The Boy Who Waited
Inuyasha had to wonder why the universe kept trying to teach him patience.
He'd had his first lessons in patience as a little boy, trying with a knock-kneed clumsiness to fend for himself in the wild. Crouching for long hours in the forest brush, waiting for some hapless creature—a squirrel, a opossum, or hell, even a field mouse—to scurry within swiping distance. Learning after nights of gut-knotting, writhing agony that he had to be more careful about which berries and mushrooms he ate, had to learn their scents, figure out the edible from the potentially lethal. Patience meant holding a palmful of wild berries in his shaking hand and, instead of shoveling the only food he'd found in days directly into his mouth, pausing long enough to make sure they weren't poisonous. Patience did not come easy to a body that had not known a meal for days on end, a body that had forgotten it could be more than aching hunger.
His patience had been tested with every human encounter. Every country yokel who shouted and pointed at him like he was no better than a rabid monkey stumbling into their village; every merchant who turned up their nose and refused to trade with him; every passing soldier or farmer-turned-mercenary who took a swing at him with a club or a knife, just because they could, because he was alone and an easy mark, and any witnesses would've just thanked them for it, anyway.
He'd cultivated patience while tracking down the Shikon no Tama, holding onto its promise—you will be complete, you will be real, no longer only two halves of an impossible whole—whispering inside him like a prayer.
Patience was being pinned to a tree for fifty years, suspended in time like an insect in amber.
Patience was getting stuck with an idiot human girl from an incomprehensible world and not killing her on day one. It was still not killing her after she shattered the Shikon no Tama—his one hope of wholeness—and it was saving her hide even though letting her die would've made his life hella easier.
Patience was putting up with her moods, the fiery anger, the snappish comebacks, how her words could lacerate in ways he'd never known. Patience was holding his tongue when she cried after seeing a dead body, cried for the orphans begging on the roads, even cried when a farmer slit the throat of his lamed oxen; Inuyasha could not understand these tears, her sorrow over what was inevitable. Even his incomprehension seemed to make her sad. And then she would turn around and laugh at a cooing baby strapped to a village woman's back, or smile at a singing bird. Patience meant digging his teeth into his tongue to keep from saying, If you want to survive my world, stop being kind.
He was patient when he felt the first stirrings of… something for this idiot human. He waited it out, held the something in his thoughts, tried to feel out its shape, and kept in check any impulse to act on it, despite the many temptations to do so. It was probably nothing, after all, just a tickle in his chest, a weird warmth beneath his skin, a lump in his throat when she turned that smile on him. He was probably just sick.
He kept waiting it out as that something stuck around, quietly taking root, digging deeper and deeper with every soft, confusing thing she did. Sometimes she smiled at him as though he made her happy, touched his hand as though he couldn't taint her. Sometimes fury ignited her whole body after someone insulted him, and sorrow clouded her eyes when she believed he belonged to another—as though he actually mattered, as though she'd lost something precious. She radiated a stony determination when she battled by his side, and sometimes she became reckless, lost her fool human head completely: jumped in front of arrows for him, faced off with powerful enemies on his behalf armed with nothing but a glare and her own indignation.
And when he lost his patience, it was nearly always on her account. Kagome was a living exercise in patience.
But it was her absence that required the most patience of him. Inuyasha found, with no small surprise (or consternation), that the girl's absence was far more trying than her presence had ever been. As though she took all of life's texture away with her, his world became unbearably dull—flattened, somehow, like she gave it dimension—when she left. It was then that he longed for her world, even with its incomprehensible strangeness, because at least it was a world with her in it.
What an uncomfortable shock it had been, to realize that she'd forever altered the landscape of his life, and she didn't even know it. To realize that she'd gone from being a mere disruption of his world to being its animating force.
And now, in her longest absence, he wondered if she'd felt remotely the same things he had: if he'd pushed at the bounds of her patience, if he'd given her a lump in her throat just with his nearness, if anxious anticipation had ever licked up her spine, if he'd tangled her up inside until she couldn't tell up from down, if he'd rearranged her world into something altogether new and exciting. He hoped so.
It was only now, in her longest absence—three years of mornings spent alone by the well, three years of nights imagining her beside him, reaching out to brush nothing but air—that he saw clearly for the first time. The promise he'd once sought—you will be complete, you will be real, no longer only two halves of an impossible whole—did not lay in the Shikon's power, but instead lay in the hands of one human girl.
And so he was patient. He waited.