I'm Not Well, But I'm Better

Naraku awoke on the couch when the sun found his eyes. The syringe on the table laughed at him. The whetstone next to it made him smile for real. It also reminded him that he had things to do today. But first he needed a fucking cup of coffee. Silence greeted his listening ears; his little mistress must have finally fallen asleep. Peeling himself up off the couch, Naraku scratched his frizzy, tangled mane and yawned, his face momentarily disappearing into a mouthful of sharp teeth. Closing the dark silk robe around his sleepy form, Rin’s keeper moseyed into Hell’s kitchen to start another beautiful fucking day.

Naraku carefully stepped around the noisy spots in the floor to silently open the bedroom door. He had to grab clothes before his excursion and those clothes were currently in a pile by his bed. The dark physician noted his captive was still spread-eagle against the wall. He also noted she had wedged the knife blade in between the filigree spars of his headboard. She currently slept propped against the thing like some deadly steel pillow, dark lashes hiding those smoky quartzite eyes full of fury and desire. Damn, he was making himself hard again; but there was time enough for that later. He had to take call tomorrow, so today was going to very much fun. Let the girl sleep; she was going to need it, he smiled wickedly.

Softly grabbing his clothes, Naraku slunk out of his bedroom as the morning’s bright sunlight flooded in.

~*~

Rin was being woken by someone moving her body around. Something important prodded her check and blinking her eyes, she noticed she was leaning her head on a large chef’s knife wedged into the wrought iron before her. Knife. It was somehow an important concept but why…?

The person manipulating her slowly reached up and tried to take the knife from her grasp. Taking the thing quickly in her mouth, Rin refused to let it go. Naraku tried to wiggle the handle out from the spar she’d wedged it into last night but with her head in the way it become much more challenging.

“Let go, girl.” he smirked at her steadfastness. “Do as you are told.”

Rin turned her eyes to Naraku and coming out of her sleep fog, remembered herself. Then she remembered him.

Rin thought over the many cascading feelings in her imposed solitary confinement overnight. The one that she had settled on, after all the others ebbed, flowed and passed on, was loneliness. That’s why she was still here, allowing this brutal, divine treatment at the hands of someone she hated, needed, wanted. Once the anger and frustration had slowly ebbed, Rin forced herself to think. She had thought until sleep claimed her, hours later. She remembered the small inching of reflected street-light across the dark, ancient floor all too well.

She lowered her eyes and let go. Naraku drew out the knife and easily cut the ties on the restraints. Rin shuddered at the ease with which the thick cotton webbing was severed; that knife had been razor sharp. If Onigumo’s hand had slipped, he could have easily killed her… and she had begged him to fuck her at the end of that knife. Rin remembered the way her blood had thundered in her ears, throbbed in her hungry body and felt the need for Naraku’s wicked touch renewed. She couldn’t look at him now because all she wanted to do was look at him.

He helped her bend her stiff, painful arms and when she didn’t try to get up or beat him up, Naraku scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom where he helped her to stand on sleep-slack legs while starting the hot water. He kept one dark red eye upon the distant woman lest she snap out of her fugue and tried to harm him while his back was turned. When the steam started to collect on his hair and Rin still had not climbed into the large, full tub, Naraku began to wonder if he had gone too far. Where was her mind?

Sitting on the commode, Naraku drew the withdrawn woman to stand between his long bent legs and really looked at her. She looked back.

Naraku thought she was darkly beautiful: he loved the dark maroon beauty mark his knife had left upon her white throat. He loved his mark upon her flesh; loved the evidence of her fate in his hands. She’d faced him down in all his incarnations with no fear until now, but something weighed so heavy on her mind she couldn’t or wouldn’t look at him. It made him almost angry to be denied the sight of himself in her hungry eyes.

“Look at me, Rin.” Naraku growled up at her.

“No.”

“Why?” he asked suddenly, more curious than anything.

“Because I’ll lose what little hate I have left for you, you fucking monster. Because if I look at you one more time, Naraku Onigumo, I’m going to lose the will to pretend I don’t want you, need you maybe even be in love with you, if that what it could be called.

“I don’t know any more. You started out as a grudge fuck, a charity case and have turned into the devil that haunts my dreams and torments my waking hours… I don’t fucking know! I don’t know what to tell you. You don’t care anyway. I mean nothing more to you than an easy distraction to fill that annoying time between fixes, don’t I? That’s all I’ve ever been to the whole of goddamn creation! Why should you be any different? What was I hoping to find here?

“There – happy now? Can I go back to trying to make sense of any of this?” Rin suddenly spewed forth with more venom then Naraku had thought possible from the daughter of the great stoic Sesshoumaru Taisho.

Her pain was beautiful; finally, she had admitted him to her heart and Naraku could see the tidal flows of the despair that Rin had kept hidden within her. He just hadn’t tumbled the right locks and now that they were overthrown, Naraku understood her better than she knew herself.

“How does that love for me feel, Rin Taisho?” Naraku asked with a hard glare to her turned-away face. “Tell me!” Naraku snarled, turning her face towards him.

“It hurts but I don’t want it to stop.” Rin whispered in thick voice, forcing herself to stay still under Naraku’s hard scrutiny.

“Life is pain and pleasure, ice and fire. That dead thing you called compassion was a lie, a false mask you wear at work – don’t mistake the things we are paid to do to others as the way we must live ourselves. The real world is the pain, Rin and the pleasure. Make your own or wilt in the desert of the real world out there.”, Naraku’s deep voice droned up to her as he held her down with his mad red eyes and she listened against the last of her stubborn will.

“Bastard! Caring for others is what I do!”

“But does not have to be all you are!”

“Cruelty is all that you are!” Rin snapped back painfully. There, she said it.

Naraku looked back at her with a long smile. “You didn’t think so when you held me down and tongue-fucked my scar. Nor did you think so when you tormented me in this very room. I am many things; I am cruel, I am quite possibly evil, I am strong and I am disgustingly weak.” he admitted with disarming alacrity.

“I am many different monsters, tied up in this person before you and you, woman, are the same. Like calls to like and you know it! We are all many different monsters; who are you to try to narrow them down into the one that will fit the most easily in your hand?” Naraku smiled crookedly, leading the woman before him easily down a path he knew she would never go on her own.

“I am the fool who loves you. Kami help me. Now shut your lying mouth and get out. I’m getting in the damn tub.” Rin sighed down at the monster before her. She did not expect him to laugh in her face at her declaration and when he dropped his dark head into her stomach and laughed into her skin, Rin felt exceptionally stupid.

“What, Onigumo, is so fucking funny in what I just said?” Rin rolled her eyes at his amusement. When Naraku drew back to glance hotly up at her through his dark brows, a chill jumped fast down Rin’s spine.

“When have I lied to you? When have you told me the whole truth?” he leered back at her.

“Agh! I am through crossing wits with you this morning! Quit assaulting me with semantics before I’ve had any coffee!” Rin threw her hands up in the air and tried to back out of Naraku’s reach. His hands trapped her before she could get anywhere and when he stood, Rin found herself being backed up hard against the steaming tub with nowhere to go.

When Naraku leaned down against her, she felt pinned and cornered and her mind helpfully supplied a Technicolor flash of her tied and spread, being tortured by this man’s delicious flesh. She turned her head away from him, trying to ignore the fire flaring up in her tightening nipples, the wetness between her shivering thighs. She felt a sudden hand in her hair, stretching her up on her toes to her lover’s hungry mouth, his lips at her throat, her neck, her ticklish ear. She felt a paw to her ass and as Naraku growled into her pliant flesh, he lifted her to ride tightly against his black coated body without hope of escape.

“Assault you? You’re so full of good ideas this morning, Taisho.”, Naraku purred into her captive ear as his hand on her ass slipped between her twining legs, his fingers finding her body slick and hungry for him. “Bathe first and laze about in the water if you like. There’s always coffee afterwards. This is a house of medicine, after all.” Naraku smiled in her ear as he slowly fingered her.

“Interesting methods you have, Doctor.” Rin sighed out with both weakening resolve and sarcasm, trying unsuccessfully to extricate herself from his embrace.

“You love it.”, he replied smugly and released her neatly back to the cool floor, licked his fingers lewdly for her benefit and then left her alone, heaving and needy, to her morning absolutions.

“Fuck! I do love it…” Rin swore quietly, with feeling and scrubbed her face with her hands to try to clear her spinning head.