InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Once Upon an Inuyoukai ❯ Umeboshi Insanity ( Chapter 17 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Empatheia 
A Valentine's Day WAFF-fest. Amusing.
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Hentai / Romance | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 02.19.2006 | Updated On: 02.20.2006 | Pages: 4 | Words: 3.9K | Visits: 238 | Status: Work In Progress
A Valentine's Day WAFF-fest. Amusing.
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Hentai / Romance | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 02.19.2006 | Updated On: 02.20.2006 | Pages: 4 | Words: 3.9K | Visits: 238 | Status: Work In Progress
A/N- Just in time for Valentine's Day- a ridiculously romantic chapter. I was in a very fluffy mood when I wrote this... consider yourself warned.
P.S.- If any of you are Fruits Basket fans, I've written a one-shot for it featuring Akito. It's interesting, I rather like it myself. I'd appreciate any feedback on it. You'll find it from my profile, it's called 'Salvatore.'
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Chapter XVII: Umeboshi Insanity
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The flight back to camp was exactly four hours, seventeen minutes, and eight seconds too long. The flight itself was ten seconds longer than that. This was because ten seconds after launching from Totosai's mountain home, he'd finally lost the battle he'd been fighting since he'd left the warm circle of firelight and the warmer circle of friends.
The four hours to Totosai's lair, he'd managed to keep the needling images at bay by counting trees and making war plans. But now, he'd run out of inane things to think about and the door was open.
It was completely irrational. Totally, utterly unreasonable. Every word he could think of to describe what he was feeling, he thought of and discarded as not forceful enough. It was wrong.
What he should be was happy, or at least relieved. Izayoi had finally found a human person to lavish her affections on. Her little obsession with him would be shunted off to the boy, and he would be free of obligation at last. The situation was perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Which was why it made no sense that for the last half of the night, he'd been struggling desperately against the vicious urge to dice Setsuna no Takemaru into gory ribbons and take a long, luxurious bath in his steaming blood. His claws were buried deep in the fleshy part of his palm, where'd they'd apparently taken up permanent residence.
As though Time itself was broken inside his mind, he saw the moment endlessly, over and over again.
She pulled away from his chest, wiping her tearstained face.
She opened the door.
She recognized the person on the other side...
After that, his recollection became tinged in red, as she flung herself in slow-motion at the yet unseen figure with all the frustrated, mortally passionate love she'd been burying deeper and deeper the whole time she'd been with him.
And then, always at that point, Time froze for a moment to afford him a good, long look at the tableau. Her arms thrown around the boy's shoulders in wanton abandonment. His arms circling her protectively. How absolutely perfect they looked together, like a fabled romance brought to life.
It was all just as it should be. So, he should be happy. No more uncomfortable moments of knowing she was looking at him with growing attraction. No more even more uncomfortable moments of returning the attraction. She'd be neatly paired up with someone so right for her it seemed the gods had possibly had a hand in it.
And so, it was massively disconcerting to admit that he was not happy. Not in any sense of the word. In fact, he had not been this patently unhappy since Mai had died. In fact, if he was truthful with himself, he was utterly miserable.
Somewhere along their short journey, she'd wormed her way into his heart in such a way that he had not even noticed, and now the thought of her draping herself all over that whelp...
His claws were now in serious danger of puncturing all the way through his hands and erupting out the backs. The pain was probably very great, but Inutaisho could not be bothered to notice.
For absolutely no rational reason he could come up with despite hours of thought, Inutaisho had decided that he hated Setsuna no Takemaru with almost human passion.
Inutaisho had come to respect Izayoi very much, and truly wanted the best for her. However, as a demon, somewhere he'd come up with the belief that no human man could ever be good enough for her. He had not, of course, ever considered himself as a match for her. That was too ridiculous to give more than a moment's thought to. But the fact remained that Takemaru was not worthy of her. Seeing him wrap himself around like that had nearly been more that Inutaisho could stand.
I do not understand.
She was no one, just a random human who he'd ended up traveling with through a series of exceedingly strange circumstances. Nobody. But she was a damned exceptional nobody.
Sweat-sheened limbs tangled in the moonlight, the gentle labored effort of breath. Dark hair tangled on white silk. Skin flushed rosy in the aftermath of passion.
Inutaisho strangled a howl in his throat. He could feel the markings on his skin growing jagged, crawling their indigo way across his cheekbones, his wrists. Felt the wrathful deity that was his true form rage for release, barely managed to hold it in check.
Dark eyes hooded with desire, pale fingers drifting over a contoured landscape of flesh. Lips parted sensuously to release an inheld breath with an ecstatic sigh. Movement, like waves and as slow, ebbing and flowing and cresting and breaking. Murmurings of endearment, softly alighting in ears like silver butterflies.
He was going mad with irrational jealousy, and could see no way around it. He could not let her go, and had no intention of taking her for himself. It was a trap that caught both ways, and he was firmly snared in its steely teeth.
She was not his. But neither could he stand the thought of her being anyone else's.
The moon looked down, and saw silver hair entwined with dark. Skin stained dark in primal markings, eyes bleeding red with the effort of restraint. Cool flesh and burning hot pressed together, slipsliding tongues.
Inutaisho nearly fell out of the sky. This was a place he had never dreamed of going, yet even as he shredded the astounding image and buried it as far undermind as he could, a new one surfaced.
A cry, half bitten-back, strangled and disbelieving at the newfound pleasure. Silver tears of joy and fulfillment standing in the corners of eyes deep as forests. Devotion seeping from every pore along with the sweat. Gentle arms around his neck, sweetest offering of trust.
Sweat stood on his forehead. Why was he tormented by such visions? Why did every line of his body ache so? She was nothing compared to Mai. Nothing. And yet...
...the lust he felt now, the trembling as every muscle strained towards something unattainable...
...was like nothing he'd ever felt with Mai. With a cry, he plummeted and submerged himself beneath the icy waters of the first stream he could find. He remained there for a long time, until the fire in his loins subsided and the fog behind his eyes cleared. Until the markings on his wrists returned to normal and he felt enough in control to surface.
Dripping wet, cold, and humilated, he resumed the journey home in a very grim mood. He'd made a decision, beneath the calming rush of the stream's waters-- Takemaru had to go. No matter that Inutaisho would not be claiming Izayoi for himself-- his presence was simply not tolerable, and so he would be leaving as soon as Inutaisho returned.
Whether he wanted to or not.
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As it turned out, Takemaru, as though in unconscious obedience to Inutaisho's unspoken command, was far, far away when the disturbed inuyoukai returned to the campsite. Coincidentally, his mind-state was in equal disarray. The discovery that his beloved friend and love interest had a soft spot for demons had quite a negative impact on his composure, and he was currently working it off in exhaustive kata exercises back at the barracks. When Inutaisho flew over him, he was too busy picturing the silver head beneath his sword to notice the silver head above his sword.
And Inutaisho was too busy hating him to notice that he was being hated right back.
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He landed like a sack of rocks, too distracted to notice that the ground was closer than he'd originally thought. Izayoi stood up to greet him eagerly, a smile on her face.
All the composure he'd painstakingly jury-rigged in the last hour of the flight while his clothes dried shuddered and collapsed when she laid a hand on his arm and asked with genuine curiosity if he'd had a safe journey.
He looked at her despite all his honest efforts not to, and--
--white silk and black silk, bedsheets and black locks, gentle gasps of ecstasy in his ear--
--felt his eyes bleeding dangerously red. He turned away with a jerk.
“The flight was fine, thank you. Why are you awake so early?”
She laid a slender finger on her lips (parted in rapture, moist from the languid dance of tongues) and blushed becomingly (all the way down to that little shiny stretch of skin between her breasts). “I haven't slept, actually,” she admitted. “I waited up.”
“You waited for me to return? I was gone all night.”
“That's kind of obvious, since it's morning now,” she pointed out.
“That was foolish. I told you I would not be back until morning. Now you will be tired all day and slow us up.”
He could see without looking the hurt expression on her face and forced himself not to care.
“If you must know, I tried to sleep.”
What?
“I only gave up a few hours ago when it became clear that I couldn't sleep until... until I knew you were safe. If I'd known you were going to be such a jerk when you came back, I wouldn't have worried!”
Worried... for me.
“I'm glad you're back. Though I can't for the life of me understand why I'm glad.”
It was an eerie echo of his own thoughts, and he started. I am glad to be with you on this journey, though I know not why.
“I am sorry,” he said absently. “I am a little distracted right now. Thank you for your concern.”
He laid down and tried to salvage the last hour between him and dawn. Behind him, he heard her join him on the ground, a chaste ten feet away. It took her bare moments to fall into a deep, steady rhythm.
She was exhausted. Foolish woman.
After a few minutes, he realized that sleep was not going to pay any attention to him tonight, so he rolled over and watched the others sleep.
By 'others', his brain meant 'Izayoi'. She was tidily curled on a blanket, feet drawn up into the wide bottoms of her hakama and hands buried in the folds of her haori. In direct contrast to the orderliness of her limbs, her hair and clothes spread messily around her, a beautiful sort of chaos.
Long dark lashes. Delicate ears like seashells. Cheeks rosy with the cold, a little travel-begrimed. Her clothes were stained with mud and dirt and nameless things that are inevitable when one travels. Undoubtedly, she was longing for a bath. Perhaps he could find a hotspring nearby...
...droplets of spray caught in the gossamer web of her hair. Sun gleaming on the flesh exposed above the dark water, nipples pale and pebbled where the cold wind caressed them...
Alarmed, he tore his thoughts away. If she wanted a hotspring, she could damned well find one herself.
She shifted in her sleep, and made a sound so low and quiet any human would have missed it completely. His traitorous imagination shifted the sound to a scene in which she made in while sleeping curled against his side, utterly sated and dreaming of him.
With a low groan, he surrendered and fled.
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“Where's Inutaisho gone to now?” Izayoi asked when she woke at last mid-morning.
Silence.
She looked around. Naruka shrugged, genuinely unaware. Jaken sat on a log, eyes streaming with hurt at the abandonment. Katsuro looked mightily puzzled, and when at last she came to Sakenmaru, she found him desperately trying not to howl with laughter.
“Sakenmaru-sama? Do you know?”
The lion nodded, beard quivering. He obviously did not trust himself to speak. She crinkled her brow. “Where is he?”
“Sitting fully clothed in a stream five minutes away from here,” Katsuro answered, seemingly hoping she would understand the logic.
She didn't. “Sitting in a stream...? What in hell is he up to now?”
She stood, stretched, and rearranged herself. “I'm going to bring him back. I'll be back in a few minutes.”
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His skin had gone completely numb about an hour ago. There was a rime of ice on the edges of the rocky streambed, and the water moved quite quickly. He sat cross legged and contemplated the virtues of pickled plums as a riceball stuffing. When he exhausted that, he moved on to an inner debate over how to best eviscerate a traitorous underling. That kept him occupied up until Izayoi came to fetch him.
“Inutaisho, what on earth are you doing?”
He looked up at her, movements made sluggish by the extreme cold. “Meditating,” he answered evenly.
“On what?” she asked skeptically, arms crossed. She looked stunning in the morning mist.
“Umeboshi,” he answered dreamily.
“Pickled plums? Why the...? Never mind. Come on, I'm not sure what happened to you but you need to get out of that water before you catch your death.”
“Demons don't get sick.”
That didn't even give her pause. “I don't care what species you are, sitting for hours in frigid water is not good for your health. Get out here.”
Obediently, he uncurled himself and trudged his sodden way out onto the banks.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, awed by the monumental idiocy of his actions.
“I am insane,” he answered with perfect equinamity, and began to walk unsteadily towards the campsite.
After standing stock still for a moment in astonishment, she caught up to him and wrapped her arms around one of his to help him walk straight. He shuddered under her hands. She was warmer than him, now, and he remembered being repelled by the coolness of her flesh. That was gone now.
The visions earlier had revealed a possibility of pleasure in how cold her skin was- it must feel exquisite against his own superheated flesh.
“You're freezing,” she murmured. “You're such an idiot.”
Yes.
“What's happened to you?”
“Is the whelp gone?” he asked, instead of answering. “Permanently?”
“You mean Takemaru?” She laughed a little. “Yes, he won't be coming with us. He'll be traveling northwards with the army. You don't have to worry about waking up to his sword at your throat. Just so you know, Katsuro-san was extremely angry with him about his behaviour back there.”
Inutaisho couldn't possibly have cared less about the whelp trying to kill him. He was a mosquito- the amount of noise he would make coming in for the sting would completely ruin his chances at actually drawing blood. Inutaisho had nothing to fear from that.
What he feared was losing Izayoi to him. Not that he 'had' Izayoi to begin with, or wanted to. She was simply too good for Takemaru, and that was it.
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Izayoi blushed like fire. She'd done this countless times when the villagers had come to her for healing, and not turned a hair at it. But this was different. Really, really different.
Inutaisho had managed to freeze his fingers so badly he could not undo the ties of his own clothing. That he needed to get in to dry clothing was not a question, and so somehow, he had to extricate himself from the wet ones. That had proven impossible with his numb fingers, and so the job had fallen to Izayoi.
To preserve modesty, more hers than his, she'd dragged him off into the shelter of the trees once she'd dug out his spare outfit.
That had been the easy part. Now, he was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to disrobe him. She was shaking and blushing so hard she thought she'd spontaneously combust.
“Er.”
“Is there a problem? If you like, I will simply let my clothing dry while I wear it. It does not bother me.”
Resolutely, she shook her head. “No way are you staying in those clothes. Even if you are a demon, it's not true that demons never get sick. If you weaken yourself enough, you'll fall ill. I've seen it in my demon friends.”
He'd almost forgotten her upbringing among demons. She was right, of course- he was teetering on the brink of illness. The flight back, sodden and flying into the wind, had greatly weakened him, and sitting for hours in that bloody stream had brought him dangerously close to succumbing. The last thing he needed was to fall ill, and so he submitted to her humiliating treatment.
Which was now in great danger of becoming something considerably more dangerous.
With shaking fingers, she undid the cord that bound his haori in place. It fell open, and he felt the wind against his suddenly bare chest.
She turned yet another deeper shade of red. He smiled at her discomfiture. With his demonic sense of modesty, this was not disturbing him in that way. It was, however, disturbing him rather a lot in quite a different way.
The damp fabric slid off his broad shoulders onto the ground with a little help from her fingers, skimming across his chest. He went quietly insane again.
How many needles on that tree, I wonder?
That cloud looks rather like a rabbit chewing its own foot off.
I have a sudden craving for yellow pickles.
It is cold outside.
Izayoi is undressing me.
Izayoi was undressing him.
He desperately wished to be back in the cold, cold water. He was in serious danger of disgracing himself if she went any further than that.
In order to not go any madder than he already was, Inutaisho made a decision.
Just for today... I will allow myself to desire her. Just today. Until I regain my senses.
Unfortunately, the concession did nothing for the current situation. He reached down and caught her trembling fingers as they fumbled at his hakama ties. She looked dumbly up at him, scarlet from head to toe.
“I think my fingers are quite recovered. You may desist.”
“Thank the gods,” she whispered under her breath, though of course he heard it. “I'll leave the rest to you, then. I'll go back and get the fire started.”
She fled, and he slowly finished the job she'd started so devastatingly. The dry clothing rasped against his skin unpleasantly. He was not cold anymore. His skin was afire where her fingers has glanced, and everywhere else as well. When he tied the dry hakama on, he was very thankful for the bagginess of their black folds.
What has she done to me?
Somehow, Takemaru's arrival had shown him exactly where Izayoi stood with him, and vice versa. Everything had changed- instead of the discomfort disappearing, it had intensified. Being around her was sheer torment, now, where it never had been before.
Because he wanted her. Because he'd admitted to himself that he wanted her. Was there any way to undo that admission? Not that he could find. He was good and stuck now.
No way out.
In the next few minutes, he was going to have to return to that campsite and look her in the face... and somehow manage to not do any of the thousand things he'd seen in his visions earlier. How he would keep himself from doing them was a question that invariably was answered with a large, insulting blank.
The world as he knew it was ending. Had probably been ending since he first smelled that impossibly alluring field of flowers in her hair. Since she'd shown up at the door to his home with a message that would save his life, exhausted from the grueling three day ride. Since she danced for him in a cave, drunken and beautiful. Since she'd stood in the middle of a spring, fully clothed and weeping, and made him feel inferior for the first time in his life. And certainly since he'd seen her show love to another man, and discovered jealousy. The world as he'd known it was long done and gone.
He finished tying everything in place and went back to face his new existence, and prayed the humiliation wouldn't hurt too much.
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A/N- That may have been completely random and muddled. I'll find out tomorrow when I reread it and do the edits. You can't blame me, I wrote it with two hundred sixteen year olds rampaging through the hotel I work at, smoking pot in the stairwells and playing floor hockey in the halls. A little insanity is to be expected.
Happy Valentine's Day!
P.S.- parts of this chapter are dedicated to mikkey hodge. You know which parts, Mikkey. I wrote them just for you (wink)! Nothing more... intense... than that for a while now. I think.
P.S.- If any of you are Fruits Basket fans, I've written a one-shot for it featuring Akito. It's interesting, I rather like it myself. I'd appreciate any feedback on it. You'll find it from my profile, it's called 'Salvatore.'
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Chapter XVII: Umeboshi Insanity
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The flight back to camp was exactly four hours, seventeen minutes, and eight seconds too long. The flight itself was ten seconds longer than that. This was because ten seconds after launching from Totosai's mountain home, he'd finally lost the battle he'd been fighting since he'd left the warm circle of firelight and the warmer circle of friends.
The four hours to Totosai's lair, he'd managed to keep the needling images at bay by counting trees and making war plans. But now, he'd run out of inane things to think about and the door was open.
It was completely irrational. Totally, utterly unreasonable. Every word he could think of to describe what he was feeling, he thought of and discarded as not forceful enough. It was wrong.
What he should be was happy, or at least relieved. Izayoi had finally found a human person to lavish her affections on. Her little obsession with him would be shunted off to the boy, and he would be free of obligation at last. The situation was perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Which was why it made no sense that for the last half of the night, he'd been struggling desperately against the vicious urge to dice Setsuna no Takemaru into gory ribbons and take a long, luxurious bath in his steaming blood. His claws were buried deep in the fleshy part of his palm, where'd they'd apparently taken up permanent residence.
As though Time itself was broken inside his mind, he saw the moment endlessly, over and over again.
She pulled away from his chest, wiping her tearstained face.
She opened the door.
She recognized the person on the other side...
After that, his recollection became tinged in red, as she flung herself in slow-motion at the yet unseen figure with all the frustrated, mortally passionate love she'd been burying deeper and deeper the whole time she'd been with him.
And then, always at that point, Time froze for a moment to afford him a good, long look at the tableau. Her arms thrown around the boy's shoulders in wanton abandonment. His arms circling her protectively. How absolutely perfect they looked together, like a fabled romance brought to life.
It was all just as it should be. So, he should be happy. No more uncomfortable moments of knowing she was looking at him with growing attraction. No more even more uncomfortable moments of returning the attraction. She'd be neatly paired up with someone so right for her it seemed the gods had possibly had a hand in it.
And so, it was massively disconcerting to admit that he was not happy. Not in any sense of the word. In fact, he had not been this patently unhappy since Mai had died. In fact, if he was truthful with himself, he was utterly miserable.
Somewhere along their short journey, she'd wormed her way into his heart in such a way that he had not even noticed, and now the thought of her draping herself all over that whelp...
His claws were now in serious danger of puncturing all the way through his hands and erupting out the backs. The pain was probably very great, but Inutaisho could not be bothered to notice.
For absolutely no rational reason he could come up with despite hours of thought, Inutaisho had decided that he hated Setsuna no Takemaru with almost human passion.
Inutaisho had come to respect Izayoi very much, and truly wanted the best for her. However, as a demon, somewhere he'd come up with the belief that no human man could ever be good enough for her. He had not, of course, ever considered himself as a match for her. That was too ridiculous to give more than a moment's thought to. But the fact remained that Takemaru was not worthy of her. Seeing him wrap himself around like that had nearly been more that Inutaisho could stand.
I do not understand.
She was no one, just a random human who he'd ended up traveling with through a series of exceedingly strange circumstances. Nobody. But she was a damned exceptional nobody.
Sweat-sheened limbs tangled in the moonlight, the gentle labored effort of breath. Dark hair tangled on white silk. Skin flushed rosy in the aftermath of passion.
Inutaisho strangled a howl in his throat. He could feel the markings on his skin growing jagged, crawling their indigo way across his cheekbones, his wrists. Felt the wrathful deity that was his true form rage for release, barely managed to hold it in check.
Dark eyes hooded with desire, pale fingers drifting over a contoured landscape of flesh. Lips parted sensuously to release an inheld breath with an ecstatic sigh. Movement, like waves and as slow, ebbing and flowing and cresting and breaking. Murmurings of endearment, softly alighting in ears like silver butterflies.
He was going mad with irrational jealousy, and could see no way around it. He could not let her go, and had no intention of taking her for himself. It was a trap that caught both ways, and he was firmly snared in its steely teeth.
She was not his. But neither could he stand the thought of her being anyone else's.
The moon looked down, and saw silver hair entwined with dark. Skin stained dark in primal markings, eyes bleeding red with the effort of restraint. Cool flesh and burning hot pressed together, slipsliding tongues.
Inutaisho nearly fell out of the sky. This was a place he had never dreamed of going, yet even as he shredded the astounding image and buried it as far undermind as he could, a new one surfaced.
A cry, half bitten-back, strangled and disbelieving at the newfound pleasure. Silver tears of joy and fulfillment standing in the corners of eyes deep as forests. Devotion seeping from every pore along with the sweat. Gentle arms around his neck, sweetest offering of trust.
Sweat stood on his forehead. Why was he tormented by such visions? Why did every line of his body ache so? She was nothing compared to Mai. Nothing. And yet...
...the lust he felt now, the trembling as every muscle strained towards something unattainable...
...was like nothing he'd ever felt with Mai. With a cry, he plummeted and submerged himself beneath the icy waters of the first stream he could find. He remained there for a long time, until the fire in his loins subsided and the fog behind his eyes cleared. Until the markings on his wrists returned to normal and he felt enough in control to surface.
Dripping wet, cold, and humilated, he resumed the journey home in a very grim mood. He'd made a decision, beneath the calming rush of the stream's waters-- Takemaru had to go. No matter that Inutaisho would not be claiming Izayoi for himself-- his presence was simply not tolerable, and so he would be leaving as soon as Inutaisho returned.
Whether he wanted to or not.
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As it turned out, Takemaru, as though in unconscious obedience to Inutaisho's unspoken command, was far, far away when the disturbed inuyoukai returned to the campsite. Coincidentally, his mind-state was in equal disarray. The discovery that his beloved friend and love interest had a soft spot for demons had quite a negative impact on his composure, and he was currently working it off in exhaustive kata exercises back at the barracks. When Inutaisho flew over him, he was too busy picturing the silver head beneath his sword to notice the silver head above his sword.
And Inutaisho was too busy hating him to notice that he was being hated right back.
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He landed like a sack of rocks, too distracted to notice that the ground was closer than he'd originally thought. Izayoi stood up to greet him eagerly, a smile on her face.
All the composure he'd painstakingly jury-rigged in the last hour of the flight while his clothes dried shuddered and collapsed when she laid a hand on his arm and asked with genuine curiosity if he'd had a safe journey.
He looked at her despite all his honest efforts not to, and--
--white silk and black silk, bedsheets and black locks, gentle gasps of ecstasy in his ear--
--felt his eyes bleeding dangerously red. He turned away with a jerk.
“The flight was fine, thank you. Why are you awake so early?”
She laid a slender finger on her lips (parted in rapture, moist from the languid dance of tongues) and blushed becomingly (all the way down to that little shiny stretch of skin between her breasts). “I haven't slept, actually,” she admitted. “I waited up.”
“You waited for me to return? I was gone all night.”
“That's kind of obvious, since it's morning now,” she pointed out.
“That was foolish. I told you I would not be back until morning. Now you will be tired all day and slow us up.”
He could see without looking the hurt expression on her face and forced himself not to care.
“If you must know, I tried to sleep.”
What?
“I only gave up a few hours ago when it became clear that I couldn't sleep until... until I knew you were safe. If I'd known you were going to be such a jerk when you came back, I wouldn't have worried!”
Worried... for me.
“I'm glad you're back. Though I can't for the life of me understand why I'm glad.”
It was an eerie echo of his own thoughts, and he started. I am glad to be with you on this journey, though I know not why.
“I am sorry,” he said absently. “I am a little distracted right now. Thank you for your concern.”
He laid down and tried to salvage the last hour between him and dawn. Behind him, he heard her join him on the ground, a chaste ten feet away. It took her bare moments to fall into a deep, steady rhythm.
She was exhausted. Foolish woman.
After a few minutes, he realized that sleep was not going to pay any attention to him tonight, so he rolled over and watched the others sleep.
By 'others', his brain meant 'Izayoi'. She was tidily curled on a blanket, feet drawn up into the wide bottoms of her hakama and hands buried in the folds of her haori. In direct contrast to the orderliness of her limbs, her hair and clothes spread messily around her, a beautiful sort of chaos.
Long dark lashes. Delicate ears like seashells. Cheeks rosy with the cold, a little travel-begrimed. Her clothes were stained with mud and dirt and nameless things that are inevitable when one travels. Undoubtedly, she was longing for a bath. Perhaps he could find a hotspring nearby...
...droplets of spray caught in the gossamer web of her hair. Sun gleaming on the flesh exposed above the dark water, nipples pale and pebbled where the cold wind caressed them...
Alarmed, he tore his thoughts away. If she wanted a hotspring, she could damned well find one herself.
She shifted in her sleep, and made a sound so low and quiet any human would have missed it completely. His traitorous imagination shifted the sound to a scene in which she made in while sleeping curled against his side, utterly sated and dreaming of him.
With a low groan, he surrendered and fled.
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“Where's Inutaisho gone to now?” Izayoi asked when she woke at last mid-morning.
Silence.
She looked around. Naruka shrugged, genuinely unaware. Jaken sat on a log, eyes streaming with hurt at the abandonment. Katsuro looked mightily puzzled, and when at last she came to Sakenmaru, she found him desperately trying not to howl with laughter.
“Sakenmaru-sama? Do you know?”
The lion nodded, beard quivering. He obviously did not trust himself to speak. She crinkled her brow. “Where is he?”
“Sitting fully clothed in a stream five minutes away from here,” Katsuro answered, seemingly hoping she would understand the logic.
She didn't. “Sitting in a stream...? What in hell is he up to now?”
She stood, stretched, and rearranged herself. “I'm going to bring him back. I'll be back in a few minutes.”
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His skin had gone completely numb about an hour ago. There was a rime of ice on the edges of the rocky streambed, and the water moved quite quickly. He sat cross legged and contemplated the virtues of pickled plums as a riceball stuffing. When he exhausted that, he moved on to an inner debate over how to best eviscerate a traitorous underling. That kept him occupied up until Izayoi came to fetch him.
“Inutaisho, what on earth are you doing?”
He looked up at her, movements made sluggish by the extreme cold. “Meditating,” he answered evenly.
“On what?” she asked skeptically, arms crossed. She looked stunning in the morning mist.
“Umeboshi,” he answered dreamily.
“Pickled plums? Why the...? Never mind. Come on, I'm not sure what happened to you but you need to get out of that water before you catch your death.”
“Demons don't get sick.”
That didn't even give her pause. “I don't care what species you are, sitting for hours in frigid water is not good for your health. Get out here.”
Obediently, he uncurled himself and trudged his sodden way out onto the banks.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, awed by the monumental idiocy of his actions.
“I am insane,” he answered with perfect equinamity, and began to walk unsteadily towards the campsite.
After standing stock still for a moment in astonishment, she caught up to him and wrapped her arms around one of his to help him walk straight. He shuddered under her hands. She was warmer than him, now, and he remembered being repelled by the coolness of her flesh. That was gone now.
The visions earlier had revealed a possibility of pleasure in how cold her skin was- it must feel exquisite against his own superheated flesh.
“You're freezing,” she murmured. “You're such an idiot.”
Yes.
“What's happened to you?”
“Is the whelp gone?” he asked, instead of answering. “Permanently?”
“You mean Takemaru?” She laughed a little. “Yes, he won't be coming with us. He'll be traveling northwards with the army. You don't have to worry about waking up to his sword at your throat. Just so you know, Katsuro-san was extremely angry with him about his behaviour back there.”
Inutaisho couldn't possibly have cared less about the whelp trying to kill him. He was a mosquito- the amount of noise he would make coming in for the sting would completely ruin his chances at actually drawing blood. Inutaisho had nothing to fear from that.
What he feared was losing Izayoi to him. Not that he 'had' Izayoi to begin with, or wanted to. She was simply too good for Takemaru, and that was it.
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Izayoi blushed like fire. She'd done this countless times when the villagers had come to her for healing, and not turned a hair at it. But this was different. Really, really different.
Inutaisho had managed to freeze his fingers so badly he could not undo the ties of his own clothing. That he needed to get in to dry clothing was not a question, and so somehow, he had to extricate himself from the wet ones. That had proven impossible with his numb fingers, and so the job had fallen to Izayoi.
To preserve modesty, more hers than his, she'd dragged him off into the shelter of the trees once she'd dug out his spare outfit.
That had been the easy part. Now, he was looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to disrobe him. She was shaking and blushing so hard she thought she'd spontaneously combust.
“Er.”
“Is there a problem? If you like, I will simply let my clothing dry while I wear it. It does not bother me.”
Resolutely, she shook her head. “No way are you staying in those clothes. Even if you are a demon, it's not true that demons never get sick. If you weaken yourself enough, you'll fall ill. I've seen it in my demon friends.”
He'd almost forgotten her upbringing among demons. She was right, of course- he was teetering on the brink of illness. The flight back, sodden and flying into the wind, had greatly weakened him, and sitting for hours in that bloody stream had brought him dangerously close to succumbing. The last thing he needed was to fall ill, and so he submitted to her humiliating treatment.
Which was now in great danger of becoming something considerably more dangerous.
With shaking fingers, she undid the cord that bound his haori in place. It fell open, and he felt the wind against his suddenly bare chest.
She turned yet another deeper shade of red. He smiled at her discomfiture. With his demonic sense of modesty, this was not disturbing him in that way. It was, however, disturbing him rather a lot in quite a different way.
The damp fabric slid off his broad shoulders onto the ground with a little help from her fingers, skimming across his chest. He went quietly insane again.
How many needles on that tree, I wonder?
That cloud looks rather like a rabbit chewing its own foot off.
I have a sudden craving for yellow pickles.
It is cold outside.
Izayoi is undressing me.
Izayoi was undressing him.
He desperately wished to be back in the cold, cold water. He was in serious danger of disgracing himself if she went any further than that.
In order to not go any madder than he already was, Inutaisho made a decision.
Just for today... I will allow myself to desire her. Just today. Until I regain my senses.
Unfortunately, the concession did nothing for the current situation. He reached down and caught her trembling fingers as they fumbled at his hakama ties. She looked dumbly up at him, scarlet from head to toe.
“I think my fingers are quite recovered. You may desist.”
“Thank the gods,” she whispered under her breath, though of course he heard it. “I'll leave the rest to you, then. I'll go back and get the fire started.”
She fled, and he slowly finished the job she'd started so devastatingly. The dry clothing rasped against his skin unpleasantly. He was not cold anymore. His skin was afire where her fingers has glanced, and everywhere else as well. When he tied the dry hakama on, he was very thankful for the bagginess of their black folds.
What has she done to me?
Somehow, Takemaru's arrival had shown him exactly where Izayoi stood with him, and vice versa. Everything had changed- instead of the discomfort disappearing, it had intensified. Being around her was sheer torment, now, where it never had been before.
Because he wanted her. Because he'd admitted to himself that he wanted her. Was there any way to undo that admission? Not that he could find. He was good and stuck now.
No way out.
In the next few minutes, he was going to have to return to that campsite and look her in the face... and somehow manage to not do any of the thousand things he'd seen in his visions earlier. How he would keep himself from doing them was a question that invariably was answered with a large, insulting blank.
The world as he knew it was ending. Had probably been ending since he first smelled that impossibly alluring field of flowers in her hair. Since she'd shown up at the door to his home with a message that would save his life, exhausted from the grueling three day ride. Since she danced for him in a cave, drunken and beautiful. Since she'd stood in the middle of a spring, fully clothed and weeping, and made him feel inferior for the first time in his life. And certainly since he'd seen her show love to another man, and discovered jealousy. The world as he'd known it was long done and gone.
He finished tying everything in place and went back to face his new existence, and prayed the humiliation wouldn't hurt too much.
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A/N- That may have been completely random and muddled. I'll find out tomorrow when I reread it and do the edits. You can't blame me, I wrote it with two hundred sixteen year olds rampaging through the hotel I work at, smoking pot in the stairwells and playing floor hockey in the halls. A little insanity is to be expected.
Happy Valentine's Day!
P.S.- parts of this chapter are dedicated to mikkey hodge. You know which parts, Mikkey. I wrote them just for you (wink)! Nothing more... intense... than that for a while now. I think.