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“You just had to go and push it, didn’t you?”
Normally, Miroku would have had a snappy comeback at the ready… but this time, it was almost impossible to answer. It was barely even possible to breathe.
Even the slightest motion caused pain to rip through the hole in his side—and right at the moment, exactly none of the movements of his body were slight. Indeed, every step seemed to violently jerk him first one way and then another as Inuyasha half-carried and half-dragged him away from the village in a series of bounding leaps that far surpassed the speed of any human.
By the time they finally stopped, Miroku’s vision was beginning to tunnel and his whole body sagged, his arm around Inuyasha’s shoulders literally the only thing that was holding him up.
“Don’t you dare fucking faint on me, monk!” Inuyasha’s voice came out as a rumbling growl against his side.
“S-sorry.” Miroku’s voice came out as a wet chuckle, and a trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “But I don’t think I’m going to have a choice.”
Even as he spoke, he slumped further and further against Inuyasha’s side, eyes slipping slowly closed. All of a sudden, he was so, so cold.
“Fuck. Fuck!” There were hands on his body, shaking him, but he couldn’t seem to make himself respond.
Then, they were moving again, zipping over the landscape so fast that huge swathes of forest fell away behind them between one bound and the next… but Miroku could barely even feel the jostling anymore.
That wasn’t good. Something in the back of his mind was screaming that that wasn’t good… but right at the moment, he was just too tired to make himself care.
It was impossible to tell how long or how far they ran, but eventually, he was aware of being on the ground, of the motion having stopped, and of Inuyasha’s voice yelling at someone who for once wasn’t him: “…outta here! Go on, scram!"
The sensation of hands tearing at his robes was just unexpected enough to motivate him to blearily force open his eyes.
A pair of golden eyes was hovering right above his face, topped by a pair of thick dark eyebrows that slammed down in a harsh scowl as the last layer of clothing was peeled away and the wound underneath was bared to open air.
“Shit!”
“So what’s… the word?” Miroku’s voice was barely above a whisper; if not for Inuyasha’s superhuman hearing, he doubted he would have been able to make himself heard at all. “Is this going to kill me before the Wind Tunnel does?”
“Would you shut the fuck up?” Then, in an undertone: “Fuck, if you lose any more blood…”
He didn’t need to say the rest: Miroku knew he was done for. As his senses began to fade once more, he could not help but wonder whether Naraku would be amused or infuriated that, after all the trouble he’d gone to to put the curse on his family line that was slowly killing him, his life was about to end by a blunder entirely of his own making, during a con gone wrong.
The only warning he got was a thick knot of fire rat cloth being shoved into his mouth.
“Bite.”
Then, before his muddled mind could come around to the reasoning, his wound was on fire once more with a searing hot pain.
It was impossible to hold back the scream that tore its way out of his throat, but the burning continued for long seconds that felt like hours, before his body finally took pity on him and his consciousness faded.
When he came back around, he was lying under a length of fire rat cloth on the floor of what looked like an abandoned cottage, and everything still hurt.
Examining himself, he could see that the wound in his side had been roughly bandaged, and smell the sharp tang of medicinal herbs. Turning his head to the side, he took note of a crackling fire and an incredibly grumpy-looking half-demon sitting with his back propped up against the wall.
“About fuckin’ time you woke up.”
“Good to know that you were so concerned about my wellbeing.”
That was only half sarcasm: Inuyasha didn’t get this angry over the near-deaths of strangers. However aggressively he expressed it, he was truly concerned.
Miroku’s first instinct was to try to sit up—an action he immediately regretted when his wound decided to make itself known yet again, and a spike of agony shot through his side.
“Are you fuckin’ trying to kill yourself?” In a flash, Inuyasha was at his side, pushing him forcefully back down onto the bedding.
“Well, you know me.” Miroku gave a weak smile. “Live first, think about the consequences later.”
“Shut up.” Inuyasha’s mouth was pressed into a thin line, and Miroku realized: he actually was angry. “Fuck, you really think you’re going to make things better by doing Naraku’s job for him?”
Even as he spoke, he was at work, using his claws to slice through bandages before peeling them away, and despite his aggressive tone, his touch was gentle.
Still, Miroku could not help but hiss in pain as the cloth pulled off of his skin: quite aside from the knife that had pierced his side, the searing heat that still permeated the flesh told him that he hadn’t been hallucinating the night before, and that his wound had indeed been seared shut.
“So?” he joked weakly as Inuyasha’s nose twitched—no doubt sniffing for signs of infection. “Am I going to live?”
“Well, you ain’t dying yet.” His earlier anger, intense as it had been, seemed to have burned itself out, and he pressed the shredded remains of some sort of leaves into the wound before lifting Miroku up—still gently—and beginning the process of re-bandaging it.
Once that was done, Inuyasha returned to his place slumped against the wall, where Miroku was surprised to see his fingers shaking with a slight tremor before he tucked his hands hastily back into his sleeves.
“Fuck. I’ve never had to do that on a human before.”
“ What do you mean, on a—”
In the end, though, Miroku didn’t finish that sentence. He knew. Even as he spoke, he knew.
There really wasn’t anything more to say after that. A short while later, Inuyasha got up and left, and Miroku didn’t ask where he was going.
When Inuyasha returned, he had clearly killed something.
It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Inuyasha wasn’t human. Oh, there were the differences—the ears and the hair and his tendency to get on all fours and sniff the ground when he was trying to track a scent—but once the first shock of his appearance wore off, once you got used to his inhuman strength and enhanced senses, he mostly acted just like any other boy on the cusp of manhood: maybe a bit rough around the edges, but still with a distinct gangly awkwardness that his power and bluster still couldn’t quite cover.
Then, there were the times he came back with blood dripping from the ends of his razor-tipped claws, carrying the dead body of a boar he’d killed with his bare hands over his shoulders as if it weighed nothing at all, and those were the times Miroku remembered that this gangly, awkward man-boy was still a demon—a predator, who’d spent most of his life carving out a living in a world that didn’t want him there with little more than his bare hands and a whole lot of spite.
This time, at least, he wasn’t carrying a whole boar—but his blood-smeared hands were full of a hunk of liver that definitely looked big enough to have come from a boar.
Automatically, Miroku groaned. “Don’t tell me you expect me to eat that.”
Inuyasha met him with a glare. “Do you have any idea how much blood you lost?”
Which, he supposed, was answer enough: Miroku knew Inuyasha well enough by this point to know that he could either force down the liver, or Inuyasha would sit on him and shove it down his throat.
Knowing he’d already lost, Miroku let out a sigh. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Granted, it wasn’t nearly as bad as having his wound seared shut… but he wasn’t exactly comfortable by the time he was finished, either.
“You know, Inuyasha,” he said from his place on the floor, “if being stabbed doesn’t kill me, your treatments just might.”
From his place across the room, Inuyasha shot him a yellow-eyed glare. “Not fuckin’ funny, bouzo.”
He let out a sigh. So much for lightening the mood. “You really don’t need to fuss over me so much, you know. I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am.”
A low, rumbling growl. “Oh, aren’t you? Then why is it that the second Kagome and Sango aren’t here, you decide it’s time to do something so stupidly dangerous?”
It was true: Kagome had gone back home for one of her “tests”, and Sango had taken the opportunity to return to the Slayers’ village for some weapons repair. Even Shippo had left them briefly, to take a kitsune exam, he’d said. It had been understood that for at least the next few days, Miroku and Inuyasha would be on their own.
It honestly had seemed like a good idea at the time. Without Kagome there to track shards, they were at loose ends, and Miroku knew from past experience that if Inuyasha was left to his own devices, he would spend the whole time pacing the ground around the Well, or staring down into the Well, before he finally gave in to his impatience and jumped down after Kagome to spend the whole time pestering her. The others had all found something productive to do with their time. Miroku had figured, why not take the time to requisition some “earnings” to help them on their next journey? The girls didn’t need to know where it came from, and roping in Inuyasha to help him was certainly better than letting him mope the whole time.
Except then what should have been a very straightforward con on an unsuspecting noble had turned sour. Even now, he couldn’t be sure what exactly had gone wrong: maybe he’d been here before and forgotten, or someone had seen him and Inuyasha approaching on the road and word had somehow reached the manor before they had . Whatever the reason, while Miroku was trying to sweet talk his way in to the lord and Inuyasha was hiding out in the trees waiting for his cue, the guards had backed had backed him into a corner, and the situation had escalated frighteningly quickly from a few suspicious expressions to Miroku on the floor with a knife in his side.
What had happened next was just what he remembered from the night before: Inuyasha bursting in, a frantic run through a darkening landscape, a searing pain, and now both of them here, in an abandoned hut in the middle of the wilderness because it was not safe to move him further.
He wondered if Kagome and Sango were back by now. He wondered if they had started to worry.
It seemed like he had taken too long to answer, for Inuyasha leaned over him until they were nearly nose to nose, silver hair falling down around them in curtains. “You never answered me earlier, monk. if you're not stupid, then are you actually trying to get yourself killed?”
There were quite a few answers Miroku could have given to that.
He could have pointed out that he was going to die soon anyway, and that it was worth a few risks to get in as much living as he could in the time he had left.
He could have pointed out that he was going to die soon anyway, and that maybe it was better to do this on his terms than to give Naraku the satisfaction of waiting for his curse to consume him as it had his father and grandfather.
He could have pointed out that he was going to die soon anyway, so there was just no point in fussing over his health.
He could have pointed out…
“Inuyasha.” His breath came out of him in a single long exhale. “Believe me, I want to live. But…”
A low, irritated growl cut him off. “So why won’t you fuckin’ fight for it?” He was baring his fangs, firelight flashing in his gold eyes. “Fuck, I thought you wanted— ”
All at once, the anger seemed to drain out of him, his ears drooping as the whole rest of his body seemed to slump as well. “I thought you wanted to prove Naraku wrong.”
“I want to. Believe me, I do want to. But…” Another shaky breath. “There are times when I have trouble believing it, myself.”
Though they both stayed awake long into the night, as the moon set and the fire burnt down to embers, neither one of them said even so much as a single word more.