Humor Me

She was a schoolgirl at heart, and she was bored out of her mind.

In-between hours of restless waking in the dark and dull dozing in the gray, bleak day, she haunted the halls of her captor's fortress, chasing dust and cobwebs out of corners and trying to entertain Kohaku.

One day – whether it was morning or evening, she couldn't tell, for the daylight hours seemed to stagnate, punctured only by the oozing blackness of Naraku's nightfall – she sent her boy companion out to gather discarded rushes, in hopes of collecting enough in the endless unfolding of empty rooms to be able to weave them into little dolls and animals for amusement. The young demon-slayer was eager and strode on ahead of her, and Kagome eventually found herself perusing the damp corridors and shivering open the rice-paper doors in solitude.

Something she had grown accustomed to, the solitude. What had once been a deeply disturbing deadness to her had numbed into a deadened buzz, a sleepiness of or an absence of living. It was in times like these, when the house was empty and when she and Kohaku were left up to their own means, that she could sink with gratitude into the safe-haven of her mind, losing herself to musings that were neither fearful nor desperate.

She hummed a little to herself, stopping every now and then to examine a shadow on the wooden floor, then moving on in search of something that could be of use to her. The heaviness of silence and subsequent pervasiveness of her own movements no longer bothered her. She came to the end of a hallway and halted abruptly, surprised, blinking and glancing around her as if the wall jumped up to meet her from some hidden corner or dark corridor. There was a lattice window, and she approached this, half-curiously, and peered out: but all that met her was the continuous dull-grey of Naraku's realm.

Now she noticed that beneath the window was a low shelf, and as she knelt to examine it, she saw that there were yellowing rolls of scrolls slipped inside.

She let out a little sigh of intrigue and put her fingers on one of the longest; pulled it out; opened it with skilled and gentle fingers.

They were historical scrolls, things she had seen in museums and university exhibits, never before up close. This one was a simple account of tariffs drawn up by the hand of a clerk in some distant province, but she was intrigued nonetheless. Something real and written. Paper and ink. She was nearly euphoric.

She gingerly rolled this scroll and grasped for another. The thing slide out easily, with a generous helping of dust. Kagome coughed and waved her hand in the vicinity of her nose. When her eyes blinked open again, she was aware of a light fluttering near her face. As her sight cleared, she saw a brown but dainty moth hovering and trembling.

Her breath caught.

Something alive.

She put her hand out, reverently, as if to touch it, but the thing maneuvered, flittering here and there in zigzag lines of light, parting the dust with slight slices of paper-thin wings. It seemed to jump up and to the right of her, and she leaned back beaming. It swooped further and made to flit around her.

As she turned to follow, a grim presence manifested itself – whether it had been there all along or suddenly just appeared she couldn't tell – and swiped the moth from view.

She looked up at him, expectantly. The hallway seemed to creak and tighten.

He cocked his head slightly at his extended fist, then twitched it at her, almost inquisitively.

She still knelt on the floor in front of him.

"Please," she said, and her voice wasn't timid and it wasn't brave. It just was. "Please, don't kill it."

Naraku raised an eyebrow like a jagged scar.

They looked at one other, each considering the other's thoughts.

His bottom lip curled. His wrist tightened.

"Wait!" she cried, jumping up and grasping his bare and taught forearm.

He said nothing, but watched her, patiently awaiting her case.

"Just . . . let it go," she pleaded.

His eyes, deep as garnets, searched her face, and she felt herself sag under the weight of his probing.

Measuring what he should do. No doubt searching for a favorable reaction.

This time, he opted for the unexpected.

Lightly, he moved his arm, and it came out of her grasp easily, as if she knew already what he would do.

His fingers came open, like a flower blossoming. Inside, enthroned in the soft center of his palm, the moth sat, confused and trembling. It lingered only a moment, then grasped at its freedom, sprang into the air, and was gone.

He was watching her intently still, marking the softening of the muscles in her face, the grayness that fell away from her like a discarded skin, and the color returning – the first shying rose of a virgin dawn.

An endless intrigue. He couldn't fathom her. What caused her and what made the blood return to her, keep returning, even after he gave it so many reasons to freeze and die?

He didn't know what to think; uncertain whether he preferred this reaction or the other, the one where her light failed, eyes misted with pain and distance. Either way, his satisfaction spread deep when he could solicit a response from her. He liked to touch her, like a subject to stimuli, to record in his insidious memory the quality, shape; taste, smell; length, duration, and texture of her where he touched her. Where his existence inserted itself, uninvited, into her own.

This rarely included physical touch. But today – whether it was the tangibility of the moth or the sudden lightening of the dark into less-dark – he felt like feeling her.

A faint pressure arrived at her throat.

Her chest deflated with a sudden exhalation of breath. His thumb touched her collar bone and his fingers splayed and rested over her shoulder, stroked the roots of her neck. She leaned back, instinctively, eyes widening, pupils dilating.

But he leaned forward into her. Put his face near her cheek, then lowered so that he could listen to the pulse of blood in her throat. Her breath coming shakily, irregular.

This however, did not please him today. His eyes were far and the line of his mouth wide and faint. He pushed away from her, lightly but not tenderly, unsatisfied.

As Naraku sliced around and walked swiftly away down the corridor, long robes sighing complainingly, he wondered at his own elusive intentions with the miko. He was growing angry and unsettled. What once had pleased him no longer satisfied. It no longer contented him to nudge her around his fabricated maze of smoke and mirrors, of pain and pleasure, promises and threats. No, it would not do. It was not enough, yet he had nothing else.

Lord Naraku was at a loss.

(And that did not bode well for Kagura, who was to show the fruit of his frustration in blossoming plum-bruises very shortly.)

At his back, tucked into the end of the hallway where the shadows moved as if finally released from the hanyou's spell, Kagome softened. Closed her eyes; then opened them. She looked down into her hand and realized that she still grasped the bundle of browning straw she'd scavenged for Kohaku's game. When she looked back up – spied the last undulating inky locks of the enigmatic demon lord disappear into a dim corridor – she wondered.

And she wondered at what point she had started to wonder about him.