Thunder boomed on high, a tepid breeze stirring the air around her. As lightning split the sky and the scent of ozone suffused her senses, Kagome curled down at the base of her husband’s grave and drew his red robe over her with a whimper.

She had been wrong.

There was nothing here for her, either. There was nowhere left for her to turn to. No safe place in all the world for her to go.

As the rain began to fall thick and slow like the blood drops in her dreams, she cradled the now-silent Tessaiga to her chest and stared blankly out toward the edge of the woods. Water pooled in the low ground before her, the dark glassy surface rippling as the rain continued to fall, and fall, and fall…

It was as though all the world was crying, and yet her own eyes remained hollow and dry. She had been seventeen years old when the Bone Eater’s Well closed behind her forever. Seventeen years old when Inuyasha had held her to him and promised her as she wept that he would take care of her, always. He would be her husband, her family, and so she had dried her eyes and given him her hand. Together they had defeated Naraku and the Jewel, and she had believed, at long last, that the hole in her heart would mend.

But she had been nineteen years old when death had torn him from her, torn open the wound within her that much deeper. She couldn’t staunch the grief that bled from her this time, that hemorrhaged from her in an ocean of tears. It was Sesshoumaru who had salvaged her from the flood. Sesshoumaru who had caught her in his iron grip and fused the broken pieces of her back together again.

“Sesshoumaru,” she breathed out like a curse, because it was he who had sealed her miserable fate, who had damned her beyond all hope of redemption.

At twenty-one years old, she was a broken woman still. A bitter, twisted, empty shell. She had no tears left to cry now. She had nothing left—nothing but her hatred and her fury. And her gnawing, fathomless remorse.

As the rainwater spread to lap at her fingertips, she gazed deep into the pool’s mirrored surface, the reflected moon inverting as she found herself by the lake once again. She was tired, so tired. Every bone in her body ached down to the core.

She was holding on to Inuyasha’s neck only barely. As she drifted off, her grip kept slipping, and his own weakened hold was scarcely enough to support her.

“Please, Inuyasha,” she begged him once more. “Please, let’s just stop here and rest.”

“We can’t stop here,” he bit out in the terse, strained voice he now always seemed to possess. “We need to keep going. This place ain’t safe.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” she murmured in frustration, her nails digging into his haori. “And the time before that, and the time before that.”

His ears flattened, his bloodshot eyes darting back at her as he clenched his jaw. “If I say it ain’t safe, it ain’t. Stop nagging.”

Whimpering, she clung to him as best she could, worrying at the tremor in his tense, biting claws. Her thighs were chafed raw from where he’d gripped her. For days now they had been trudging along at this grueling pace, pausing only for a handful of minutes at a time. As soon as they stopped, Inuyasha was anxious to be on the move again. When she could go no further on her own, he’d picked her up and continued to drag them haggardly on.

Why, she wanted to ask him. Why this stubborn, reckless urgency? Rather than hunting the killer, it felt more like they were the ones being pursued.

What were you running from, Inuyasha? she asked him now in despair. You were running from something, weren’t you?

“…Aren’t you?”

“Huh?”

She was semi-conscious when she felt it grab her, when she felt it rip her from him like the claws of the Beast himself. Inuyasha stumbled forward a step as the short, dark dead tree hooked its thorny fingers deep into her sleeve. She hissed as she was yanked to the ground, the spiny branches lashing across her face. Slowly, so slowly, she wrestled to free herself from the dead tree’s vicious hold, not noticing the shift in the air behind her, the ripple that broke the still surface of the lake.

The water! she yelled at herself now. The water, you idiot! The water!

But by the time she turned, Inuyasha was between them, her sleeve shearing in two as he shoved her roughly aside. She picked herself up as he half-turned toward her, the dragon rising behind him in a crystalline spray—

Silver glinted from his neck, a shining thread. And then his head was sliding free, falling away from the rest of him as she screamed and screamed and screamed.

All she could see was the gush of his blood. All she could feel was hot rush of it over her hands as she crawled to his side, as the dragon bore down on them both and vaporized against the blinding light that flared from her in her anguish.

“No,” she moaned futilely as she held his severed head to his neck. “No, no, no, no, no…”

Closing his lifeless eyes, she lay down in the blood beside him, wrapped her arms around him as the soaked sand of the lakeshore caved beneath them. She wanted the earth to swallow her up.

She still did.

But as she stared wretchedly on, red eyes glared back at her from the shadows of the woods, a pale figure striding toward her through the darkness—

“Kagome.”

Her eyes widened, adrenaline pounding through her veins. Her power blazed around her as that ghostly form moved closer, and closer still…

“Kagome, child.”

The miko started, vertigo crashing over her as she bolted upright. Inuyasha’s haori slid heavily from her shoulders, her hands white-knuckled as she clutched Tessaiga to her heart. Breathing rapidly, blinking furiously in the ruddy light of dawn, she met Kaede’s equally startled gaze.

“Kagome, child,” the elderly miko began again, shifting her basket of urns and incense from one arm to the other. “What are ye doing here, at this hour?”

“Baa-chan…” Swiping a grimy hand over her stinging face, Kagome fought to even out her breathing, her shoulders slumping as she lowered the battered sword. “I—I must have fallen asleep.”

Kaede’s brow creased deeply in concern. “Did ye spend the night in this place?”

Kagome didn’t answer. Climbing stiffly to her feet, she gathered up Inuyasha’s few possessions and stepped past her, back toward the village. Her head swam, her eyes red-rimmed and searing. As she forced herself across the threshold of her home—their home—in the fragments of a busted mirror on the floor, she caught a glimpse of the wasted wraith she’d become.

For an interminable amount of time, she stood there, frozen amidst the rubble of her ruined life. Then, she heard a voice at the door.

“Kagome-san? Kagome-san, are you home?”

Picking her way across the wreckage around her, she pushed the curtain aside and frowned. “Kohaku-kun.”

At the sight of her, the taijiya frowned as well. Dark eyes moved carefully over her scratched, ashen face.

“Kaede-sama told me you’d returned,” he said with a trace of uncertainty. “…Are you well?”

Kagome crumbled at the question. As she listed forward, Kohaku caught her against him, lowering them both to the porch. Clutching his leather armor for support, Kagome stared up at him in a cold sweat.

“D-didn’t sleep,” she stammered out, struggling for coherence as a barrage of razor-edged emotion assailed her. “The nightmares…the dead girls…Inuyasha…”

Kohaku’s gaze softened. “I’m sorry, Kagome-san. I came here to tell you that I found no further trace of the Beast during my travels north. But Rin tells me Sesshoumaru-sama has returned to the Western Lands. I’ll go see him in a few days and seek his counsel. Surely he will know how to proceed.”

Kagome went deathly still. As he set her upon her feet once again, her arms fell woodenly from him, her haunted gaze descending to the vial at his hip.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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