The Worthy and the Worthless by naqaashi
The Worthy and the Worthless
Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha.
A/N: This is my entry for the Second Round of Tangerine Dream's Second Annual Fanfiction Tournament. Do vote for me if you feel that my entry is good enough!
My parter for this round is Summerbirdy, and our prompt was PEANUT. Please read her entry too, before you decide who you're going to vote for!
Here are the contest rules -
http://www.dokuga.com/forum/29-challenges/64798-second-annual-fanfiction-tournament
As a special note, many, many thanks to QuoththeDragon, for helping me work throuhg alternatives till I got this story well and truly started. Also, to Smortz, who agreed to be my emergency beta...even though I asked at the very last second. And finally, a huge hug and lots of love to Summerbirdy herself, because without her support, I wouldn't have managed to get myself composed enough to write.
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For the first time in a life that spanned seven hundred and fifty six years, Taisho Sesshoumaru experienced the warmth of holding the woman he loved in his arms.
She was dying.
More importantly, she was gazing at him steadily, blue eyes glimmering in sympathy at his plight. The message shining in them was clear – I love you so very much. I trust you.
He swallowed the lump in his throat. Once, twice, more. His voice refused to come, and perhaps it was just as well, he whispered to himself. When the fates and the gods and all the magic and power of the universe had abandoned you, how could mere physical functions be expected to hold steady?
Or perhaps, he simply loved her very, very much too.
He didn’t care which it was; either way, the pain was unbearable, crippling in its intensity.
If only she would stop looking at him! That trust…that savage, delicate trust that he feared would shatter the moment he found his voice…he prayed to every god he knew of to prove their existence. One small miracle. Grant this Sesshoumaru one miracle!
And just like that, his voice returned to him.
“This Sesshoumaru cannot save you.”
And just like that, it set about murdering the last hope of this girl whom he adored, who had taken his left arm, and could take it again, if it meant he could spare her this final indignity of discovering how helpless and weak the loss of one precious sword had left him. The mighty youkai bowed his head, awaiting her tears and her judgement.
It came swiftly. “Silly, I never asked to be saved, did I? This place…this time, they’re all wrong for me anyway…”
He gaped at her, torn between relief that she wasn’t disappointed in him and wonder at the warmth that never failed to infuse her tone, no matter what predicament she found herself in – though someone should have told her that dying was last on the list of ideal predicaments for a very good reason. It bred too much strife, too much disappointment.
He cast the philosophising aside and concentrated on memorizing her last moments. His gaze burned into hers, committing every look, every memory to his heart, till the answer came to him. The very simplicity of it took him by surprise, stealing his breath and weakening his knees. “This Sesshoumaru cannot save you, Kagome….but this Sesshou…this…I cannot save you, but I can find you,” he rasped.
She cupped his cheek in her bruised palm and managed a faint grin. “I know you will, sweetheart, I know it.”
And then she was gone.
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He took to wandering the earth, following the trails of holiness through the lands in the faint, unceasing hope that one of them might belong to her. None of them ever did.
Till he trudged into a remote, picturesque hamlet in the mountains of Europe, and found himself face to face with the same blue eyes, the same sunny smile, the same warmth. It was Kagome’s. She was Kagome; he was sure of it. Even though she was just a child, his soul recognized her. His heart soared in jubilation and he settled down in a corner of the field, tired golden eyes greedily drinking in her movements as she played hopscotch with other village children.
He watched her till sundown, but the gentle longing in his eyes had long since been replaced by confusion and disappointment. There was no question that this was Kagome.
But she was all wrong.
Just a little selfish, a little too easily pushed around, a little too stupid…Kagome, but a weaker, more insipid Kagome. One who didn’t recognize or acknowledge him until it was too dark to play and her friends had left for their respective homes. She skipped past him, then stopped to look him over in curiosity. “You look funny, mister!” she chirped, giggling and uncaring, and continued on her way.
Sesshoumaru decided that he had had enough. He took off after the child, who knew only that she was snagged by the back of her frock, lifted high in the air and then a sharp shaft of pain and gurgling blood and a disappointed, sad baritone informing her that defective things could not be allowed to exist.
And then, blissfully, her broken little body knew no more.
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He had to wait nearly a hundred years before he found her again. He accepted the long interlude as punishment for his sin – though he considered it a necessary purge, and yet he hoped that this time, she would get it right.
She nearly did. Small, curvy and brown-skinned, alternately blushing and laughing through the red veil of her sari. It was a sweltering afternoon in Benaras, and she was a happy, eager bride. Her eyes were brown instead of blue, but they shone with the same shy joy and zest for life as she stole glances at her bridegroom.
His Kagome, in love with another man. Willing to be touched by another man. Envisioning a life, a home, children with another man.
Sesshoumaru let her marry him without incident. The hours flew by as ceremony after ceremony was completed, relatives laughed and chatted and gorged themselves on a sumptuous banquet, as the guests departed and the bride was led to her new rooms to await her husband.
Golden eyes took in every last detail of the scene, grim finality mingling with heartbreak in their depths. The rose petals strewn on the bed, the woman kneeling in the centre, the arrival of her husband…and then they touched.
Sesshoumaru took his broken, beaten heart and left India, never to return, as the bride and groom lay close together among the rose petals on their bed, sheets soaked with their blood, strangled with their own entrails.
Next time, my love, you had better get it right. This Sesshoumaru is tired of waiting for you.
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To his continuing frustration, Kagome continued to rebel.
Why do you rebuff my will? he wanted to snarl at her. Was this how she had chosen to punish him for failing to save her life that day? The idea calmed him a little…but never enough.
She was an infant abandoned on the Great Wall of China. He could feel the aura bursting from her, marking her identity. He took her in, raised her for two years and hoped. She never smiled. He drowned her in the bath.
Just a little longer, Kagome….this Sesshoumaru shall allow to have your retribution, but you must grow reasonable.
She was a wild hellion stifled by the stiff English society of the Victorian Era. He recognized with excitement the passion and independent spirit of his lost love, seduced her and organized an elopement. Days after the hasty nuptials, he discovered that she had married him for his wealth. His Kagome…a greedy whore? Sesshoumaru briefly lamented the upbringing she had received in this life, and promptly arranged a carriage accident. She was delicious to hold, this morally bankrupt Kagome, but he couldn’t let her pure soul be corrupted like this, could he?
Again, my love? I had thought you were no longer angry with me, when your life left my arms that cursed day. Were you lying to this Sesshoumaru when you assured him of your trust?
She was a rancher’s daughter during the rise of the American West. Tall, strong and vivacious, the resident healer and belle of every ball, she played the cowboys’ heartstrings with unfeeling precision. She was amused by her conquests; he was horrified at the utter absence of the innate modesty and monogamy he knew to be true of his Kagome. She tried to play him and he let her. Then she found herself with child…his child, and he left her. She killed herself within a fortnight rather than bear the shame, as he knew she would. In any case, if she hadn’t, he had had a midwife ready and bribed, to ensure that neither the faulty mother nor her spawn survived the birthing.
Enough! Willful woman! Why are you doing this? Why can’t you see? How much longer…how much longer, Kagome? I grow impatient. Do not anger this Sesshoumaru, love, just do not.
Yet, for all his pleading and cursing, his goddess remained aloof and withdrawn, and his hands grew black with the many stains of her wrong, unnatural, incomplete, deformed, defective blood.
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Sesshoumaru had spent so many centuries hunting for Kagome..all the wrong Kagomes, that when he finally met the real one, he had quite forgotten what he was supposed to do with her. Love her, suggested his heart.
But he already did.
Know her, urged his soul.
But he already did.
Take her, screamed his body.
He would, but not just yet.
Finally, reason stepped in. Talk to her.
She was perfect, this girl. Born in Hokkaido to innkeepers, she had the same upbringing, the same glorious enthusiasm for the daily grind of life, the same compassionate and loving heart that had matched his, and the same intelligent curiosity that had drawn her original to him in the first place. As it had drawn her too…for strangely enough, this one had found him.
“I feel like I’ve been waiting for you.” That was all she said, when he ordered dinner at her family’s inn, and insisted on serving him through the evening.
He felt himself coming undone, as every leashed hope, every disappointment of the centuries and girls gone past melted away in the face of this living, breathing homage to his long-dead lover. No, not a mere homage. This is Kagome. My own Kagome herself, come to my arms at last.
Sesshoumaru felt his heart take flight once more and finally allowed himself to plan for a lavish, joyful future with his rediscovered love.
And as he lay on the tatami later that night, trembling, aching, burning and foaming at the mouth, he stared into the gentle blue eyes that looked down at him with love and pity, and wondered what had gone wrong, this time.
Cold anger washed over him, at the bleak triumph evident on her face.
“I…devoted…to you….”
“You placed me on an impossible pedestal.”
“….hunted…the world…”
“And left a trail of my blood.”
“I killed…body…save your…soul…!”
“Yet, all my soul remembers is pain.”
“….followed your lives…all…lives…every….life…you…”
“Followed every life I lived…only to take it from me, to never give me a choice or dream that I could hope to fulfill. Was my soul worth so much to you, Sesshoumaru, that it reduced my life...my lives, to peanuts?”
She was implacable, as though explaining simple sums to a newly schooled child, and he was unable to ask the questions that truly mattered, for the pain grew till he was convulsing at her feet, throat clogged with mucous and vomit and foamy poison. Yet, through it all, he managed to keep his eyes fixed on her, silently demanding more answers. The real answers.
She seemed to catch the question in his narrowed eyes. You were the perfect one! The answer to all my prayers, the woman this Sesshoumaru has been hunting for! Why have you forsaken me, Kagome, my Kagome? What…has gone wrong? What part of you did I fail to judge correctly? Why are you perfect…yet wrong?
She turned away from his haunted, accusing stare to fiddle with the remains of the meal, removing all traces of the poison she had snuck in. Finally, when his body had quit heaving in agony and the light was going from his eyes, she knelt close to him and held his clammy hand in her own.
He had been expecting triumph or hatred. But all there was in her voice was an old, old sadness that seemed to creep up through her words till all the years that had passed between them lay bare.
“Have you considered, Sesshoumaru, that after all this time, you are the one who is…defective?” And then she looked straight into his eyes, angry and hurt. “Defective things cannot be allowed to exist, my love.”
His eyes widened, then narrowed, then fell closed. He never felt the warm brush of lips against his cheek, or the pained hope that someday, if the fates and time allowed them a second chance, they would both finally get it right.
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