A/N - Children can get funny ideas into their heads, remember. And so can grown men.
Seven Days Deep
Kikyou says:
Often, he is quiet, very quiet, but he can speak yet, and will if he feels lonely or frightened. Do not fault him for his chosen words; they leave his lips and are gone from his mind. You see, he has lived as a callous man for so long, and he knows that death is scenting for him. It is not our judgement that he fears now. You see. Remember to stay calm. He will be secure in your care.
Kaede replies:
Sister . . . I am not a healer like you. But I suppose - if I must - if you say so.
Kikyou says:
Yes.
On the morning of the first warm, dry day he lies still and pretends to sleep until the sun slants hot and vindictive through the trees, scouring the raw membranes that have begun to coalesce over his burns. Kaede picks her way down into the cave's humid belly an hour before noon and sees him stirring feebly. The silvery wing of her shadow spreads like plague across the floor, consuming him.
Sweat-damp, she shivers and hesitates. There is a corpse here with her, in the ground under the grass. Moving.
He can speak yet.
He startles himself awake with a whisper that echoes in the small, filthy space. He blinks in the dusky, distant light - almost, Kaede thinks, as though he has never known the day before - then looks directly at her and begins to cry.
This is a possibility Kikyou failed to mention; stranded without explicit orders, Kaede stands limned in light, holding an armful of bandages and blankets and little brown ointment jars, simply staring. Eventually it occurs to her that she must go to sit at his elbow, so she does, dabbing his tears with a clean white cloth that comes away pink and oily under her fingertips.
"It's, it's bright," he says, stricken; "make it dark again. My arms, all over my arms, what's, what's on them, where are they? Hello? Please; I smell smoke. Please, hello?"
The first time, that first morning she hears him speak thus - his voice so small and wretched, his lips squirming like tormented worms - her heart forgets its confident pace and stumbles over the sharp points of her ribs. She has never felt anything like it; such a precise kind of pain, ghostly next to his obvious suffering but still kindred to it, tempered by his every sigh and grimace.
Without thinking, she takes his hand that first time, on that first day. Heat sings through the slender bones of his fingers, and a clear fluid thicker than sweat or spit weeps between their palms, reeking sweet in the close, stifling air.
Gleaming in the dark mess where a face should be, his eyes creep wide and he says, "Ah," then pauses thoughtfully and screams. He heaves himself toward the soothing shadows beyond her reach, out of her hands. He is a wounded animal in a state of sharp, disjointed lucidity, knowing pain, knowing that he must escape it. Spots of blood bite into the yellowed bandages looped about his body - swelling and merging like great, scarlet banners along his flanks - but he seems not to acknowledge that new damage, as if it is made less somehow by desperation.
At last, drawn up against the dirt wall, he shudders and lies down in a puddle of flesh and fluid, regarding her with hate-glazed eyes. Every breath rattles alarmingly in his throat, and Kaede feels her broken heart sink when she imagines how Kikyou would scold her for her carelessness.
"Forgive me," she says to him, reaching out on hands and knees. "Have I done wrong?"
He laughs at her, vomiting curses and bile.
Kaede waits patiently for him to finish, then crawls forward and eases him onto her lap, swaying and crooning and stroking his head, until finally he admits that all of the fire has gone out of it.
"Back to finish me off, are you?" he whispers on the second day, leering with the half of his face that still obeys him.
Kaede stops, clutching the collar of her dirty robes in a tiny, white fist. The shadows swim before her, and light throbs at her back, releasing the soft, slim figure of her sister into the hollowed earth. Bending like a willow branch, Kikyou whispers to a halt, touching the deep cleft between Kaede's shoulders.
"Onigumo," she says, eyeing the tangle of cloth and skin on the cave floor. Reflexively Kaede catches at her sister's long sleeve as she passes, but knows better than to pull her back. She would have to explain herself; she would have to admit yesterday's foolish mistake. "You promised to be kind."
Scabs crack and seep, drawing a network of grooves around his cagey smile. "That was two whole days ago."
"Kaede tells me you wept again."
He looks aside. "Well."
In the uneasy silence hooked to the end of that single, wavering word, Kikyou moves though the dark spaces around the man. She is elegant, nearly phantasmal. Her hands drift and plunge like ethereal birds, seeking out weak flesh. Kneeling at the man's side she inspects his wounds and their dressings, and seems not to notice Kaede's reluctance to join her.
"Is that all she told you?" Onigumo asks at last. There is a sudden ferocity to his voice, hungry and focused, as though a wolf's tongue has grown from the lesions in his ruined mouth. He even growls when Kikyou begins to clean his blisters.
"Why? Was there something you had hoped she would say?"
He does not answer immediately. Kikyou leans over him to daub at the other side of his face and he devotes himself to the sight of her. By the time she is satisfied with his dreadful appearance, most of the rancor has gone out of his narrow eyes. "She sure doesn't have your hands," he mutters thickly. "That's all. That's for sure."
Cautious and quiet, Kaede creeps inside and drops into a crouch as quickly as possible. Something is rushing in her head - blood, or else gratitude, thick and overwhelming - with enough violence to make her sway. She has not been accused and marked out as a foolish little girl. She will not be reprimanded.
Kikyou makes a very soft, kind sound - of gentle understanding, Kaede supposes - and slips deft fingers into Onigumo's wrappings, peeling them away like dead petals.
"No," he says petulantly. "Make her do it."
Expressionless, Kikyou takes her beautiful hands away, shifting aside to make room. Kaede knows that she is proud despite her stillness, that she thinks the first day went well, and though it is wrong to let her older sister believe this lie of omission, she only bows a little and slinks close to obey.
She has never been very good at lying to Kikyou, but lately she is even worse at telling the truth.
On the third day, Onigumo finally asks for her name, and then scoffs when she gives it to him.
"That's it? Is that it?" Looking up at the blank rock above him, he seems disgruntled, even offended. It makes Kaede unhappy, to have her name met with the same reaction as a particularly vile insult. "Not very nice, now, is it? Not as nice as your sister's."
"No," she says, which is true enough; Kikyou is the more auspicious name, to be sure.
He is silent after that, aside from the gentle tune he hums, comforting the shadows as they recoil from the sun. Realizing that he has no interest in speaking with her anymore, Kaede frowns and pushes a handful of soiled bandages into the basin of water steadied between her knees. Tinted bronze and running thick as pond scum, the filthy water makes her effort meaningless; it should have been changed as soon as she arrived, but she does not relish the idea of carrying the heavy thing all the way to the creek and back.
"Yesterday," she says abruptly, and Onigumo turns his head to watch her; "That was cruel. And then kind. You didn't need to do that."
"Which?"
"Either. Both."
"No," he agrees. "I didn't."
"I'm glad you decided not to tell her."
"It doesn't matter. The longer you wait, the worse - " His chest heaves and convulses, and Kaede cups her hand beside his mouth to catch whatever is coming up - "the worse, so much worse it'll be when she finds out you're a failure."
Nose wrinkling delicately, Kaede thrusts her arm into the water and scrubs, looking mournfully at the chunks of tissue that bob to the surface. She pokes at them with a finger, trying to press them all from sight before any reappear. "Don't talk about things getting worse."
"What? Oh."
There is a lull. Bemused, Onigumo has nothing to say to her, and she thinks there is a good chance they are both happier that way.
Finally she stands and informs him that she will be gone for an hour, fetching fresh water to clean his body. When he fails to reply, she repeats herself more loudly, and he spits something dark at her feet with a sour look on his face.
"Your sister," he murmurs, "your Kikyou; she wouldn't happen - she certainly wouldn't happen to be a virgin." Squirming under his blankets like a serpent, he twists painfully to look at her where she stands at the mouth of the cave, basin in hand. "Would she?"
Kaede has only a vague understanding of what that is, and she tells him as much.
He looks at her, thoughtful, and then smiles unpleasantly. "I'll explain it to you, maybe, when you get back."
Something in his voice, in his manner, makes Kaede uneasy. The light and the outside are suddenly very tempting, so she only says, "Fine," and hurries off, though not quickly enough to avoid hearing him say, "Because she's so pretty and clean. Little peach, unbruised, unbitten."
Kaede says:
Sister, he's not a good man. I've talked to him. I've looked after him carefully, because I know you want me to, but he - well, he asks me so many funny things.
Kikyou says:
I know, Kaede. There is little else we could expect. He is dying.
Kaede asks:
Sister? Are all people so ugly underneath their skin?
The fourth day is a short one because Onigumo is in a foul mood, hissing obscenities at everything; the earth, the sky, the shapes of the shadows drifting along the back of his eyes, and - most of all - at Kikyou. As Kaede had expected her sister is absent again, but he speaks as if she is there, listening, and he crows in victory, laughing as he imagines the way she might look, growing troubled, growing restless.
Having endured his cruel monologues for hours, Kaede finally leaps to her feet and shouts at him, throwing words like stones to stun him into silence. Before he can retaliate she bolts from the cold damp darkness, running out to meet the sunlight, running the way he never can, ever again. She lifts her skirts up to her thighs. Trees flicker past her and the tall grass slashes at her bare legs. With one small hand, she catches the heads of wildflowers, breaking them from their bodies, casting them into the sweeping, open air.
Sunset burnishes the western arc of the sky and she turns toward home, breathless, elated.
That night she does not sleep well. Her dreams are vultures, circling around and around the image of an ugly man who lies helpless and cold in a maze of lightless catacombs. Wolves fall upon him, sniffing out his scent in the dark, and she wakes up violently, crying, in the instant before they tear out his throat.
"I didn't like what you said about Kikyou," she tells him, once he wakes to meet the fifth day and his whimpers have been quieted.
"I know," he replies. His voice is getting worse, and there always seems to be a thin gloss of blood on his lips. "I'm sorry, I am. I don't know what was wrong with me. Don't leave me like that again."
"I won't. But I don't forgive you."
Raising his head the fraction of an inch he can manage, Onigumo fixes her with a clear, guileless stare and says nothing. That, somehow, is more unsettling than all of the threats he has snarled at her, and all of the odd questions he has ever asked. More deliberate, like a carefully planned crime.
"Yet," she amends quietly.
He lets his head drop back onto the pallet beneath him. Wincing, Kaede reaches under his neck, making certain that he is not pushing the bones into an awkward position. His skin sucks at her through its wrappings, and she can believe for a moment that the linens wound around him are the only thing holding the meat to his bones. It feels as though he is going to liquid, dripping away. She wonders what it would be like to walk here one morning, stoop low and see nothing in the cave's darkness except for a thin line of wax, slithering downhill to join the river on its journey out to sea.
Cradled in the crook of her arm, he lies very still, his eyes shut against the sunlight.
Resting; or else dead.
The air stops in her throat. She tries to call him, is at first unable to make a sound.
"Onigumo?" she whispers.
Lit by the sun, his eyelids are nearly translucent. His veiled pupils swivel toward her, dark as bruises. "So how old are you?"
She is surprised. Then angry. "Young."
"Not even ripe yet," he mutters, and shifts slowly out of her grasp.
Six days they have spent together, and - in the long, golden moments just before the sun disappears - Kaede considers him without his burns for the first time.
He is not, as she had been assuming, physically repulsive by nature. Below the scabs and oozing sores, his jaw is smooth and his cheekbones are crescents, perfectly shaped. It is difficult to judge his appearance, she realizes, because his true face is gone, smeared with unfair mutilations.
"Who burned you?" she asks, staring openly.
He looks away.
Fluid is leaking out of him constantly now, in thickening ribbons. To Kaede, it seems that the terrible, stinking blotches on the underside of his bandages must be the last dregs of his soul, slipping through every available crack. He is dying, and his body knows it - each day it relinquishes a little more of itself, handing bits of hair and muscle back into the earth. She watches the pieces go, finger by finger, and does all she can think to do. She exchanges discoloured bandages for clean ones twice a day, as tenderly as she can. She lets him talk about anything at all, even her sister, and he usually behaves well, using neutral words, a soft voice.
Usually; not always.
"What a bitch, though," he chuckles. "Here I am, her discovery, her secret, and where is she? Where? Bitch, where?"
"I don't know," Kaede answers, annoyed despite all her efforts to be understanding.
"Neither do I. Probably off with some boy. Some pretty boy with a girl-face and all his goddamn skin still on. Not a virgin anymore, if she ever was. Right? Little one; right?"
That is what he has taken to calling her: little one.
"I'd rather not talk about Kikyou anymore."
He nods wisely. Even the slightest motions pain him now, but he loves to nod his head - like a sage, a grizzled elder. Once he starts, Kaede is often unable to make him be still again. "Tough being her sister? I'd imagine. Everybody wants a piece of her, but you're only this big, so if no one looks down, no one sees. Poor little one."
"You should stop talking."
"It's that - thing, though."
"What thing?"
"That thing around her neck. Jewel. Beautiful. Absolutely damn gorgeous. If I got her on the ground, wearing just that. Perfect."
Another handful of his skin slops into the bowl filled with sticky, unsalvagable linens, and then Kaede goes completely still. She is careful to look at the wall, not Onigumo's raw, contorted face, and she bites down on her tongue to be sure that she will not respond.
"Perfect," he says faintly.
She looks at him, hoping that all of the breath is about to go out of him.
"Hey, little one; any chance you'd try to steal it for me?"
Silent, Kaede stands and walks out into the night without looking back.
The seventh day will be the last. She has told herself this, and intends to make it true, no matter what Kikyou will think or say, no matter what Onigumo does when she lets him know he will die here, unguarded and unmourned.
The last. It will be the last.
Inside the cave, it is difficult to breathe. Hot and thick and sweet, the air rolls down Kaede's throat like candy, rotting her insides. Beads of moisture glisten on the walls, and the smells of decay and fear and arousal beat at her with closed fists, trying to drive her back.
She lurks in the safety of the sun's glare, a demon of the light. She wonders if, perhaps, her courage has run out, leaving her unable to move from where she stands.
"So," a smoky voice calls. "Little one."
Summoned, she goes to it.
Onigumo is propped up one side by a angry, violet blister; fingers of it curl around to the front of his body, interrupting the wet gleam of peeling skin. He has torn the bandages away from his torso, leaving them strewn across his legs like gutted snakes. His breathing is irregular, catching and tearing on the barbs in his throat. Hooking onto the sight of her, his eyes curve, mimicking the shape of a smile.
She kneels beside him.
"You won't see me again. Or my sister. You'll die soon, and we won't come back for you." Creases dig strange shadows into her brow. "I hope at least that the pain will be over quickly."
He spits at her. Tries to, but chokes on ichor instead.
She bends over him, and puts a kiss onto his lips, finding his mouth soft and warm with blood. Briefly, he is quiet and still, feigning death.
She withdraws, taking the taste of coal from him like a parting gift.
She says: good-bye.
He says: there's nothing good about it.
A bright spot among shadows, she retreats. Nodding to herself. Not looking back.
The sun bleeds away. Onigumo lies awake, alone; until at last a deep, heartless chill overcomes the world outside, and the stars open like eyes, and - feeling no pain - he regrets nothing anymore.