Title: Hello Goodbye
Started: April 13, 2007
Ended: April 14, 2007

Summary: Something terrible has happened, and Inuyasha and Shippou deal with the aftermath. A poignant, gory tearjerker.

Author's Ramblings: I blame my stillborn uncle, pomegranate vodka, and sloth regarding my Spanish thesis for this story. It absolutely killed me to write it.

He wondered how to do it without drowning in his own tears. He wasn't sure, but he started anyway.

Miroku and Sango were first. He did not know nor did he really care how the Buddhist mourned their dead, so he just dug a pit deep enough for both of them. Miroku at least would have appreciated that. He almost put the monk's cold, dead hand on Sango's cold, dead rear, but thought better of it at the last second when Kirara growled in warning. It was a shame, really, because doing so would have given him a laugh, and he really needed a laugh….

He sobbed and turned to look at her. Shippou was still attending to her—pulling the detritus out of her stubborn, fluffy, dead hair, wiping the mud off her lifeless cheeks; generally making her presentable for her grieving hanyou.

He smiled, an aching and hollow thing, admiring the face of his corpse bride.

He turned away before he could wail in pain again, once more focusing on Miroku and Sango. He needed to shovel the dirt back on them, so that their bodies would not be feasted upon by forest creatures, but he really didn't want to mar them more than they had already been. And Miroku would not appreciate him making Sango that filthy.

"I'm sorry, monk," he said aloud, his voice quiet and garbled with grief. "You'll need a bath wherever you end up. You too, Sango." And that was that.

When he finished burying them, he wiped his hands on his hakama and turned around again, this time seeing Shippou nuzzling Kagome's breasts. He almost yelled, angry at the boy for giving her such an intimate touch, but the boy spoke before he could, "I know she's yours, Inuyasha, but I can smell her milk and it comforts me."

Her milk. Inuyasha choked on his own snot and sobbed again. Was Shippou trying to kill him? "Don't you dare drink it!" he snarled tearfully. "Leave it for the pup."

"Even if I wanted it, it wouldn't be warm anymore," Shippou replied sullenly, eyes glazed as he become lost in his own memories and fantasies. "And the pup can't even get to it."

Inuyasha, quiet and solemn and bitter, walked up to the side of Kagome closest to him, the side unoccupied by Shippou, and kneeled next to her. Slowly, reverently, he reached out and rubbed her heavy, swollen, cold belly. He lifted her shirt slightly to rub her stretched, flat naval, remembering that just yesterday this same action had prompted her to swat away his hand in annoyance because it had both tickled and itched her. She had been so easily irritable these past months, but she had wanted that pup so badly. She had sewn so many tiny kimonos, and Inuyasha's heart clenched when he remembered that they would still be stacked in the crib he had built in their home. He would never see Kagome pick up their child from that crib and dress it in a little kimono….

A thought struck him then, and he turned to Shippou, "Do you think she might want to hold it?"

"You mean…cut it out of her?" Shippou asked, looking a little green.

"I don't want to do it either, but you know how she was." Again he tenderly, sadly, rubbed her cold belly.

"She's already got it inside her. Why would she want to hold it?" Shippou asked, entirely curious.

"It's a bitch thing. She wanted to love it and take care of it." He swallowed thickly. "I wanted to help her."

Shippou reached out and set his own small hand atop Inuyasha's much larger one, the one resting on Kagome's belly. He looked up at Inuyasha, his eyes young and soft and sad. "You want to see it, don't you? You want to see your pup."

Inuyasha looked away, unable to answer.

Shippou bit his lip, and thought it was unfair that the hanyou had to consider going to such lengths with his wife's body to see what would likely be the only pup he'd ever father.

Silence reigned for a small while, both their hands still on Kagome's cold belly.

"I don't want to hurt her," Inuyasha said suddenly, quietly. "I want to let her hold it, but I don't want to cut her open."

"She can't feel anything. She's dead," Shippou retorted.

The fox really was trying to kill him, Inuyasha thought. But it worked. He lifted her shirt out of the way and with the claw on his right thumb he cut horizontally across the lower portion of her cold belly. It was not unlike gutting a carp, and this thought made him cringe, as did the absence of any bleeding until he remembered that the blood stops flowing when one dies. Of course she would not bleed. Not anymore.

He was drawn from his thoughts when he saw Shippou lean forward. Apparently he'd opened her womb already and hadn't even noticed.

"Oh look, Inuyasha!" Shippou said in a sort of melancholy childlike awe. "It was a boy pup."

It was a boy pup. Not even born yet and already he was relegated to the past tense. Inuyasha barely held back his own vomit. "I'm not sure I can do this," he said. He wasn't sure if he could look at his cold, dead, unborn pup. He had fantasized for so long about a squalling, squirming, rosy-cheeked one that this one was just wrong in innumerable ways. But just leaving him inside her seemed wrong too. Inuyasha was sure she would've wanted to hold him. Still, he hesitated.

"I'll lift him out," Shippou said, unafraid of such things as some young demons are. "Then you can cut the cord."

"Aa," Inuyasha acquiesced, too despaired to disagree, tears streaming down his face yet again. "Be careful with him," he warned softly, nasally, "He's just a pup."

Shippou nodded, and pulled him up with the utmost tenderness, then displayed him to the upset hanyou. Inuyasha could only stare, at first. The pup was tiny but fully-formed, still curled in fetal position, covered in blood and other pregnancy fluids. He had wisps of dark gray hair slicked to his tiny head, and little folded puppy ears. His eyes were closed.

Inuyasha lost it then; he whimpered, sobbed, and with shaking hands nearly snatched the child out of Shippou's grasp. He sliced the cord and cradled his cold, wet, slightly stiff pup to his chest. "My son," he mourned, wailed as he scooted forward, "Look, Kagome, we have a boy. Isn't he so beautiful?" And he was beautiful, Inuyasha thought, half-crazed now; beautiful and cold and dead and never alive.

Shippou cried now too. "He's a good mix of both of you," he said, wiping his nose with his sleeve. He watched Inuyasha cuddle his son and rock him gently as if he were alive to be soothed; listened to him tell the tiny pup stories of Kagome with a grief-stricken voice. And when the sun set, he helped Inuyasha swaddle the pup in his fire-rat haori and arrange him in Kagome's stiffened arms. It took a long time to say goodbye, even longer to cover mother and baby with grave soil, and even longer to convince Inuyasha to walk away.

And that was that.

Meta-ramblings: I hurt. Please tell me your reactions, too.