"Sesshoumaru-sama, what are you—"
"Jaken. Silence."
His vassal quieted himself at once as the daiyokai returned his concentration to the scent in the air. He'd paused along this path moments earlier, stopped in his tracks by his keen nose. The gusting spring wind brought with it the ambience of a close-by human settlement and with it, a faint but familiar smell. Familiar in the wrong way.
It was what made him pause so long to decipher it. It couldn't be her. No, it was...off. It couldn't be her but it was so kindred to the smell he remembered.
He grimaced, not wanting to have to enter a human enclave. He let out an internal sigh, knowing the curiosity would overwhelm him enough to have to investigate.
He changed direction, the imp hot on his heels. The silent management of expectations repeated like a mantra in his head. Not her. It can't be her. It's too human . There's no trace of…
It isn't her.
Of course.
Who it was, he realized, was the only person it possibly could have been. It should have been obvious, maybe, but he'd willed her into such an inconsequential figure. Secure in the idea that she had no role in his future anymore, he'd mentally discarded her.
He spied the young woman from his perch on a high tree branch. That vantage point gave him a view of the road on which she traveled. From beside him, Jaken glanced nervously from the ground view, to his master and back to the road again. Obviously, his vassal was curious about what business he had in a place inhabited by humans, but having already been told to keep his mouth shut, would not ask any further questions.
Sesshoumaru took a sharp inhale through his nose to confirm that the woman he was watching was the one he thought she was. It was necessary, because even from that far away, he could tell that she was a woman and not a little girl like he remembered.
Had that much time passed already?
He'd known her only incidentally. His lasting memory is a tiny girl-shape in a dirty kimono, cheerfully hand in hand with the fearsome hanyou specter that still haunted his imagination. He had been thinking he should leave then. Turn around, his curiosity sated, and never look back. He didn't have to have anything to do with her. Didn't want to have anything to do with her. Whatever fondness he'd reluctantly developed for the daughter of his errant self, he would not go down that path in this time. If anything, that vision of the future would serve as a guide map to avoiding pitfalls and ruin; A second chance not to stray from the path he was meant for.
They could—and should, be strangers.
Another strong gust of wind whips through the air, blowing his hair forward and rattling the branches with their newly-formed buds. He smirked as some of the buds blew off, lifted by the wind and landing in the dirt below; pruned before they would ever get the chance to mature into leaves. The expression fell from his face when the scent again drifted into his nostrils. Pleasant and perfume-like, maybe the finest he'd ever smelled. Swept up and carried to him from a retreating figure.