Title: Vigil

Author: Sandra

Category: Drabble... ish.

Rating: R

Author's Note: Sango/Kohaku... ish. For I am brave! And was clearly very bored in Humanities.

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Her favorite word is yes.

Yes, I'm fine, or yes, you're right.

And yes, she hasn't brought her weapon today.

Because he is walking, a familiar shadow, in the opposite direction, beyond the frozen riverbank. They will meet eventually, where all snow-covered bridges meet, but for now she just wants to look at him.

So she watches and keeps her vigil against the nudging wind, and wonders. Wonders why she wants, so very, very desperately, to see this place, this place she doesn't believe in; why she wants to be guided by this thing, this thing she doesn't think exists.

But spring is coming, so she veers off the path.

Her feet touch the floor of ice, polished and sparkling and free of snow; this frozen lake he was born in. He joins her within a shared heartbeat, and she knows he's lost and abandoned and a sequence of her mistakes.

"I think I remember you," he says.

The kusarigama raises and lowers and sinks into her flesh.

For a moment, he looks older than she'll ever be. But then he wraps the chain around his wrist—twice around your wrists, children—and tugs her closer, scoring the ice beneath them.

"Do I?" he asks, pressing a hand to her bleeding stomach.

"Yes," she tells him softly.

He frowns, glancing at her blood on his fingers. Quietly, he removes the kusarigama and, together, they tumble to the ground, cheeks grazing against blades of jagged ice.

Her hands belong there. They belong around his neck, feasting on a promise rising inside her, gathering speed, crashing over her. But her touch is blind and gentle and achy, and her sleeves are turning white, weighed with snowflakes and time and what ifs.

"Will it be over soon?" he asks, his bandages soaked and dripping with her blood.

"Yes," she replies with a smile.

"I think," he tells her softly, lapping at the snowflakes on her nose, "I remember."

And locked in that dark room of her mind, with spiders clawing at her, he is five years old again. He knows all about constellations, and sleeps by her feet. He smells like dirt and rice and her mother. He cries and clings and she pushes him away.

Because she's hunting. She's lurking in the shadows and pulling wings off butterflies with her chubby little fingers. She is at her best doing this. And she's better. She's always been better.

"Aneue, stop."

And then she's back, back to reality, back to existing, back to tearing through his flesh. She bends her head to his little chest and kisses the tiny fang around his neck, sucks it into her mouth, rolls it around with her tongue.

She used to carry it with her all the time, this string of memories bound within a broken fang. How odd that it should belong to this empty little thing now, this foreign little animal writhing beneath her.

"A-ne-u-e, please."

She stops.

"I think I remember you," she tells him happily.

And with a gentle push, he is impaled on a blade of ice as sharp and as dangerous as her heart. His little body curves around both and she thinks that maybe there is something very wrong with this frozen lake and this frozen intoxication.

Because the lake is turning red and the intoxication is a clear drop of water sliding down her cheek, slipping and burning a deep hole in the bloodied snow. His heart is still beating and he is amber and he is sticky, wrapping around the fossils of her sanity.

His blood spills across the crystal surface, coating her in snow and trapping her in dreams, but he is ordinary and she is red and precious and father's favorite—always has been—and for an instant, there is contact.

A warm breath washes over her neck. "Stop."

So she does.

She drops atop him, presses her cheek against his cold forehead, and sings him off to death with a silent lullaby. Counts his freckles, kisses his little nose, and only when she remembers that she loves him, only then she doesn't.

But soon, she will wake anew.

Her spirit will be young and ignorant and free of this heavy knowledge, of this diseased melody festering within her. And if they ask, she will tell them spring came. She will survive this winter in her soul, hidden under layers of absolute despair. She will be better than him.

So, sleepily, she burrows deeper, lets him borrow some of her heat. Because he's still five years old and mad at her and pretending to be dead to get back at her, to make her feel sorry. So she will let him pretend a little bit longer, perhaps until the snow melts, or until father returns home.

Because he will ask if she took care of her little brother while he was gone.

And she will have to say yes.