Fandom: Inuyasha
Title: Vintage Wine
Claimed Pairing: Naraku/Kikyo
Theme: Memories
Word Count: 658
Genre: Futuristic
Prompt Table:
http://quirkysmuse.livejournal.com/92902.html Kikyo sighed neutrally as he took her hand. She knew he was staring at her again with strange embers of memory flicking in his eyes.
“Do you remember?” He said, his voice had always been sharp and the darkest hue of silk. Although, over decades his voice had lost its harshness and turned into a warm sort of mellow. She thought of him as a mad biting cat that finally had given in to austere melody of life, dropping the malicious façade and purring reluctantly to obscurity.
She would have thought that after all this time together, memories would be meaningless to him as they were to her, that the past would just eat itself away.
She almost cried knowing it would not. The reason they were here together now, in this time, was an entity that’s foundation stemmed from the cursed past.
One year she had called their life tragic and volatile. They had been enemies.
And when three more years went away, their life had reached a climax. She didn’t even remember what the jewel really looked like anymore. Was it pink or black in the end? She almost forgot that she had loved someone, but then in turn had given up on concepts of love long ago, hiding at the prologue of her finalized fate.
Yet, somehow, by a power she had never even knew about, the thing she least anticipated bound them together.
Hundreds of years went by, and here they were, companions tied by physical need and the fear of loneliness without each other. Whatever plight had them at odds in the past had long faded away; they stayed together shackled by habit. Despite hate or love, trust or mistrust, they remained with each other by the comfort of familiarity.
She looked out the window to the starch black sky pricked with pulsing stars. The view had not always been this high up. She almost forgot that once they could walk on the ground and look up to the stars, not meet them at eye level. Yet things were different in this time like all the other times. Automobiles whizzed by her view flying on science and fumes a little lighter than air.
Inside the restaurant, Kikyo shivered as a thin, frozen draft whispered against her skin from an open door. Naraku promptly got up and covered her with his suit coat.
The waiter finally came to them, breaking away their usual muddy atmosphere.
To their side, he held out a bottle of wine.
Naraku smiled upon reading the year that it was made, flipping his long hair behind him. Kikyo rested her elbow on the table and watched him with tedium as his face lit up like an innocent child’s.
“2021, what a good year! Don’t you think so, Kikyo?” Kikyo smiled half-heartedly and nodded, merely not to distress the waiter with her normal complacent demeanor.
‘1521, 1821, 2021 ... What did it matter?’ She looked at Naraku’s content face as wine was poured gracefully into their glasses. She smiled weakly, letting go of some of the scratching that piggybacked her nerves. She slowly caved in, defeated by immortal monotony.
The Yesterdays didn’t matter much anymore. The Tomorrows weren’t that appealing much either. Even the Todays didn’t stir much to move her ever-kinetic frame.
And over time, they had encountered and recycled every possible emotion together, and played out every possible scene. Memories meshed together like that same convoluted 10 minute dream she had of a girl who made a vague wish on a jewel, putting her and her companion here, snagged on an arduous unsaturated journey through endless future.
Naraku sipped the wine and closed his eyes in content. “You can almost taste the year here, Kikyo. Silly isn’t it?”
Kikyo gave him a wistful glance and took the sip herself. The wine seemed bland to her, so much like the year it was made. She gave him a mechanical response. “Indeed.”