---

“We decided she would be better off not knowing the rest.” Violet eyes stray aside. “The three of us decided together.”

---

It wasn’t her fault.

This was what he’d told himself when he’d first barged into that shack and seen Kagome lying there, pale and listless under that ratty blanket. She’d fallen into the river, Sango had said. Hit her head on a rock. There were a few shallow scratches on her. The muddy tang of river water clung to her hair and skin. He couldn’t see or scent anything else.

But there was a shadow on her. Somehow he could sense it. Looking at her unconscious face, somehow he knew.

He just knew.

A girl like her winds up downriver, and what are the odds she just tripped and fell?

He wasn’t fucking stupid.

Sitting across the campfire from her now, he saw that shadow on her still. She left off babying Shippou and tossed him a smile through the flickering flames. His jaw remained set.

It wasn’t her fault, he told himself again.

It was his.

---

“I cannot speak for Sango. But I regretted, later, not telling Inuyasha the full truth of what we saw. Of what I suspected.”

---

It didn’t matter, Inuyasha decided, when the Bone-Eater’s Well still wouldn’t open for her, and he held her to his chest until she’d sobbed herself to sleep yet again.

In the morning when she woke, he was holding her to him still. Unlike her, he hadn’t slept a wink.

“Kagome,” he said, when he felt her stiff body stir. “Kagome, I love you.”

Her puffy, red-rimmed eyes rose to his, and for the first time in days he saw a spark of hope return to them. That spark crushed the last of his doubts. Made him feel something like hopeful himself.

“Let’s get married,” he said, leaning in to kiss her. “We’ll be a family, together.”

Her eyes misted anew. “Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

As he kissed her, he told himself that the well sealing shut didn’t matter. That whatever had happened that night didn’t matter, either. These things were behind them. The past was in the past.

Kikyou, she was in the past too. His future was with Kagome, and hers was with him.

He told himself this, and he believed it—

He would’ve married her anyway.

---

“It was this half-truth which drove Inuyasha to his death. By the gods, I believe it to be so.”

---

On their wedding day, Edo village was in a frenzy. The fields were empty. All other tasks set aside. Even the looming threat of Naraku had been dismissed. Kagome was on a warpath of her own, storming around to make sure everything was in order. Inuyasha retreated into the woods to stay out of her way. They’d been snapping at each other all morning as it was.

Even in the open air of the forest he felt stifled by her still. Alone, he brooded, agitated and uneasy. He’d cut things off with Kikyou the day before, and it hadn’t gone well.

The parting look she’d given him had left him gutted. His doubts had returned ten-fold. He dreaded she would show up here, and he honestly wasn’t sure what he’d do if she did.

When he felt the air stir with magic, his ears pricked. His pulse kicked up a notch. But it wasn’t Kikyou.

It was the furthest thing from her.

The skies darkened like a sudden storm had swept in. Youki crackled against Inuyasha’s skin. Before he even saw Sesshoumaru, white claws flashed toward him. Inuyasha dodged the strike with ease.

Skidding aside, he fell into a defensive crouch. But Sesshoumaru didn’t whirl to counter. From across the clearing, Inuyasha frowned. Panting like he was flat-out winded, Sesshoumaru had sunk his claws into a tree for purchase. His armor and fur were missing. His fine hair and clothes were askew. His flushed face sheened with sweat. He was roughed-up like he’d been in a brawl already. A patch of his chest was red and blistered as if someone had tried to boil off a big chunk of his flesh.

In short, he looked like total shit. Inuyasha stared. He’d never seen Sesshoumaru so out of sorts. He’d never even thought Sesshoumaru could be so out of sorts. Scenting the air, Inuyasha felt his eyes flare wide. Though it was burning off fast, he could hardly believe what he was smelling.

“Sesshoumaru,” he blurted, “are you drunk?”

Sesshoumaru shot him a glare, his eyes slightly unfocused. Wrenching his claws from the trunk, he staggered threateningly toward Inuyasha.

“That miko—Kagome—you intend to marry her?”

“Yeah.” Inuyasha scowled, his brow furrowing heavily. “So what? Don’t see what business it is of yours.”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes flashed red. Inuyasha had a half-second warning before a hailstorm of kenatsu shot toward him. He leapt, but a few still caught him nonetheless—their jagged edges ripping through his flesh. From his treetop perch, blood splattered down to land against the moss. Inuyasha winced and swore.

“What business is it of mine,” Sesshoumaru muttered darkly, slurring slightly as he advanced. “Insolent, fucking half-breed bastard.” Whipping out Bakusaiga, he brought it around in an arc of venomous, blazing green. “One priestess is much the same to you as any other—but not to me!”

Inuyasha yelped, lunging away as the tree he was on and several others beside it were felled in that one crushing sweep. “What—what the fuck, Sesshoumaru! Why the hell do you care so much?”

Casting Bakusaiga away, Sesshoumaru was on him. It seemed his rage had sobered him because he had no trouble streaking ahead to where Inuyasha had leapt and pinning him brutally to the ground by his throat. Sesshoumaru’s red-cracked golden eyes seared down into his.

“Why do you think,” he said lowly, and when Inuyasha could only gape at him in shock, Sesshoumaru eased off him, growling, “Hear me, Inuyasha—mate her, and I will kill you.”

“Hey!”

Both Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru glanced back to where Kagome stood, in her wedding kimono, with her bow drawn and flaring before her. Her blue eyes were narrowed, her teeth bared.

“Let him go, Sesshoumaru! Get off him right now, or I’ll shoot you—I swear I will!”

Sesshoumaru peered hard at her. Inuyasha peered hard at Sesshoumaru. After a moment, his searing gaze flickered, dulled. The look on his face was strangely beaten as he shoved himself off Inuyasha and disappeared in a ball of white light.

---

“I am deeply afraid, Sesshoumaru-sama. There is so much anger in Kagome-sama, so much bitterness—it blazes more and more fiercely within her soul. I do not know how to help her now, if ever I could.”

---

It wasn’t long before his doubts began to fester. He couldn’t prevent it.

Not when the mating mark he’d left on her started to fade, and only the pierce of his fangs could keep it there. His instinctive lust to cement his claim on her, to breed her, waned with each fading mark. He had begun to withdraw from her, even before he’d realized the full extent of her rejection of him.

It wasn’t that she told him so. Not in so many words—

But he could feel it when they were fucking. He could feel it in the biting edge of her reiki, how badly she wanted him to hold her down. How badly she wanted him to hurt her.

How badly she wanted him to be someone else—

The demon that he wasn’t.

“Harder,” she’d growl at him. “Harder!”

“No,” he’d pant back, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You won’t,” she’d plead with him. “I can handle it. Don’t worry about your claws. If you make me bleed, that’s okay.”

He resisted this. It soured his stomach. He didn’t want to be violent with her, but that seemed to be exactly what she wanted. It was like she didn’t want him so much as the violence. It was like she didn’t want him at all. One time she provoked him so much he did cut into her, and she came so hard it revolted him.

Truth was, she’d always been too aggressive for his tastes. It just wasn’t womanly, the way she acted. Only now it was worse, so much worse. He dreaded their nights together. He dreaded her violent lust. He dreaded her scorn even more.

Because when he couldn’t give her what she wanted, he felt her frustration cutting into him. It wore him down, feeling like he was a constant disappointment to her. Like he didn’t measure up to whatever idea of a husband she had in her head.

They quarreled more and more. They argued endlessly. Not like their bickering of the past, but vicious fighting, tooth and nail.

“You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you? You think I’m some sort of freak, just because I like it rough?”

“Don’t put fucking words in my mouth.”

“But that’s what you think, isn’t it? That’s why you can’t get it up for me anymore, because I don’t just want to lie under you like a corpse. Well, I think you’re just pathetic.”

“You bitch, you crazy bitch…yeah I called you crazy, so what? Maybe you’re right—maybe there is something wrong with you!”

He said this, but he already knew. He knew better than she did, didn’t he?

She glared at him, and he glared back. He felt guilty, and he knew he looked it too. He felt guilty even before he went back to Kikyou. But gods help him if her lying meek and breathy beneath him didn’t make him feel a little better. Didn’t make him feel more like a man in the face of Kagome’s continual evisceration of him.

---

An errant breeze stirs the air between them.

Silver hair lists over features of stone. “Worry not, Miroku. I have her in hand.”

---

Kikyou was dead. Inuyasha had no time to grieve for her. The final battle with Naraku was upon them.

But in a flash, Naraku was dead too. By Kagome’s own hand, though later on, she had no recollection of it. Miroku’s face had been as pale as his, as they’d emerged from their own battles to find Kagome alone and glowing in the midst of Naraku’s smoldering devastation. White flames licked across the battlefield still.

Inuyasha couldn’t take one step further. Beside him, Miroku fell to his knees and began to pray. The Shikon no Tama shone whole and pink in Kagome’s hand. Her face looked transfigured somehow—she was herself and not herself. Inuyasha could only stare. As she spoke, pale light dripped from the Jewel like tears.

“Oh, little sister,” Inuyasha seemed to hear her say, “what a mess you’ve gotten yourself into. But don’t worry—I am here.”

She closed her shining fist then, and the Jewel melted away with a sigh. Arriving on the scene from out of nowhere, Sesshoumaru strode straight into the flames. They burned him, but he didn’t seem to care. He took her by the shoulders and called out her name. The pale flames dispersed. Groggily, she blinked up at him, as though he’d roused her from a deep, dreamless sleep.

---

“Whatever the events of that night, they do not concern me.”

---

Inuyasha was almost glad, later, when the bodies began to appear. At least it gave him some distraction from Kagome’s baleful stare. It distracted her, too. She seemed to care more about those dead girls than she’d ever cared about the Jewel.

A distressing pattern in the victims emerged to him, but he was reluctant to share it with her. It was a pattern she would never have guessed herself.

To her, it was an invisible pattern.

At first, Inuyasha refused to believe it himself. But one after another, the pattern became clearer and clearer to him. The one who was raping and butchering those girls…

He was hunting by scent.

---

“Soon, she will take my mark, and all will be as it should.”

---

It occurred to him only later—

But maybe he’d just been refusing to admit it.

How much those girls smelled to him like Kagome.

---

“You mean to make her your wife, Sesshoumaru-sama.”

It is not quite a question. 

---

His only thought was to protect her. Through sleepless nights and haggard days, this thought drove him onward, relentlessly.

Kagome…Kagome…no, it can’t be…

But he knew that it was.

Not long ago, they’d encountered Sesshoumaru. Inuyasha had all but begged him to help them. But Sesshoumaru had refused. Then he’d looked to Kagome.

In that one lingering look, Inuyasha had seen everything.

Everything.

That look haunted him still. Drove him onward though he was beginning to see double.

Kagome was so weak with fatigue she could only whimper. “Inuyasha…please, can we stop?”

No, he told her, no. It wasn’t safe. Just a little farther. They just needed to clear the Western Lands, and then maybe…maybe…

But who the fuck was he kidding?

He stumbled, delirious. She’d fallen from his shoulders somehow, by the shores of a lake. Gotten tangled up in some blasted tree. He was cutting her free when he felt demonic pressure bearing down on his senses. Kagome must have felt it too.

She was out of her mind then, screaming mad. She was thrashing and shrieking bloody murder. And Inuyasha knew then just what had happened to her that night. How violently she must have struggled, only to die anyway. How Sesshoumaru must have resurrected her with Tenseiga, before he’d destroyed it later for her sake.

He was biding his time, Inuyasha realized. He was biding his time because he wanted to take her again.

He had tried to warn him, but Inuyasha wouldn’t listen.

Damnit, why didn’t he listen?—

No, fuck Sesshoumaru. Damn him to hell.

Her reiki sliced into him at random, and first it felt like nothing, it was so fine a thread. But then his windpipe was severed. Then he could only stare at her as her attack sliced him through. He saw the darkness of the woods beyond them. Closing in.

Sesshoumaru—it’s him! he wanted to shout at her. You stay away from him, Kagome! Stay away…

But he couldn’t breathe, let alone work his mouth anymore. In that split-second as he hovered between life and death, he saw the spectral image of her—of her immortal soul, he saw the marks upon it, so much deeper than any he could pierce into her flesh, and he despaired.

It’s not your fault, he tried to tell her with his eyes, as her own expression crumpled. Kagome, it’s not your fault. I forgive you. Just keep away from him, Kagome. Keep away from him, please—

The darkness of death fell over him like a blade.

---

Pale lips curve in answer anyway.

“In my mind, she already is.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Series Navigation

<< Control Side-Stories: That Night, Part Five