Here Comes the Rain by Aubrey Simone

Here Comes the Rain

I ache, and it is because she is gone.

Gone. Nothing but a memory now, as fleeting as the sakura in bloom, temporary, fragile, gone. And yet…

I cannot help but hope that she might rise, that she might breathe once more, might laugh once more, and might love once more.

A foolish sentiment, love. I have known this since the death of my father. I have watched it tear apart countless hearts, have seen it turn men into monsters and women into skeletons of themselves, and I had vowed to never allow it free reign in me.

But even one such as I could not be completely unmoved. And it was all because of her.

Her, who has lost her life to jealousy and hate.

I will not lie. Seeing her, so white, so dead, pains me. It pains me in a way I never thought it would, pains me so deeply that I am positive the agony was always there; always lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to make itself known. She had held it back, kept it dormant, and now…Now she is no more and the torment writhes like worms amongst the vessels of my flesh, seeping their poison of despair.

I know her murderers. I also know their motives, but the logical why did not eliminate the need for the emotional reasoning. Was the full blooded pup she bore not enough? Was my hanyou daughter too much of a disgrace to them, too large of a stain against her elder brother's purity? Or were they simply too old, too insipid, to realize her potential?

She'd donned her old school outfit, the one I'd abhorred with all my being, and I knew that she had done it to show me how far we'd walked since the first tentative threads of friendship had been woven into Fate's tapestry; the realization tears my control, chips away at it until it is ragged around the edges, the pieces of her that had held it in place falling away to fly on the breeze, a breeze that is pregnant with the coming of rain.

I move.

The agony of her murder weighs on my shoulders, drives my heels into the ground, but still I move, because I need.

My mind screams, anger and pain twisting and winding around each other until pain is anger and anger is pain and there is no way for me to break free of them.

And then she is in my arms again, lifeless and cold. It does not satisfy me, but I hold her nonetheless, knowing that, for a century, she was mine.

Is, I amend. She is mine. She will always be mine. She was timeless, after all, immune to the aging that took many humans' lives. Timeless, but not immortal.

"She was an abomination," comes the voice, from one of the elders who had watched me come home, knowing that they had killed her and thinking that they had succeeded in strengthening this House. "She put up a valiant fight at first, my lord," the rasping, confident tone continued, "though we'll never know why she insisted on wearing that whore's garb."

I didn't care what they knew. Her choice had been made for me, and they would never understand.

Her body is still soft; her scent still lingers, twining soothingly around my head. I nearly smile. Even in death, she seeks to comfort me, to assure me that all is well. "But," I want to say, "all is not well, because you are not here. You cannot look upon me with love in your eyes, cannot touch me and ease my hurt. No, koi, all is not well."

"Lord Sesshomaru, please. We must burn her."

There is the sound of a shuffling footstep, but I do not turn, do not move until the hand reaches out to touch me; the appendage is promptly removed, and I revel for a moment in the shocked gasps and the agonized scream. "The pain will soon fade, Kisuke," I pledge.

"M-my lord?"

"You will not have a head to register it." Silence meets my promise, and I am grateful, for I have not finished speaking. "Your and your families' lives are mine for your blasphemy; for every drop of her blood you have spilled, you shall pay in a hundredfold more of your own."

"My lord! Surely you realize that we were only ridding you of your weakness! We should not be punished—"

"You will not be punished," I interrupt, her hair brushing my chin as I speak. I keep my voice calm, keep the anger, the rage, from boiling over, and I know she would've been proud at my restraint. "To punish," I continue, "is to let live, and you shall not live past this day; that I swear."

They know that I do not lie, and the stench of fear momentarily taints her scent until a rain-thick gust of wind blows it away. The weight of my hair is lifted from the back of my neck, and I remember how she loved to brush the very same locks away to kiss the sensitive skin there; in that moment, I feel her mouth, hear her breathy laughter.

I recall her smile, her touch, her life, and I know: She will always be mine.

It is the final thought before I lay her down and slaughter her murderers and their families, sparing their females and their children only because it is what she would've wanted me to do. I chuckled darkly at the thought; even though she is gone, I do as she bid me to do, because she had done so much more for me than I could ever do for her.

She had eased me through the loss of Rin nearly fifty years before, and had adopted a human child to lessen the sting of my first child's death. She had birthed two strong pups, one of pure blood—a true gift from the kami—and another of mixed blood, no weaker than her brother and no less loved than Inuyasha in his final days.

It is not until they are all dead that I go back to her, and gather her in my arms once more. The storm brews, and for a while, I stare at the walls around me. Walls that she had helped rebuild after the fire five years previous, walls that she had wandered through when she was pregnant and restless, clinging to my arm for support.

Why? Why have they done this to me?

Why had the kami abandoned me so suddenly? Did I not visit their shrines enough? Did I not care for their miko in a satisfactory manner?

I knew not what I had done to deserve this fate, but as I stood in the wind and as the clouds gathered ever quicker above my head, I realized that I could not stand by and be dealt this hand. I had endured too much, had gone far too long without the contentment of love to give it up so easily.

You are gone now, koi, I think, cradling her head. But you will not be gone for long.

And I turn my gaze to the sky, gather the power I had inherited from my father and the determination I had learned from her, and shot into the clouds.

You will not be gone for long.

(((*)))

Author's Note: Alright, I know, I know. I should be working on The Twelfth Concubine, but I saw "Here Comes the Rain" by Sheridan, and I couldn't help but write this out; if you haven't seen the picture yet, here's the link: http://dokuga.com/gallery?func=detail&id=6184

Thanks for reading, and be sure to go show Sheridan some love for her awesome artwork!

~Aubrey