Kagome returned home in a morbid haze. As she trudged up the porch steps in the deepening dusk, it was like she’d lost time. She was so spaced-out she didn’t even realize she’d been soaked to the bone until Inuyasha arched a brow at her and said, “What happened? You fall into a creek or something?”

Kagome blinked, glancing down at her damp hair, clinging robes and chafing sandals. Belatedly, she shivered. 

“Yeah,” she said, having no idea, “something like that.”

Inuyasha shook his head, laying Tessaiga upright in its usual place against the wall. He must have only gotten back a few minutes before her.

“Where’ve you been, anyway? It’s getting late.”

“Walking,” she said dully, as she squelched past him and started making supper.

It was strange, over the next few days, how she felt morose and empty all at once. Like the melancholy had settled in the hollows of her bones. She had wanted to feel shamed by the only person who could truly shame her. Whether there’d have been any real catharsis in it for her, Kagome would never know. Because Sesshoumaru had denied her, leaving her gutted with this grim shadow of feeling instead. 

It was better to feel this sadness than nothing, though. She knew that now. She’d felt before like a ghost trapped in her own skin. The sadness at least told her that she was alive. So she nursed the sadness like picking at an old wound, and went about in the wake of its dull pangs.

She didn’t think about what she’d done. She didn’t think about much of anything, except in an abstract sort of way. It was like there was a fog in her mind, hazing out anything that wasn’t right in front of her. Despite her brooding, her conscious thoughts were superficial, reactionary.

“That’s the fifth time you’ve sighed in the past ten minutes,” Inuyasha groused at her, arms in his sleeves as he sat cross-legged by the hearth.

Kagome paused in her soup stirring. “Oh,” she said slowly, only now realizing that she’d been sighing at all, “I’m sorry.”

His ears dipped. “Are you okay? You seem like you’re, I don’t know, in a funk lately.”

“I’m okay,” she said, returning to the soup. “Just hormonal.”

Inuyasha made a noncommittal sound. While he still didn’t grasp what ‘hormones’ were, he knew what she meant by the term: moody, difficult. Though no doubt he’d have described her condition in choicer terms than that.

She was only a couple of weeks away now, she reckoned, from her expected due date. Over the past week or so, Taiyoutori’s daily eggs had been growing steadily smaller and thinner-shelled. Yesterday’s egg had been scarcely the size of a robin’s egg. It had cracked in the warmth of her hand to reveal a small golden kernel, so rich and meltingly sweet that it brought tears to her eyes. 

But this morning there had been no egg, no Taiyoutori. Just red-gold sunbeams slanting down upon the empty straw. Kagome tried not to read into this. She’d woken up late after all, so that would explain why he was gone. Maybe the egg was so small it had slipped through a gap in the floorboards. Inuyasha had already set out for the day, but when he returned that night, she’d ask him to sniff it out.

With this in mind, she went about her day. But she couldn’t help but feel slightly shaken. A stab of true anxiety had penetrated her melancholy fog.

Basket by her side, she was sitting in a flowered clearing ferreting out medicinal roots when a brilliant, ruby-red shape fluttered down before her. Kagome let out a breath of relief she didn’t know she’d been holding.

“There you are,” she said to Taiyoutori, half-smiling. “I couldn’t find you or your egg this morning. It rattled me a little.”

The sunbird cocked his gleaming, crested head, studying her with his shrewd golden eye. Kagome was about to speak again when he opened his serrated beak and began to sing, so surreally high and trilling it raised gooseflesh on her arms. When his song was finished, Kagome stared at him, hardly believing her still-ringing ears.

“Wow,” she breathed out at last, her smile twitching, “your singing is really terrible. I’d never have guessed it, lovely as you are.”

Taiyoutori ruffled his sheening feathers. As red-gold youki began to wreathe around him, Kagome tensed, worried she’d actually ticked him off. Before her eyes, he transformed. If she’d thought he was lovely in his miniature form, it was nothing compared to how magnificent he looked as he towered over her: a phoenix shedding plumes of living flame with each sweep of his vast, molten wings. His blazing red eye met hers once more before before he soared off into the clear blue sky, trailing fiery sparks behind him.

Kagome stood to watch after him, until he winked out of sight on the horizon. She was starting to lower herself to the earth when she felt it, like a plug had been popped out of her—

All the blood drained from her face as she looked down, and saw clear fluid trickling from her leg to the grass.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 6/14/23