Disclaimer: The series Inuyasha does not belong to me in any way, shape, or form.
Rated for: Language and adult situations.
Notes: Response to a challenge issued by Riana.
Unanswerable
©2005 by Kei
There is something small and bitter festering in her noble breast, behind a murmuring heart, as she watches her only child being shunned. Everyone scorns him for his mixed blood, child of a second marriage, a marriage of love. To her, he could not be lovelier or more perfect, and why don't they see that?
She loved that vicious, gentle dog demon lord who rose out of the west in defiance of the setting sun. Yes, she loved him and he betrayed her by his death. He should have outlived her by centuries, yet she is alone with their ostracized son, and how could he do that to them?
In his pureblood son she sees him and there is an ache behind her eyes. The image blurs, shifting for a moment into her lover, and when she grows sick there is no longer any difference. As her tiny boy dozes by her delirious bedside, she rises like a spirit from a grave and seeks, whispering one name into shadows that whisper back, and isn't that a little odd?
"You really are pathetic, human whore," he says with no inflection when she finds him. "There's illness in your weak body and there's no foolish dog demon here to protect you and your half-breed whelp. I ought to slaughter you right now, wouldn't that be nice?"
"I'm sorry I'm sick," she says quietly to her lingering dead husband. "I'll likely die wretchedly and leave the poor children all alone. My Inuyasha is so young, and Sesshoumaru is so distant from everything, what are they going to do?"
"You're speaking nonsense," he snarls. "You'll die, the whelp will die, and this Sesshoumaru will live on. Don't speak like I need you to survive, disgusting wench, what would make you think such ridiculous things?"
"Love, I have missed you so," she says, sidling sickly closer to him. He watches impassively, awaiting her next moronic human trick. "If I may give you this one last thing, I shall die happy, shan't I?"
In a frozen moment her contagious lips touch his and her fingertips full of blight trace the markings on his cheeks. She pulls away with a dreamy smile and drifts away back to her fever-dreams. Sesshoumaru raises a claw to his mouth and after a pregnant second slashes his lips open, because won't his pure demon blood cleanse the human stain?
When at last the great Western Lord's anomalously human widow dies, her child howls his grief and wants to cling to his nearby remote older half-brother, who watches the pyre with blank golden eyes, never able to comprehend why that creature was his father's beloved. He picks up the whelp by the scruff and carries him away into the forest and tells him how he'll be living now. Walking away from the abandoned pup, he briefly notices and quickly dismisses the bitterness behind his icy heart, because what did that bitch Izayoi mean to him anyway?
-finis-