Bingo: Prompt, Inuyasha "Heartless"
Songfic written for inusongfics
Prompt: Inuyasha
Song: Heartless by Kanye West
Pairing: Inu/Kags
Warnings: Mild cursing
In the night, I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
They think I don’t hear them; that I’m asleep or too far away. Just because they can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t hear them. In fact, I choose not to go too far away for the sole purpose of being able to hear them, to hear if something goes wrong, to be but a second’s run away should danger appear. However this puts me at a prime distance to hear everything they talk about in the evenings.
Usually, I try not to listen. Their lives are none of my concern, but on nights like tonight, I hear my own name and my ears perk up unintentionally and I catch myself leaning over in their direction ever so slightly. It’s not eavesdropping if you are the subject of the conversation, right?
Tonight I wish I wasn’t close enough to hear, though. Tonight I wish that I had the will to ignore the tell-tale sound of my name. This is not a conversation they should be having, and it is definitely about an occurrence I wish I could stop reliving on my own, much less have to listen to those I count as my friends discuss with a kind of morbid detachment.
“I still don’t understand why. She said she loved him, she promised they would be together, and he promised the same. Why would she try and kill him?” Kagome’s innocently sweet voice filters in through the branches of the trees, carried by the cool autumn winds. “What did he do to deserve such hatred?”
“No one really knows.” Miroku, sounding more serious than I have ever heard him. “A feud such as this is the stuff of legends, a lot of rumor, and not too many facts.”
“But we need to know.” Kagome again, and I could hear the sadness in her voice, could smell the hint of salt carried on the wind as she tried to hold back the tell-tale signs of her emotions. So perfectly predictable, so perfectly loving, all of the things I do not deserve, but that I receive from her unconditionally. “He still loves her, and she is not going to be going away. We have to know why she did what she did and fix it.”
“I don’t think this is a story that we are meant to be telling.” Sango’s voice was subdued and muffled, as though she were facing away from the gathering. “It is none of our business. He will say what he wishes to tell us in his own time, and as for her side of events, that is something we may never be meant to know and we are going to just have to live with that.”
“Inuyasha will not tell us more than he has already said and you know it.” Kagome masking her deeper feelings with the hot flash of anger as usual.
“Why do you care?” Harsh male tones pushing their way through the foliage, Miroku was uncomfortable and guarding his vulnerability in the way that I was often prone to doing: posturing and hoping that no one would spend the time to get down underneath the mask he was projecting. “It doesn’t concern any of us, and I don’t see why we need to be poking our noses in where they don’t belong.”
“It is an interesting series of events though. Tragic in a way. Star-crossed lovers brought up to the peak of an agreement, a solution they can live with, love with, only to be brought down by their own secret desires.” Sango’s voice had dropped in volume, almost a whisper now. She breathed each and every word as though she were spinning an epic tale. “It’s a tragedy, really, the way things went down. The highest betrayal by someone you have come to love and trust, someone you pictured living the rest of your life with. Someone you would be willing to sacrifice even your deepest desires for so that they may be happy, and then they turn around and shoot you in the back.”
I didn’t want to listen anymore. This isn’t some fucking fairy tale where there is a winner and loser and whoever the winner happens to be lives happily ever after with all of his fucking dreams coming true. This is real fucking life and it’s my life to boot. Scowling, I drop down to a lower branch and springboard off it into the night, putting as much distance between me and them as I dare.
I don’t need to hear this shit right now. I don’t need to hear it ever.
How could you be so cold as the winter wind as it breeze, yo?
Just remember that you talkin’ to me though.
You need to watch the way you talkin’ to me, yo.
I mean after all the things that we’ve been through.
I mean after all the things we got into.
Hey yo, I know some of the things you ain’t told me.
Hey yo, I did some things but that’s the old me.
And now you wanna get back and you gon’ show me.
So you walk around like you don’t know me.
You got a new friend, while I got homies.
But in the end it’s still so lonely.
She loved me once.
I huddle into a ball far up above the earth as my mind wander to the subject of my friend’s discussion. Kikyo, she loved me, and I think I loved her. Well, as close to loving anything as I was capable of being back then. She’s not the same now, I know it deep down inside, but the knowing doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. Makes the sharp knives of her words dig that much deeper into my skin, get that much closer to my heart.
I didn’t have anyone back then. I was utterly alone, scorned and shoved away into the backdrop because of what I was, forced to survive on the bare bones of civilization because I was not strong enough to do anything else. Shunned from the demons because I was weak, feared by the humans because I was strong. I did not have a place to call my own and nowhere to belong and I liked that just fine… Or so I thought.
Riding on the cusp between two worlds with no one to call a friend and no need to obtain one, I had run into her by chance in my search to find the one thing that could make me into the demon I truly wished to become. Strength, as always, has its charms, but she had charms, too. She saw me for what I was, a wretched creature that wanted to be strong because to be weak was to resign myself to dying. She saved me, and made me into the type of being that can have the friends I do now.
The old me was a loner, and I guess the new me kind of is, too.
I take a deep breath and stare down into the dense foliage that comprises the forest floor. Why did it have to go so wrong? I had been so willing to give into what she had wanted. I was going to become a fucking human for her. I was going to give up the dreams of power and strength and a place where I could force myself to belong. I was going to give it up all for her, and this is the way she repays me? By trying to kill me? By coming back from the dead and looking me straight in the eye and choosing to ignore everything we went through. By wanting to forget everything but the hate, the pain.
Well, fuck that. I don’t need her to be here for me anymore. I have now proven that I can make friends all on my own… not that I enjoy carrying weaklings around everywhere I go, but the thought that there are people out there that would attempt to have my back is a nice one. It is a good feeling to be able to drop down from the trees from time to time and have a fire crackling cheerfully and a group of people waiting for me.
But it’s not right. It doesn’t feel the same. They like me, and they know me, and day by day I can feel their residual fear of me fading away into the background, but they are humans. They are not the creatures I wish to take comfort with. There was only one human for me and she has now made it perfectly clear that I an unnecessary. I was supposed to be the one to relieve her burden, but instead I was the one to take her life.
I watch the little creatures that make this forest their home scamper around beneath me. Squirrels and rodents, each one running to another, chattering in their own language, sharing food, shelter, and whatever tales they may think to speak of, and I wonder. Kikyo, wherever you are, are you alone tonight?
Are you like me, hiding from a world that wants to leave you behind while you are stuck forever in the past? Do you look up at the stars some nights and wonder how it would be if you could just look and me and say what it is that you feel? Is your, cold dead body capable of feeling anything but spite and your burning drive to seek revenge, or do you long for those idyllic days when we dreamed our dreams together, each of us on a path that would lead to our happiness?
Do you long for me, too, or are you too far gone for caring?
Because even in a crowd, even with those I call my friends, I think of you, and I am alone.
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
I know what they say about her. I know what they think. They don’t know the way she was before. They don’t know the stunning woman she was, how strong and loving, how sweet and caring underneath the stern façade of the jewel’s sole guardian. All they see is this pale specter they have come to know, one whose eyes burn with nothing but the fires of the infinite hatred that she now holds. Her heart does not beat and she does not even breath, living on the souls of the unfortunate to continue her painful existence and yet they can blame her for the way she feels. If they had known her then, could they hate her now?
I can’t.
I still want to help her. She hasn’t asked for my help this time around, and I know she doesn’t want it and wouldn’t ask for it even if she did. She doesn’t trust me anymore, for good reason. I wouldn’t trust me either, but that doesn’t make the pain any less searing. It doesn’t make my heart quiet down when I think of how her heart can’t beat at all. It doesn’t make the shadows of what could be and what was stop chasing me through my sleeping hours and haunting me in my waking ones.
Can’t they see that I cannot escape her, even if she were to disappear into the void, I could never let her go. There was too much left unsaid, too much left undone.
There was still more story to be told.
How could you be so Dr. Evil?
You bringing out a side of me that I don’t know.
I decided we weren’t gon’ speak so,
Why we up three A.M. on the phone?
Why does she be so mad at me fo’?
Homie, I don’t know, she’s hot and cold.
I won’t stop, won’t mess my groove up.
‘Cause I already know how this thing go.
You run and tell your friend that you’re leavin’ me.
They say that they don’t see what you see in me.
You wait a couple months, then you gon’ see.
You’ll never find nobody better than me.
As much as I want to ignore her, as much as I want her to go away, to rest in peace the way she should be, I don’t want her to go. I don’t want her to die again, not when she is so close to living, but she’s not the same. The Kikyo I knew would have stood to listen to reason, she would have known when she was being played and she would have stopped to consider the evidence laid before her. This Kikyo is nothing more than half a soul attached to a body of clay. She is cold inside and out and nothing I can do will reach her.
But damn it all if I don’t want to try.
She is just as torn as I am, I know it. There are flashes in her eyes when we speak, tinges of something that is almost human. The remnants of the part of her soul that wants to believe in the goodness that she once saw within me. That part is mostly gone from her now, brought back in the form of another beautiful and strong young woman, but how can I be the one to finish her when I know that those traces are still there, like the embers at the bottom of our campfire, not quite powerful enough to live, but still there and waiting for the right gust of wind, the right nudge from a stick, so that they can take flight and become a raging inferno once more.
Could I have Kikyo again, the woman I fell in love with all those years ago when I was nothing more than a creature hell bent on getting what I wanted and damn the consequences? Do I want that Kikyo back? No, I don’t think so… Not anymore. Not when I am so close to someone else who is everything she could never be, not even when she was alive.
It burns to think this way. These thoughts rebel and scream at me from within my own mind because I did love Kikyo in my own way. I would have given her the gift of my humanity if I have been able to, but the fact is that I hadn’t been able to and that is something I am never going to be able to change and I want to move on. I don’t want to be locked in the past, not when there is a brilliant and perfect future waiting for me if I could only get together the courage to trust again.
But every time I see here again, I feel that resolve weakening and I wonder. Is it weakening in her, too? Does she look at me sometimes and see the man she used to love, the man that she thought was going to bring her peace? Can I be that man again, even if it means having to send her back to the pits of hell?
I don’t think I can.
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
The whispering of the breeze through the tree does not carry any words, at least not words from this realm. I am too far away from civilization to hear the idle chatter of humans or demons. I am utterly and completely alone and I like it that way… Only, I like being with people, too.
I walk this line, a line that I have made for myself between what I should be and what I long to be. I should be mean. I should push them away. Everything I have ever been taught is tearing its way up from inside of me, saying that they are weaklings. They are not to survive. It is not their destiny to live when I am the thing saving them from their ultimate fate. Humans will die. You can delay it. You can buy them more time, postpone the inevitable, but it is inevitable. Age will find them if the flesh hungry demons do not.
I don’t want to embrace my human side, I hate it. I tell myself this every day, but in reality, I’m just tired. I don’t want to walk this line anymore. I just want it to be over with. Who could love a man like me, torn between two worlds and belonging to neither? Fuck, I don’t even love me.
My ears swivel back and forth as the sounds of the animals in the night wash over me. Even animals succumb to the circle of life and death. The weak live only long enough to feed the strong. That is the lives we live. The demons eat the humans because they cannot be stopped, and that is the way it should be. It is the way it has to be because the demon will not allow it be any other way. But where is there a place for someone who is both. I can fend off the demons, I can kill off the humans, but I cannot be with either group because they do not want me. There was someone who wanted me once, granted she wanted me on her terms, but she did want me. Can there really be someone out there for me that could love me for what I am?
Could I love them enough in return to put aside all of my doubts and my fears and live they way they saw me? I tried that once. I loved her so much and I fell so hard. Could I put aside my doubts and insecurities and just be?
Maybe…
But that is a story that I don’t have the words to tell.
Talkin’, talkin’, talkin’, talk.
Baby let’s just knock it off.
They don’t know what we’ve been through.
They don’t know ‘bout me and you.
So I got something new to see,
And you just gon’ keep hatin’ me.
And we just gon’ be enemies.
I know you can’t believe,
I could just make it wrong,
And you can’t make it right.
I’ gon’ take off tonight,
Into the night…
But I will never know if I don’t try.
The thought strikes me as the moon begins to sink down below the treetops. If I look out and train my eyes to the peak of their capabilities, I can just make out the dying glow of their fire on the horizon. Maybe I have been going about this the wrong way. They are going to ask their questions, and they are going to sit there and speculate about Kikyo and I won’t be the one to step in and stop them by giving them the information they so desperately. That is not for me to do.
They will never know what happened in those few months when I was so happy, so accepting of my life and what I needed to do with it. I will not tell them and she will not tell them. That will be our secret until the grave, and I don’t want it any other way, but I will not keep living in the past. There has to be an end to this and her cycle of revenge is not the way.
She won’t believe it, the next time I see her. I’ll hesitate; just as I always do because even seeing her face is sometimes enough to jump start the wheel of my memories and allow them to turn the pages back to the days when we were the world to each other. A trust so carefully won and so easily lost. I’ll stop and I’ll look into her flat, brown eyes, devoid of everything that once made her human, and I will take a deep breath and I will tell her that this is the end, and she won’t believe me.
I will let her go and she won’t believe me.
But it will sit there in the back of whatever constitutes her mind and she will come to see what I am thinking now. She will come to know that there is nothing more that I want for her than for her to return to the peace of death because her time is over now. Whether it was by my hand or not, whether it was by some unconscious design of mine or not; she will return to the comforting embrace of her coffin and she will go back to rest, and she will know that I was the one to send her there. I was the one to take a look at the bigger picture. Yes, rash and uncouth me was the one to read between the lines and see the light at the end of the tunnel. The irony hurts.
I rise slowly to my feet, the branch groaning under my weight and bending downwards. Turning to face our camp I feel the sun’s warmth at my back and I take a deep breath. I cannot live in the past, that is over and done with. There is nothing I can change. There is nothing I can make better, and if leaving things the way they are is the only way that I can live my life, I am going to do it. I am going to do it for me for once.
No more trying to please others. No more gaining strength for the sake of having it. I will go out and I will protect those I want to protect, no matter what other say, and I will do it in my way in my time and the world is just going to have to get over it.
The wind rushes past my face as I leap forward and back to our campsite. Towards my future and my hope because if I can’t trust myself, then who can I trust?
And maybe, just maybe, I can come to love someone else again.
But first I must begin to live…
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
Prompt: Inuyasha
Song: Heartless by Kanye West
Pairing: Inu/Kags
Warnings: Mild cursing
In the night, I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
They think I don’t hear them; that I’m asleep or too far away. Just because they can’t see me doesn’t mean I can’t hear them. In fact, I choose not to go too far away for the sole purpose of being able to hear them, to hear if something goes wrong, to be but a second’s run away should danger appear. However this puts me at a prime distance to hear everything they talk about in the evenings.
Usually, I try not to listen. Their lives are none of my concern, but on nights like tonight, I hear my own name and my ears perk up unintentionally and I catch myself leaning over in their direction ever so slightly. It’s not eavesdropping if you are the subject of the conversation, right?
Tonight I wish I wasn’t close enough to hear, though. Tonight I wish that I had the will to ignore the tell-tale sound of my name. This is not a conversation they should be having, and it is definitely about an occurrence I wish I could stop reliving on my own, much less have to listen to those I count as my friends discuss with a kind of morbid detachment.
“I still don’t understand why. She said she loved him, she promised they would be together, and he promised the same. Why would she try and kill him?” Kagome’s innocently sweet voice filters in through the branches of the trees, carried by the cool autumn winds. “What did he do to deserve such hatred?”
“No one really knows.” Miroku, sounding more serious than I have ever heard him. “A feud such as this is the stuff of legends, a lot of rumor, and not too many facts.”
“But we need to know.” Kagome again, and I could hear the sadness in her voice, could smell the hint of salt carried on the wind as she tried to hold back the tell-tale signs of her emotions. So perfectly predictable, so perfectly loving, all of the things I do not deserve, but that I receive from her unconditionally. “He still loves her, and she is not going to be going away. We have to know why she did what she did and fix it.”
“I don’t think this is a story that we are meant to be telling.” Sango’s voice was subdued and muffled, as though she were facing away from the gathering. “It is none of our business. He will say what he wishes to tell us in his own time, and as for her side of events, that is something we may never be meant to know and we are going to just have to live with that.”
“Inuyasha will not tell us more than he has already said and you know it.” Kagome masking her deeper feelings with the hot flash of anger as usual.
“Why do you care?” Harsh male tones pushing their way through the foliage, Miroku was uncomfortable and guarding his vulnerability in the way that I was often prone to doing: posturing and hoping that no one would spend the time to get down underneath the mask he was projecting. “It doesn’t concern any of us, and I don’t see why we need to be poking our noses in where they don’t belong.”
“It is an interesting series of events though. Tragic in a way. Star-crossed lovers brought up to the peak of an agreement, a solution they can live with, love with, only to be brought down by their own secret desires.” Sango’s voice had dropped in volume, almost a whisper now. She breathed each and every word as though she were spinning an epic tale. “It’s a tragedy, really, the way things went down. The highest betrayal by someone you have come to love and trust, someone you pictured living the rest of your life with. Someone you would be willing to sacrifice even your deepest desires for so that they may be happy, and then they turn around and shoot you in the back.”
I didn’t want to listen anymore. This isn’t some fucking fairy tale where there is a winner and loser and whoever the winner happens to be lives happily ever after with all of his fucking dreams coming true. This is real fucking life and it’s my life to boot. Scowling, I drop down to a lower branch and springboard off it into the night, putting as much distance between me and them as I dare.
I don’t need to hear this shit right now. I don’t need to hear it ever.
How could you be so cold as the winter wind as it breeze, yo?
Just remember that you talkin’ to me though.
You need to watch the way you talkin’ to me, yo.
I mean after all the things that we’ve been through.
I mean after all the things we got into.
Hey yo, I know some of the things you ain’t told me.
Hey yo, I did some things but that’s the old me.
And now you wanna get back and you gon’ show me.
So you walk around like you don’t know me.
You got a new friend, while I got homies.
But in the end it’s still so lonely.
She loved me once.
I huddle into a ball far up above the earth as my mind wander to the subject of my friend’s discussion. Kikyo, she loved me, and I think I loved her. Well, as close to loving anything as I was capable of being back then. She’s not the same now, I know it deep down inside, but the knowing doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. Makes the sharp knives of her words dig that much deeper into my skin, get that much closer to my heart.
I didn’t have anyone back then. I was utterly alone, scorned and shoved away into the backdrop because of what I was, forced to survive on the bare bones of civilization because I was not strong enough to do anything else. Shunned from the demons because I was weak, feared by the humans because I was strong. I did not have a place to call my own and nowhere to belong and I liked that just fine… Or so I thought.
Riding on the cusp between two worlds with no one to call a friend and no need to obtain one, I had run into her by chance in my search to find the one thing that could make me into the demon I truly wished to become. Strength, as always, has its charms, but she had charms, too. She saw me for what I was, a wretched creature that wanted to be strong because to be weak was to resign myself to dying. She saved me, and made me into the type of being that can have the friends I do now.
The old me was a loner, and I guess the new me kind of is, too.
I take a deep breath and stare down into the dense foliage that comprises the forest floor. Why did it have to go so wrong? I had been so willing to give into what she had wanted. I was going to become a fucking human for her. I was going to give up the dreams of power and strength and a place where I could force myself to belong. I was going to give it up all for her, and this is the way she repays me? By trying to kill me? By coming back from the dead and looking me straight in the eye and choosing to ignore everything we went through. By wanting to forget everything but the hate, the pain.
Well, fuck that. I don’t need her to be here for me anymore. I have now proven that I can make friends all on my own… not that I enjoy carrying weaklings around everywhere I go, but the thought that there are people out there that would attempt to have my back is a nice one. It is a good feeling to be able to drop down from the trees from time to time and have a fire crackling cheerfully and a group of people waiting for me.
But it’s not right. It doesn’t feel the same. They like me, and they know me, and day by day I can feel their residual fear of me fading away into the background, but they are humans. They are not the creatures I wish to take comfort with. There was only one human for me and she has now made it perfectly clear that I an unnecessary. I was supposed to be the one to relieve her burden, but instead I was the one to take her life.
I watch the little creatures that make this forest their home scamper around beneath me. Squirrels and rodents, each one running to another, chattering in their own language, sharing food, shelter, and whatever tales they may think to speak of, and I wonder. Kikyo, wherever you are, are you alone tonight?
Are you like me, hiding from a world that wants to leave you behind while you are stuck forever in the past? Do you look up at the stars some nights and wonder how it would be if you could just look and me and say what it is that you feel? Is your, cold dead body capable of feeling anything but spite and your burning drive to seek revenge, or do you long for those idyllic days when we dreamed our dreams together, each of us on a path that would lead to our happiness?
Do you long for me, too, or are you too far gone for caring?
Because even in a crowd, even with those I call my friends, I think of you, and I am alone.
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
I know what they say about her. I know what they think. They don’t know the way she was before. They don’t know the stunning woman she was, how strong and loving, how sweet and caring underneath the stern façade of the jewel’s sole guardian. All they see is this pale specter they have come to know, one whose eyes burn with nothing but the fires of the infinite hatred that she now holds. Her heart does not beat and she does not even breath, living on the souls of the unfortunate to continue her painful existence and yet they can blame her for the way she feels. If they had known her then, could they hate her now?
I can’t.
I still want to help her. She hasn’t asked for my help this time around, and I know she doesn’t want it and wouldn’t ask for it even if she did. She doesn’t trust me anymore, for good reason. I wouldn’t trust me either, but that doesn’t make the pain any less searing. It doesn’t make my heart quiet down when I think of how her heart can’t beat at all. It doesn’t make the shadows of what could be and what was stop chasing me through my sleeping hours and haunting me in my waking ones.
Can’t they see that I cannot escape her, even if she were to disappear into the void, I could never let her go. There was too much left unsaid, too much left undone.
There was still more story to be told.
How could you be so Dr. Evil?
You bringing out a side of me that I don’t know.
I decided we weren’t gon’ speak so,
Why we up three A.M. on the phone?
Why does she be so mad at me fo’?
Homie, I don’t know, she’s hot and cold.
I won’t stop, won’t mess my groove up.
‘Cause I already know how this thing go.
You run and tell your friend that you’re leavin’ me.
They say that they don’t see what you see in me.
You wait a couple months, then you gon’ see.
You’ll never find nobody better than me.
As much as I want to ignore her, as much as I want her to go away, to rest in peace the way she should be, I don’t want her to go. I don’t want her to die again, not when she is so close to living, but she’s not the same. The Kikyo I knew would have stood to listen to reason, she would have known when she was being played and she would have stopped to consider the evidence laid before her. This Kikyo is nothing more than half a soul attached to a body of clay. She is cold inside and out and nothing I can do will reach her.
But damn it all if I don’t want to try.
She is just as torn as I am, I know it. There are flashes in her eyes when we speak, tinges of something that is almost human. The remnants of the part of her soul that wants to believe in the goodness that she once saw within me. That part is mostly gone from her now, brought back in the form of another beautiful and strong young woman, but how can I be the one to finish her when I know that those traces are still there, like the embers at the bottom of our campfire, not quite powerful enough to live, but still there and waiting for the right gust of wind, the right nudge from a stick, so that they can take flight and become a raging inferno once more.
Could I have Kikyo again, the woman I fell in love with all those years ago when I was nothing more than a creature hell bent on getting what I wanted and damn the consequences? Do I want that Kikyo back? No, I don’t think so… Not anymore. Not when I am so close to someone else who is everything she could never be, not even when she was alive.
It burns to think this way. These thoughts rebel and scream at me from within my own mind because I did love Kikyo in my own way. I would have given her the gift of my humanity if I have been able to, but the fact is that I hadn’t been able to and that is something I am never going to be able to change and I want to move on. I don’t want to be locked in the past, not when there is a brilliant and perfect future waiting for me if I could only get together the courage to trust again.
But every time I see here again, I feel that resolve weakening and I wonder. Is it weakening in her, too? Does she look at me sometimes and see the man she used to love, the man that she thought was going to bring her peace? Can I be that man again, even if it means having to send her back to the pits of hell?
I don’t think I can.
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?
The whispering of the breeze through the tree does not carry any words, at least not words from this realm. I am too far away from civilization to hear the idle chatter of humans or demons. I am utterly and completely alone and I like it that way… Only, I like being with people, too.
I walk this line, a line that I have made for myself between what I should be and what I long to be. I should be mean. I should push them away. Everything I have ever been taught is tearing its way up from inside of me, saying that they are weaklings. They are not to survive. It is not their destiny to live when I am the thing saving them from their ultimate fate. Humans will die. You can delay it. You can buy them more time, postpone the inevitable, but it is inevitable. Age will find them if the flesh hungry demons do not.
I don’t want to embrace my human side, I hate it. I tell myself this every day, but in reality, I’m just tired. I don’t want to walk this line anymore. I just want it to be over with. Who could love a man like me, torn between two worlds and belonging to neither? Fuck, I don’t even love me.
My ears swivel back and forth as the sounds of the animals in the night wash over me. Even animals succumb to the circle of life and death. The weak live only long enough to feed the strong. That is the lives we live. The demons eat the humans because they cannot be stopped, and that is the way it should be. It is the way it has to be because the demon will not allow it be any other way. But where is there a place for someone who is both. I can fend off the demons, I can kill off the humans, but I cannot be with either group because they do not want me. There was someone who wanted me once, granted she wanted me on her terms, but she did want me. Can there really be someone out there for me that could love me for what I am?
Could I love them enough in return to put aside all of my doubts and my fears and live they way they saw me? I tried that once. I loved her so much and I fell so hard. Could I put aside my doubts and insecurities and just be?
Maybe…
But that is a story that I don’t have the words to tell.
Talkin’, talkin’, talkin’, talk.
Baby let’s just knock it off.
They don’t know what we’ve been through.
They don’t know ‘bout me and you.
So I got something new to see,
And you just gon’ keep hatin’ me.
And we just gon’ be enemies.
I know you can’t believe,
I could just make it wrong,
And you can’t make it right.
I’ gon’ take off tonight,
Into the night…
But I will never know if I don’t try.
The thought strikes me as the moon begins to sink down below the treetops. If I look out and train my eyes to the peak of their capabilities, I can just make out the dying glow of their fire on the horizon. Maybe I have been going about this the wrong way. They are going to ask their questions, and they are going to sit there and speculate about Kikyo and I won’t be the one to step in and stop them by giving them the information they so desperately. That is not for me to do.
They will never know what happened in those few months when I was so happy, so accepting of my life and what I needed to do with it. I will not tell them and she will not tell them. That will be our secret until the grave, and I don’t want it any other way, but I will not keep living in the past. There has to be an end to this and her cycle of revenge is not the way.
She won’t believe it, the next time I see her. I’ll hesitate; just as I always do because even seeing her face is sometimes enough to jump start the wheel of my memories and allow them to turn the pages back to the days when we were the world to each other. A trust so carefully won and so easily lost. I’ll stop and I’ll look into her flat, brown eyes, devoid of everything that once made her human, and I will take a deep breath and I will tell her that this is the end, and she won’t believe me.
I will let her go and she won’t believe me.
But it will sit there in the back of whatever constitutes her mind and she will come to see what I am thinking now. She will come to know that there is nothing more that I want for her than for her to return to the peace of death because her time is over now. Whether it was by my hand or not, whether it was by some unconscious design of mine or not; she will return to the comforting embrace of her coffin and she will go back to rest, and she will know that I was the one to send her there. I was the one to take a look at the bigger picture. Yes, rash and uncouth me was the one to read between the lines and see the light at the end of the tunnel. The irony hurts.
I rise slowly to my feet, the branch groaning under my weight and bending downwards. Turning to face our camp I feel the sun’s warmth at my back and I take a deep breath. I cannot live in the past, that is over and done with. There is nothing I can change. There is nothing I can make better, and if leaving things the way they are is the only way that I can live my life, I am going to do it. I am going to do it for me for once.
No more trying to please others. No more gaining strength for the sake of having it. I will go out and I will protect those I want to protect, no matter what other say, and I will do it in my way in my time and the world is just going to have to get over it.
The wind rushes past my face as I leap forward and back to our campsite. Towards my future and my hope because if I can’t trust myself, then who can I trust?
And maybe, just maybe, I can come to love someone else again.
But first I must begin to live…
In the night I hear ‘em talk,
The coldest story ever told.
Somewhere far along this road, he lost his soul,
To a woman so heartless.
How could you be so heartless?
Oh… How could you be so heartless?