinboku.

Then, the illusion dissipated.

Finding her balance, Kagome was able to clearly distinguish the rolling clouds of purple miasma that lazily encircled Naraku and her, obscuring them from the houshi and taijiya's view.

Even though there was no sign of the blood that had poured down her slender frame in sinuous waves of glimmering scarlet only moments ago, Kagome did not turn around and instead trained her mutely glowing sapphire eyes (speckled with a growing, startling scarlet but somehow less menacing than before) on the traitorous Inuyasha, who was still immobile and oblivious as ever.

As she almost nonchalantly surveyed him, her countenance remained strangely indifferent, almost serene. No hint of that prior vengeance wrathfully shimmered in those exotic, bi-colored eyes, only a cool acceptance, the pristine expression of the miko she should be.

Even is she wasn't sentimental, she was a miko. She was human, a living, breathing soul, no matter how much of her once ripe, perpetually optimistic heart had wilted into this blackened, gaping void of sin or how much Naraku proclaimed her to be a—his—beautiful, soulless doll.

This is where I say goodbye, Inuyasha, Kagome dispassionately thought as if it was a dream from which she was finally awaking. This is where I say goodbye to you forever.

"Perhaps, I need you," Naraku evenly assented behind her, his manner placid and false.

You are my past, Inuyasha, and I live in my own future, where you are nothing, Kagome continued soundlessly, mindlessly. This was your choice and this is the end.

"However, I merely need you as one needs a doll, a lovely plaything to pass the time," Naraku declared smoothly, and Kagome's smile widened, a longer stretch of bloodless, blood-smeared lips that gave her wintry features more sparkling vivacity than they had possessed in far too long.

"We shall see if you are a liar, Kagome."

But Kagome had realized that they were far similar than they liked to acknowledge, and Kagome took an odd comfort in that. Naraku was as much as a liar as she.

He didn't understand her and thus feared her like he had once proclaimed she feared the unknown.

"You're a liar, Naraku, and have become so lost in these games that you have spun with you spider fingers that you are blind," Kagome retorted, at last turning to face Naraku, that dazzling smile now full bloom across her exquisite, porcelain features (and she does look so enticing to Naraku, beautiful and awash in an aura of bloody scarlet).

"Dolls don't love," Naraku reminded her, in a jeering, wary voice.

"I don't deny that you helped create that person who I am now," Kagome acquiesced calmly, fluidly moving forward, still with the ghostly grace of translucent butterfly fluttering in a surreal reality of her own. "But despite what you think I don't believe you ever truly wanted a doll, because that wouldn't be any fun, ne, Naraku-sama?"

While Naraku observed her with suspicious, narrowed scarlet eyes which Kagome knew as well as she knew her own, she heedlessly lifted her right hand—the one with his mark, burning as strong and red as ever—and, easily ignoring the blood slickly sliding down her tarnished silvery white sleeve like a supple waterfall of clashing red and white, she placed her palm against Naraku's solid chest.

As she expected, there was no heart beat.

Her flawless smile didn't falter for a moment, still as brilliant and tenacious as ever (it was similar to the one she had when she first awoke, and Naraku was undeniably intrigued, fascinated).

Naraku had a demonic heart that didn't beat with life, and she had a hollow bruised wound that leisurely bled her life away.

They were a perfect match.

Idly, she slid her hand over the fine, elegant material of his clothes, across silky skin, languidly following the curve of his neck and jaw, coming to rest on his oddly warm cheek.

He was so warm, wrapped in his bloody scarlet sin and wicked mendacity, while she was cold, adrift in her gentle, delicate human ways and icy, unsentimental beliefs.

They were perfect for each other in this deceptive, juxtaposed game of theirs that no one else could understand, and they savored each beguiling moment.

"Don't you have anything more to say?" Naraku questioned curiously, referring to Inuyasha.

"No," Kagome answered simply, not even bothering to look back.

"And the houshi and the taijiya?"

Casually Kagome's sapphire eyes flickered over to where the houshi and the taijiya had remained, (for what seemed like an eternity but truly no more than a few, timeless minutes),Miroku restraining Sango as they both gazed distressingly at the curling miasma which hid Kagome and Naraku. Kagome lightly shook her head (after taking amused, detached note that Naraku had not returned the Kazaana to the houshi's hand).

In time, perhaps, they would be alright.

Once upon a time, she might have loved them, cared for them, but in that selfless affection she had died for them, and now she was not the Kagome they had known, loved, cherished.

"They are the past and—"

"—They are meaningless," Naraku finished for her, that devious smirk (for which she had unknowingly acquired a fondness, perhaps even love, swept and carefully spun in his sinful silk web) reappearing on those velvet lips, devilishly scarlet eyes as addictive and malicious as ever.

Kagome felt the sudden, insatiable urge to kiss him, so she did, and Naraku responded viciously, tongues warring, teeth biting, nipping, saliva and blood mingling. Bloodstained nails dug into her wild raven hair savagely; razor nails dragged across her skin, carelessly tearing fine cloth and leaving raw, possessive streaks of blistering red in their wake.

Such a treacherous game of illusions and dreams, lies and fantasy in which they had been caught with no chance of escape, an enthralling tortuous game in which they would live together, ruling over all those inferior, and then die together, leaving behind a darkly tempting legacy of sin and power.

And she wouldn't have it any other way.

"So my beautiful doll," murmured Naraku tauntingly, pointed fang trailing casually over her swollen bottom lip, "what shall we do next?"

Kagome knew the word was more tease than malice and she delightedly accepted the challenge with effortless poise, falling into her role gracefully.

"Do you know the bone-eater's well, Naraku-sama?" Kagome dreamily breathed against his skin, the air between them moist and almost tangible like sticky strings of a sweetly poisoned gossamer web that infinitely connected them together. "My mother lives on the other side of the well, and I think we should pay her a visit. For one last goodbye."

With a sinister gleam in his beautiful scarlet eyes, Naraku laughed darkly, kissed her again, and Kagome smiled contentedly into that kiss.

In the next moment, both figures, a striking mural of contrasting realities—light, dark; truth, lie—warped sinfully into one, suddenly vanished in a tumultuous haze of purple miasma.

Contentment was blissful in an all too sinful way.

– Owari –

End Notes: So... review?

Once again thanks so much to everyone who read and reviewed! Hope you enjoyed!

Ja ne!

– scelerus animus o.O