Token
By Rurouni Star

For Will: I promised I would dedicate you a book. I hope someday I will - but for now, maybe this will do.

i

She was cradling the beads gently in her cupped hands when he found her in the hut.

"I'm so sad about it," she said in a quiet voice. "And so angry."

Miroku knelt beside her and watched with a careful lack of expression as her lower lip quivered dangerously.

"It's so stupid, too," Kagome added, afraid she sounded just a little too choked. "It's just a necklace."

That expression turned gentle, now, as he put his own hands around hers. They were warm and caring, and everything she didn't deserve.

"It's all a matter of perspective," he told her. "I'm sure Shippo will understand later."

Kagome could feel her hands trembling. "I yelled at him," she said in a quivering voice. "And it's just a necklace."

He shrugged, and she sniffled, pulling one hand from his involuntarily to wipe at the tears.

"I'm sure you're exaggerating somewhere," Miroku told her. "You're a very warm person, Kagome-sama. I imagine you have a very good reason to be upset."

She had. She did. But oh, she didn't want to remember.

"My father gave it to me."

It came out very small and soft. Because she wasn't sure whether she really wanted him to hear.

He was silent for a moment, and she felt her muscles seizing up with the effort of remaining stolid. But soon, he tilted her other hand just slightly, the beads trickling into his own.

"Sometimes," he said, "keepsakes can be unhealthy."

He left, and she moved to huddle in her blankets with her knees up to her chest.

The next day, he handed her a necklace of similar beads – perhaps the same – and said nothing.

ii

It was Christmastime, not long after, and she was giving gifts. He stared down at his hands where rested a tiny bracelet, set in deep green jade.

"For luck," she told him with a smile.

For longevity, she thought to herself.

Miroku looked at her then, in a strange way, and she noticed something in his eyes. Something he wanted to say, perhaps.

"Thank you," he told her.

But nothing else.

It was possibly more expensive than any other present she had given. But for all that she could tell, he didn't wear it.

Later that night, she almost tore the beads from her neck in frustration, and some inexplicable need to cry. Almost.

A battle later, he opened his hand, and she saw the glint of green wound about his wrist beneath the glove.

iii

When her eyes were dark and her dreams very tired, his hand was cool upon her brow.

"It hurts so much," she told him, uncertain what she referred to.

"Always," he agreed.

His beads clinked against her skin, cool as death and almost as tender. His lips touched her forehead, in the darkness of a frigid, placid night. His fingers brushed the necklace of beads at her throat.

"You shouldn't keep mementos," he told her again, one hand touching his gloved wrist self-consciously.

She burned him into her memory, knowing that anything could happen.

iv

At the dawn of a day among others, he was gone.

They looked with frantic screams, cries of his name echoing into the air to dissolve once more. And for fifteen hours, she believed him dead.

Her memory of a man in quiet stillness returned, but it wasn't nearly enough. Would never be.

But she found him at the river, staring into its moonlit waters, looking like a ghost waiting to die.

"I felt it didn't matter," Miroku told her.

She told him how very much it did matter, and he closed his eyes as though in pain. Guilt returned at the thought of a petty fit at the death of a necklace. Kagome stopped talking then, and only sat to enjoy his company and remember him more fully. Another circumstance carved ruthlessly, surreally into memory, even as he clutched her hand.

v

It was laying on the ground, as green as the swaying stalks of grass around it. But grass did not gleam, and it didn't make her breath catch in her throat like this.

She held it to her chest and ran until she fell, maybe hoping she would die as well.

You shouldn't keep mementos, his memory admonished as it kissed her forehead.

She wished that she could feel it.