Title - Embody
Pairing - Kikyou/Kagome
Theme - Whisper(s)
Genre - Dark fantasy
Rating - T
Word Count - 3630
Squicks - Implied yuri
Notes - This is something of an experimental piece, written under unusual circumstances. Some readers might find it a little disjointed.
Summary - Anybody can whisper, about love, or hatred, or eternity. And anybody could be listening.

Embody

At the very bottom of the well, it is very dry and strangely bright. Framed by the wooden lip high above her head – which must have spit splinters into her palm as she was pulled over it, she notes with a small sigh – flecks of blue sky blink serenely down at her through the clouds, and light spills along the twisting, curving tendrils of ivy that web the walls, offering their fingertips in the place of a ladder. Cradling her speckled hands, Kagome approaches and plucks timidly at a few leaves. They are thick and difficult to rip, qualities she can only take as a good sign. She still doubts that any plant in the world could hold her full weight while she flails and clambers up its stem, but the well itself was solidly built. There are no loose stones, no gaps in which to stuff her feet and fingers – so this is her only option. She grabs the longest vine and begins climbing, ignoring the hot ache beating on her palms. Overhead, the watching sky slowly grows larger, wider, perhaps surprised by her progress.

Halfway to the top, the knot of leaves beneath her feet snaps apart with a wet pop, like the sound of breaking bones, and the vines shake violently, gasping and hissing as she struggles to hold herself against them, and it occurs to her that she should see the dark, dusty ceiling beams of the wellhouse, not clouds and sky and healthy, green plants. Then she decides that she cannot really be in the well, because that would mean she had in fact been dragged into it by a woman with arms and arms and arms, whose mouth dripped fangs, and that simply was not possible.

But there is no denying the situation she is in. Her body is pressed flat against the wellstones; the dirt from its dry floor has caked her new shoes; trees peek at her as she climbs, living trees that still wear green robes and have not been forced to lie in the shape of a building.

Also, it is very quiet. Moreso than she would have thought possible in the city, but then she sees that the city is not where she left it.

Clawing her way into the clashing, crashing glare of a beautiful place she has never seen before, Kagome calls: "Souta? Souta!"

No one answers. Absolutely no one, save birds and creaking insects and the wind.

She slides from the lip of the well, stumbles, falls and scrapes her knees. They burn, taking up the same painful beat keeping time in her hands.

"Whispers?" she cries.

They are somewhere in the distance; she feels them vaguely like the pain prickling along the last layers of her skin. But they do not answer.

Fighting panic, Kagome scrambles up and dashes after their echoes.

She hears them sometimes. Words, where there are no voices; voices, from a deep, dark maw that her mother calls Don't play near the well. They are soft and sweet – they are scaled in shards of glass – they soothe her, accuse her, and, no matter how many times she reminds them, they coldly refuse to remember her name.

Resonating in the shadowy spaces between her bones, they are named: the whispers. When she was younger, Kagome always wondered why; she has never known them to do anything but scream.

This is a dream.

"Why have you given this to me?"

There are people in armour kneeling before you, as if they have been conquered. Demonslayers.

"You fools."

You are speaking to them.

"You thoughtless, useless, heartless, godless – "

You are screaming at them.

" – motherless, genderless children of a hundred, rutting demons!"

But you didn't really say all of this.

"You cowardly bastards!"

You lacked the courage to do anything more than stare, and think:

"WHY DON'T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?"

Yes, why?

Kneeling – and enduring vehement protests about it from both raw legs – she stares openly at the familiar strangeness of the people staring back at her. She has seen them before. Has, at least, seen all the different components of their homes and bodies, sketched out and described in the books she left sitting on her desk, in her room, in her house – all of which have vanished and been replaced by near-endless forest, by crudely tended fields, by huts made of clay-brick and straw.

These people, incidentally, are mostly women and children – "During the day, women with progeny remained at home, where they spent time not only preparing food and tending their children but maintaining the village itself," page ninety-six of her history textbook said dutifully – and they are dressed in well-worn traditional yukata of the sort that any girl Kagome's age should find mortifyingly out-of-style. So she takes particular interest in a group of girls her age who bend together, clutching their patterned sleeves and sneering at her long, bare legs. After a while, their contempt makes Kagome uncomfortable; she turns deliberately away and folds her hands in her lap, wishing that she had been carrying a sweater or something else she could drape there.

The old woman sitting directly across from her, at least, has decided to overlook her apparently indecent appearance. In most cases, Kagome wouldn't even have cared what some musty witch thought about her clothing – but something is different about this woman. Something besides the glaringly obvious things that surround her, like a circle of painted phantoms.

Perched on her age-sloped shoulders, unseen but not unknown, Kagome recognizes a trace of the whispers. And they recognize her.

Kaede, they say. Over and over again, like a recording: Kaede.

"Kaede?" Kagome echoes, curious.

The old woman flinches away from the name, halting the smooth, accented flow of her speech with a sudden breath. Kagome is relieved; she understood only fragments of what was being said – something about punishment for tresspassing, and "ground untrod for fifty of all years remaining", and a white-magic curse – through the maze of archaic terms and inflections. This place, she decides, is old. Not just this woman and her words; all of what she has said finds resonance here, and women are nodding sternly, holding onto the shoulders of young boys who understand but would rather run off after wandering chickens. It is Kagome who speaks in a jumbled, corrupt tongue, and she had been starting to feel embarassed again.

"Yes," the woman replies, and her one uncovered eye gleams distrustfully.

"Thought so. Do I – " It feels foolish to ask, so she falters briefly – "know you?"

That single, dark eye widens. In surprise or perhaps even outrage at first, but all of that quickly fades away. Then it mists with tears, and Kagome feels an inexplicable flexing of sorrow in the centre of her chest.

Kaede, the whispers say in affirmation, and drift off in a more important direction.

Inuyasha is introduced with such gently wistful nostalgia that Kagome draws close without even thinking. The way his name is spoken suits the place in which he rests; the light is soft and slow, the shadows are hung from long, lean branches like a string of silver beads, and most of all this is the one thing Kagome can name and know on her own: Goshinboku, younger here, and wearing his veil of sleeping magic in the guise of a sweet, sleeping boy.

Kagome rather wished he had stayed asleep, once he was awake. The whispers only flicker with laughter at the sound of his voice, his practiced show of arrogance and ferocity. Then rise up in fear, anger, uncertainty. Then swoop and clash against each other, shrieking about arms and arms and arms.

It is from Kaede that Kagome finally learns the name of the fierce little ball of luminescence leaping with the blood from the split in her side. As it soars into the open air, the whispers make the words Shikon jewel into a terrible song of hatred and clamour with no meaning beyond the pain they see inside it.

"I was very young when it was brought to my sister. A group of demonslayers came and requested an audience with her – I thought they were part of an army, now that I come to it, and that they would take Kikyou away, though they were and they did in a way, I suppose. But never mind. They wore their armour and held their weapons while they knelt for her, and then a man at the front lifted his head and said terrible things about the jewel he had just put into my sister's hand. I don't recall much of it, just that I dreamed of demons for weeks afterward. And Kikyou kept the jewel around her neck from then on, and she killed demons who came to steal it, and men, as well. There were a few of those."

"When they gave it to her – when the demonslayers were kneeling, I mean, and asking her to take the jewel – do you remember if she was angry?"

"Kikyou? Oh, no. She only looked at them, I remember that. She looked at them, and nodded, and that was that."

"I guess it was."

Kagome has been following Inuyasha's sharp, tireless silhouette for hours. Every time she stumbles, his ear twitches backwards; involuntarily it seems, because he always swivels it forward again the moment she calls for him to slow down, and then walks a little more quickly – the rhythm of his footsteps changes just enough to let her notice.

When she becomes too short of breath to shout at him, he finally stops and offers coldly to carry her on his back.

Wishing she had the strength to refuse out of spite, she accepts, though she pulls his hair as she settles herself between his shoulderblades. Accidentally.

"Mama," Kagome says, her young brow squeezed tight with concentration. No lines mark her skin – it will be years before she needs to worry about that – but when her mother brushes the soft, black hair away from her eyes, she can see muscles pinching together, like fingers trying to hold down a particularly elusive thought.

So Mrs. Higurashi cannot help smiling, though she knows that she should try to be serious. "What is it, sweetheart?"

"What do I need friends for?"

"Friends?" For a moment, she is nonplussed. "Is something the matter between you and your friends?" A note of confidence comes into her voice as she grasps at that idea, because it is the only possibility, and one easily dealt with. "Did you have another fight with Ayame?"

And Kagome twists her lips into a suspiciously insincere frown, rolling big, dark, liquid eyes that are sure to enchant all the boys by the time she outgrows her newest summer outfit. Which will be far too soon in her mother's opinion, but – "No, Mama. But why do I have to play with Ayame all the time?"

"Don't you like playing with her?"

"I guess. Sometimes."

"Well, what else would you rather be doing, then?"

A heavy sigh. "I don't know."

There is silence while Mrs. Hirurashi holds her daughter and thinks carefully. Unconcerned with her mother's confusion, Kagome sits in her arms and peels split-ends from her own hair, until she receives the customary pat on the hand and an order not to do that anymore.

"Sweetheart, you don't really need friends the way you need food or water. You can live without them – but I don't think you'd have the best life you could if you tried to live without any friends. Good friends will give you advice, and tell you stories and jokes, and help you if you're in trouble. And – and sometimes they'll get angry at you, or you'll get angry at them – but it will probably be because they care about you, or you care about them."

"Like when I go to the well, and you don't want me to fall down it, so you shout," Kagome offers, with only the faintest trace of sulleness in the tilt of her head.

"Yes, like that."

"So I shouldn't be afraid of them." This, like all central questions that Kagome asks, is not spoken as a question. But it is the important one. It is the thing she has been meaning to ask all along, and Mrs. Higurashi is startled.

"Of course not! You should love your true friends with all your heart. The ones who are always always there for you deserve all the love you can give them. That's why you have to be careful, and have the best friends you can find."

"Okay." Suddenly appeased, Kagome hops to the floor and gives a little bow and goes forward to give her mother a hug and a kiss. "Thanks, Mama."

Mrs. Higurashi smiles, glad to have said the right things. She watches proudly as her daughter hurries outside, off no doubt, to spend the last hours of sunlight with the ones she loved the most.

It makes sense, Kagome decides, even as her mind rebels and her body sinks deeper and deeper into a darkness veined with sharp scents and the harsh bite of practiced magic. As a child, she had always assumed that other children had whispers of their own, and as a young woman had simply accepted them as a fact of her life. Since falling through the well, she'd had her suspicions, but now all of the evidence is gathered in one place – on this bleak, faceless hell of a mountain – and she can see what it means, what she should have known all along.

Lying on her back in terrible, clutching oils, she stares up at Urasae through hooded eyes, summoning the will to lash out. But her concentration is shifting. Her focus skitters and slides as though across a globe of ice, not turning to another purpose but lifting itself from her flesh and crawling, crawling toward something more familiar.

There is another woman standing over her. She is pale and small against the iron sky, and her beauty is stunning. Gazing at her, Kagome feels her grip on herself spasm – she would rather be this new girl, so what is she fighting for? Why is she straining away? Why does it feel wrong to want the thing that stands, slack, at Urasae's side, to want to be it?

Out from the shadows in her eyes, the whispers slide serpentine. They go toward the still, passionless woman with a sort of trepidation that Kagome has never seen from them before, then circle her, thoughtful.

Somewhere far away, familiar voices are crying out. Kagome tries to ignore them.

Don't say my name, the whispers say at last, very softly.

Then they fold around the woman. Things snatch and pull and resist, until finally everything breaks and senseless speech fills the air, ringing against the mountainside though the mountain is not listening even as all the world is uprooted and the shadows are held back by nothing anymore.

In a whisper, Inuyasha says, "Kikyou."

So why are you still here?

A very long time ago – fifty years, to be precise, which may not be that long after all, depending on who's asked – Kikyou came to the conclusion that there was little sense in letting the bastard who'd killed her get away with it, even if she'd once loved him enough to hate him as much as she did now. So she used the last of her strength to strike at him, but the last wasn't enough to make him die – or perhaps some part of herself had rebelled against the intention, which would be even worse – and she died of the shame more than anything else, while he slept and dreamed of the fury in her eyes.

Now that he's awake again, the dream is a dim blur in comparison.

Someone is calling her. Shaking her. Asking – demanding to know – if she is all right.

Someone. Not the whispers. They have fled again, in an auspicious direction, toward significant things, and they are calling her as well, without purpose, without knowing why.

Habit, she wants to tell them, but they cannot hear. Will not be able to hear ever again. Foreign flesh traps them; the body that was once theirs, the mind, the identity. They are not hers anymore, and they cannot hear her.

So she will find them. She will make them hear.

To the sound of many urgent, frightened voices, Kagome wakes from a deep sleep like death and sends her invitation echoing silently down all the lines of power she has ever touched with her stolen soul.

"Kikyou-onee-sama," Kaede says, turning her wide, unblinking eyes to the sentinel trees. "Is there anyone in the world that you love more than most others?"

The question does not come as a surprise, and it troubles Kikyou only a little that her sister's gaze strays immediately to the forest in which Inuyasha has made his home. Soon she will have to be told the truth, or will piece it together on her own, and either way will understand in a way that no one else ever could. But – not yet. Secrecy is safety, and it is alluring and hard to cast away; Kikyou thinks, Only a few more weeks, and smiles faintly at Kaede.

"You, and that is all. Even so, I know what it is that youwould like to know. And I want you to let your heart be at peace, Kaede-chan. Love answers to love, and you will recognize its voice someday, and you will answer it."

The girl sighed. "Yes, but when?"

Turned toward the forest and the mountains, Kaede did not see Kikyou's smile grow warm and bright like the peak of a summer sky. "Truthfully, I don't know. Later. When you least expect it. Only be sure that you look for it in all things, and that you do not turn it away when it does come to you."

"I wouldn't turn it away," Kaede says wistfully.

"You might without ever knowing. Or you may think that it's something you want from a certain person. Remember to be careful; love will give you power over others. Do not refuse it when it is offered sincerely, and don't abuse it when it is yours. Such a thing is fitting only for a man or woman whose heart has died."

"Yes, Kikyou-onee-sama."

"For now, we should simply leave these matters to fate. You have more than enough time to sort them out." Reaching to touch Kaede's hair gently, she adds quietly, "We both do."

Love anwers to love. And so does lust, and violence, and greed, and jealousy, and . . .

When she finally catches up to them, she finds that they have been waiting for her, leading her on, wanting to see her again.

"What for?" she asks, grimacing as her hopeful heart thunders against the misgivings stored deep inside it.

Kikyou lifts her chin, and whispers, "Morbid curiosity."

She is lying wrapped in an dark, impossible spill of velvety hair that is but is not her own. The whispers are a wild chaos all around her, speaking without language, simply filling the wide, empty spaces of the world with the sound of their presence. It is night; the darkness presses close, like a supple body. There can be nothing and no one else in this place they have made; no intruders, no warriors or thieves, certainly no shapes or sounds that have not been familiar since the beginning of memory.

They are perfectly still, folded over and across and all around each other until the whispers finally quiet themselves, like the sea after a storm.

Kikyou makes a soft noise, and begins to reclaim everything that is hers – limbs, hair, clothing, though she spends a moment looking about for something that is, apparently, entirely gone. With all of it clutched in front of her body, she perches in the cold, damp grass, shivering a little – unless that is only a small flicker in Kagome's imagination.

She rises, like the sun and its silver light at dawn. She covers up her body and is dark again, nearly invisible in the night. Only the whispers betray her nearness; she is standing in the tall grass, slender and wary as an ash-gray fox gazing down on prey, or a slumbering enemy, or the wounded mate it must leave behind. She does not speak, and the whispers are in her body now, are her body, and Kagome has accepted that she cannot have them anymore. Not in the same way. Not as she always did. Knowing that, however, does not hurt her as much as could, because now she knows something else: there are other ways.

Perhaps Kikyou senses this. Perhaps the whispers have told her. More likely that she has not, they did not, and she intends never to visit this place or this memory again.

Though Kagome does not see it for herself, Kikyou vanishes in pieces – one slow step at a time – and the whispers with her. She feels it, she hears it, but it must be morning before she can see it; they have gone, in the way that dreams and nightmares go; seeking darkness in the face of dawn.

Hidden behind shadow and steel, a creature called Naraku cradles a girl who cradles a mirror. Human whispers range the small, scented chamber they have claimed, and Naraku is the only one who can hear them, though he often makes it a point not to listen.

They gaze raptly at the mirror, at the things they see inside it. Eventually, he grows tired or satisfied, and has the mirror and then the girl put neatly away until he needs them again. All the light and all the scent and all the world sputter out around him slowly, because he is done with that, too.

He sits alone for a time. Or not alone, but motionless, at least.

In the darkness, a voice says reflectively: then what love there must have been in this heart of mine.