#savethelastdan

But then the woman sits up, looking about with wild red eyes and blood smeared over her face. A thin layer of ice covers the ground and the tops of her shaking shoulders.

"Who's there?" She snaps, pulling her hand free from the hole she's carved in the stomach of the corpse to scrub across her gore-covered face.

Sesshomaru frowns. Normal humans cannot perceive him. Yet, when he moves closer, she bares her teeth in a grimace and says, "What the fuck are you supposed to be?"

Brushing silver hair over his shoulder, Sesshomaru ignores her question in favor of his own. "This dead man's soul is mine to collect."

Rapid blinking; and then an amused, blood-stained smile spreads across her face. "A reaper spirit, then. Are all of you this handsome in person?"

His tone would rival the air's chill. "Where is it."

"Same place his liver is." She licks her lips pointedly. Sesshomaru frowns deeper - so she's a mortal demon, then. The kind that can feed on bodies and souls alike. How rare to meet one, since the days that the gods first laid their favor on humankind. Most creatures outside of the divine realm remain hidden, or perish - those like him merely pass through long enough to do their duty and nothing more.

No such sense of self-preservation in this one; she stands uneasily, but does not make a move to run. Instead, she tilts her head and studies him, as if calculating whether it's possible to make a meal out of him.

Sesshomaru's jaw tightens. The soul is gone, unable to be delivered to its rightful place. How careless, ignorant -

The creature-woman opens her mouth to speak, but a tremor overtakes her. Sesshomaru watches in morbid curiosity as she bends at the waist, breathing raggedly.

"It won't stop." She spits out the words like fish bones lodged in the back of her throat. Painfully-red eyes seek out his own golden ones. "How many more before it stops?"

Ah. So that's it.

Back in the old days, Sesshomaru heard of creatures that ate human flesh after a long period of fasting, and so lost control of themselves. Having never met any such being personally, Sesshomaru always approached the idea with disdain.

It is not typically his responsibility to deal with creatures like her. However...

"Feed on the flesh as you like. It has nothing to do with me," he sighs, turning away. "But leave the soul next time, and don't disturb my work."

-

The next time they meet, he physically has to pry the soul free from her mouth.

"Bastard," she gasps from the pavement, rubbing the scratches on her chin from where his nails cut into the skin. "Souls are hundred times better - "

Practically smoking with irritation, Sesshomaru tucks the glowing orb into his sleeve. He prefers for the souls he escorts to need as little handling as possible, but this one's unlikely to reveal its true form until they reach the Underworld. Since there are bite marks.

"I will not warn you again."

-

The third time, she spits the soul into her palm and throws it at him. Considering how her whole body shakes with clear regret afterwards, Sesshomaru can find a smidgen of respect for that.

"Perhaps you have common sense, after all."

"Fuck off," she replies, clawing at the corpse with a desperation that sends a crawling sensation over his body. Some organ disappears between her teeth, and she groans as if in pain. "If you were really a neutral creature, then you'd put me out of my misery."

"The hunger will ease, eventually," he says. Why the words push themselves past his lips, when he owes her nothing, is as mysterious as the entire situation.

She coughs, and something dark splatters in the grass. "It's been months. Who knows how many bodies. Eventually can come about any time it pleases."

-

Her name is Kagura.

She might have been something else, back before the gods offered allegiance to humanity over demonkind. But thanks to the constant hunger, she can't remember.

Talking, even if the response is minimal, apparently helps to distract her from the urge to feed.

Sesshomaru departs for the Underworld with a perfectly pristine soul at his side, and something twisting uncomfortably in his own stomach.

-

She keeps eating.

She still feels empty.

He keeps collecting.

His stomach hurts a lot these days.

-

Her kind can sometimes live for centuries.

-

"What the fuck is that?"

Kagura lifts her head from her knees to stare at his outstretched hand. The breeze drifts between them, lifting her bangs off her forehead. She looks wary, and frustrated, and starving.

Sesshomaru doesn't explain. Even as he makes this choice, violates his own reason for existence; he cannot name it. All he says is, "This one is marked for suffering in hell."

He kneels. Kagura cups his hand in both of her own to draw it closer to her mouth. Dark eyes meet his with bottomless curiosity.

"Are you sure?"

Sesshomaru looks away, even as he feels the wetness of her mouth slip over his fingers, the barest scrape of her teeth on his palm. At the relieved sigh she gives - only a few moments of peace, before she'll be in pain again - his own stomach finally settles.

"Sesshomaru."

He twists his head back, and she smiles wryly at him.

"Creatures like me don't have to wait for the body to die before we take the soul. Do you know what we do instead?"

He frowns in confusion. Kagura leans forward, mouth brushing against his. For a moment, he can taste what must be the remnants of the soul he brought (to the wrong realm, to her, in defiance of the Goddess of Death): iron, spice; a there-and-gone burn against his lips. Then, for a moment, all of the air in his lungs stirs. He is not a living creature in the typical sense, and yet his pulse races.

Kagura leans back. "Our kiss can draw out the soul of other creatures on this realm. If you were human, it would have felt like you couldn't breathe. Swallowing your life energy would be easy." Then, with a far-too-casual sigh, she adds, "But reaping spirits don't quite have souls, do they?"

Clearing his throat, Sesshomaru considers whether he should bother to respond. What he ends up with, as he rises to his feet, is a muttered, "A far cleaner method than devouring the flesh."

Kagura leans her chin on her hand and gazes up at him. "Curious about what I could do to your body, given the chance?"

"Not in the least."

Sesshomaru flees to the Underworld with the echo of her cackling laughter in his ears. One can only imagine what nerve she must have (what she's like), when she's sated...

-

"Will you keep coming back, if the hunger goes away?"

"I wouldn't know where to look for you."

"But you would look."

-

He would.

Layers of clothing hide a collection of poorly-healed battle wounds that neither time nor demonic blood could erase. They burn with the reminder of her original purpose: Soldier. Shield. Slave. 

Worst of all is the spider that still mars the whole of her back. Rough, ugly, and wind-worn. Though she can't see it herself, knowing it's there (like a stamp, a brand) makes her want to claw her body to ribbons. 

Kagura’s scars feel like a curse.

-

The wind god finally allows her to resurrect, and it is a disappointment that her body remains unhealed.

Jaken complains about the time she spends melting away in hot springs, unaware how many minutes are dedicated to scrubbing her skin raw. Her displeasure is not out of a sense of vanity; rather the constant reminder the marks make, of the being that put them there. 

I will be free, Kagura spits at her tormentor's back for the hundredth time. Echos of a thousand demonic cries shudder through the castle walls. 

Naraku doesn't even spare a look back towards her as he retorts, You don't even have a reason to exist without me.

Now she has a life of her own. But with how the vessel containing her spirit looks, who would know?  If she could live with a hollowed out place in my chest, then a few layers of skin off the back won’t matter…

The sky grows dark, indicating she's taken far too long. So Kagura grits her teeth and ties her kimonos loosely around sore, stinging shoulder-blades. The spider mark burns; perhaps Naraku is using it to send her a message from Hell. 

That night, curled up together in a cave somewhere, Sesshomaru watches the ginger way she moves about. Predictably, he doesn't actually say anything. But Kagura picks a fight anyway, just to distract herself from what he could be thinking. 

Pity would be bad enough, and isn't something she wants anyway. Confusion is more likely; Sesshomaru often finds her feelings and behaviors a mystery. 

As for compassion - Jaken claims the daiyokai has developed some, in the time between Kagura's death and rebirth. But as the source is less than reputable, she won't hold her breath for that. 

-

Over the years, her body gains other scars. But it's different this time.  

It's not hard for someone with Kagura's taste for fun to meet with trouble - how fascinating, that violence seems to be a constant partner of good entertainment! So she collects a few more battle wounds. It takes days for her demonic energy to fade them into a white or pink interruption of skin. But in this life, Kagura is not shut up in a corner of the castle to wonder at the consequences of resting for too long. Instead, Sesshomaru sits by her side with little comment, other than a dry reprimand for her lack of sense. And nothing happens to her heart.

Well, nothing bad, anyway. 

A year after her resurrection, they kiss for the first time, and his fangs catch her lip. It's sharp enough to leave a divot that she runs her tongue over at night. Not with fear, but excitement. And the next time their lips meet, she tries her best to give him a matching one.  

Her body stretches as she eats and drinks and laughs more often; in the hot spring, she counts blue stripes along her hips and thighs and delights in how they look like sunlight rippling across wind-touched water. It leaves much less time to try to wash away a dreadful past. 

Jaken mentions it off-handedly one night - a demon who makes art out of people's bodies with ink. Kagura interrupts to ask about something she will never remember later, and as with most of their conversations, it quickly devolves into a screaming match. She ends up so focused on chasing the kappa around the room with blades of wind, that Sesshomaru's thoughtful expression completely passes her notice. 

A few days later, he takes her to a grimy seaside village. They stop at a dark stall covered with line-work designs, where he stuffs a genuinely worrying amount of money into her hand. "This should cover anything that you feel is necessary."

To cover her rapidly increasing heartbeat, Kagura punches his arm with a shout - don't treat me like a greedy little mistress you're abandoning in a merchant's square! But even if he didn't have excellent hearing, the warm wind that twines around his shoulders would still make her delight clear. 

The self-proclaimed artist, Yatora, deems the scars on her wrists "not a problem". He is clearly taken aback when she states that is not her concern; when she pulls away the final kimono to display the spider scar that still stains her back, the response is a frustrated sigh.

"Well...I hope you can handle pain." 

Memories rush in, but she is past feeling like she'll drown in them. "Won't be a problem."

-

In the growing darkness, Kagura flexes her shoulder-blades carefully to test the stretch of the raw, needled skin. She left the mirror somewhere, or else she'd go to look at the finished design again. Even swollen and healing, it makes the air around her sing with pride, to have the spider finally covered. 

Sesshomaru watches her move, eyes half-lidded. After some time, he murmurs, "What was it that convinced Fujin to resurrect you?" 

Kagura twists her head towards the futon; he has never asked her this before. Perhaps because it didn't matter to either of them, so long as she was alive at all. As she considers how to answer, her tongue worries the divot in her bottom lip. 

"I dunno. It was something like - my smile had 'too much beauty in it to be left to a hopeless fate'."  

Sesshomaru frowns. 

"Okay, fine, I made that up. He never said why; don't reckon I'll ever know." 

He shifts closer; the tips of his claws run down the collection of blue lines striping her left hip, and she shivers. 

Clearing her throat, she says, “Whatever it is, I suppose you’re asking because you’re grateful for it?”

Sesshomaru’s eyes gleam in the barest hint of lantern-light that remains. It makes Kagura want to mark him, too.