AN: You guys probably will hate me a little for this one. Written to Boats and Birds by Gregory and the Hawk. I do suggest you listen to the song DURING, but before or after is fine. Its a beautiful song.
Thank you all for being amazing.
Sunken eyes stared into the rafters, barely lit by the dwindling kindle of the fire. They were splintered, aged beyond that of his own body. Upon his death bed, so cozy in his knitted throws and feverish debris, he waited as his heartbeat thrummed a slowly melody before it stilled.
She, the precious house of a soul of which is so adored and desired, had passed long before he. The golden rings around his eyes had darkened on this moonless night, leaving his body to the wolves that roamed the darkness of the night.
Their children, long since grown and distant, had sent their well wishings and firelight origami cranes alone the river - which lead to their mother's grave. He would follow her. He yearned to graciously climb the starlit ladder to the heavens where her heart beat against the sun to rouse it at dawn.
Oh, he clutched the cooling air around him as his withered skin brushed the fabric around his body, determining how long it would be before her soul entwined with his. Which lover did he so believe owned the soul that was his? He believed it to be the latter - in the centuries to come, he prayed to meet her newness with an equivalence.
How many lifetimes he would have suffered for her. These past handful of years grew dreary and unwarranted as the faces he had known disappeared and were reborn on their kindred bearings.
The old woman had passed upon the hilltops, crashing like a wave as she tumble down the valley as her feeble husband failed to catch her. The sword-maker forged his own destiny, taking his life shortly after. He no longer could endure a life of solitude after finding such companionship with the haggard beauty.
InuYasha's chapped lips curled crookedly as he thought of Sango, his best friend and their obnoxiously stout children. They had children, grandchildren and passed on themselves.
Shippo, with his fiery hair and grassy eyes was a man, and the only left standing. He mated, fought valiantly in the last war as he masqueraded as a human...
All of these things flurried through the crescents of his lashes as though they were a burning strip of film. He could see their faces, hear their laughter in the revelry of the silence around him.
Hesitantly, he closed his weary eyes and saw Kagome's pallid skin shining like the stardust that made her whole. He never saw her age, gray into a simple and used woman. In his eyes, she was as radiant as the first night his eyes fell upon her.
A hand cupped at his heart, still pressing the golden locket against his flesh. His heart did beat a little faster as he thought of her eyes so fearfully meeting his as she wrapped her fingers around the protrusion in his chest.
Nary did a day come that he didn't think of her sweetness, or compliance to his wayward youth. She was the stone that balanced his body and carried more than her own burdens. Loving her...
Loving her was spellbinding. Kagome was everything that Kikyo has failed to be, or Midoriko had ever intended. She was a woman, a lover, a mother in her certain age.
How had she seen the beauty beneath the ferocity of a beast with no control? She tamed him like the horrors from the stories she'd told around campfires and late night pillow talks in her plush bed at her mother's.
Thinking of her was like erasing the aches in his hollowed bones, filling them with new marrow and erasing the cancer that had set in. In his old age, InuYasha's human blood became more prominent, scaling down the Eden of his youkai half.
Time. Time was always the spider on his back. Kagome was time. She has broken the barrier to be with him. Her will had eviscerated the idea - of numerals and mechanics to share a moment with him that he had never regretted.
If she had never come - he would have waited. He would have done anything. Inhaling sharply, the man held onto the harsh rumbling in his chest.
It felt like knives pricking the interior of his lungs as he parted his drying mouth. He didn't struggle against the pain creasing across his abdomen as his body involuntarily tried to function.
His heart palpitated, cursing against its house behind his sternum. The nerves beneath his wrinkled skin cried for attention as his spine tensed.
The pads of his fingers pulled against the quilt his wife had knitted, hoping so wholly that he could be gifted with her warm hand instead. His eyes stared vacantly at the same rafters, moisture kissing the ducts as they curled down his cheeks.
Exhaling, his breath was gone like a ghost in the daylight. He was a bare body in the midst of their home. His soul had retreated from its imprisonment in his temple and burst into the night.
There was freedom.
Freedom from the suffrage, the desire, the promises... And freedom from missing her.
Silent as the evening began, it ended with a thunderous crescendo of a new star borne from his body. Somewhere in that sky rested his lover, swimming in a garden of light, waiting patiently for him to take her hand.