A/N - For LJ's 30shards. (may/11/2007: Old, awkwardly styled, melodramatic. I do believe my work is finished here.)
Title - Stagger
Pairing - Kikyou/Kagome
Theme - Memories
Genre - General
Rating - 13+
Length - About 4100 words
Squicks - Nope
Summary - We live our lives from beginning to end, slowly earning the right to forget.
Stagger
For as long as she can remember, Kikyou has remembered.
Against her will, against the grain of her old, holy wisdom, it rises in her like the tide – it closes on her like a tireless animal – it simply happens when she cannot bear to look upon a world that no longer has any place for her, and she closes her eyes, and she gives herself up to the black beach of blindness. The remembering waits for her there, on a shore that has never known the turning of the winds or the cries of greedy gulls; the waves have faces – hands – names – and they reach for her, over and over and over again, scrabbling with silver fingers, curling inward and slinking back and rushing at her, because she is their mother, their centre, the unfufilled promise of their salvation. They call. She hears them. And, though she can rarely make out the words, she always remembers their voices.
She remembers.
Like laughter and the immortal threat of death, it is something that all living creatures must endure: remembering. But Kikyou is not alive. But the threat of death grew bold and closed its black jaws on her head fifty years ago. The memories should have been squeezed out, the bowl of her broken skull licked clean.
She wonders; if not through death, how does one escape from remembering?
The memories reply; one does not.
When she sleeps, all of the frightened, flowing faces twist into masks of anger. Clumsy fingers sprout claws. Fangs crowd the mouths of her friends and family, lancing through their soft lips, gleaming as they gaze up at the peak of the missing sky and weave her name into a song of cobbled echoes.
Locked in the dark, she watches them learn to stand, gouging each other's flanks as they shamble toward her. Sleek, pale bodies, lurching then walking then gliding like ghosts, pressing close enough that the darkness thins and their claws slip through. Cold hands curl around her waist and arms; flinted talontips press the shallow valley between her collarbones.
The priestess who carries the jewel, they howl. The purest of all, she does not live in a bone-dust body!
With a violent tug, they wrench her apart. Her flesh falls to powder, and firelight flickers quicksilver along the icy hands through which she crumbles.
only a dream only a dream
It is not a dream. It is another memory, the most bold and fearsome of them all, stalking her without doubt or shame. Incandescent with the power it holds over her, it flares in place of the spark of life, feeding her, being fed, shifting restlessly as she watches until the details are clouded, shrouded, and she can be certain of nothing anymore.
All it lets her know is that she felt something sharp and cruel pass through her body, and then she was being burned away, away, away, until she knew nothing at all.
No one thinks that she is holy anymore and, though Kikyou knows this probably true, she can hardly help feeling betrayed. Once, long ago, she had something; a glimmer, a mote of magic that repelled monstrous creatures intolerant of virtue – and everyone knew, and everyone saw, and they drank it in, sucked it from her skin, leaving only the dry, damned husk of her body behind. She would have stopped them, if only she had known what was happening.
If only. Wind on the water, whispering in the back of her mind; if only.
If only she had never heard the words if only. She imagines her life would be better, or at least much less complicated; the knots and tangles tied up with strings of regret would be loose, dangling from her fingertips – she could toss them upward and hang weightless, suspended from the clouds.
She would. If she could.
If only.
But the clouds cannot carry her heavy heart, and she has no way to bind herself to them; all of her snarled strings are already attached to things that live in the black ocean behind her eyes. Perhaps that is why the memories will not leave her; she has bound herself to them, and has no knife to cut them free.
She imagines her life would be better if she did. She imagines blades and insults and other sharp things with the dreadful, wild hunger of a demon, and all she has now is all she once scorned.
Sometimes, when her wanderpath carries her to the edge of a flat, silent pond that lies like crystal scum beside a forest or a field or the first shattered cliffs carving out a stairway up into the mountains – sometimes she bends low and stares at herself in the water. Stares the way the villagers must have stared; hardly thinking, hardly breathing, only freezing, gazing, drinking. Never blinking. Her reflection stares back, startled, perhaps a little afraid. In her head, she names it Kagome, and it is young and new and beloved by all in tarnished Kikyou's place.
So. Her stomach heaves, clenching around the empty spaces where food should be. That's what all of this is about.
On this night, by this pond, the wind is dead like Kikyou's flesh. There are no whispers, and there are no waves, and so there are no faces. Still, even under a fine veneer of sneering starlight, the beach is black, and the reaching, silver hands must only be asleep beneath the water's smooth surface, claws sheathed, fingers limp and drifting – but ready. She can smell them, waiting nearby to grip her with a tale of the terrible past. She would stand to flee, if only – if only! – she could remember how.
burned away, away, away
She remembers: her skin and bones blackened, smoke in the air, mingling with ash, twisting heat, tears, burnt blood, fury, hatred, and nononopleasecomeback. Veiled and misted, all of it, as though balanced on the fringe of something brighter than the most sacred flame. Everything is smeared, and colours race like hunted things, and the only face she truly knows is her own; closed, peaceful, then consumed. She presides over the ritual burning, watching until the point of fierce, raging light clutched in her dead fingers flickers out. And she follows. And it is done.
Or should have been.
She remembers: her face most of all, vivid and sharp-angled. Fire-wreathed and not-quite lost. Her face. Her pride. She is surrounded by a sea of mourners, and they reach toward her solemn face as she slides away, hands dusted silver as the air fills with her ashes.
Her face.
Is different.
It is not the one she sees reflected in the dark water, or in the eyes of eager young girls she would use as substitutes for her lost little sister. The fine features do not belong to her; they cannot; they were burned long ago. What she remembers is the face of a powerful priestess, and what she sees in the water below is a creature called Kagome.
What she has forgotten is which face belongs to her.
Am I not myself any longer?
She wakes from a deep sleep like second-death, knowing that she has just committed the gravest of sins. The dead do not rise. They do not look up at the morning sky as it blanches in fear of the sun, and they most certainly do not step forward into the embrace of another day. They do not, they do not; the obedient dead lie motionless and dream forever of nothing.
Kikyou knows that she is damned. She felt it briefly in her soul, and then even her soul was taken away, so she could not feel at all. And that apathy – she knows there is no sign more sure than that. Feeling the absence of feeling, she sits with her back to a diseased tree and wonders what killed her; the wounds in her flesh, the fury in her heart, or the Shikon jewel itself, grown tired of bathing in her blazing nimbus day after day after day.
It hardly matters. The last and first thing she remembers is InuYasha; smirking, soaring, thinking he has won. She should have killed him. She thought she had, and finds it cruelest of all that she must exist again to bear both the weight of damnation and the knowledge that she had faltered at the end.
Faltered at the false end, her memories sigh, disappointed. And all the gods fell away like illusions.
The only things that are real, Kikyou has learned, are the things that should not be; a monster she meant to destroy, and the vessel that her stolen soul has come to inhabit. Even now she senses them, living lives that should belong to her; one like the cold coils of a hungry serpent, his love or hatred running thick as blood in her empty veins; the other like a new shell still wet on her skin, trapping her in a strange place with a name that is not her own and a pair of deep, damp eyes misted over with terrible, innocent compassion.
She cannot escape them. Both are part of her now, caught up in things she once took for truths and old memories of herself.
Am I not myself?
She is not herself today. She wanders the woods, touching leaves and dirt and the old bones she finds lying beneath a bed of dry autumn rot. Sunlight bleeds through the canopy, staining her shoulder; she can find no way to wind it up in her fingers, so she retreats to the deep shadows, distressed.
Everything is strangely unstrange. Though she wanders, lost, thinking that all paths in the world must have changed since the time she was last in it, the sun and the seasons and the singing birds seem to know their way as surely as ever. They soar through their familiar arcs in a daze, stepping neatly around Kikyou. She is a venomous snake from beyond these woods, and – although the roots and soil and rich, sultry rot could learn how to accept her – she can feel that her dead flesh is not entirely welcome on the mouldering leaves.
Angry and a little frightened, she walks until the trees cannot keep up with her and finally fall away. Her tireless feet carry her to a field where there is no shade, where no flowers or berry bushes bloom, where the only thing that moves is the horizon; rippling clouds blowing in from the distant sea, wavering hills heaped before her on the sharp ledge where land meets sky. Standing in the light, she holds her long sleeves tight in both hands and recites body parts in the back of her head, then the names of healing herbs and how they must be prepared, then the ceremonial cants that every skilled priestess knows – regardless of whether or not she believes in ceremony.
A truly skilled priestess, she does not live in a –
Anything to stave off the mounting terror, the sense that she does not belong and will soon be discovered. Facts, poetry, names, spells, flickering through her head like frantic wings. Remembering a thousand things at once, letting the memories crash down and over and around with all the violence they possess.
she does not live in
Sunset calms her. The coming of night is a balm for her sunburned heart. When the first pale stars prickle in the sky, she sees them balanced like bright tears on the rim of a great black eye and every drop of her apprehension is blinked away.
By moonlight, nothing is swift or sure. Fierce, accusing edges melt, flowing into the whisper and suggestion of soft shapes, shy and nameless. The world is peopled with silhouettes and small, hidden hunters that trust nothing outside the reach of their paws. Day is a time for peaked judgement and speed and action, and the whipping wind of life's passing leaves Kikyou staggered, breathless – but night belongs to things like her. Things that expect to be struck down at any moment, that wear the darkness like a disguise, hoping to hide and stalk and survive a little longer. Perhaps even long enough to see another menacing dawn.
She travels by night now, and she knows what she must do.
she does
Late at night, Kagome twists and Kagome turns, feeling her skin fret and fidget around something that squirms in her gut like a many-limbed parasite. She can't sleep. She can't even trick herself into dreaming about it. There is a restlessness that lives inside her, sinking root into the marrow of her bones; it twists, she turns, but neither is able to wrench free of the other.
Everything is dark and cold and she feels things slinking where they cannot be watched.
By the light of a last, brooding ember, she can see the bundled shapes of her friends strewn across the sheer shelf of rock on which they have made camp. They all seem to be sleeping. Bundled into the crook of Kagome's arm, Shippo certainly is; he has curled up like Buyo, with his thick tail over his face and a slow, deliberate rhythm to his breathing. Kagome nearly expects to hear him purr, is always vaguely disappointed when he doesn't.
Not that he has anything to purr about tonight. The air is frigid; the bare rock is rough and intrusive, even through the thick layer of her bedroll. She, of course, had opposed the idea of settling down in such a desolate place, but Sango had been adamant. Before the sun had even dipped to taste the distant hills, she'd sent everyone off in search of firewood and started an enormous blaze in the centre of a wide, flat rock lodged in the soil. Sweating, streaked with soot, she tended it for hours, then banked the leaping flames when their colour matched the bloodstained sky, and scattered its glowing skeleton all around. Inuyasha had called her a madwoman, but now even he was coming to recognize the wisdom of what she had done. Early winter winds were blowing inland from the sea, and twilight descended like the edge of a sword; not long after the full darkness of night had spread itself over the surrounding meadow, Inuyasha climbed wordlessly down from his perch in one of the stunted trees nearby. Kagome saw through lowered lashes that his delicate ears were edged with frost. He'd settled near her, shivering subtly.
So Sango's hunter's-knowledge has saved them again. No matter how terribly uncomfortable it might be, the rock beneath is warm and Kagome is as grateful for it as she can manage. Her breath cuts lines of thick fog through the looming darkness, like little ghosts fluttering out of her mouth, and she does not like to consider how cold she would be otherwise, curled and trembling in a bed of ice-limned grass.
Winter is coming. There's no doubt of that, not after tonight. In a quiet way, Kagome is dismayed, though the shifting of seasons hardly affects her plans or her mission; she will simply have to move away from the coast to escape the worst weather, and that, in any case, will keep her closer to the well – her gateway to home and relative safety. No; it's a much more personal distaste that moves her. Despite the beauty of snow and the almost supernatural stillness of a world wrapped in ice, Kagome cannot help thinking that winter is a dead season. Cold and uncaring, lovely but supremely lethal. Every year it comes inland surreptiously, creeping like tendrils of plague. Kagome can sense its gentle malice on the tail of a sudden, chilled breeze.
Can sense it keenly, can almost hear it whispering for her from the empty, black maw beyond the lip of her stone mattress.
A true priestess . . .
She sits up slowly, ignoring the cold air that slithers into her mother's old sleeping bag, winds around her legs. The last ember flickers and sighs, drawing thick bronze lines over the curve of Sango's hip, through Kirara's twin tails; its light paints half of Miroku's smooth face like a mask. It gilds, it illuminates, it does not reach past them. The wide, wild field has been erased, swallowed up by a black ocean. And she can hear the slap of waves against a stone shore; can smell salt, and sand-scoured wind; can nearly taste the singing voices that have swept her up and filled her with the image of a beach bled cold and black beneath patient, dragging claws.
"Inuyasha," Kagome whispers. Leaning over Shippo, she stretches out her long body and tugs at his sleeve, his opalescent hair. "Inuyasha."
Nothing. He does not move, or give any sign that he has heard her. Shippo is the same, locked up in a deep slumber, and Miroku, and Sango, and even little Kirara. Clutching the fox kit in her arms, Kagome stares at them and tries not to panic.
Winter is coming. So, it seems, is someone with the power to steal people away in their dreams.
After a moment, Kagome carefully tucks Shippo into the folds of her sleeping bag and digs out the heavy, knitted sweater her mother forced her to pack. As it slips over her head, she smells – rather than the terrible, false scent of a phantom sea – lilacs and candy-sweet roses; her mother's perfume. She takes a little confidence from that, though she doesn't understand why. Hugging herself tightly, she gazes warily at all the things she cannot see and then starts forward.
She can feel the path her feet should take, and – suddenly, with what must be the faith of a true, pious priestess – she knows what she must do.
Kikyou is easily the most beautiful creature Kagome has ever seen. She knows that she should take pride in this, having descended directly from the drifting pieces of her soul, but it is difficult to be proud when her throat and lungs and mouth are clogged with so much crusted guilt. Gazing at the woman she was born to imitate, Kagome feels like a thief, a crude copy, and her legs lock and she can barely keep her footing in the slippery grass, let alone turn to flee.
What do you want? she tries to demand, imposing, imperious, a fierce spirit clothed in deceptively delicate flesh. But her lips part and it is so cold that her tongue freezes and the words are suctioned out soundlessly, rising in a cloud of fog to the severe, silent sky. She begins to quiver, so violently now that she cannot conceal it.
Kikyou looks at her evenly. Kikyou is perfectly still and untroubled, at home in the darkness, in the cold, in the casual danger of the night. Her white robes and pale skin glow discreetly; clouds crowd the heavens, but she is the moon, radiant and unreachable as ever.
"Did you remember me," she asks quietly, "before we first met?"
Kikyou remembers:
A time before memory in the forest near her home. Golden light in the broken spaces open to the sky, leaves and moss wrapped like lace about the dark, elegant limbs arched and curled and fanned out above her head. They were like dancers' arms, those black branches – painted, inked, and dusted with ash – flaring in the fashion of a festival demon dance. This, she realizes, is the forest through a child's eyes; all the light and shadow stitched seamlessly together, sunbeams from the sky winking playfully at the world below, trees dancing and weaving to the pulsing rhythm of an immortal heart. Sanctuary. The semblance of home.
In that same forest, she found a broken man who called himself Onigumo, fell beneath the arc of a half-demon's claws, and died thinking that there is no such thing as love.
She is far from that forest now. From that time, that terror, that tragedy. Her memories of it – and all the waves and waves of faces – are fast becoming abstract things; fascinating, perhaps, but nearly unrecognizable. She stands above them, looking down, nothing more than a spectator. She is benign. She keeps them as if they are pets, and covets them simply because they are the one thing she has that Kagome does not.
Kagome, a timid wraith trembling in the deep, heartless night, stares at her and seems to understand.
Priestess, say the silvered waves. Priestess, where is our shore? Where have you gone? What have you done?
Kikyou and Kagome smell the salt of the sea, feel the darkness and the dead water clasp them like greedy jaws. Despite the clouds swelling overhead, there is enough light for them to see that they have each other's eyes.
As one, they reply; "what I must."
Kagome is not afraid.
Kikyou is not angry.
Priestess.
Kagome remembers Kaede's young face and nimble hands. Blood does not frighten her, and she knows how to dispell summoned demonlings with a thought. Swift and strong, she is a better warrior than most young men. Her friends tell her that she should resent her older sister, that she should be the primary priestess of their village, but Kaede is loyal. Kaede is clever. Kaede is missing an eye; tell them to burn this with my body; you will do well alone, do not fear, please do not fear please do not.
The shore, Priestess.
Kikyou remembers Souta's fleet feet and ready smile, thinks with fond irritation on the tricks he plays, the little lies he has told. Though he complains about Grandpa's sutras and stories, he can repeat them all without pause for breath. He is the fastest runner in his grade, he is the son of the family, the traditional heir, and at every turn he makes his sister do everything for him. Even when Buyo escapes his arms, he hangs back and watches the well, waiting for someone else to search, waiting and then running forward, forgetting his own cowardice, trying and failing to save his sister from a creature like the ones in all the stories he never believed.
The shore.
Both remember Kikyou as she once was. A guardian. A warrior and a woman, fighting to lie in the same flesh. Her hands are calloused; her legs are slender. Scars hatch her palms and wrists; smooth skin sheathes the narrow cage of her ribs, the gentle dip and surge of waist into hips. Though the feeling takes her by surprise, Kagome is not embarassed to know the body of another woman so well. It is right, somehow; it is closer to the heart than mother – sister – daughter. It is knowledge of self, moving between two selves, like shared blood and newborn dreams.
They had known that this would happen. They knew that it must. Broken things seek to mend themselves, from jewel shards to severed souls.
It divides.
Did you remember me, she had asked, and the girl finally answered:
I'm the memory.
It occurs to Kikyou that the dead sleep so soundly because they have earned it. Life demands many efforts and emotions, and those who have died are those who have fufilled all that has been asked of them. They have suffered. They have loved. They have failed and triumphed and wept for the sake of both. They deserve their peace, and are released from their mortal burdens slowly – forgetting – being forgotten – until there is nothing left beyond an absence of memory.
And she has not earned that.
As a priestess, a white maiden of great purity and power, she is bound by the will of the gods to protect, to defend, to keep whole the things that are most precious. It is her duty. Oaths were taken, training was endured, and she was meant to live a long life devoted to serving everyone save herself. To keeping things whole, and mending things that were broken.
Like jewels.
Like souls.
Kikyou is alone in the night. She had thought herself beyond mercy, but she let the girl go free. This one last time, she told herself; just to see her disappear this one last time. The darkness still gleams and chuckles with impossible iridescence, marked by the passing of a girl with fearsome power. Power that does not belong to her. Ability that is not her own. Shrouded in the stillness of the unborn and a moonlit breath that snakes through the clouds, Kikyou contemplates everything that has been taken from her.
Priestess, her memories say, after a long, long silence. We can tell you how to take it back.
And she remembers at last what it is to have a purpose.