CHAPTER 19: RATHER BE ASHES THAN DUST
"I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark
Should burn out in a brilliant
Blaze than it should be stifled
By dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb
Meteor, every atom of me in
Magnificent flow, than a
Sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live,
Not to exist. I shall not waste
My days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time."
(Jack London)
When he wakes, it is both similar and dissimilar to his dreamy waking yesterday. Both days he was curled around a warm and pliant body, his body heavy and lax with the remnants of a deep and restful sleep. Both days there was a swirling in his stomach that harkens dangerously of happiness. Both days there a tug on his cheeks that wants to become a full-fledged smile.
But today, unlike yesterday, they are gloriously, beautifully, finally naked. The body pulled into his chest is soft skin, the legs tangled with his are smooth, the flesh beneath his palm is a supple breast. He noses into the hair at the top of her spine, breathing in deeply the scent of lavender and lovemaking and light. His inner beast wants to purr at the smell of their coupling, a sign to others that she has been claimed by him, that she has accepted him and no one else. There's a soft sigh, like music to his ears, and Kagome arches back against him.
He twitches against her in immediate interest, his body still not satiated, even after a long night of cloud dancing. His fingers begin to knead the flesh under his palm, his teeth nipping at the tender skin beneath his mouth, his body humming with hot, carnal awareness as he starts to thrust forward.
The softly panting breaths are interrupted by a spine tingling scream that raises the hair on his neck in one swoop.
Kagome shoots upwards. "Rin!" His own mind has already processed the sound and moved into action. Rolling out the opposite side of the bed, he reaches for his clothes, cursing himself as the only thing he has to wear is the formal clothes from the evening before. But there is no time to go for his armor as he hears a window rattling blast from the front entrance.
Kagome rushes past him, hopping on one foot as she slides on her skirt. He looks away from all that smooth, pale flesh, the love-bitten skin, and the tousled hair, and rushes after her. At the door, he wavers indecisively, wanting the reassuring weight of Tokijin at his side, but not wanting to waste time retrieving it.
"Milord!" Jaken's high voice screeches down the hall, and when Sesshomaru turns to him, the imp is struggling to drag the blade towards his master. Sesshomaru snatches it without preamble and turns, leaving in a whoosh of hair and fabric, following Kagome who is already halfway down the stairs, following the sounds of screaming intent that is slowly becoming more discernable the closer he gets.
"Come out you high class shit so I can tear you to pieces!"
He recognizes that voice. That brash, grating, full of itself voice. He skids to a stop on the front step, taking in the scene playing out on his front drive. With a sweep of the area, he sees Rin cowering behind Ah-Un, who is snorting smoke in his agitation. She seems scared, but, luckily unharmed. Jaken tumbles down the steps behind him and scrambles towards her, planting his two-headed staff on the ground defiantly. Inuyasha, his idiotic half-brother, is standing in between the door and smashed gate, eyes glinting red, fangs bared, Tetsaiga cleaving a trench in the ground as he walked. Kagome was between them, her hands outstretched in a placating, but futile, gesture.
"Inuyasha! What are you doing?!"
"Getting you back, wench!"
"I'm not being held prisoner here, you know!"
His lip curls back as he sneers. "I can smell him all over you, Kagome! How do you explain that!"
Though her face blooms red, she does not deny it. "I'm a big girl, Inuyasha, and I can do what I want!"
He scoffed. "Yeah, it sure smells like you can do whoever you want."
When she would have opened her mouth to give back another biting retort, he stepped forward. "Little brother."
Inuyasha's head snapped to him at his quiet, carrying voice. So surprised was he that, when his eyes widened at the sight of his brother's mangled face, the red began to recede. "Holy shit, what happened to you?"
"This Sesshomaru is under no obligation to explain himself to you."
"Guess not," he shrugged. "I'm gonna kill you either way." He leapt forward with a sudden upward motion, shooting straight over Kagome and landing with a thug directly in front of Sesshomaru. He grinned, feral and wicked, and swung Tetsaiga in an arc.
Instead of blocking it, Sesshomaru flitted to the side, drawing his brother farther away from the entrance to his manor and farther away from Rin, towards the gate and the open road and field on the opposite side, where no one would be in the path of Tokijin's destruction. "Come now, little brother, surely you can do better than that."
"I'll gut you for what you did to Kagome, you monster!" His downward stroke cracks a hole in the earth that splinters off in a dozen directions.
Sesshomaru jumps back a few more paces until he is sure Jaken will be able to move Rin to safety without fear of being caught in the crosshairs. "I assure you, she enjoyed every minute of it."
His scream is pure, inarticulate rage and he springs forward with a flurry of motion, and it is only by a small piece of luck that Sesshomaru manages to bring his own blade up to block the swing towards his face. He leans back, head tilting to the side in order to take in a wider area. He had not anticipated how much he might be at a disadvantage with his field of vision at fifty percent. He has not been in a battle in many months, but refuses to let Inuyasha sense his advantage.
He pushes his brother's blade off of him with a surge of youkai strength, still the master here in this land. While in the past Inuyasha would have slid back a dozen meters at that force, this time he only stumbled backwards a few feet. A slight frown mars Sesshomaru's features. It is possible that, as the time to his name day draws near, more of their father's power was transferring to his brother, who might not have noticed due to his great, personal quest to never return to the lands of the west.
Well, no matter. He adjusts his grip, shifts his stance. All he must do is end this battle quickly, before Inuyasha discovered either of those things.
"No pretty demoness want you with that ugly mug of yours, Sesshomaru?" He swings Tetsaiga in an easy motion, unleashing a cutting wind that Sesshomaru leaps high to avoid. "Just had to take advantage of Kagome to get your rocks off."
Sesshomaru growled, his own eyes bleeding red, at the slight to Kagome. "Unlike you, she is the first and foremost woman in this Sesshomaru's life."
Surprisingly, this doesn't elicit a snarling comeback, but an eye roll. "Not you, too. Why don't you just take your thoughts about Kikyo… and shove them up your ass!" He jumps high, holding their father's blade back over his head to come down in an ax-like blow. Sesshomaru raises a high guard, but at the last second, Inuyasha shifts his grip and, gripping Tetsaiga only in his left hand, lets it zing down beside his brother, missing him by inches. Before he can anticipate what that means, there's a stinging pain across his cheek as Inuyasha slashes his claws across his face. He had irrationally assumed that Inuyasha would not notice his deteriorating vision, thus making his blind spot a moot point.
A foolish wish, he mulled over as blood dripped into his blind eye and down his cheek, dripping onto the dusty ground like red rain. "Very clever, little brother."
Inuyasha straightened, holding his bloodied claws cocked in front of him. "It's a shame I didn't rip your throat out."
"Stop it you two!"
Without need for conscious thought, his head swivels in her direction. He has a split second where he sees her climbing impetuously over the mangled gate and trying to make her way towards them, before he realizes that, by turning his head, he had left his brother in his empty field of vision. There isn't even time to snap back to him before he is tackled by a brunt force around his middle and sent sprawling to the ground. Tokijin goes sprawling from shocked fingers and goes skittering across the ground.
"I'm going to take her away from you," his brother growls in his ear.
He is not the kind of fighter built for scrappy, in-you-face, wrestling. He is not used to teeth snapping at his face in such close quarters, the underhandedness of someone wrenching his hair back in order to swipe claws at his exposed throat, knees to his gut, or a hard forehead smashing into his own. But he does not want Kagome to come any closer to this. Feels a prehistoric anger surge through him at the thought of another male taking his woman away from him. And he knows that he cannot let that happen. So he lets his claws drip with acid and swipes them back just as unforgivingly, gets his teeth around a twitching ear and clamps down.
Inuyasha howls in pain and he feels a split second of victory before he's punch with every ounce of his brother's strength on the already injured side of his face. His vision goes black and pinpricks of white dot across his vision. When his eyesight clears, he looks up to see Inuyasha standing in front of where he is sprawled across the dirt, Tetsaiga heaved up and resting on his shoulder. There is no more red in his eyes, but he looks ragged with rage and confusion and a primal need to solve a problem he had presented itself with violence.
"You're dead meat, Sesshomaru." And he swings Tetsaiga downward.
"Inuyasha, sit!"
He had already been making a move to attempt to dodge the killing blow, but at Kagome's shout, he redoubled his efforts. Putting on a burst of speed, he barely made it out of the way of his younger brother slamming face first into the ground, leaving a crater in the dirt. Amidst the dust cloud, another body slams into him. For a moment, he tenses, but the scent of lavender makes him grip them tighter to him as he recognizes who it is. "You crazy girl," he says as he grasps her to him tightly and presses his face to her hair. There's a thud of something heavy hitting the ground and he realizes she has brought Tokijin to him. How she had even managed to touch it was surprising. "You should not be out here."
"Kagome!" A silhouette in the dust struggles to his feet. He steadies himself as the dust clears. When his eyes fall on the two of them, holding ear other tightly, he scowls. It only deepens further when a bubble of spiritual energy appears around them.
Sesshomaru glances down at Kagome. While she was obviously the cause of the barrier, there had been no flicker of movement from her, no motion to suggest her erecting it. It had been seamless. And, even though he was a full demon, he felt no repulsion from the spiritual power pulsing around him. It felt familiar and dear. It felt like home.
"Inuyasha," she says, pulling away from Sesshomaru and standing. Inuyasha is on the other side of the barrier, his eyes roving over her for wounds. When he finds none, no obvious signs of neglect or injury or harm, they slide back up to her with confusion swirling in their depths. Sesshomaru is silent, letting them speak, as he, too stands and catches his breath, sheathing his blade. "Inuyasha," she says again, her voice sad. "Please don't do this, you're better than this."
"But he took you away from me."
"Nobody took me, sweetie, I came here because I wanted to. And I stayed because I wanted to."
His ears flick backwards. "You left me."
"I didn't leave you and I was going to come back. We still have jewel shards to find. And I would never abandon Miroku or Sango or Shippo." Her voice softens. "I would never abandon you. I love you." A frisson of fear shoots through Sesshomaru's spine before he hears her continue. "I love all of you. You're my family." The barrier flickers and drops down around them like a curtain falling. Sesshomaru feels a thrill of alarm and takes a step forward. "Please don't do this, don't be like this, don't ruin this for."
Inuyasha, who until that moment had been slowly softening, his muscles relaxing, caught sight of Sesshomaru reaching out to place a gentle hand on her elbow. She doesn't resist, just leans back into him. At that, his expression sours, and expression wrenches his features that Sesshomaru cannot quite pinpoint. Regret? Longing? Despair? Perhaps a mixture of all three. "No." He steps back, swings Tetsaiga around to point in front of him, at Sesshomaru's face visible over Kagome's head. "No, I'm taking you home."
"Inuyasha- "
Sesshomaru stills her with a hand on her shoulder. "Please get out of the way of the battle, Kagome." She turns to him and, when her expression flickers over the injury on his face, he knows she is thinking of his disadvantage and of the possible ways that Inuyasha might use it to his advantage and how he might lose. His expression softens and he finds he doesn't even care if Inuyasha sees. "This Sesshomaru shall be fine." He places his hand against her cheek and she tilts her head into the feeling. Inuyasha growls behind them, but does nothing. "I find it helps having something to protect."
Then he steps back, pushing her gently back towards the house, hoping she goes back to the safety of the manor. "But now I must finish this." He turns to his brother, drawing his sword. "We must finish this."
And he lunges forward.