A veil of enchanted mist closed behind them as Saitou and his brother soared away from the secluded valley. Perched to one side of the youki cloud, Touma gazed back, watching until their mother’s ridge-top home faded fully from view. The yearning on his face was starkly apparent, his tempestuous emotions proving too difficult for him to conceal.

“What do you think of Mother,” Saitou asked him after a moment, “as a woman?”

Touma started at the question. Hedging, he replied, “…She is very beautiful.”

Saitou glanced at his brother aside. “Do you desire her?”

Touma stared back at him. The defensiveness in his posture was telling enough. Saitou returned his gaze to the horizon, his brother’s discomfiture easing his own.

“I, too, have such feelings for her.”

Tensely, Touma shifted. “…Truly, Brother?”

Saitou nodded, his younger sibling releasing a shallow breath of relief.

“But it is wrong, is it not?” Touma said, his voice edged with caution. “…Unnatural?”

Saitou considered this. Though Kagome was their mother, she had been absent for most of their lives. Denied her maternal presence, the love they harbored for her had grown along a dark and twisted path. Though they had reunited with her once more, this convolution of past emotion remained.

“I suppose,” he answered at last. “Yet given the circumstances, perhaps it is to be expected.”

“Do you think,” Touma asked on a murmur, the tips of his silver ears descending in thought, “that she feels the same?”

It was a question Saitou had found himself contemplating more and more. As Sesshoumaru’s full-blooded heir, he was well aware of the strong resemblance he bore to her estranged mate, while Touma, by Kagome’s own admission, favored her first husband—their half-demon uncle, Inuyasha. The way her eyes lingered upon his younger brother in particular had often given Saitou pause.

“Perhaps,” he allowed, the darkening of Touma’s gaze mirroring his own.

…

Days later, detained by their father on a matter of state, Saitou and his brother found themselves growing increasingly restless. Though they dared not speak openly of her within the palace walls, both longed keenly to see their mother, and knew this to be the prime source of one another’s frustration. Touma, of course, had never been as adept at managing his temper. While Saitou grit his fangs through the hours upon hours of veiled threats and tedious diplomacy, his brother’s black mood inevitably spilled over. After the third barked insult directed at the ponderous southern lord, Sesshoumaru expelled his younger son bodily from the negotiations.

The injury to his pride only inflamed Touma’s agitation. By the time Saitou was finally released for the day, his brother’s hostility was palpable. Ears flat, he sulked alone in a corner of the private baths, Saitou’s attempts to engage him meeting with nothing but dark, brooding silence. Sighing, the young daiyoukai settled back against a boulder, the heavy steam lulling him into a doze. It was a full minute before he realized his brother had spoken to him.

“Hm?” he said, cracking open an eye.

Arms crossed, Touma scowled. “I asked you, how much longer do you think these negotiations will go on?”

“Difficult to say,” Saitou replied, straightening. “The old bastard speaks in circles, and Father will make no concessions. A week, perhaps?”

“Gods,” Touma muttered, clawtips denting his biceps as he glared off to the side. “This is unbearable.”

Saitou agreed. Wading over, he joined the half-demon at the edge of the pool. As he sat down next to him upon the submerged ledge, an idea occurred to him.

“I dreamed of her,” he said, catching his brother’s eye, “last night.”

Uncrossing his arms, Touma relaxed a fraction. “You did?”

While not strictly true, Saitou nodded all the same. Since he was a boy, he had often dreamed of her, in a vague and disembodied sense. Upon waking, he would sometimes spend hours embellishing upon these abstract impressions, piecing them together with his handful of scattered memories—inventing fanciful scenarios so vivid they crystallized to true images in his mind, as they were crystallizing now.

“You were too young to remember, but when the two of us were children, we used to nap together with her in the afternoons—you in her arms and me curled against her back. In my dream, this is how we were,” he said, his voice pitching lower, “except you and I were not children.”

Touma’s amber gaze sharpened with interest. “No?”

Turning toward him, Saitou continued, “During the hot summer months, she would wear the thinnest of kimonos—just the merest slip of a garment, so light you could see the blush of her skin through the silk. This is what she was clothed in last night, although the air was much too cold for it. Touching her, I could feel the warmth and smoothness of her body as if she were wearing nothing at all.” Pausing for a moment, he suppressed a smirk at the slight, rapt dilation of his brother’s pupils. “She was sleeping so soundly against you that she did not stir as I brushed her hair aside and kissed her, in the place where her neck meets her shoulder. My tongue dampened her through the fabric, and she trembled at this, though she did not awaken, even as I applied my fangs.”

“You marked her?” Touma murmured, the points of his own fangs showing briefly as his chest drew taut.

“No, it was only a scratch. I did not wish to wake her. The expression on her face was so lovely, so untroubled. She was dreaming, too, it seemed.” Saitou’s lids grew heavy as he began to lose himself in the thread of his own imaginings. “Her long dark lashes fluttered like moth’s wings over her fair cheeks, the softest feathering of motion. But after I kissed her, her pink lips parted, ever so slightly, and I could see—I could scent—that the course of her dreams had taken a turn.” Riveted, his brother stared at him in burning anticipation. Indolently, Saitou smiled. “If only you had been awake yourself, little brother, you would surely have felt the firm swell of her breasts pushing hard-tipped into your chest, the unconscious, questing arch of her body coming flush against your own.”

Touma bit his lip on a groan, the inward slant of his arm betraying where his hand had come to rest. The sight heated Saitou’s blood in turn. Long before either of them had known a woman, he had entertained them in this way—describing stolen glimpses of the servant girls, or other females he had often only claimed to see. It had been many years since they had indulged like this, yet the demon prince found himself slipping comfortably back into their old routine. Giving his own aching cock a squeeze, he resumed his narrative of Kagome.

“In seeking your hardness with her hips and thighs, she had presented their backs to mine. The full round curve of her ass fit snugly against my torso as I partially mounted her, my cock gliding along the cleft in her cheeks. Slick and cool against my burning flesh, that clinging sheath of silk she wore was all that kept her from me. It tantalized and exasperated me all at once, yet I feared that if I tore it from her she would awaken and become distressed.”

Water rippled around Touma’s flexing arm, thin veins beginning to protrude from the muscles of his chest and shoulders. His breathing was raspy and low, his eyes tawny and glazed with lust. Resisting the urge to sate himself just yet, Saitou skimmed his claws along the length of his shaft and carried on.

“The heat of her sex so close to mine was driving me to madness. In vain, I rubbed against her clothed center, seeking a measure of relief, but the wetting of that damnable silk between us only stoked my frustration. I had thought the moisture to be my own, at first. Yet as it spread and even pooled at her entrance, I knew it must be hers, and the knowledge of how desperately aroused she had become made me twice as hard for her as before.” Saitou’s eyes slid to his brother’s as his cock gave an answering throb. “I had to fill her, Touma—her need was at least as great as mine. For both our sakes, I had to fuck her.”

“Yes,” the hanyou panted with conviction.

The sudden grasp of his free hand around Saitou’s pulsing length surprised him. In the past, he had been the one to initiate such contact, yet his younger brother’s present assertiveness did not displease him. No doubt Touma wished to match Saitou’s tangible girth to his spoken descriptions, to gauge by touch the raging hardness that sought to breach their alluring mother. Eager now to enhance the fantasy, Saitou clenched his fist around Touma’s and guided him over the torrid beam of his sex.

“But how to penetrate her without waking her,” the demon prince mused aloud, grinding his brother’s palm against the swollen head of his cock. “To disrobe her in any way would expose her delicate skin to the chill of the air. As I agonized over how to proceed, I traced my thumb along the sodden path of her slit, increasing the pressure of my touch until the strained fabric happened to at last give way, splitting like fruit skin beneath the graze of my claw. Her womanhood bloomed open before me, so ripe and so sweet, bursting with her arousal, and now…now there was nothing to prevent me from claiming it.”

Saitou felt Touma’s portentous shudder echo down his shaft. Unquestionably, his younger brother was much farther along in his pleasure—and far past the point of self-restraint. Ignoring his low snarl, Saitou broke his brother’s furious grip and took hold of him instead.

“You can imagine my urge to taste her,” he said huskily, his younger sibling whimpering as Saitou stroked him hard and slow, “but I dared not delay any longer. The cut I had made in her dress was too small to accommodate me, at the onset, but as I positioned myself and pushed ahead, the silk yielded before my advance, parting as easily as her hot, tender flesh. Her readiness made my path forward expedient—despite her virginal tightness, and the inner convulsions that were already rippling through her.”

“How snug and needy her little cunt must be,” Touma rumbled, thrusting headily into his brother’s moving fist, “without Father around to stretch it for her.”

Saitou’s balls tightened perilously at this vulgar suggestion. What his brother lacked in eloquence he made up for in sheer carnality. Bracing himself with the pierce of his fang, Saitou fixed the hanyou with a wry, warning glare.

“Careful, little brother,” the demon prince growled, dropping his hand from Touma’s and giving him free rein over his cock at last. “Blunt your claws so your touch will feel more like hers.”

As Touma complied with this demand, Saitou did the same, raking the naked tips of his fingers over his brother’s twitching hardness. Under the guise of their mother’s caress, they stoked one another to the verge of completion, their combined youki roiling the air as the demon prince hastened to conclude his sordid tale.

“Caught in the grip of her release,” he rasped out, “it was a monumental task not to finish at her every fleeting clutch. But I could not shame her by spending myself so shallowly within her. Only by spilling my seed in her depths could I ensure that it would remain hidden. And so…” his voice failed briefly as the base of his shaft and his brother’s further engorged, heralding the end for them both. “And so, I sheathed myself in her to the hilt—one full thrust sending me over, sending me…”

Saitou’s breath caught as the shock of his bliss crashed like lightning over him, his brother’s feral curse signaling the same for him. As their cocks spasmed and their seed gushed forth, they released one another and fell bonelessly back against the rough edge of the pool. Long minutes passed before their blood cooled and their youki receded, a shared emptiness following in the wake of their physical gratification.

As Saitou slicked back the silver hair that streaked his face, Touma frowned toward him. “Another week, you said?”

“…Hopefully,” the daiyoukai answered with a sigh. Rising from the bath, he slanted his eyes down at his sullen brother. “Come now, Father is expecting us for the Hunt. If we are late, he will be displeased.”

“Father is always displeased,” Touma grumbled, standing nonetheless.

There was truth in that remark—though not the whole truth. While their father had never been warm, distant as it was, Saitou could remember a time when the Lord of the West had not been quite so cold and embittered. A time before their mother had left him—left them all.

Knowing more now of her reasons for doing so did not make all those years of abandonment easier to bear. Whether or not Sesshoumaru deserved it, Saitou and his brother certainly had not, and still they had suffered for it—Touma most of all. How different might their lives have been, if she had been able to take them with her? If she had stayed?

It was impossible to know, and pointless to dwell upon it. Yet the human sentiments he had inherited from her made his heart heavy with regret. Glancing toward his brother, he smiled thinly.

“So he is.”

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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