Moonlit Nights by EtherealCrescent

Dark Smiles

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or its characters. They are the sole property of Takahashi Rumiko.

Moonlit Nights

Chapter 1: Dark Smiles

...O...

He sometimes smiled at her…

So infrequently that she forgot what they were like long before being graced with the next.

Only late in the night when slumber had nearly burrowed its way into her mind and the moonlight had drowned out the landscape did he indulge her in these moments.

She sometimes wondered if he meant for her to believe she was dreaming.

She sometimes wondered if she was dreaming.

Very few were blessed or perhaps cursed enough to see that peculiar expression carved into the features that made up his face.

The corners of his mouth would be forced up so unnaturally that the sight would be both blissful and dreadful; leaving her throat dry as the pattern of her throbbing heartbeat frantically crafted itself into some facade of a love song.

She reveled that he would do something so unnatural for her or in her presence.

She reveled that he could smile.

Her soul ached when the beautiful horror of those dark smiles left her memory.

Forgetting left her cold like him.

She'd been following him since her life had turned upside down, unconsciously drawn to his form… to his graceful movements.

Nothing and everything about him had guided her away from the sunlight that was so much like her and into the moonlight that was so much like him.

She would be fated to go nowhere for all eternity… if only the gods would grant her plea to follow him always…to allow her to tread in the indentations he left behind in the dirt, to be where he had been, to be with him, to be him.

He travelled aimlessly and for no real purpose.

No purpose that anyone else could see or hope for him to share… and no purpose that she would have cared about anyways.

His lidded sunlit eyes were the only reminder of the bright sunny life filled with laughter and joy that she had effortlessly chose to leave behind… and his long glowing hair, flawless ethereal skin, and regal yet delicate magenta markings; the only encouragement for her moonlit life to continue to exist at all.

She mused that the sun in his eyes seemed brighter than any sun she had ever known.

He was an angel…

A dark, horrible, beautiful, radiant angel.

She had long ago realized that the moon had come into existence to try and mimic the symbol that adorned his brow… and humorously to try to bathe everything around it in its white light as brightly and sometimes as bloody as he bathed everything that was around him.

He could not love.

A being such as he was too great for love…the damnable emotion that led others astray.

He went where he wanted and nothing could ever lead him anywhere.

Sesshomaru did not love her, she knew this.

He could not love her, she occasionally corrected herself.

But he could smile… infrequently

So Kagome smiled too and followed.