Title: Disciple

Author: Sandra

Rating: PG

Author's Note: So, this one's, um... different.

---

Once upon a time, there died a boy.

Bound within a rotting memory, he rose and bled into a man.

"Wake up."

But there was, of course, a weakness within him, twisting along an old rosary...

"Wake up, Kagome-sama."

...and a fear in his soul that drove it away.

"Kagome."

"Nhnn, page seven, Yuka-chan," she whines groggily and pulls the covers over her head.

A small, rueful smile tugs at his lips.

He glances at the dark shadow behind him, lingers, slides a hand under the warm coverlet...

"Eee—wh—ah, Miroku!"

"Good morning, Kagome-sama."

Hair flying everywhere, cheeks flushed, she jumps up, hand over her little heart. "You—agh—why—" she begins shakily, straightening her pajamas. "Sometimes—sometimes I really do fantasize about global castration..."

She freezes, looks at him, trembles.

He smiles.

"Miroku-sama...?" she whispers to no one in particular. Her eyes widen. "Miroku-sama." A strangled little cry and then she is in his arms, surprised and flustered and frightened.

The dark shadow slips to the floor and watches.

"I thought—we thought you—you... weren't coming back—" she tells his chin and tangles her fingers in his dirty hair, "—thought the kazaana..."

There is guilt, but only for a moment. "I went for a walk."

"For TWO WEEKS?" she rambles desperately, pushing herself away. "I thought you'd died, you idiot! I thought—I thought... dead. I thought you were dead!"

"I was," he says.

But she's not listening.

"The kazaana," she grabs his hand, "Mushin-sama said he couldn't..."

Soft horrified gasp.

He smiles at her again.

Her fingers ghost across his scarred palm. "H-how?"

"I don't know," he lies and gently pries her off. "Where's Sango?"

She reaches for his hand again. "She... she's... I... wait." There is something slightly suspicious and slightly broken in her voice as she mumbles, "You have a shard."

"And Inuyasha?"

"You have a shard, Miroku-sama."

"And Shippou?"

She takes a step back. "There's a shard. There's a shard where the kazaana is supposed to be."

"And Kaede-sama?"

Two, three steps back, pressed up against a wooden wall, she asks, "Miroku-sama, why—"

He turns to the shadow, blocks the hut's entrance, and murmurs, "So, we're alone?"

She draws a shaky breath. "Yes."

He takes her hands in his.

"Kagome-sama," he hums. "Did you miss me?"

"Y-yes," she squirms.

"Did you mourn for me?"

"I—yes."

Another dark shadow slithers past him. "He won't hurt you."

She looks up, pale and dreaming. "I don't... Miroku-sama, I don't understand."

"You won't tell anyone, will you, Kagome?" he asks softly. "Not yet?"

And just as softly, she replies, "O-our secret."

---

Tucked away within a ravine, at the far end of a blackened ocean, lies a string of saltwater pearls.

She's convinced they were once the marrow running through his spine. She's convinced they clung to his skull as he rose toward the abyss on tongues of fire.

She's convinced if he ever truly returned, she would pluck his bones from the red earth and sail to China, to Hunan. She would do as her mother before her.

Her eyes, she tells herself, would be sparrows, constantly searching the horizon, her feet a nest of spring vines, gentle against the wet ground. She would be a drop of rain and a tree and a butchered bark, and his memory would climb her.

One night, he would come to her.

He would come to her alone, a boy born without his shadow, stained black by a hunger she will never know, and he would rest his soul on her thigh and kiss her.

Tonight, though, she lies awake on a mossy riverbank, thinking about that string of pearls.

---

He thinks, perhaps, in a previous life, he was a tree.

He thinks, perhaps, she climbed him as a child.

He thinks, perhaps, he is still a tree.

She comes to him, every night, with a loaf of bread and a nervous smile.

"You're late," he says.

"Today," she tells him in return, "I almost told them."

He rubs his eyes with stiffened fingers and slouches upon his jagged rock.

Slowly, with an awkward gait, she shuffles over and slips a shard into his pocket. "Eat."

He grins. "Don't need to."

She climbs him and says please.

So he takes a bite for her and thinks about tomorrow.

"You could always... not go through with it," she says.

He feels the driftwood gather around his feet. "Ah. Unfortunately, puppets seldom disobey."

She'll bury him atop a mountain, and below, bury him in a clearing above a city, and underneath the waves, but he'll take root in the red earth and rise with the sunset again.

So he asks her now, while the Shikon stands guard above her, to keep his secret a while longer.

And softly, she leaves him to his string of pearls and says, "Okay."

---

It steals across a sacred grove of trees, through a rotting archway, and saves only her.

When she's older, existing somewhere in China, in Hunan, she counts the pearls her mother kept in a chest made of bone. There are thirty-nine chipped pearls mined with memories. She can wrap them around her wrist four times, but never around her mind.

She's tearing through the mattress lining when she thinks she hears his voice. He speaks to her just before she falls asleep. He tells her stories about the clinging winter, about standing alone in the spring rain, about the child, his child, that died within her.

When I buried your father, her mother said, I planted him with a landscape in my palm.

They watch the willows together, searching for a nest. The landscape, though—a future—never appears.

So she spends herself twisting along an old rosary.

"Wake up, Kagome."

But there is no fear in her soul.

"Missed me?" he asks softly as she tumbles out of bed.

It occurs to her he's never been more than a thought away since the night she'd given him a loaf of bread, a nervous smile, and herself.

"It's time?" she wonders with a strangled little cry.

"In a minute, yes," he replies and tangles his fingers in her dirty hair.

She descends with him to the shore, precisely at midnight.

"I never meant to pass it on to you," he tells her as she plants herself into the red earth, roots herself to an existence she's not certain she wants.

Quietly, he removes the shard, black as tar, from his palm and she surrenders the pearls.

Restless, the winds rise around them, her hair floating loosely from her skull, his leaves rustling away from his bark.

"Our secret," she agrees.

And here at last, eleven days into November, the weakness makes sense.