InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Pinkie Swear ❯ Miracle ( Chapter 16 )

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=#= Miracle =#=

 

She is only a child, who wishes upon a shooting star.

 

She is a human, who grows and lives and dies, in the span of a mere handful of his heartbeats. Like pages of a child's picture book, her existence passes beneath his fingertips as time compels him to hear her story to its end. Over and over he returns to her modest little grave, as if to refresh the memories whose reality he can no longer quite grasp…

 

Out of the corner of his eye, he almost sees the wind tease dark locks of silken hair. In a crowded street and in the quiet gloom of solitude, the echo of her laughter almost reaches his ears. Utter dark, where he can hide from his shame, he almost feels his hands on his body as hers…

 

Turn by turn the sun and moon shine upon him, turn by turn summer, fall, winter, and spring surround him, but time leaves him untouched. Change sinks its talons into all but he, leaving him perfect and incomplete. Her race grows dominant and lazy, lethargic in its success and wholly complacent in its place at the top of the world…

 

He is too tired to remind them of the things they once respected and feared. Deeper and higher they press on in their march of expansion, but there is only so far they can push the boundaries of their fragile lives. He retreats to the last wildernesses of nature, unbothered by hunger or thirst, untainted by mortality except for a heart that ever more aches for her…

 

He learns, inadvertently, of the human technology that claims to replicate exactly the one being cloned. His search through his old territory is frantic, his regret at having not guarded her grave well enough razor keen. It takes him months to find anything he recognizes, and longer to locate the place her body used to rest. A mysterious break in leaves a deep hole in a prosperous bank's floor, nothing stolen but whatever rested beneath the building…

 

Bribery, coercion, fear; he uses them all until they promise to give him what he wants. A perfect little baby girl that he has them keep in stasis, her little fingers and toes curled as if in sleep.

 

Once more a rusted sword is pulled from its brittle sheath and the stone guardians are forced to once again yield to the master of the blade. Beyond the bone yard, beyond the skeleton of his father, he lays siege to the very core of Hell until he finds the bright little soul he craves. Carefully he entraps her in a ceramic urn, tucking the sealed vessel against his skin as he flies swiftly out of the closing gates.

 

Magic older than he himself implants the spirit inside the body created with cutting edge science. Dark brown eyes open—and her coo of delight is like sunshine to his parched, lonely being. Tiny, delicate fingers grab hold of one long, clawed, callused one as the love embittered by her death bursts once more into full, fragrant life. A soft, fragile smile of hope lights his face, reaching all the way into his flinty amber eyes, as she toothlessly grins up at him with recognition.

 

He is only the taiyoukai, who wishes to keep her forever.

 

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