– 26 –

.the gift.

Sesshoumaru steps down into the room, his sword Bakusaiga dripping blood and poison. With a flick of his wrist, he flings the droplets from the blade, as though in disgust. Yet his face betrays no emotion.

They regard one another in wary silence. Within the circle of her arms, she can feel the life fading from Yashamaru with every quickened beating of her heart.

The screen doors fly open as his breathing stills.

A flood of guards and servants pours in, freezing at the sight before them–their mistress, bloodied and pinned beneath the thief’s dead body, and their master, standing suddenly before them in the flesh, his sword outstretched above it all.

“That’s him,” Mei declares triumphantly from the front of the crowd. “That’s the strange man I saw Kagome-sama consorting with on the night of her return.”

Ochre eyes snap to the servant woman’s face. “Return?”

Mei quails, the other members of the crowd shooting her dark looks. The lord of the castle strides toward them, the point of his acrid sword coming to rest beneath a guardsman’s jaw.

“Speak,” he commands.

“M-my lord,” the guard begins, “Kagome-sama was…was abducted during a burglary a few months back.”

“Why was I not sent word of this?”

The man yelps in pain as Bakusaiga’s poison singes his flesh, his mouth working fruitlessly to form words of apology.

“Because they feared your anger,” she answers woodenly in the guard’s stead. “They hoped I would be returned to the palace before you arrived, and so I have. Please, Sesshoumaru-sama, let them be.”

He turns back to her, lowering Bakusaiga. “Leave us.”

The crowd retreats, the screen doors closing swiftly behind them.

Alone again, he considers her.

“So,” he says at last, “you cared for this half-breed.”

Her arms tighten around Yashamaru’s lifeless form. “Yes.”

“And yet you returned to me. Why?”

She looks up from Yashamaru’s golden eyes and into his own still yellow stare. A world of difference lies between the two shades. It is a truth seared into the pit of her heart–a truth she has always known, yet only now remembered.

“Because,” she answers in resignation, “I know my place.”

His gaze flickers, even as he nods. “It is well that you do.”

He sheathes Bakusaiga and retrieves another blade. In his hand, the thin length of silver gleams faintly blue.

“Do you know this sword?” he asks her.

“It is Tenseiga,” she replies. “Your birthright.”

“A frivolous weapon,” he remarks, studying the sharpened edge. “Still, never before have I wielded it with regret.”

He approaches on soundless footsteps, the dark silk of his haori setting his moonwhite skin aglow.

Leveling Tenseiga, he draws to a stop before her, a strange cast to his expression.

“What would you give me,” he asks lowly, “in exchange for the half-breed’s life?”

Her mind races at the question. Hopelessly, she meets his gaze.

“What more could I give you, than what I already have?”

His lips quirk faintly, an echo of that same hopelessness in his reply.

“Nothing, it seems.”

In one smooth arc, Tenseiga slices through the air above her. As the sword returns to its sheath, the body in her arms inhales a shuddering breath.

Life returns to the thief’s golden eyes. Slowly he blinks, one hand rising to her bloodspattered cheek.

“Yashamaru,” she whispers, tears obscuring her sight.

“Only once can Tenseiga restore one to life,” Sesshoumaru warns, turning from them and moving to the door. “Remember this when saying your farewells.”

With that, he leaves them.

“You didn’t mention,” Yashamaru rasps, “that your lord is a daiyoukai.”

“Would it have mattered if I had?”

“No,” the hanyou laughs weakly, “I guess not.”

Cursing, he pushes himself into a sitting position. New pink skin seals the wound in his chest.

“The gods themselves couldn’t keep me from you, if I knew you wished to be with me.”

He sighs, ruffling a set of claws through his dark unruly hair. Frowning, she reaches out to him, guiding his face back toward her own.

Their eyes hold one another across the distance. In the burnished surface of his gaze, time falls away, until only their immortal selves remain–two souls drawn together in the space of a moment, the chasm of fate ever widening between them.

“There is nothing I want more in this world,” she says with quiet sincerity, “than to be with you.”

“But you don’t choose to be,” he corrects her, half-smiling.

“I choose for you to live,” she says softly.

“And so I will, for whatever that’s worth.”

Wincing, Yashamaru rises from the floor, and she with him. Dusting off his pants and straightening his obi, the thief glances at her shrewdly. Before she can protest, his mouth is upon hers, hungry and warm, fangs nicking her lower lip as she pulls away, breathless.

“Take care, Kagome,” he whispers against her ear. “I won’t forget you, so don’t you go forgetting about me.”

With one bound he is through the window, the sound of his voice calling back to her in mocking farewell.

How could I forget, she thinks, closing her eyes as his presence fades to the east.

In the cold loneliness of his absence she turns, crossing at last to the door.

The main palace is silent. Her breath catches in trepidation, her senses guiding her outside, toward the castle gates.

As the torii arch draws into view, she stills, one hand rising to her mouth in horror.

Before her is a scene of slaughter. Guards and gardeners, servants and scribes–each and every resident of the castle lies strewn upon the blasted ground, cut down like straw beneath the scythe.

And in the center of it all stands their executioner, not a drop of blood upon him. Only the fixed stares of a hundred knowing dead.

“Come,” he says to her over his shoulder. “It is time for us to leave this place.”

She follows him into the wilderness.

By the side of a stream, he forces her down. Her back grates against the rocky shore, the skin at the corner of her eye stretching taut beneath Yashamaru’s dried and flaking blood.

She winces as her head snaps back, scalp stinging beneath his merciless grasp.

“Look at me,” the one above her demands. “Look to whom you belong.”

She looks. And she sees–as Mei must have seen, the instant before her brutal demise–the monster that he is.

…

She awakens to the rocking of waves.

A smile touches her lips before she remembers–her sunlit days on the island are gone.

Wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she ventures out onto the deck. The water is choppy and dark beyond the railing. Land is nowhere to be seen.

Aimlessly, she wanders toward the bow, the crew granting her a wide berth as she passes.

She thinks of Yashamaru’s mother, of how she must have felt, looking down at the churning sea from her place of captivity. Did she, too, wonder at being swallowed up in the tumult of the waves, at sinking down to rest in the quiet darkness of the deep?

She steps forward, wondering still, until a strange sensation gives her pause.

Turning, she sees Sesshoumaru approach her, a curious glint shining through the material of his haori. Transfixed, she watches as his claws slip beneath the collar, extracting a small chunk of black crystal.

She gasps when he drops it in her palm. Before her eyes the blackness recedes, replaced by a faint purple hue.

“What is this?” she asks him, heart pounding in her ears.

“A piece of the Shikon no Tama,” he answers. “For you.”

For a while, she studies the fragment, while he studies her in turn.

Holding it close to her chest, she looks up at him at last.

“Will you have it set for me?” she asks.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi