After parting ways with Kohaku, Kagome entered Sango’s home, calling out as she did. With it being so cold out, the children were inside, playing quietly together by the hearth. They’d been subdued like this ever since their father’s death. It hurt Kagome’s heart to see it, their somberness and frowning faces.  “Where’s your mama?”

What Kagome thought would be the low point of her day—maybe even her life—was only the beginning. Inuyasha’s high spirits that morning had only sunk her into a deeper depression. When he’d kissed her and left the house, she hadn’t felt better exactly—just not worse.  She whiled away an hour or so around the house,

With her reiki, Kagome burned away the spill of Sesshoumaru’s seed from her skin. She did this with the same habitual thoroughness she’d have used to burn it up inside her. As he’d told her, it was her prerogative to ‘see to it,’ and so she did. No risk of any lingering evidence of him

She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t help herself. Maybe it was her own deranged perception of events, but it seemed he couldn’t either. Neither of them could help themselves anymore. All sense of sanity and restraint were gone. Lost to the blaze of his frustration, to the flung floodgates of her anguish that wouldn’t shut to

Kagome raised herself up and turned toward him. The sight of Sesshoumaru standing there against the purpling skies was almost blinding to her misted eyes. She blinked up at him and felt a fresh wave of tears course down her cheeks. “This is all my fault,” she said tremulously. Sesshoumaru’s golden gaze trailed over the

It was an overcast day when they laid Miroku’s remains to rest, as if the gods themselves had selected the backdrop best suited to the occasion—a gloomy, ash grey. The funeral was a bleak affair—what funeral wasn’t? But Kagome was most staggered by the surrealness of it. She couldn’t wrap her head around the fact