30 Shards

Title: Obverse Reverse
Genre: Tragedy/Angst/Horror
Pairing: Kagome/Kohaku, implied Inuyasha/Kagome
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 629
Summary: [Kagome x Kohaku] Legends only live on if someone is there to spread the story. And everyone knows that every story has two sides. ONESHOT. warning: character death.

Obverse Reverse



Legends only live on if someone is there to spread the story.

And everyone knows that every story has two sides.

Kagome no longer remembers how it began, only how it ended.

Perhaps it was the stench of death or the rivers of blood that nourished nothing but the skeletons of trees and soldiers on both sides. Perhaps it was what felt like eons of endless slaughter. Or perhaps, it was when the long awaited power of that shimmering, coveted jewel was finally unleashed upon the battlefield littered with bodies and tentacles... with little effect.

She remembers little of what happened, of who died first. The graves were indiscriminate. Humans lay with youkai lay with only two hanyou. There was just a swirl of power when she had wished and wished and wished, before she had faded.

But after thinking she’d see none of them again, she saw a boy who shouldn’t have freckles but does, a boy who can tell her the other side of the story and help her fill in the gaps where her memory is faulty, a boy who saw all and spoke - and lived and breathed and thought - with the enemy.

A boy who survived and yet didn’t.

And they can’t help but remember together. They supplement each other, complement each other.

At night she calms his nightmares - or are they memories? - and at dawn he tries to be every man in her life she lost. He is so lost that he tries to find himself in everyone else, everyone dead and gone and here. As if he’d known all along of her travels, and showing her the other side of the coin…

Kohaku’s gifts grew from the seedlings of concern into saplings of comfort - comfort she needs in order to drug herself and drain herself of those awful images.

The technicolor bloodshed in a million shades of red, the twisted corpses, the hum of the useless jewel…

Kagome envisions the malfunctioning jewel, a glow of pink in a moat of red-brown-black, and even she wishes to forget. Promises and remember this day and never forget us and nonexistent goodbyes and all those shallow graves she never got to cover up.

Months and centuries down the road, that familiar face surprised her. Of all people, he was least expected.

But he is enough.

It’s at night when the floodgates in her mind are smashed, and only when he holds her down and kisses away her pain and mends those gates the best way he can, the way his former master taught him to, can Kagome keep from mourning Inuyasha too much.

Kohaku knows how it feels to drown in memories after falling through the webbed ice, the inability to purge them.

Kagome cries sometimes, because of him and them and him, and Kohaku simply lets them roll down her cheeks before kissing them away. Sometimes the best way to forget is to remember. Mouth upon her jaw and their legs bonelessly entwined, pressing down to hold her frame from shaking too much, Kohaku helps her remember, then lets her forget.

Kagome isn't certain if she wants to remember or forget. She sees her memories in the form of pain, while he sees his pain in the form of memories. Neither is wrong.

And when daybreak comes and Inuyasha looks down on them in jealousy, Kagome remembers that while her hanyou had not survived, everyone will live on with the union of Kagome’s and Kohaku’s memories. The jewel had made certain of that, in bringing together two opposing sides of the coin that is the legend they helped create.

Legends only live on if someone is there to spread the story.

And everyone knows that every story has two sides.