From his vantage, Sesshoumaru watched as Kagome stole back into her hovel, swift and wary, as if some devil were nipping at her heels. What an earful she’d give him, he thought, were he to leap down from here and follow her inside. Or perhaps she might very well fall quiet for once. Regardless, she would see just how much ground she’d gained for all her impassioned rebuffing. Sesshoumaru smiled slightly to himself. The prospect was tempting.

But he’d done enough, for now, to leave her riled. Her tendency to ruminate was his chiefest ally. He need only be patient, and wait for opportunity to present.

Timing with her was everything. A tedious calculation to reckon upon, but he’d be damned if a part of him didn’t enjoy the challenge.

Ruminating along these lines, Sesshoumaru recalled an encounter long forgotten to him. Perhaps he might’ve forgotten it entirely, had it not been his first. He’d been little more than a boy at the time. The girl had been little more than a servant, a scribe’s daughter. Very pretty, always smiling. At him in particular, or so he’d thought.

So he’d liked to think, at any rate.

…

When he found her naked in his bed, he was more surprised at first than anything. He hadn’t thought her the type, but then that had been the end of his thinking on the matter. He trysted with her over the course of an afternoon, until she had to leave before she was missed.

She smiled to him in parting, and he smiled back.

He was still lying there sprawled when his father barged in on him. He bolted upright, incensed. His father’s expression was infuriatingly knowing.

“So,” the Inu no Taishou asked him, smirking, “how was she?”

Sesshoumaru’s hackles rose further. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t be coy, son. I mean that little vixen you’ve been sniffing after. I take it she’s the one who rumpled your sheets. They reek of her, and so do you. Or does my nose deceive me?”

Sesshoumaru turned up his chin at his father’s crudeness. “Don’t speak of her that way.”

The Inu no Taishou grinned. “Are you her champion now, Sesshoumaru? I warn you, your cause will wear thin with each one like her who warms your bed.”

“She’s not a bed warmer.”

His father gave a wave. “Whatever she is, the point remains. A whisper in the ear, and her sort comes panting about with tail upraised.”

Sesshoumaru glared, having a mind as to just who had contrived to put such whispers in her ear. “Leave me be, Father.”

“Best to have these easy bitches over and done with,” the Inu no Taishou continued on, as though Sesshoumaru had said nothing. “Save your brooding for one worthy of the chase, or a few bedstains will be the least of your troubles.” Lips half quirked, his father fixed him with a level look. “Tell me truly, son, do you still burn for this girl as once you did?”

Sesshoumaru didn’t answer. But neither did he endeavor to cross paths with her again. At last he did, by sheer coincidence. She looked to him hopefully, but when he avoided her eye, her pretty smile wilted on her face.

…

Sesshoumaru had often pondered his father’s words to him in the years thereafter. No more so than when the Inu no Taishou had done something so foolhardy as to fall in love with a mortal woman.

It was a wanton disgrace Sesshoumaru struggled mightily to reconcile. Despite their differences, he had esteemed his father. Idolized him, even. 

But this calamitous affair diminished him in Sesshoumaru’s eyes. How could it not? The best sense he could make of it was that his father had lost his senses.

How else could he prefer some lowly human to his peerless mother?

…

When Sesshoumaru found her, she was sulking. Her approximation of sulking, that was to say. His mother was not a sentimental creature. It was a trait he admired in her, this cool composure. A trait he liked to think he’d inherited from her himself. Unquestionably, he favored her. He had long considered this a point of pride.

But now as he looked at her, he found himself subtly irritated by the resemblance.

He approached her, peering down. “Mother,” he said, “what will you do?”

Not looking at him, not seeming to look in particular at anything through the window she was gazing, she gave a slight and elegant shrug. Sesshoumaru’s claws balled to a fist at his side.

“Nothing,” he stated darkly, as though he’d not already surmised as much. “This is your response to such indignity.”

His mother’s glance slid to him, slow and appraising. “What would you have me do, Sesshoumaru? Lower myself to hound and harangue him? Attack him, even? To what end? So that he would feel compelled to forsake her and remain at my side? Even were it possible, what would it prove?”

“That you are not amenable to his foolishness,” Sesshoumaru said sharply. “That at the very least you are not made of stone.” His eyes raked coldly over her where she sat. “But I see now why he forsook you. No doubt this mortal wench gives him more sport than you.”

His mother’s eyes flashed—the briefest of warnings. Still Sesshoumaru caught her claws before they laid open his cheek. As she collapsed back into herself, he thought perhaps he should have let her.

“Remember this, my son,” she said to him with rare remorse, “that whatever I am, so too are you.”

…

Sesshoumaru remembered. He was her son, true enough.

Yet he was his father’s son, too.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 3/20/23