Post Tenebras: Lux by Aubrey Simone

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Pre-Note:

As of January 23, 2015, anonymous reading and commenting has been enabled. That being said, please heed the warnings for this story - if the subject matter is something you don't want to read, then please don't do so. I'm not taking them lightly and neither should you - please don't risk your well-being for the sake of a few words. For those of you who are brave enough to keep reading, welcome to Post Tenebras: Lux, in which there is darkness, but also, eventually, light. I hope you enjoy. *bow*

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[ I ]

WARNINGS: Rape/Dubiously-Consensual Sex, Angst, Dark!Kagome, Manipulative!Sesshomaru, Forced Bondage, Forced Mating, Sadomasochism

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When Kagome wakes up, she realizes three things in rapid, startling succession: that she isn't where she's supposed to be, that she doesn't remember where she is, and that she hurts from her the tips of her toes to the crown of her head.

Unbidden, a groan tumbles from her lips, and when something cool splashes against her mouth, she can't help shoving aside the voice that whispers poison and embracing the one that shouts water, because the liquid is like a godsend, soaking her parched gums and dry throat.

In her hurry—dear gods has she ever been so thirsty?—she chokes, and the blessed water is pulled away in the same instant that she forces her head to the side and coughs. Coughing turns to hacking turns to heaving turns to vomiting, and even though part of her is raging at the loss of the water, another part is horrified at what she sees splattered across the floor when she finally forces her eyes open: blood and a black, bubbling, viscous concoction that hisses against the floor.

"It's begun," someone says, and Kagome whirls despite the protesting ache of her muscles, because she's heard that sort of sick glee before, the kind that sounds like oil and tar and tastes like what pure darkness must taste like, sour and sharp in the back of her throat. The woman who'd spoken wears priestess' garb, but both her hakama and haori are a strange, muddy red, like dried blood against white fabric. There's a manic light in her dark eyes that makes Kagome's stomach flip, and she grins as Kagome takes her in, gaunt face and sallow skin making her look sickly in the torchlight. "Are you ready for your transformation?"

Kagome doesn't get to respond, because the woman reaches down and pulls her to her feet with a strength that the miko wouldn't have thought she possessed. It hurts immediately and everywhere all at once, but the woman, bony fingers closed tight around Kagome's upper arm, ignores the cry that rips itself out of her throat; knees buckling, Kagome is dragged from the room.

She immediately recognizes the dismal conditions of a dungeon, stone walls and uneven floor shining wetly in the light that spills from the torches. She can hear water, somewhere, and as the woman continues to drag her through the halls, the sound of tortured screams send chills up and down her spine.

It doesn't take long for the woman to herd her to their destination—a large round cavern that's only occupied by one other person, chained near the far wall. The sight of him—he's painfully, embarrassingly naked—all silver hair and lean, bloodied flesh, sends a jolt of fear through Kagome's gut, but some part of her recognizes not Inuyasha's thick hair, but Sesshomaru's ankle length tresses.

And then the fear deepens to panic, because if Sesshomaru has been captured, where does that leave the rest of the group? They've all been traveling together for the better part of a year, after all, and no matter Inuyasha's brute strength, they all knew that Sesshomaru was their true weapon, their strategic advantage against anything and everything Naraku threw at them.

But...but if he's here, then…?

She doesn't get to think any more on the subject—her captor tosses her bodily into the room, sneers when Kagome turns to glare at her, and then shuts the door with a slam and a cackle. Kagome swallows and gingerly picks herself up off of the floor, her legs still trembling but her determination holding firm.

Sesshomaru doesn't react until she's within three feet of him, but when he looks up, the light in his eyes isn't angry or embarrassed or even coldly blank, but resigned, as though he's given up. She's hardly had time to decide that she doesn't like it before he's looking away again, his hair falling in a dirty swath across his blood-streaked chest. She swallows again, and her throat clicks.

"I - Sesshomaru, I'm sorry," she whispers, and she doesn't even know what she's apologizing for, but she can't take it back now that she's said it, so she steps closer, adamantly ignoring his state of undress in favor of examining his bonds.

He's only held by his arms, the thick manacles that are closed just above the joint of his elbows shining dully in the dim light. The chain that connects the two manacles is attached to the floor, just long enough, it seems, for Sesshomaru to stand upright. He can't take more than a step away from where he is now, and Kagome's heart clenches; she knows he must feel horrible, worse than a pet dog, stuck in one place when he's spent so much of his life in constant motion.

"Your pity is unnecessary, girl."

She jumps at the sound of his voice, hoarser than she remembers it, and turns to see him watching her from the corner of his eye, his bangs hanging dirtily across his forehead. She shakes her head. "I'm sorry, I - "

And then words and thought and every sensation except that of acute, bone-wrenching pain fade into nothing.

She can't breathe around the agony, but if she could get enough air in her lungs, she knows that she would be screaming her throat raw; the pain feels like someone's dragging broken glass along her nerves, like someone has replaced her blood with magma or acid or pure undiluted poison.

It feels like it lasts forever, and when it ends she's on the ground, sweating forehead pressed into the cool stone. She can feel Sesshomaru's eyes on her, and when she manages to roll onto her side, his jaw is clenching and his face is as open as she's ever seen it—there's resolution in the taut line of his mouth; resolution and something that looks, surprisingly, like pain.

"Don't fight it," he says lowly, as simply as if he'd been advising her on the best archer's post in a mountain range, and she forces herself to process the words through the haze that's still clearing from her psyche.

She wants to ask what he means—why he seems to know what's happening and why she isn't supposed to fight it—but the pain is building again, closing first around her gut and then her lungs and then her throat and her head until she can't see past the violent haze of it, until she isn't sure whether there was a time when she didn't hurt.

The episode is shorter this time, she thinks, and when she comes out of it, she isn't breathing quite as hard as the first time. Her reprieve, however, lasts only long enough for her to blink the tears out of her eyes, and then it strikes again, rolling over her like a tsunami.

This time, she does scream.

The next time, she vomits blood.

The time after that, she empties her stomach for the third time since she's been awake, and the black liquid burns her fingers when it splashes onto the stone.

Slowly, so painfully slowly, the fits pass, and instead of pain curling in her gut at random intervals, something else, something unidentifiable and foreign, sidles along her senses like a cat seeking affection. She draws in a breath, and then there's the taste of something tantalizing on the back of her tongue, like the remnants of her favorite dessert, just barely there but alluring all the same.

She turns her head, licks her lips, and Sesshomaru lowers himself to his knees as she stares at him, knowing that that taste—that utterly addictive flavor—is coming from him. She can see his throat bob as he swallows, and something about the motion, something about the utter vulnerability of it snaps her thoughts from languid to sharp in seconds. She blinks. Sesshomaru swallows again.

Although the pain has disappeared, that something else is still there, rolling around just out of reach, slick and seductive and oh so foreign. She can't feel her reiki any longer, not even when she reaches for it, and it's the loss of that that sends panic rushing into her throat; tightly, she asks, "What…? Sesshomaru, what happened, why can't I - "

"A ritual," he interrupts quietly, "meant to corrupt even the purest of souls." He pauses, waits until he's sure he has her attention, and says, "You are shadow youkai now, the darkest of our kind, and no longer the Shikon's priestess."

The blow is invisible but she feels it just as acutely as if she'd seen it coming. Her breath rushes out of her, and she sways forward before she can stop herself, catching her weight on her arms—arms, she notices now, covered in thin black lines that swirl and curl, entrancing, over her skin, dark enough to be visible even through the sleeves of her yukata. Her hair falls around her face, and if it's actually thicker and longer than it was before, Kagome decides to adamantly ignore that fact.

"Then," she croaks, throat working against the dryness of it, "then that means Naraku wins, doesn't it? If I can't - if I'm not a miko anymore, then…then he wins, right?"

The snarl that Sesshomaru lets loose sends a strange tingle skittering down her back, and she looks up in surprise, immediately caught in the fiery red-gold cast of his eyes. "I will die before I allow such filth to best me," he rumbles, fists clenching and chain rattling.

Kagome tries to remember to breathe—she's starting to taste that sweetness on the back of her tongue again, and firmly tells herself to pretend that the thrill tingling at the base of her spine isn't arousal—and then dips her head forward. "I know, I'm sorry, I just...What are we going to do?"

Sesshomaru's face goes blank and the fire in his eyes dims until only ice is left. "I will do nothing."

"Then what can I do?" Scooting closer, Kagome tucks her legs beneath her and sits across from him as though they haven't been captured by the enemy; as though she's explaining the workings of a car to him in one of his more curious moods. "You said that there was a ritual performed, right? Well how do I stop it? There must be some way to disrupt it."

Slowly, Sesshomaru shakes his head. "It is too far progressed," he responds, nodding toward her arms. "Your only choice now is to complete it, as Naraku intends."

His voice drops lower and lower as he talks, until the last word is hardly more than a vibration through the air. Kagome twists her fingers. "And how do I finish it?"

He doesn't meet her eyes. "You will do what you must."

Kagome tries to catch his eye, but he stares at the wall to his left, hair hiding his face just as effectively as a solid wall would have. "Sesshomaru, what do you mean?"

She can hear the scrape of his claws against the floor when he curls his fists. "I," he says, so quietly that she knows he's only refraining from shouting through pure self-control, "am to be a final sacrifice."

Kagome instantly feels sick. "I have to…I'm supposed to kill you?"

If he's annoyed with the squeak of her voice, he doesn't give any indication, and it's only because she's watching him so closely that she sees the slight slump of his shoulders when he shakes his head. "It is what they expect, but that is not what you will do." He says it so calmly, so nonchalantly, that she's surprised at the malice she sees in his eyes when he turns back to her. "You will take me as your mate, instead, and I will take you as mine, and our souls will be bound for the rest of our lifetimes."

And I do not want it, she hears, as loudly and as clearly as if he'd spoken the words. She shakes her head.

"I can't…I won't do that to you," she whispers. "You don't want a mate, I know you don't, much less one who used to be human, I—"

"You will," he interrupts with a snarl, beautiful features twisting in unadulterated anger, "or we will die here." She shakes her head again, and he lurches forward, chain rattling, his face just inches from her own. "You will do this, or you will spend the rest of your pathetic once-human life wishing you had." His upper lip curls. "You will do this, or you will watch from the afterlife as Naraku slaughters every human in sight; you will do this, or your friends"—he sneers the word, like it's bitter on his tongue—"will be be captured, and you know that the spider will torture them, don't you? He will break their bones and spill their blood; he will make them watch as he flays them alive; he will rape them and break them and—"

"Stop it!" She doesn't mean to yell, not at him, but once the words are out, she realizes that she's been holding them in for some time. "You can't - you can't expect me to do this to you, Sesshomaru! I'll find some other way to—"

"There is no other way!" Sesshomaru all but roars, and she scrambles instinctually away from him as he jerks toward her, fangs bared. She has never seen him so angry at anyone but Inuyasha; has never seen his face cycling through despair and pain and fury the way it's doing now. "Unless you slaughter me," he grits out, and the tone of his voice tells her that he doesn't believe she would do it, "there is nothing else than can be done."

Her heart is pounding, and that sensual otherness in her veins is sliding faster, pooling in her gut and the cradle of her hips and slipping down her spine and arms and legs. She swallows and ignores it, just for a little while longer.

"Can you…can you get free, at least? I—"

"Were I free," he interrupts, no longer looking at her, "or willing, the ritual would not be complete, and we would both perish."

Then I'll have to…I'm going to…I have to rape him!

She wretches and turns away, but nothing but bile burns at the back of her tongue no matter how heavily her stomach lurches. Wiping a shaking hand against her mouth, Kagome tries to rationalize.

If I do this, then maybe we can get free. She doesn't know how long she's been here—she doesn't even remember being captured or having a ritual performed on her—but if she can do this…

"Then," she begins, peeking at him through her lashes, "afterwards...Can you get us out?"

"Yes." The unhesitating answer—and the utter certainty of it, the complete faith Sesshomaru has and has always had in his own abilities—settles at least a portion of her anxiety, and she inches back toward him, folding her legs underneath her and fiddling with the hem of the thin, tattered yukata she wears.

"And will you…forgive me?"

He looks away and doesn't answer, and Kagome nods to herself, ducking her head. She probably won't forgive herself either, not for a long while.

Time passes in silence, and the only reason Kagome knows that anything unsavory is about to happen is the way Sesshomaru slowly and steadily stiffens, and the way her arousal rocks higher and higher, the sweetly sharp taste of her reluctant companion growing thicker and thicker in her throat.

At some point, she looks up, and Sesshomaru is straining, quietly and fervently, away from her, turned and leaning as far away as he can. She doesn't know if he's consciously doing it, or if even he, always so poised, has lost his composure, but she feels instantly sorry for him and for herself. Why this, of all things? she wonders, curling her hands against the urge to reach out and touch him as the darkness that has replaced her reiki swirls more insistently in her blood. Why couldn't it be me sitting there?

It's a strange thing, she thinks, to wish rape on herself, but once the thought passes through her head, she can't help but wish it really was her in Sesshomaru's place. At least that way it wouldn't be so much of a violation—she could handle it then, maybe, because this? This was simply wrong, that a youkai of Sesshomaru's stature was going to have his pride and power trod upon like dirt, treated like nothing more than an instrument for Naraku's amusement.

But, she realizes, shifting at the wetness that grows unbidden between her legs, that's exactly what Naraku wants, isn't it? He wants them broken beyond repair, so that he can enjoy their suffering. Maybe he wants to come in while it's happening, she thinks, swallowing thickly. Or maybe, when it's over, he's going to—

"We have to do this fast," she whispers, and refuses to look at Sesshomaru even when he snaps his head up to look at her. "It would be just like him to come in, or send someone else in, thinking he's going to catch us broken and unprepared…" She sneaks a peek at the youkai from under her lashes, and her fingers twitch with the urge to reach for him; an urge she adamantly ignores and buries deep. "But we have to be ready—it'll be the only chance we have at getting out, won't it?"

Slowly, Sesshomaru nods, and as she watches, the stiff line of his shoulders settles into something that's less like revulsion and more like determination. "The Mate-Bond," he says quietly (she can hear the capitalization and can't help but to inwardly cringe at how utterly she's about to violate the sanctity of it), "will momentarily grant me the strength to overpower the enchantments on the chain—once it breaks, and someone opens the door, freeing ourselves will come easily."

She nods, and idly thinks that maybe this won't be so bad after all, because if Sesshomaru can still talk strategy, if his mind—he's scarily intelligent, she's found out, far smarter than her even with her education—can still weave through the gossamer squares of the world's chessboard, then he's going to find the best possible way of dealing with this.

They're going to deal with this.

It's that thought that holds her over as the new power—the youki of a shadow youkai, she thinks logically—begins to swell and roll, slowly clouding her thoughts and flooding through her body. The youki is thick in a way that her reiki never was, and it sparks beneath her skin the longer she ignores it, stretching itself through her in sensual tendrils. She can't help resisting the urges it whispers in her thoughts—touch him, it rasps, cut him, please him, own him—because she doesn't want this, Sesshomaru doesn't want this, and—

She's trembling by the time she can't take it anymore, and when she screws her eyes shut, whimpering, against the arousal that pulses between her legs, Sesshomaru growls.

The sound doesn't help—the darkness surges, and she feels like she's suffocating on pure oxygen; like she's drowning in reverse, and her skin comes alive with heat and sensation; she jerks forward with a cry, stopping herself from touching the dog lord's bare thigh by sheer will alone.

"Stop resisting," Sesshomaru hisses, and the sweet sharpness of his scent—pine needles and lightning and smoke—floods into her mouth when he leans forward, putting his face directly in her line of sight. "We have agreed that this must happen—will you not sacrifice as much as I in this? Will you be as much of a coward as you were when you were human?"

She growls, and even though the sound is foreign in her ears, even though she thinks that she doesn't mean to make such a vicious noise, Sesshomaru seems satisfied.

"Then do it."

And so she does.

She clambers into his lap, unmindful of the claws that curve delicately at the tips of her fingers and the way they scratch his skin. She hisses when his flesh makes contact with hers—his youki feels different than hers, deeper and heavier and just a little rougher—and then catches her breath at the first brush of his cock against her wetness.

He's hard (it's just a physical reaction, her rational mind tells her, he doesn't want this anymore than I do, but his body can't help it anymore than mine can), thick and long and heavy, and she rolls her hips against the smoothness of his shaft, feeling the coarse curls of his pubic hair catch against her own trimmed thatch. She doesn't know if he'll fit (he'll fit perfectly, the darkness purrs, and it'll hurt beautifully, simply beautifully), but she reaches down and positions him nonetheless, her free hand digging into the shoulder of his recently returned left arm.

Sesshomaru's claws scritch against her thighs when she forces just the head of him inside, and the pain is instant and sharp although it only registers as pain for a short time—it transforms to bliss just as he snarls his impatience with her, and when he leans forward to scrape his teeth against the bone of her collar, she shudders and sinks down.

Remembering to breathe, Kagome takes him in one thrust, and determination twines with pleasure and pain as he pulses softly inside of her, his heart pounding just as frantically as her own.

"Move," he commands, red snaking into his stone-hard eyes, and when she doesn't, he snarls and curls his fingers until his claws break the skin of her thighs. "Move, damn you!"

She does, and she lets his anger spur her on, lets the scent of her virgin's blood and their mingled arousal cloud her thoughts and drown her misgivings.

Because she has to, she moves; because she has to, she rapes him.

The darkness in her revels in every scratch, every bite, every snarl. The loathing in Sesshomaru's eyes only makes it want more, and she moves faster and faster, instinctively tilting her head back as what can only be the beginnings of the Mate-Bond stirs beneath her skin. Her breath heaves faster, and Sesshomaru's aura dances against her as the markings on her arms begin to burn.

There's sweat at her temples, slicking every space where their skin touches, heat and sensation and pure power bouncing back and forth between them like a ball thrown between friends. She can't breathe, can't force herself to focus long enough to keep a steady pace, can't help but want with every fiber of her being.

She whimpers, whispers something that sounds vaguely like a request for more, and Sesshomaru lurches forward to take her bottom lip between his teeth. He bites, growls, allows her to sink her own fangs into the swell of his lips, and—

Her climax hits her suddenly, and she freezes just long enough for Sesshomaru to get a good grip at her hips; his claws sink viciously into the skin just shy of the small of her back, and he gouges her violently, claws cutting four arcing, burning lines over her hips.

She screams, her orgasm soaring into bliss at the pain, and he both comes and breaks the chain holding him with an almighty tug in the same instant, flooding her insides with the heat of his seed and snarling all the while. Their eyes lock and she feels the Mate-Bond take, an otherworldly awareness of the dog lord sliding soul-deep; she shudders.

And then he's pushing her away from him and she's scrambling to put space between them, bile burning at the back of her throat and her stomach roiling. The darkness—and the newly formed Bond—balk at the distance, but Kagome knows what she's done, and she won't force him to deal with her anymore than he has to. She won't take his will from him again.

So they sit as far away from each other as they can, no more than an arm's length apart because the Bond makes her bones ache when she moves any further, and wait for someone to come for them.

It won't take long, she thinks, and the tenebrous roll of her new power nearly perks, because she hopes the woman, the one who'd put her in here and had no doubt performed whatever ritual had been performed, is the one who comes back.

Because Kagome is going to rip her limb from limb, and she's going to enjoy every second of it.

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End Note:

Well, as you all can see, I'm not dead or otherwise horribly indisposed - school has just been sort of time-consuming this semester, and I've had some real problems getting the next chapter of TTC written and posted, so I've decided to go ahead and post this instead.

As for this story, it'll be updated probably once every once in a while. I'm not going to promise any sort of regular update schedule, but I will try for at least one chapter every couple of weeks (or, preferably, once a week).

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll let me know what you thought, whether you liked or hated it - every opinion counts.

~Aubrey

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