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Chapter Text

So you’re Inuyasha’s elder brother, Sesshoumaru.

The words dance across the skin of his palm when he comes of age. 

His mother takes one look at the letters and sneers. She does not speak for the rest of the night.

His father is not there to celebrate. 

For this he is glad, because he thinks they would come to blows for the slight.

His mother has no words to mark her, but his father does. The words had appeared shortly after Sesshoumaru’s conception, when the Dog General had been young and wild, when he hadn’t cared for such a thing as soulmates and destiny, had only cared for his own reputation. 

Sesshoumaru has never seen them for himself, but he assumes the words belong in the mouth of a human woman. 

And while he cannot fault his father for the unfortunate fate, he can blame him for the abomination he has sired. That the bastard’s name now mars his own skin.

Later, Sesshoumaru wanders out into the night and digs claws into his palm, smearing the words with acid and blood. They will return, he knows they always will, such is the curse of this sort of mark, but for now he will fight the urge to gnaw off the arm that bears the half-breed’s name.

When his father dies, he comes very close.

The hanyou lives. Sesshoumaru avoids it as long as he can, but curiosity and some misplaced sense of responsibility gets the best of him and he finds his feet moving through the rotten outskirts of a human settlement.

Sesshoumaru has never been prone to fear, but he feels a jolt of terror when the human woman looks up at him and says: “ You are his older brother, are you not?”

It takes him aback. But no, the words are not the same, the speech too proper for what his mark reads.

The boy stares up at him from behind his mother’s legs, golden eyed, and Sesshoumaru wonders―if the brat does live into adolescence―what sort of creature he’ll become to leave such a shadow hanging over his own fate. 

He forces those thoughts from his mind, and through grit teeth he merely warns them both and goes on his way, palm tingling.

Years later, when he hears the news of the hanyou’s sealing, he nearly breathes a sigh of relief.

He treats it like a blessing, and when fifty years comes and goes the letters on his palm become as innocuous as any of the other marks on his skin.

He cannot live in the shadow of someone who is for all purposes: dead, and he has no interest in finding a thing as preposterous as a soulmate. Not when he has already seen the aftermath of such a thing. He is not a being that will be beholden to something as ridiculous as destiny.

Sesshoumaru keeps walking, the words merely a black stain on his palm.

When he hears of the hanyou’s resurrection, that old familiar urge to gnaw off his arm returns. 

But as loathe as he is to tempt destiny, his ambition is too strong to be pushed aside for something so silly. He is determined to claim his birthright, the sword that could fell a thousand enemies. 

The irony is not lost on him, that he seeks the sword his father had created to protect a human woman. 

When Inuyasha severs his arm with that very sword, and the words that have plagued him for nearly a century are lost to the border between worlds, he almost thinks it’s poetic justice, and begrudgingly admits that its possible fate has a much more ironic sense of humor than he’d previously thought.

Still, the words may as well have been etched into his mind’s eye, because Sesshoumaru never forgets. They remain, hidden behind his eyelids, echoing in his head in a voice he can’t quite identify, a phantom sound… 

So you’re Inuyasha’s elder brother, Sesshoumaru.

So you’re Inuyasha’s elder brother...

So you’re… Sesshoumaru… 

He tries―and as expected, fails ―to find a replacement for his arm. The lack of it does not hinder him, he is powerful even one-handed, but he misses the weight. 

He remembers receiving the sword tied at his hip, how the extra weight had left him off balance for months. The lack of an arm has left him similarly bereft. If only for that, he rips limbs from whatever sizeable youkai he can find. 

Oni serve well enough for his human guise, the shape and function are much the same. The size and color is off, but at the very least they do not have the markings his own arm had, words included. 

But, limbs stolen from the corpses of weaker beings still cannot hold up to his power, wasting away at even an insignificant show of strength. Until― 

“Elder brother of that accursed Inuyasha, Sesshoumaru, are you not?”

He freezes, the words sinking in.

Close. But not quite.

The crouched figure, hiding in the foliage and draped in the pelt of a baboon, has an odd stink. Not quite youkai, not quite human. Like something unfinished, incomplete. The smells he can identify too weak, too overpowered by the mess of things that make up this being.

He comes to the word malodorous and responds in kind, asking what it is exactly the bastard wants. 

He is offered an arm. One similar enough to the one he’d lost in form and function, with the added benefit of a jewel shard for longevity. And human .

With such a thing he will surely be able to wield the Tessaiga. So he takes it.

Sesshoumaru does not miss the words that should be there. And when Inuyasha rips the hand off at the wrist he does not feel the pain. 

He does not lament the loss of the arm. Or the jewel shard it holds when he tosses it to the insects.

A woman?

Kagura has never been taught to read, but she recognizes the letters that mark the skin of her wrist. The knowledge is instinctual, the same as knowing how to walk, how to talk. Passed on by the multitude of youkai that make up her being. 

The words aren’t the only thing that mark her, she knows, but they are the strangest. There is a question there, not a statement, not a fact. She wonders what that means for her existence, and it is only after a mind numbingly boring day, locked away inside the castle of Kagewaki Hitomi that she finally musters up the courage to question it herself.

Unfortunately, the only person she can ask is also the only one she truly fears.

She sees his face when she does, and she only has a split second to prepare herself for the worst. 

Naraku is incredulous, anger flashing across his features as he rushes her, and for a brief moment she thinks he will lash out and strike her. He has hurt her before, and though he has never raised his own hand against her, she flinches away at the expected blow, but instead he just snatches her arm from where she’s clutched it against her chest.

He stares at the mark, mouthing the words as he reads them over. 

Kagura can do nothing but stand there, frozen.

“Has anyone said this to you?”

She shrugs as delicately as she can with her wrist in his grip. The question unnerves her. What difference would that make? “I don’t know. How am I supposed to remember everythin’ anyone has ever said to me?”

As close as he is, she can feel that oppressive weight that radiates off of him. After a moment, Naraku just scowls and tosses her arm away from him. Kagura almost stumbles, catches herself before she can make an impact with the wall beside her. She rubs at her wrist, soothing the skin, still tender from his grip. 

“It’s nothing,” he says as he sits back down, “it’s merely another mark. You belong to me, remember that.”

For some reason, Kagura has the feeling that that isn’t true, but she isn’t stupid enough to try pressing the matter.

She thinks about asking Kanna, or one of the humans that wander the halls of the castle. But she thinks better of it. Whatever it is, whatever it means, it seems she’s better off not knowing. 

A familiar smell reaches his nose as he returns to the little camp Rin has made. The girl is ever excited to see him, she welcomes him back with a shout and runs to greet them as he scans the trees for a voyeur.

He recognizes the smell― Naraku, his memory supplies the name―but it’s different, less offensive than he remembers. He orders Rin to stay still, and she does, freezing to the spot mid step as he leaps past her and slices through the trees, a show of strength and a test of his new blade. 

When the trees crash to the ground he realizes why the scent is so different.

“A woman…?”

She dodges his attack easily enough. He comments on the similarity of her scent before she can open her mouth and try to ply him like her predecessor. The smell may be different but he’s dealt with shapeshifters before, if this is the same creature then he will cut her down where she stands.

Red eyes shimmer with mirth and she smirks at him:

“ So you’re Inuyasha’s elder brother, Sesshoumaru.”

Something pinches deep in his chest. He no longer has the words to verify, but he is sure, the inflection, the rough speech―

“You’ve got a fine face.”

He’s so distracted, he almost misses her comment. She seems unphased. Too much. It’s possible that he is wrong, that he’s forgotten, so he tucks away his own words for later because surely if she’d recognized them they would be having a much different conversation.

She starts talking, and he almost misses her name― Kagura, the wind user―an offspring, an incarnation , of that Naraku that had tricked him before. The monster who’s fangs made up his sword was the same, she says, and when he asks if that’s why she’s here she just chuckles. She’s far from grieving for her murdered brother, it seems.    

And he knows he must be mistaken by the next words that leave her ruby painted lips:

“You’re strong, aren’t you?” she asks curiously, a slight tilt to her chin. “Maybe you could possibly… be strong enough to kill Naraku.”

It’s a statement, but he knows there is a question there. One she is afraid to ask him outright. She’s in the sky within the next breath, calling out to him that the sword is his, as if he hadn’t already known.

He watches her go until she’s no more than a flickering white spot amongst the stars. 

For the first time in a long time, he feels the phantom ache of his missing arm, of the words that hover unseen within his mind’s eye. Maybe he is wrong, maybe he’s forgotten… but the months since should not have affected his memory so badly.

He watches the sky for a while after she’s gone, feeling as if he is on the precipice of something― but by the time they stop to make camp for Rin’s sake , he has already hardened his resolve.

She cannot be.

He ignores the ache of his missing limb.

It’s only a few weeks later that they meet again.

Kagura comes to him on a moonless night, all arrogance topped off with a haughty smirk. Casual, she does not defer to him, her speech is still just as rough as the words inked into flesh that rots somewhere in hell.

“So you remembered me?” she asks when he says her name.

How could he forget when that phantom ache still pesters him...

She wants to bargain with him. She wants him to kill her master, and she offers two jewel shards as payment.

He’s been here before, with the very master she’d like him to kill. She wants him to free her from Naraku, but she has more in common with him than she’d like to think. Sesshoumaru realizes that he was without a doubt: wrong. That no one fated to be his would stoop so low or be so weak or cowardly to require someone else to do their dirty work for them. 

And he tells her so.

That sly smirk vanishes from her face, quickly replaced by seething fury―he feels it in the air when she hisses and spits at him, calls him a coward through bared teeth.

Sesshoumaru is so stunned by the outburst that he doesn’t have the time to respond before she is disappearing into the sky again, whisked away by the whipping winds, her muttered curses inaudible against the gust.

He blinks against the wind, watching her feather disappear all over again and all he can think is…

She’d called him a coward.

The chains sear her flesh. It will heal, she knows, because Naraku likes his toys pretty. 

But for now, the letters that adorn her wrist are nothing more than muddled lines in the burned and scarred skin. 

She wonders if they’ll return. She hopes they don’t. 

A woman?

Just another mark. To signify what she is. Where she belongs. 

Again, she wonders why it’s a question.

The next time they meet, she does not ask him to save her.

But she does point him in the right direction.

She escorts him to the gateway to the borderland. He goes because their interests have aligned, and now he wants Naraku dead for his own reasons. 

Kagura comes to him behind her master’s back, telling him of another way to the border, she says it’s dangerous. Fatal, even. But she doesn’t seem all that concerned for his safety and leads him when he tells her to.

He notices it, the tension in her. She has always been haughty, a smirk playing on her lips, a quirk to her brow that speaks to her confidence. But now… it seems bitter, forced, a poorly executed performance. She flies with urgency, her shoulders bunched, spine stiff. 

It sets him on edge. 

He has wholeheartedly decided that she is not his―well, his anything―but with all the time he’s spent devoted to that decision, he has constructed a very strict image of her in his mind. 

And the woman that flies before him now is not her.  

She leads him through the skies, to the cave where the gateway lies. She tells him that its very likely he will die, and doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

He thinks that's promising. As far as their relationship goes, at least. 

Sesshoumaru does not die, though, and while he flies through the mists of the borderland, he wonders if she’s relieved.

A few weeks after she sees those brilliant sparks of free thought flicker behind Kohaku’s eyes; she asks him. 

Naraku is a liar, manipulator, and she’s known this since the first day she opened her eyes in a slimy dungeon and he’d grinned at her and deemed himself her master. She knows that the words on her skin mean more than he wants her to know.

And Kohaku has them, too.

He keeps them hidden beneath the wrappings on his wrist or the leather of his armor, but she’s seen glimpses of them. He’s quick to hide them once he starts to remember.

“What does it mean? The words.”

She squats down beside him and he flinches. They’ve been left alone for once. No Naraku, no Hakudoushi, not even Kanna there to eavesdrop. Still, the boy has reason to be cautious.

Kohaku stares up at her for a moment, suspicious, but Kagura shoves her arm in front of his face. It takes his eyes a moment to focus on the letters. He squints at her wrist, mouthing them out slowly.

“It’s…” He bites his lip―a nervous habit he’d picked up ever since he’d gotten his memories back―and rubs at his own wrist. “It’s a soul mark.”

Kagura quirks a brow. “A what?”

“It helps you find your soulmate.”

She barks out a laugh before she can stop herself, but at the look on his face she sucks her lips between her teeth and covers her mouth with the tip of her fan. He looks hurt, and she knows she should feel bad but―he can’t be serious.

“It’s supposed to be the first thing they say to you.”

Kagura squints at her mark. If what the boy says is true, then no wonder Naraku had been so furious when she’d asked him.

“You have one.” He nods. “What does it say?”

He hesitates, but then reluctantly tugs at the wrapping around his wrist to show her.

“‘ Who’re you?’” She snorts. “That ain’t very helpful. How’re you supposed to find someone when the phrases are so vague?”

Kohaku covers the mark quickly and looks away. “...I already know who it is.”

“You do?” She blinks. That means he’s met them. Kohaku curls into himself, and Kagura remembers how young he is.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, bitterly. “It’s not… possible anymore.”

She wishes she had never asked, because that one little sentence hits her like she’s been doused with cold water.

Her breath catches. Kohaku is right. Things like soulmates, love― happy endings ―aren’t meant for them. The dead boy and the woman made from the flesh of a monster. He is destined to return to the earth, and Kagura… 

She doesn’t even have a beating heart to call her own. 

But the mark on her palm says otherwise. She has a soul, a heart, a life she could lead. And as silly as the notion sounds, that means that somewhere out there is someone meant for her. Only her. And that knowledge threatens to crush her heart quicker than Naraku ever could.

She might raize the mountain they stand on to rubble if she had any energy left to rage. Instead she sinks down beside him, feeling hollow, wishing she’d never asked―because the knowing just makes it hurt more. 

Freedom has always been nothing more than a nameless ideal, and while Kagura wants for nothing more, she has never thought about what it would really mean. What would she do, once she found herself unshackled? Fly across the world? Start her own reign of terror? She isn’t quite sure, but the mark on her arm has already made one choice for her, if only she’s destined to live that long.

Kagura watches the clouds drifting across the sky, her mind wandering, wondering what such a person would even be like…

A silhouette flickers before her mind’s eye, silver hair and golden eyes― 

She pushes the thought away as quickly as it appears, though she tries in vain to remember that first meeting… 

In her memory, she sees his lips move, but the words are inaudible, swept away by the wind.

When he pulls her from the river his curiosity gets the best of him, and he confirms what he already knows.

There is a gaping hole in her chest, blasted through an empty rib cage. But, there, on her wrist, etched into her flesh just as deeply as the spider shaped burn seared across her spine:

A woman?

The first words he’d spoken to her. 

He realizes that she must not have known. That in all their dealings, she has never once thrown fate or destiny or anything of the like in his face. Never tried to exploit him in the name of soulmates or love. 

Kagura has only ever offered him what she thinks he might benefit from: Jewel Shards, the gateway to the border between this world and the next, the fuyouheki. 

She’d called him a coward, once, but she has never expected him to be obligated to her. 

And for once, as he watches the hole in her torso patch itself back together, he almost wishes she had.

Kagura wakes, tells him the new information she has found. He finds himself reminding her― warning her―that no matter what she does Naraku is no fool; her machinations will only lead to her ruin. He sees it in her face, in the way her shoulders sink, that she knows the risk, but her resolve is too strong now. 

Sesshoumaru can see it, the future that lies before her.

As he watches her feather disappear into the sky, he wonders why that knowledge hurts.

In the hours before she dies―after she finds Kohaku and lets him go, a vain attempt at saving one of them, after Hakudoushi’s head vanishes into the monk’s fist, after the miko offers her a place amongst them and Kagura refuses because, how could she? After the sun setting behind the mountains blinds her, when all she can do is fly― She stares at the mark on her wrist again…

Would it have made a difference? If she’d found them? If she’d known?

If he had been―she destroys that thought before it can go too far. No use in falling too far into fantasy.  

She doesn’t remember all the things that have been said to her. Hard to, when so many of her first meetings have also been the last. It doesn’t bother her as much as it should, that its possible she’s already murdered them, used their corpse as a weapon and then left them to rot… Probably a kinder fate than whatever games Naraku would play to torture her. 

There is a small spark of hope, as the sun rises―maybe he’ll let her go, maybe she’ll live. Maybe the conversation that plays out on her skin hasn’t happened yet, maybe one day, she’ll awake, warm and safe, protected, and this will all be nothing more than a hazy memory… 

When she dies, he can do nothing but stand and watch.

Kagura smiles, and― 

It’s the first time he has ever felt like a failure.

Fate has a penchant for mocking him. 

In the wake of Kagura’s death, he gains all the things he thought he’d deserved, back before the words on his palm hadn’t had a voice to accompany them.

Strength, power, a birthright― 

Before that smile had been ripped away by the wind.

His arm is returned to him. 

Months ago he would have been pleased by this, but now he only finds himself lamenting its weight.

There are no tattoos marking his wrist. But there are words , and again he is tempted to gouge them from his skin, to throw the cursed thing back into the depths of the underworld.

But then there comes a breeze, soft, whispering between his fingers, tracing out the letters that mark him. Such a faint sensation, barely there, but when he looks up he sees the boy she gave her life for, and Sesshoumaru knows what he must do.

Naraku falls, but the persistent itch does not leave him.

He entrusts Rin to the old miko of Inuyasha’s village. He watches as she and Kohaku grow closer. Inevitable, given what the boy has already told him. Sesshoumaru is happy for them, proud even, knowing that Rin will have a husband who truly loves her.

But in his visits he sees his brother, too. The hanyou is withdrawn, anxious, always watching over the bone eater’s well.

For once, Sesshoumaru thinks they have something in common. 

And he almost envies his brother in this. The miko is gone, but from what he knows she is somewhere safe with her family, in a world it will take five hundred years to reach.

Better his woman lost to time than dead. 

Three years later he is slapped in the face with her return, whole and healthy and calling him “onii-san”. Sesshoumaru has never been the type to believe in fate, this once he truly sees the cruelty of his own.

He’d spent almost a century cursing his half-breed brother’s name branded onto his flesh, then for stealing the sword he’d thought was his birthright. Too preoccupied with the slight, he hadn’t bothered to think about the voice that would speak the words, the tragedy that would follow, how he would allow his own pride and ego to hold him immobile as Kagura’s life was cut short.

He’d known, despite his denial, and had done nothing by choice. 

She had come to him, looking to bargain with him for her freedom. And Sesshoumaru had given her nothing.

But Kagura…

Had given him more than she could have ever imagined.

Sesshoumaru is not one for guilt, but that persistent itch begins to encompass his every waking thought. It burns, eats away at him until he wants to cast his arm back into the depths of hell.

Sesshoumaru doesn’t believe much in his own fate. 

But he does believe in defying it.

As in all things, there is a cost.

A steep one, and Sesshoumaru will pay it, when the time comes.

But when he stands atop the mountain peak and lifts his hand to the sky, and hers reaches back…

He knows that it’s worth it.

Chapter Text

Kagura is not the same.

Her hand reaches for him, only to lash out when he pulls her out of the air. She thrashes and beats her fists against anything she can reach―his chest, his shoulder, his face―and he must restrain her until she calms. When she finally opens her eyes she looks up at him in dawning terror and then confusion and she doesn’t ask much―only a “what the fuck?” that she spits at him with a hoarse voice, but that is the worst of it. 

Sesshoumaru watches her quietly, relief warming his bones like nothing he’s ever felt. Kagura ignores him for the most part, once she gets over the shock of resurrection, of being in a flesh and blood body. She spends a long time just pulling air into her lungs, a hand over her heart and eyes closed… 

He isn’t sure what he’d expected. Gratitude? A joyful reunion like his brother had received? But he is not his brother and Kagura is nothing like his miko. She has always had a tendency to surprise him, and he’s chagrined to find that her resurrection is no different. 

But she is. Different. A fact they discover as she feels out her body and her senses. She grumbles while he waits, almost half expecting her to disappear in front of him again. The sun begins to set, and when he finally speaks to tell her they cannot remain on the mountain top forever she finds that she can no longer fly.

Oh, she certainly tries. He feels it when she calls the wind to her, but it isn’t enough to lift her into the sky. 

She hides whatever frustration she feels, swallows it down with a grimace, but then she stomps to the cliff’s edge on wobbling legs and peers over as if she means to go down on her own. 

He can’t help but feel a little insulted, that she thinks he would abandon her to climb down herself, but when he calls her name and offers her his arm it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time. Kagura blinks at him, glancing from his arm to his face, uncomprehending.

Sesshoumaru extends his arm further. Kagura’s brow furrows, but she reaches out a tentative hand and rests it on his wrist.

Her hand is warm― alive― but Sesshoumaru does not give in to the temptation of pulling her against his chest, of wrapping her in his arms, and instead uses the length of his fur to steady her as he lifts them both into the air. This way, he feels the warmth of her, but she has the freedom to move away if she chooses. Kagura holds herself stiffly, as she looks down at the world moving below them, but as the wind whips at her hair she digs her fingers into his fur and holds tight.

He delivers her to an old abandoned manor he’d chanced upon weeks ago, left by humans for being haunted, most likely. He sets them down in the courtyard and Kagura steps away from him without a second glance. 

“This isn’t yours, is it?” she asks, scoffing at the cobwebs and broken paper screens. He tells her that it isn’t, but it could be hers, if she’d like it.  

“Careful,” she chides as she steps up onto the veranda, “I might start to think you mean to keep me.”

Sesshoumaru doesn’t have a response for that. It isn’t his right to say so. 

She doesn’t say anything more, instead she goes and finds a dusty futon, tucked away in some rotted closet, probably crawling with bugs. She throws it down on the soft wood of the veranda a cloud of dust erupts from the cotton and sets her coughing and cursing, and when the dust settles she flops down onto it, which just sends up another cloud. Kagura ignores it, sniffs against the dust and curls into herself. She watches him through heavy lidded eyes, still just as fiery as the last time he’d seen them. 

He stays a while, until the stars are bright in the sky. Content only with the soft sound of Kagura’s breathing as she sleeps.

Her abilities never fully return. She is glad for her freedom, but she resents the circumstance.

She isn’t sure if this is a new body she inhabits, or the stitched together pieces of her old one, but the spider down her spine still remains. As do the words along her wrist. 

The warm summer months come and go as she settles into the house he’s given her. She arranges it to her liking, pulls down all the doors until it is nothing but a skeleton’s husk, only a roof to keep out the rain and curtains for the insects. 

Kagura makes it into a home, something she’s never wanted nor needed, but she finds that it’s comfortable here. The wind flows freely through the house, and once she starts the task of cleaning what she can and ripping out what she can’t, it feels like something she might have wanted in another life. She is safe here, Naraku is long dead, and as for other threats… 

She has a guard dog for those.

She knows that it is because of Sesshoumaru that she lives, but she still can’t fathom why. He visits her often enough that hardly three days go by that he is not descending from the sky into her courtyard. His dragon is never far behind, and always laden with gifts: plaster for the house’s crumbling walls, paint and varnish for the remaining wood, a new futon, a kotatsu, a tea kettle and cups, new robes and rouge… Everything that she could need or want, he brings without being asked. 

He tells her that she owes him nothing, which only makes her roll her eyes. He tells her that he can take her wherever she’d like, but she says that the manor ruins are good enough for whatever sort of creature she is now.

And she stays.

The wind is no longer under her control in the way it was before, but she makes herself a home, and does not think about the symbols that mark her.

It feels selfish, at first, knowing that she only lives because he hadn’t been able to bear the insult. But as the months pass, everytime he sets foot on the grounds of her manor it feels like coming home. He has never set foot within the walls, but a soft sort of comfort warms him when he sees her there on the veranda, whole and watching him. 

She says that she is content, but he sees the tension in her when he visits. He wonders if she feels trapped in this new life, if returning her to flesh is more a curse than a blessing. He doesn’t ask and she never says otherwise. 

Sesshoumaru never mentions the marks. He has not brought her back just to claim her, Kagura deserves better than such a fate, so he merely ensures that she is comfortable and asks nothing of her in return. 

He isn’t the type to make grand declarations of joy, but he thinks he comes close enough on the afternoons when she sets water to boil and asks him if he’d like to stay for tea.

It becomes routine, this new life of hers. 

Sesshoumaru visits, bringing along his gifts, and when everything is put away he stands there as if he has nowhere else to go. 

Kagura doesn’t mind much, his is the only company she receives in her dark and dingy little mansion, but she finds that it’s enough. She’d started offering him tea after he’d brought her the kettle and cups and she’d found a merchant in a town not too far. He’d accepted it, to her surprise, and hasn’t turned her down since.  

He isn’t the talkative type, so most of their afternoons are spent in relative silence, but it’s comfortable, and after a while she starts to think that maybe she could do this forever, that a simple little life in her manor with her guard dog never far away is perfectly suitable. She still wants to travel, to feel the wind on her face, but she finds that the more she thinks about it, the lonelier that dream feels. So Kagura stays and haunts her little mansion, and always has a pot ready to boil.

...And she is content, until a day in the fall when he arrives with his dragon leading a cart stacked with boards for her outer doors, a bundle of cloth thick enough for a coat, straw for boots if she needs them. All things to keep out the coming winter cold. She waits for him on the veranda, a smile on her lips, feeling a little warmer for his company, but when he reaches up to hand her one of the bundles his sleeve falls away from his wrist and― 

The air stills in her lungs, but she recovers quickly and takes the fabric from him. She retreats into the house, tries to find a place to hide in her skeleton of a home. 

She has no reason to be upset. He’s made her no promises. She knows that it was some misplaced guilt that inspired his quest to return her life to her, nothing more, and that it might only be curiosity or a sense of responsibility that keeps him coming back.

Still, there is something twisting in her breast that she can’t quite place, and it takes her longer than it should for her to tuck the cloth away.

By the time she steals her nerves and goes back Sesshoumaru has already unloaded the rest of the cart and stands in the middle of the yard. He looks up when she reappears, but she can’t meet his eyes, and she goes to her little hibachi and the kettle full of water. She sets it to boil and mixes the tea without a word. She knows that usually she would have made some quip about the things he’s brought her, how they’re not to her taste or far too fine for a witch’s manor, but for once Kagura can’t find anything to say, her head full of too may conflicting thoughts. 

The kettle begins to whistle an ear splitting shriek and Kagura is quick to pour out two cups. If he notices her attitude he doesn’t mention it, he just accepts it when she slides his to him across the planks of the veranda. Sesshoumaru drinks―though she knows that it’s still far too hot―but he doesn’t even bite his tongue at the heat.

Kagura finds herself growing irritated, like she’s coming to boil with each mouthful of tea she forces down her throat, she feels it in her cheeks and the tips of her fingers, that sharp little needle jammed between her ribs…

She finishes her cup far too quickly and slams it down on the wood.

“What will they say?” She whips her head to face him. She doesn’t mean to spit the words, but she’s not the type to take them back either.

Sesshoumaru turns to her with a quirked brow. “What do you mean?”

Kagura fixes her face. As much as she’d like to snap she swallows it down and keeps her cool as best she can. She gestures at his arm, the one closest to her. “What will that person say when they discover you’ve been keeping a woman?”

“You’re referring to this?” He asks, watching her closely as he lifts his wrist. He does not show her the words, they remain hidden behind his sleeve and the turn of his arm. She doesn’t want to know what they say, but she feels the sting of insult that he hides them. “Then you know what the words mean.”

“I do.” She hisses without meaning to. She’s not an idiot. 

His eyes harden. “Why are you upset?”

“ I’m not ,” she crosses her arms and turns away from him. “But they certainly will be if they ever find out how much time you spend at another woman’s house.”

“Kagura.” He slides off the edge of the veranda and steps within arms reach of her, slowly. When she glances at him there’s a glimmer in his eye she doesn’t recognize. “What does the mark mean?”

She doesn’t like that look. Or him standing so close when she’s upset. But she levels him with a glare. “It’s a ‘soul mark’, supposed to help you find your person, or whatever.”

“You haven’t always known.”

He says it so factually that she must begrudgingly concede, and through grit teeth says: “Kohaku told me.”

“Because you have a mark.”

She squeezes her folded arms a little closer into her chest. “I do.”

He watches her, and she finds herself feeling small under that golden gaze. Heat creeps up her neck, but this time it isn’t fury that fuels it… 

“You ask me what ‘they’ will think if they discover the time I spend here, and yet, you’re not curious about your own?” he asks, a slight quirk to his lips. He moves closer, so that her bent knees almost brush his thighs. She can’t keep his gaze like this―“You’re fine with staying here? Instead of going looking for them? You have the freedom to.”

Kagura sucks her lip between her teeth and lets out a sigh, that heat is slowly draining out of her. He’s right, she could be, but...

“Maybe I’m fine right where I am.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long while. It’s several long minutes with him just standing there before her, and she unable to meet his eyes. Finally he moves, and she expects him to back away, but instead he extends his left hand out to her, palm up, as an answer. She doesn’t want to read them, but her curiosity is far too strong for her own good. Kagura keeps her eyes down, but cranes her neck so that she can read out the words… 

“The first thing you said to me.” 

Kagura’s heartbeat screams in her ears when he reaches for her arm. This is the first time he’s touched her since he’d brought her here. His fingers are cool against her skin, gentle, and she lets him pull her arm so that the words etched into her skin are visible, parallel to his own. Kagura leans into the space between his arms, just a breath away from his chest… 

“And the first thing I said to you.”

There is sudden silence, even the wind holding its breath as they sit there, so close that she can feel the gentle push and pull as he inhales and exhales. Kagura stares at their outstretched arms, frozen. 

A woman?

And…

So you’re Inuyasha’s elder brother, Sesshoumaru.

Kagura takes a deep, stuttering breath as she reaches out to trace her fingers along the words. She can feel his pulse flutter beneath the pale skin of his wrist, and she remembers , a night so long ago, before she’d known anything about anything. Slowly, she turns to look up at him, a furrow in her brow and a part in her lips, and for a moment Sesshoumaru looks terrified―

“You asshole,” she spits, but then her mouth splits into a grin, and Kagura laughs.