Title: The Inexact Art
Summary: In which a taiyoukai attempts to change the past, and a miko attempts to ensure the future. A lyrical oneshot containing tragedy, romance, and time travel. SessKag AU(ish).
Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha or the characters therein. I am pretty sure no-one owns Sesshoumaru.
oooooooooo
The darkness cradles them.
"Don't go back," Sesshoumaru intones. His voice echoes in the shadows. Over their time together, she has learned to recognize the various shades of intensity in his tone.
Right now he is earnest, though no-one else would think so.
"Sesshoumaru-sama," she whispers, her fingers threading in his hair. "You know I have to. You said they wouldn't win without me."
oooooooooo
He sits at his table. He pours over scrolls, maps, books with cracked leather bindings and soft pages. The room is bathed in colored light and parchment. His hair gleams.
He has to find the answer. He has to know the exact day.
You wouldn't think time would be so hard to translate, that days and hours would amount to such an inexact art.
oooooooooo
It is then. It is now. It is all times at once. He knows this: falling apart in his arms, the smell of chamomile and warm rice, the way her black hair slides over his arm, which is braced against her back. He leans down, breathes her in.
"I love you," she whispers. "No matter what."
Kagome.
oooooooooo
The first time Sesshoumaru sees her again, he grows still. He does not freeze, or stiffen: such is not the way of this Sesshourmaru. Instead, movement simply…departs from him, like a branch of sakura blossoms when the breeze has stopped.
The smell of her comes first, like a nightmare that has never stopped haunting him. He swears the scent has lingered on his clothing for centuries.
When she died, he felt nothing at first, except contempt. And confusion. Her words were filling his ears. Nevertheless, the first few nights after her death, even a quick turn of his head would dowse him in her fragrance, as though she clung to his hair: tea, rice, skin, blood. But her natural perfume fragmented over time, until he almost forgot it was there.
Then Rin had died. This Sesshoumaru had held her as he kneeled in the snow—held her like an offering: loosely lifted, tenderly cradled. His eyes had focused on some distant cloud, empty, and he felt nothing.
It was the worst feeling he'd ever not had.
And in that moment, when the void threatened to overtake him, he could smell her again—the miko named Kagome, spilling over his arm, the line of her throat arching toward the sun.
oooooooooo
It is then. No, it is now. He smells her first.
Then he turns.
The long braid of his hair lashes behind him like a whip. When he sees her, stillness floods slowly through him like an incoming tide. He stares at her, unblinking.
All the blood drains from his face.
oooooooooo
The others are gone now—the kitsune, the wolf, his hanyou half-brother. His father, his pack. Most of the youkai in the world.
Perhaps she is something to cling to: a floating spar in the ocean, a tree full of lush oranges in a wasteland.
And it is a wasteland. It has been for some time. The tall buildings, the rafters of glass and steel—the noise, the odors—they do not please him. He can no longer find the places where he used to meditate: they are alien terrain now. Trees have grown and been cut down, roads have been paved through, buildings have been demolished and resurrected: stronger, harder, brighter.
He has only vaguely noticed the changes as they happen. Since the last of his pack has died out, he has taken to locking himself in his map room. His mind is always on the future, and it is always on the past. Sometimes it collides with itself.
He is looking for the day. He is looking for this one moment, this ripple, this place where the stone skipped. He is looking for her.
Every once in a while he wakes up, and he finds the world is different than how he left it.
oooooooooo
Then he finds her. He recognizes her by the smell of her hair. He sees her: laughing, light-hearted. It is so different from the last time he saw her, which was centuries ago and last night all at once—because of the dreams, you know. The nightmares.
He strides toward her. He stops. He wonders what to say. He has always been aloof, but lately—in the last dozen decades or so—he has begun to think that aloof is just another word for lonesome. And what will she say when she sees him? Will she fear him? For now, she only knows him as he was in the past: fierce, mocking, regal. Perhaps she won't even recognize his hollow eyes.
He remembers her last words to him.
I love you. No matter what.
oooooooooo
She has died draped against his arm, and he has spent long nights with the scent of her in his hair, trying to dispel the twisting confusion that roils in his brain when he smells her, sneering at the memory of her which comes unbidden. He has never had the death of a meager human being haunt him—most of the time he cannot even remember their faces—and the understanding that he smells her still is abhorrent to him. He has almost succeeded in driving out her memory, but somehow it springs to life again with the death of Rin. He's almost managed to put it out of his mind once more…but as the years take away youkai and trade them for metal towers and snapping wires, she has shown her face in his dreams every night. He wakens to the fragrance of her hair.
Somewhere in the vast expanse of his solitude, he has decided to find her, to see her just once in the impending future.
And then, he thinks, he will be able to let her die.
"You can't command me, Sesshoumaru-sama," she says now, and the words are gentle. He is amazed she is capable of such tenderness.
Now he knows such thoughts—thoughts of letting her go—are foolishness. Had he ever really intended it? Or perhaps, deep inside, he had grown to want to save her. In fact, in retrospect, the prospect of letting her die is almost as foolish as the prospect of trying to prevent it.
Which is, of course, what he intends to do.
oooooooooo
The smell of her. The sight of her. The way her eyes and her purity suddenly flares with recognition and the glow of her face as she turns. She recognizes him, despite the subtle differences in his appearance, and her entire demeanor says: ally.
She trusts him. That she reaches for him so easily—with her smile, with the light in her eyes—it lances through him.
"Sesshoumaru-sama," she says respectfully, and bows. But her eyes are glowing with happiness. "It is good to see you. To know you made it." A faint smile curls her mouth. He stares at it, wants to linger in it. He knows it won't last. "Tell me," she teases, "do we win?"
He lifts his head. "You know this Sesshoumaru cannot tell you such things," he rebukes.
Something flickers in her eyes: surprise, he thinks. He wonders what changes have been wrought in him over the centuries, what small differences she is noting now. He wonders if he seems more hesitant, less indifferent, a little bit haunted. A little bit desperate. He is weary, now, even if he doesn't look it. Gaunt and hungry and tired. He is old: he can't see it, but he can feel it.
"Of course not," she says, and she smiles, and it is a strange, sweet balm that startles him. He had expected—hoped—to see her again. He had sought her with single-mindedness, with dogged determination. He hadn't taken the time to discern what his own response to her would be.
He hadn't imagined she would soothe him.
"Come," she says. "Have dinner with my family. Tell me what little you can." He hesitates. "Come," she says again. "I will make you tea."
And he does, with a dismissive grunt, as though he is granting her the favor. Which is ridiculous, all things considered. But she humors him, and he lets her, because it pleases him to do so.
Because it pleases him to feel anything at all.
oooooooooo
He wants to know where her words came from, that day when she died in his arms. He doesn't realize until it's far, far too late that he has already made them happen.
Tea—chamomile, of course; it's the scent that clings to her skin and hair—tea has led to a long walk and stilted discussion. Which has led to more than one walk, and more than one discussion, and sitting on a swing in the park late at night, and much less awkwardness. He is surprised to find how enjoyable it is to speak with her, to listen to her chatter. He wonders, sometimes, if it is only so because it has been so long since he has spoken with anyone, but quickly decides that it is not. She is clever, and generous with her laughter, and kind. This kindness shines through in her words. She is strong, too—much stronger than he remembers. Or perhaps he had not understood true strength when he was so young.
Now they sit in the park in the darkness. She is swinging, her hair a black gleaming banner behind her. He watches. His chest is aching and he does not understand why.
Later that night, he will slide into her small and narrow bed. His fingers will thread between hers. Her warmth will startle him; he will touch her as though he is afraid of her fragility, afraid he will break her. He cannot forget: he has seen her broken. It will only take so long, though, before everything changes, before he is gripping her so hard her bones creak, clinging to her skin as though she is the last person in the world.
She is, of course. The last person in his world.
He will die if he cannot keep her.
Later, she will hold him while he breathes unsteadily, shocked and appalled at his own loss of control. His breath will warm the bare skin of her breast, which he is cradled against.
I love you, she will say.
The words are a horror to him. He will grapple with them, and then, with his mouth on the swell of her breast, he will speak with no inflection. His words will be glassy and smooth, impenetrable, and they will be the kind of words he used to say: words that can be interpreted as mocking, scornful.
But she will not see them that way. She will listen to what lies behind the words and she will know, and that in and of itself is enough to convince him that she has to live.
In the darkness, he speaks again, and only she can hear the brokenness behind his words:
Who am I, that you should love me?
oooooooooo
It is then. It is now. It is all times at once, and she is lying against his arm, and he can smell the chamomile at the edges of her sweet black hair. Her eyes are only for him.
"I love you," she says.
oooooooooo
He is amazed she can understand him, can see what lies behind his words. It is one of the other things he is discovering about her, the things which make her precious. He understands, now, his half-brother's protection of her, the loyalty and devotion given so willingly by the rest of her pack.
"Don't go back," he tells her.
"Sesshoumaru-sama?"
He lifts his head regally. "Do not go back through the well," he clarifies. "Your pack, I am sure, would beg you to stay here if they knew what would befall you."
She goes pale. He thinks this is good. He thinks she will stay.
"I can't," she says after a moment, and the words wound his ears. He stares at her, his eyes implacable, his heart pummeling is chest. "They're counting on me. I have to go."
oooooooooo
He returns to the map room. Golden light, parchment. He strings them from the ceiling: spiderwebs, gossamer. When she comes back from the well, he demands to know everything about her time there. He tries to find the pattern, the puzzle-piece that fits. He tries to figure out which day it is that he must change.
He will stall her. He will steal her. He will do whatever it takes.
oooooooooo
Once, he accidentally lets slip that they do, in fact, win the battle with Naraku. She is on him in a trice, laughing, teasing, begging to know more.
"Perhaps this is why we win!" she reasons. "Because we have you, here, in my time, to tell us what to do."
He refuses, and is ashamed of how easily she has wrung even this small bit of information from him. Such a fracture in his composure and poise would never have happened a few short centuries ago.
oooooooooo
At night—and sometimes in the morning, with the dawn streaming in goldenly—he holds her. He alternates between touching her with reverence and awe, and grasping her hips as though she were an anchor in the darkness.
When she embraces him afterward and whispers, I love you, I love you, he doesn't know whether to kiss her with joy or with dread.
He settles, instead, for just kissing her.
oooooooooo
Kissing is a human custom, in the sense of two mouths meeting.
The great Sesshoumaru's kisses are like this: he buries his face in the skin of her neck and breathes her in. He chuffs into her hair, tangled in her, and his tongue darts out to lap at her skin. It trails delicately over flesh wherever he finds it, exploring the scents and tastes of her. Doggishly, and yet somehow elegantly, he licks her from collarbone to chin, committing the line of her throat to his memory: he saw it once before, as she was spilled over his arm in the late sun, dying; now he tastes it, holds the memory in his mouth. His tongue meets her lips, rasping gently over the soft skin until—depending on the mood of their exchange—she giggles, or moans, and opens her mouth to him.
It would be fitting to take her while she was on her knees. It is natural for folk of his ilk to use such a method. And indeed, on the occasions when he sees her bent over, cleaning, her dark hair parting in back to reveal the nape of her neck, the desire to mount her from behind and take her throat in his mouth, to worry the flesh there between his teeth, is almost overwhelming.
He doesn't, though. He always mates with her face-to-face, though there are many ways to be creative in this, too. If she notices anything odd, she says nothing, though he thinks perhaps she is not well-versed in the mating rituals of inuyoukai. The deprivation is senseless—he is sure she would enjoy intercourse with him in any form—but it provides him with a perverse satisfaction, to deny himself in this way.
It is punishment, perhaps. He won't allow himself to come unless he is looking in her face, reminding himself of everything he has to lose if he fails.
oooooooooo
He charts the days. One morning, he lets slip: they can't win the battle against Naraku without her.
It is their first fight, he supposes, thought the term fits awkwardly in his mouth. What of all those times gone before, back then, back when his hanyou half-brother was still alive and Kagome was nothing more to this Sesshoumaru than some meddlesome, wandering priestess? Were those not fights? And now, when he sits with regal silence while Kagome flusters and rages like some truly impotent hurricane, can this really be called a fight? He takes on her frustration like a cloak. He is implacable in his stillness, his devotion to his own purposes: resolute. But he does not fight back.
She spends herself quickly and he is amazed at how easily all is forgiven, though she still disagrees with him. She lays her hand at the back of his neck and strokes his shoulders from where she stands. He lets her, though he wants her rage. Her kindness too-readily melts him.
"Why don't you want me to go back?" she pleads. There is a broken confusion in her voice. "I know—something bad must happen. But just think—if they need me, if I do something vital to change the course of the battle—what will happen if I don't? This whole world might be different, right now." Her fingers grip his shoulders beggingly. "We might be different. We might not be here."
He grapples with the words in his heart. He has never been one to bare his personal thoughts, and now—when so much rides on them—it is a struggle to speak, to say enough without revealing too much. "I would not have you go," he says slowly, calmly. His voice does not bely his inner wrestlings, though of course she somehow sees it anyway. "Not until I can figure out how to change—" He pauses, wrapping the words in his mouth, testing them. "You are right," he says at last. "Something 'bad' happens. Directly after the battle." The words are foul in his mouth. He licks his teeth in distaste. "You will not go," he says, more firmly this time.
"You can't command me, Sesshoumaru-sama," she says, her words so infinitely gentle.
He closes his eyes—just for a moment—and holds onto the sound of her voice.
"No," he concedes after a moment. "But Kagome—do not go."
He can feel, in the grip of her hands on his shoulders—exactly when she realizes that he speaks not a command, but a plea.
oooooooooo
In his nightmares, she is tossed aside into the dirt. He thinks, perhaps, that this is worse than her actual death: to see her disregarded in such a way, the tiny curls of dust that waft around her. She deserves to be raised up, lifted in loving arms, borne to her grave with care and infinite gentleness. He wakes, sitting upright in the darkness, not panting with terror but simply painfully aware: of the shortness of time, of his own failings.
He will lose her, and he will have no-one to blame but himself.
The thought—the weight of it—is almost enough to make him howl.
He looks beside him in the dark, his eyes glowing. She is curled up on her pillow, one slim bare arm gleaming white in the shadows. He hopes, in the distant past, that her pack picked her up, that they lifted her in the way he imagined and bore her tenderly to some sweet grave, where they and their children and their children's children might lay flowers and offerings. His stomach knots; he prays she was not left alone in the mud, garbage to be picked clean by scavengers. Forgotten, neglected. He can see it, even now as he looks at her delicate features, her mouth slightly parted in sleep.
He doesn't know if he should scoop her up against him, breathe her in while he can, or if he should be spending this night in the maproom, charting the course of time.
It is, after all, so short.
It is so short that it has already happened.
oooooooooo
The darkness cradles them.
"Don't go back," Sesshoumaru intones. His voice echoes in the shadows. Over their time together, she has learned to recognize the various shades of intensity in his tone.
Right now he is earnest, though no-one else would think so.
"Sesshoumaru-sama," she whispers, her fingers threading in his hair. "You know I have to. You said they wouldn't win without me."
oooooooooo
He works feverishly now, though you wouldn't know it to look at him. On the outside he appears determined, but calm and detached. On the inside, he is frantic.
The books and scrolls spill over, out of the maproom, flooding into the halls. He spends his days with her, and the first half of the nights. When she wakes in the morning, he is at her side, his hands full of sunlight and her hair. She doesn't even know he is leaving for almost a week, in fact.
Then one night, she wakes, and his pillow is cold. She rises. She wanders toward the golden light of this room, and she finds him there, charting courses, plotting days. Her mind bubbles over; her stomach roils with sickness.
"What happened?" she breathes, because of course she alone can see the fervor in his carefully-controlled movements.
He is surprised, and appalled that he did not sense her coming. He is so startled, in fact, that he speaks the truth: unguarded, wounded, his response not in the past but the present tense, the future tense, as though it is happening right now, as though it is happening again, every moment that he does not find the answer.
"I kill you," he says.
oooooooooo
It takes a long time, but they sit in silence at the end, staring out into the beginning flickering of sunrise. He has told her now: the way she looks, spilled over his arm, that she has said words he will not repeat to her now, and that have haunted him, have driven him to find her. He can't let her go back, can't let it happen again.
She listens. There is fear on her face, but also a grave kind of understanding. The dawn touches her features with rose and goldness. The image burns into him.
"If I don't go back," she says slowly, "they lose the battle. Everything could be different now."
He will not lie to her. "It is likely."
She turns luminous eyes to him. "And if I don't go back, I will never say to you…whatever it is that I say that leads you to me."
He hesitates. He begs for options. It clearer moments, he is amazed he has been brought so low.
"Perhaps not," he hedges. "Perhaps I am simply drawn to you, always, because you are the last one left." And because she is the only one who hears the hope that underpins his desperate words.
She shakes her head slowly. Her hand is on his face. It takes all his strength not to lean into it, and then he wonders: why? and leans anyway.
"I don't think," she says slowly, and he can feel the blush rising in her face. "I won't risk not having this. With you. Not for anything."
It takes him a moment to understand what she is saying. She will return to the past, to her death, in order to save the world and ensure their time together. It is…humbling.
He leans toward her, his mouth on her forehead, and breathes her in.
oooooooooo
It is then. It is now. It is all times at once.
The black wave of her hair, the scent of her skin: of rice and chamomile, warm.
He turns his head; the perfume of her wafts into his nose.
oooooooooo
Somehow, he knows that this is the time she will not come back. There is no art or science to evidence this fact: only a sense of aloneness more acute than anything he has experienced before. The house he has been sharing with her for the last few months seems suddenly, unbearably empty, quieter than it has ever been before, even in her absence. His youkai ears cannot detect a sound.
He wanders from room to room, surveying all the things that mark her as part of this time, the time shared with him: her hairbrush on the dresser, the frothy lace garment on the bedpost. He reassures himself that these things are still here, that they haven't disappeared along with her body. They are artifacts, because Higurashi Kagome's body will never be found, and it will be as though she has never existed except in the memories of the family who grieves for her and these few small objects.
And one lone youkai.
He steps into the maproom. The movements to an outsider look regal, composed: Kagome would have seen them as the movements of a man who is haunted. After so long, there is nothing to do with his hands, his eyes, his time. This room seems useless, a golden haze of parchment and failure.
oooooooooo
Days have past, and this Sesshoumary has not moved. He stands motionless in the room. The candles have burnt down to nothing, but his youkai eyes still survey the scene before him in the dark. The maps gaze back, and he despairs of the past…and of the future.
The prospect of the next few centuries without her, without even a possibility of pursuing her, seems damning. True, there is always reincarnation—but from what he understands, Kagome is as different from her past self as this Sesshoumaru is different from a hanyou. There are fundamental changes that take place when a soul is reborn. He doesn't know if she will still be Kagome; more than likely, she will not be Kagome at all.
Slowly, now—days after she has gone, longer than she has ever been gone before—days after he first felt the ache on his skin as though he had been half-purified already—he drops gracefully to his knees amidst the tatters of old scrolls and letters. They smell like dead trees and animal skins.
He presses his hands into his knees.
He aches with emptiness. How he aches.
oooooooooo
It is then. It is now. It is then, then, then, and the foolish human priestess—Kagome, he remembers with a snarl—has gotten in the way.
He sneers, at his claw which has gone through her, at his poison seeping into her skin. She blinks up at him, eyes wide with something like surprise, which is impractical at best. She is only, after all, a human, and she should not have thought that this temporary alliance in killing Naraku would exempt her from his disdain.
The weak hanyou is yelling, his eyes wide with unseemly panic. The kit is wide-eyed and stunned into broken silence. The slayer and the monk are still with shock. Sesshoumaru flares his nostrils delicately: chamomile, warm rice, skin, blood. He looks down at the girl, and pulls out his hand, only to loop his arm quickly behind her back. She stares up at him, and her eyes see through him. He almost betrays his surprise at the clarity of her vision, the softness of it. Instead, he flicks his gaze carelessly away.
She is nothing, after all.
"Oh, Sesshoumaru-sama," she breathes, and her tone is a lover's. He grows still with contempt at the intimacy of it—even the honorific, in her voice, is made personal. Yet she sounds infinitely saddened, and he recoils from the strange pity in her voice, the unwanted forgiveness he finds there. "I love you," she whispers to him, as though she thinks the words are a reassurance. Instead, they repulse him. She is searching his cold gaze. "No matter what."
The strange, sweet light in her eyes fades; the scent of her tatters around the corners, losing the edge of life. The pulse in the arch of her throat slows, and then stops: he watches it as it goes, unburdened by its absence. He cares not. Her hands, curled against his chest, relax and slide down to dangle helplessly.
Now the kitsune screams. The hanyou is on his knees, gripping his midsection, gagging on his own inner pain.
Sesshoumaru reins in his disgust, glances down with distaste at the black-haired priestess in his arms.
Casually, he tosses her body aside, into the dirt, like so much human garbage.
He does not look back.
oooooooooo