Memento Mori
The scent roped him first, looping around him like a suffocating memory. He couldn't place it; he craned his head back and forth, even over his newspaper. It was almost the smell of dusty begonia. He caught himself before he sniffed the newspaper; age had made him unseemly, distracted. He never got arthritic; his memory leaked a little (but then, whose didn't?). He couldn't run as quickly as he used to. But he was a taiyoukai in a world swarming with faceless humans, one of the last of his kind, and therefore he was still stronger, brighter, faster than any of them.
Death. He recalled it now; the scent bordered on miasmic.
Those two never did have the same scent—close enough, but not the same. He remembered this as he folded his newspaper carefully, following the creases of the gray print. And they never should've existed at the same time, but they did, something of a recursive paradox. His brother had been a fool to think the newer one smelled the same (though maybe lovers knew something that all-powerful taiyoukais did not know). Scents changed by the millisecond; sweat diluted and wind dissipated. The two had been similar enough on a macrolevel—but never the same.
Was she around the corner? Why a lobby in the middle of this metropolitan wilderness? The scent got stronger toward the revolving door; it stagnated in one of the slices he pushed himself through and burst out like a flower past its prime as he emerged in the twilight. He was going to miss his meeting; he didn't care.
After centuries being bombarded by novelty, it still stupefied him how rapidly one snatch of song, one ray of sun, one whiff of oxygen would remind him of his youth. Of little girls atop two-headed monsters, and little boys playing by themselves. If he could redo the past— but it still stupefied him.
As did, when he stopped to think about it, the world he inhabited now. The thick chrome and glass trunks of skyscrapers forming a canopy of mirrors above him on all sides; the careening steel monsters spewing exhaust in their wake, which the humans directed like parasites; the frozen, colorless food; the constant noise (squeals of friction, blasting honks, the creaks of buildings as they settled. On a good night, he opened his windows to the wind to welcome it back into his life, but it could rarely creep into his apartment, barricaded from all sides as it was by sister-buildings. Sister monstrosities.
When he couldn't see her after one block, after two, he realized… she wasn't hiding. She was in plain view. He just couldn't recognize her anymore; in a field of shifting faceless girls, she was undifferentiated. Like prey. He felt his heart leap unconsciously, not from desire—no, well, actually yes—from desire. Desire of the chase. A stroke of vertigo momentarily disoriented him. What if it wasn't her whose path whom he dogged? No, it had to be her. He would find her on his senses alone.
He narrowed his eyes to sharpen his eyesight (hopefully the others wouldn't see them grow suddenly red as a case of contagion). Saw her.
Or, that seemed to be her. He approached, darting through the crowd, tongue dry. A wolfish smirk had unconsciously twisted his face. He knew it, like a predator, before he reached out a hand to her shoulder.
She was older than he expected her to be. Not as old as Kagome had been when she died, but old enough that he couldn't call her a little girl.
"Yes?"
She looked up at him through the same (reborn) eyes, not a spark of recognition in them.
He felt his excitement snuff out, as a candle under an airtight beaker.
"Sorry—I thought you were someone I recognized. From a long time ago." He stepped back, gruffly. The crowd pooled, then ran around them as water trickles around stone.
She gazed at him quietly for a few minutes, waiting for the rude stranger to apologize. He blinked, excused himself, hating his gentile manners cultivated from years undercover among humans. There was a nearby alleyway that he ducked into, silk suit and all, and an external stair which he began to climb, away from the city's unrelenting river of people. Sometimes, living in this forsaken town, he felt the need for time alone.
It was her.
The delicate chin, the transparent skin, even the tone in which she spoke. But no more Kikyou than Kagome was. The scent wasn't exactly the same either (it could never have been exactly the same). What had he wanted, slipping into the night to chase a phantom? Reincarnation was a bitch. Souls changed bodies, changed memories, changed lives. They couldn't even be the same damn people anymore, could they?
Not like him, unwilling to give up having once been that Sesshoumaru.
When he came back down to earth, having spent a few minutes on the rooftops listening to the sky ring with radio feedback, aching to see the stars behind the murk of the city's night, he found a slight figure standing at the end of the alley.
"Where do I know you?" she inquired, hostility creeping into her voice. "Why have I seen you before?"
He paused. "I have a very recognizable face," he said, blandly.
"No, you don't." He flinched. "You have taken pains to make yourself unrecognizable. Your haircut, the set of your jaw. You want to hide the fact that you're not human."
He felt his center of gravity shift. It had been centuries since he was last found out.
"Well?" she demanded. "Are you going to deny it?"
Uneasy laugh: "You're crazy."
"They told me that in school. They wanted me to be. But I grew up around a shrine. I see people like you all the time, walking around in human shells, but hiding the most dangerous bloodthirsts of all feral animals. You're a youkai."
He stiffened. "A taiyoukai."
She nodded appreciatively. "I didn't think any of them existed anymore."
Then the young woman, who was just a little shorter than he, the reincarnation of Kikyou (or maybe Kikyou remembered, because he saw recognition there, in the antagonistic set of her eyes and the way her hands craned forward as if both to touch him and to repel him but maybe—he half hoped—to purify him) came up to him and peered straight into his face.
"What do you want from me?"
How to answer? Her scent, so close now, smothered him, like the haze of a polluted dawn. He wanted to bury his face in it and to run, to get out of the city and out of his body, to not be the perpetual outsider, the rare specimen masquerading as a real person. He could tell her so many things (he wanted so many things). Grab her by the shoulders and hurt her, the way he used to hurt humans who threatened him—see if that made her flinch. Test the boundaries of her miko powers; reawaken the woman who had very nearly defeated his brother. Recount their deaths, for he was the sole survivor of everything. He had survived everything.
"I want to remember."
"You don't need me for that, Sesshoumaru," said Kikyou out of her reincarnation's lips. "You already remember everything and it's haunting you."
"Then I want to forget."
She smiled wryly.
"Then come with me."
Slowly, she walked out of the alley into the stream. He looked after her, torn between carrying on as if this encounter had never happened, and taking the plunge. When she was nearly obscured by the mass passing on the road, he could smell the city air again—exhaust, dust particles, fear.
Sesshoumaru turned and strode after her retreating back. Chasing.