Forever is what you make it.
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There are a million great stories out there that deal with the agony of Sesshoumaru's immortality in relation to his developing attachment to humans. So I decided go this route and twist the clichés to my whim. It kinda came out of nowhere, so please review to tell me if it's successful (listening to the "Lost" soundtrack is making me melancholy. Weh!). Sometimes I reread it and it makes perfect sense, other times I make my own brain combust at its suckage. And it has nothing to do with the cult and all it's crazy kool-aid death parties, FYI!
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha, but I'm willing to rent. Who needs equity in this economy anyway?
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Ah, it's true.
When our ancestors spoke of heaven,
they were speaking of this moment.
When they went on about nirvana
they imagined a time like this.
When they sang of paradise,
it was this morning they imagined.
-from "Heaven's Gate" by Mark Belletini
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Every night she dreamt of her bedroom window.
Open or shut, it was a nightmare. No one waited on the other side. There was no white hair or red clothing. It kept her out. It kept her in.
It left her completely alone.
She knew there were scarier ways to be alone. Dying was the most prominent in her understanding, so she devoted her seclusion in the modern world to making sure others didn't suffer the same. She cloistered herself in the darkest, least populated portion of the university library to study while her friends made more friends, clogging the bars with their volume and vivacity and stepping over the homeless tucked into the hermetic hovels of dark tunnels and doorways. She dissected her schooling with practice and precision to make those forgotten feel whole.
In layman's terms, she became a doctor.
Well, not quite. Currently she was a resident, but soon she'd have the formal papers to begin her quest to piece together shards of other people's scattered hopes. She felt it was the only way to reclaim her own.
Things were hard in the ER. Accidents rushed in with graphic damage she hadn't even witnessed in the Sengoku Jidai. Sudden disease debilitated even the strongest individual. Violence made her struggle through wondering if everyone was worth saving. Every injury and illness tore her apart on the inside, made her heart bleed more than her patient, and yet her hands were always steady, her ears always listening, her head always clear enough to make her feet follow orders. She was good at what she did because she'd learned long ago to separate emotion from action in order to get the job done and save that person's life, or at least, to hold their hand and be their strength in death.
And it occurred to her the night they wheeled him in, with his body cut in half from what the police explained as a severe highway pile-up, who had inspired her to be that way.
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It had taken him a long time, but Sesshoumaru had finally learned his lesson.
He'd lived though his loss of Rin. His loss of others. The many years spent with nothing to lose. How his memories never left him alone. How he wished they would. How he'd become too crippled to let them go.
He mourned the vision of the woman with whom he'd barely spoke. The one he'd grown to admire but never had the courage to know. He shouldered the weary knowledge that there was no point to loving things that slipped through his life like water.
Humans were born with a compass in their hearts, always moving and changing, developing from modest streams into wide, raging rivers that reached the sea and blended into each other, losing their individuality, becoming whole and perfect and evaporating in the air only to be rained down again. He tired of being the stone at their source, of sending them off but never joining them. He resented their growth and his stagnance.
But then, in the midst of lifting a little boy from a raging housefire, he had an epiphany. He looked to his hands full of the child and imagined Tetsusaiga in his grasp. He looked behind him through the crumbling inferno to the boy's mother and imagined a princess sheltering a hanyou infant. He saw her hope, her naked love, and his perception shifted. His hands weren't his own. His soul shook in a different body, one he'd buried long ago.
He went back to that night he'd watched his father run to the flagrant fire, leading his own funeral procession, marching to his royal ascension, and Sesshoumaru found his own feet charting that same course.
The woman's face flashed in his eye, and he stumbled into the future where she waited to spring forth, floundering down the road to his freedom.
"Do you have something to protect?"
At once, Sesshoumaru found his reason to live.
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There was nothing she could do.
He was dying on the table and when she found the courage to tell him so the first thing he did was grab her hand. "I know why he died." He shared his secret. "I understand now."
"Who?"
"My father."
She braced her resolve against the threat of tears. "Why?"
"Because that was the only way he could protect her."
An epic explanation flashed through her head and she took small steps with careful words to make sure she followed him. "You mean...she would've died anyway, eventually, and his hanyou son, too, because his blood would outlive them. He didn't want to be left behind, did he?"
His eyes glistened. Time distended. Her mind tumbled down a tunnel of stone.
"How long have you been left behind, Sesshoumaru?"
He answered her with a gaze so penetrating she wondered if he'd absorbed Tenseiga's power, knowing it was the only way to revive her. Her heart leapt with what felt like it's first use since the well had closed.
He coughed out blood. "Forever."
She trembled as his grip tightened around her hand, his thumb ghosting across her knuckles.
"But you are here." His eyes shut as his mouth opened in a genuine smile. It was a glorious awakening and she suffered a moment outside herself. "I knew you would be here."
There was another moment, Kagome remembered, when they'd been alone together after one of the final battles. Everyone had been scattered, and thankfully Rin was safe near Inuyasha, but Kagome had been diverted far across the battlefield. He'd been thrown there beside her, pristine and solid, and they shed the weight of their quest with one shared look. A lifetime passed in his gaze, at least, her lifetime, and she was inundated with his loneliness even while she sat right next to him. It felt too much like time traveling. Transcendent. Jarring. Incomprehensible. Finite.
He knew this as much as she did, but in that floating frame of time he allowed her to see the forbidden wants he was never supposed to have. How his hand slipped along her arm. How his face hovered close and his breath healed her wounds. How he drew near but kept his distance. There was promise in his touch, but she was only allowed to commit it to memory. She knew that was all he could offer, so with a gracious, secret smile she dusted herself off, bowed her thanks and stood to walk away.
His eyes had followed her, but his feet stayed behind. She figured she'd never see him again, at least not anywhere that wasn't behind her eyes, but here he was with his life in her hands, bleeding out a confession that she was sure would never come and fading away with breathtaking abandon.
"How did you find me?" She wanted to know how he'd always managed to find her.
"I built your shrine...funded your scholarship." His breathing grew labored. "I brought you the victims, because I knew you would save them, somehow."
"Is that what you did today? Is that why they're all here?"
The doors broke open with a glut of gurneys, more casualties from the highway accident. A little boy wailed past their room and she caught a glimpse of his left arm dangling from the shoulder.
"I can't save everybody." She swallowed. "You have too much faith in me."
"No I don't." His expression blinded her under the fluorescent light.
"What if I fail?"
"Do not worry," he wheezed, his voice bubbling with blood and dripping away the seconds. His eyes closed again, shutting the gate to his soul, and she shivered, feeling his spirit spool away. "I will always protect you."
Chaos reigned around them, but she grew dizzy in the wake of his silence. The doctor recorded his time of death, and she draped the blanket over his peaceful face.
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That night she dreamt of her bedroom window.
She walked up and placed her hand on the windowpane, expecting the frost that normally bit her fingertips, but it was warm. She looked out, expecting to see a vacant tree, or the blue-black darkness, the chill of loss.
But there was a golden glimmer beyond the glass.
A man sat in the boughs of the tree.
The vision of him was foggy and transparent, made of ether it seemed, but his eyes were solid with a promise kept. They fell upon her, releasing the window's latch, and with a lucid gasp she cried her freedom.
White hair. Red clothes. Or at least, the blossoms on the lapel. It was enough.
It was everything.
His hand extended and she knew he'd wait. He was patient, calm, and finally immortalized in the way he deserved.
"When did you get there?" she asked. "Is that where you've been all along?"
His face softened and she awoke as the warm sunrise streamed through her window. She was finally rested, finally alive.
At once, she knew she had a place to come home to.
Kagome breathed her first.
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