InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Brush of Fingertips ❯ BoF ( Chapter 1 )

Brush of Fingertips

Kaede looks up at her elder sister Kikyou as she stares out the window of their hut. Through the silence, Kikyou tells her that she will take her vengeance and swears it. Before Kaede begins to ask her meaning, her elder sister wishes her good night and exits the hut, leaving Kaede no choice but to sleep.

Kaede dreams--

I breathe onto a window and the outside world becomes haze and mist. Brushing my fingers on the frosty panes, the world peeps through and I bring my eye near to meet it.
She stands outside in the snow, solemn, her white kimono dusty and red hakama bright against its white purity. Above her the tree branches shelter her from the snowfall but threaten to release the collected snow in their leaves upon her. She ignores the danger and waits.

He steps toward her, his clothes a beacon of red, walking as the snow fills his footsteps and tickles his bare feet. The branches crack overhead. Inuyasha seems to smile with his warm, gold eyes, despite the snowflakes in his eyelashes and tangled hair.

In the white world, they move and embrace. He strokes her long dripping hair. She keeps her face in his ice-crusted haori. They both tighten their arms and meet the other with their lips.

Through the brush of my fingertips on the window as the white world peeps through, he tightens her fingers around a glint of metal and she tenderly guts his chest with the dagger. Red stains her fingers and drips gently onto the snow. Smiling, he slides the dagger from his heart and together they fall to the whiteness of the snow.

Through a hole in the mist of my breath, she holds his hands until he sees her no more.

With a last finger touch across the paleness of his face, she stands once again and walks away, leaving as the snow begins to rain from their branch cages and bury him away until not even his red haori can be seen.

As she walks toward the house, I breathe upon the window and she disappears.

I turn away from my icy window as my door opens and catch my elder sister when she sways unsteadily. The wetness of the melting snow on her clothes and hair dampen my shoulders and skin. The red of the blood on her hands clenching me tight smear my night gown and seep along the streams of trickling melted snow.

As I wash the blood off Kikyou's skin, I ask, "Why?"

My elder sister's fingers bite into her palm, blood sliding from the small wounds into the water.

A tear drops and splashes against the tub.

"If it was possible, wouldn't you rather die by a lover's blade instead of an enemy`s?" my sister asked me as more tears rained into the blood tinted water.

I dried her hands with a white cloth, wiping away the stains.

"But an enemy wouldn't follow a victim into death," I answer.

She smiles sadly.

When night comes, my sister leaves into the cold, snowy dark. She closes the door before I can follow.

She never returns.

--When Kaede wakes, there are no frosty windows and white snow. She sweats in the sudden heat and sighs with relief. But her sister is not there.

Kaede feels a sudden change in the air and instinctively, she heads to the shrine of the Shikon-no-Tama. As she hurries past the Goshinboku tree, Kaede senses a blast of power and turns in time to see her elder sister shoot the hanyou Inuyasha to the tree.

Even as she stares, even as she weeps while Kikyou follows her hanyou lover into beyond, even as her elder sister gradually becomes scorching ashes, Kaede does not feel shock. She is not surprised that she is alone, a sister no more.

Kaede mourns and shivers at the first fall of snow.