Disclaimer: The rights to the series Inuyasha do not belong to me. The following is a work of fanfiction and was written for entertainment only. No profit is made from the writing or reading of this work.
Rated for: Sexuality, adult situations, and language.
Notes: Written as a token of gratitude to my LJ pal and fellow FFN author, NarakuYugureHimitsu, for all her kind feedback.
Grim
©2006 by Kei
She was a girl – a girl in love. She was a girl in love with a supernatural creature. She was a teenaged girl in love with a supernatural creature. It was impossible to not, every so often, see herself in the shoes of this or that young heroine in book or film, or cast herself in the roles of countless female characters from childhood fairytales. Those girls were beautiful and kind-hearted and always won the hearts of the men they loved.
It takes some time (five years) and a few (sixty-two) aborted attempts at making out with him for Kagome to realize that Inuyasha is not some knight in shining armor or an exiled prince in disguise and that she herself is not a lovely and much-sought-after princess or poor but noble village lass who marries into royalty. Her life is not an oddball version of "Beauty and the Beast" with time-traveling.
She knows, in her broken little girl's heart, that Inuyasha doesn't love her. Or, rather, he loves her, but is not in love with her. Every time he looks at her he sees the ghost of Kikyou hovering just over her shoulder like a shadow, even at night when shadows turn invisible. Kagome kind of wants plastic surgery.
She cries at Sango and Miroku's wedding, but not for the reason everyone thinks. She can smile as bright as the sun and say the tears are from happiness, but really she weeps out of loneliness, out of the fact that Inuyasha doesn't want her, out of the fact that a tiny part of her hates Sango, hates Miroku, hates Inuyasha, hates herself.
She also hates Naraku, or Onigumo, or something. She's not sure what to call him now, the bony wraith with the black hair and red eyes and not a trace of demon in him anymore. Something in that final confrontation went wrong, went – strange. There was a killing blow delivered by someone (Kagome can't quite recall who now) and the shards of the Jewel of the Four Souls all became one at the precise same moment, delivering a blinding flash of light to the entire field of battle. When the candescence faded and the dust cleared, a naked human body could be seen, grossly emaciated like the concentration camp prisoners in the awful photos Kagome had to see at school during the World War II unit in history class. Closer inspection revealed that the figure was Naraku, and he was alive, and he also wasn't a half-demon any longer, but human. Everyone immediately called for blood from the unconscious almost-corpse, but Kagome, the kind-hearted beauty of the story, spoke up and convinced all her comrades of the need to show mercy to their fallen enemy.
Kirara had ended up being the one to drag the man—by his hair—to an empty hut in their base village, where he remained comatose for two days. Kaede and Miroku both pasted wards all over the hovel that would keep Naraku in and keep out any humans and demons who might want to kill the being that had destroyed so very many lives.
When he'd finally awoken, Naraku seemed disoriented. Kaede dispassionately explained, while standing just outside the doorway, what had occurred. Naraku had looked like he might explode, but suddenly just went limp and didn't acknowledge anybody after that. From what Inuyasha's nose could tell, the former half-demon was starving to death, which resulted in Inuyasha actually entering the hut and physically forcing Naraku to eat something, telling him in no uncertain terms that he didn't get to die so easily. He kept shoveling food into Naraku until it stopped coming back up, and thereafter arranged with the male villagers for a round-the-clock guard on Naraku to make sure he didn't attempt suicide. Kagome thought then that Inuyasha would probably make a wonderful police officer.
Naraku's long waves of black hair were summarily shaven off so he couldn't strangle himself with them. Kagome, with help from her mother and grandfather, had managed to smuggle a straitjacket out of a sanatorium so Naraku couldn't try any manual method of killing himself. She also struggled numerous plush mattresses across time to provide padding for the entire interior of the hut, so Naraku couldn't bash his skull in, either. The twenty-four hour watch continued unabated, and if occasionally individuals managed to enter and beat ninety-nine percent of the life out of Naraku, nobody said anything. Kagome tended to his wounds, of course, good and gentle heroine that she was. He never thanked her – never said anything to anyone, actually. He stared at everyone with his unnerving crimson gaze until he was backhanded for insolence, but didn't ever make any discernable vocalizations.
He received two meals a day, courtesy of Kagome, who didn't trust anyone else to not poison the prisoner. At first it was only ramen, but she knew one could not subsist on ramen alone and so started varying his food. His feeding had fallen to her as well, maneuvering chopsticks to unresponsive lips and babbling about anything to fill the wretched silence of the space. Naraku's eyes remain always on Kagome's face and sometimes he blinks when she pauses, almost like he is listening, though her rational mind tells her that such cannot be the case.
She's the only one who really speaks to him now, she's fairly sure. The beatings and invectives seem to have tapered off, even the vengeful guards no longer calling out crude taunts when Naraku (or Onigumo, as most refer to him, a taunt that he's now a pitiful human again like the pathetic burnt husk Kikyou cared for all those years ago; only Kagome calls him by his chosen name now) has to piss or shit in the bucket in the corner.
Sometimes she just stays in the room with him, reading books, sometimes aloud, or just talking about nothing to somebody who appears to listen. In this padded place she can escape the reality of her own lovelorn state and how there's no "happily ever after" in real life despite the surreality of her day-to-day existence. She can pretend a little, here, and her secret sorrow will be absorbed by the mattresses and by eyes that sparkle like dark rubies when light catches them.
On the night she accepts that Inuyasha doesn't love me like that she visits Naraku. She sits silently with him, waits for the youth on guard (sleepy, she knows, from a newborn baby and several nights of sleeplessness caused thereby) to doze off, and then removes Naraku's straitjacket. She's come dressed like Kikyou, that red and white priestess outfit, and it's not long before he, as she predicted, is on her, tearing her clothes off and splitting her open like a ripe fruit while she bleeds virginal juices and wonders if this is rape of some sort because she doesn't really want it and she won't be coming but she needs it to take her mind off her emotional pain, twistedly sublimate it into this unsatisfying physical encounter.
Naraku doesn't say anything, even at the peak, then pulls away from her and slides the straitjacket over his own head and crosses his arms, waiting for her to rebind him in the only article of clothing he wears. She does so, cleans up the fluids, and leaves. She burns the priestess garb, bathes, and goes home to sleep. She's not sure what she'll do if/when Inuyasha's damn sensitive nose figures out what's happened. She's not the sweet and beautiful maiden of a fairy-story anymore, and this time she might not speak up and save Naraku's life. She can't even save her own, after all.
-finis-