Inuyasha gripped the sides of the casket, tears streaming down his childishly round face. “Big Brother, why won’t Mommy wake up?” he sobbed. Sesshomaru shook his head, putting an arm around his baby brother’s shoulders. Inuyasha was only six years old. Sesshomaru appeared to be about eleven, while he was truly about a hundred and seventeen. “Why won’t she wake up?!” Inuyasha wailed.

“She’s gone, Inuyasha,” Sesshomaru said, trying to be stronger than he was. But he remembered. He remembered standing in his baby brother’s shoes a little over a century ago, watching them close his mother’s casket.

“She can’t be gone! She said she’d play with me in the garden today!! It’s not fair! IT’S NOT FAIR!!!!!” Inuyasha lunged for the casket as the youkai on either side lowered it into the ground, but Sesshomaru held him where he was.

“It won’t do any good. You’ll see her again someday,” Sesshomaru told him.

“I don’t want her to leave! She can’t just leave me!” Inuyasha turned to sob into his brother’s shoulder. Sesshomaru felt a single hot tear slide down his cheek as they threw dirt upon his step-mother’s grave. Inuyasha wailed into his shoulder as he stood holding the small child.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect her. I’m sorry,” he apologized. With their father dead, Sesshomaru was left the Western Lands. He had learned many things in a century, but he was physically and quite emotionally an eleven-year-old.

“Why did you leave us?!?” he heard himself scream at the sky, realizing that he was talking to his and Inuyasha’s father. “I don’t know what to do!!! I’m just a kid!!!! Why did you leave!?!?” He fell to the ground, still holding his baby brother, and they both sobbed as the sky opened up and cold rain completed the despair-filled day.