I'm Not Well, But I'm Better

She still hadn’t found her clothes… that was the last thing Rin remembered when she scooted back into bed and tried to ignore the other person already sleeping beside her. Sleep claimed with all the gentleness of a Mack truck and she was out like a light.

The bedroom was full of twilit pink and orange light when she turned over and opened her eyes. Soft creepy things were twitching over her shoulder and Rin nearly freaked out until she realized it was only rouge strands of Onigumo’s long hair waving in the ceiling fan’s wake. His sleeping face was turned into her shoulder, the bruise colors to his eyelids a strange contrast to his pale face. She wished her damn eyelashes were that long, if he got a personality transplant, Naraku Onigumo would have been the perfect hunk of man for her, and Rin rolled her eyes at her own wit with a soft snort.

Milking the opportunity to study the Good Doctor Onigumo while he was blissfully unaware, Rin marveled at how thin he was – not necessarily bony, but wiry, whip-like. Junkies are always thin her mind helpfully supplied and Rin tasted bitter bile at the back of her throat, angrily pushing that voice away with grinding teeth. Long, tall and imposing even in sleep, she mused. She couldn’t see Naraku’s marred back but Rin knew it was still there, queering his perfection for the rest of his days. Her cheeks blazed at the reminder of the taste of dark physician’s brutalized flesh – she’d never be able to look at him again without thinking of that act.

“As a known enemy…” Rin started humming to herself and added a few notes of the rather ingenious bass line that attended the words. She would have laughed if anyone but the man next to her had mimed strumming those same notes on some phantom bass.

“Nice air guitar, Onigumo. Get some lessons.” Rin barked with a crooked smile on her sloppy face.

“Who do you think taught little Kagura how to play?” was his quietly superior reply.

“Oh my, a gentleman and a scholar! Is there anything you can’t do?” she snarked back, hands between her knees. Rin noticed there were fresh abrasions on them both; must have been when she passed out at the bar.

“Stand your screeching voice in my ear.” Onigumo replied quickly, keeping his eyes shut. Rin rolled her eyes at him with a very heart-felt hand gesture telling the man what he could do with himself and then stopped mid-bird. He was sweating. It’s wasn’t hot. They had only slept under a sheet all day long. Rin was lying close enough to the physician to have felt him radiate heat if he were feverish. But he was cold and he was sweating. Naraku was beginning to fiend.

Rin propped her arms on her knees and put her head down upon them with a deep breath. That’s why she’d remembered that song…

There was nothing to do, nothing she could do and knowing that pissed her off in big way, both as a woman and as a nurse. Rin Taisho hated that powerless observer role! Might as well do something constructive, she figured. Time to find her clothes and her bag! She knew it had a toothbrush in it. Nurses carry toothbrushes; long shifts and quick lunches make them a pleasant necessity – plus they drink lots of coffee. Patients with nausea – coffee breath: you do the math. Rin idly switched gears to think of anything else other than the nightmare lying next to her.

Obviously he felt well enough to lean out of bed and slap her hard on the ass when she got up.

“I’m going to make you pay for that, asshole.” she smiled back with menace, secretly relieved.

“Don’t lie to me, girl.” Naraku dismissed with a bored wave of his red hand.

“Go shoot up, you’re acting like a little bitch.” she spat back and slammed the bedroom door on her way out. Inside herself Rin was appalled at how easy it had been to throw Naraku’s weakness in his face.

She could hear his laughter through the door and it was a little sickening.

Never mind him, her mind patted gently. Get your shit together and then you can feed us, it smoothed over in her head. Padding naked through the cavernous decay Onigumo called home, Rin found her bag by the door. She found the remains of her dress and underwear on the couch; damn doctor – he just cut her clothes off with trauma shears! That dress was brand… fucking… new! Great. Well, the monster now owed her clothes!

She noticed a sparse kitchen with way too many sharp knives hanging from magnetic bars, gleaming like hungry teeth in the fading light. She could drink out of the bathroom sink, thank you very much. There was no way on Earth she was going into Onigumo’s kitchen. Not while he was alive.

She passed a gorgeous Rickenbacker bass guitar on a stand and stuck her tongue out at it.

She passed a small black box on the heavy wood table next to the couch and stopped. Rin knew what was in there but she needed to look. She needed to be sure. Lifting the lid, Rin Taisho couldn’t help the professional voice listing the litany of names, both brand and generic of the vials she found within: Sublimaze, fentanyl – Demerol, merperidine – Morphine, the grandfather of them all. There was a small one at the bottom. Rin squinted her eyes to read the label: Nimbex. That name meant nothing to her, but the generic did: cisatracurium. Curare… the paralytic agent, combined with the narcotics…

“Oh my god…” she whispered and dropped the small vial like it was poison. It bounced against the sterile insulin syringes and hit the wooden floor with small sloshing sound.

“Relax…” a slick oily voice echoed against her ear and Rin instinctively backed into the large shivering body behind her. “If I was going to kill myself, I would have done it by now. That vial is very old. You didn’t look at the expiration date, Taisho? How unprofessional of you.” Naraku purred as he pulled her hard into him with an arm around her neck. His skin was slimy from sweat and a fine tremor vibrated along the arm held tight around her neck.

“I didn’t look – I don’t work in surgery.” she spoke out of reflex, not really thinking. Rin’s mind still conjured up visions of Onigumo’s black despair. That such a seemingly egotistical and proud being was so rotten to the core with self-hatred and despair was nearly unthinkable in her mind. She would never joke about him to Kagome again; he was too fucking tragic.

“I’ll thank you to let go of my works so I can shoot up and stop being a little bitch, Rin Taisho.”, Naraku growled into her unhearing ear.

She didn’t hear him and kept the box clutched tightly in a tight cold hand. When he let go of her neck and started peeling her fingers from the evil thing, Rin found her mind and roused it from shocked slumber.

“No!” she yelled back at the man behind her and threw the box across the room – narrowly missing the pristine guitar. Facing the looming physician with sudden determination – she would not watch him continue to destroy himself! – Rin never saw his left hand when it hit her.

“GIVE ME WHAT IS MINE!” Naraku screamed in her face with sudden desperate fury and threw her at the couch.

Rin was slightly dazed, her cheek and nose stung as she slid off the couch to plop flat on her butt onto the floor. The glass vial of Nimbex rolled against her fingers. It had expired four years ago. He was, of course right. Liquid death sloshed within its glass egg as she picked it up and fisted it. Naraku had taken two large strides, retrieved his kit and was inspecting the outside for damage when Rin lunged and leapt onto his scarred back with a scream. It wasn’t her uncle’s famous battle cry but was a very respectable scream, nonetheless. She wound her arms around the irate physician’s neck and locked her legs about his waist. He was hard to keep hold of, still slick with cold sweat and Naraku did his best to ignore her angry trashing and continue his dread work.

Rin was furious the monster could still draw up an injection with an angry woman attempting to throw him off balance with her small angry mass.

So she loosened one hand and covered his eyes.

Naraku stopped moving. His heaving breaths belied the effort it was taking to bear them both up under her thrashing. Suddenly the world was calm.

“Taisho, I am holding an open syringe of Demerol. Even if I were to pretend not to know your weight, this dose would put you in respiratory arrest.” Naraku spoke quietly and slowly as if to cataclysmically retarded child. “Respiratory arrest means ventilator. Ventilator means ICU. ICU means under the service of Doctor… Naraku… Onigumo!” he growled out with impressive menace. Rin was tempted to let go.

“If you do not let go, I may accidentally stick you and I cannot afford both our habits, Rin. Let me go.” Naraku finished in a darkly quiet voice.

“I will not let you keep doing this, Onigumo! Naraku… please stop this madness.” she begged angrily, tightening her grip on his waist.

“Let me go.” Naraku repeated. “I will not ask again.”

“No!”

Carefully Naraku put the cap back on his syringe and set it and the box on the nearby table. The half scream and half roar he then suddenly screamed could only be agony, Rin thought distantly as he ripped her arm from around his neck and then ripped her bodily from his back. Undeterred, Rin used her momentum to swing herself back around for roundhouse punch to his solar plexus, which Naraku easily blocked by turning sideways, grabbing her fist in his own and pushing her hard to end of it like a yo-yo. Losing her balance Rin fell hard onto her abraded knees with a hiss of both pain and defeat. A small crunching noise surprised them both and Rin cried out in sharp pain as the vial of Nimbex broke in her hand and sliced her palm.

Naraku blinked his maroon eyes in surprise and the disbelief, opening her clutching hand as clear liquid ran down her wrist, dripping to the floor.

“What do you have in your hand, Rin?” he breathlessly rasped out at her.

“Liquid death, dead in that vial. I used it to pad my fist.” Rin breathed out and fatefully waited for the paralysis to begin.

“What – you couldn’t find a lighter?” he raised an eyebrow at her and drug the naked, shivering woman to her unsteady feet. Quickly, Naraku drug her into the bathroom and pushed her into the tub. Bright florescent light blared in the small room as the doctor lit the darkness.

“Kneel in the tub and stick your hand under the faucet.” Naraku commanded in his coldest, most clinical physician’s voice.

“What? Why?” Rin narrowed her eyes in instinctive stubbornness.

“To get the liquid death off your hand and out of your blood stream, or do you like the idea of my intubating you in my bathroom? I know I’ll enjoy It.”, Naraku glared with a sick leer and turned on the cold water full-blast.

“Turn your hand so the glass washes off. Stay this way for five minutes. If you feel you are having respiratory distress, scream.” Naraku spoke dryly over her shoulder as he pulled Rin into position under the water.

“You’re such an asshole, you know that, Naraku?” Rin sneered up at the towering doctor washing his hands in the sink.

“You love it. If you move from there in the space of five minutes, I will turn on the shower and you may enjoy it that way for 15 minutes.”, Naraku bit out right back at her and left, closing the door behind him.

She’d picked out most of the glass by the time he came back and for once, she was glad he was right about everything – the vial had been too old to harm her other than by giving her a pretty decent laceration on her palm. Naraku had draped a towel around his waist, Pharaoh-style and lifting her from the frigid tub, set her on his lap. A sterile instrument kit lay on the counter and he quickly picked the last stubborn shards out of her hand with tweesers, leaning over her shoulder to see. Weirdly intimate, neither spoke as the doctor put steri-strips on the wound. He hung over her shoulder a moment more than necessary and she almost said something.

Rin noticed that his hands didn’t shake once. Pain bloomed hot in her gut.

“Can I trust you not put that wound in the water? You do still practice basic wound care on the ICU?” Naraku quietly asked the small woman perched on his lap, but his words lacked their usual sarcasm, instead he sounded calculating.

“Yes.”, Rin distantly replied without really thinking. She wanted to simply sit where she was, a simple intimate act without complications or expectations. She felt warm hands on her arms, standing her up, however unwillingly. Rin felt Naraku’s nose brush her ear.

“Your hair smells like cigarettes, scotch and sex.” he growled.

Oh Kami, Rin wanted to hear him breathe “sex” about a thousand more times in her ear… and hated herself for it, but… the hate was becoming a knee-jerk reaction now. She didn’t really mean it, so much…

~*~

Rin stretched out in the tub as she watched Naraku rinse the soap from his tangled mane. Oh lord, he was even better when wet! Rin drooled mentally and then shook her head to clear it. It had to be the steamy heat getting to her! This same gorgeous creature had struck her when she tried to stop him from shooting up.

Yeah – that had been a very stupid move on her part. Was it him or was it the fiending for narcotics that had done that? Rin wish she knew – but it made her even more determined to try and save Naraku from himself. She’d done foolhardy things before in the name of compassion, like that time she’d climbed that cliff to get a rare plant for her Father’s oldest friend as a gift and nearly broken her fool neck in the process. Rin mused on her own prickly self and was snapped out of her pleasant, heat-induced reverie when Naraku began talking.

“This is what started it.”, he spoke to anyone but her.

She wanted him to continue so Rin said nothing.

“You’ll never know what pain is until you put your burned flesh under hot water. You know that burn victims are… medicated… before debridement.”, his face twisted with remembered pain and hate as Naraku paused, his red eyes seeing the past or nothing at all.

“Debridement is a fucking sick joke made up by sadists far worse than me. Scraping the non-viable skin and tissue from your raw tortured body, that’s what it really means in practice. In the beginning, I only shot up before dressing changes and baths…” self-loathing and anger darkened his already deep voice.

Turning back around, Naraku retreated back within himself, rinsing the remainder of his white body with the cleansing water.

“The water’s getting cold. Move your ass if you’re getting in here.” Rin barked when the shower was turned off.

“I’m nearly positive the large lever that turns on the wall there can fix that.” Naraku narrowed his eyes at her and pointed to the faucet.

Rin gave him a shitty look and turned the hot water on after she flipped the drain.

“It’s a modern fucking miracle, Taisho!” Naraku enthused falsely and stepped into the tub.

When he dropped to his knees, Rin stopped him from lowering completely within the water. His height was such a convenient thing! Time for some payback… her hand stung still.

She avoided his narrowed eyes completely, the red irises swallowing the pin-pint pupils with evil light, and instead quickly ran her wet, hot hands down his newly dried stomach. The goose-bumps Rin left in her wake were incredibly satisfying. She merely had to spread her knees and duck her head a bit to get him in her mouth. A flock of birds flew past the light in her peripheral vision as Naraku tossed his wet hair back and thrust his rapidly hardening cock in and out of her willing mouth.

Fellatio was one of Rin’s secret sexual thrills. She’d much rather blow a guy than actually have to get personal and fuck him, especially if it was just for a quick and dirty fling. She’d had the luck to be broken to act by a guy with a giant cock and so everyone else came easy.

Rin snorted her cheesy wit around the meat in her mouth, which Naraku was far beyond noticing. When she felt him twitch in her mouth and felt his stomach begin to flex and writhe with oncoming orgasm, Rin pulled back completely and wiped her mouth.

She could hear Naraku grinding his teeth in pent-up agony and after a long moment, she let him guide himself back within her gag-less depths. A quick minute later and she was also fondling his heavy sac to make the pain just that much sweeter. He was nearly there again, snarling moans echoing loudly off the tiled walls - so Rin stopped again, turning her head when the frustrated physician tried to pull her back onto his spit-slick cock by her hair.

“Do you know how painful that is, you crazy whore?” Naraku swore through clenched teeth.

Rin gave him a hard stare. “It can’t be worse than debridement, now can it? You’ve been thoroughly medicated, now suffer.” she spat out with more vehemence than she expected.

Naraku lifted his hand from her hair and instead cupped her chin, a dead-cold fire burning in his cruel eyes that had Rin’s name written all over it. He made no move to force her back upon his still throbbing flesh but when she lowered her head again, he guided her to her place as Rin engulfed him in pleasure and pain once more.

She denied him three more times before she let him come, nearly screaming and bucking so hard against her face, Rin thought the beast would throw her off of him in his seizing, searing release. When his breathing evened out and Naraku returned from the dark side of the moon, he leaned heavily against her in the large clawed tub.

“You got your hand wet, Taisho.” Naraku scolded half-heartedly in a sullen way.

“Boy that’s too bad, next time I’ll be more careful, Doctor.”