Author Note: I wrote Flowers as a whim. There might be a part II. I might rewrite it entirely. I kind of took Kouga giving Kagome flowers for the first time and expanded upon that. Also, I know they call Kouga a Prince . This is assuming that after Kagome’s finished school and stayed in the Feudal Era, that he has risen in ranking and become King of the wolf tribes.
It started with a single flower. Just one.
And one flower became two and then four until I couldn’t count how many. Sometimes I woke with them in my hair or covering me like a blanket, outlining my body in the position I had slept in.
And every morning that I woke to flowers, Inuyasha would stomp around angrily, huffing, cursing the gods and crushing the flowers into a dust.
Every morning, he would mutter about how stupid flowers were and the useless wolf demon that left them, but he never did anything. He never showed me affection or stopped calling me wench or idiot.
“Are you falling for this?”
“What if I am?” I whispered, my fingers running through my hair, “It’s romantic.”
He huffed and rolled his eyes. “Please.”
“What would you know anyway? You wouldn’t know a romantic gesture if it slapped you in the face.”
He glowered at me cruelly. “He’s pathetic and if you’re falling for it, you’re being stupid.”
“It’s not pathetic to leave a girl flowers and I’m not stupid, you big jerk!” I yelled.
I stomped away from him, my feelings tender considering. After school, I had returned to the Feudal Era thinking Inuyasha and I might be together, but every day was always full of the same thing. I tried to look passed his aggression and his insults and his distance, but a girl can only take so much, right? So what if I liked getting flowers every day. I didn’t need flowers and maybe he didn’t get that. Inuyasha knew I needed sleep and food and water and protection, but he didn’t understand the purpose of flowers.
Truthfully, I didn’t need Inuyasha to give me flowers, but I needed him to give me something, but he never budged an inch.
Sighing, I stood by the river I had marched over to, the water rushing downstream. At that moment, I just needed to calm down and the rushing sound was soothing.
Plopping down, I crossed my legs and began braiding my hair, careful to remove the flowers that had been so delicately placed in my hair, before placing them along my newly braided locks.
He left me flowers every day for months on end without missing a single time. He never stayed, never left anything but his scent for Inuyasha to pick up. I mean, I assumed that’s what it was that made him so angry.
If Kouga wanted to romance me, why didn’t he ever do anything but leave flowers? Why did he never come around to check on me like he once did? Since the flowers began appearing, I wondered why the arrogant wolf never came to claim me, to tell me he was in love with me, that it was in fact him leaving the flowers.
On that day, alone by the river, I found myself reminiscing about Birds of Paradise and a certain over confident wolf demon.
Some nights I attempted to stay awake long enough to see him, to confront him, but he never showed until I was sound asleep. As sleep threatened to pull me under, I wondered if he spent all night collecting flowers for me.
One night, I got it in my mind to escape. On the night of the new moon, Inuyasha became a human. And he didn’t have super human hearing or strength or sense of smell. It was my only option.
So on the night of the next new moon, while Inuyasha slumbered in a tree, I gathered my backpack and I snuck away.
Into the forest, I walked for hours. I knew Inuyasha would pick up my scent in the morning when he roused, no longer a human, but a half demon again, fully sensing and would be able to catch up to me with ease.
As dawn approached, I broke off in a run. I dropped my backpack, leaving my personal items behind. About this time, Inuyasha would notice I was gone. Surely, he would come looking for me and for once, I didn’t want him to find me. After all my hard work, only to have him drag me back over his shoulder, cursing at me for wasting his time? No way.
How did you stop a dog demon from finding you? The question of the century. Inuyasha always found me.
Running and attempting not to trip over my own boots, I quickly came upon a solution. A rabbit hopped across the ground in front of me, several yards away.
Quickly, I retrieved an arrow and shot it clean through the head. Without a moment’s hesitation, I ripped it open, the rush of dark red coating my hands quickly. Without giving it any thought – because if I had, if I let it sink in, what I was doing, I would have vomited – I ran the blood over my throat, my arms, my legs, in my hair, on my face. What the blood didn’t cover, I took dirt from the ground and mixed it in, praying this covered my scent.
I grabbed my bow and quiver of arrows and leaving everything else, I ran.
It had to be around noon when I collapsed by a body of water. I could taste rust in my mouth and I felt revolting. How far had I traveled? Was it enough? Had I escaped? Had I given him the slip – I doubted it. Had he simply not come after me?
It had been nearly half a day since I had run away and I was exhausted, having run for miles.
It had crossed my mind that Kouga would know I had gone away. I did want him to find me.
Was he worried about me? Was he pleased knowing I left Inuyasha?
Two days of walking and sleeping in trees came and went before I felt safe enough to rinse off the dirt and blood mixture that painted my skin. Inuyasha either couldn’t find me or wasn’t looking. If I wanted Kouga to find me, I needed him to be able to find my scent. I figured I could have just run around shouting his name but while I wanted one man to find me, I was still attempting to evade another.
Finally coming across a spring, I knelt down and began rinsing my body of the mess. It wasn’t enough. Removing my boots and socks, I walked into the spring fully dressed.
I scrubbed for what felt like hours before my hair even began to feel clean, and I nearly whimpered with the longing for a bar of soap. My skin was cold and pink by the time I had rinsed off the gunk from the rest of my body. I cleaned my clothes the best I could. Some things just couldn’t be salvaged and that was the price I paid to escape.
As nervous and panicked as I constantly felt, worried the wrong man would find me, I felt like a weight had been lifted from my heart.
Once my clothes were dry enough to put on, I dressed. I wrung out my hair and pleated it so it wouldn’t dry in a tangled mess. Satisfied that I was about as clean as I would ever get, for now, I set off along the dirt path, moving east. All I knew was that the dens were east.
How would Kouga find me? Would he be able to pick up my scent? Had he already found me? Was he lingering just beyond the trees? Would Inuyasha pick up my scent and take me away?
The thought made me want to cry.
Part of me knew it was cowardly to leave in the middle of the night, when his senses were weak, when he couldn’t make an excuse for why I shouldn’t leave, couldn’t stop me.
And part of me was sad that I left him like I had, but I couldn’t take another day in his suffocating silence with his insufferable insults.
A larger part of me knew he might love me, but what was love if you never showed it? What was love with walls up?
I knew all of this, yet with the little energy I had, I couldn’t find it in me to care. There was no part of me that felt I had made the wrong decision. I had to distance myself from one and see if I could be happy with the other.
If I had tried calmly sitting down with Inuyasha and telling him I was unhappy – oh, how I had tried – he would scoff and tell me I was being an idiot girl. If he had heard me leave, he would have taken me back immediately and watched my every move.
No, he never would have let me leave on my own if he had a say.
Little time had passed when I felt a breeze blow over my shoulder. Someone was coming and I would have to face whoever it was. With cat like reflexes, I spun on my heel, my bow over my shoulder in a flash and poised to shoot at my attacker.
That’s when I came face-to-face with the tall, dark skinned, long haired and bright blue eyed wolf demon I had dreamed about seeing again. His eyes showed no surprise or fear as he slowly palmed away my arrow to my side.
“K-Kouga,” I breathed, my heart hammering in my chest.
His bright blue eyes grew cloudy and he came close, invading my space, hands on my waist, his nose pressed against my jugular. He was smelling me.
That was important to wolves.
I wondered if I smelled good to him. I had to.
“How did you do that? Mask your scent,” he demanded to know. His voice was deep and hoarse and his lips tickled my throat as he spoke.
I shook my head, shivering with his touch. “Animal blood and mud.”
To my complete surprise, I felt him grin against the skin of my throat. I expected him to be angry, not amused. Even still.
“My resourceful, Kagome. When I couldn’t find your scent, I… thought you were hurt,” he said, palming his hand through my hair, careful not to mess up my braid, holding my waist, touching my face, cheek, nose, lips. The look of concern in his eyes nearly undid me
“I’m s-sorry if I worried you.”
.”Never again,” he asked. “It drove me mad to think that…”
Suddenly, I felt an urge to comfort him, to soothe him. I needed to do something. Slowly, I reached up and placed a gentle hand on his cheek.
“I won’t. Never again,” I promised. I shivered again, my knees nearly buckling as he kissed the inside of my hand.
Having spent days in the forest, lost and filthy and hungry and tired, I needed to know something.
He squinted at me, unsure of what I was trying to say, his fingers at my pulse. Feeling that I was alive. “What?”
“You left me flowers for months, but you never came for me.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, confusion and a bit of sadness in his eyes. “You wanted me to come for you?”
As tears started to fall from my eyes. I felt his hands on either side of my face. “You never stayed. I couldn’t tell you.”
“If I had known, nothing and no one would have kept me from getting to you,” he vowed, meaning every word. Kouga was anything if not devoted. I was convinced that this part of him would always be.
Still his proclamation caught me by surprise. “Nothing?”
Sighing visibly with relief at my whole person, he wrapped his arms around me, tucking my head under his chin. “No, nothing.”
What now? Would I go away with him? Would he ask me to? He had to!
“He’ll come for me. He will try to steal me from you.”
I would be a fool not to fear such a fearsome demon as Inuyasha, half demon as he was. He would come for me, come for what he claimed as his. What he claimed as his in words, but nothing else.
I did not escape for nothing. I would not go willingly.
“Do I?” he asked, a hint of humor in his eyes and something else.
Honestly? I was terrified of what was about to happen. What this shift would mean. But was I afraid of him?
I pushed back, enough to look up at his face. “Should you frighten me?”
If not for the wolfish grin or the fangs or his tail, he would have seemed human in that moment when he smiled at me, mischief in his brilliantly blue eyes.
“You should be a little bit frightened of what I will do to you.”
His fingers brushed the nape of my neck and I shivered again. “I am.” He inched closer still.
“Being with me will change everything.” His hands pulled me flush against him and my hands rested against his armor covered chest.
It would change everything for him too. He had to know that.
“I’m human. Your people may revolt against you with a human as a Queen.”
He shook his head, nuzzling his nose over mine. “They wouldn’t dream of overthrowing me and my wolves love you. There’d be no better queen for our Western lands.”
My cheeks pinked a little at this. I knew Ginta and Hakkaku were fond of me, but the others as well? They liked me?
“Our children, they would be, they would be just like him.”
He kissed my cheek, then the other. “If they are anything like you, they will be kind and generous and beautiful and smart. And if they are like me they will be strong and resourceful and long suffering in their love for their women.”
Kouga had suffered long in his love for me. He had waited years and had showered me in affection, in attention and sweet words. He had brought me an alarming number of flowers every single day for nearly a year. He had waited years for me, probably knowing that I might never love him.
It was becoming harder to control my emotions. “I will die someday. There will be time after me that you will have to be without me.”
He breathed in my scent, his fangs bared against my neck. “I know this, too. I have no choice in the matter. I never have.”
I bristled in his arms. What did he mean?
“Do you remember when I told you that wolves mate – ”
“For life,” I finished. I remembered. I had never forgotten. It was one of the first things he had ever said to me.
It was never an infatuation or a crush for him.
Whether it was instinct or magic or something else entirely, he had loved me from practically the first moment he saw me and I was overcome with emotion.
And it didn’t matter that I was human. That our children might be mocked or that I would perish someday, hundreds or perhaps thousands of years before he would die.
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