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The Tale of the Demon Lord	By : Arianawray Category: InuYasha > Yaoi - Male/Male > InuYasha/Sessh?maru > InuYasha/Sessh?maru Views: 56279 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of its characters, and I do not make any money from these writings.

Chapter List
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XX: Ghost From The Past
Reestablishing communication with Totosai was not as straightforward as it had been to start talking to Bokusen'o again. While Sesshomaru's tree-demon godfather had ceased to speak to him for years out of disapproval at his conduct, his fire-demon godfather had fallen out with him much more violently.
Totosai's blunt refusal to forge Tokijin for Sesshomaru, followed by the demon lord's provocatively harsh words against his deceased father, then the obdurate manner in which he had barred Totosai's access to Inuyasha when the half-demon was a baby, had built up bad feeling between them and eventually culminated in a ferocious physical fight outside the castle grounds.
Now, as Sesshomaru sat stiffly on a chair in one of his meeting rooms in the administrative wing, his left arm tightly bandaged under the silky white sleeve of the fresh garment he had just changed into, he gazed coldly down at the ancient, grey-haired fire demon in drab rags as dull as his straggly hair. Totosai had stubbornly refused a chair but insisted instead on sitting cross-legged on the floor, resting his long-handled swordsmith's mallet over his shoulder.
Only the barest of acknowledgements had passed between them when they entered the room, as each remembered their last meeting, when the demon lord had disrespectfully raised his weapon against his godfather, and Totosai in self-defence had come very close to singeing every strand of Sesshomaru's beautiful platinum hair to a frizzy ebony crisp.
Standing close to the wall on one side of the room, Inuyasha watched with interest as the two powerful demons eyed each other cautiously. All three of them remained silent until Sesshomaru had dismissed the attendants and guards, and the meeting room door was firmly shut, leaving them to talk in private.
"Sit down, Inuyasha," Sesshomaru said evenly. "On a chair, please, like a well-bred prince."
Inuyasha saw that his brother was not so much giving him an order as he was talking at Totosai, through him.
This, he reckoned, would be interesting. So he quietly took a seat a little behind Sesshomaru and to his left.
"You certainly waited more than long enough to do the right thing," Totosai stated to the demon lord, not bothering with tact or protocol of any description. His way of hunching as he sat, his voice so gravelly that it sounded unsteady, and his manner of craning his neck to peer upward out of his bulging eyes might have made a casual observer think that he was nervous, or afraid of Sesshomaru, but the demon lord knew better. Inuyasha too could tell that behind the humble façade was a steely certainty about what he would or would not do.
"What precisely are you referring to?" Sesshomaru asked coolly.
"Giving your brother the sword that your father meant him to have, of course," Totosai answered gruffly. "You stuck both those beautiful lengths of fang up on the wall out of spite all this time, didn't you, you dolt? Two hundred years of utter silence from those magnificent blades, then at last, today, they began to sing."
"Sing?" Sesshomaru inquired icily, extremely displeased at being called a dolt to his face, although in the familial and social scheme of things, Totosai as his godfather was not without the status and authority to do so.
"Yes, that's exactly what I said – sing. I forged them, and they are able to sing to me as they did to your father, and if you would only open those too-sharp ears of yours to listen to what is truly important, you would hear them too. That goes for you as well, little one," Totosai said to Inuyasha. "With those ears, you certainly should be able to hear well."
Inuyasha had always been self-conscious about his prominent puppy ears, for they were the most conspicuous physical trait that marked him as different from the humans he had been raised among. But old Totosai did not speak of his furry appendages in the hostile manner that unfriendly humans did – he spoke of them almost fondly, underneath all that grumpy warbling.
Inuyasha's instinct was to put a hand up to his pointed white-furred flaps with their soft pink insides, but a reaction like that would only expose his awkwardness, so he settled for allowing his ears to merely twitch.
Sesshomaru's excellent peripheral vision caught the softly twitching flaps, which made his lips betray the trace of a smile. When he turned his attention back to Totosai, however, the smile was nowhere to be seen.
"Did you come here purely to tell us of your fascinating ability to communicate with teeth, Godfather?" Sesshomaru asked.
"Oh, I could go on at length about teeth – dog-demon teeth, ogre teeth, dragon teeth, fangs, incisors, molars… mmm… but I don't suppose you'd really be interested…" Totosai's speech tapered off as a strangely distant look came over his face, and he appeared to have suddenly fallen asleep with his staring eyes wide open.
Inuyasha raised his eyebrows and leaned forward to stare curiously at the fire demon. But Sesshomaru seemed accustomed to such eccentric behaviour, for the demon lord sat unmoving and unmoved until Totosai snapped to life again, prompted by no apparent signal that anyone could see, only to murmur: "What was I saying?"
"You were saying nothing that I cared to hear about teeth," Sesshomaru replied.
"Ah – yes, of course – teeth that you care nothing about, you unkind moron. What a way to treat your father's fang…"
"Are we still talking about that?" Sesshomaru asked dryly.
"Well, it's important!" Totosai snapped, slapping his own knee for emphasis. "Your father didn't break off that great tooth of his for nothing, you know! He knew that one of his massive fangs would make the best possible weapons and instruments for his own use, but he also wished to leave them to his children. And he had me make them in ways that would bring out the best in both his offspring!"
"He left me a sword that could not cut to bring out the best in me?" remarked the demon lord ironically. "How, pray tell, does that work?"
"Precisely what your royal sire's plan was is something that you will have to discover for yourself – it does no good to have someone report to you how it is meant to turn out, does it? It's the same difference between having someone telling you how you are supposed to train for combat, and actually going through the training. I can suggest, however, that you ought to listen to your Tenseiga. If you learn to hear its voice, it will be able to guide you in critical situations. Perhaps you ought to have learnt to listen to it long ago – but then you never did want to listen to anything you preferred not to hear. Much use your sharp ears are."
Sesshomaru considered this piece of advice and sat in silence digesting it.
"As for you, young one," Totosai said to Inuyasha. "The Tetsusaiga was designed to match and magnify your natural strength, while keeping your demon blood from taking over your soul."
"What are you talking about?" Inuyasha questioned. "Didn't my father have this sword made before I was born? How could he design it to match me? And I'm naturally half-demon, aren't I? How can the demon part of me take over my soul?"
"Your father had met your mother by the time he decided to have me craft two swords that he – or anyone else who wished to protect one of human blood – could wield in her defence. In his wisdom, he knew what kind of power a child of theirs would turn out to have. Once you were conceived, he could feel the strength of your spirit-energy growing, and twice, he had me fine-tune the sword to fit your nature better. He could not tell for certain if you were a male or female child in the womb, but he knew you were very strong."
"And the demon blood thing?" Inuyasha pressed for an answer.
"You wouldn't know about that as I doubt you have ever been pushed near enough to the brink for it to take over. A half-demon like you, who at times becomes fully human for a while – yes, I know about that – also faces times when he is capable of turning full-demon. But because you were not born a full demon, you haven't the ability – at least not at your age – to control your demon strength and instincts when that happens. Perhaps when you are older and more powerful you will be able to govern it. But at this stage in your life, the demon blood would take over your entire mind and body, and you would cease to think or feel. You would kill everything in sight, and eventually destroy yourself."
Inuyasha's eyes had opened so wide by this time that if the topic had not been so serious, it would have been a comical sight.
"So… what kind of stuff could push me over the edge?" he asked Totosai in a hushed voice.
"Well, I couldn't say for certain as it has never happened," the fire demon remarked vaguely. "I would imagine that being on the verge of getting killed, or being forced to keep fighting even when you are critically wounded, might bring out the entire demon part of you, which will instinctively emerge to keep you alive for a while longer. Which is why it is important, now that you are approaching maturity and gaining greater physical strength by the year, that you should keep the Tetsusaiga with you at all times."
"My life's been in danger lots and lots and lots of times," Inuyasha huffed. "And I'm pretty sure I never turned into some uncontrollable killing machine on any of those occasions. I know a couple of ogres that would have been ripped into small enough shreds to fertilise large tracts of forest if merely being in danger of getting killed was enough to turn me full-demon!"
"You mean the mountain ogres who attacked you near the Grey Hills when you were about this small?" Totosai held his hand about two-and-a-half feet off the floor.
At this, both Sesshomaru's and Inuyasha's eyes narrowed as they regarded the ancient swordsmith.
"How did you know about that?" Inuyasha demanded.
"I was there."
"What? That's ridiculous! If you were there, why didn't you help me?"
"I did help you, you silly child," Totosai snapped. "I burnt both those oversized bullies to ashes once you were out of the area so that they wouldn't go after you! If they had gone after you as you ran off, maybe then you would have been pushed to the edge."
"Why didn't you help me before that?" Inuyasha asked, raising his voice. "I was hurt! They – they almost – that bald one – he crushed the burrow I was hiding in with his hand, and the earth came down and I couldn't breathe, and my leg was almost smashed–"
Inuyasha broke off, overcome by reliving that terrifying episode of his childhood not long after his mother's death, swamped all over again by the bitter feelings he had had then of utter helplessness, defenceless solitude, pain and misery.
"I couldn't, child," Totosai stated flatly. "You would have seen me if I had. I waited till you were out of there. But if it's any consolation, if I had seen that you truly had been about to be killed, I would have intervened at once."
"It's no consolation!" Inuyasha snapped. "You were there, and you didn't show your face. No one showed up for me, ever. Mama died and that was it – I was completely alone for years and years, with no one even to have a normal conversation with, until Kikyo and Kaede became my friends…"
For a demon who usually maintained the most unemotional of facades, Sesshomaru was starting to look distinctly uncomfortable, and very guilty. But Totosai was speaking again.
"I'm sorry, little one," the old swordsmith said. "Myoga and I decided that while you were in your mother's care, we should leave you alone to see if you could integrate into human society, into her family. We continued to keep out of sight after your mother's passing, to give you a chance to make your way back among your human relations somehow, or perhaps find your own social group. Perhaps we shouldn't have pushed it quite so far for so long, but when you were eventually accepted by the priestesses and by the village you most recently lived in, we felt we had been right not to interfere, and left you there to live in peace. We did, however, secretly keep an eye on you all the time that you were out in the wilds on your own, between your mother's death and your arrival at the village."
"It was my fault," Sesshomaru spoke up at last, turning to his brother with a strained look in his golden eyes, which held a rare look of pain. "I told Totosai and Myoga that no demon tribe or group would ever accept you, and that if they tried to make a place for you in demon society, they would only be destroying you. I was speaking for myself then, and not for all demons, because I was still young and foolish enough to hate you. I was wrong to have done that, Inuyasha. I should have encouraged them to step in even if I myself was too stupid to look after you as I should have."
Inuyasha stood up and glared at the two demons in the room with him, eyes shining in anger. He was quite close to tears, but he had done more than enough crying of late, and he thought that if he cried again now, it would look like nothing more than self-pitying indulgence and childish weakness. So he kept his face hard and his eyes blazing as he stood up and declared: "I think you're both idiots."
He turned on his heel and strode out of the meeting room.
Left alone together, Sesshomaru and Totosai eyed each other in silence again before the demon lord said: "I had hoped not to give him more pain for some time, but your colourful tales from the past have stirred up further anguish for him."
"Better out than in," Totosai murmured. "We would have had to deal with the facts of his abandonment by you sooner or later. So it's sooner. Better than letting it fester, no?"
"There isn't really a 'we' in this, is there, Godfather?" Sesshomaru commented, standing up. "You're not the one who will have to patch things up with the boy immediately."
"Ah well, isn't that what brothers are for?" the fire demon asked airily.
~ - ~
Sesshomaru tracked Inuyasha's scent and spirit-energy to their father's room. The half-demon was seated at the edge of the bed his parents had shared, staring at the Tetsusaiga in his lap. When Sesshomaru entered, he stood up abruptly and went to the window, where he gazed out over the field that stretched out before the royal wing.
"It seems that the wrongs I have committed against you stretch back endlessly into the past, Inuyasha," Sesshomaru spoke. "I am truly sorry. I should never have left you to fend for yourself when you were still so small."
"Well, I turned out fine, didn't I?" Inuyasha answered shortly, keeping his back to his brother.
"Very fine," the demon lord said, taking Inuyasha's dismissive remark about himself and transforming it into praise for the half-demon. "But life should never have been so hard for you. That it was, was my responsibility. I do not know how I shall ever make up for all your years of loneliness and pain, but I have every intention of trying, if you will still let me. I know it gets harder and more ridiculous to you with every new revelation from the past, but please let me try."
"You really were such a bastard when I was a child, you know that?" the prince said.
"I know."
"But you know what? I think in your own sick and miserable world, you were pretty damn lonely too," he said, turning to look at Sesshomaru. "So I don't know. Maybe that makes two of us."
"Maybe it does," Sesshomaru said, thinking that Inuyasha suddenly seemed to have grown up in those few seconds.
"I guess it's not the old fellow's fault either," Inuyasha sighed. "He was trying to do what he believed was right for me."
"I accept full blame for all that took place."
The tension dissolved significantly as they spoke, and both of them stood there together looking out over the field to the far horizon beyond the castle boundaries, not quite touching, but not as far apart as they might perhaps have been, given the circumstances.
~ - ~
Inuyasha made it up with Totosai an hour later, when he felt calmer and better able to release himself from the shackles of the past that he had barely realised were still clinging to him.
In return, the old fire demon took the prince out to one of the more spacious gardens and guided him through a few paces with his Tetsusaiga, helping him to sense its power and discern the demon auras that swirled around the blade whenever it was in its transformed state – forces invisible to the untrained, but which showed the initiated the different destructive forces the blade could unleash. It was important, Totosai said, that he should sense these auras well so he would not accidentally release a blow that could kill a hundred demons in one go – why carelessly take out enemies and friends alike?
At the end of the intensive instruction, Totosai put his mallet away over his shoulder and said: "That's more than enough for today. You should not over-train."
The half-demon nodded and watched Totosai step back indoors for a further word with Sesshomaru. Naturally, Inuyasha did not heed the fire demon's advice. The moment the swordsmith was out of sight, the prince unsheathed the Tetsusaiga again and continued practising with it in the garden.
He still had not quite got the knack of wielding it with one arm – while sparring with Sesshomaru earlier, he had resorted at times to swinging the blade with both arms so as not to lose his balance and momentum. He believed it was his lack of control that had made him injure Sesshomaru so badly.
He twirled the blade, keeping his left arm behind his back to prevent the temptation to bring it into play. He was overdoing the training, and his muscles were sore, but he was obstinate and kept going. Before he knew it, he was overbalancing and getting tossed around by the wildly swinging blade. To avoid chopping down the beautiful pine tree he was under, Inuyasha ended up planting his face into the tree trunk, and scraping his left hand hard against the rough bark.
"Owww," he muttered to himself as he peeled his face off the pine.
At least, he thought he was muttering to himself, until he heard a small giggle from behind him.
He turned and saw a wolf-demon child peering at him from the corner of the castle beside the garden, and another child – a little dog-demon – peering out too from behind the first.
When they realised that they had been seen, the children's eyes widened in alarm, and they disappeared round the corner. Inuyasha followed them through the garden on the other side of the wall, and found them with a small handful of demon children of various species seated on the grass, in the company of the wolf-demon healer, Satoshi.
"I'm afraid the children have been bothering Your Highness," Satoshi said, rising quickly and bowing to the prince, prompting the little ones to stand up and bow too.
"Not at all," Inuyasha said, looking at the tiny faces staring up at him in awe, and remembering what he himself had been like as a child looking up fearfully at strange adults who looked so impressively big and tall to him. "Are you their teacher?"
"I have somehow or other – I don't quite know how – become an unofficial tutor to the children living here. They have their proper lessons, of course, but they seem to find it amusing to tag along with me and learn more about herbs and plants," the wolf demon explained bemusedly. "I can't imagine why."
Inuyasha smiled, thinking of the two priestesses back in the village, who spent hours each day taking the village children through the herb and vegetable patches, and through the safe parts of the forest, to teach them how to identify, harvest and plant useful medicinal and food flora, and how to read and write. "Children gravitate naturally towards certain grown-ups," he said. "You are obviously one of them."
"Why that should be so will be an eternal mystery to me," the wolf demon chuckled.
"I was wondering why I hadn't seen any little ones since I came back," Inuyasha remarked, bending down to pat a fox-demon toddler who had crept over to his right foot and was pulling at the soft blue leather of his suede-textured boots. "So this is where they've been hiding! Are these all of them? So few? When I was a child, this place was crawling with children."
"This is all we have at present, Your Highness," Satoshi replied. "I believe the reason why there are fewer little ones here now is that the town near the castle has grown greatly over the last one hundred years. Many of the staff now house their families in the town instead of on the castle grounds. It's better for their mates, parents and children to be able to move freely about the big town and for the children to go to school there, than be constrained by the security and etiquette restrictions necessary within the castle."
"Is that town really so developed now?" Inuyasha asked. He remembered seeing the place in his childhood only once, when his mother had finally left the castle with him, and they had passed the unimpressive collection of houses and shops on the way to her family's home town many miles away.
"Oh yes," Satoshi said. "In the last hundred years, it has really come along. It has numerous demon residents and tradespeople, as well as a small number of human shop owners who moved there from villages in this region. It has two schools, a paved main street, and a security force of its own. Three important ministers have built their homes there."
"I guess I really have been away for a long time," Inuyasha commented.
Satoshi's lilac eyes had been flicking irresistibly towards Inuyasha's forehead every few seconds, and the wolf-demon healer could no longer restrain himself. As he raised one hand in a slightly apologetic manner, he said: "I beg your pardon, Your Highness, but if you would permit me…"
He stepped forward and carefully extracted two splinters from Inuyasha's forehead, embedded there thanks to his face making contact with the pine bark.
"Damn! Did I get those stuck in there?" the prince asked, staring at the slivers of pine wood now resting on Satoshi's palm and rubbing his forehead, which made the children giggle again.
Satoshi cast the splinters aside on the grass, away from the spots where the children usually played, and cleared his throat a little as he gestured apologetically again, this time to Inuyasha's left hand. "More splinters there, Your Highness. If you would let me…"
The healer took Inuyasha's hand and gently drew several splinters out of it, casting each one aside as it came free. The removal of one of the larger splinters was followed by the appearance of a spot of blood. Satoshi immediately pulled some wrapped-up patches of clean white linen from his robe pocket. He dabbed away the blood and pressed down on the spot, then carefully lifted the linen patch and looked satisfied. "There you go."
"Great, thanks!" Inuyasha said cheerfully.
"Please do not mention it, Your Highness," Satoshi said easily. "The children are supposed to start getting ready for dinner, so I had better take them inside."
The healer and the children bowed to take their leave. Inuyasha bowed playfully in return before going back inside, by the other entrance closer to the royal wing, never realising that they had had an audience.
Sesshomaru had been watching quietly from a window above. As Satoshi extracted the bark from the half-demon's forehead and took his hand to remove the splinters there, Sesshomaru felt a surge of jealousy.
Why was it so easy for anyone else to touch Inuyasha when he, Sesshomaru, was reduced to asking permission to make contact, and carefully tiptoeing around the boy? For a second, his old instincts flared, and he found himself thinking: I should summon that presumptuous wolf-demon healer and show him his place – he is pretty enough himself – perhaps an hour or two at my mercy, in my room, would show him who has the right to Inuyasha…
Sesshomaru abruptly checked himself upon realising that he had left his mind unguarded and allowed his negative old instincts to speak where they should have remained silent. Satoshi had not done anything wrong; he had acted correctly and professionally as a castle healer.
Inuyasha too had done nothing wrong (other than disregard Totosai's advice not to overtrain). In truth, if the prince of this kingdom chose to use any of the castle staff or servants, or even the children, he would not be acting out of order for his rank and rights, provided that he did not go overboard and screw everything that moved, like his brother once had.
The only one behaving badly, thought Sesshomaru, was Sesshomaru. So the demon lord swallowed his jealousy, silenced the complaints of his bad habits which had been given free rein for close to two hundred years, and heeded the quiet pulse of the Tenseiga tucked into his sash.
~ - ~
With Totosai refusing a room in the castle after dinner, preferring to spend the night in the forest patch with Bokusen'o and his flying bovine mount, there was no need to assign room attendants to the old swordsmith. Sesshomaru gave orders to the guards on patrol near the forest patch to ensure that his two godfathers were not disturbed or harassed, and to bring Totosai any food or drink he asked for.
The demon lord's arm was healing swiftly, but the flesh still smarted and the bone ached. He was doing his best to ignore the discomfort while preparing to go to bed, when a knock sounded at his door.
"Come in," he said.
His heart and spirit rose when Inuyasha entered, still wearing the thick, embroidered blue jacket and trousers he had worn to dinner.
"I came to see how your arm was," Inuyasha told him. "Does it still hurt?"
"Very little," Sesshomaru replied. "It is healing well. There is no permanent damage done. Have you drunk your final dose of medicine yet?"
"I just finished it. Sesshomaru, I'm really sorry for hurting you."
"Likewise, in a different way."
"Huh. Maybe we should just stop apologising to each other all the time," Inuyasha muttered.
"Not if there are things still worth apologising for."
"Anything I can help you with before I go to bed?" the half-demon asked. "Anything that you can't do with one arm, I mean."
"You'd be surprised by how much I can get done with one working arm," Sesshomaru remarked.
Inuyasha smiled wryly. "I probably would. So if there's nothing you need…"
"There's nothing I need. But if you would like to stay and talk, you are more than welcome to."
"No, not tonight," Inuyasha said, a little too quickly. "I should just go back to my room and get some rest – it's been quite a day."
"Of course."
"Goodnight, then."
"Goodnight," Sesshomaru replied, then added just as Inuyasha was reaching for the door handle. "I won't do anything you don't want me to do to you from now on, you know. Even if you happen to be in my bedroom all night."
Inuyasha coloured a little, but summoned enough steadiness of voice to turn to Sesshomaru and answer calmly: "I know. Thank you. Sleep well."
He turned the door handle and was gone.
Sesshomaru was disappointed by his departure, but he could not in all fairness expect Inuyasha to come around in such a short time and get cosy with him as if he, Sesshomaru, had never been anything other than a kind, loving and protective brother to him. It would serve him right if the boy sought the wolf-demon's bed instead.
All he could do was to keep hoping that it was not much, much too late to heal a rift that had spent two hundred years growing into a chasm, and which threatened to grow larger and deeper with every new appearance of yet another ghost from the past like Totosai, returning to haunt them.
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The Tale of the Demon Lord