I'm Not Well, But I'm Better

Rin found herself staring at the minute details of her hands as they clutched hard to the clinical coldness of the white sink before her. Her stomach still felt strange but it was calm for now; Rin should have known Onigumo would have acted a physician even as he was also a torturer and apparently, a junkie. Damn her, her thoughts kept circling back around to that! Maybe she had seen wrong – there were shadows and neon reflections after all. Rin continued to look down at her hands and avoid the mirror before her.

She hated Onigumo for his cruelty and his God complex, but fuck – there had to be more to the man than he let on if he truly was destroying himself one syringe at a time. Swishing out her dry mouth, Rin caught a glimpse of her own face in the mirror. She looked haggard, the harsh mercury-vapor light filtering through the old warbled privacy glass threw dark, hungry shadows under her eyes even as the watery fingers of pre-dawn light began to inject a blue cast to her pale skin. Never mind the horrific trails of eye make-up winding feline streaks down her cheeks. Rin let a puff of air out of her lungs that would have been a laugh any other time.

“Just think, those Goth girls spend hours trying to accomplish this.” Rin mumbled through a hoarse throat at her reflection. She had been screaming a bit the last 12 hours, she guessed.

There was a very expensive wrist watch on a glass slab below the mirror; dawn was coming on hard. When harsh, bright-white daylight illuminated Rin and (oh god) last night’s apparently drunken lay, what was she going to say? Somewhere, her healer’s mind begged her to try to get Onigumo to give up his wicked habit, because they both knew exactly where it would take him. Rin may have despised him, well – at least didn’t like him much at all, but she did not want him dead. The woman hiding under the self-righteous cloak of healer and nurse wondered at a deeper cause and perhaps a deeper, costlier cure. Addiction was a slippery beast that often bit its handlers as well as its exterminators. Rin could see Onigumo as monster, naked, bestial – kneeling with his punctured arms out to her, a myriad of insectile limbs, slimy translucent tentacles sprouting from his gorgeous body and pumping poison through twisted veins, beaconing to her, calling her to subsume, to sublimate, to ignore…to mind her own fucking business…

Speaking of business… the toilet seat was absolutely fucking frigid this morning in a stranger’s home.

At least it was clean – the man was a doctor, after all – thank the Kami for small favors.

What was she going to do? Rin pissed and thought, and then after a while she only thought. She cursed the small but growing spore of desire for the beast on the other side of that door. Once she allowed her eyes to see it, yes – Onigumo was beautiful in a dark way and he was even more so, now that he had laced that beauty with certain doom. Rin knew she was a sucker for a wounded bird; her foster father had always tried to break her of that habit, even when he himself was injured or sick. She just couldn’t help herself; it was who Rin Taisho was. She also couldn’t help but feel the dull licking flames of anger. What reason could such a perfect – at least in his own eyes – being have for slowly destroying himself from the inside out?

“Suck it up, already!” Rin swore to both herself and her mental Onigumo.

Time to shit or get off the pot, Rin snorted out to herself silently and washing her cold hands, forgot all about her messy face and opened the door.

Onigumo was lying down; his long back to her, apparently unconcerned that she might come out of the bathroom with a razor to slit his throat for his abduction and questionable seduction. Long, waving hair fanned down almost to his ass, thankfully covered by the sheet. Rin was nothing if she was not curious and so repeating the manta in her head over and over, “There must be a reason...”, she crawled slowly back into the wide yet Spartan bed with her enemy.

Naraku heard the old bleached floorboards squeak and ride as Rin walked softly across them towards him. He would have guessed she’d have bolted out the door in self-loathing and absolute fury; he was surprised and the tiniest bit annoyed that she instead chose to stay and collect. Very well; he had given her the chance to deny him. Her next words were like ice water down his spine. He had, for the moment forgotten Rin had both eyes and mind to see him and that she was also a highly trained professional.

“Onigumo… what reason could you have to do that to yourself?” Rin asked with as little inflection to her voice as she could manage. She wasn’t trying to confront him – yet, she was… it was a very slippery place between them.

He kept his back to her for a long moment and said nothing. Just as she was opening her mouth to ask again, his deep rasping voice filled the vast chasm of uncomfortable silence between them.

“Taisho, my back itches – scratch it for me.”, Naraku’s dead voice commanded.

Rin was momentarily confused by this change in subject – was he going to just pretend she’d said nothing at all? There wasn’t any harm in it and if he did anything to piss her off, she could just gouge her nails into his flesh and say fuck-all to his problems. Nice and simple!

“Move your hair, your highness.” Rin muttered, scooting close enough to do as she was asked.

Naraku twisted himself around to gather the long, heavy mass in one pale hand and twisting it with a bored complexity born of long habit drew himself open to her wide, shocked eyes.

The scar was horrifying and worst of all, it was very deep. The twisting pink and white striations of gristle-like scar tissue began in the center of the physician’s broad back and the crater appeared nearly large enough to rest her head in the alien-like depression that was formed. Fingers of tell-tale alligator skin markings splayed out like the legs of a spider from the main wound; old healed skin-graft donor sites; Rin would know them anywhere. It was a bitter fact that however perfect the rest of Naraku Onigumo’s body might appear, he was in truth hideously disfigured. She couldn’t bring herself to touch even the border of normal intact skin, though still abnormally pink at the edge of the wound.

Suddenly, Rin knew. She understood.

“You don’t know and you don’t understand. You think you do. And before you get all high and mighty about what you think is heroin in my veins, you may calm yourself. I am after all, a doctor. Do you think anyone’s going to question a doctor about his heavy use of narcotics during patient care?” Naraku spoke to the wall, laying stone-still and exposed.

“I can assume you learned the sequelae to extensive, severe burns, Taisho.” Naraku quietly patronized with an unseen bitter smile.

“Chronic pain among other things. Onigumo – what… did that to you?” Rin intoned in a daze. Her hand hovered over the gnarled, ruined flesh and she wanted to touch him, to try to comfort him but just couldn’t move. Instinctively, like she was beholding a leper, Rin found her sudden squeamishness overwhelming. No – she was a professional and this was someone in pain! Far more pain then she could ever imagine… he was right, of course. She couldn’t truly understand.

“Lye.”

The end of the word transformed into a hiss as Rin set her hand down finally on Naraku’s ruined back as he spoke. Rin’s brows knitted together momentarily at that one leaden word. The worst possible kind of chemical burn, lye turned flesh into soap, which sloughed off, never to be healed – only to be covered, in this case with unsuccessful skin grafts. The scarring was tremendous. Rin could not believe Onigumo had survived it.

The sensation was strange for them both. The odd textures and firm yet warm ridges of Naraku’s scar made her palm tingle and she slowly traced the alien world of his skin with her fingers. Naraku had never let anyone touch the monstrosity upon his back in the long years since he’d last suffered the Silvadene and the bandages. The extremely sensitive scar tissue made every tiny, feather-light stroke upon his back burn with delicious fire and he quickly lost himself in the jolts of pleasure each one shot through his exposed body.

Once she’d gotten over her initial revulsion, Rin found the tortured flash fascinating. A small voice in the back of her mind scolded her that only a medical professional was sick enough to be fascinated by a rare and extreme wound. She gave that little voice the mental finger and noticed Onigumo’s tense shoulders and his panting breaths. Was she now the tormentor of this beast of a man? Perhaps that’s what he needs, Rin wondered at herself and wondered at what she might do if the great and powerful Onigumo was now at her mercy. She kept thinking, “Perhaps that’s what he needs…” and suddenly Rin Taisho felt the strangest mix of need and frustration, anger and desire to heal all twisted up into a tight skein within her.

She leaned deftly over Naraku’s shoulder and looked at his face. He had his nightmare-colored eyes held closed against her and the look of abject self-loathing harrowed his pale face, making him look like a devil sick of sin. Rin then noticed that rather than suffering her petting with anger, the man was hard as a stone, the full head of his arousal poking hungrily from under the sheet at his waist. He appeared to loathe himself utterly for such pleasure and testing her theory, Rin drug her nails softly down the center of the vile mark, immediately earning her a hiss from his lips and throb from his cock.

Leaning back on her arm, Rin switched hands momentarily. Naraku twitched under her tender ministrations with immaculate control. He never told her to stop, never spoke a word to her and he never moved outright. He was hiding himself away, denying her his submission and acceptance. It was always a battle with this man; Rin sighed heavily and then stubbornly decided she was going to win this battle, even if it meant that she ultimately lost the war.

Scooting closer, Rin decided to push Naraku off the edge he was clinging to, however bravely. She brought her face close to his ruined back and after a moment’s hesitation, licked him. The surprised and somewhat strangled cry that answered was perfect. How could he not understand that such disfigurement was not an automatic rejection from the rest of humanity? Was this the reason he tried to play God and also why he sought to destroy himself with drugs? She’d had worse patients… Rin mused and tasted him again.

A cold line of taboo drilled at her mind: She had never done - could not contemplate ever doing such things with a patient.

Naraku finally moaned through his closed lips and Rin decided to put the questions of her motives and her feelings away for another time. He was resisting and she was just paying this jerk back in kind, wasn’t she? She continued to slowly tongue Naraku’s hypersensitive flesh and spooned her body flush with his. She could feel the urge to move, to resist, to desist hard within him and yet he did nothing. Running her hand over the deceptive perfection of his hip, Rin found his straining cock was in easy reach. When her fingers meet the hot flesh, Naraku pushed back against her suddenly – she almost bit her tongue.

“If you move, I will stop. You will hold still Naraku Onigumo.”, Rin made sure to speak loud enough for him to hear her from her position at his back.

He said nothing, but thrust himself slickly against her questing hand.

“After all, you deserve this.” Rin whispered into his moist back.

She was surprised at the feel of him in her hand. Rin had some experience, sure, but not a lot. She’d seen longer, but probably not bigger. She stroked her hand up and down slowly in time with the strokes of her tongue across his wicked scar until his hips were jerking out a helplessly spastic rhythm. She vaguely saw him reach slowly for the bed’s heavy iron above his unseeing eyes and Rin let him lead as she tongued Naraku’s ugliness and took it within herself while he cried out with a snarl and submitted to her succor, a thick coating of his seed spurting out to cover her squeezing, stroking hand.

His breathing was still ragged as Naraku rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up on his long forearms. He made a fist with one and watched his veins squirm just under the translucent pale surface.

He gave Rin a malefic glance then kissed her very hard, conquering her mouth with his tongue. She didn’t even have time to join in before he was again glancing at his abused arm.

“I’m surprised you didn’t decide to try out your traction skills, Taisho.” Naraku smirked through his dark brows at her where she lay, idly wiping her hand clean on the sheet. The prick, she thought – he could worry about his laundry later.

“We don’t do traction in ICU – you want to play with weights and string, you go to Orthopedics.” she countered sarcastically and got up to wash her hands.
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