Choices by wonderbug

Choices

WARNING: As with all of my stories, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Author's note: Don't own IY obviously. This is a piece of dark and (potentially?) disturbing introspection, based off my blog fic of the same name. One-shot for now, but maybe I'll write a follow-up someday, who knows. ;)

*For the latest fic updates and other writing experiments from me, check out my blog www.ficaholic.com

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Choices

Sesshoumaru was a patient creature.

It was not immortality which had imparted this quality to him so much as his own stoic nature. Since his early youth he had learned to abstain from base fulfillment, to seek instead the higher rewards which only tenacity, cold reason, and restraint could yield him. He had learned, in short, the greater pleasure, the sublime satisfaction, that was to be gained through delayed gratification.

Of course, over the innumerable years, his tastes had refined. Sharpened.

It was a many-layered thing, this lust of his. Folded over, again and again, like the steel of a well-forged blade. And at last when he did strike out to slake it, the pleasure was divine.

How cruel you are to torment them so, his mother had once remarked with a twist of lip. Pray you do not encounter one so sadistic, for surely the gods will have no mercy upon you.

Sesshoumaru smiled to himself at this. Inukimi did love to jest.

The soft sound of approaching footsteps drew his attention. His eyes lowered from the sickle moon to rest upon the form of a young woman, standing warily at the edge of the clearing. In truth, he had sensed her long before he had heard her. Such was the strength of her presence, and the power of his own perception.

It was this acuity he leveled against her now, as he spoke her name, "Kagome."

The tension in her jaw compounded, yet she did not reply. Nor did she move any closer to him. Her posture was rigid, her features graven and pale. In her white fingers she clasped a longbow, over-tight. In her eyes she held a tempest of mirrored fury.

Now here was something amusing. His brow arched at her aggressive stance. "Do you mean to oppose me?"

"No," she said, though her grip on the bow tightened further.

Sesshoumaru stared back at her with perfect equanimity. "Then you mean to obey me." As she opened her mouth to retort, he continued implacably, "Drop your weapon and come here."

Lightning flashed in her blue-grey eyes. Her cheeks flared with rage even as she opened her stiff fingers and let the bow fall through them. It whispered against the moss as it fell, and she stepped past it, toward him.

"This isn't right," she said harshly, lowly. "This is extortion."

"This is the price you agreed to pay," Sesshoumaru replied without inflection. "Stop there, and take off your clothes."

Kagome froze, all the heat of her anger fleeing from her in the face of his utter indifference. Sesshoumaru felt a tendril of dark thrill at this, her sudden meekness. Oh, she was used to getting her way with his half-breed brother, to storming over him and all the rest with her passion and righteous temper.

But her emotional appeals held no sway over him. She was beginning to see this. Soon, she would know it to the fullest extent.

"Please," she said, softer now, "don't make me do this."

His blood heated a little at her useless pleading. Words of supplication became her. Her supple pink lips were well-shaped for them—among other things.

"I will not repeat myself," he warned her coldly.

A faint trembling overtook her. For a moment more, she stared at him, before her fingers rose shivering to the ties of her hakama. Loosening them, she eased the red fabric past the curve of her hips, let it slither heavily down her thighs and calves to pool at her sandaled feet. Her trembling intensified as she stepped clear of them both and drew apart her white haori.

As the long, draping folds fell asunder, Sesshoumaru's eyes narrowed upon her near-nakedness. Only a few strange slips of cloth concealed her breasts and the junction of her thighs. Despite how much of her flesh he had previously seen, with the lewd attire she had worn as a girl, this was the most exposed she had ever been before him. A fact which was as glaring to Kagome as it was to himself.

At her sides, her bloodless fingers furled and unfurled. Twin lines of tears escaped from her brimming eyes as she turned her face away. Sesshoumaru tilted his head at this silent protest.

"Such tearful displays do not interest me," he said, reaching out and hooking his claw into the slim, stiff band of cotton between her breasts. "Nor do they move me."

With a brisk tug, he sheared through the taut bridge of fabric. Kagome gasped as her chest spilled free, the sound turning to a discomfited whimper as he seized one warm, yielding swell. Human or demon, the female form was largely the same. Yet this downy softness was new to him. An indulgence he had withheld from himself, first out of spite, then out of calculation.

Sesshoumaru took nothing without the latter.

She hissed in a breath as his claw rasped over the raised tip of her breast, catching slightly. This sharp inhalation drew his gaze to her mouth again. Such a lovely, inviting feature. The part of her which had first caught his eye, years ago, when her hips had been too narrow yet to stir him. Releasing his palmful of captive flesh, he grazed his thumb along the plush, faintly crinkled bow of her lips. Their silky texture made him rigid.

Aroused in him a sort of generosity.

“I will let you choose,” he said to her, plying at the moistened seam, "where to receive me this night."

Sharply, she pulled back. "This night?"

"Did you think there would be just the one?" At the ripple of despair in her large, limpid eyes, the corner of his mouth lifted slightly. "Yes, Kagome, you will submit to me again. You will submit to me until I deem otherwise. Until I have grown bored of you, which will doubtless be soon," he added, his smirk deepening at the spark of indignation that lit her gaze, even as her features paled. "It is the night I no longer desire you which you should regard with dread."

Her whole being so railed at this that Sesshoumaru could have laughed. It was precisely the defiance he had expected from such goading. Perversely, he reveled in it, the flare of her aura, the glare of her eye and the clench of her jaw. How much keener would it chafe and wound, when later she recalled these 'outrageous' claims of his and discovered them to be true?

Even now, Sesshoumaru throbbed in anticipation of it. Her shame and bitter anguish.

"I won't choose," she whispered, her voice thick with contempt.

Slipping the straps of her broken garment from her shoulders, Sesshoumaru caressed her collar almost tenderly, the cool brush of his clawtips prickling her naked skin. "All of this is your choice, Kagome. I cannot force you."

Perhaps this was not entirely true, yet it was a dangerous proposition to consider, and of no particular enticement to him. A willing victim was what he desired in her. What he had been waiting for.

"You may leave, if you choose," he continued, his fingers encircling the smooth, slender column of her throat. The faint swallow, the anxious flutter of her pulse had him burning anew. "You may walk away from your obligations to me, and I will do the same to you."

His grip on her did not tighten. He was scarcely touching her, yet she struggled to breathe. It was the threat in his words which so constricted her, the surety in them which caused her throat to seize with a tightness so exquisite he felt the echo of its clutch around his cock. How beautifully her breasts quivered with the strain, the ample cream of them disrupted by the depths of her turmoil, sloped and shaped to a ruddy point—the same point she herself was coming to as she held his gaze, her lips parting in speechless surrender.

And so he could not help but feel a flicker of disappointment when she wrenched off the last bit of cloth concealing her and, turning from him, dropped down upon her hands and knees instead. Bared and parted, she bowed before him, presented him with the entrance to her womb fully exposed. She was baiting him, of course—

Sesshoumaru had to admit, it was effective.

"Well, go on then, your highness," she fumed.

Ivory claws bit into his palm. The scent of blood there braced him, quieted the roar of his instincts. Some cheek she had, his half-brother's wench. To offer up her womanhood so that her mouth would remain free to berate him—

With an air of noble sacrifice, nonetheless.

Inuyasha would not thank her for it. Half-blooded or not, any self-respecting male would rather be dead than have his woman thus prostituted. Yet Sesshoumaru did not tell her this.

"On your back," he said to her instead.

Kagome stiffened—he as well. Here was a possibility she had clearly not accounted for: having to face him while he took his pleasure from her. He savored the distress that edged her aura as she turned slowly over and lay down in the moss. Her legs were upbent and shuttered, her arms banded about her breasts.

All Sesshoumaru could see of her as he approached was the inky spill of her hair about her icy face and rigid shoulders, the tense curving lines of her form, the taut white plane of her stomach, and the inverted triangle of dark fur which marked its cloistered union with her thighs. At a piercing look from him, her knees cracked reluctantly open, and he stepped between them, wedging her farther apart.

"Lift your legs," he ordered, reaching for the ties of his hakama.

Staring murderously at him, Kagome complied. Delicate fingers gripped herself under the knees, her spine curling out as she pulled her legs in toward her chest. Utterly vulnerable, she rocked slightly back, the raised tilt of her hips cleaved open from back to front. Her unshielded breasts swayed a little at the motion, upthrust by the furious heaving of her lungs.

It was a defenseless, degrading position. As uncomfortable as it was mortifying to endure. Knowing this, Sesshoumaru took his time removing the layers of his haori. His armor and swords he had already stowed away, so as to set her on edge the moment she had entered the clearing. Now, with painful and deliberate slowness, he freed the hardness whose outline she had been eyeing in trepidation and glaring away from in bemusing equal measure.

For a while he thus remained, erect and looming above her. The passing minutes served not only to further exhaust and unnerve her, but to force her attention to focus upon him. When required to do as such, one must find appreciation in the object of study—if there was appreciation to be found. Even as she wrathfully scrutinized him, Sesshoumaru could glimpse, in the shifting shadows of her gaze, a grudging approbation of him. His bearing and stature. His strength and his size.

Surely she, like himself, could not help but contemplate this titillating disparity between them.

In the lingering of her glances, in the creasing of her brow, the weighing of her lips and the faint reddening of her cheeks, he could detect this contemplation. Unlike her, he stared blatantly upon her, devouring her with his gaze. She was so expressive. Even her chest was stained with a creeping flush, as though her very flesh must make known its every sentiment toward him.

Not that her tone disguised it.

"Why do you even want this?" she snapped. "I'm sure there are plenty of demonesses who would be happy to sleep with you."

"There are," he said simply, his claws curving at last around his shaft. "Spread your knees."

Shaking with outrage, she widened the gap between her legs to reveal even more of her sundered sex to his view. Doubled and tilted as she was, both her front and rear entrances were on clear display, as if proffered for his easy selection. Eyeing that slim opening and the tight tiny ring beneath it, Sesshoumaru knew he would be hard-pressed to choose. As he stroked himself to the sight of her so crudely splayed, helpless tears of humiliation bled down her temples. Deep in his lower stomach, Sesshoumaru's muscles contracted in a voluptuous cinch.

He needed not chains to hold her in open bondage to him. He needed not even his own hands and claws. By his will alone, she had bound and quartered herself for his pleasure. She was a whore at his will, a slave to his will.

This was the prize his patience had won him.

"Think of Inuyasha as the bridge between us." Kneeling down between the spread of her thighs, he said this as though resuming a perfectly mundane conversation, her hips flinching away from the searing heat of his. "He and I are half-brothers. As you are attracted to him, and he to you, so am I to you. And you, to me."

"I'm not—"

Her voice cut off as he guided the tip of his cock along her slit. Dampness smeared across the sensitive head, though whether it was more hers or his he could not say with iron certainty—only that as he drew back from her, they both glistened of it. There were other tells of her arousal, as well, which he observed by sight alone.

And here was where her body differed most from the ones he had laid claim to before. While demonesses knew pleasure only from within, these human women were clearly not content with the mating act. A corolla of blushing flesh surrounded Kagome's dewy center—petal-like folds which were as sensitive to the touch as the entrance they guarded. And tipped at the helm of them was a rosy bud whose blood-stiffness was not unlike his own. Sesshoumaru marveled at the sheer carnality of it—and perhaps at long last came to understand something of his father's earthly preoccupations.

Certainly his own cock had never before been so hard in his fist.

Yet her engorgement presented a conundrum. For how could he tyrannize her from both within and without? In the jut of that little organ was the promise of rebellion. Already he could envision how it would crush and graze between them—either at the base of his groin, or against the arc of his testicles—defying the pace which he would set and thwarting his careful denial of her. The alternative was not to seat himself fully inside her—which, with the extent and accumulation of his lust for her, was to Sesshoumaru no alternative at all.

It warranted further consideration than he was disposed to entertain at the moment—and had no bearing on his present plans at any rate. Sitting back on his haunches, he pumped himself a hairsbreadth away from her steamy sex, letting the charged air between them carry the currents of his whispered movements to her. Faintly, she twitched, an ebb of frustration surfacing subtly in her aura, as her imagination re-constructed his outward thrusting motion, transposing it inward instead.

"Are you thinking of him, Kagome?" he asked her, slightly ragged. "Are you remembering how my little brother used to fuck you, before he went mad and tried to rip out your throat?"

It was no coincidence Sesshoumaru had waited this long to call in her debt to him. It was no coincidence he had waited so very long for her altogether. Ignorant virgins did not appeal to him. How could one who knew nothing of sexual fulfillment suffer from its deprivation? There was no question that Kagome was suffering, that each spiralling course of his hand around the length of his cock was the twisting of a blade within her. He could see it in the welling gleam of her eyes and cunt. He could hear it in the rasp of her breath, scent it in the course of her simmering blood.

"You bastard," she said with a quaver. "You sick sadistic bastard..."

Like the threads of white claw-marks that scarred her throat, the vein of her agony lay open before him, and he drank in her pain like a cask of wine long fermented. Well-bodied with resentment. Finished with despair.

Thinking to let her breathe, he took her small hand from beneath her knee and, guiding it to the ridge between her thighs, replaced it with his own. "Touch yourself, there."

"No," she choked out, incensed.

Sesshoumaru's claws dug into the soft underside of her thigh, making her yelp. "Defy me again, and we are finished."

Her eyes were impossibly wide. In their churning blue depths, he watched her resistance capsize. With a whimper, she curled her fingers against that rosy peak, adopting a swirling, pressing pattern which Sesshoumaru burned into memory before leaning forward. The leg he had seized compressed to her chest. She gasped in discomfort as her crushed breast distended around her knee, and Sesshoumaru's outstretched cock dripped high on the flinching breadth of her stomach.

"This is where I would land within you," he rumbled, thrusting hard down through the vise of his fist to drive into her slickened belly. "Does it excite you, woman?—the prospect of being so possessed?"

Kagome grit her teeth, yet he could sense her excitement in the hitch of her breath, the flurry of her fingers, and the roil of her reiki. Sesshoumaru smiled in self-satisfaction. One must know an enemy in order to vanquish it. There was a familiar sharpness in this rising pleasure of hers. Vaguely masculine, as he had assumed, yet now confirmed through observation.

Already a strategy was taking shape to counter it, yet he would allow her this one release, if only to complete her present debasement and heighten her future disappointment. Besides, it was rather entrancing to him how her cheeks were coloring, how her eyes were misting and how her spirit was teeming. He would be depriving himself if he did not witness her attainment, this once.

Her lips parted in a silent cry, her bliss crashing against his aura in waves of light. Viscerally, this tide pulled at him, the point of his fang scoring his tongue as he resisted the uncanny sweep of it. His gaze riveted on her red panting mouth. How fiercely he longed to paint it white, yet she had chosen otherwise.

A pity.

Easing back, he stared down at her in dark exultation. He stared down at her as a god might stare down upon a worm writhing in the dirt, in torment and ecstasy of his divine presence.

“Some priestess you are, to be so gladly defiled,” he said on a low, scathing growl. “To be the creature of one such as I.”

She said nothing to this. He supposed it was because she could not, so adrift was she still. But there was a dimming in her pleasure which stoked his own to completion. Laying her open wide at the thigh, he aimed his cock at her prone sex. Already he could see how thickly he would coat both her holes, how the flood of his seed would glaze her folds and bead in her curls. How shamefully evident his use of her would be.

The Shikon Miko, his filthy little slut.

As he swelled and tightened on the brink of ecstasy, he looked to her, wanting the expression of her disgrace, her anguish, to be the image which carried him over. But what he saw instead was the sudden clearing of her misted gaze. Hard and sharp, her eyes seized his, the haze of her aura dispelling like a cloud. There was no trace of sordid pleasure in her. There never had been—

She had deceived him.

Sesshoumaru reeled with a snarl, but even he could not stop the sensation that was rushing upon him. He could not stop her from reading it in his youki, no more than he could stop the small, cruel smile of true gratification that framed her lips as he spilled himself out emptily onto the ground between them.

Seething through his joyless release, Sesshoumaru glared at Kagome as she swiftly stood. Not even bothering with her undergarments, she pulled on her miko garb almost as an afterthought and, striding toward the edge of the clearing, retrieved her discarded weapon. At the treeline she glanced back at him in cold disdain.

“I’ll do what you say, but I’m not your ‘creature’.” Moonlight glinted from the raised frame of her bow, silvered the tousle of her raven hair and set the visible swathes of her pale skin aglow. “Take more nights with me, if you want. Keep digging yourself in deeper. Nothing’s going to change the fact that the only creature I see here is you.”

Turning on her heel, she left him naked and kneeling. Long after the radiance of her spirit had faded from his detection, Sesshoumaru remained, still and unsated, despite the softness of his sex and the crust of his seed upon the earth. Within him was a boiling agitation, a sear of wounded pride to which he was uniquely unaccustomed.

That woman...

As if there were any question of him not answering to such a challenge. What had transpired this evening had been a simple miscalculation, a setback owing entirely to her human strangeness and his underestimation of it. Let her savor her supposed superiority over him. When he proved her triumph of will no more than a mere fluke, she would learn what it meant to suffer at his whim.

Taking up the slip of cotton which had covered her, he breathed in the traces of her musk which lingered, and anticipated the nights to come.