Sesshoumaru didn’t forget.

And when Kagome had finished telling her story, he told her one of his own. How, centuries ago, his father had fallen in love with a mortal woman to his peril, how this indiscretion had torn apart not only his demon family but his kingdom as well. How, still young and unproven in the eyes of many, his firstborn son had been thrust into the mantle of warlord. How there had been no place in this for thoughts of compassion, for the suggestion of softness of any sort. How in his bitterness there had been none within him, at any rate.

“I was furious,” Sesshoumaru said. “Resentful. Even before Father died, I felt this way, though my thoughts toward him grew colder, after. He had cast my mother and I aside as though we were nothing. In his foolishness and weakness over that woman, he was slain, and I was left with the wreckage.”

“Is that when you began to hate them,” Kagome asked him with a frown, “humans, I mean?”

“Hated humans? No, I never hated them.” When she blinked in surprise, he said, “Do you hate the thorn that pricks your heel? In the moment it offends you, but in the next it is gone, and you think of it and its kind no more.”

Kagome’s expression flattened. “…I see.”

“But Inuyasha was a thorn I couldn’t dislodge. Whenever I considered him, I felt the scorn in our father’s choices. To kill the boy would have been to acknowledge him—this was what I told myself, at the time.” His lips lifted slightly at the corner. “After the crisis was over, and my reign secure, I took to wandering. I was restless. I was coldly furious still. I traveled far and fought many demons. I saw many things, many people. I saw them without seeing them. There were times when the coldness would seem to thaw, when I would perceive something through it, but at the center of myself I was as embittered as I’d ever been.”

“Were,” Kagome said, and when Sesshoumaru glanced sharply at her, she flushed and scrambled to explain, “You said it in the past tense, as if that’s no longer the case.”

The demon lord looked away from her, toward the wilderness. “That coldness had kept me in power.” His eyes were narrowed, his voice hard. “I was reluctant to part with it—I still am.”

“So you’re afraid.”

And now there was no mistaking the cut of his eyes. Like lightning they flashed to her, and Kagome clapped a hand to her lips, hardly believing she’d blurted out something so suicidal.

“I am cautious,” he said briskly, and the danger passed.

Mildly, Kagome smiled, opting for a change of tack. “Well, I think your father was very brave. It takes real courage to go against the grain like he did. I think he knew what it might cost him, and he loved Inuyasha’s mother anyway. And you know what else I think? I think he trusted in you enough to take that risk.”

Sesshoumaru’s gaze was riveted on her. “And why is that?”

Kagome balked a little beneath the force of his scrutiny, yet squaring her shoulders, she straightened and said, “Because of Rin-chan…because I think, well, you’re a lot like him.”

The searing challenge in that look of his softened as he smiled. Truly smiled. Kagome’s heart gave a curious flutter at the sight.

“I am beginning to think you are right.”

~

“So, what changed?” Kagome asked him, later. From the tips of her fingers, her loosed arrow flew true. “Something must have.”

Sitting cross-legged upon the pitted ‘practice stump’, Sesshoumaru caught her glittering projectile an inch above his armored chest. “I lost a limb and gained it back.”

“Oh.” For a moment she considered him, something nagging at her still. “Is that all?”

From the arrow clasped between the claws of his left hand, Sesshoumaru’s eyes strayed to hers. “No,” he said, “there was something more.”

~

And later still—

Setting the sprig of herb she was trimming back in her basket, Kagome followed the direction of Sesshoumaru’s gaze. “What do you see now, when you look at Inuyasha?”

The hanyou in question was snoring high above them, in the bare branches of an outlying tree. Whenever his elder brother was around, he felt the need to be ‘on the lookout’—but it was clearly becoming more and more of a formality.

“Something of myself,” Sesshoumaru replied, gazing upward still. Then, rather dryly, he added to her, “And something else entirely.”

~

‘And when you look at me?’ she’d felt the urge to ask him.

But the question lodged itself somewhere in her chest.

~

When the night of the full moon came around, Kirara was nowhere to be seen.

Hugging her shawl a little tighter around her shoulders, Kagome ventured out into the chill and the drizzle, the icy droplets winking like beads of silver in the gathering dark. From somewhere deep in the ghostly tangle of Inuyasha’s Forest, she caught the flame-like whisper of Kirara’s youki. That her feline friend had chosen this particular time to go hunting struck Kagome as no coincidence, and she sagged against the porch rail with a sigh.

All throughout the intervening days, the miko had been debating whether or not to attempt another trip to the cave. Now that the choice had been taken from her, she felt anxious and bereft.

Aimlessly, she wandered down the steps and out into the deserted square. In a sky misted with rain and choked with clouds, even the moon was hidden from her. As her hair began to grow heavy and lank, she took cover beneath the awning of an empty stall—a little lean-to with with three of its sides largely open to the night.

Sinking down to the brittle bits of hay that floored it, Kagome pressed her hands to her face and sobbed.

Like an egg, her heart cracked open, and what came out of it was so sticky and messy and dense with feeling that it seeped between the seams of her fingers and leaked out of her in a whimpery trickle. She felt ashamed of herself, ashamed of her sadness—and the sadness only made her feel more ashamed.

And the shame only made her feel more miserable…

“Kagome,” a deep, familiar voice addressed her.

The miko stiffened. Slowly, she turned, peeking blearily through her hands as one last hiccup escaped her. Against the darkness, Sesshoumaru was coolly radiant, his hair and fur untouched by the evening rain. In a nimbus of pale light, his aura bent around him, vaporizing the drizzle as it fell.

He was as pristine and perfect as ever—and she was a total disaster.

Whipping around, Kagome scrubbed her face furiously with a sleeve. As her skin began to smart from the effort, she raked a hand through the still-damp tousle of her bangs, and turned back to him with as much pluck as she could muster.

“S-some weather we’re having, huh?”

For a moment, his golden eyes seemed to linger on her tear-stained cheeks. Then, he stepped forward, and bowing his head—gods, just how tall was he, anyway?—he joined her beneath the roof of her measly little shelter. Shifting to make room for him, she struggled not to sniffle, stealing a quick, raw-eyed glance at him as he settled beside her in the straw. Together they sat in companionable silence, both looking out through the wide-open front of the lean-to.

Just as she was beginning to think she’d gotten away with it, he said, as if remarking upon the weather itself, “You’re upset.”

Kagome blanched. Her first defensive impulse was to deny it outright; her second, to laugh it off as nothing. But in the calmness of his presence what she replied with instead was—

“Do you ever feel lonely?”

Sesshoumaru’s gaze slid to hers. “Why do you ask?”

“Well…you seem to spend a lot of time alone.”

“There is a difference between loneliness and solitude,” he said, his eyes fixing once more upon the gloom.

“That’s true.” Kagome’s mouth twisted. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

Sesshoumaru’s lips ticked up in turn. “Perhaps I have, at times,” he admitted.

Outside, the rain began to cease its whispering fall. Above and beyond the thatched overhang, the dark curtains of cloud drifted apart, and the reflected light of the moon shone through them. Sesshoumaru’s mirrored eyes glinted, just as bright.

“But I don’t feel lonely now,” he said to her.

Against the back of her hand, the spill of his fur brushed her knuckles, warm and velvety soft. Gazing at him in moonlit profile, Kagome smiled.

“Neither do I.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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