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And You, My Brother	By : Arianawray Category: InuYasha > Yaoi - Male/Male > InuYasha/Sessh?maru > InuYasha/Sessh?maru Views: 15027 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of its characters, and I do not make any money from these writings.

Chapter List
- 14
- 15
- 16
Chapter XV: Perforce, withholds the loved boy

"Are you a boy or a girl?" Rin asked, moving as close to the barrier as Kaede would allow, and staring wide-eyed at the apparition trapped inside it.
"Boy or girl?" the child-like thing asked in return. "What is that?"
"Eh?" Rin gasped. "Everybody knows if they're a boy or girl! Which are you?"
Kaede, resting her hands on Rin's shoulders, said gently: "Rin, this apparition isn't a real child. It is an artificial being. It doesn't know if it's a boy or a girl. I don't think it's either."
"Huh?" Rin exclaimed in amazement, turning to stare up at the priestess. "But it only has to look inside its clothes to know!"
"Even though its master has made it more solid, its clothes and body aren't real. They're like the clothes Shippo draws on the people in his pictures – there's probably nothing else behind them. Every part of it is drawn, so to speak."
They were in Kaede's hut on the third day of holding the apparition, after Miroku, Kaede and Sango had camped outdoors for two days beside the well and the barrier, fearing that if they tried to shift the barrier, it would break.
"Something strong enough to push Inuyasha into the well would be strong enough to escape if we weakened the shield in any way," Sango had protested, when the rain came down on the second day and Miroku broached the subject of shifting the entire thing indoors.
"If we camp out here any longer, we'll fall ill from exposure, and who's going to care for Shippo and Rin then?" the monk sighed. "Kaede-sama's looking exhausted already." He failed to mention that Shippo and Rin had in fact been the ones caring for them these past days, cooking simple meals and carrying them out to the well, or getting help from some of the villagers to prepare their food.
So they had added seals and reinforced the barrier, and made the bumpy journey back to the village, with Miroku and Kaede moving the spherical shield gingerly between them like a hazardous piece of baggage. They then had to navigate the pockets of curious villagers who had already trickled out to the well for a look, but still came out now to stare at the "ghost", which seemed unfazed by its audience. Eventually, they had to park Shippo outside the hut to stop people from crowding in to view it as if it were an exotic animal.
Their attempts to question it had thus far been an exercise in frustration. Rin's failure to get so much as a half-answer from it as to whether it was male or female only summed up for them the impossibility of extracting useful information from it: it was a thing that had as good as hatched new into the world, and while it had rudimentary language ability, was so unaware of facts everyone else took for granted, that they could barely ask a single question without having another asked about it in return. Kaede had sat by the barrier for some hours after moving it into the hut and talked to it, trying to teach it things so it would know more before being further questioned. But it did not seem to have been designed to absorb a lot of information, so she could not impart much to it.
After painful and patient interrogation, they managed only to grasp from its halting answers that it had been to the well before, taken "the hanyou's unhappiness" from it, "lost" the well, found it again, found Inuyasha, and sent him "to my master". As to who its master was, the reply was simply "my master", and when pressed for a name, could not supply one. When they asked if it had ever seen a demon with its master, they had to cobble together the bits of information it gave, which eventually amounted to the fact that the apparition had only ever seen its master when it was "home". Asked what it had done to the well, it could only say that "my master gave… the thing… to put in the well before the hanyou".
"Why did your master want you to put the hanyou in the well?" Kaede asked.
"The well... no more unhappiness."
"When was there no more unhappiness in the well?"
"When?" it queried, and they knew this line of questioning would get nowhere, for it had little concept of time.
"Do you collect only the hanyou's unhappiness? Do you collect other things?" Kaede asked it.
"Collect everything," came the whispered answer.
The priestess turned to her companions. "I think Inuyasha's emotions were among many it was collecting, but for some reason, its master wanted Inuyasha badly enough to have him pushed into the well, into which he must have placed a portal spell," she said. "I imagine that when Shippo finally coaxed Inuyasha out of the well some weeks ago, the emotions in it ran dry, and eventually the warlock decided to take Inuyasha himself."
"Why would he want Inuyasha in particular?" Miroku asked. "We haven't heard from other villages so far about the apparition making anyone else disappear."
"And didn't Inuyasha sometimes sneak back out to the well after we persuaded him to stop sitting in it?" Sango asked. "He thought we didn't know, but Shippo followed him out there in secret. Surely the emotions wouldn't have completely dried up in there?"
Miroku said thoughtfully: "The well is a magical structure in itself, although its former time portal has closed. In those weeks when Inuyasha sat inside it almost continuously, it must have concentrated his emotions in its confined space, and the apparition must have been drawn to that. We know that such apparitions normally collect emotions generated by a large number of people, or those generated in a place over a prolonged period of time, but perhaps the well's magical properties focused Inuyasha's unhappiness within it. He may have gone back there occasionally, but Shippo said he didn't always enter the well during that time, so perhaps the concentration that had attracted the apparition was no longer there."
"Perhaps. There's so much we don't know because we can't get answers from that child," Kaede sighed.
"It's not a child," Miroku reminded her.
"I know, but it looks so much like one."
That afternoon, while they were resting from questioning the apparition, Kohaku arrived – not riding Kirara, but carrying her in her untransformed, little-cat shape. He limped into Kaede's hut, Shippo hovering behind him, until the villagers started peeking in again, and the kitsune had to step back outside to stop them.
"Kohaku!" Rin cried happily, running up to him and grabbing his hand. She had had a bit of a crush on the handsome lad ever since he had hesitated to kill her on Naraku's orders, and her sense of connection with him had deepened in the time he had spent as part of Sesshomaru's pack. Her pleasure at seeing him whenever they met occasionally made Shippo jealous, and the kitsune now peered in at them from under the hanging screen in the doorway, pouting as he heard her tenderly ask the boy: "What happened to your leg? How did Kirara get hurt?"
The bandage over Kohaku's left knee and shin was caked in dried blood, although he looked otherwise well, while the fire-neko was mewing softly as she nuzzled a large wound over her ribs. It looked to be healing smoothly, but it must have been crippling to begin with.
Sango's attention was torn between her brother and the neko who had been her faithful companion for so long. "What happened to the two of you?" she asked.
"We're okay," Kohaku assured her. "But Kirara can't fly right now, and I'm not walking too well. The villagers told me all the way in about you lot catching the apparition at last – and our wounds have something to do with it."
"Huh?" was the puzzled chorus in response to his news.
"Not directly – but I was looking into the matter of the apparition up north when I overheard some lizard youkai talking about it. I was up on a cliff and they were below, and the wind carried a few words up to me which indicated that they were talking about what you've got trapped over there." Here, he nodded at the apparition in the corner.
"I crept down the side of the cliff where I thought they wouldn't see me, and hid behind some rocks to better eavesdrop on them," he continued. "But even though we were downwind, they eventually realised I was there. I managed to dodge their first few blows, then Kirara flew in to get me out, and they managed to strike us both as we were gaining altitude. Kirara still got us away, though. There was some poison in our wounds, but I had suitable antidotes with me, luckily. My fault. I won't make the mistake of getting too close again. But I couldn't have heard what they were saying if I hadn't gone closer."
"What were they saying?"
"One of them was telling the other two about a sorcerer who'd had dealings with their clan some time ago, and whom he guessed was the one controlling the apparition, because he had mastered some weird craft. He said he encountered the sorcerer a few weeks ago and detected faint traces of lizard youkai on him, and wondered if they might know the demon working with him. But that was when they smelt me. So… that's all I have."
"Oh, Kohaku," Sango said, steering him over to the raised section of the hut where the little fire pit was and making him sit down with Kirara on his lap so that she and Rin could change his bandage and inspect Kirara's wound. "Why did you look into this on your own?"
"It's good that he did," Kaede remarked. "We have new information now."
But Sango looked guilty, saying to Kaede: "Kohaku and Hachi were supposed to stay in the village with us for a few days after we first saw the apparition, then Miroku and I decided to go and investigate it, so Hachi went off and Kohaku took the demon-slaying job – but he wasn't supposed to go after the apparition by himself. If we'd insisted on his coming straight to us after finishing the job…."
"I'm not a child any more, Oneesan," Kohaku said gently. "You can't always keep me safe from my own stupidity."
"I don't think you're stupid," Rin said loyally.
Miroku sighed. "Inuyasha's not a child either, and he still couldn't stop this thing that wasn't supposed to be able to touch anyone from throwing him down the well. It's only natural for your sister to want to keep you out of harm's way."
"What?" Kohaku cried. "It threw Inuyasha down the well? The villagers didn't mention that to me! Is he hurt?"
"He's disappeared," Miroku said. "We still haven't got an answer from it about where he's gone to. It said something about putting a thing in the well before pushing Inuyasha in, and we can only speculate that its master must have had it deliver a portal spell there."
"Does Sesshomaru-sama know about this?" Kohaku asked. "Maybe he could question the lizard youkai about what I overheard."
"Sesshomaru doesn't know about Inuyasha yet, unless he's found out through some other source," Miroku replied. "Besides, the inu youkai have never got along with the dragon and lizard clans, especially since the Inu no Taisho fought Ryukotsusei. We expect him back here in a few days. Inuyasha could have tracked him, but he's gone. Perhaps Kirara could have found him too, but she can't fly right now."
In the doorway, Shippo watched and listened, and the tears began to pool in his wide green eyes again as he remembered how he had screamed at Inuyasha not to follow the child-thing. "I told him not to go to the well with it!" he cried, as his friends turned to look at him. "I warned him it was a trap – I told him! But he wouldn't listen!"
"Shippo-chan…." Sango began, wanting to comfort him, but not knowing how.
Rin stood up and tried to go to him, but the kitsune ran off, away from the hut, too fast for her to see where he had gone, and the curious villagers got in the way.

** *** **

He felt cold. The stone slab beneath him was chilly, despite his having lain on it for what felt like endless hours, and all the brews bubbling and steaming in their pots over at least three small fires in the den did not seem to be warming the place up. Was it just him? The sorcerer looked quite comfortable at his worktable. Maybe he was falling ill. Or… wait a minute… what the hell? Where are my clothes? he wondered as he gradually became aware that he was bare-bodied apart from his prayer beads. He tried to look down at himself, but he was lying flat on his tummy in the cage, and couldn't seem to raise himself off the slab.
That was when he realised that his hands were sticking out beyond the bars at one end and chained together outside the bars, while his feet, protruding beyond the bars at the other end, were likewise chained to each other outside, by the ankles. He lifted his head and craned his neck to look over his own shoulder and back, and saw that he had been stripped down to his skin from head to toe.
Great. A further indignity after having been obliged to piss out through the bars while lying down and empty his bowels onto a large yam leaf in a corner of the cage when he had last been conscious, after the sorcerer made it clear that under no circumstances would he be let out to relieve himself. The only positive thing he could think of was that the bastard seemed to have a good drainage system through a network of cracks in the den's rock floor down which he washed the waste matter with buckets of water, probably into a deeper network of caverns or underground streams, or the stench would be unbearable by now.
"Oh, you're awake at last," the sorcerer said, looking up from his worktable.
Inuyasha glared at him, and as he did he saw, tossed into a heap on the floor behind his jailor, his fire rat robes and their white underlayers, with the Tetsusaiga lying atop them.
"Give me back my clothes," he growled. "And get these fucking chains off me."
"Absolutely not. Kinrin-sama wanted to have a good look at you. He already had quite an eyeful while you were out of it, but he wanted me to tell him once you awoke, so I'm going to get him now."
"Give me back my clothes!" he roared, straining to turn his head to his left to glare at the sorcerer disappearing out through a metal door in the wall of the den. But his words broke off into a series of dry coughs that felt like they were tearing his throat apart, and he lowered his face to the slab, pressing his right cheek against the cold stone. He wondered how the devil he was going to get out of this, or how any of his friends would ever be able to trace him when he hadn't travelled through a physical space to get here. And Sesshomaru – he felt an actual physical pain in his chest as he thought of him – Sesshomaru probably didn't even know he had been captured by these freaks.
The door opened again. Every muscle in his body tensed as he sensed Kinrin's youki filling the den like a wave of energy. This was a powerful demon who could take anyone on in combat – what the hell was he doing messing around with stupid things like potions? If the pervert touched him, he would…
The demon came into view before the cage, and just about ate up every inch of his exposed skin with his eyes, triggering in Inuyasha again the feeling of wanting to throw up.
"Kinrin-sama," the sorcerer said, concern filling his voice. "It's not advisable for you to come so often to the cage and stand so close to it. The spells on it are very intense to keep the half-breed under control, and I don't want you suffering any ill effects from them – their vibes affect your demon energy too, you know, and it hasn't been that long since you fully recovered –"
"Oh do be quiet, Tatsuya," the demon snapped. "I won't stay too long. I just want him awake for a while – handling unconscious creatures does absolutely nothing for me – I like them writhing, as you well know."
"I really would not advise you to put your hand into the cage," the sorcerer Tatsuya cautioned. "I've chained him up as you instructed, but he's so wild –"
"Oh, hush."
Inuyasha growled and snarled, but he could do little as the demon crouched down right in front of the cage and put a hand through the bars. He felt those claw-tipped, golden fingers stroke his back slowly along his spine, stopping to pinch his flesh twice, right down to his buttocks. The bars then got in the way, so the demon readjusted his position and put his arm through another pair of bars further down the cage to caress the back of his left thigh, and down his calf.
"Gorgeous muscle tone, and such creamy skin – you're very young, aren't you?" Kinrin murmured as he stroked him.
"Stop touching me, freak!" the hanyou snarled through gritted fangs.
"I've been getting the scent of another demon off you and your clothes. A very powerful one. Who is he? Your lover? So you should be used to being touched, shouldn't you?"
"Get your disgusting hands off me now, you sick bag of scaly hide."
"Ooh, as mouthy as before," Kinrin said. "I like that. I'll like it even better when I finish what I'm working on so I'll have time to play with you – I promise you'll like it so much you won't be able to roll a single coherent swear word off that pretty tongue of yours."
This was like every worst nightmare about Jakotsu coming after him in his human form, multiplied by about a hundred. "Yeah, you just try that and I'll rip your grubby head off and piss down your throat," he snarled.
"Ho – I am really going to have lots and lots of fun breaking you in. Tatsuya tells me those beads around your neck can't be removed. Did your lover put them there? Does he control you through them? That must mean you're used to being obedient, mustn't it? You'll just have to learn to obey someone else now."
That filthy hand was playing with his butt again, probing deeper and deeper into spots it had no right to go anywhere near, and if those fingers explored any further he swore he would turn around and bite that scaly hand off even if it meant having to tear off his own arm to get free of those chains….
But Tatsuya was speaking again. "Kinrin-sama, I would strongly recommend that you move away from the cage now, before the spells make you ill."
To Inuyasha's immense relief, the hand withdrew.
"You're such a killjoy and a nag," the demon complained, standing up and stepping away from the cage at last. "Or should that be 'jealous'? Don't be, my dear – I'm big enough for the two of you and more."
Inuyasha glared up at the two beings who held him in their power and watched as Kinrin chucked Tatsuya playfully under the chin before striding out of the den. The sorcerer followed the demon with his eyes until the door clanged shut again, then turned those dark eyes back to Inuyasha to give him a look of distaste.
"Never knew he had such a taste for half-breeds," he commented, before moving over to the chains around Inuyasha's ankles and releasing them.
The hanyou pulled his feet back into the cage and twisted onto his side, drawing his knees up to his chest. Tatsuya moved over to the other end of the cage and told him sternly: "I'm going to remove these chains from your hands. Behave yourself and don't try to claw me when I do. If you behave, I'll give you some of your clothes back."
Inuyasha was sorely tempted to sink his claws into the sorcerer's arms as he handled the cuffs and chains, but he decided not to, to see if he really would give him something to wear. Once the chains were off his wrists, he pulled his hands back into the cage and waited to see what Tatsuya would do.
For a moment, he thought the sorcerer wouldn't keep his word, as he tinkered about, putting the chains away in a chest and apparently rearranging the contents of that container. But finally, he left off and went over to the corner where his clothes were, picked up the fire rat hakama, carried it over to the cage and stuffed it through the bars.
Inuyasha snatched at it and went through some contortions to pull the hakama over his legs and hips and secure the ties round his waist in that tiny cage. He knew he probably looked stupid wrestling it on. But Tatsuya wasn't paying attention and the filthy demon was out of the den for now. Looking like an idiot for a few seconds was worth it if he could retain a shred of dignity for a little longer.

** *** **

Sesshomaru had picked up traces of the bear oni's passage through a north-eastern forest, and tracked them to the border of a lizard youkai clan's territory. Loose wisps of magic waste mingled with what remained of the oni's scent, along with a minuscule hint of something reptile-demon in nature, although he could not pinpoint the type as it was well disguised by magic.
He was no friend of the dragon, lizard and snake youkai clans. Although Ah-Un was a dragon, it was a youkai beast, like a steed or a bull would be to a human who kept it, and was nothing at all like the vicious, power-hungry, politically motivated descendants and relations of Ryukotsusei. Dragon mount or no, Sesshomaru decided that barging into the territories of the scaled youkai to hunt down one of their own without having clearly identified any individual as the wrongdoer would be counterproductive, and might drive the demon he was searching for deeper underground. He decided to follow the scents south along the border instead, to see if an opening would present itself.
That was not the only thing on his mind, however. He had felt a vague, uneasy sensation in his chest all day, one that made him want to turn around and fly back to the village to see Inuyasha. But he wondered if the unease had something to do with the way he had last parted with his brother. The lad needed time away from him to work things through in his head. For all he knew, the distress he seemed to be psychically picking up from him might originate from his disgust with Sesshomaru. If so, the last thing he needed was to see him now. The sensation was unpleasant, though, and he ached to return. Perhaps if he went to the forest behind the village, he could make sure all was well without being seen by him – although Inuyasha would sense him there and think he was stalking him. That wouldn't do. Besides, he was with all his friends. He couldn't be in any real trouble.
So Sesshomaru decided against returning just yet, pushed the sense of unease down into a corner of his soul, and continued investigating the scents along the border.
- 14
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And You, My Brother