Chapter 37: Let it end
Everything hurt inside and out. Here she was lying on the ground with him above yet she hasn’t done anything to stop him. Why didn’t she force him to stop? Why was she so broken by everything that had happened between them?
She stared at Emiko, who continued to nurse at her breast. Her child deserved better, deserved to grow up knowing that she was equal to any man that. It was something that she wasn’t going to let happen. She wanted to be like her mother, she wanted to give her own children a better future that she knew that only Sesshomaru could give them. But he had broken his promise.
For that she needed to punish him.
She needed to teach him that a promise could only be broken for the sake of other’s lives and not for one’s own pleasures. Why was she so weak and pathetic? Where had the real her gone in the last two years? Where was the woman that would have stared down giant monsters with only a bow and arrows in hand?
When had she allowed all this to happen to her? When had her soul and heart started breaking, taking the strong woman that she had been to turn her into a weak child? But how would she grasp hold of the strong woman she had once been so that she can become her once more?
Kagome glanced at Sesshomaru, who still towered over her body. He looked as if he was about to be sick and it filled her with a sick pleasure to know that he found her sickening.
Let him see what she had become in both body and mind from what his hands on her had done. He had been poison to her, crippling and burning her from the inside out just as atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had done to the victims of World War II. But then Sesshomaru did not know about the first or the second wars that would rock the world on its axle. He knew nothing of the poison that filled and killed the people that simply breathed the air.
He had broken his promise and he needed to be punished for it.
“Get out.” It had just been a whispered but had still passed her lips.
“Kagome-”
“GET OUT!” She snarled at him before finding the strength within her to stand and strike him.
GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT!” She screamed at him with all the strength her lungs had as she continued to strike at him with just one hand.
The air filled with tension as their children began to cry, even little Emiko had stopped nursing to cry along with her brothers and sisters. Their cries were protest to their parents fighting but still Kagome continued to strike at Sesshomaru who did nothing but take it all without protest.
But all too soon, she became weak and tired, falling to her knees in need of rest. She fell to her knees as the weakness filled her flesh.
“Kagome, why did you allow yourself to become like this?” He questioned her.
Allow? She hadn’t allowed anything; this was all done to her by him and his mother. Her mind has lasted this long but her body was dying, immortal or not. She was dying but he had the nerve to say that she had allowed it. That was too much for her.
Without even thinking, her power flowed from her like blood flowing freely from an open wound. Sesshomaru stood his ground though and looked her in the eye even as his skin burned and blistered under her power. Pain filled his gaze but still he looked into her eyes as if what was in there would make her stop. She wanted to hurt him, he wanted to make him burn with pain like he had her for the last two years.
“Kagome, you need to stop.”
No, no she would not stop making him hurt and burn under her power; she should have killed him before, should have make him die a painful death like he had her when he had forced himself inside of her body. Make him suffer as she had every time that he made her feel pleasure; she wanted him to feel all of this just as she did.
“No, you need to suffer, Sesshomaru. I’m going to make you suffer now.” Her words had been whisper soft but she knew that he had heard her from the hurt that filled his eyes alongside the pain.
“I will strip you bare as you have done me, I will make you burn and I will show you how you are a poison that seeks to end me.” She informed when he fell to his knees before her.
But still he refused to look away from her gaze, not even as the skin on his face was slowly burned away which caused him to bleed and showed the muscle beneath it. She did not understand why he refused to look away or even to strike her. Why had he never hit her before that first time all those years ago?
He reached out to touch her cheek but she backed away from him, she couldn’t have him touch her when she stood before him naked as when she was forced to his bed. She felt so tired and numb from everything that she wished for anything that would make her feel something real.
It was then that her eyes flickered to the blade at his hip. Bakusaiga could be the answer to her desire.
But Sesshomaru saw where her gaze had wandered and reared back from his knees with fear in his golden eyes. Why did his eyes have to be so like Inuyasha’s? Why did they hold such care and kindness for her in those golden pools?
“No…No, Kagome!” He said with such strength that she would never have known that he was on his knees in pain just a moment before.
“Give it to me; I want this pain to end now!” She moved to take it but still he stepped back from her as if her reaching hands were like his own when filled with poison. The screaming of their crying children was slowly becoming deafeningly, calling to her like a siren’s song.
But unlike their father, they were fine. They were just upset because of the fighting and likely their father’s blood; she wanted to calm her babies, giving them the comfort that they needed.
Yet, the numbness was overwhelming to her senses, which cried out to her in need of sensation. But her body was numb because of Sesshomaru.
She needed to punish him and the burns were just the beginning of it.
“Give it to me, Sesshomaru. Let me feel something besides this numbing poison!” She demanded.
But he refused. “Kagome stop, Bakusaiga would kill you if you were to touch the blade.”
“You think I care? I don’t even feel human anymore, Sesshomaru. I feel like a thing, an object that you use as you wish to.”
He moved to the door and disappeared through it so fast that Kagome had almost missed it. It was all just too much for her.
oOo
He had to break it. He had to break it or get rid of it. He needed to do something so that Kagome could not touch his sword; she couldn’t be allow to touch the essence of his flesh and blood made into steel. True, he did not know if Kagome was immune to the blade’s poison as he was.
It was better to destroy Bakusaiga then to allow Kagome to kill herself with his very essence. Anything was better than allowing Kagome to kill herself.
After all, he was a lord of high standing, one of the great four that world the human realm was terrified at the thought of losing Kagome. She and their children were the most important things in his life. Burned and bleeding as he was, but that did not matter.
It was a little thing compared to Kagome’s safety.
“Lord Sesshomaru?” The voice stopped him in his sprint.
He turned to look at the old lord that had once been friends with his father. The lord of the east still appeared strong and powerful as Sesshomaru remembered from childhood. Dark blue hair, strong rigid markings that went well with the demon’s powerful jaw but there were lines of age that hadn’t been there before. It spoke of weakness.
He wore clothes that were befitting only demons of their high standing but Sesshomaru could have cared less in that moment as his mind raced with concern for Kagome. She was alone and a threat to herself at the moment. It was no matter that she was immortal, she was still a threat to herself, and he could not allow that.
“Lord Roka, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here to propose an alliance between our houses by marriage but that does not matter right now. What happened to you?”
Sesshomaru looked down at his hands to see them badly burned and bleeding but he had known that they would be so. Kagome’s power felt as if it had been burning him alive and was different from the powers of other. She had never truly lashed out at him before, not even at the cave.
But she had just now and he wondered at her words. He had been a poison to her in all their time together; how those words had hurt. He had never wanted to be poison to her but then she had changed so much in the last two years.
Her smiles were gone when he was around and when she did smile for their children, they were weak, brittle things that looked as if they would shatter into tears no matter how sweet they were for the children. She played the koto less, and less as if the instrument no longer calmed her of her upsets.
Was he truly a poison to her?
“Lord Sesshomaru? Did you hear me?”
Sesshomaru glared at the lord before him. “Yes and no. I have no need for an alliance with your house since we already have one by arrangement of trades that benefits both our houses.”
He would not allow his children to be bargaining chips for power. His lust for power was great but Kagome and their children had tamed it without even trying. They were his everything; their happiness came first. Mizuki popped into his head as an adult, unhappy with the arranged match that an alliance would force on her.
He would have the realm and every living thing end before he allowed that to happen.
“It is a trade agreement, yes but it does not call upon my aid in war and there are rumors that you are going to war soon. I would be a strong ally for you and my sons are powerful in their own rights.”
“Rumors are rumors until true but regardless, my family has many allies to give aid in war.”
“That may have been true once, but things have changed because of your wanderings all those years ago and you know it.”
It was true that his house and bloodline had become weak since he had not been actively ruling it as he should have been. But the wandering of the land to seek out ways to increase his power had been too great and he had given into it willingly like a drunk gave into a bottle of sake.
He had not found a way to increase his power as he had hoped. Instead he had found Kagome, then Rin and power followed the feelings that they brought out in him.
Even now, Kagome filled him with power with the feelings that he had for her.
It was then running feet could be heard before servants appeared. They ran toward him and Lord Roka, fear plain upon their faces. They ran pass them until Lord Roka grabbed one but Sesshomaru knew what they were running from. They were running from Kagome, for her power was slowly filling the air.
It was like mount Hakurei all over again, it was something that made him wonder just how powerful Kagome was.
“What is going on?” He heard the other lord question but Sesshomaru blocked out what was likely to follow as he moved to go back to her. He needed to return to Kagome and sooth her of her pain as best he could despite his injuries.
The hall was slowly flooded with her power and it burned him once more but he ignored the pain as he walked through it to her.
oOo
Tears flowed freely as she soothed her children, her power flowing from her continuously like a wound to an artery. She didn’t know how to stem her power but then she didn’t care at the moment. She wanted to be alone with her children and breathe in the air without Sesshomaru near.
She wanted to be free but that was never going to be possible within these walls.
Which told her what she needed to do.
Without another thought, she put down Kiyomi, who had been crying the hardest of all her children when she Sesshomaru had been fighting.
Turning to the door, she walked out of the room, not realizing that Mizuki was quick to follow her. But then Kagome was too full of the numbness that made her so want to end it all. That she could not stand it any longer was something that no one seemed to realize but she would make them all understand now that she refused to let it continue.