#mirkag

She didn't see Inuyasha cross the distance. No one ever did. There was just the red blur and the impact, his arm a bar across her ribs. The breath punched out of her as the world spun and the web closed on the empty air where she'd been standing with a sound like a thousand wet knives sliding home.

They hit the ground hard. Rolled. Came up against the roots of an old cedar with Inuyasha on top of her, shielding her with his whole body, Tessaiga already swinging up to carve a smoking arc through Naraku's puppet before it dissolved into the muck and laughter and miasma it was made of.

It was over in seconds. It always seemed to be, at least. That was the thing about being rescued — it happened too fast to do anything but be grateful, and then you spent the rest of the day choking on the shape of the gratitude.

"You okay?" Inuyasha's voice, rough, already pulling back to scan the treeline for the next thing. "Kagome. Hey. You hurt?"

"I'm fine." She was looking at the web. At where she'd been standing. At the long curved line of secretly serrated silk that would have opened her from collarbone to hip if a half-demon hadn't moved faster than thought. "I'm fine. He got away again."

"Feh. It was a puppet. Naraku's not stupid enough to show up himself." Inuyasha hauled her to her feet by the wrist, already moving on. "C'mon. Sango's got the kid."

She let herself be pulled up. She brushed the dirt off her skirt. She did not say the thing that was sitting in her throat like a stone, which was: That's the fourth time this month.

The fourth time you've had to stop fighting to come and pull me out of the fire.

What happens when… if… you no longer can?

✻ ✻ ✻

Across the valley, kneeling in the trampled grass with his staff laid across his knees and his cursed hand throbbing where he'd kept the kazaana sealed — too many saimyosho in the air, the poison wasn't worth it — Miroku had seen everything.

He watched Kagome freeze. He watched Inuyasha move. He watched the web close on nothing.

And he watched, with the particular attention of a man who'd spent years learning to read the weather of the spirit, the look that came over Kagome's face afterward. Not fear. Fear he could have understood; fear was honest. This was worse. This was the careful, practiced blankness of someone folding a humiliation away small enough to carry.

He had seen that look before. He'd worn it himself, most of his life, every time someone glanced at the beads around his hand and went soft with pity.

His gaze dropped to her hands, hanging loose at her sides as she pretended to study the dirt on her skirt.

And the memory came — unbidden, vivid, the way the important ones always did.

A farmer's hut, two months ago. An arrowhead worked free of a torn shoulder. Kagome on her knees in the lamplight with someone else's blood drying on her jaw, murmuring 'almost there, almost, you're doing so well,' in that voice she used to make a frightened man believe a kind lie.

And then — the thing only Miroku had seen, because only Miroku had been looking — a faint pink luminescence gathering at her fingertips as she pressed her palm to the wound. A pulse, soft as a heartbeat. The bleeding slowing where no bandage had yet touched it. The man's gray lips going pink. And Kagome reaching for the gauze without the faintest idea she'd done anything at all.

He had said nothing then. He was very good at saying nothing while appearing to say a great deal.

But he had not stopped thinking about it since. Because that — that — was not the mark of a liability. That was the strongest latent gift he had felt in a decade going off like a wet firework: once in a while, sideways, when no one was aiming it.

There was a sun inside this girl, and she had spent three years apologizing for being a candle.

✻ ✻ ✻

That evening, when the camp had quieted and Inuyasha had stalked off to hunt as was his custom during the hour, Miroku found her at the river, washing the day off her hands.

"While I do appreciate the demonstration of the expression washing your hands of the situation," he remarked, observing the vigorous manner in which she continued to scrub, "I'm certain that you've exceeded even your own standards of cleanliness."

When she didn't respond, he quickly realized that a direct approach would be the only thing jarring enough to bait her into honesty.

"You're angry."

She didn't look up. "I'm tired."

"You're angry, and you're hiding it in tired, which is what people do when the thing they're angry at is themselves." He crouched beside her, the bell-rings of his staff chiming softly as he set it in the mud. "You froze today. And it's eating you alive, because you froze yesterday, and last week, and you've started counting."

Her hands had gone still in the cold water. The river muttered over its stones. Somewhere upstream a frog tried out a single note and thought better of it.

"I'm… holding us back," she said, very low. It came out of her like something she'd been holding underwater. "I'm the reason he has to keep stopping, giving Naraku opening after opening to escape. I'm the thing the rest of you have to defend instead of focusing on the fight. Three years, Miroku, and I'm still the girl who needs rescuing." She finally looked at him, and her eyes were bright and furious and wet. "I find the jewel shards. That's it. That's the whole of what I'm good for. A — a clumsy compass that gets in the way."

"Kagome-sama, if I may share a word? One you may find a bit hard to believe?"

"You're going to whether I say yes or not."

"That's the spirit." The ghost of a smile touched his mouth, then faded into something steadier. "Two months ago, in one of the farmer's huts in Kaede's village, I watched you close a wound with your bare hand. Reiki left your fingertips like light off water and you never knew you'd done it."

He let that settle.

"Most monks spend a decade learning to do on purpose, badly, what you did by accident while thinking about bandages. I have felt the auras of a great many gifted people, Kagome. I have never felt a well as deep as yours. The trouble is you keep a lid hammered down over the top of it, because someone, somewhere, taught you that your fire was a lesser thing than another woman's."

She went very still at that. He saw the name move behind her eyes without either of them saying it.

"Train with me," he said.

She blinked. "What?"

"Your reiki. I can teach you to find it on purpose. To aim it. To stop freezing, because the next time a web comes for you, you'll have something in your hands besides arrows you don't trust." He kept his voice light, transactional, a monk proposing a sensible arrangement. "Naraku is close. We both feel it. I'm sure you would very much prefer if you walked into the end of this knowing what you carry."

He told himself it was strategy. A monk hardening a blade that would be needed.

He told himself a number of things these days, and was getting quite good at believing it.

"Okay," Kagome said, and something in her face had unfastened — not hope, not yet, but the door that hope could walk through. "Yeah. Teach me."

And the small, traitorous gladness that moved through his chest at the word yeah — like the first warmth after a long cold — was a thing he chose, very deliberately, not to examine.

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