WARNING: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

Outside in the central courtyard, Sesshoumaru drew in a clarifying breath, his boots crunching lightly over the shimmering shell gravel as he approached the Lady of the Western Lands.

Her back to him, Inukimi waited beneath the swaying emerald boughs of a willow tree, her form as still and statuesque as the stone bench upon which she sat. The long silver-white tails of her hair listed faintly in the breeze, her powerful aura swirling subtly around her, stirring and portentous as the air before a storm.

She did not turn as he paused behind her. Forced to circle around her instead, Sesshoumaru felt like a pup summoned forth for a scolding—a sentiment that deepened as his mother’s cool amber eyes locked with his.

“Why did you bring that poor creature here?”

His jaw clenched at her choice of words, perhaps in part because they mirrored his own inner thoughts. Callous and unjust as the reference was, what they had brought back from Naraku’s hellish lair hardly seemed like the human girl he had known.

“She needed help,” he replied, his answer sounding weak even to his ears. “She seemed to be in a great deal of pain.”

“Pain,” his mother repeated with cutting softness as she rose to her feet, seeming to tower over him despite the substantial difference in their heights. “Her legs are shattered beyond repair. She will not walk again—will struggle even to feed herself again with what is left of her hands. She is blind and tongueless, and had she the breasts to someday nurse a child, her ravaged womb would never permit it.” It was all Sesshoumaru could do not to recoil from the ruthless sear of her glare. “Shall I go on?”

“No,” he ground out, biting back the word please.

Stepping briskly around him, Inukimi looked to the castle as she adjusted the resplendent fur draped across her shoulders. “I have done what I can for her. I have stopped her bleeding, sealed and bound her wounds.” Glancing back at him, she frowned in censure. “Numbed her pain enough so that she can rest in relative peace.”

Sesshoumaru frowned in return. “There must be more that can be done for her.”

“Oh, my son,” his mother sighed, her eyes pitying as she turned and touched her lacquered claws to his cheek. “You would bend heaven and earth to your will, would you not? But there is a limit to what mortal flesh can mend, and to what the gods will allow.”

Sesshoumaru’s features hardened in defiance. Seeing the fate that had befallen Kagome, he had little care for what the gods would allow. As if reading this in his expression, Inukimi’s brow creased in thought.

“Truly,” she said, a rare touch of wistfulness entering her gaze, “you become more like him with each passing day.”

“Like whom?” Sesshoumaru demanded.

“Your father, of course,” she replied as her hand fell away from his face, her tone and her look inscrutable. After a moment of consideration, she continued, “It would be best to send your priestess on to the next life, before she reawakens into this one.”

Once again he tensed at her wording. There was something testing in it, and judging by the way her eyes sharpened upon him, Sesshoumaru sensed that he had already been weighed. Still, he found himself responding to her nevertheless.

“It is too late for that now.”

With a nod, Inukimi stepped back. “So I can see.”

There was a sad, fatalistic quality to the curve of her lips. It reminded him of the last smile Kagome had worn, on the day that she was taken from him. Sesshoumaru’s claws twitched with the absurd impulse to reach out for her, as a pearly cloud of youki gathered beneath his mother’s feet and spirited her off into the sky.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi