Sleeping
AKA: How many different times can Sanko write the InuKag reuinion fic? I'm sorry I just have so many scenarios! And I need to write them all…681 words.
When Kagome came back through the well, Inuyasha goes to sleep with her that night.
It's not planned. It wasn't like they had even talked about it- of course he wouldn't, he barely could break out six words to her the whole day ("What have you been up to?") and he was lucky to even get that much out past his quivering lips.
But once everyone began to hobble to their homes well past dusk: Inuyasha and Kagome get up, start walking side by side, and when they get to the little shamble of a hut that he had constructed for himself, despite him fully meaning to deposit her for the night and leave, he just…doesn't.
She doesn't even ask him. She lifts the crudely woven mat, takes his hand, and leads him in. Allows it to close behind her. Cuts out the moonlight.
He's stiff like a board. Awkward and daunted. Transparently uncertain about whether he should be there. Transparently uncertain about what to do with his limbs, hands and elbows.
She's not too keen on what to do either; she'd only slept with him a handful of times in her bed at the shrine, and even then it was a desperate-to-find-sleep affair, and not one full of longing and relief and finally-he's-real-this-is-real. The futon on the floor is just big enough to fit them both, so it's not like they're crammed into each other, but its close enough accommodations that they can't exactly stay on fully separated sides.
But they don't want to anyway.
Three years.
He was sure he would never see her again. She was sure she'd never see him again. They've been through the seven circles of hell, and then thrown into worlds where they could never possibly meet. She'd been through the cold reality of an era that could never understand her, he'd been through the nightmare of losing her.
And now he's here.
This aloof, beautiful, uncertain half-demon man, lying so close to her in the obscurity and smelling of pine and sweat and familiar (so familiar) robes that she could identify anywhere even if she could never hope to define it.
And she doesn't ever want him to leave.
She looks at the back of his head and smiles, able to make out the dark lines of his ears as they stand honed in on her every movement.
Gathering her courage, she swallows and whispers, "It's okay."
He freezes, then sighs, and she hears him turning to face her. Feels him as his breath rolls over her face like a welcoming breeze.
She repeats it and says, "I want you to stay," and he gradually relaxes, almost like he'd been holding his breath underwater. Like the only solace he could ever hope to find in this life was her approval. She sits up to undo the cardigan around her shoulders but she senses his fidgeting anxiety, so she lies back down and tucks her hands under her chin. She's grown a habit of making herself small when she sleeps, and she suspects it's in part a from of defense from traveling in a dangerous war riddled era, and part because she's utilized it as a method to cope when she wasn't- but right now it doesn't feel like either of those things.
It just feels like the right thing to be small, when he's so not.
He feels big and solid and safe, and she wants it to saturate her again, the way it used to.
At some point his heavy hand settles over the arch of her waist. Her bare leg nestles between his. They gravitate towards each other and it becomes a full body hug- one that's been years coming. She feels his form tremble around her, and listens quietly as a single wet intake of air brushes past her ears. She closes her eyes against his chest, and nests her face beside his heart.
It still doesn't feel completely easy, but time and distance have proven themselves overwhelmingly malleable; thus they mold into each other like streams of water meeting for the sea.
Then She sleeps.
And so does He.