30 Shards

Title: For her laughter, wherever I may find it
Character/Theme: Kagome/laughter
Rating: PG-13 (sex and language)
Squicks: Lot's of gettin' busy, nothing very graphic though. Kagome/Kouga pairing.
Words: 1,432
Summary: How much trouble/fun can come from one laugh?



What happens when time rebuilds you like a mud wall? When you feel completely restacked, reorganized in your head, rearranged in your insides? Kagome had come to think of her life in two parts: pre-Inuyasha and post-Inuyasha. What was more, because the latter was so completely soaked in memories, so saturated in blood, so slaked in tears-- she just did not have the room in her head for the former part of her life. This would not have been all that bad, except now she was trapped in the only world she knew, and she found it—less than satisfying.

At some point that she could not remember, she had given up on Inuyasha. There were many moments when she thought something might change, that things might get better. But in the end she always concluded that it had been merely a trick of the light, a shift of the shadows. Some simple event, some tiny gesture would ignite a temporary passion. A few years after her initial trip through time these spells became more frequent and alluring, but no less transient. A few stolen moments of fumbling ecstasy and he would succumb to the needle in his brain that was his conscience, and mutter some unbearably awkward apology. This went on until neither them could bear the cyclical burden, and the final flame went out. The fatigued love transformed into an eternal friendship, a bond of comradery and complicity til death.

That did not mean that Kagome was relieved of the needs of her flesh. She was still a young woman after all. So it was that her present circumstances, while more or less happy, were not quite satisfying.

Covered in the shadows of an overwhelming mission and blanketing by so many platonic relationships, Kagome had secretly become a woman of fluid flesh and possessing a hidden sensuality. She would lie in a bed of fire each night and curse her weakness and her silly preoccupation with her unfortunate solitude.

Before the growing madness consumed her, or worse, hurled her into a horrid mistake, she was saved in the most unlikely way imaginable. It occurred quite by accident, on a long day in July when the heat hammered people’s heads and birds crushed themselves trying to fly into houses to escape it. By chance Kagome was alone and, maddened by the heat, she went to a stream to dunk either her feet or head in the water; she did not care which. When she arrived, the area seemed so secretive that she looked around furtively for any signs of perverted monks, and then threw off her yukata and walked into the cool waters with an indulgent shudder. She was turning and floating in the water, enjoying the notion that the liquid relief was caressing her, when she let out a startled yelp and nearly drowned herself trying to dive as deep as she could. Kouga was standing on the bank making no effort to hide his admiration.

Unless one is a fish however, one can stay at the bottom of a stream for only so long. Eventually she was obliged to resurface, sputtering and choking and cursing.

“What the heck are you doing?” Kouga asked her in amazement.

“Me?” she screeched at him. “What are you doing? How can you just stand there?”

“Was there something specific you wanted me to do instead?” he asked slyly.

Kagome blushed to the roots of her hair. “Kouga!” she exclaimed, shocked to the core.

“Well, what did you expect?” He said nonchalantly and still not taking his eyes off her, “You are already my mate. Why should I not be here?”

Amazingly, Kagome could not think of an answer to that. She waved her arms at him instead. “Go away!”

“Why?” he asked with innocent-looking eyes. “Do you think dog boy is going to come and kill me for seeing you?”

Kagome then remembered that Inuyasha was not, in fact, that far away and if she shouted, he would certainly come running. With a shudder that shook her insides, she realized that Kouga also knew this perfectly well. He took a step towards her, and she did not react.

“I suppose he’s on his way now,” Kouga continued to joke. “Probably coming to rescue you from a fate worse than death,” he smirked.

Then Kagome made the “mistake” that saved her. For some reason, the notion of Inuyasha rushing to this scene stuck her as enormously funny, and she let out an expansive laugh that ran across the surface of the water. It made her feel strange, and yet good, comfortable despite her nudity. That relaxing of the armaments was more than enough for Kouga. He grabbed her yukata and in an instant he was there. He smiled and took her by the waist. It was all Kagome could do not to die as a cyclonic force lifted her from the water and into the air. She had no idea where he took her, somewhere soft, green and dim. Before she could even catch her breath she was on her back. She even defended herself sincerely, but it was a savage and ceremonial struggle without violence, a mark of her regard for something she no longer cared about. Out of curiosity she relented for only a second, but then, terrified by the permanence of the decision, she tried to readvance. It was too late. She was planted in place by something that destroyed her center of gravity and filled her with an irresistible anxiety that made her think she could see the orange fuzz and incandescent globes on the other side of the universe. She turned the teeth and claws of her former defense into a method to hide in his chest the cries that were tearing through her throat. She managed to thank God for having been born and for not letting anyone find them before she lost all sense of reality.

After that, the two lived in a sensual zone. Kouga was always on the periphery, out of sight and smell of the hanyou, waiting for an unguarded moment in which they would make love with a gagged ardor, often interrupted. Whenever they could steal away they succumbed to the fevered delirium of lovers making up for lost time. The encounters were usually brief but frequent, so that the pair of them were kept in a state of perpetual excitement.

Surprisingly, it was Kagome who was the more adventurous of the two, though Kouga was just as ferocious a lover. She possessed an erotic genius and was gifted with the young, sleek body of a mink. She often found less than safe places and then, with a mere smirk and a shift in her weight, incited Kouga beyond all control. The pair took a delicious delight in their love's destruction that remained blameless because no one knew the truth. Indeed, they destroyed furniture, tore hammocks to shreds, wrecked storage rooms, flattened seven square feet of a vegetable garden, and “wasted” any number of preserves and other liquid-like foods. Villagers would discover these ravages in dismay and blame any number of supernatural misfortunes. All the while Kagome could taste the sweet secret so badly that she could barely swallow it. Once, Sango noticed.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Kagome did not miss a beat. “Nothing,” she said, “I was only now thinking how much I love you all.”

They were all rather moved, and Kagome felt slightly guilty. But it was not exactly untrue, so she just forgot about it.

The madness probably could not go on forever. She understood this and knew that Kouga understood it as well. But neither of them spoke of the future. They were too content sifting through the interludes of passion, like grains of gold. Kagome was grateful that she no longer cursed any part of herself nor any inclination. Once, Kouga remarked that they would inevitably be discovered someday. Kagome could not suppress the hilarity at that notion and she laughed again.

“What hurts me most,” she said, still laughing, “is how much time we wasted.”

For his part, Kouga did not give a damn what happened or what anyone else thought or didn’t think. He heard in his head the voices of his elders calling his obsession a crime against nature. “Fuck nature two times over,” he would mumble to himself. The only thing he cared about, the only thing he ever wanted, even more than the stupendous and acrobatic love making, was just to not go any place where that laugh was not.




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