The Lord of Edo raised his tired eyes from the bloodstained scroll before him. Another missive from one of his generals. There was trouble again at the western border.

It seemed there was always trouble there, these days.

Rubbing at the keen point of tension lancing between his brows, he removed the dagger holding the scroll open at one end. The stiff parchment furled shut with a snap—almost like magic. Taking up one of the candles perched on the lacquered table’s edge, he crossed over to the window.

Outside, rain drizzled, casting a fine silver veil over the gathering dark. Pinpoints of torchlight flared from the fortress walls, softer hues of orange and yellow glowing from the hearths of the city below. Still, the light felt cold to him, distant.

At times, it struck him how vastly this place had changed. He still remembered the rolling wooded hills, the shimmering acres of rice paddies, the smattering of modest huts. Now the dirt roads had been paved over with stone, the huts replaced with fine houses. The open farmlands lay far beyond his view, and walls of timber and rock now encaged him. For he, too, had once been free. Before he was a warlord—before he was anyone but himself.

An orphan, an outsider.

A murderer redeemed.

Or so he wished to believe. Though the once-wild hills of Edo had long since been built over, beneath the trappings of civilization they remained, hidden at the foundation. And inside him still he felt it, lurking in his bones. The truth of who he was, of what he was—

The killer within.

Frowning, he gripped the oil lamp tighter in his fist. Otou-san is always frowning, his youngest son would say. A strange child, the lord reflected. A child born out of time.

Though he was only a small boy, Ieyasu seemed to notice what others missed. Such an intent dark gaze—crow-sharp and uncanny as his father’s own. Of all the warlord’s children, it was this youngest who resembled him most. Given the nature of the boy’s birth, he supposed it was fitting.

The other three were his wife’s entirely, with their warm brown eyes and their swift, earnest tempers. And the lord was grateful for it. They had been a joy to her in a life full of disappointments—of which he himself had been chief among them.

His frown deepened as he looked out over his domain—a city raised from the ashes by his own hand. Yet here, in this lofty castle, he had never felt more like a slave. Beholden to the expectations of his vassals, his samurai, even his family. Indebted to the people who lived and died under his rule. Burdened always with responsibilities he had never wished to bear.

Even during his time of bondage, he had been able to roam with relative freedom. A captive by circumstance, not by choice. In that distinction lay everything.

The brass of the lamp was beginning to scald his hand. Yet he maintained his vigil. It had become a habit of his over the years, to stand at this window and look out into the night. Though what he had been hoping to see through it had eluded him, until now.

His breath caught, his fingers trembled. The flame flickered precariously as the lamp titled, nearly slipping from his grasp.

It was the shifting stormclouds which had revealed her—the slender figure of a woman, standing just outside, in the flowering courtyard which had once been his wife’s sanctuary. Moonlight silvered the woman’s form as she knelt down, the shadows of maple leaves dappling over her like strands of inky tears. Though her back was to him, he would know her anywhere.

With numb fingers, he pulled back the screen. Crossing the veranda, he descended the steps as if in a daze, the light in his hand sputtering out and steaming in the drizzle. Still he held the lamp to him as he approached her across the moonlit yard.

Beneath a tapered straw hat, her head titled, as if question. Slowly, she rose, turning toward him, the small tawny feline behind her edging around with a soft mew.

“Kohaku-kun,” the woman said, her hands clasped lightly before her.

Not since his wife had anyone addressed him so. As though in a dream, he studied her beautiful face. In that moment time stood still. Before him was the specter of a woman which had haunted him through wakefulness and sleep alike. Phantomlike, she had appeared before him—a living ghost, unchanged as he remembered.

“Kagome,” he returned, unable to wrest his eyes from hers. Dark blue and glassy, they held him suspended.

A faint smile quirked her lips as she stepped toward him. “…Or should I say, ‘Tokugawa-sama’?”

The lord’s jaw clenched, heat rising to his cheeks. In one gesture, in one teasing phrase, she had reduced him to an awkward boy once again.

“One can hardly be a daimyo without a surname,” he said stiffly. “It seemed as good a name as any.”

Smiling still, she drew to a stop before him. The expression in her eyes was thoughtful, cryptic.

“Well, I think it’s a fine name,” she said at last. Rain tipped from the brim of her hat in a crystalline fall as she inclined her head. “Would you mind if I came inside for a bit? This weather isn’t exactly pleasant.”

Kohaku tensed, his well-honed manners forgotten in the shock of the moment. Now they berated him as he nodded to her in turn, leading the way back up the stairs and into his palace. He felt her follow, Kirara trailing in her wake. At the doorway, the neko youkai paused, curling up in her favorite spot beneath the awning.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed your work,” Kagome said, casting a pointed glance at the scrolls that littered his desk and the tatami around it.

“There was nothing to disturb,” he said honestly.

Slipping off her sandals, she padded toward him, slim white fingers taking down her hat as she shook loose a few glittering droplets from her bangs. Kohaku swallowed, suddenly conscious of the fact that his own unbound hair was dripping down his back and shoulders, his damp haori clinging uncomfortably to his chest.

Though her hair was mussed and her cheeks were flushed with cold, she stood as a vision before him. Clothed in a simple burgundy kimono, with a pattern of white irises slanting down at the shoulder, she stepped across the threshold toward him. An effortless beauty adorned her, as it ever had. Her lovely blue eyes flicked lightly over the room’s various ornamentations. As he watched her survey his private quarters, a flood of questions—of accusations—rose and lodged in his throat.

“It’s been thirty years,” he said thickly at last.

Her gaze met his. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

Looking at her, it was.

Still, her mild response disarmed him completely. Feeling the full weight of his own years come to bear, Kohaku strode over to a cupboard and removed a jar of sake. He hadn’t had a drink in years, yet if any occasion called for it, he supposed it was this.

“Here,” she said, crooking a smile as she crossed the distance between them. “Let me.”

Wordlessly, he handed her the jar. As though she were right at home, she removed a pair of cups from a shelf and walked into the next room—his bedroom. Slowly, warily, Kohaku pursued her.

She was seated before a brazier of warm coals. Taking up the cushion next to her, Kohaku watched her closely as she poured them each a cup of wine, his fingers brushing hers for a moment as he accepted the drink from her. His pulse accelerated at the contact, at this firm reassurance that she was in fact real and in his presence.

Delicately, she drank, Kohaku watching over the rim of his own cup as her throat worked faintly to swallow the sip of sake down. Just as he was wishing she would unbind her hair, she reached back and pulled the limp ivory ribbon free with a sigh, her fingers ruffling through her long blue-black tresses.

“That’s better,” she said, taking another sip. “This is quite good, you know.”

At her glibness, Kohaku’s habitual frown returned. “Why have you come here, Kagome?”

Setting down her cup, she looked at him directly. “To visit, of course. It’s been a long time.”

“Ane-ue and her husband perished from fever more than a decade ago,” Kohaku said harshly, without preamble. “Rin died in childbirth, half as many years past.”

Her gaze fell, her expression mirroring his own. “…I see.” Lifting once more to his, her eyes shone with compassion. “I’m sorry.”

Breaking the contact, Kohaku downed his cup of sake in one burning swig. It scorched like acid in his throat, a welcome punishment. It was sake, after all, which had resulted in Ieyasu’s untimely conception. In one drunken act, he had robbed his children of their mother, his people of their divine protector. And as for himself…

“Did you love her,” Kagome asked him gently, “Rin-chan?”

Unable to meet her gaze, Kohaku stared hard at the cup in his hand. “As best I could,” he answered.

He could still feel the strike of her hand, the wrack of her sobs after a name not her own had torn from his lips upon completion. Worse yet, the despairing look in her eyes as she’d told him that she was with child. His fingers were limp as Kagome took the empty cup from them, and quietly refilled it.

Something in the act sparked anger through him. When his eyes met hers again, they were sharp with resentment.

“He came here after she died,” he said to her coldly. “Sesshoumaru.”

A subtle tension limned her frame. Closing her eyes briefly, Kagome set the jar of sake aside.

“He thought of her as his own,” she said, as though weighing each word with care.

Kohaku’s features hardened. “And you?—are you ‘his’?”

“I’m his wife, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied, her eyes narrowing slightly.

It was, and it wasn’t.

“Do you have children?” he demanded.

“Two sons,” she said, her voice softening. “They’re with their father.” Her lashes fell as she raised the cup to her lips again. “I haven’t seen them in many years.”

Surprise stole Kohaku’s anger from him. “You left him,” he realized aloud. “Why?”

A shadow seemed to pass over Kagome’s fair features. “I went home,” she said to him after a while.

This was not exactly an answer. Yet from her implacable demeanor, Kohaku decided it was the only one she would give.

“I thought you couldn’t go home,” he pressed instead, taking up the cup she’d replenished for him. “I thought that the well was shut.”

“I found a way,” she said, running her thumb along the porcelain’s gilded edge. Her voice fell to a murmur so faint he could scarcely hear it. “Though the price was high.”

Kohaku frowned at the raw pain in her expression. Yet he had no words of comfort to give her. After a moment, she looked up at him, a mustered smile in place once more.

“Tell me about your children,” she said.

Relaxing a little into the well-worn subject, he took another drink, the pleasantries rolling easily off his tongue. “My eldest—my only daughter—is married with children of her own. Her husband is a samurai, an honorable man. He was a good match for her at the time, though now she fancies herself a lord’s wife and finds him lacking.” At Kagome’s easy grin, he felt the corners of his lips twitch up in turn. “My two elder sons are away at war—against my wishes. They are brave to a fault, but terrible fighters both. Half the job of my generals is to keep them from losing their heads.” Shaking his own, Kohaku chuckled along with his guest, the sound seeming so foreign to his ears. “And my youngest—”

Yet here, Kohaku’s words abruptly failed him. What could he say, of the boy who like himself had come into the world with his mother’s death upon him? Whose very life had been bought with that of another? A killer, before he even knew the word…

“—my youngest is Ieyasu,” he finished flatly, tipping the rest of the sake down his throat.

For a time, Kagome was silent. Intently so. A curious, perceptive glimmer lit her eyes, the expression in them inscrutable.

“Another fine name,” she said sincerely to him at last.

Despite himself, Kohaku warmed at the praise. Though he knew the sake was to blame, he felt more at ease than he had in years. Almost…content.

“It must be disappointing for you,” he said to her, not unkindly, “to have returned after all this time only to find me here.”

Finishing her own drink, Kagome set the cup aside. “Of course it would have been nice to see the others again,” she said, her eyes resting level upon him. “But you were the one I wanted to see the most.”

Kohaku’s mouth ran dry at her words, though he was reluctant to believe them. “Why?” he asked, slightly breathless.

“Because you were the one I hurt the most,” she answered, her eyes gleaming with contrition. “I wanted to apologize to you. For the mess that I made.”

An apology. That was her reason for being here, for humoring him. Bitterness surged in his chest.

“There is no need,” he said stonily, turning from her. “It is all in the past.”

Besides, if anyone in this room was owed an apology, it was her. Remembering their last encounter filled him even now with unspeakable shame.

A cool touch to his jaw drew his eyes back to hers. When had she come so close to him, he wondered vaguely.

“I’ve always cared for you, Kohaku,” she said softly, her fingers skimming up along his temple. “Despite everything.”

He wanted to tell her that he cared for her too—despite everything. He wanted to tell her that he’d loved her all his life. But as his hand rose to clasp her cheek, what he said to her instead was—

“Will you return to him?”

She frowned, the look in her eyes strangely distant.

“One day,” she said, as her fingers curled back into his hair. “But not yet.”

At the first brush of her lips against his, he was frozen. At the second, he slanted his mouth hard against hers and crushed her to his chest.

Her muffled sound of need sent fire coursing through his veins. Like a starving man, he prised open her full lips, tasted the sake that was still on her tongue. The urge to devour her was overwhelming, all-consuming. Her touch, her scent—the warmth and softness and sweetness of her assailed his senses.

There wasn’t a part of him that didn’t ache for her. No part of him that didn’t long to feel her.

To have her.

Rising swiftly with Kagome in his arms, he carried her to his bed—as he would have on their wedding night, had the gods or fate ever allowed it to be so. In his hold, she was slight, almost weightless. He wasn’t a young man anymore, but his daily training had kept him fit and strong. As he lay her down and stripped off his haori, her hooded eyes roamed appreciatively over the sculpted lines of his stomach and chest.

“You’re quite the man, Kohaku,” she murmured, his muscles flinching as she skimmed her fingers along his waist.

The mere feathering of her touch was nearly enough to undo him. Taking hold of her slim wrist, he guided her hand lower, over the whole burning, iron length of him.

“I am what you made me,” he said to her huskily. Truthfully.

As her hand tightened around him, they both knew she could unmake him just as easily. With a groan, he detached her from him, pinning back both her wrists as he straddled her hips and kissed her deeply again. Powerful as Kagome was against demons, trapped beneath him like this, she was defenseless as a lamb.

A dark exhilaration possessed Kohaku as he curved his free hand around the slender column of her throat. Without much effort at all, he could crush the life from her. In his mind he could picture it so clearly—her soft flesh caving beneath his grip, her body convulsing under him as her airway constricted. His cock throbbed as he imagined what it would be like to be buried inside her as he killed her, her death throes gripping them both.

It was a fantasy he’d often entertained. If he slew her, would her tyranny over him finally end? The cynical part of him whispered that it would never end, this hold she had over him. Chains he had given her himself of his own free will. Whether in this world or the next, she would have dominion. Her lifeless eyes would haunt him through eternity.

And so he eased the pressure at her neck. His palm smoothed down from her collar to mold to her breast instead. Through her kimono he kneaded her, her nipple pebbling beneath the graze of his thumb. Her back arched, her wrists straining in his hold. Panting his name, she begged him with her eyes to release her. A plea which Kohaku ruthlessly denied, as he wrenched open her kimono and bent his mouth to her breast instead.

Her skin was smooth as silk as he chased his lips over it, her tender flesh yielding exquisitely when he sank his teeth into the captive swell. Her breathy gasp had him biting down harder, his tongue rasping greedily over her. He tasted salt, the trace of soap—and her beneath it. A flavor indescribable, but uniquely addicting. Latching lustily onto her hardened peak, he nursed himself freely upon the taste of her—drinking her in.

Kagome whimpered, the sound smothering low in her throat. “Kohaku, please…”

His teeth set against her at the word, a growl rising in his chest. Though phrased as an entreaty, he knew a pull on the reins when he felt it. No doubt she was urging him to flip her over, to mount her like her beast of a husband would. But Kohaku was a man, and he would fuck her like a man.

Releasing her nipple, he drew back and regarded her. Dark glossy hair fanned out in a halo behind her, her eyes glittering with raw desire. Her long lashes dipped, beckoning, the high bones of her cheeks flushed ripe and red as her panting lips. With callused fingertips, he traced her fine features, his eyes descending to her blushing chest, to her exposed left breast and the shimmer of his saliva upon it.

Had any man ever wanted a woman so completely? To possess every fiber of her, as she had so thoroughly possessed him.

With a ceremony bordering on reverence, he undid her loosened obi and pulled her free of her kimono at last. His past stolen glimpses were nothing compared to this. Naked and lovely, she lay beneath him—cream-skinned and lithe-limbed, her curves shaped to tortuous perfection. An unblemished canvas, awaiting his measured stroke.

Her delicate flesh fluttered as he trailed his rough hands over her body—worshiping her in full. Every span and contour, every valley and crest. When his fingers dusted over the dark, dewy curls at her center, she trembled and clutched at him in turn. It was here, at her womb, and at her throat, that his touch and his gaze lingered most.

He wanted her sons to be his. He wanted that scar on her neck to have been made by his own teeth instead.

But it was futile. Any mark he left upon her would heal. Any seed he spent in her would come to nothing.

Sesshoumaru would see to that.

Even to touch her like this was to invite the demon lord’s unceasing wrath. Rin’s children or not, Kohaku’s house would be scorched from the earth.

Yet he could not bring himself to care.

Slipping his hand between her silken thighs, he let her gathered wetness coat his fingers before driving one into her to the hilt. Kagome cried out, Kohaku biting his tongue bloody at the fiery tightness of her sex. Her head fell back as he pumped and probed her, forcing a second finger in to join the first. Gradually, she loosened for him, her eyes misting and her features falling slack—despite the tension building in her stomach and thighs.

A whimper of discontent escaped her as Kohaku withdrew his hand. Bringing his drenched fingers to his lips, he savored the musky feminine taste of her, as she gazed at him with dim, hazy eyes. A slight pout pulled at her lips, but Kohaku disregarded it. He was determined to draw out her pleasure, as well as his own.

In the past, sex for him had been a perfunctory exercise, he and Rin discovering early on in their marriage that there was little enjoyment in it for either of them. When she’d wanted a child, he’d endeavored to give her one—as expediently as possible. Except for that one night of misplaced passion, he had performed his duty toward her with perfect detachment, focusing in on the physical sensations that would most quickly bring the act to an end.

As he wouldn’t dishonor his wife by taking a mistress, he wouldn’t bring his thoughts of Kagome into their marriage bed. Those thoughts had been reserved for Kohaku alone, scenarios which he could dwell upon and embellish at will. Self-pleasure had been his indulgence, empty though it was. Empty though he had always believed it would be, until tonight.

Parting her legs, he settled between them, his eyes feasting hungrily on the teasing pink folds of her flesh. Glazed with arousal, they slickened his thumbs as he peeled her fully open to his view. His piercing gaze chiseled the image to memory as he lowered himself before her. Her entrance faintly shivered when he touched his tongue to it, the point gliding in to siphon the delicious moisture teeming there. Kagome moaned high and keening as he traced the periphery of her slit with a slowness only years of tireless discipline had ingrained in him. Still, the impulse to thrust his tongue into her with reckless abandon, to lave like a dog at the engorged tip of her sex required a monumental act of will to suppress.

Lightly, he rasped his tongue against her from bottom to top, reveling in the hiss of her breath as he skimmed the underside of her swollen nub. A recollection came vividly to mind at this reaction, a chance encounter which in retrospect had perhaps sealed his fate. He had been little more than a boy when he’d come upon them—Kagome and Inuyasha, entwined together amidst the roots of a tree. Inuyasha’s back had been against the trunk, with Kagome’s against him. At first glance it had looked as though they were simply embracing, but as Kohaku had crept closer, he could hear the strange, heavy rhythm of their breathing, see the flush that had stained Kagome’s cheeks. Inuyasha’s mouth had been crushed to her ear, one hand at her chest and the other beneath the upraised hem of her skirt—underneath which she had been startlingly bare.

In the shock of this discovery, Kohaku had stood frozen before them in what would have been plain view—had Kagome’s head not been thrown back and Inuyasha’s eyes not closed against her. Her long legs had been sweaty and askew, a trail of wetness stringing from her sex to the earth. As Kohaku had stared on in frozen captivation, the pad of Inuyasha’s thumb had swirled just so over the little bud of flesh at her apex—her sharp intake of breath mirroring the one Kohaku himself had just elicited from her now.

When Inuyasha’s eyes had slid open toward him a minute later in unmistakable threat, Kohaku had stealthily fled. But the sound, the sight, had been seared into his adolescent brain. Collapsing breathless by the side of a stream, he’d felt the distressing hardness he had sometimes experienced from looking at Kagome’s naked thighs or the outline of her bust surface with a painful vengeance. The discomfort had been acute, unbearable. In desperation he had stripped down and waded into the chilly current, seeking relief, but still that wretched hardness had persisted, until at last he’d closed his fist around his hot rigid flesh and squeezed until the feeling had broken like a fever within him. Exhausted, he had slumped down into the shallows thereafter, watching white liquid trickle from him like pus from an opened wound.

He had thought himself cured, but in truth, it had only been the beginning of a lifelong affliction.

Had he not seen her in such a shocking way, had his first sexual release not been so inextricably tied to her, had he gone on to discover other women, gradually and at the proper time, how different might his life have been? Might he have been able to escape his past, to prevent disaster?

Might he have been able to forget her?

Stripping off his hakama and settling at last into the cradle of her thighs, Kohaku couldn’t be sure. The hot slick press of her open core against him had his own breath rushing from him. He had never felt anything half as good as the sensation of her closing around the head of his cock, seen anything half as beautiful as the way her eyes glistened and her lips parted as she stretched to take him in. With every ounce of restraint he possessed, Kohaku eased into her deeper, watching the myriad of emotions that rippled through the blue of her gaze. As she clung to his shoulders, as she dug her heels into the backs of his thighs and rolled her hips against him, he could almost believe that she wanted him as badly as he wanted her.

He could almost believe that she loved him.

Her head snapped back as he drove into her sharply, fully. With one single, gouging thrust, he was inside her completely. His lungs heaved, veins standing out on his arms and chest as he struggled not to finish. Were it not for the dampening effect of the sake, he wouldn’t have been able to prevent it—she was too tight, too perfect. His pent-up longing for her was too strong. In the warm wet grip of her sex was the culmination of his heart’s most desperate desire.

But it was an illusion, another empty pleasure—

Still.

Blood beaded from her bitten lower lip. As she glared up at him, he gripped her by the nape and brought his mouth down brutally upon hers. She cursed into him as her blood drew afresh at his assault, as he withdrew and re-sheathed himself into her with another bone-jarring thrust. His hips crashed into hers, his teeth clashed against hers. Her fingers twisted sharply in his hair as she fucked him back.

She would never be his wife, and he would never be her husband. Her husband was an immortal demon, and his wife was ashes on the breeze.

But as her walls began to convulse around him, as his balls drew taut and his cock went rigid inside her, they were united. In this eternal moment, they were together as one.

“Kagome,” he rasped, all the love and lust and hatred he had ever felt for her condensed into the sound of her name.

“Kohaku,” she breathed back, with feeling.

The tension melted from her features as her pleasure washed over her, dragging him along in its undertow. Burying his face in the unmarked side of her neck, he poured himself out into her—until he was over, until there was nothing left. Nothing but the aging husk of a man who had nothing more to give.

His weary joints creaked as he pushed himself off of her. Lying on his back, he glanced aside as his breathing evened, watching the rise and fall of her naked chest. Her eyes met his, dark and sated. In that shared look of calm, he wondered how two people who had set out to do so much good in the world had done so much wrong.

He wondered, what was the point of it all.

Turning toward Kagome, he took her by the hand. “Stay with me,” he said. “Just for tonight.”

Her fingers curled against his as she turned and tucked herself into his chest. As his arm went around her, Kohaku decided that, perhaps, this was enough.

.

.

.

.

In the last dark hour before dawn, Kagome awakened. At her back, Kohaku was fast asleep, his arm wound tightly around her ribs. Carefully, she extracted herself from his hold. Though the sedative she’d slipped into his second cup of sake should buy her a few more hours at least, with his slayer senses, she couldn’t afford to take any chances.

She’d stayed here long enough, as it was.

Quickly and quietly, she dressed and padded from the bedroom. Taking up her straw hat and sandals, she slipped them on and drew back the outer screen to the courtyard. Outside, a light rain continued to fall, coloring the predawn world in misty grey. Catching Kirara’s one cracked-open eye, Kagome stepped lightly across the veranda and down the wooden stairs.

As she glanced back to see the firecat rising with a stretch, a flicker of movement caught her attention. Tilting her head, Kagome followed the direction of the motion, a pair of crow-dark eyes meeting hers briefly through a veil of leaves, before the mysterious figure disappeared along a row of thicker, bordering hedges.

A faint smile pulled at Kagome’s lips. Tokugawa Ieyasu, she thought, as a transformed Kirara drew up alongside her. What a future that boy had before him.

Her gaze turned wistful as she placed a hand to her stomach, thinking of her own children. With a sigh, she turned away.

Climbing atop her old friend’s warm back, Kagome flew to the outskirts of Edo, where still as of yet the Bone-Eater’s Well remained wild and secluded. But even from here, she could see the lights of an outlying township. In another few decades, maybe less, her ancestors would set up home here and build a shrine around this sacred place.

Kagome ran her hand lightly over the well’s timeworn ledge. It was an amazing thing to consider.

From beneath the tangle of vines, she retrieved her stashed belongings. An updated version of her trusty yellow pack, a quiver full of arrows, and the longbow which had been hers for far longer now than it had ever been Kikyou’s—

Another amazing thing.

Kirara’s plaintive mew drew Kagome from her contemplations. Crouching down, she mustered a smile for the downcast feline.

“I know, I wish I could stay longer too,” she said, stroking her fingers along the diamond-shaped marking on Kirara’s brow. “But it’s too risky. Sesshoumaru has so many eyes and ears in Japan. It’d only be a matter of time until he found me here, and that would be terrible—especially now.”

The firecat rumbled sadly in agreement, nuzzling back against Kagome’s hand.

“I’m going away, across the sea. But I’ll leave signs so you can find me. Please promise me that you will—when the time comes.”

Kirara’s red gaze was solemn with promise. Crooking another smile, Kagome gave her a pat and stood, adjusting the straps of her backpack.

“Well, then, I’m off,” she said warmly. “Take care—all of you.”

Purring back, Kirara transformed and took to the sky, Kagome watching after her until her blazing figure melded with the rising sun. Turning away from the place that had once been her home, both in the present and the past, the Priestess of the Shikon no Tama looked ahead toward the future.

As the rain continued to fall, she walked forward, vanishing into the mist.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Okay so, full disclosure:

1. I am drunk
2. I blew off my real job today to write this XD
3. I’m in desperate need of emotional support, so please – even if you didn’t like whatever the fuck this was, give me some internet love, mmkay? 🙂
4. I love you all. So much

<3

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