Work Text:
Admiring
In their downtime from hunting down Naraku and sacred jewel shards, the group of friends was hanging out in their home village on a warm, sunny day. Since it was such a nice day, the village was alive with people playing games, working on their typical daily chores with an extra hype in their steps etc.
They'd all had a nice picnic and now that it was over, Kagome and Sango walking towards the nearby river with Shippo and Kirara while Inuyasha and Miroku sat under a tree on their red picnic blanket. While the girls were fixated on looking at fish in the river, the guys were interested in looking at something else.
Miroku observed Sango's beautiful figure as she walked towards the river. Her hair swished behind her and her hips swayed with each step. Kagome said something and Sango laughed in a way that made her face bunch up in that cute way it always did. As if she weren't beautiful enough, Miroku nearly caught his breath when she bent down to pick up her little Kirara with her butt pointing in his direction. Beautiful and sexy; she was the entire package.
And she was all his. It had been a few weeks since he'd asked her to marry him. She'd made him the happiest man in the world when she agreed and she continued to make him happy every day since. He knew he wasn't perfect but she made him want to be better for her. And she was his motivation to keep pushing forward on this mission because he wanted to live for her. Their relationship was everything he had ever dreamed of and more and he knew he had to hold onto this as tightly as he could.
What's more, now that they were officially together, he could admire her like this without shame.
While he admired his beautiful woman, it didn't slip past him that Inuyasha was also admiring Kagome. He himself saw Kagome as more of a little sister; she was the one woman he could never look at in such a way now. But this wasn't the first time he'd caught Inuyasha admiring her. How could he not after all with the way she wore that short skirt all the time? And how could he resist squeezing her butt when he carried her on his back (he knew Inuyasha dutifully clenched his fists whenever he carried her that way). Yes, his friend was a gentleman and didn't openly gawk at Kagome. How he had been able to resist her this whole time, however, was a mystery to Miroku.
"Beautiful, aren't they?" Miroku said casually.
"Hmm," was Inuyasha's only response although Miroku knew that he would agree.
"It's nothing but pure bliss when a woman knows how much you love her," Miroku said, before turning to his friend. "You get all the perks," he said with a wink.
Inuyasha rolled his eyes. "Perv."
"Why don't you ever tell Kagome how you feel about her? It's got to beat staring at her all the time."
Inuyasha's face immediately went bright red. "It's…it's complicated, okay?"
"Is it really though?"
"What do you know?" Inuyasha said defensively.
"I know a lot," Miroku said. "I know that you really care for her. Every time you're around her you want to tell her. The only thing preventing you is your loyalty to Kikyo, but you don't even love Kikyo anymore. You stick by her out of guilt and loyalty to fix what happened to her, but you don't look at her the same way you do Kagome and you don't think of her when you envision your future. You light up when you're around Kagome, you feel alive when you're with her, and when she's gone you sit by that well all day because you're afraid that the best thing that's ever happened to you won't come back."
By the shocked expression on Inuyasha's face, Miroku could tell that everything he said was correct.
"H-How did you…?"
Miroku shrugged, suppressing a smug expression. "I know how to read people."
Inuyasha looked back over at their girls laughing and splashing their bare feet in the river. There was a longing expression on his face. "One day I'll tell her…when the time is right."