Of all the things Inuyasha had imagined his life to include, a fun day out with the devil had not crossed his mind. But here he was, arm-in-arm with Kagome. The devil. Well, technically the child of god and the devil.
Inuyasha was awkward enough talking to normal people. He was not prepared to try to make small talk with a woman so beautiful that it was obvious that she did not belong on Earth.
It wasn't just her looks, either. There was also something about the way that she smelled, like cloves and oranges, that captured Inuyasha and would not let him go. He supposed that this was normal for her quarry. She probably smelled like everyone's favorite things, because that would help her get what she wanted from them.
"So, how often do you visit—uh—us?" He at least was going to try.
"Not too often," Kagome answered. "It's too bad, too. I always forget how much I enjoy it right as I have to go back."
"What's… back like?" Inuyasha asked.
The question caught Kagome off guard. Yes, he had signed his soul away to hell to live the life brought to him through wishes, but the ones condemned to her would mostly pretend she didn't exist. Some of them ogled and flirted (she was a looker, there was no denying that), but they didn't try to connect.
Every turn, Inuyasha tried to connect. It was awkward and clumsy, like a baby giraffe hobbling and failing to stand, but just like the giraffe, he did not give up when he found his face in the dirt. Even this question, the hell question, was not being asked from a place of doom. He asked because he wanted to know what Kagome's day-to-day was like.
"It's what you make of it." Kagome's answer was completely true, and somehow still completely deceptive. "That's the thing about hell. You can't exactly describe it, because it is so personalized. Your hell looks completely different than my hell."
"What's your hell like?" Inuyasha followed up.
People didn't ask Kagome things like that. She was the daughter of Naraku. People made assumptions. But… Inuyasha was not making assumptions here.
"Fun." Kagome told the truth (she always did). "I enjoy the chaos of it. I lament the people who went there not knowing that their eternities are in their hands, and I celebrate the ones who made it their paradise."
"Is it your paradise?" Inuyasha was staring off into the distance as he asked.
It was not a question Kagome wanted to answer. Because she wasn't sure she knew the answer. It was complicated.
Sometimes Kagome missed her mother. A lot. And she missed her sister too. A lot. Hell was the right place for her, since she was forced to choose, but Kagome mourned the choice. She did believe in self-determination, but there was an inherent loneliness to it. She had made a world for herself there, but she often found that she was the only person in it.
Her favorite moments were the ones where she got to be in between. The times that she and Kikyō vied for a soul on the Earth. Or those extremely rare occasions that brought Midoriko and Naraku together, to talk. Earth was the place that Kagome got to play as if she had a family, as if she was normal, as if…
She wasn't ready to think about those things.
"You could just wish for me to make it your paradise and we could skip this part," Kagome dodged. Inuyasha was the soul she was here to collect, nothing more. That was what she needed to keep telling herself.
"That's not my next wish," Inuyasha said, and he turned his eyes to Kagome. They were… sad. Not for him, but for her. "And you don't need to answer."
"What is your next wish then?" Kagome's reply was sharper than she meant it to be.
"Sick of me already?" Inuyasha's chuckle was forced.
"Hardly." Kagome's sarcasm did a good job masking her honesty.
She needed to get away from Inuyasha, and soon. Because the opposite was happening. Spending time with him was making her want to spend more time with him, more time on Earth. And… that type of thinking could have catastrophic consequences.
"Okay," Inuyasha sighed, but he did not stop looking at Kagome. For a moment there, he thought he saw something akin to longing flash in her eyes, but it was gone with the flick of her sharp tongue. "I want to reconcile with my brother. I—I want to see Sesshōmaru, and I want to meet his family. My family."
Kagome snapped her fingers with a flourish. She couldn't deny that she was intrigued at where wish #2 was fated to go. Repairing broken families was a pretty common one, but something about this felt different. Then again, everything that involved Inuyasha felt different.
"What's that I hear?" Kagome smirked. "Looks like you have a phone call."
Sesshōmaru Taisho liked to be the best. He went to the best schools. He wore the best suits. Even his appliances were always the best.
He graduated top of his class at every level of education that he completed. He won entrepreneur of the year when his first business went public, and now his venture capital firm was considered the best incubator in the world.
Sesshōmaru had an eye for the best.
It was why he turned away from his father for taking a human wife.
Why he made no effort whatsoever to connect when he found that he had a half-brother.
Why… all those years ago, when he attended his father's funeral, he refused to sit in the same row as the human and half-demon who tried to claim blood ties to him.
His was a quest for supremacy, and becoming familiar with that other side of his father's life tainted that quest.
Then he met Kagura Kazemajo.
She was a half-demon, whose mother and father had been murdered by a serial killer hellbent on destroying human-demon bonds. Kagura had hunted down the killer herself and exacted revenge. The trial was short and she was acquitted for "self-defense" (truth be told, the man had begged for mercy at the end, and Kagura had not seen fit to grant it). She was powerful, but like all half-demons, was ultimately inferior.
Then, almost against his will, Sesshōmaru fell in love with her.
Kagura never took the world too seriously. She didn't care whether or not she was the best. She cared that every single day, she could do one thing that brought a smile to her face, and ultimately, her inner fire warmed Sesshōmaru in kind.
They eloped; the only witness being Sesshōmaru's own mother. And for the first time in his life, Sesshōmaru did not need the best. Just saying vows to Kagura was enough.
Kagura made Sesshōmaru abandon his quest to be the best.
She gave him enough.
In normal circumstances, finding someone like Kagura should have given Sesshōmaru the perfect avenue to reconcile with his half-demon relation, but it did not. For some reason, the idea of reuniting with Inuyasha after the years that he denied their family bonds and resented Izayoi felt futile. The rift felt too great to cross. Although Sesshōmaru had abandoned supremacy, he was not yet ready to accept failure.
"Give it time," Kagura had said Sesshōmaru had learned of Izayoi's passing. "You'll know when it is the right time."
"He'll forgive you," she had said when Sesshōmaru found out that he was going to be a father (and Inuyasha an uncle).
"Think about how excited they'll be meeting their cool half-demon uncle!" Kagura had beamed as their twins, Towa and Setsuna, played at full force on the private island that they had rented for the twins' second birthday. "And think about how excited Inuyasha will be to meet them. Children change things."
Yet, Sesshōmaru still balked. That was, until a particularly sunny Seattle day.
"What's a half-breed?" Towa came trotting over to Sesshōmaru from the playset. She was three and a half years old now.
Sesshōmaru had to restrain himself from going over and slicing into the red-haired panther demon girl. At least the wretch had the good sense to flee the moment she made eye contact with Sesshōmaru.
So it was, not the death of a mother, the birth of a child, or the love of a half-demon that finally broke Sesshōmaru, but instead, the innocent eyes of a child, who for the first time in her life, had been subjected to a hurt and a bigotry that she did not fully understand.
Sesshōmaru looked down at his phone, down at the number he had never deleted, the one that would connect him to the half-brother he had never acknowledged existed, and he hit [Call].
A butterfly's wing flutters in Brazil and causes a monsoon in Ethiopia. Everyone has heard of chaos theory, but very few have mastered it. Kagome was one who relished in it.
It would have been easy to snap her fingers and compel Sesshōmaru's hands to dial, to influence him to think of his brother and finally decide that it was time, but that would have been too easy. Too forced. It would have made the wish and the reconciliation disingenuous, because the hand of god would have been involved, and even if people cannot see a god, something is always left behind when their strings are pulled.
And for Inuyasha, for his second wish, that would not do.
So Kagome pulled the strings of another. Karan, the red-headed panther demon who had been told since she was young that humans and demons did not mix, that they were like oil and gasoline, combustible and destructive. And she listened to her family say it, over and over and over.
When she went to the park that day, and played on the swingset, she saw the two little girls with strange auras, who played and teased and laughed… in their blood she sensed their humanity, and was driven to act in a way she had always thought to, but never had.
She marched up to the silver-haired girl, with the red eyes and the brightest smile and she pointed her finger and yelled "half-breed!" at the top of her lungs.
She hadn't planned to say it; there was an unnatural tug to do it, in fact.
It felt awful, the way the girl's eyes widened and she scuttled off to ask her dad (definitely a full demon) what it meant. The father's glare sent Karan running as fast as she could. Back home, back where it was safe, far away from the confused half-demon and her angry father.
It was the first time Karan had ever questioned her family's views, and it would not be the last.
"So…" Inuyasha tapped the stein in front of him, his ears pinned back as he stared across the table at his half-brother. He saw Kagome out of the corner of his eye, sipping a drink. He seemed to be the only person who noticed that she was there.
"Inuyasha…" Sesshōmaru was stiff, but there was a fire in his eyes under their coldness, something that Inuyasha had never seen before. "It's been—"
"A lifetime." Inuyasha finished Sesshōmaru's sentence. "Since dad…"
"Since his funeral," Sesshōmaru nodded.
"Yeah," Inuyasha murmured; he didn't want to tell Sesshōmaru that the only reason they were talking at that precise moment was because he'd made a deal with the devil, who was sitting just out of notice and listening to the whole damn conversation.
Sesshōmaru shook his head, and looked down at his own drink: a top shelf vodka (there were some things that could only be the best), straight.
"Towa asked me what a half-breed was yesterday." Sesshōmaru played with the rim of the glass with his fingers. "Some panther girl called her one, and she didn't know what it meant."
"Oh." Inuyasha looked down at his own drink. Was that why Sesshōmaru had called him?
"Kagura has been telling me to reach out to you for… years." Sesshōmaru took a swig of the vodka, enough to loosen his tongue so he could say the rest of what he needed to.
"She looks nice," Inuyasha said.
"She has made me a far better person." Sesshōmaru allowed himself a placid smile, remembering the way that Kagura had pulled him into her arms when he said he'd finally done it. And the way it filled him with warmth.
"That's not too hard…" Inuyasha blurted before he could stop himself.
Shit. This was not a good way to start his wish, alienating the brother and family that was apparently worth ⅓ of his soul.
"No, I suppose not." Inuyasha looked up, catching Sesshōmaru's smile. Well, at least it was as close as Inuyasha thought he probably ever really came to smiling… "She begged me to set up a gathering of some sort. Dinner, something, so she could meet you. And…" Sesshōmaru's face lost the whisper of the smile then. "Give our girls a chance to get to know a few more half-demons… so they don't feel so… isolated."
Inuyasha stared at his brother. There was a look there, one he had only ever seen in his mother's eyes: that haunted realization that there was nothing she would be able to do to protect her child from what the world was going to do to them.
"So what, I get to be Uncle Half-Breed?" Inuyasha deadpanned. He wanted that, desperately, but when his mother had that look in her eyes and could have used family, Sesshōmaru had decided that it wasn't worth being family…
"Please do not use that word." Sesshōmaru's face strained at Inuyasha's challenge, but he did not take the bait. It was worse; the haunts in his eyes deepened. "If you would rather we not—"
"I'd like that," Inuyasha smiled softly. "To meet Kagura, to see your twins… to be Uncle Inuyasha."
Sesshōmaru paused, then the slight curl of his lips was back.
"Be warned, once Kagura has adopted you, you will never be able to escape." Sesshōmaru sighed. Instead of continuing, Sesshōmaru went silent. He downed the rest of his vodka in a single gulp. "I'm… sorry."
Inuyasha glared at Kagome the moment after sorry tumbled from Sesshōmaru's mouth.
"I—I gotta pee," Inuyasha lied, and darted up from the table, throwing a single glance toward Kagome to follow him.
There was exactly zero possibility that Sesshōmaru would voluntarily admit to fault. It wasn't part of the bargain, it wasn't what he wanted.
"You need something?" Kagome raised her eyebrow at the murderous look that Inuyasha was shooting her.
"Stop making him say stuff!" Inuyasha rounded on Kagome.
"Say… stuff?" Kagome tried not to smirk.
"That man does not apologize for shit. He doesn't come after years and years and just want to be in my life. He doesn't fucking smile." Inuyasha hated this. He hated knowing that his brother returned to his life because he begged the devil for it. "It's all a facade. And I didn't want my wish to be a fa—"
"It's not a facade." Kagome put her finger up to Inuyasha's lips.
Inuyasha grabbed Kagome's hand, moving it off his lips. "Bullshit. There's no fucking way."
"Ask me how I did it," Kagome interrupted him again. "If you don't believe me, ask me how I did it."
Kagome did not reveal her tricks. It took something away from the whole "perceived as a god" thing, and was usually unnecessary. People didn't like to think about the deals they made; they just wanted what they wanted. They really didn't care if it was sincere or not.
But Inuyasha proved over and over again that he was unlike all the others. It was unsettling.
"How." Inuyasha's ears drooped and he refused to look her in the eye, but a desperate longing was radiating off of him. He wanted to believe Kagome, he wanted this to be sincere.
"By calling his daughter a half-breed," Kagome answered. "Well… tugging the string of a panther demon girl who was already thinking it." Saying it out loud certainly made it sound pretty bad. "Everything else? Nothing to do with me."
"You mean…" Inuyasha finally looked up, capturing Kagome's eyes, "that he really has… wanted to see me again?"
Kagome didn't answer, she merely smiled. Inuyasha didn't need her to answer; he believed her.
Then, something happened that had never happened before. Inuyasha's arms were around Kagome's body, and his nose was buried in her neck. She could feel his breath tickling her skin, his staccato pulse just under the surface. She could feel… his happiness.
"Thank you," he whispered into her hair.
Kagome tried to say something, tried to do something, but she was paralyzed. Inuyasha's arms around her felt… right. Finally, Inuyasha broke the hug, his eyes searching Kagome's, looking for answers to questions that neither had any desire to acknowledge were there.
"I'm gonna… go talk to my brother some more," Inuyasha murmured. "Hope it's okay if… we wait a while for the next—uh—wish."
"Yeah." Kagome's mind was on autopilot.
"Okay. Good," Inuyasha said, and he returned to the bar and to his brother.
Kagome wasn't so sure that waiting on the last wish was actually going to turn out okay.
Not anymore.
Not when the memory of Inuyasha's warm embrace still lingered.