Stillness of the Passing Breeze by Lillian

Stillness of the Passing Breeze

Disclaimer: I hereby disclaim and do forever disclaim any possibility of owning Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha.

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She had never really thought this would happen to her, and the flashing lights and yells of, “Higurashi-san! Over here!” threatened to shut her down. Kagome still hadn’t gotten used to the noise and hectic pace of city life, especially after she had relocated to the countryside to get away from it all.

“Higurashi-san, how do you feel about your best selling manga being turned into an anime?”

“Higurashi-san, how does it feel to be nominated for the most prestigious award allowed to mangakas?"

“Higurashi-san! Higurashi-san!”

Letting her hair shield her face, she simply moved through the crowd, making no reply at all.

This explosion of fame had never been what she had aimed for.

~~~~~~~~

They had found her, speechless, bloody, and broken on the dirt floor of the well, her legs curled under her, black hair snarled and streaked with some type of goo from a youkai. Of course, Mama had clucked all over her, tending to her minor wounds and tenderly washing all the blood and ichor from her skin.

She stood in front of her daughter, looking into cerulean eyes as blank as the cloudless sky. “Kagome, dear, do you want to talk about it?”

A quick shake of her head was all the reply Aiko received before Kagome slowly put one foot in front of the other and made her way laboriously up the stairs, where she flopped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling, ignoring the lone tear that streaked down her cheek.



In the end, it was a kind old man with a penchant for seeing too much that saved her--not Jiji, though he was good to her--while she was wandering through life with no purpose. He stopped her on the street as she made her way back to the shrine, where she would look at Goshinboku with eyes that reflected the burden that weighed her down, and simply handed her a package. “You look like you need these more than my granddaughter does,” he said, pushing her gently on her way before turning and disappearing down the down.

Kagome looked at the package, wrapped in plain brown paper with twined as a bow, in her hands, and shrugged. She put it in her school satchel before continuing down the road.
It remained unopened.


Wind howled outside as rain hit the windows and roof in an imitation of a thousand angry stomps. The sound of a tap turning and water flowing interrupted the screams of mother nature, and a small splash indicated the beginning of a long soak.

Or, what one would think indicated the beginning of a long soak.

Kagome looked at the note carefully placed on the floor next to her and looked down at the blurry image of her body, halfway submersed in the deep tub.

It wouldn’t take long--probably a minute, a minute and a half. All she had to do was submerge herself, open her mouth, and breathe. She knew she could override her body’s survival instinct; her mind, along with her heart, was convinced this was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

She took a deep breathe, slid down even further, and let her head slide under the surface.

Eyes open, she looked at the ceiling through a curtain of water, thinking of them, thinking of him. Kagome blinked once, slowly, and opened her mouth. Warm water rushed in, and she knew she was one step closer to where she belonged.

She went to take a breathe, prepared for the feeling, but found she couldn’t do it. Steeling herself, Kagome waited, letting the gentle slide of the water against her body calm her into tranquility.

Detached from what was happening, she almost watched herself from above as she took a deep breath of water, watching as she choked and gasped, jackknifing out of the water and taking sobbing gulps of air.

Kagome tried to submerge herself again, but her body wouldn’t let her do it, wouldn’t let her kill herself in the violent way she planned, the suffering way that she wanted.

A raw scream, low and hoarse, erupted from her, and she pounded the lip of the tub violently until her hands bruised and she collapsed.

Later that night, her suicide note was thrown out the window, ink smearing and fading as rain destroyed all evidence of her attempt to ease her misery.

And still, when asked about her hands, Kagome did not say.

The next day, she opened the package.


Markers, pencils, toners, books for the aspiring mangaka. Kagome stared the pile of supplies on her desk apathetically and thought about where the nearest charity was. It was a fortune in items, but she didn’t know the first thing about drawing or writing or putting panels together. She had missed that part of childhood.

Her throat closed at the thought of what she had been doing instead of reading manga, agonizing over boys, and attending school.

Shippou had liked to draw.

Kagome reached for the ‘how to’ book, flipping for the first page.

At first her drawings barely resembled anything, looking suspiciously like circles with two dots and a smile, along with an oblong body and strangely shaped limbs. An octopus perhaps, if she tilted her head just so.

She worked at it, though, and she improved by leaps and bounds--small ones, but leaps and bounds nonetheless.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was inking and panelling, her fingers movings swiftly and nimbly to tell a story she knew by heart. Goshinboku took shape, leaves fluttering, limbs creaking every now and then, and then he came. She stopped when she finished, fingers caressing the image of his face as he lay pinned to the tree.

It moved faster then. Kaede flew by; the jewel shattered under her inexpert firing of an arrow; the hunt began as a tentative relationship formed.

Fingers trembled as she slowed to a stop, her hand gracefully making lines to form a small, childishly round face with a bow on his head.

She put her head in her hands, shoulders shaking, not caring that black streaks of ink transferred to her face, looking suspiciously like streaks tears would leave.

Anguish was shelved, and she moved on again. Days passed as she worked fervently to get the story out, to tell it all.

One figure remained conspicuously absent--Tetsaiga had been found and pulled out by Inuyasha, the quest resumed without issue.

She couldn’t do it. It would tear her soul in half before she saw his face again.


Her mother sent in a few panels for a contest without her knowing. It was the greatest kind of betrayal to see them splashed across the pages of a magazine, with the headline, “Rising star brings intrigue and history alive”. She had won it, and her personal story was out there for all to see and enjoy as a work of fiction.
The response to the spread was huge. The magazine called her and told her a company wanted to sign her as a professional. She took the news silently--something she always did these days--and accepted the offer, knowing the shrine needed the influx of cash and hoping that, if people loved her family like she did, their memories would live on after she too, passed away.

It would be her--their--legacy.


~~~~~

He had come for her.

It was the beginning of something tenuous, something new and utterly fragile like the first bloom of spring.

Her spirit bobbed aimlessly in the in-between that she had been sent to, fluttering back and forth in agitation.

“Miko.”

She, or the essence of her, turned to see him. Slowly, he held out his hand, and she floated towards him uncertainly.

“Be calm. I will not harm you.”

Kagome lit into his palm, settling gently, and his fingers curled around her, one stroking her gently.

“Do not worry. I will protect you.”

He strode out and back into the world.

~~~~~~

Hands smudged with black ink held the screens she had just finished, and she carefully put them in order before going to her closet, one she dedicated solely to her boxes of original pages. There was one shelf, though, in her workroom’s closet, that was dedicated to things not in her manga. Truthfully, it was dedicated to him .

A box of golden brown was pulled out, and a hand stroked the small crescent inlaid in the center before opening the lid. She looked down at the filled box, and his piercing eyes looked back at her before she placed the new pages over the old. Now all she had to look at was the waterfall of hair as he walked away with her soul in the palm of his hand.

Two fingers touched her lips and then the page, stilling for a moment before closing the lid.

Gone, but not forgotten.


There was a tree that looked a lot like Goshiboku by the front of her country house. Since she’d moved there with the money from her success, she’d leaned against it countless time, staring blankly up at the patches of sky filtering through the trees. Right now, red and orange leaves adorned the limbs, creating a gorgeous riot of color.

She could almost see it happening before her as it had those many years ago.

“You aren’t perfect, Sesshomaru, no matter what your name says about you!” He stood before her impassively, facial expression changing minutely as she yelled. “You can’t do that kind of thing. You can’t; I won’t allow it.”

Dangerously velvetly, he said, “Are you ordering me, miko?”

Her face twisted in fear and anguish. “I’m not afraid to do so, Sesshomaru! I know you won’t kill me.”

A silver brow arched imperiously. “Do you?” His fingers caressed the hilt of Tokijin.

“Of course.”

“I could kill you, miko, for the impudence you’re showing. You mean nothing to me.” They both knew he lied. “Just a pathetic ningen.”

She flew at him in a rage, beating against his chest. He allowed her to rage. “You idiot! You stupid, stupid youkai! You could have died!”

Gentle hands came up to grasp her shoulders, and she wilted then, head leaning against his chest as she sobbed and he offered wordless comfort.


She touched her shoulders where he had placed his hands and kept them there, hugging herself and wishing it was him, wishing he wasn’t gone, wishing she was with him.


When she saw him on her way to her editor’s office--and she knew it was him, it had to be---she ran into a pole straight on because she was so busy gawking at him.

“Miss, are you alright?”

A man kindly helped her up, and she nodded her thanks, craning her head to see if he was still there.

He wasn’t.

He wasn’t, because he was dead.

Dead, all because of her.


Saya-chan was out of her chair in a second when she saw Kagome standing pale-faced in her doorway. “Kagome-san, are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Kagome shrugged and sat down, pulling out her notepad to take notes on and her latest chapter for Saya to look over.

Saya looked over the panels, hmming and nodding in approval every now and then.

“This is quality work as always, Kagome.” The artist smiled slightly in response, tucking a strand of glossy black hair behind her ear. “It’s quality work, but I’ve got a suggestion for you.”

She quirked a brow and waited for it. Sometimes Saya’s suggestions were quite funny, considering Kagome already knew what was going to happen next in the manga.

“How about a love interest for the main character, Kasuka? We all know that Inuyasha is supposed to be her love interest, sort of,” Saya smiled wryly, “but it’s not happening because of Kikyou and his past and their current entanglement. What’s going to happen to Kasuka? Is she ever going to find love? The readers are dying for something good to happen to her--she’s so brave and everything, but she’s just not getting what she deserves.” Saya sat back in her chair. “So I thought a love interest. Maybe something juicy, like Inuyasha’s biggest rival from his past, who comes and tries to steal her away.”

It all hit too close to home for her. What Saya was suggesting, she couldn’t do. She couldn’t share him, couldn’t let them know about him. Kagome had shared everything else about her life, but not him. Not Sesshomaru.

Kaogme quickly gathered everything up and left, feeling the tears prickling in her eyes as she fled the building, ignoring Saya’s calls of, “Kagome? Kagome!”


The next time she saw him was as she lounged under the boughs of her pretend Goshinboku, inking her panels. The sun shone down on her, and for once, she was relaxed and kind of dozing as she let the sound of nature lull her.

There was a flash across the sky, like a lightning bolt of a sort, but she recognized it. She recognized it immediately. His youkai was unmistakable to her.

Yet, when she sent out questioning tendrils of her reiki, nothing was there. Nothing at all.

~~~~~

It was her selfishness that failed them all in that final battle with Naraku. Everything was going well: they were winning a decisive victory, especially with Sesshomaru fighting alongside them.

She saw a tentacle arcing towards her mate-to-be, and knew that, even though she had been told time and again to not get in Naraku’s reach, she couldn’t let him die. Silently, she sprinted to shield him with her body (a gut reaction) as he fought two of Naraku’s minions and fended off tentacles from the front.

It was surprisingly painless, the entry and exit of the tentacle through her chest. Perhaps it was because she knew that she had done it to save him, the only one she could not live without, perhaps it was because she knew it was right--but either way, Kagome died with a smile on her face as Sesshomaru roared at her not to die and Naraku cackled with glee at his turn of good fortune.

When she realized she was alive (it seemed only a moment had passed), the field was quiet. Everyone but her and Sesshomaru had vanished, gone to someplace else to fight, maybe, and she raised a trembling hand to his bloody face, looking at the holes in his body that made him look like a sorry impersonation of swiss cheese.

Tensaiga lay next to him in his grasp, and she knew, knew that he had died while resurrecting her. Her jewel shards were gone; so were her friends and Naraku to Kami knows where; her mate was dead.

Kagome was seized with a wild grief, and grabbed Tensaiga as the nearest weapon of choice. She lay on top of Sesshomaru’s battered body, face to face, and plunged the blunt tip of the sword into her body and out of it, feeling it slide into Sesshomaru’s. “I wish for you to live, but if you can’t, I will go with you.”

Tensaiga did not kill her. She lay there, hoping against hope that it would, knowing that if it hadn’t yet killed her because of its entry into her body, it wouldn’t kill her after she pulled it out.

When Kagome opened her eyes after crying herself to sleep over his body, she found herself in the bottom of the well in her era, not even a scar to evidence her attempt to stay with Sesshomaru.


~~~~~

Though she had realized he was alive and searched desperately to find him, it never struck her that he might not want anything to do with her.

Now, face to face because of some strange circumstance of fate that caused him to be on the street in front of her house, she realized that her Sesshomaru was no longer present in the cold, hard face of the man in front of her.

Voice cracked and hoarse with disuse, she said, “I am sorry.”

“For?” He looked like he couldn’t care less, but asked the question nonetheless.

“Getting you killed with my stupidity. It was my fault--I just--I couldn’t let--Naraku, he--” Kagome fumbled with her words, unable to adequately convey her feelings and thoughts to him.

His face shuttered even further, if that was possible. “That is what you apologize for?” His tone was scathing, and Kagome scrambled to think of what else she had done wrong.

“I’m sorry for trying to kill myself to be with you?” She offered it up.

Golden eyes went blank with surprise and shock. “You what?”

Kagome nodded. “Twice. Once, when I awoke after you resurrected me with Tensaiga--I thrust it through me and into you, trying to go be with you in the afterlife--and the second a few years ago when I couldn’t bear living without you any longer.” She shrugged. “Apparently drowning isn’t the easiest thing to do.”

His jaw clenched and unclenched. “You idiot woman! You do not apologize for leaving me to spend my life alone, and attempt to kill yourself in the process of trying to get...to me?”

“You died. When I woke up, you were dead beside me. Once together, never apart,” she said, quoting part of their pact to each other. “I was determined to follow through with it, especially since my shards were gone and so was everyone else.” Her voice softened. “I suppose they died...”

This time he strode forwards and shook her shoulders. “They were not dead! They were in search to see why you had not awoken after I passed Tensaiga over you. I had died defending you and killing Naraku. Since you were not yet revitalized when Naraku was defeated, they took the shards to protect them and then embarked on a journey to cure you. Inuyasha ended up using the wish and brought you back to life, at which point you did your suicide attempt and cleaved us together. You mated us with the exchange of blood and act of sacrifice. I lived because of that bond--my heart was not quite yet stopped, but I swear it did when you disappeared.”

He continued, “You left me alone and vulnerable to go chase something else in your time--this time. You left my vows and left me, so now that you have relocated me, why should not do the same?”

It was al a misunderstanding. “I didn’t leave you in purpose! I was transported back without my own free will. I would have stayed with you, would have lived there just to be close to your spirit. I did not forget you.”

“Then why does your manga lack me?”

The dam burst. “Because you’re mine! You’re nobody else’s, mine and mine alone. I will not share even your memory with anyone, because they do not deserve to look upon your face.

He scoffed at her grandiose proclamation. “Prove it.”

Kagome grabbed his hand and dragged him into her house, whereupon she showed him her trove of inked frames. “I made you over and over. I dream about you. I think about you when I walk, when I eat, when I sleep, when I breathe.

He gentled because of the anguish in her voice, and could not keep his confession from her, either. “You never left my heart, not my head.”

~~~~~

“Miss Higurashi, how do you feel about Inuyasha being turned into an anime, complete with new character Sesshomaru and his surprising involvement edited in there as if it happened chronologically instead of flashbacks?” the interviewer asked.

“Excited,” she said enthusiastically, liking her first vocal performance to an interviewer.

Sesshomaru rumbled beside her, and she kissed his cheek. “Not as excited as I am about marrying this lug over here, though.”

The man scribbled excitedly in his notepad. “Congratulations, Higurashi-san! Is this formal news?”

Kagome bowed her head, hiding her face behind her curtain of hair, and refused to answer.

It was Sesshomaru who did. “Yes.”