His studio was in shambles.

Again.

Torn, busted canvases lay scattered about. Easels tottered on broken legs. Jars of paint burst and spilled where they hadn’t simply shattered against the walls and the floor and the thick-paned windows. Sticky and wet and gleaming like so many mixed streams of gore, the whole place had the look of a crime scene—and he the hapless wretch caught red-handed in the middle of it all.

Slicking his fingers through his disheveled hair, Sesshoumaru winced at the bruise already forming on his cheek. Like a wild wounded creature, his attacker glared up at him, her fists trembling and chest heaving with irrepressible fury.

“You’re such an asshole,” she hissed out, her lovely features contorted in anguish. “You’re a cold-hearted monster, and someday you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

Violently, she strode past him, her heels snapping across the tiles. He grit his teeth as the door slammed shut behind her, and he was plunged into grim angry silence once more.

~

“So another jilted model wrecked your shit,” Inuyasha said, smirking as he leaned back in his seat. “When are you gonna stop leading ‘em on?”

From across the low table, Sesshoumaru looked coldly at his younger half-brother. “I do nothing to encourage them.”

“Feh, who says you have to ‘do’ anything. You’ve got our old man’s devilish good looks same as I do,” Inuyasha said smugly, “and you’re rich and famous besides.”

There was a touch of pettiness in this last remark. Sesshoumaru chose to ignore it. His little brother had always been petty and contentious, and indulged by their father to harbor such vices, since his mother had died when he was so young.

“I make it clear from the start that I don’t want any complications,” Sesshoumaru said, glancing coolly aside. “That I value my solitude. Why is it so difficult for them to respect this?”

Inuyasha snorted. “Because that’s exactly the sort of talk that drives these hungry bitches wild. No wonder they keep going crazy on you. They don’t really see you as unattainable—they see you as a prize catch. Acting like that just makes them want to sink their claws into you even more.” Rubbing his chin, Inuyasha squinted in thought. “What you need is a woman whose sights are already set.” A snide grin tugged at his lips. “Staking out wedding chapels might be a good place to start.”

Sesshoumaru didn’t dignify this with a response. As Inuyasha tipped the last of the sake down his throat, the apartment door banged open, and the frazzled form of his fiancée appeared in the threshold, her windburned face just peeping over the edge of the grocery bags she was juggling.

“I’m home!” Kagome announced a little breathlessly, as she plopped the bags down upon the counter. Seeing Sesshoumaru, she smiled warmly. “Hi there. How are you?”

Before he could return the greeting, Inuyasha asked her gruffly, “Hey, did you buy more sake?”

Smiling still, Kagome rifled through the bags. “Yep! Here it is.”

”Great. Bring it over.”

Sesshoumaru frowned, but Kagome seemed as unfazed by Inuyasha’s rudeness as she always did. With her coat still on, she hurried over to the table with bottle in hand. Pressing a kiss to his cheek, she bent to refill his cup, before reaching politely for Sesshoumaru’s. As she did so, her thin scarf slipped, and his eyes were drawn inexorably to the curve of her throat.

How had he never noticed before, Sesshoumaru wondered, what a graceful curve it was.

~

“Model for you?” Kagome blinked. “Me?”

Sesshoumaru nodded, trying not to grimace in dread at the memory of debacles past. “I think you would be perfect for it.”

Her cheeks flushed. “Would I have to, um, get naked in front of you?”

“Not if you do not wish to.”

A bit of her tension eased at this. Yet still she shifted, her eyes fixed upon the teacup she was clutching in both hands.

“I don’t know…I don’t think Inuyasha would like it.”

Certainly not, Sesshoumaru knew, though it shouldn’t concern him. “I’ll pay you, of course.”

She had such an expressive face. In Inuyasha’s absence, her features had lost their habitual soft schooling, and the array of emotions that flitted past was so vivid and raw that Sesshoumaru wished he could sketch her right then and there. It reminded him of the play of sun and shadow through a veil of shifting cloud, but all that light and darkness came from within her instead.

He could read the deliberation in her downcast eyes. Against her reservations, she was weighing Inuyasha’s debts and her own, and finding in the balance some dream long deferred. But when she looked to him again, her fair face was clear—like marble swept clean by the rain.

“How much?” Kagome asked him.

~

It was another week still before she arrived at his studio, and only, Sesshoumaru supposed, because of his dogged insistence. She looked haggard, rather exasperated even, as he met her at the door and invited her in. There were kohl-dark smudges beneath her lashes, as if she hadn’t slept well in days, though this didn’t detract from the unvarnished allure of her gaze. Rather, it seemed to throw the brilliance of her eyes into even sharper contrast.

Catching the light, her blue irises faintly sparkled, as she stepped across the threshold and into his domain. “Oh my…this is a lovely space. It’s so bright and open.”

Standing back, Sesshoumaru observed her as she wandered forward. Her eyes trailed over the tables of brushes and inks, the sculptures and sketches, the stacks of painted canvases both finished and unfinished. Her hands she kept to herself, for which Sesshoumaru was grateful. He was as particular and prickly about his workspace as he was everything else.

But it was the high, shining wall of glass at the back that seemed to draw her most. Through it, the crisp green-and-red vista of a traditional Japanese garden was displayed. Stepping up to the window, Kagome peered beyond it, her gaze following the garden’s gradual slope.

“You can see the river from here,” she said, a small wistful smile pulling at her lips. “It’s kind of freeing, isn’t it? To just watch things drift along on their natural course.”

The view she was describing was precisely the reason he had bought this place to begin with. She had a good eye, his would-be sister-in-law—though this discovery didn’t surprise Sesshoumaru as much as it once would have. He was beginning to expect the unexpected from her.

Absently, she touched her fingers to the glass as she continued to gaze out. In doing so, Sesshoumaru noticed the ring on her left hand had changed. Where before there had been a golden band with a small solitaire, there was now just a cheap ring of silver. He could guess well enough where its predecessor had gone—either to the loan sharks or the gambling dens, whichever his brother had happened upon first.

Sensing his icy stare upon her, Kagome turned. Her eyes traced the severity of that look back to her hand, which was still pressed to the pane.

“…I’m sorry,” she said, abashed, as she lifted her fingertips from the faint, misty imprints she’d left on the glass. “That was careless of me—”

“No,” Sesshoumaru said, so abruptly that she tensed in alarm. Forcing his voice to lose its urgent edge, he crossed over to a fresh canvas and quietly said, “Stay just as you are.”

~

“You really should have us over sometime, Inuyasha and I. All these years, and you’ve never invited us once.”

Sesshoumaru kept painting. “Are you offended?”

“A little,” Kagome said, but he could hear the smile in her voice. “Mostly I just want an excuse to tour the rest of this killer house.”

“I don’t like guests,” he said flatly, his brushstroke landing heavier than intended.

“I get the impression you don’t like much of anything.”

Sesshoumaru glanced up to where she sat. And now he could see the sparkle in her eye. It unsettled him. Had it always been there, this clarity of perception?

All these years, and he had never really bothered to look at her, let alone get to know her. He knew how old she was and which university she’d attended. He knew that her family were shrine-keepers, and that she taught Japanese history to high school students. But he knew next to nothing about her as a person. It was as though he had labelled her as “Inuyasha’s love interest,” and then promptly written her off.

He had a habit of writing people off. Most of the time, he felt that he was right.

But with her, he was beginning to doubt.

“I like models who chatter less,” he said curtly.

As Kagome blushed, he returned to his portrait, and added to it the most beguiling tinge of red.

~

In truth, he didn’t mind her chatter. She talked to put herself at ease, and he wanted her to be as natural as possible. He didn’t direct her much at all, in fact—which for him was a departure from the norm. He was typically quite exacting with his models, but with Kagome he found himself content merely to study her wherever she sat or leaned or stood.

She was so unaffected in her manner that Sesshoumaru felt almost as if he were intruding upon her, whenever he asked her to pause and hold a pose.

“Tomorrow is mine and Inuyasha’s six-year anniversary.” Her chin was balanced on her knuckles; ever so slightly, they dimpled the creamy smoothness of her cheek. “Six years,” she added with a soft little sigh. “It really makes you think.”

“About what?” Sesshoumaru asked, to his own chagrin.

“Time,” she said simply, and he left it at that.

~

For all her good cheer, there was a deep sadness in Kagome. Sesshoumaru could sense it, though he couldn’t define it. Its edges were formless, yet somehow distinct, like a line of waves breaking upon the sand.

“My father died when I was young,” she told him one day. “I think that’s why Inuyasha and I became so close, because I understand the pain that he feels.”

“Yet you do not let it dictate your behavior,” Sesshoumaru said, brisk and matter-of-fact. “He has been wallowing in his victimhood all his life. I can attest to it.”

Kagome frowned. “You’re too hard on him.”

“And you are too soft,” Sesshoumaru said, his eyes snapping to her. “You enable him.”

Her face fell. Perhaps he had pressed the issue too far, but Sesshoumaru couldn’t bring himself to regret it. He supposed he was every bit as cold-hearted as he’d been accused.

“Some people just need more than others,” she said quietly, meeting his gaze. “There’s a difference.”

Sesshoumaru wanted to retort that there would never be an end to what his brother ‘needed’ from her. That she had the face of the first girl Inuyasha had ever loved, and the spirit of his mother, and that the great, futile effort of his life had been to fill in the holes his losses had left in him instead of patching them over and moving on. And if there was any real victim in all of this, it was Kagome herself.

“Tell me then,” he replied instead, a sharp note of challenge in his voice, “what do you think I need that I couldn’t provide for myself?”

“Not much,” Kagome said. “But something.” She smiled at him then, and the radiant warmth of it set him aflame. “Isn’t that why I’m here?”

~

Not in many years had Sesshoumaru felt this inspired. Perhaps he never had.

There was a frankness in Kagome—a purity—which fixated him.

In vain, his hand strove to keep up with his eye—but always there was another glance from her, another turn of the lips, another subtle movement that would arrest him. The images tormented him as he felt them slip through his fingers, like grains of the finest gold.

He held to them as fiercely as he could, to no avail. Even what he retained of her left him dissatisfied. For the first time that Sesshoumaru could recall, he felt inadequate to the task of capturing what he sought.

Of capturing her.

He took photos to help him, but they only served to deepen his frustrations—these dead broken moments of her. He erased them in contempt. From memory, he painted a dozen pictures just of her eyes, and ripped them all to shreds.

Then he snatched up his phone and begged her as much as he’d ever begged anyone in his life—

Come by earlier tomorrow, if you can.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Welp, y’all that AU has morphed into a little miniseries…lol. But I’ve written most of it at this point, so it’ll only be like a 3-parter I think. Anyway, hope you enjoy <3

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