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“– love you.”
The murmur almost didn’t carry through the metre of space between them. The tenor of Inuyasha’s voice was rough and low, and with him deep in sleep, the words left his lips as an accompaniment to a soundless, gradual exhale. If Kagome had not already been awake, curled on her side beneath the humid duvet, ears tuned into chittering crickets from beyond the hut’s walls and her day’s memories of yokai’s crackling cries, she would never have heard these words of his.
If she had never heard them, then she would never have started wondering about them tonight.
Who are you dreaming of?
The answer had to be obvious.
Unable to sleep and trying not to think, Kagome plucked at a fibre separated from her pillow’s seam. When all the worrying she did failed to peel it from its source, she began rolling the stray buckwheat between the pads of her fingers.
She had done this so often it had become a habit, but tonight, she wondered why it didn't satisfy her as much as it normally did. That was when she touched her fingertips together and felt the thin calluses bumping along her skin.
She returned to it anyway.
What else am I supposed to do? she thought, pinching the stiff, thin fibre tight between her index and thumb.
It indented her flesh as if it were bowstring. Tight and unyielding and aching. There was a weight and a wait to it, made clear to her every time she drew her weapon. A tension, like a breath held too long, until the muscles of her shoulders, back and lungs trembled with the reminder of just who she had never known or remembered being.
But more and more, beyond the moments where she wielded her bow and arrows, she was beginning to feel this way, too. Like a wound-up clock, always waiting, watching, with the knowledge that any time now, she would have to expand a burst of energy and catch up with the rest – with the quicker, the stronger, the smarter. The older. The wiser. The ones who had grown up not only among war, but also among the spiritual and supernatural. Those unlike her.
Across from her, one of Inuyasha’s ears flicked. She inched her head forward, along the scratchy pillow, thinking maybe she would hear him again.
But he let out a small, aborted snore and mumbled something unintelligible, mouth parted and cheek pressed against the wood-panelled floor, which bore perforations and worn-smooth splinters. Histories of little marks collected over the years; Kaede’s hut was more than half a century old.
Kagome couldn’t have handled sleeping on a surface like that. It would have scratched and dug into her flesh over the night, and made her spine and neck grow cricks by morning, but Inuyasha sunk into sleep like a log as dead as the wood he lay on, and he woke up fresh-faced and abuzz with energy, without fail. And his face, when Kagome could sneak looks, never had marrs. No scars. Nothing brought forward from before dawn.
Not like her.
Her fingers left the fibre they had been tugging, twitching towards her forehead, where she knew there was a faint, frustrating tenderness above her left brow if she touched it. She clenched her fists, tucking them into the warmth beneath her covers. Only her second night here, away from a modern bath, and a pimple was forming.
Kagome bet yokai didn’t think about these things. They thought about their next meal or how to get rid of competitors for their territory or whether their next clash with each other over a Shikon Jewel shard would end with the loss of whole arms or whole heads. So did humans, thinking about what it meant for your family to be tricked and enslaved by spirits or for your fellow villagers to fall, one by one, to famine, to senseless fighting.
And Inuyasha, if she ever brought up what humans of her age and era fretted about, would scoff. He wouldn’t understand, because he was not like her and she was not like him, and she was not like Kikyo.
There.
Kagome turned slowly onto her back, sinking lower down the pillow till it propped up her head uncomfortably, and let out a harsh breath. The ceiling was deep in shadow.
I said it.
Her right shoulder ached. She had to have pulled a muscle there when practising shooting – as much as she could practice, anyway, while tripping away from a family of kappa that had not appreciated them straying too close to a lake they had taken residence in, south of the village.
Inuyasha would have either growled or snarked at her if he found out she had let it be. Priestess Kaede would have uncovered her jar of sharp-scenting ointment, a paste of roots and leaves of plants whose names she could not remember but knew likely did not come cheap, and rubbed layers into the skin of pained muscle. She would have insisted gruffly on it even though there were hurts larger than an overtaxed shoulder – hurts that she carried, for herself, the village people, and the older sister Kagome knew the priestess saw every time they talked. She would have told her and Inuyasha both to come back when they needed help, despite knowing Kagome could resolve a matter like this herself by leaping into the Bone-eater’s Well, by going home, to where she belonged.
And each time, Kaede would trust in her return. Inuyasha wouldn’t pass up the chance to let Kagome hear his complaints, but even then, he, too, would wait for her to come back.
Kagome’s head circled around that thought.
Next to her was movement. Inuyasha was murmuring again. Kagome tilted her head to look right at him, freely, and saw that his expression wasn’t pinched. There was no tightness in his features, and it occurred to her this should have been the first thing she thought about when she had first begun to notice his more frequent dreaming. As stupid and ruffianish and rude as he could be, he had a good heart. He cared about her. He might prefer to die before he admitted it, but he didn’t have to.
“Don’t…” Peaceful, Inuyasha sighed. It sounded breathless, light. “Every day…”
I’ll ask about my shoulder up tomorrow, she thought, listening. Kaede-san will have something.
An arm’s reach away, Inuyasha quietly called a name, and Kagome let her eyes close.