Infinity, Stacking Doll by Sada

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Title: Infinity, Stacking Doll

Author: Sada

Summary: The mind is a terrible thing to waste, the soul a helpless thing to pollute.

Genre: Angst, Insanity, Implied sex, etc.

Rating: Like... PG-13. Or R.

Notes: I needed something to make me think. This didn't work. See, I started this thinking shit like, 'I'm going to be poetic!' And I wasn't. And that's sad. Honestly, I didn't even have this idea in my head before I started typing, I just sat down and started and then finished a week or so later. If there are plot-holes, well, it's a drabble of sorts, and shut-up, because those are totally allowed to have holes. I'll get back to other things now.

Feedback: Preferably detailed. 'Cause I love people who review. Nicely. With length... Guh. Perverted thoughts.

Kagome can't make dinner anymore, to whom it may concern.

Her's is a slow death, eating at her heart like a lazy poison. There is blood on her hands and clothes, and her soul has grown twice as heavy since Kikyou returned it.

She hadn't asked for it back, you know.

But still it sits inside her, a burden of presence. It runs icy fingers up her spine, and wishes her all the best pain. The fall of a thousand and one soldiers the other her that wasn't really her couldn't save rocks back and forth in her mind, feeding her images of gore and villages gone. Her hands shake too bad to hold pots and pans these days, which is why she can't take care of anything, in case you were wondering.

When Sango looks at her, the slayer wants to tell her to suck it up, Kagome knows. Sango has been to Hell and back with her brother, who's a zombie and a murderer and her only solace in this world of strangers, and she thinks Kagome is overreacting (as she always does). Miroku feels only pity for the weak little miko--he doesn't seem to realize that her prison of flesh is twice as desolate as his. Inuyasha ignores her, positive that she'll snap out of it soon enough. Shippo thinks she has a cold. Kagome thinks she might have a cold, too.

She's too far numb to really know the difference.

Often, Kagome thinks about drilling a hole through herself in the hopes that some of Kikyou's soul will spill out, disappear, piecing back together a small part of her innocence. Kagome wishes desperately for oblivion, for the whitewashed streets of youth, a place where happy endings are always just around the corner.

There are no more corners where she's at now, trapped between a spider and a memory.

Sometimes a small spark of Kagome-pre-Kikyou will speak up deep inside her, telling her that these tortured recollections of death and sickness and tragic love aren't her's, aren't Kagome's, aren't supposed to be killing her. Usually this voice is swiftly silenced by a new memory of death. Or sickness. Or tragic love.

It's funny because it's inescapable, and late at night Kagome can feel hysterical laughter crawling up her throat. No one notices when she bites hard on her wrist to distract her from the joke. What they do notice is the bruises, and the faint indents of teeth decorating her skin. They ask her what it's all about, of course. That only makes her want to laugh more. So she doesn't answer.

Eventually, there's going to be someone she can share the joke with. She hopes its Kikyou.

The days pass, droning and dangerous, and she tries not to slip further into this combined force of despair. Now, when she sleeps, there's a dull roar in her cage of a skull, like the thrash of an angry sea. Kagome likes to pretend some part of her is fighting back the disease festering. But every morning when she wakes up, the world is still grey, and her throat is still working around laughter. In the few minutes of sleep she does get, she usually dreams about the Bone-Eater's Well. The well is closed, since she's Kikyou now and doesn't have a whole jewel. (Or maybe it won't let her pass because she can't feel her priestess powers anymore.)

Kagome doesn't really think about it.

Winter is coming, and she hopes the weather will help her somehow.

During the first snow she doesn't feel any better, it only makes her analyze why her mind has fallen into ruin. In a moment of sick irony, it is a hallucination of Kikyou that gives her this small bit of knowledge. There is soul upon soul upon soul of scared, miserable women trapped in Kikyou's soul--the souls she consumed to sustain herself. They are wrapped as tightly around Kagome's soul now as a snake coiled around it's prey.

She hopes they don't consume her (even though she knows they will).

There are shadows everywhere recently, in places there didn't used to be shadows, but in the second week of December the snow covers them and Kagome's breath comes to her a little easier. Villagers say it is to be the worst winter in years. Everyone but Kagome complains. Kagome is tangled in a loose knot of excitement.

By January, she is eating better.

February she feels herself sliding backwards into that oppressive reality where endings are nonexistent. Winter will be gone too soon, and she will be back in the space of frenzied calm. Summer is breathing on her back, filled with childhoods and promises she's too weary to keep.

So.

One night, after looking at each of her companions with eyes of a priestess long gone, she leaves.

Kagome travels north, to the mountains, to the deeper snow and frigid temperatures. Snow makes her feel clean, the cold air fills her lungs with sensation. She settles in a village at the base of a mountain that has no name. Her hut is lonely, on the outskirts and furthest up. Someday, she will move even closer to the top of the towering peak. Now she catches up on lost sleep, dreamless and content.

In March, it is spring, but Kagome is still in her world of white. Word reaches her that an odd band of travelers is searching for a girl, a priestess. They've scoured the countryside and are ever closer to finding her. Kagome flees further up the mountain, knowing they will discover her, drag her back to the place where winter ends and summer drives hot knives into her flesh.

All of the sudden one day, she realizes she's turned seventeen. To celebrate she goes further up the mountain than she's ever gone before.

As a present she lets herself indulge of her happiest memories of traveling with Inuyasha, ignoring the oozing welt each one leaves on her brain. By accident, she realizes why she loves winter so much. It is Kikyou to her, and Kikyou is the only one who would understand what it's really like to be dead and revived with half of everything. Half a soul, half a will, half a love. Kagome doesn't own any of these things anymore, and she often looses herself in the screaming of the souls stuck inside the soul stuck inside her.

No one hears her laughing feverishly, picturing herself an empty box filled with hundreds of smaller boxes.

It is May when they find her, and she doesn't mind as much since the snow is mostly gone.

She's very quiet, back to barely any sleep. They all ignore her gaunt appearance, commenting on the lovely weather and heat. Kagome pretends it's winter again.

In August, in the height of summer and the deepest part of her recession, they run into Inuyasha's half-brother. Kagome looks up at him, and can't help but breathe easier.

He is cold and aloof and silent and all things frigid. He is a blur of white and an uncaring manner, dressed in snow, filled with ice. Kagome thinks she loves him.

When she walks to him, Inuyasha screaming and everyone in a panic, he ignores her. It is when she wraps her hand in the empty sleeve of his left arm that he gives her a withering glare. His glare is perfect for her, and she almost smiles. When he threatens to sever her hand, Kagome tries not to ask him to sever the whole arm, so they can match. Inuyasha yanks her back, and the screaming of the souls inside Kikyou inside Kagome grow louder and louder, until Kagome realizes it's her screaming, and please stop that.

Inuyasha lets her go, reeling back, confused and probably scared. It is the demon lord who moves first, leans down to look into her eyes. She figures they're probably the glassy eyes of a corpse, and decides she isn't going to blink while he's so close to her. He leans back, apparently finding something, and walks away.

Kagome follows him.

They all try to stop her, but she's determined, and secretly they were all tired of dealing with her new problems anyway.

By September Sesshomaru still isn't acknowledging her. When she asks him questions, he is silent, and she loves his not-answers better than any other response he could give. The girl Rin runs around her, joyous and warm, and Kagome doesn't like to be alone around her. Rin is convinced Kagome just needs a friend, and gives her flowers, and snails, and catches butterflies for her. Kagome never touches them.

When winter comes again, Kagome will go back to her hut, as close to content as she can be.

They don't see Inuyasha or anyone else she knows again, but Naraku is forever looming, a growing ink spill on her leftover courage.

At the very end of November, it snows, and Kagome flees while Rin sleeps and Sesshomaru is elsewhere. Jaken watches, happy when she's gone, positive his lord will be happy, too.

In the second week of a different December, Sesshomaru is standing outside her hut.

The snow is less this year, melting off and falling again as the days lazily unfurl. Kagome can't help but be pleased that this perpetual winter figure has rejoined her. She stares back at him from her lonely, decrepit hut, feeling the cold night sweeping in behind her.

"It was rather pretentious of you to begin traveling with this one." It is the first time he's ever directly addressed her. She isn't sure she likes it. Kagome backs into her icy home, positive he will go away now. Instead he follows her, filling the entire right side of her dark hut with his white existence. "It was even more pretentious of you to leave without a word of thanks for my undeserved hospitality."

She would like to argue that he was not, in fact, hospitable, but only sits down, staring with wide dead-child eyes. Sesshomaru sits across from her; Kagome knows she didn't invite him in. For a moment, she thinks he's going to ask about her current state of mind, about why she's living like this, why she isn't responsive, why she can't laugh anymore, why have you replaced that lively girl that everyone used to know? Rather, he only asks, "What do you eat?"

Kagome mumbles about how her hunger hardly bothers her these days, and it isn't that she's killing herself, only that in some odd way the souls that were consumed fill her to overflowing, and if she tries to fit much more in her body, surely it will burst.

Sesshomaru gives the impression of heaving a large, drawn-out sigh without actually doing so. He watches her, and it is with startling clarity that Kagome suddenly realizes that he doesn't actually care about anything anymore. He is so old, so constant, so tired, and he's seen everything before, because isn't it that humans only repeat themselves? Demons with thought follow the same pattern, it's only natural.

"Why are you here?" She questions.

"It was accessible."

A perfectly logical answer.

There is a perfectly illogical glint to his eyes, though, and for a moment the souls inside her are quiet. Kagome wonders what this being, this being that isn't anything she understands, is seeing right now, in this small, dusty room with her. What does she look like? Kikyou, certainly. With a bit of madness and a dash of death. Are there shadows in her eyes, like his? Or are they different?

His head tilts, hair flashing, and a strong winter wind wafts over her skin.

Different, since he knows what his demons are, what it is that keeps him up at night. The things that he's killed, the villages he's burned, the families he's ruined. Surely with his immortal mind he remembers every face, every sound, every smell. She wonders if his was a slow descent into this living tomb. Even now she can see Sesshomaru's sins falling in folds around him, like an invisible cloak. A giggle bubbles threateningly close to the surface, and Kagome silences it by putting her wrist to her mouth. Sesshomaru watches tiredly.

Kagome's troubles, however, are the opposite. They are unknown and helpless, terrified mortal souls of women who are trapped in the limbo that kept Kikyou alive for so long. They are bewildered, and aware of who they are and what state they're in--dead, of course--but are clueless as to where. And so they cry out, and their memories ignite and fade in Kagome's psyche, and her awareness shatters more and more everyday. She hears voices, now, and she knows that no medicine from the future could shut them up, even if she were able to get there.

She notices long after it happens that Sesshomaru is holding her wrist, close enough for her clothing to brush his, studying the bruises on her pale flesh. He looks at her, and Kagome shivers, skin prickling with the cold around her. "This is how you deal with your problems?" Kagome edges away from him, troubled eyes clearing. Sesshomaru's firm grip stops her from getting anywhere, but she can pretend she's over there, in that corner. "Are all humans this self-destructive?"

Kagome squirms, thoughts erupting in her mind that she knows aren't her's. "In one way or another, I suppose..."

They had traveled together for four months. Kagome asked questions sparingly during that time, and his silence was a constant answer to everything.

She wonders if he would answer now if she asked him what he was doing.

The hand on her wrist travels down, her sleeve falls back, and the souls inside her stop. For a terrifying moment, she is Kagome again. Her eyes, the blue of bitter-truth, meet his hesitantly. She is Kagome, a terrible cold rush lapping at her spine, a horrifying future dripping into every pore, a composure that's been lost for years, maybe longer, never coming back. Mentally, she tries to claw herself back into the world where there are an endless stream of voices that don't belong to her, where winter is relief, and she doesn't have to go on pretending there are somedays in her future. Someday I will return home, to Mama. Someday I will marry Inuyasha. Someday I will raise a child. It is now that she realizes these are stupid thoughts, because the universal someday is simply, Someday I will die, and you will die, and you, and you, and you.

And then Sesshomaru is kissing her, but it isn't really a kiss, it's a press of mouth against mouth, and in his action she reads, "I understand you. You are caged and predictable, and you are similar. This is how I am going to treat you, I know you won't stop me."

She doesn't stop him when she finds herself sprawled out on the floor, or when her clothing is open to the season's frigid eyes, or when he is moving over her, making bits and pieces of her fall out. It is when it is all over that she thinks she should've told him she didn't want his company. Because now, when she stands up, intent on making a fire because it is so cold her hair is almost frozen stiff, her feet aren't touching the ground. She is walking, certainly, but the souls upon souls upon souls inside her are quieter, and more content, since they felt something familiar, something that is collective and recognizable even in limbo.

When there is a flame in her hearth and a weight on her mind, she looks at him.

He is sitting, his back to the door, clothes a bit askew. There is the blue light of winter behind him, spinning in his hair, making it shine like white-hot metal, and there, the earthy glow of the fire, in and around his eyes. It is a startling contrast, winter's blue and poor-man's gold, and her breath catches.

Kagome is back in her world of voices, a thousand and one regrets, an infinity to pick apart all the women locked inside the soul of the former her.

She stares at him, and thinks, I never invited you in.

He stares back, and knows, You wouldn't have stopped me anyway.