Once Upon a Murder

Golden stars, the likes of which she couldn’t see in her own time, shone brightly outside of her tiny cell window. Perhaps they shone so brightly because her future seemed so bleak; after all, with a master named Naraku, it was next to impossible to think about a future that didn’t have death in it.

Ever the cock eyed optimist, Kagome found that she couldn’t force herself to look at the bright side. If someone was there in the cell with her, someone else that was just as hopeless as she was, then she might be able to dredge up something positive to say, but no – the others had been taken away, one by one.

Naraku never said what had become of them, and never mentioned them ever again, which was the best punishment she could think of. Nothing he could have done could be worse than her own ideas; rape torture trepenation. . .

The things she devised had to be hundreds of times worse than the things he had done, and she didn’t stop imagining them; her friends may have only died once, but to her, they died a thousand times in a thousand different ways. It was a clever torture indeed.

Something twinkled out of the corner of her eye, out of the corner of her cell, and she saw the flickering of candlelight – not so different from starlight at all.

“Girl.” She didn’t have a name to him – that would be to personal, and even he understood that he had no right to call her by her name. She was Kagome, she was a miko; she was the one who had tried and triumphed time and again against him.

She was the one who had failed, and this was her forfeit.

“Won’t you keep me company?” It was a pattern, a habit, a lie. And like such, it had the strange ability to suck people in; like a drug without the high, like falling without the flying. Like death with out reprieve.

They walked underneath those same stars that she could see out of her window every night, the same stars her friends would never see again, the same stars she had yet to be born under. He made idle conversation – the village he had conquered, the heroes he had slain – and she pretended to ignore him, which was only a little better than pretending to listen.

“We’re moving in to the northern territory, and soon that wolf of yours will fall too.” Naraku told her in the same voice that someone might discuss the weather, which suited him. “Would you like to watch him die?”

We can kill him! Inuyasha had been so sure of himself, so sure of them. Maybe he had been right. Maybe if he hadn’t been so goddamn sure of himself, they might have stood a chance. Maybe if they had been more worried, they would have seen the trap that should have been so obvious – even Naraku had been a bit surprised that they had so willingly walked to their deaths. Maybe. . .

She knew that she was relying on those maybes, because maybes were the only thing she had to keep them alive.

“My girl, are you even listening to me?”

The stars winked at her, as though they were trying to share a secret. I know something you don’t know; I’ll never tell. . . She wondered which one was the first she had seen, which was the first she had whispered a wish to. She wondered what wish they would have made if they had been able to beat Naraku, and suddenly she felt like giggling.

Naraku’s eyes narrowed on her and in what she assumed was supposed to be a threatening manner, he brandished a knife. “What do you find so funny, my dear?” His voice was like whiskey, his eyes were like fire. She knew his touch intimately, and she knew she would feel it again. She wasn’t afraid; she had moved past that.

She was just tired.

“We would have wished for world peace!” She was laughing hysterically now, clutching at her stomach as though it would split if she couldn’t hold it together. “We would have wished for all the deaths to come undone, or no more hunger, or ponies!” She went down on one knee, and Naraku moved over her, blocking her view of the stars.

“What are you going on about?” He sounded genuinely curious; but he had a talent for making something out of nothing. It was the only reason he was still alive. That, and she was already dead.

The glint of his knife was a lot like the glint of the stars, and she stared curiously at it. “Where I come from, children wish on falling stars.” She reached for the hand that he hadn’t offered and pulled herself up, a hairs breadth away from the glittering knife. “They make wishes for new toys and good grades and cute boys. They wish for happy endings and fairytales.”

“Children’s games?” Naraku hissed. It was the closest thing that she had heard to laughter in weeks. “I threaten your life and all you can think of is children’s games?”

Kagome’s eyes turned cold and looked so remarkbably like his that he hesitated. “There’s a poem about an itsy bitys spider who was washed down a water spout, would you perfer that instead?” She knew that she deserved the back hand that she received, she just hadn’t expected it to send her reeling back to the ground.

“Do you seek to agitate me, girl?” It was a rhetorical question, but she answered it with a giggle none the less. “What is funny this time?”

She looked up at his knife and then at the stars. “Falling stars falling stars falling stars. . . they are all just dying.” This tie when she reached up, she reached for the hand that had the knife.

I wish they weren’t dead. I wish they weren’t hurt. I wish this was all just a bad dream, I wish that I’ll wake up and it’ll be my fifteenth birthday and Souta won’t let Buyo in to the well house and I’ll forget this or blame it on an overactive imagination and sweets.

And because she knew that those were all child’s wishes and she had left her childhood far behind her, she made one last wish.

She smiled and puffed, as if she was blowing out candles.

“Will you wish upon my death?”

A star, glittering like diamond dust, fell to Earth and flickered out of exitence, but no one screamed.

Children who saw it held their breath and wished.