A/n: Anybody out there still read inusan?
My word is my life.
There is no going back.
A promise is a promise, and she takes note of this before she parts her lips to speak. As a woman she fights for that much. She claws and tears through the superficial condition of 'woman is worthless' as though she may drown beneath it.
A woman is a woman with no place outside of the kitchen, outside of bare feet and a babe at her breast.
But Sango is Sango, and her word is her honor is her lifeblood.
This is why she waits for him. Sango bears the flesh of a woman but her heart beat is that of a warrior. Honor and duty rip through her veins and warm the hilt of the katana she keeps by her side, as she kneels low in the dewy grass before sunrise.
It was a night much like this she gave him her word. She might as well have let him open her throat right then and there. Sango is not a fool and she knew the weight of her words when she spoke them. Inuyasha did as well. He need not respond, his firm grip on her shoulder and somber golden gaze spoke of all the thanks and compassion she would never hear.
It was he who stood beside her for so many years, he who insulted her, damned her to hell knowing that it might bring her out of her sorrow. He who hunted with her, laughed with her. He who upon meeting, she tried to kill, and he who saved her from her own foolishness.
He who saw her as not woman, but comrade.
And he who licked her own blood from the points of his own claws.
She gave him her word she would wait for him, stand beside him no matter what he was: man, hanyou, youkai, beast.
Last night, her promise called to her. His bloodlust was insatiable, Tessusaiga was snapped and cast aside. It was then that he stole each and every one of them from her. He butchered them like meat, their entrails spilled over the ground and soaked into the dirt. It was easy and fluid and quick. If they screamed she couldn't remember. Inuyasha gave one last feral slash at her torso before ripping away into the night, leaving her to nurse a rather deep gash in her stomach, nothing she wouldn't survive however.
They were dead, she was alive, and he was gone.
When she was a girl she would have hated him. She knows better now though. She is seasoned in loss and well rehearsed in agony. "Life is a game, young one. You just have to play it right." her mother told her one morning while the men were away.
In this game, she used to believe there were rules. Now it seems, as she grows older, there is only brutal chaos with tiny fissures of nostalgia.
But amongst the chaos she has known only one thing to hold true; Honor. Sango's word is her honor. Her promise is her honor and amongst the dead and the living-dead in her memory, honor is all she has left.
Her honor is her word is her lifeblood, the blood that hasn't drained from her body through that slash on her belly. That is what keeps her here, keeps her waiting for him.
The bodies of her surrogate family lay haphazardly around her. And Inuyasha is gone. And the girl inside her hates him. But woman inside her loves him. And the warrior inside her promised him.
So, still in the grass, until the ground drinks the rest of her blood, she waits.