Forget Me Not by The Talentless Hack
Forget Me Not
A/N: This…wasn’t actually supposed to be my first Dokuga offering. But impatience with myself has won out, and this is actually ready for “publication,” as it were. It was supposed to be a companion piece to an Inuyasha fic I did years and years ago, but I’ve since decided that this fits into a different universe than that fic. So I have dusted her off, and set her out into the world. Treat my poor idiot child gently.
Disclaimer: Not mine, not now, not ever.
Forget Me Not
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
He hated her most when he missed her most, and he missed and hated her most when he stood in the Moon Garden.
It was an affliction, Sesshoumaru decided as he stood alone in the center of what had once been one of the most beautiful gardens in Japan. He hated her with a passion unequalled by even his odium of Inuyasha…but gods above, some days it was difficult to face the day, knowing she wasn’t curled up in his futon, sleeping late.
Taking the miko for his mate had been a spectacular failure, all in all, a fantastic mistake. That was his fault. And what’s more, he had known from the start that it would end badly—it had to end badly. They were beings at opposite ends of the spectrum, creatures at the absolute extremes of what was good and what was not. She was a child of light; he was darkness incarnate. It was an impossible thing they had endeavored, however accidental the attempt.
Still. Telling oneself this did not change the fact that one was alone again. And standing in the ruined Moon Garden, Sesshoumaru reflected that even when Inuyasha and Rin had died so suddenly, one after the other, he had not felt as alone in the world as he did at this moment. Because his companion was still alive, somewhere out there. And why that should be so much worse than the absolute end that was death was something he still didn’t understand even ten years later.
He also didn’t understand why he’d felt each one of those ten years. As youkai, time really had very little meaning for him. And as taiyoukai, well…time didn’t really exist as a tangible concept. It was just seasons passing by, one after the other after the other after the other, until it was time to start over again. It was the moon waxing and waning, forever and forever, in the night sky. It was the sun rising and setting every day. For Sesshoumaru, time just happened, and he just happened to stop long enough to take note of its passage every now and again.
He had sealed their bond, furious with her for her betrayal, but when he felt most alone, he sometimes toyed with the idea of unsealing it and letting her emotions flow over him, into him, through him. There had been a time when her emotions had annoyed and exasperated him. It was dark irony indeed that something that had so irritated him once should now be so very attractive.
He turned his gaze from the night sky to the desolate expanse of scorched earth all around him. He had torn the garden apart upon returning to his manor, so blind with rage that he had only wished to destroy the one thing in the whole place that meant the most to her, even if she wouldn’t ever see or know about it. He had used his poison claws on every delicate flower and tender stalk with brutal efficiency. And then, he’d turned to the cherry blossom trees, saving them for last because she had enjoyed them so much. He had reduced the beautiful, majestic arbors to bubbling piles of goo, and then he’d stalked into his palace and locked himself away in his study for several days, stewing in bitter solitude.
Ten years later, with the moonlight softly glowing over it, the garden looked as abandoned as he felt. Nothing had dared grow; not even a blade of grass had pushed through the abused dirt in the long, lonely decade since his rampage. For the first year after it, Sesshoumaru had felt idiotic for taking out his savage anger on the garden that had been a fixture in his ancestral home through several generations of inu. It had been a disgraceful lack of self-control, and it had made him hate her all the more for it, for having that power over him, a power he hadn’t even been aware of.
How had this all happened? How in the world had he found himself standing in the middle of a garden that bore more resemblance to a sad graveyard? He had been mulling over the answer for ten years now, and he was still no nearer to one than he’d been then.
But he did know one thing for sure: he should never have allowed her to become such an important part of his life. She had been so firmly entrenched in his day-to-day existence that the first year without her had filled him with a sort of despair he’d never encountered in all his many centuries. She was much more than his mate, she was his sole companion. She knew him as no one—no one—else did. Hell, she knew where he liked to be scratched; he hadn’t even known he’d enjoyed being scratched until she’d lightly dragged her nails over his abdomen over two centuries ago. She had become…gods above, she had become his friend. Yes, she was his consort; yes, she was his mate; but above all else she was his closest, only friend in the whole world, the only person on the whole planet who knew what he felt, and it hurt so fucking much that she wasn’t there anymore.
She knew the color of his pain, knew its flavor and how much he could hurt. She knew the darkness in his soul and the evil in his heart and she had still cried for him. Once upon a time, he would have sneered at the gesture, told her not to waste her stupid human sentimentalities on him, he didn’t need them. But she struck a cord in him, somewhere deep down inside of him, where his beast slept, and she soothed that beast and she soothed his soul…and he missed her so much somedays…
Sesshoumaru closed his eyes, ignoring the pang in his shriveled heart. It had started with Rin: she had slid into a barely perceptible fissure in the ice around his heart and melted a comfortable little spot to reside in. And then that foolish, stupid woman he’d made the mistake of claiming had tiptoed in and melted the rest of the ice away, a little every year, until he’d been forced to feel.
Stupid bitch, he thought bitterly. And I’m a bigger fool for letting you do it to me.
The demon lord opened his eyes and looked up at the moon as it hung serenely in the sky above him. It no longer brought him peace. He could blame her for that too: she had ruined his garden for him and she had ruined his only source of tranquility. Two for the price of one. And every time he looked up at the night sky, he was reminded of a human woman who smelled like sunlight on water, with huge blue-gray eyes and long nails and a warm, soft body and a healing presence. And every time the world was bathed in the soft glow of moonshine, he was reminded of a miko who fought like a youkai, with a ready smile and an annoyingly cheerful voice and a gentle touch and an irritating habit of crying when she was happy or sad. And every time he entered his chambers he caught a ghostly whiff of sunlight on water and the faint whisper of what once was that disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.
A memory of her came to him, unbidden:
“Sesshoumaru?” she asked, lifting her head from his shoulder to fix him with serious eyes.
He met her gaze.
“Will you remember me when I die?”
He’d gone rigid, his eyes widening ever so slightly. She still hadn’t been aware of The Bond, still didn’t know that she wouldn’t be dying until he did, and he had no intention of dying any time soon. She had watched him with wide, quiet eyes, curious eyes, eyes begging him for an answer that would make her feel better. He sat in silence for a moment, then quietly said,
“What a question.”
She couldn’t have known that Rin had asked him the same question. She couldn’t have known that it had surprised him as much then as it did now. And she couldn’t have known that he had, for a split second, felt an odd twinge in the area of his heart at the thought of her dying.
He couldn’t have forgotten her if he’d tried. So he hadn’t: sometimes, it was easier to just let Fate have its way rather than uselessly struggle against it, less painful to just lie there and watch yourself bleed out…simpler to just give up.
Sesshoumaru’s lips twitched into a sardonic, aching smile.
“How the mighty have fallen,” he murmured, and then he turned and walked out of the dark, gloomy garden, the silent testament to yet another failure, without looking back.