It amazed him, how easily Kagome assimilated into his daily life. He had never gotten on well in close quarters with anyone—not even his parents, and especially not his obnoxious little brother. His creative space had always been a prized commodity; his privacy, a jealously-guarded thing. But now Sesshoumaru wondered how he had ever lived without her.

Perched on the edge of a table in his studio, she was wearing one of his shirts as if it were her own, and Sesshoumaru found himself consenting wholeheartedly to its appropriation. The long line of buttons hung invitingly open. Beneath and between them, she wore nothing at all. Letting the charcoal fall from his hand, he knelt before her as her thighs parted open with a soft, rosy gleam—

“You…”

In Sesshoumaru’s hair, Kagome’s fingers seized in fright. A few strands tore loose as he jerked back his head, to find Inuyasha standing red-faced and glaring from the open door.

“You son of a bitch. I should’ve known…”

Abruptly, Sesshoumaru stood as Kagome scrambled off the table behind him and clutched at the folds of her shirt. But there was nothing for it; the evidence was damning enough, even without the finger tracks of charcoal smudging her bare inner thighs. Sesshoumaru grimaced. He’d been mentally preparing to confront his younger brother, but not like this…

“Inuyasha—”

“Don’t—don’t you fucking dare try to talk me down. And you,” he snarled, turning his wrathful gaze upon the pale, shrinking figure of his former fiancée, “don’t you say anything either, you two-faced, lying slut.”

As Kagome clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle her anguished cry, Sesshoumaru strode forward, his expression hard with anger. “Leave her out of this, Inuyasha. Whatever quarrel you have, you can direct it at me.”

Inuyasha’s features twisted in scorn. “Always so fucking sure of yourself, aren’t you? Asshole.”

Before Sesshoumaru could respond, Inuyasha was flying at him, his thrown fist clipping Sesshoumaru just beneath the jaw. Kagome screamed out at the bone-grinding crack, but Sesshoumaru shook it off, and brought his knee up hard into Inuyasha’s stomach. Before their father had made his fortune in real estate, he’d fought competitively on a national scale, and his sons had inherited his martial talent. Inuyasha was a savage brawler, but Sesshoumaru had always had the advantage of poise—that, and a cool, level head.

As Inuyasha doubled over wheezing, Sesshoumaru clutched at his busted jaw. “Get up,” he said coldly, glaring down, “and get out.”

Inuyasha glared back, still gasping violently for breath. “Fuck you…Sesshoumaru…” For a minute his jaw locked tight. Angry tears boiled in his eyes. “You always…always got to…knock me down. What little I got…you gotta take that from me too…”

“What ‘little’ you have?” Sesshoumaru said, caustic and withering. “You, who’s been given nothing but handouts your entire life? You’re the one who always takes, and still you have this chip on your shoulder.” Resentment spiked through him, and he couldn’t stop himself. “Grasping and lowbred, just like your tramp of a mother.”

Inuyasha’s face was a mask of white-lipped fury. “Shut the fuck up about my mother…you bastard…”

“You are the bastard,” Sesshoumaru shot back. “My family was torn apart because of you—because of her. I’ll say whatever I damn well like about her. She was my nanny before she was your mother, and I loved her before I grew to hate her.” A pain so old he’d forgotten he’d buried it lanced in his chest. “But with you I had no choice.”

Inuyasha staggered to his feet, swaying slightly. “So you’ve always hated me, too.” Lost, he looked to Kagome, who was staring at him just as despairingly. “Well then, that explains it.”

Sesshoumaru’s teeth clenched in vicious denial. “No—”

But Inuyasha didn’t seem to hear it. There was a utility knife sitting on a table near him—then suddenly it was in his hand. Sesshoumaru tensed, bracing himself for a charge that never came, as Inuyasha turned the point of the blade back upon himself.

~

Sesshoumaru could still see the flash of the ambulance lights burning behind his tired eyes. Grinding his knuckles into them once again, he reclined against the hard back of the hospital chair. Beside him, Kagome sat stiffly, her face bloodless and graven with tension.

He reached for her. In his hand, her own felt cold and small.

Silently they waited, as the hours ticked by.

At last a harried nurse approached them, speaking in a rush of medical jargon which Sesshoumaru struggled to digest in his state of fatigue. But from Kagome’s watery sigh of relief, he caught the gist of it.

“…He’s stable. You can see him now,” the nurse concluded, giving Sesshoumaru and his bloodied jaw a hawkish once-over. “But you ought to let me stitch that wound of yours up first.”

Kagome had already shot to her feet, but hearing this, she looked to Sesshoumaru with an uncertain frown. “Go on,” he told her gruffly as he stood. “I’ll join you when I’m through.”

“…Okay,” she said, her fingers slipping through his like smoke.

~

It took longer than Sesshoumaru would have liked for that nurse to stitch him up. Drugged though Inuyasha would undoubtedly be, Sesshoumaru didn’t relish the prospect of leaving Kagome alone to bear the brunt of his discontent, no matter how subdued.

But as he stepped up to the open room, he saw his little brother lying meekly in his hospital bed, the bandages around his chest showing the faintest line of red. His eyes were heavy-lidded as he gazed up at Kagome, who was sitting beside him with her back to the door. Quietly, they conversed; so quietly that Sesshoumaru had no hope of hearing the words that passed between them.

Yet somehow he knew.

And when Kagome’s hand pressed tenderly to Inuyasha’s cheek, when he closed his eyes and turned his face into her palm, all Sesshoumaru could hear was the sound of his own heart splintering in his chest. She happened to glance back at him then, and a pall of regret fell over her. Her eyes gleamed with an apology her trembling lips couldn’t seem to frame.

But Sesshoumaru had seen enough. He turned from her and walked away.

~

If only he could leave the image of her so easily behind.

He saw her everywhere he looked. Before, he had relished her presence, basked in it like some sort of divine visitation. The thought of her alone had awakened him, revitalized him. Now the memory of her haunted him instead.

It was as though a shadow had fallen over his world, tainting everything. Even after he’d sent the last of her things back to her, his home felt not his own. There wasn’t a corner of it that didn’t bear some reminder of her. The cool darkness of his bedroom was no longer a comfort. He couldn’t retreat beneath the sheets without feeling some imprint of her there beside him.

But his studio was the worst. Sesshoumaru couldn’t stand to set foot in it, he felt such a strong sense of aversion. All the desire to create art had fled him. He doubted it would ever return. Contemplating his past creations filled him with increasing disdain.

As the days crawled by, this feeling of disdain fomented, until Sesshoumaru pried open the crates containing the collection of Feudal Era paintings. Gathering them up, he broke them down and burned them along with his sketchbooks in the firepit out back. The curtained piece he saved for last. Uncovering it, he threw it whole into the crackling flames, and as Kagome’s likeness turned to ash, his emptiness consumed him.

~

“I’m retiring,” Sesshoumaru told Jaken shortly over the phone.

“R-retiring?” the agent exclaimed, spluttering. “But how?—you’re only thirty-two! Who on earth retires at thirty-two?”

“Someone for whom the well has run dry,” Sesshoumaru replied, the words tasting bitter and metallic on his tongue.

~

He put his house on the market.

“The list price is too high,” his realtor said with a frown.

Sesshoumaru ignored this warning and listed it anyway. He had his few remaining personal effects put into storage. He moved into an apartment in the city.

He had a string of meaningless affairs there, with women whose faces he forgot as soon as he looked away. His days were spent on investment calls, and in conference rooms which felt as barren as his soul. But the coldness of counting yen appealed to him. He felt more walled-off and icy than he ever had, and the cool impassivity with which he watched his wealth amass put fear and admiration into the eyes of his associates.

He loathed them, as he loathed himself.

Jaken sought him out, begged to stay on as his agent. Sesshoumaru agreed, and not even reluctantly; Jaken had always known far more about business than art.

Though his primary subject of study seemed to be Sesshoumaru himself.

“And if you ever do decide to return to your craft,” Jaken said with glinting eyes and an impish smile, “we’ll simply call this stint of yours an intellectual sabbatical.”

Sesshoumaru frowned and glanced away, resisting the impulse to chuck the granite paperweight he was rolling in his fist.

~

When he received word that an outlandish offer had come in on his house, Sesshoumaru was conflicted. Despite his desire to be shed of the place, and all the painful associations it harbored, he felt a strange reluctance to accept.

Perhaps it was simply inertia.

He decided to visit his home again, thinking that to subject himself to that atmosphere of remembered disappointment would spur him into action. But when he stepped foot across the threshold, he didn’t feel that strangling hold on his throat that he’d expected. He felt only a quiet lonesomeness.

Desperate to arouse in himself some sense of antipathy, he stepped into his dreaded studio. The space was incongruously bright compared to his dark expectations. Walking around in that innocuous space, searching for something to offend him, Sesshoumaru began to feel ridiculous.

But as his eyes raked over every inch, a flash of white caught his attention—peeking from beneath a cabinet in the corner.

It was a sheaf of heavy paper. Some scrap of cardstock the movers must have missed when they’d cleared out his things. He bent down and picked it up—and a flare of intense feeling pierced through his chest.

Emblazoned on the surface was an image of the Jewel, half-completed. A forgotten relic from those bygone days he’d spent with Kagome, illustrating out of love for her this fantastical tale from Sengoku Jidai.

But this wasn’t one of his sketches—it was hers.

It had survived the purge of his art only because it had been incomplete, and unknown to him. It had evaded being cast into the darkness of oblivion only by chance.

The engraving quivered in his hands as he gazed upon it, and felt only half-complete himself.

He set it down upon a table. He took out a pen from his pocket and pressed it to the page. Slowly, tortuously, he inked in the rest, as though etching each line from the vein.

~

When his work was finished, he slipped the page into an envelope and took it with him into the city.

Not to his apartment, but to hers—hers and his brother’s. Or so he still assumed it to be.

With the etching tucked beneath his arm, he knocked on the door. It was an odd time of day, early morning on the weekend, but after a moment of scuffling from within, the door cracked open. A familiar face peered out.

“…Sesshoumaru,” Kagome said, soft and surprised.

Resting against the frame, her left hand was startlingly bare. But as the door opened wide, he could see the rumpled couch behind her, the twisted blanket and flung pillows. Her eyes were hooded, her hair and nightclothes so sensually mussed that Sesshoumaru found himself clenching his jaw and glancing away. He’d been expecting his brother to answer.

As if expecting that he’d been expecting this, Kagome said, “Inuyasha’s not home now; you’ve just missed him. He’s at the gym, training.” In his periphery, she shivered, fidgeting with the flimsy straps of her camisole. “He’s been working really hard, to get back into fighting shape after all these years. There’s a tournament coming up next month.”

Sesshoumaru nodded, still looking askance, “I’m glad to hear it.”

Truly he was, despite how forced his reply had sounded. Kagome smiled gently.

“Thank you for taking care of the hospital bills,” she said quietly after a moment. “You really helped us out. We’ve finally managed to get our heads above water now.”

Sesshoumaru hadn’t done it for them—he’d done it for her. He would have done more, if he’d thought it wouldn’t cause trouble between her and Inuyasha.

“It was nothing,” he said, cursing the frigid strain in his voice.

“And for the emails,” she added, more quietly still.

Sesshoumaru looked to her directly. A faint blush limned her cheeks. So she knew about them then—but well, why wouldn’t she.

For better or worse, his little brother had never been one to hide anything.

~

About a week after the knife incident, Sesshoumaru had sent the first one. It was an apology letter more than anything. He’d signed it with love, though it had been difficult and awkward to express that kind of thing to his brother, even in written form. He hadn’t expected a response, but a few days later he’d gotten one anyway. Laced with invectives though it’d been, a line of honest communication had opened between them at last.

It seemed it was easier for both of them to speak to one another through the tempering medium of typed words on a screen. They’d been corresponding regularly ever since, mostly about the past. Their father and their mothers, childhood experiences, university days which had both been cut short for them, for very different reasons. They didn’t speak much about the present, and never about Kagome. But Inuyasha wrote to him often about Kikyou—his high school sweetheart who’d dumped him under the allegation he’d pawned her grandmother’s locket for spending money, which to this day he vehemently denied.

…But then, I thought, fuck it, she thinks I’m such a piece of trash, maybe I am. It really screwed with my head, the way she dropped me like that out of nowhere. And I was drinking so much anyway, and doing all sorts of other reckless shit just to try to forget her, so it kind of just spiraled from there. I got kicked out of uni. I gambled away my trust fund. I stopped training and competing, and you know fighting’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. It’s like I just got stuck in that moment when she walked out on me, and I’ve been stuck there ever since…

~

“It meant a lot to him,” Kagome said presently, “that you reached out. I wanted to—I picked up my phone so many times to talk to you, but I just couldn’t find the words…”

She trailed off helplessly, but Sesshoumaru understood. He had done the same thing, countless times.

Kagome’s lashes fell like wingtips toward her reddened cheeks. “Inuyasha…he has a good heart, you know.”

“I know,” Sesshoumaru said.

“And so do you,” Kagome replied, her gaze settling upon him, calm and clear, blue as untroubled skies. A few beats of silence passed between them. “Would you like to come in? He should be back in an hour or so.”

“No,” he said tersely, taking the envelope from beneath his arm and extending it toward her. “I’m selling my house, and I was going through some things. I found this and thought you might want to keep it.”

“…Oh,” Kagome said mildly, blinking as she accepted it. “Thank you—”

But Sesshoumaru had already turned away and started down the street. He should never have come here. He felt stupid, embarrassed, giving her a silly thing like that. It was hardly even her drawing anymore, now that he’d penned in the rest.

So lost in his heated stewing, he was more than halfway down the block before he heard the sound of soft, hurried footsteps falling in behind him. Sesshoumaru turned as Kagome crashed into his chest, the sketch of the Jewel crushing flat between them. He steadied her as she held fast to him—irrationally concerned for her bare little feet, amidst all the frost and grime that crusted the pavement. Her tearstained face peeled back from his shirt, and he saw now what her sleeping on that couch had really meant. His jaded illusions fell away, and he saw only her, as she was. A true, selfless friend to his brother, and to him—

“I love you,” she said, smiling up at him through the sheen of her tears. “I love you so much.”

~

They were married in the spring, just after the snow had melted. It was a small ceremony, held at the Higurashi family shrine. Though the setting was traditional, they said their vows to one another in their own way, beneath the ornamented branches of the Sacred Tree.

Inuyasha was conspicuously absent. Kagome was distraught at this, but Sesshoumaru was strangely heartened by it. With the bottle of sake he’d sent them as a wedding present, Inuyasha had attached a note, which said he’d be going abroad during that time, to Europe, and he didn’t know when he’d be back. Sesshoumaru understood, perhaps better than anyone else did, that his brother needed to find his own way to sort through his heartache. Kikyou’s last known whereabouts were London, after all.

As firecrackers lit the darkening sky above them, Sesshoumaru spirited Kagome away. Sweeping her off her feet, he carried her across the threshold of his home—their home, as ever it had seemed to him now in his mind—and up the steps to their bedroom. Kagome’s eyes glowed with love and wonder as she gazed up at him, her arms wound around his shoulders.

“It feels like I’m flying,” she said with a laugh.

~Eight Years Later~

“Papa!”

Sesshoumaru turned with paintbrush in hand, arching a brow as a small dark-haired figure barreled into him at top-speed. Ruffling his free hand through her bangs, he smiled down as his daughter drew back from him, gap-toothed and beaming.

“Rin,” he said, “you’re home early. How was school?”

The little girl screwed up her face. “Boooring. And soccer practice was canceled for today, remember?” Rocking up on her toes, she peeked around him. “What are you painting, Papa? Oh, it’s Grandpa Touga. But…who is that lady with him?”

Sesshoumaru glanced back to the painting. Though it wasn’t exactly of his father, Rin recognized him anyway, as the Great Dog-Demon General of the West.

“Your step-grandmother Izayoi,” he answered. “She was a princess of the Western Lands.”

“She’s very pretty,” Rin said with a blush.

“She was,” Sesshoumaru replied. “And kind as well.”

Rin dashed over to an easel not far from his. “I should add her to my painting, too!”

Borrowing from Sesshoumaru’s palette, she brushed in her caricature of Izayoi beside that of Touga, to join in her own flower-framed curation of Feudal Era heroes. Loftily above and to the far left was Sesshoumaru’s elegant mother. On the far right were Rin’s Uncle Inuyasha and Aunt Kikyou. And between them were Sesshoumaru, Kagome, the impish Jaken and even Rin herself, and all of their other fabled friends, both demon and human alike. It was a canvas full of storied characters, brought to life by a family of time-traveling dreamers.

“Rin-chan,” Kagome said gently from the door, “it’s homework time.”

Rin groaned, but set down her brush and skipped away. Her mother smiled after her.

“She’s such a daddy’s girl,” Kagome laughed as she drew up beside Sesshoumaru. Slipping her arm around his waist as he did the same, she gazed admiringly at his latest addition to the famous Tales of Segoku Jidai, which had now inspired more films, comics, and novels than Sesshoumaru could count. “This one may be your best work yet.”

Sesshoumaru snorted. “You always say that.”

Placing a hand to his chest, she grinned up at him. “And I always mean it, too.”

As he skimmed his lips against hers, her eyes glimmered with such scintillating promise that Sesshoumaru had to forcibly remind himself that their daughter was within earshot still. Breaking away from his wife, for now, he let his eyes stray elsewhere, to land on the framed drawing of the Sacred Jewel, the lone survivor from the original Feudal Era collection.

“You never did tell me,” he said, “what the priestess wished for, in the end.”

“Nothing,” Kagome murmured, tightening her hold around him with a happy sigh. “Her heart was full.”

 

~the end~

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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