by
Resmiranda
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life is buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
--Oscar Wilde, "Requiescat"
Inuyasha laughs long and hard, and it sounds like the echo of a hundred years tumbling over one another.
"I am waiting," he says after he has recovered, panting a little.
Though wishes are ephemeral and foolish, a human thing, Sesshoumaru wishes only that he could steal the breath that escapes between his brother's teeth, pin it with his claws, trap it in his hands, wrap it around his fingers and present it to her. Breath is, after all, the only gift he has ever been able to give. He is a poverty, a barrenness, except for the wind that howls inside his hollow body.
It is cruelty that his only gift should have failed him when most he needed it.
The clouds are gathering near. The naked trees, burnt husks of their former selves, scrape against the sky, and though he does not care the air is cold enough to shatter, like that winter when he traveled south and south again.
He is settling into stillness.
"How long?" he says, his voice telling him that he is still alive.
Inuyasha shrugs and places another block of wood on the tree stump before slicing it cleanly in half. The action is so pure and simple, and so out of reach.
"Until she comes back," his brother says. Beneath his skin his muscles bunch and slide as he methodically prepares for the winter, and this winter is one of hundreds he will see as he trips down through the centuries to find her again.
"What if she never comes back?" The cold is in his mouth, curling over his tongue and snaking into his lungs, and he is suddenly so, so tired he thinks he may lay down where he stands and slumber for a thousand years.
"Then I'll wait forever," Inuyasha replies, and in that moment Sesshoumaru wants nothing more than to slice him open and bleed him dry. He wants to kill him, because what Inuyasha really means is that he will wait until he dies, and that is nowhere near forever. Envy claws up his throat, burns his tongue, strangling him with rage and all his choked and cherished need, with all his sad devotion.
Inuyasha will die, but Sesshoumaru feels the end of the world rumble in his bones.
"But she will," Inuyasha is saying. "She has a soul, and it will be born again, or I'll find her when I am old and she is still fifteen. But it doesn't really matter which one happens. I can wait."
"She will be reborn," Sesshoumaru repeats. The words taste like pain and poison, like loving lies. The wind rips through his clothing, tossing his hair, and he almost turns his face to it, almost closes his eyes and vanishes into the darkness of his head.
At the edge of his hearing, Inuyasha gives a cough. "You're welcome to wait with me," he says. It is a queer olive branch to offer, but it is still the best he has.
Sesshoumaru says nothing. He is thinking, rolling great hollow thoughts around in his head, listening to the silent cacophony they make.
"A soul," he finally says out loud, the sound low and dark on the wind.
And he remembers that night beneath the moon, in the cold, when he felt little fingers creeping through the chambers of his heart, turning him inside out, drawing the border between regret and resurrection. He thinks his little human girl, his little mortal, was always wiser than he guessed. He thinks she might have known what she was doing.
He thinks if she returns, she will find him and he will --
Inuyasha breathes on his hands and flicks his ears, as if to shake off the sleepy frost. "It's going to be a tough winter," he says.
"Yes," Sesshoumaru replies.
The icy wind slips razors on his skin, and he cannot discern the difference between grief and dying, for he has never known either and they seem to be one and the same.
He has nothing left to say. His words have run dry; he is picked clean, can no longer speak, except for a name and that name he will not voice until its owner returns.
Sesshoumaru turns and walks away to find his own aimless aim. Maybe, in some other time, he will return and they will wait together, but now the roadless sky is calling him, and he thinks to wander for just a while.
He hopes his feet will remember the way back.
She is elsewhere, far away, but he knows that she is there for he can feel her casting back her shadow, and it moves upon him, over him, in him, he need only walk it to find her, he need only take a step and all that starts with one, need only follow into the deep and dark, the secret shadowed, and she is elsewhere, waiting for --