Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha, I don't profit by this in any way, shape or form. This is written simply for my own, personal (disturbed?) amusement. This disclaimer applies to all chapters of this story.
There's a lot of adult things though nothing explicit is described. For the sexual abuse (and physical abuse) and other horror elements, I'm giving it an M rating.
PLEASE NOTE: This was not meant to be easy or light reading. You've got to read between the lines. You've got to interpret and infer what's happening by examining what's said and isn't said. It's not a PWP, lemon, etc, if you came here thinking it was erotic you will be disappointed.
"Honey For Kagura" by Abraxas ( 07-11-14)
The flames quivered and the shadows flickered across the cavern. The air that burst through the tunnel threatened to overwhelm the light with the darkness. Yet the danger did not materialize. While the current was steady it was not strung enough to extinguish the torch.
Still the boy feared its going-out.
He was already unsettled just with that creature keeping behind and out of sight. To add a layer of blindness meant to be unprepared to face the worst of its intentions. And with the demon it could be lethal.
"Why do you slow?" it asked as if unaware of its effect.
"Lord Naraku," replied Kohaku. "There's a sound ahead."
"Yes, a familiar sound is it not?" The thing that looked like a man adjusted its pace to remain behind at arm's length away from the servant. "But you heard it when you entered the cave? And you know what it is?"
"It could be many different things, Lord Naraku."
"Why do you not know what it is?"
It was not emotion but lack of it that frightened the boy. The creature could have scared a man dead with a whisper – so inhumanly calm was its temperament. The very model of the anti-Buddha.
"I heard it but she did not let me see all of it."
The only defense was truth. No matter how mundane or intimate the observation. If even a syllable was a lie Lord Naraku knew it.
"What would be the purpose of this place?" it mused freely while gazing onto the servant's naked and exposed skin, looking at the tension of the flesh, the outward signals of inward consternations.
Then, as if to answer, the universe summoned a bee. The insect swarmed above the light of the torch. It caught fire and flew. Away, it exploded like a spark, like embers of incense it fell into nothing.
"She did not tell me," he replied. He wanted to add that she did not confide with him but thought better of it.
"You do not tell a lie, my Kohaku." Lord Naraku grasped the servant's shoulder. "Yet, you are not familiar?"
"I saw what she wanted to me see but I remember things."
"I know you do."
The hand tightened its grip.
"What do you remember, my Kohaku?"
Kohaku was tormented by another weird touch too when the secrets of the cave were revealed; he recalled it then and there as if it happened anew.
"Stupid little things," Kagura said, betraying fragments of love as if taken by the suicidal drive of that conjugation between bee and flame. "Stupid little things." Reflexively, unaware of any other expression, she clutched and pinched the boy.
A heavy, sticky urn almost slipped through Kohaku's fingers.
It was true that Kagura did not confide with him but by that he meant she did not reveal the plan explicitly. There were other things she exposed from time to time. Things designed to lure him into a world where if he were not careful it would be destruction: in effect extorting him into silence by making him accomplice to crime.
So it was with a mix of excitement and dread that he followed her onto the grassy slopes between the two ridges. Before them, upon the façade of a rocky dome, was a long narrow slit. It opened, it seemed, into the forbidden.
Kohaku approached and was met by a warm, humid air.
Within, the cave was an organic, gray-like world. Forms were fuzzy and indistinct. The effect induced the disorientation of a fever. But that discomfort subsided as the details came into view. The walls were rough. The floor was littered by fallen and scattered rocks. There were shards of pottery and remains of fires. The area had been the site of activity and what remained of it that had not fallen victim to time were vases sealed by wax.
Bees congregated about the urns.
Kagura flick the fan and the insects dissolved.
"It arouses them, those little fools," she explained. "Hurry, boy, you shouldn't linger."
Kohaku grabbed an urn and followed Kagura who lead deep into that dome-like hill. The demon carried a torch and with its light he caught a trail of sorts already etched into the dirt. Doubtless other, stranger objects had been dragged through the passage.
As they trekked they heard that sound.
At length there was a curtain – it parted and he stepped into the chamber. She placed the urn amid a pile of other, fallen and cracked vessels. Their contents dripped onto the ground while bees flew everywhere. But it was that wash of smoky blue light coloring the world with the shades of nightmare that scared him away.
Kohaku was unsure, however, if what he recalled was real or imagined – or a mixture of the two – so much of it escaped memory.
Kagura's hate and love were intertwined. Pain and pleasure were so mixed that he did not believe she knew she hurt him. He supposed she thought it was normal for affection to be brutal.
What else could be learned form Lord Naraku's example?
He did not fault her and knew better that to suffer openly. To express pain was to show weakness. In a world of demons humans did not reveal the breaking point and live.
Kohaku knew there was a problem with Kagura long, long before he had been permitted a glimpse of the plot.
It was when he entered the dungeon. He could have screamed at what he found. If there were not a litany of things seen and done infinitely worse.
Yet there it was: Lord Naraku was laughing while a figure was writhing. It, whatever it was, wailed what could have been a scream muffled by a hand. But there was not a hand any more than there was a mouth as there did not appear to be lips. The thing, that looked grotesque and deformed, defied understanding with its lack of feature.
Indeed, it took more than a few moments to realize just what it was and the truth of it was worse.
Chained onto the wall, slumped as if exhausted, was Lord Naraku's latest victim covered by wasps. Draped by sheets of wings intertwined with legs. Whirling, prickling, mindlessly crawling and poking into the body. Everywhere.
With a nod from the master the insects disappeared and revealed Kagura.
She was naked. Her flesh was swollen and red. Beads of sweat trickled from her brow to the stone.
Lord Naraku whispered into the demon's ear then retreated, passing by Kohaku almost ignoring the boy.
Kagura remained chained while insects were free to straggle about the intimacies of her body.
He remained within the shadows, watching and staring – aching. Amid scars and bruises he realized how beautiful she could be. And he felt a rush of guilt realizing she was pained while he was taking advantage from the distance.
Kohaku found the woman's kimono upon the floor. He approached while she followed him with those cold, stabbing eyes. He was about to cover the demon when he noticed a wasp suckling about the cleanly-shaven hairs of a region that drew his most complete and natural attention.
The wasp crawled between folds whose swelling seemed to be exaggerated beyond normal – the thing was fascinated by a sweet-smelling drool-like ooze.
He withdrew, he recalled, the odor of honey lingered about his fingers.
To be safe from the miasma, Lord Naraku allowed him to sleep at the gatehouse out of the castle. One night, while struggling with sleep, he caught sight of Kagura slithering into the wilderness. For many a night afterward he noticed the event repeat – especially when ever there was a lull with that war against the Seekers of the Jewel.
He was not suspicious rather curious. It could not have been a mission from the master. The spider did not trust Kagura to go alone.
He did not know how to express that curiosity until there came a break with that routine.
Under the moonlight, blanketed by the calm of silence that surrounded the castle, she sighed while he sat, tying his kimono, whipping away a tear involuntarily shed. She collected him onto her lap violently and without warning. She held his face against her warmth which, rocking back and forth, was exposed. Flesh upon flesh.
Again he gazed and again recovered the woman though resistant and hesitant.
He only wanted not to be alone.
He always sensed in Kagura a kinship as both struggled to be free of Lord Naraku. That could not be revealed. It would have been destruction to express it aloud. Even to intimate the idea. But what if it were confessed in silence by action?
To profess with action what was forbidden with word?
Suddenly it became clear why she had been so bold. She wanted to know he could be trusted – and she would have known it if he returned the exposure of vulnerability. Before she withdrew again he held her shoulders and stood in front of her face.
It became the new and secret ritual. A substitute for open communication. The language with which to express not love but a bond of trust forged out of the fear of that demon.
The beauty of it was its deception – how easily it could be misinterpreted! Even if Lord Naraku discovered it, the monster would not have thought it as anything but a mere corruption between a woman and a boy. It could not have imagined what that physicality truly meant.
Eventually together they crept out of the hut and into the woods. Soon the trek was supplanted by a flight upon a feather. Until they landed upon that clearing within the field of flowers.
He watched while she collected the buds a few of which were open at that time of night.
He offered to help but she cursed: "There are places you do not go."
"Could there have been another side of Kagura you were not aware of?" Lord Naraku asked.
To be sure there were times he slipped and forgot it was not love. Outside of that routine a great many things were not allowed. The danger was there that it could be used against them.
The source of her pleasure remained elsewhere, unknowable and unimaginable.
Yes, she must have found another outlet that satisfied the needs of her mind and body. Collecting flowers and taking them into that cave. For what purpose he did not know. Even those occasions when he was allowed into that complex the plan was beyond grasp. If there was a plan.
The hot, humid air. The hum echoing about it. The sweetness that flavored it.
It was mimicked only by the honey-like odor about his fingers every morning and those sticky drops of stains about his sheets that he knew were not of his own making.
Whatever it meant he understood it encoded the secret of Kagura's passion.
Toward the end he stopped the ritual. It was too hard to continue. The machinations were alarmingly violent and sadistic. Worse, that she expected him to be like her and he could not bring himself to be that hurtful.
She suffered and seemed to spiral into a pattern of self-destructive tendency, garnering punishment after punishment at the hands of Lord Naraku – and those wasps.
Was that not the secret, then, that she wanted to be tortured?
The inflicting of pain, to Kagura, was it the equal of a lover's kiss?
If so then it had been true intimacy. Physical and emotional. He had not grasped it fully until it was denied. He panicked, worried that his rejection of her motives would be seen as a repudiation of the bond between them – which was not at all what he meant.
Yet, when tempered by thought he realized it had not been complete intimacy anyway. There was that secret always withheld. There was that place always denied. And when he considered those liberties to which innocence had been sacrificed he could not help but wonder what could have been deeper?
What was going on in that cave?
Kohaku attempted to resume the pattern. At fist she did not min. until he gazed upon where curly, short hairs used to be. Now only stumps of black remained scattered about hot, red and swollen skin. She shaved again, he thought, offering the relief of his hand. But she slapped away his touch after that moment of contact. Brief as it had been, the instant of stolen intimacy revealed to him that those were not stumps of hair.
As if to apologize for that violence she answered his offer of comfort with a kiss that drew as much blood as it suckled pleasure.
"Here," Kohaku answered. He stopped and looked back at Lord Naraku. "I don't understand what's beyond it."
In front of the two was a curtain of feathers like the kind Kagura used to fly. It swayed as the torch shivered since both were caught by the current. The air that escaped the chamber yet undisturbed.
Lord Naraku slipped into the entrance – while it tried to be careful the curtain was knocked aside and tumbled, melted onto the ground.
Kohaku saw the creature's figure crawl by an object at the center of the room. It studied the figure a few moments. It knelt and hovered over what remained unknown and indecipherable to the boy. Suddenly the beast arose and returned.
When the face of Lord Naraku was again in Kohaku's view the boy felt he did not understand how he survived the seeing of it. He tied not to acknowledge that visage upon its features revealed by the light. He tried to forget it was possible that it existed. That expression – which was magnified into the proportions of nightmares by the goo smeared across its lips.
"Magnificent," it uttered.
Entering next Kohaku was, again, washed by that dim blue light whose source were the cracks along the ceiling through which filtered daylight. The sound was irrepressible. And at last he realized it was the chamber itself that hummed with the life of bees.
The goo dribbled from the ceiling to the floor where it pooled.
It was honey and its keepers guarded it jealously.
But he was not after a drop of it.
At the center was that slab upon which lay the body of Kagura. She was naked, her legs elevated and parted as if she had been giving birth at the moment of death. A twisted grimace of release and torment was spread across her face.
Her stomach was bloated and he drew aback just at the sight of its flesh crawling.
There was activity within the body!
Suddenly his eyes scanned the red, swollen muted lips marked by countless points of black. As many bees were dead and mixed about the hairs. Then one, then two, then a hive of insects burst through that silent slit.
END