Disclaimer: Inuyasha and all characters therein are the property of Rumiko Takahashi, and I derive no profit whatsoever from their use in this story.

Author's Note: In case I made things too vague in the summary...there are SPOILERS here up through chapter 407 of the manga series. You have been warned.


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Pinnacles


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He thinks he would find it calming, to stand on a steep mountainside under a sharp, silent moon, and know with certainty that his presence transcended that of the domains below.

He forges his own identity so that he might be able to do this someday, so that only strength, and the fear of it, may appease his pride. In this identity he is to be ambition personified, seeking only to assert his claim to power regardless of the cause for which the latter is disputed.

He is likewise to have no sympathy for those who succumb to weakness that can only be of their own making. To tie himself - however remotely - to any of them would be meaningless, and in his perception meaninglessness is perilous and thus cannot be allowed to endure.

Except that in practice all of it proves more difficult than it should be.

Except that, walking away from a field patched with flowers, he has never before found himself so lost.


Maddeningly pink petals brush up against his clothing even as he feels the stares of Inuyasha's company on his back. The putrid scent of miasma lingers over the field even as, to his ears, an upsweeping zephyr seems to whisper, too late.

Truthfully none of this ought involve him, concern him, wrench from him a second glance, and by all rights he does not have a reason to be entangled in the Naraku affair in the first place. But what had just passed, what he had allowed to pass, was not right. And so it bothershim.

Beyond anything else, he is forced to admit that he has changed, because time was that he would have dismissed flowers and wind for the foolishness that they were.


He wonders where it began, remembers encountering a half-demon sibling in the company of a human woman; approaching a small, wolf-ravaged corpse where it lay on a dark woodland path; surveying the wind herself as she offered him two seemingly insignificant shards of crystal.

Or perhaps, perhaps, it had commenced much earlier than all that, when he first held his father's useless heirloom in his hands, but did not even then think to cast it away. Perhaps, there was nothing to change, because he had never really been there in the first place.

He knows where it ends, because he discovers that it is dangerous to waver, however slightly, between two such volatile extremes, and because eventually it is those who cling to the pinnacles of pride that take the greatest falls of all. Sharp and paralyzing agony enters his side even as he sees the dark-sheened diamond shards close around him, edges lethally sharp.

And nothing is there anymore even as he thinks, again, too late.


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