Inuyasha…

Inuyasha, forgive me.

Golden and still, his eyes stared back at her, his silver hair dark and wet with his blood. With shaking fingers Kagome brushed the soft fringe of his raven lashes, eased his fixed lids down over his empty eyes like window shades. Curling into his lingering warmth, she lay down with him in the craterous depression his body had made in the sand.

Her own eyes remained open and staring. Seeing but not seeing. As his warmth faded with the light of day, she shivered, clinging to his cool, stiff corpse—wondering vaguely if a demon would happen upon them and devour their remains.

Because although she could move, she was dead with him—she must be. How could she exist, apart from him? How could she go on living without him? Inuyasha, Inuyasha…

Her life, her love.

Her everything.

Without him, she was lost and adrift. Alone and untethered in this world. Silently weeping, she threaded her fingers through his rigid claws, holding on to him as she careened through the void and the darkness.

“…Kagome.”

Slowly, her gaze focused on the pale, glowing figure approaching her through the shadows. Silver hair, golden eyes. His appearance was alien and strange, yet so familiar—so achingly familiar. Her brow furrowed, her eyes narrowing as she struggled to place him within the context of her nightmare—to reconcile his haunting likeness with the one etched into her heart.

“Kagome,” he said to her again, his fair features hard and drawn—the edges of her vision trembling at the timbre of his voice.

Clawed fingers slid over her ribs, wedged between her and the body—the dead body, the dead body—of her husband. With sudden, frightening lucidity she started—as if awakening from one terrible dream into another.

Except for the agony lancing through her, she might have believed it to be so.

“No!” she cried out, her fingers hooking into the sticky crusted fabric of her husband’s haori. “Inuyasha! Inuyasha!”

But the iron hands around her were prising her away, dragging her thrashing and wailing against an armored chest. As her reiki flared on instinct, a snarl of pain rent the boggy air, a firm grip at her nape directing her panicked gaze toward the demon behind her.

“Look at me, Kagome.” The grip tightened. “Look at me.”

Her wide, wild eyes roved over her brother-in-law’s stony face, her lungs heaving as she recognized him at last. Swallowing jerkily, she sagged in his hold, the tears that filmed her eyes obscuring the glimmer of his own.

“Sesshoumaru…Sesshoumaru, h-he—Inuyasha is…I-inuyasha was…” Her expression crumpled, her words dissolving into a series of incomprehensible, irrepressible sobs.

The pressure at her nape lessened, Sesshoumaru’s touch shifting down her spine and around her. As he turned her against him, as he slipped his other arm beneath her knees and started to rise, she lunged for Inuyasha in violent distress.

“Stop!” she shrieked, struggling. “Don’t—don’t leave him!” Her voice fell to a piteous whine as he subdued her and drew her back. “You can’t leave him, you can’t…”

Holding her tightly to his chest, Sesshoumaru stood. “I am taking you home. Jakken will guard him until I return.”

Trembling, defeated, she tore her watery gaze away from the imp standing sentinel over the body of her dead husband and sank into the circle of Sesshoumaru’s arms with a whimper. Her face hid itself in the soft fur cascading from his shoulder, her fingers curling over the cold, metallic edge of his breastplate. A cloud of youki gathered beneath them. Shutting her eyes, she clung to him as they rose.

As the days stretched on, he alone kept her anchored against the sweeping currents of her misery, kept her moving when all she wanted to do was lie down in the blood and the ashes and let them bury her alive. In the formless wasteland of her grief, he was the only solid thing she could see, and so she latched onto him with fierce desperation.

He had brought her to the brink of her despair and delivered her from it. He was her enemy and her ally. Her tormentor and her savior.

And she was clinging to him, still.

I couldn’t end it, either, she confessed to the memory of her departed love. I lost my nerve.

I…

I failed them, too.

Silver hair whispered across her cheek like threads of spider silk, clawed hands holding her suspended above the crumbling chaos of her existence. When his molten gaze fell to hers, her cracked eyes sheened and shivered, tears bleeding from the seam of her lashes as they melded back together again.

He was the chaos. The monster, the killer, the—

No, she begged the heartless gods above. This time…this time, please—please just let this all be another bad dream.

“…Please,” she whispered aloud as her eyes fluttered open again.

She was in her own home, lying in her own bed. As she stared up at the gentle, dancing reflections of the hearth fire on the sloped ceiling, a shallow breath of relief passed her lips. Her joints cracked as she sat up, her cramped muscles protesting the motion.

Wincing, she rolled her left shoulder to stretch it—noticing then that she was still clothed in her miko attire, the long, snow white sleeve of her haori stained black with streaks of soot. Her spine went rigid at the sight, her pulse pounding in her ears as she turned slowly toward the opposite wall.

Two bright, mirrored eyes studied her through the darkness. Slit pupils narrowed as they moved toward her, into the flickering light. Half cloaked in the shifting umbra of the shadows, Sesshoumaru regarded her, his features ghostly and obscure.

“Now,” he said to her, “let us talk.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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