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fuedalreesespieces · 3 months

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inukag week - day 5: personal space

the meaning of touch

read on ao3!

tw: non graphic verbal/physical abuse; implied sexual content

His mother stood by the misty bridge like a troubled wraith, shrouded in cool fog and the humid atmosphere of midsummer.

Inuyasha eavesdropped from the entry hall of their home, half-hidden in the shadows. He was supposed to be in their shared chamber, sleeping after a long evening of tepid play, but he’d found himself restless and unable to. Instead he’d watched through one attentive eye as his mother brushed out the tangles in her dark hair, the air heavy with the acrid stench of anxiety. She behaved as though there were an unwelcome specter lingering at her back, driving coldness into her stiff shoulder blades and making her elegant posture break in ways he had never seen before.

Inuyasha crept closer down the bridge that separated their home from the shore. From the fog emerged an old woman, dressed in rather plain robes. Her lustrous hair was piled high, twin strands cusping her lower jaw. The grooves in her face were numerous, eroded by the years, and thus her deep frown looked much more severe than it ought to. She held herself high, chin sharply jutting out, and Izayoi’s own rose to match.

“Mother,” she greeted.

The woman said nothing in response. She made no move to cross the threshold onto the bridge, halting at the grassy shore. Her eyes perused the house with distaste. “How many days has it last been since I visited you, Izayoi?”

“I believe thirteen moons.”

“Thirteen moons...” she murmured. A fan beat a steady wind against her clammy skin. “What an insufferable evening.”

“The lake is cool,” Izayoi remarked mechanically. “The heat never becomes unbearable here.”

“I’m glad of it. We did not visit often when you were a child, but I recall...the still lake was such a beautiful sight. Do you remember?”

“It was quite some time ago, mother.”

“How halcyon it was,” she continued, her eyes closing as she descended into an unseen dream. “The sun high in the sky, casting fragments of light against the serene blue. The water seemed to roll out from the horizon like a bolt of fine silk. Sometimes we would not permit ourselves to enter for fear of ruining its sanctity, even though those were our waters to wade in. There was a scared nature...” her words drifted. “How halcyon it was.”

“Indeed,” said Izayoi. Inuyasha couldn’t see her face, only the tip of her finger digging into her waist, drawing circles through the layers of fabric. She did the same thing for him at night, when she gently bade him to forget the smothering heat of summer and slumber.

“But I can’t see a thing now. All this fog. I can hardly glimpse the water itself. So thick. How do you bare it?”

“There has always been fog at this time of year,” Izayoi responded tiredly.

“Ah, but it was quite some time ago,” she echoed. “You fail to recognize an omen when it presents itself, but I do not. At least one of us remembers when you were my daughter.”

“Mother-”

“Thirteen moons? Thirteen moons you waste away with that creature you call a son?”

Izayoi drew in a breath. “If this is all you came for, to belittle me in my own house- ”

“Your what?” her mother snapped. “House? What house? You forget you own nothing. Every blade of grass, every plank of wood, every drop of water in this lake belongs to your father. Our family, which you have forsaken tenthfold. The sole thing of value in your possession, you gave away to the first youkai to slip in your bed. And now you are nothing. Where has he gone, after he’s ruined you?”

“Toga has passed,” Izayoi said with chilling calm. “He died in battle. You know this.”

“Dead,” her mother parroted. “And thank the kami for it, if that is the truth. But is it so? The journey home from war is long and tedious, and no matter what barren wastelands men find themselves trekking, there will always be women other than their wives. Women to help them forget. Do you believe he thinks of you?” Her eyes narrowed into slits. “Stupid girl.”

Inuyasha couldn’t help it – part of him surged forward on impulse. He managed to stop himself before he got too close, but his clumsy steps on the bridge’s creaking staves quickly drew the attention of the two women.

“Inuyasha!” Izayoi cried. “What are you doing up?”

“I - I was thirsty,” he mumbled. He could manage no more than a lie when he saw her face. She looked how she did when she was holding back tears in front of him, her face contorting in an effort to keep the tears at bay, desperate for a moment of recluse.

“Inuyasha?” her mother repeated. She laughed, and the roosting birds scattered from their trees. “How fitting. Let me get a look at it.”

Her gaze felt inescapable. The wooden rails of the bridge closed in on either side of him, and he became so miniscule that she could have plucked him off like an insect. Her eyes drank in his darker toned skin, a contrast to Izayoi’s pale complexion, and the clawed tips of his fingers. They drew a path up his neck, where they briefly met his own citrine-colored pupils, and continued until they came to rest on his crop of unruly white hair and the twitching ears nestled there. She watched his ears for a long time, the wrinkles in her face shifting like ripples in water. Her words had abandoned her.

“Inuyasha,” his mother whispered. “Go inside. I shall join you in a moment.”

He didn’t argue with her. She looked so hurt, so inexplicably worn down, and all the radiance from that morning had drained into the darkness of the lake.

Inuyasha returned to their rooms and tried to sleep – he tried, but he couldn’t dim his awareness any more than he could make himself disappear. He heard the woman who was his grandmother choke on her words, the woman who had been so wickedly verbose struggling to find a term that would best describe him. And when she found she could not, she released an long, harrowing sigh, and he heard her steps retreat further away.

I nearly pity you , she finally said. That you should have to look at it every day.

The most he was able to get out of his mother was that his obaa-san visited at her leisure – whether to lecture her daughter or convince her of something, Inuyasha couldn’t tell. Izayoi refused to speak any longer about it, and in the days following his grandmother’s visit, spent long hours sitting by the edge of the lake with him nestled in the folds of her robes, staring at the opaque surface as though discerning how long the drop would take.

Inuyasha stared deep at the water too, but he cared nothing for what lay underneath, only the glassy reflection that observed him in return. Later, he learned what word his grandmother had been searching for: hanyo.

. . .

Inuyasha had grown accustomed to various stares throughout his adolescence. The jawless gapes, like fish plucked from water; the shrunken pupils and stiff mouths; the frustratingly vacant eyes of his brother. At first they’d been like individual pricks to his skin, irritating and omnipresent, but he determined they were preferable to what people did when their disgust overrode their fear.

The first person to hit him had been Sesshomaru. He hadn’t even touched Inuyasha, claiming it was beneath him – instead he had flogged him with his poison whip after Inuyasha trailed behind him longer than he deemed tolerable.

“I shan’t repeat myself, hanyo ,” he said, his voice serene in the face of Inuyasha’s torrent of sobs. The strike had cut through his cheek, splitting apart his skin like rotting linen seams. The pain was unlike anything he had ever known. “Stay out of my sight. Look elsewhere for charity.”

Inuyasha couldn’t name the second person to hit him, nor the third. Faceless villagers, whose long, thick fingers he recalled far better than their names. They had caught him stealing fruit from their orchards and dragged him in front of the others. It had been a spectacle. They had tried to pry the Fire-Rat off him when they realized it protected him from being burnt.

He came to expect being beaten – it was the secondary response, the realization that this hanyo might have been half-youkai, but he was also a child and therefore easier to put down. And when he was no longer a child, he was less youkai and more an angry shell of a person, spiteful towards everyone, even the memory of his mother.

Why? He thought. Why didn’t you warn me this was going to be the reality someday? Had she thought she would live forever with him in that blasted haven over the lake, and he would never have to confront the world and its hatred?

Thoughts like those dissolved quick as they came. He couldn’t be angry with her when she had suffered more than he ever had. It was difficult to remember his mother when all his emotions ran a vicious circuit: hurt was quickly followed by anger, and he could no longer recall the memory of his mother without getting furious at everything that had happened – his father’s untimely death, her family, whom blamed Izayoi for their destitution, her mother who visited only to mock her, Izayoi’s slow descent into sickness and her miserable passing. So he resolved not to think at all.

. . .

We are alike, you and I.

Inuyasha sat in the boughs of a flowering cherry blossom tree, thoughts consumed by the woman at its feet. She sat underneath the tree, her bow and arrow laying in the grass. Village children flanked her on all sides, a small army, and their idle chatter was swept up to his ears by the drifting wind. Their discarded laundry baskets laid abandoned by the riverside.

Do I look human to you, Inuyasha? Kikyo had asked. She talked as though he were supposed to regard her as a statue, but the question hadn’t made a single bit of sense to him. Humanity wasn’t a state of living, it was an identity that depended solely on your ascendants. If he had been taught anything in his life, it was this.

Still, she was different than the other humans he had come across. Perhaps it was her occupation as a miko that made her so unafraid of him, a fact that kept him irate even now. Fear was the only reliable source he could draw power from. If people feared him, they left him alone, and there was no trouble in that. It was the best outcome.

But Kikyo neither feared him nor left him alone. Her questions frustrated him because he didn’t know one human who would bother to ask a half-human what they thought constituted humanity. He waited for her to drop her absurd niceties and shoot him, but she never did.

She talked like she had no company, and that was something else he didn’t understand. Perhaps she couldn’t divulge her secrets to the innocent children who deserted their chores each evening to be at her side, but he knew for certain she had a sister with whom to express her feelings to. Why she came to him was something inscrutable, but he would admit that he enjoyed listening to her talk. It had been a long time since he had heard the voice of another so calm, and even longer since he had shared an opinion.

He began to feel disappointed when she had to leave, which was pathetic on its own – as if he hadn’t lived just fine without her conversations. But pathetic as it was, he craved them, even if that meant divvying his attention between her voice and the bow slung behind her back.

Inuyasha wondered if she hurried to meet him in the way he did. If she thought about him during her mundane duties. Sometimes he could feel her stare on him, inquisitive and probing, and hear her heartbeat grow irregular. Irregular described his feelings, too, especially when Kikyo began to broach the topic of the jewel and her new intended use for it. Kikyo had smiled as she explained it to him, a rosy, uncharacteristic blush lining her cheeks. We would be free , she said, and hope shined in her dark eyes like oil on water.

To think someone wanted a future with him. It was the closest to happiness he had felt in years, the thought of being promised to someone else. Did this make him her husband? She had not said. He’d only spied glimpses of domestic life, men who kissed their wives before leaving for the morning, hugged them in times of crisis. He and Kikyo had never even touched fingers before.

We are alike, you and I , she’d once said.

If we were alike , he thought, you wouldn’t have to sit so far away from me.

But maybe this was love – sitting with an ocean between them.

. . .

The memories came in pieces, sluggishly assembling themselves in his mind. He remembered being strung up and bitten, being freed by fervent, gingerly hands. Kagome .

His neck was wet and throbbing, slick with blood, and his skin burned, as though he were resting on coals. He had tasted poison before, but only in his half-demon state, and even then he’d had to swallow the sting and pretend it wasn’t painful. Now he had neither the strength nor the inhibition to make an effort at anything.

A wet cloth pressed gently against his head. His eyes opened, sticky with sweat and trying to adjust to the dimness of the room they were sequestered in. The first thing he registered was Kagome leaning over him, her hair falling past her shoulder like a dark curtain separating them from the others.

“Sorry,” she whispered, clutching the handkerchief to her chest. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” he croaked. At the sight of her, everything returned to him in a swift, painful recollection: the indignant orphan girl and the disguised spider-youkai, Inuyasha’s eventual capture, and Kagome, climbing the web of stony limbs to rescue him, Tessaiga in hand. She’d approached him with the courage he had come to associate with her, but she had also been crying, and that had baffled him so much that he’d turned the scene over and over in his lethargic thoughts like a heated stone.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said slowly, without any of the hesitation that came with full consciousness, “why...were you crying for me?”

Kagome stared at him. Hers was the earnest, genuine sort that he had to fashion a name for because he had never seen anything like it. “Because...I thought you were going to die.”

Because I thought you were going to die. A statement that wouldn’t have been damning to anyone but her.

He remembered her frantic climb towards him, hours earlier when he’d tried to fight the spider-monk despite having been drained of his youki . She’d yelled at him for telling her to run away even though it was the most rational decision of them all. It was the instinct of survival he thought fueled everyone, just as it fueled him, but she crouched among the poison webs and remained by his side. Kindness was her instinct and she kept it like an oath.

I will not leave here without you, she told him, and it was a demand despite the tears building in her eyes.

“Your lap...” he murmured. His throat felt filled with ash. “Will you lend me your lap?”

Kagome blinked owlishly. Her response was more a question. “Uh...sure.” She carefully adjusted his head. “There...is that better?”

“Yes.” She was pleasantly warm. If he had been resting on a bed of coals earlier, she was the soothing crackle of flames from a distance. He hardly noticed the approaching sun or the tingle of radiance at his feet. A comforting scent perfumed the air – the aroma of fresh lavender, mild yet sweet.

His eyes fluttered shut from exhaustion. “You smell good.”

Kagome made a sound of disbelief. “But...” her voice trailed off, “you said you hated my scent.”

He blamed the next words to come out of is mouth on delirium: “Well...I was lying.”

Sleep claimed him before he could hear her response. The morning after, as their boat went downstream, he pretended not to recall a thing, even as he saw the questions behind Kagome’s eyes. He had practically flayed himself open that night and she had been there to see it, and he knew if she asked, he would have no viable answers for his vulnerability.

He didn’t know if she thought often of that night, but he did. Every time she made a choice to stand at his side, he was reminded of her fearlessness and it compelled him to be a little more forward with her. She was always so forward with him , after all – wrapping her arms around his shoulders, leaning her head against his, laying close to him, speaking her mind.

People whispered about her, and others were not so discreet. Inuyasha would turn to her, expecting her to defend herself in the way she defended him, but her eyes were always closed, a quaint smile on her face. Either she didn’t hear or she didn’t care. She was so much better at it than he.

. . .

He was an idiot to think that things would be smooth sailing from here on out, but it was difficult to feel anything other than stupid bliss. Kagome was here , she was in his arms, and everything bad that had ever happened to him was null and void.

Except that it wasn’t, and it took Kagome to realize it. A few weeks into her return, she moved in with him, and became that much harder to keep away from her. She slept beside him each night, her soothing scent exuding through the sheets. Their shoulders touched and their hands found each other easily in the dark.

The kissing was new – or rather, in his case, the act of reciprocation. Kagome kissed his cheek before departing to Kaede’s for her miko training; nipped his nose just to see the face he would make. He returned her kisses with equal enthusiasm, his lips brushing over her smooth knuckles and forehead. It was an action that came with ease after years of dreaming of it.

One evening, she found his way into his lap while they kissed. He felt something building in him, an intensity that propelled his hands down her shoulders and to her waist. Her own hands were pressed against his chest, until they too grew restless. There was a shock of cold as he felt the panels of his kosode split apart.

I pity you, that you should have to look at it every day.

His grip on Kagome’s waist tightened. Cloth pooled at the crooks of his elbows. Her lithe fingers trailed down his chest.

Look at him. Found him in the fields, digging at our food. The smell of ash from a burning torch. Let’s teach him a lesson, eh?

The irori fire crackled and popped. The scent of it was nauseating.

“Inuyasha?”

His vision focused. Kagome was hardly a breath away, but her expression was concerned. The tails of her mussed hair fell down her back in loose curls. “Are you okay?”

“Ah...” he swallowed. “Sorry.”

“Did I do something?”

“No,” he said hurriedly, breathless from their previous actions. “No, I just – I just...” He refrained from cursing at his own ineptitude. “I dunno...I just froze. I’m sorry. We can – we can try again, if ya want.”

She squeezed his hand. “If you aren’t in the mood, you can always tell me.”

But I am , he wanted to say. The mood was all he had been in for the past few weeks. Now that he’d finally been given a chance to act on his feelings, memories that had laid shriveled up inside him were resurfacing.

Why? Why now, when he was the happiest he’d ever been?

Kagome accepted his sudden silence, sinking into his chest. After a few moments, he wrapped his arms around her, and she snuggled closer, releasing a quiet sigh. He held her until her breathing evened out, carrying her to their futon to settle her gingerly upon the thick animal pelts they’d hunted and sewn together into blankets.

He closed the panels of his kosode , and his bare chest disappeared beneath the fabric. She had touched it before, back during their questing days, but only when he was heavily injured. Even then he had argued against it.

Inuyasha decided that he’d simply been nervous and amended that tomorrow he would do better. If he could sleep beside her, hold her, and kiss her, then what followed shouldn’t have made him act like this. He should be able to return her gestures as assuredly as she gave them. He would get over himself soon.

...

“Kagome,” he breathed out. “Kagome...a minute.”

She peered up at him with an coquettish expression, her lips ghosting over his collarbone. Rain fell outside, and the air was damp and heavy with inescapable humidity. The occasional flash of lightning illuminated his wife’s body in strokes of startling white. “Mm?”

“I need...” he rose, suddenly finding it difficult to inhale. “A minute.”

I pity you, that you should look at it every day.

He pivoted towards the other wall, where he could see the dead ashes of the fire that had long gone out. His heart raced. He felt the urge to draw his protective garbs over his skin, covering them up from sight.

“Inuyasha?” Kagome said his name tentatively.

Grab him. He’s tryin’ to run away.

“I’m alright,” he reassured. His head was spinning. “‘Jus give me a second.”

Thunder shook the earth. A cold, shallow wind brushed against his bare skin. Behind him, Kagome moved positions in the blankets. Earlier her sleeping robe had hung at her shoulders, and now it sank even lower, barely covering the slope of her breasts. She’d been flustered and embarrassed, but he had kissed her firmly and told her she was beautiful, and she had opened up further. Yet here he was.

What the hell is wrong with you?

His wife came to sit beside him. She looked anxious, and he internally cursed for the nth time. “I just...I want to know if I did something that made you uncomfortable.”

“’Gome...”

“I don’t want you to feel pressured,” she murmured. “Please talk to me.”

Lightning flashed. The air was electric, and so was the sight of her, dark hair tumbling down her back, the curve of her waist under the silk kosode. “I...I want to,” he said. “I want to be with you. I just keep...”

“Freezing?” she suggested.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I’m not gonna let it happen again, I swear-”

She held up a hand. “Inuyasha, that’s not something you can ignore.”

“But-”

She shook her head. “Come here.” She gestured to the blankets next to her. Hesitantly, he brought himself over to where she sat among the furs.

After a stretch of silence, she asked, “Can you describe it for me?”

Kagome drew circles in his arm, tickling his skin, warm against the growing cold. “I remember things.”

“What sorts of things?”

“’Jus things...from when I was younger. I don’t like to think about ‘em. But I remember anyway.” He breathed a stiff, humorless laugh. “It was years ago. Don’t see why it started matterin’ now.”

She paused. “What exactly do you remember?”

“I...” His voice broke. The details were blurry, and for years he’d purposefully suppressed them so they would be difficult to recall. “A lotta things, I guess. Mostly the way people acted towards me. They got physical sometimes, before I knew how to protect myself. And when they didn’t, they just said things.” Lighting flashed again, followed by a sound that resembled a mountain cracking in half. “Like I said...it was a long time ago.”

“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Kagome. Her voice was quiet. “We fought Naraku three years ago, and I still have nightmares about him. Even if it was long ago, some experiences effect us for a while afterwards. Especially cruel ones.”

He couldn’t meet her eyes, but he could feel her fingers weaving between his limp ones. “In my time, there was a girl I knew whose father was arrested for beating her when she was a child. She didn’t like when people touched her – she would get really angry and constantly looked around her. Sometimes she’d faint. Those were the reactions her body had because of the things that happened to her...and these are yours.”

But I’m not scared of you. I want to touch you. Why does it all hinge on shit that happened years ago, said and done by people who are all probably in the grave by now? Why do they get a say in my life long after they tried to ruin it?

“Inuyasha?”

“Sorry, ‘Gome,” he managed. His pounding head laid heavy in his hands. He hadn’t felt this disoriented since a battle, and he hated how that was the first and most accessible comparison his mind conjured.

Kagome embraced him, her hug fiercely tight. He slowly wrapped his arms around her, breathing in her scent. “Don’t ever apologize for something like this.”

They stayed like that until the sweat on his back cooled and the rain had slowed to a lethargic rhythm. Its sound reminded him of the machine in Kagome’s room, its hands shifting every second to show the change in time. He’d broken one of them by accident, but the larger one on her wall, the one that didn’t shriek, was still ominous in its silence.

“We’ll take it step by step,” Kagome said, parting from where she sat against his chest. “We don’t have to go fast. If there’s ever a time where you start to feel uncomfortable, you tell me and we’ll stop immediately. Does that sound okay?”

“But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are ya...are ya okay with waiting?”

Her eyes shone. “Oh, Inuyasha.” The way she said his name, an achingly familiar combination of sweetness and exasperation, made a fraction of the stress weighing over him fade. “I didn’t come back solely for this. I came back because I wanted to see you . I’m not waiting for you to be with me in that way, I’m waiting for you to be comfortable so we can both enjoy it. And if we never do it, that’s okay, too.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

She did, though. Somehow she never ran out of the right things to say. “I get pretty happy just waking up to your face, you know. That’s all I ever wanted.”

. . .

It took much longer than he ever could have imagined. He’d hoped he could just close his eyes and will the fear away, but as Kagome had had to remind him several times, it simply didn’t work that way. This couldn’t be cut down with a sword or sealed away with a sutra. It was the tedium of winnowing on a hot afternoon, separating grains and knowing the work would last ages. The effort was often chased by heavy guilt that he was failing his wife in some way, despite her constant reassurance otherwise.

The severe dichotomy of their intimacy was frustrating. He could be in the midst of enjoying Kagome’s ministrations, then suddenly experience intense discomfort following a particular memory. Some days were better than others, though, and he found that the best ones were when he focused on his wife – unraveling her in and out without removing so much as his kosode .

After their first few attempts, when they’d redress and lay together by the fire, Kagome urged him to talk about the specific memories he saw. He’d been vague, partly because he didn’t know how to discuss something he’d vowed to never dwell on, but mostly because he was pulling at dregs. He didn’t remember many of the things that had happened, just a few vivid snippets that threw a hot spoke into their sexual ventures.

And when he did remember something, it was like choking out a gourd. Kagome was always encouraging, but when she sensed it was too difficult, she offered to leave the room and allow him some privacy.

Stay , he’d said. I want you to stay here.

Kagome’s patience awed him. When he couldn’t bring himself to talk, she would tell him something about her day, a mundane but safe topic. Her soothing voice was like a frail beam of light through the fog that settled between them, leading him back into her arms, slowly but surely. Sometimes she got him to laugh with silly anecdotes, and their conversations would grow miscellaneous until they fell asleep.

It won’t be like climbing a hill , she’d told him. It won’t just be a burst of effort to the peak. It’s more like...a rocky path, maybe. There are smooth parts and rough parts, but the longer you spend on it, the more ways you learn to navigate it.

She had been right, in a way. Their first time together had been a thing of dreams, and he’d enjoyed it as much as she had, but when they tried again the next day, the discomfort returned tenthfold.

Kagome found him by the riverbank near their hut, where the village women met in hordes to do the washing. “Inuyasha?”

He responded with a toneless grunt. She sat down next to him, dressed in her thin kosode, barefoot against the wet grass. The river was clear and smooth as a jade mirror. He hadn’t seen himself in a while, not in a reflection so still. He looked haunted, like his mother had all those years ago, the weight of her actions hanging over her when his grandmother visited.

“Why’d you come out here?” he asked.

Her eyes flickered towards him. “Do you want me to leave?”

“...No,” he said. “‘s just...I thought it’d be fine now. It’s happenin’ again .”

“It’s not something that’ll go away just ‘cause you succeed once,” she said gently. “Yesterday...” Her cheeks flushed. “Yesterday was wonderful . But it might not be something you can do every day, at least for a while. You might not even want to for weeks.”

He couldn’t imagine that, given how much he had enjoyed yesterday, but now she had reminded him that going downhill was indeed a possibility. He fell backwards into the grass and tried not to think about the memory that had brought him out of it earlier, but started talking anyway: “My grandmother was such a bitch.”

Kagome couldn’t help it – she snorted. “W-what?”

“My grandmother,” he repeated. “On my ma’s side. She’d come over once a year. Just to say shitty things to my mother. Call her an embarrassment, say she had brought their family down...really, though, she wanted to say all that shit to me , but my mother hid me away during her visits. Told me to sleep. I should’a listened when I had the chance.”

Kagome frowned. He could tell she was angry but didn’t want him to think it was directed at him – her clenched fists gave it away, though. “They were just looking for a scapegoat,” she muttered. “Someone to blame for everything. Anyone but themselves.”

“They were already losin’ money when I was born – my mother was supposed to be promised to some prince to keep ‘em out of poverty, but then she met my old man.” His ears twitched as a flock of birds flew from the trees. “My grandmother saw me on one of her visits. She was a chatty woman...never shut up. But when she saw me she didn’t say anything except that she pitied my ma.”

He paused, mouth dry. “Her face was...it was like crumpled paper. She wasn’t even pissed like everyone else, just sad. It was probably the first time she acted sad for my mother, even though she would’a swore my mother was goin’ straight to hell.”

“She’s going to hell.” Kagome muttered. At his shocked look, she amended, “your grandmother, I mean.”

He choked out a laugh. “ Geez , Kagome.”

“We were both thinking it.”

“I dunno if the village miko should be the one to say it out loud.”

“I think that gives me more authority to say it, actually,” she teased. “I have a feeling.”

“Oh?” he drawled. His hands traced line of her cheekbone, and her mouth widened into a grin as he drew her into a kiss.

When they parted, she rested her head against his chest, her luminous hair splayed over his bare skin. “So...she is actually dead, right?”

He scoffed. “’S been fifty-three years, and she was already old. If she’s still alive, she’s kami-blessed.”

“Ah, so she was youkai all along.”

They shared a laugh, laying together at the river’s edge, and he felt the coil in his stomach unfurl, relief spreading through him like a balm.

. . .

“Inuyasha...”

“No.”

“ Inuyasha. ”

“No. Go back ta sleep.”

“Let me go!” Kagome squirmed in his arms, but he held her waist steadfastly. “I have to see Kaede early!”

“She’ll be fine,” he grumbled. “Stay.”

“I’ll S-I-T-you,” she deadpanned.

“Not like this ya won’t.”

“You’d be surprised what I can try when I’m annoyed enough,” she said dryly. “As much as I’d like to sleep here for another five minutes, I’m not about to fall into your trap again.”

He yawned, one arm locked around her waist, and blinked the sleep from his eyes. His long, white hair draped over his toned back and shoulders, falling in loose, lazy circles against his skin. “What trap?”

She blushed. “ That trap.”

“No idea what you’re talkin’ about. Sleep.”

Kagome sighed, sinking under the blankets. “Five minutes, then.”

“Five minutes.”

He intended to keep her there for at least half the day, but she didn’t need to know that. He just wanted to hold her for a while.

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