Tidings by Azure

Tidings

Hey guys! 

I wanted to write something a little heart-wrenching, not sure why but I was in one of those moods. Let me know if I made you cry while reading it! *hands out tissues*

XOXOX

Kagome blew an errant curl of ebony hair out of her face as she struggled to wrap her present for her fiancé. It was a pocket watch she’d saved up for months to buy and now, on Christmas eve, she was finally wrapping it. She’d had to polish it after all the hours she’d spent holding it up to the firelight to make it shine like her Sesshoumaru’s hair.

Finally she set the wrapped gift under the tree, admiring the way the gold wrapping paper caught the light. It was by far the prettiest present she’d wrapped so far… not that that was saying much, the bow was lopsided and the edges not as cleanly pressed as the presents her mother had wrapped but it was hers.

“I dream of none but you.” She whispered, echoing the inscription that was on the inside of her engagement ring and the inside of the pocket watch.

She set about cleaning the scraps of paper and tinsel strewn about the room, humming a Christmas love song and occasionally getting side-tracked as different things reminded her of her missing lover. The silver tinsel reminded her of his hair, the golden light of the fire reminded her of his eyes, the delicate glass bird he’d given her to put on the tree reminded her of his soft side, the absurdly tall Christmas tree itself reminded her of his imposing figure… if she looked hard enough she could find something in everything that reminded her of Sesshoumaru.

A knock at the door drew her out of her thoughts and she felt a thrill run through her heart. Sesshoumaru had mentioned nothing about making it home for Christmas but in her secret heart she’d hoped he’d come. Before she even realized she was moving she was frolicking across the floor in her sock-clad feet and throwing open the door with shaking hands.

Silver hair and golden eyes made her world complete for a moment before she realized that the eyes were too rounded and the face they were set in too boyish to be Sesshoumaru.

“I-Inuyasha?” She looked around him, like he was somehow hiding the taller form of his older brother in the snow-blurred lane behind him.

There was another man in uniform next to her childhood friend, from Sesshoumaru’s letters and the picture he’d sent of him with his platoon in a foreign meadow she could make a good guess at who it was.

“Would you be Miroku-san?” She smiled and stepped back from the doorway. “Please come in where it’s warm.”

“Thank you Higurashi-sama.” The man with the haunted violet eyes bowed deeply before following Inuyasha over the threshold. “You are even more beautiful than your picture.”

Kagome arched an eyebrow and smiled. “And you are just as much of a flirt as Sesshoumaru described… is he with you? Or maybe back at the base?”

Immediately at her words the color drained from both men’s faces and Kagome felt a ball of dread tighten in her stomach.

“Inuyasha?” She kept her smile firmly in place and turned to her friend. “Where is he?”

“Kagome… I…” He pulled an envelope from his pocket and handed it to her.

She immediately recognized the heavily slanted writing on the front as Sesshoumaru’s penmanship and rubbed her thumb over her name printed with the confidence that he applied to everything he did. When they’d first met in high school his confidence and arrogance had been off-putting and they’d quarreled immediately.

But as the president of the student council he’d had to spend a lot of time working with her as the vice-president and when he graduated, president in his place. Love had never been part of the plan but when he’d kissed her in the middle of the fabricated wonderland she’d put together for the winter dance it was like the center of her universe shifted.

That had been five years previous and for three of those years they’d been inseparable. War had drawn them apart but brought them even closer through letters. As Sesshoumaru rose through the ranks with the same effortless grace as he did all things Kagome worked two jobs to save enough money to buy their first house when he came home.

“You came all this way to give me a letter?” She turned sincere blue eyes up to Inuyasha and he flinched as though her gaze burned him.

“And… these…” He haltingly drew a long silver chain from his pocket that clinked cheerfully in a horrible parody of the abject atmosphere in the room.

Numbly Kagome accepted the dog tags, her hands going on auto-pilot as her brain shut down. Sesshoumaru’s name was inscribed on them and she sank to her knees in the entryway of her home.

“No.” Her voice was faint in comparison to the ear-splitting screaming of her heart.

“Kagome… I’m so sorry.” Inuyasha clenched his hands and looked at the ground, unable to meet her eyes.

It wasn’t possible. Her fearless Sesshoumaru, who seemed invincible. In his arms she had pretended that no force on earth could tear them apart.

The future she’d been building crumbled around her and she stared at her hands, one holding the last letter Sesshoumaru had ever written her and one holding his dog tags. She couldn’t help but wonder if the gods were conspiring to destroy her heart. First her father died in the war, and now the love of her life.

Sparkling drops of light made the tags in her hand glisten and it took her a moment to realize they were tears, her tears.

Numbly she opened the letter, blocking out the rest of the world as she unfolded the paper with shaking hands and clung to the last thoughts of the love of her life, heavy with the weight of her broken heart.

 

INUYASHA © Rumiko Takahashi/Shogakukan • Yomiuri TV • Sunrise 2000
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