But the more pressure she felt to avoid it, the more Kagome was drawn to it—the cool and patient darkness that lay at the bottom of her grief. A darkness she could fall into, settle into. How easy it would be, like slipping over the edge of the Bone-Eater’s Well.

Like returning home.

In the soft shadow of that endless night, she could sleep forever. Free from the blinding pain of her present reality, reunited at last with the spirit of the man she loved. Together they could drift through the void of eternity, and dream of the life to come.

Isn’t this the pattern the two of them had been following throughout the ages? Touching her fingertips to her chest, Kagome gazed toward horizons without and within. She saw herself as she was, at the core of her soul, and she saw him—

The man, the mortal. The reason for everything.

She hated him as much as she loved him. Between her desire to live and her desire for him, she was torn.

She had always been torn.

“…Kagome-chan?”

Kagome blinked, coming back to herself. Glancing down, she saw a pair of warm brown eyes staring up at her in concern. The Shikon Miko mustered a smile.

“Ah, Rin-chan, sorry about that.”

The young girl frowned, peering still. “Are you feeling well, Kagome-chan? Your eyes…they’re very bright.”

Kagome nodded. “I was just lost in thought, that was all.” Her gaze strayed down to the basket in her apprentice’s arms. “Did you finish collecting them?”

Beaming, Rin pulled back the thin white cloth covering the contents of the basket. Within, an array of plucked red spider lilies lay, their delicate petals, stems, and stamens limned with a faint preserving glimmer of reiki. Despite the flowers’ unfortunate connotation, Kagome smiled back at Rin. Truly, she couldn’t have done a better job herself.

“What’s next on the list?” she asked.

Setting the basket on the ground at her sandaled feet, Rin pulled out a slip of parchment, onto which she had scribbled off a list of ingredients. It wasn’t overly long, but Kagome had taken the opportunity to work in some writing practice along with Rin’s miko training.

“Ginger root,” Rin replied, glancing up. “That’s the last one.”

“Right, okay.” Rifling through her satchel, Kagome frowned. “…I’d already prepared some, but I must have left it at home. You run on ahead to Granny Kaede’s. I’ll meet you there in a little while.”

Already turning toward her house, Kagome halted at a sudden snag to her sleeve. Surprised, she looked back.

“I’m supposed to stay with you,” Rin said, shaking her head.

Kagome’s jaw tightened—Sesshoumaru. “Is that right? Well, there’s no sense in both of us backtracking to my house just to pick up some roots. Go on ahead.”

Rin hesitated, clearly conflicted as to whose orders to obey—the vague directives of her absent guardian, or the very clear and present commands of her mentor. Biting her lip, Rin released Kagome’s sleeve at last. Picking up the basket, she set off toward Kaede’s home. Seething, Kagome struck out for her own.

So this was Sesshoumaru’s answer to her complaints that he had been stifling her with his watchdog behavior—by having his own poor ward stand sentinel in his stead. Kagome should have known when he’d seemed to back off so easily…

Huffing, she trekked through the grove of spider lilies, listening to their stems snap with vindictive pleasure.

As her home came into sight through the trees, Kagome’s brief flare of anger began to dim. Trudging up the steps, she felt the weight of the satchel at her hip, the weight of her own feet beneath her as they carried her across the threshold and into the familiar gloom. The coals had burned low. Not bothering to stoke them, she strode over to a shelf and took down the bowl of forgotten roots.

Picking up one coarse slice of ginger and eyeing it critically, she muttered to herself, “Could be finer.”

As she took up a knife to parse the piece, then another, and another still, Kagome watched with morbid fascination at how easily the blade slipped through the root’s pale flesh. How easily it yielded beneath the slightest pressure. One neat slice, and it was over.

So easy, so quick…

Kagome scarcely realized the knife point was at her wrist until she felt the blood rushing out of her, hot and wet and red. So red. It was the redness that alarmed her ahead of the pain, and then suddenly that was rushing out of her too, out of the soft blue vein that had yielded more easily still. In the torrent of this agony, she at last found a touchpoint for the anguish in her heart. It was perfect—

It was terrible.

Still clutching the bloody knife to her wrist, Kagome screamed.

Maybe it was the sound. Maybe it was the scent. Or maybe it was some sixth sense he possessed for dark intentions—whatever it was, the next thing Kagome knew, Sesshoumaru was upon her. The knife ripped from her listless fingers. Dizzy with blood loss, she screamed again in pain and confusion—

The vise-like clamp of his claws around her bleeding wrist, the white-hot sear of his venom against her torn flesh caused her reiki to burst from her on instinct.

Seizing her jaw with his free hand, Sesshoumaru snarled into her face as his eyes flashed red. “Do not raise your power to me.”

Kagome whimpered. Some dark undertone in that threat of his chilled her to the core. Reining in her flaring aura, she gazed up at him with bleary eyes. Still pinned in his claws, her wrist was on fire, yet she could see that the worst of the bleeding had stopped. Dazed, she sucked a breath down her parched throat at the sight.

Cauterized by his acidic claws, the vertical slash she’d made in her wrist appeared stitched over with threads of smoking black. In between these seams, dark blood crusted, sticky and gleaming. Sagging against the bloodied work table, Kagome pulled weakly against his hold. As Sesshoumaru released her, she cradled her wounded wrist to her chest and hung her head.

“…Thank you,” she murmured, after a while.

Though Sesshoumaru said nothing, she could feel his fury thundering down upon her. Impossibly dark, his youki swelled and crashed, an oppressive storm of sheer displeasure. Kagome wilted beneath it, suffered beneath it. Her reiki scalded. Her lungs strained to breathe through the dense demonic haze. She wished he would yell at her or berate her. She wished he would do anything—anything but this.

Unable to bear it any longer, Kagome bit out, “If I really want to kill myself, you should just let me. Who do you think you are, anyway, to think that you have a say in what I choose to do with my own life? I’m not your ward. I’m not your woman—”

Kagome’s head snapped to the side as Sesshoumaru’s open hand connected with her cheek. Lips parting, she touched her fingers to her smarting skin. Her eyes went wide. Mutely, she stared up at him, rendered speechless more by the shock of the slap than the pain of it.

No matter how viciously she and Inuyasha had quarreled in the past, he had never laid a hand on her like this. Intuitively, Kagome had known he never would. It was an invisible boundary he would never cross. He wasn’t capable of it, hurting a woman.

Despite their common blood, as she continued to gaze up into Sesshoumaru’s cold inhuman eyes, as his immense demonic power continued to oppress her, with dreadful certainty Kagome realized that unlike Inuyasha, he was capable of anything.

“Bind that wound and clean yourself up,” the daiyoukai said, his tone disconcertingly cool and even as he turned upon his heel. “Rin is waiting.”

Staring after him, Kagome felt the phantom sting of that slap more intensely than the burning pain in her wrist. As the curtain swung shut behind him, she peeled herself slowly away from the table’s edge, and did as she was told.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Revised 6/26/23

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