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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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XXI: Opening Doors
"My greatest regret is that I obeyed your father when he ordered me to stay out of the battle," Totosai admitted to Inuyasha as he sat with the half-demon in the forest patch at Bokusen'o's roots. "If I had disobeyed him – if I had only defied him and stood by him as he defended you and your mother, there is every chance that he would be alive today."
Inuyasha had had his morning lessons out in the forest with Jaken, watched over by Totosai and Bokusen'o, as well as by the flying cow. The prince's kappa tutor had then discreetly withdrawn from the forest at the end of the lesson, leaving Inuyasha to go through some more training with his sword under Totosai's guidance. When the old fire demon ended the training for the morning, Inuyasha rested with him in the shade Bokusen'o provided and talked to his godfathers.
"My next-greatest regret is that I believed your brother when he said you would never have a proper place in demon society," Totosai said, in a rare stretch of verbal clarity. "He was wrong. You have a place here, and you also have a place among humans – you should have had the best of both worlds. Instead, you ended up with neither for eighty years of your life. I made mistakes listening to those two. I do not intend to repeat those mistakes."
Inuyasha turned his words over in his head for a while before saying, carefully and thoughtfully: "If you had defied my father, there is a chance that both of you could have died. Then he would have had one friend less remaining in the world of the living to give advice to his sons."
"That may be true, but I am nonetheless sorry that I listened to him at such a time. I should also have ignored your brother's words and not left you lonely all by yourself in the forest. At the time, I truly believed it best for you to have no social contact with demons, as I thought you could find humans to live among after your mother's death, despite her relatives rejecting you. I thought you had a better chance there, because any half-demon is stronger by far than even a large group of humans, and you would be able to defend yourself and hold your own among them; at the time, I did not have your father's faith in your potential power, and did not know how your strength would develop. I feared that throwing you in among other demons would mean your swift demise, especially with an elder brother who was so influential, and who hated you so much. It is good to see that he does not hate you now. Far from it, if my old eyes still serve me."
"Huh. Who knows how long that'll last?" the prince mumbled.
"What makes you think it won't?"
"He hated me for two hundred years, Totosai! I'm not planning to get all excited just because he's suddenly taken a fancy to me for… what? A few days? Anyway I'm not convinced that enjoying his affection isn't somewhat worse than being hated by him."
"So he got inside your trousers, did he?" Totosai asked matter-of-factly.
Inuyasha started at that comment and fervently hoped that he wasn't blushing.
The old demon peered at him and remarked: "What are you looking so embarrassed about? You could do a lot worse than Sesshomaru, you know."
"What would you know, you old bag of bones?" the prince snapped, convinced that his face must be bright red by now.
"Oh," Totosai said, his goggle eyes widening even further. "I could tell you all about the exploits of my youth, the countless lovers I had everywhere, male and female, the things we did… but I don't suppose you'd really be interested."
Inuyasha's eyes grew almost as goggle-like as Totosai's, revealing his horror at the thought of having to hear in uncomfortable detail about this godfather's ancient sexual exploits. How old was this dried-up creature? Three thousand? He was certain too, that if he had been blushing earlier, the rosy flush would surely have vanished instantly, for his cheeks would certainly have paled at the prospect of being forced to picture Totosai cavorting naked all over the kingdom.
"Uhm… maybe another time… when I'm not about to have lunch…" Inuyasha murmured awkwardly.
"Well, perhaps it's best not to mention most of what happened in the past," Totosai remarked, a faraway look coming into his eyes. "I promised some of those lassies I would take their secrets to my grave – naughty little things, some of those females were, particularly that green-eyed one with the large bosom and the prettiest, pinkest nipples I ever saw…"
"O-kay… maybe we should leave it at that!" Inuyasha declared with a note of finality, springing to his feet as Bokusen'o let out a low, deep chuckle and Totosai blinked away the glazed expression on his face.
"Hmm, yes, perhaps we should, before I slip and wax lyrical about her very generous derriere too – I always did like my females on the plump side," the swordsmith remarked. "So much more grabbable and pinchable than those stick-thin creatures with two bony lumps as an excuse for a backside – you need a rump you can really knead with both hands…"
Bokusen'o chuckled again to see the face Inuyasha was pulling, and interrupted his friend by saying to Inuyasha: "You probably do not want to hear Totosai's ancient stories. But the old codger is right about the fact that you could do much worse than Sesshomaru, young one."
"Right – and you would be experienced enough to agree with Totosai because you've spent two thousand years flirting with the rose bushes in all the gardens?" Inuyasha grumbled.
Bokusen'o's face in the trunk pulled deeper into the bark in the arboreal equivalent of a recoil. "The rose bushes?" the tree demon growled. "You silly young thing – if you knew anything at all you'd never suggest that I would even speak to those air-headed, frigid shrubs. They smell sickly sweet and don't feel great either – bristling with thorns, you know. But a gentle willow, or maybe a sturdy pine, now those are a joy to rub one's trunk up against. When you get some rhythmic friction going, the sensations are quite stimulating…"
Inuyasha groaned, turned quickly away from the two demons before he heard anything more to burn his ears and raze his imagination, and fled the forest patch to the chuckles of the two godfathers.
He headed back to the castle and spent the afternoon inside his mother's old room, whose door he had not opened since his return, afraid that seeing the interior would bring back even more memories and make him sad.
But when he entered, no heaviness weighed on his heart even though the furnishings in the room were very much as they had been when his Mama had lived here. He thought the bed even held a very, very tiny hint of her scent from all those years ago – but that was surely nothing more than wishful thinking, for the mattress was new. Still, it somehow felt to him like a happy room now. It retained no trace of her former sadness, which she had always tried to conceal from him, but which he could sense as easily as he could feel his own emotions.
He opened the shutters, let in the light, and inhaled. There was no bitterness here, no anger, not even despair, for his mother had been a strong woman – as psychologically strong as she was kind of heart. There was only a gentle, calm, unselfish sadness which was dissipating even as he breathed in the physical scents and spiritual memories around him. Her soul was at peace now. He would never wish for her to return to the chaotic world of the living, much as he longed to see her again.
Her room was one door away from his. In the past, there had been a smaller room in-between that was originally meant as a nursery. But as she had raised him herself, with almost no help at all from the servants, the nursery had never been used. She would have been happy for her child to have lived in her room with her all the time, but Inuyasha vaguely recalled overhearing Sesshomaru once saying to her in a cold, curt speech that it was inappropriate for a growing child of his father's to spend all his nights inside his mother's room, beyond his infancy.
Very soon after that speech, Inuyasha had officially moved into his own bedroom. However, Sesshomaru had not troubled himself further with whether he actually slept in his room or in his mother's – the demon lord seemed to have insisted on the move for nothing more than form's sake; in all else, he left mother and child to their own devices. Inuyasha had therefore never been prevented from running over to his Mama's room every time he felt lonely, or her from visiting him.
The prince smiled to himself as he remembered pattering up and down the corridor in the middle of the night and waking his mother up at all hours, and how patiently she had tolerated the frequent disruption to her sleep.
He left her room now and stepped into the corridor. The nursery door was gone, seamlessly walled up with the same stones as the rest of the corridor wall. That had apparently been done a few years ago, when the wall between the nursery and his old bedroom had been knocked down and the two spaces merged in order to make the bedroom bigger and better for him.
To think that Sesshomaru had done that at a time when he had not even cared about Inuyasha's welfare, but had only thought that things should be done "properly" and improved to match his brother's rank, once he succeeded in compelling him to come home.
As he stood in the corridor, he caught Totosai's scent. So the swordsmith had come indoors too. A few more steps down the passageway revealed to him that Sesshomaru's room door was wide open – not how it normally was, for it was almost always kept closed except at mid-morning, when the cleaning staff were going about their work inside.
Out of curiosity, he walked past his own room and went right up to Sesshomaru's open door, to see what was going on in there.
Totosai was standing in the room, head tilted back against his shoulder blades, as he admired the painting on the ceiling above Sesshomaru's bed. Sesshomaru stood a few feet behind the old demon.
"One of my finest pieces of art, even if I say so myself," the swordsmith said to Inuyasha when he spotted the prince in the corridor.
"You were the one who painted that?" the half-demon asked, entering his brother's room as Sesshomaru inclined his head to invite him in.
"Yes, I was the painter," Totosai answered wistfully. "Those were the good old days, when your father was all excited over the idiot here, and doing all he could to humour him in every imaginable way."
The idiot in Totosai's opinion being Sesshomaru, of course.
The demon lord glowered at his godfather, but Inuyasha could sense that his brother and the fire demon had had a private talk sometime during the afternoon, probably at the same time as he was reminiscing in his mother's room. Sesshomaru seemed much less hostile towards Totosai than he had been yesterday.
"Father very quickly lost his enthusiasm for me, however," Sesshomaru said to Inuyasha.
Totosai turned to both the brothers at once, a click of impatience snapping off his tongue. "That is nonsense, and you know it, you fool," he said to the older brother. "Your father loved you every day of his life from the second you were born, to the moment he died. And he was as proud of you as any father could be. Just because your personality didn't meld well with his as you grew bigger, it doesn't mean that he loved you any less, or was any less proud of you. You'd be a clod to think he didn't care for you."
To Inuyasha, the fire demon said: "Your brother imagines that your father was disappointed in him, and that he never loved him. It might have been true that he found it hard to express his affection to such a naturally cold child, and Sesshomaru grew even icier when your sire seemed to become less outwardly loving. It was certainly true that that was the fault of them both. But he never stopped loving your brother, and he trusted him to find the right way to live and rule eventually. He had such faith in him. He believed that in the end, he would do the right thing in every facet of his life."
"I am sure that my father was right to have faith in my brother," Inuyasha said politely – and rather generously, considering his previous experiences with Sesshomaru.
Totosai scratched his beard and gazed for some time at his friend's sons, apparently slipping into another spell of waking unconsciousness, before he blinked and murmured: "Hmm… yes… let's see how everything pans out, shall we? Not sticking those fine swords up on the wall for another two hundred years ought to be one step in the right direction, I suppose."
The look on Sesshomaru's face implied that he would not be too unhappy if he could jam Totosai's mouth shut with those very swords, but the demon lord kept his thoughts to himself and invited his godfather to join Inuyasha and himself for dinner.
Totosai accepted the invitation and ate with them, looking most incongruous in the dining hall in his ragged clothes, about which he seemed not the slightest bit self-conscious.
"I'll be leaving in the morning," the old swordsmith announced when they had eaten their fill. "But I shall make regular visits, as a good godfather is supposed to be free to do, instead of being driven off with swords and poisonous whips and barred from seeing his younger godchild. In the meantime, work with your swords, both of you, not against them."
Inuyasha promised to be up to see him off, then rose from his seat and took his leave, bowing to both Totosai and Sesshomaru before going back upstairs to his room.
Totosai again declined indoor accommodation for the night, so Sesshomaru walked his godfather out to Bokusen'o's forest patch. Halfway there, when they were in the middle of a field with no one nearby, Totosai said to his royal godson: "Sesshomaru, if you hurt that boy again, I will break your head. Even if you manage to dodge my blows, I promise that you will never be happy if you cause him any more pain."
"That sounds like a curse," the demon lord remarked calmly.
"Perhaps it is. But it may be a blessing too, if you heed the warning. Your father designed the swords not only to suit himself, but to match your souls. The two swords were once one fang. Destroy your brother, and you will destroy yourself. But love him, and you will grow stronger."
"I have no intention of hurting Inuyasha again," Sesshomaru stated. "But I do not think he will make it easy for me to do right by him."
"You didn't make it easy for him to survive before. You'll pay for that in spadefuls of patience and understanding, neither of which have ever been your strong points."
"I assure you that repayment has already begun."
"You haven't filled up so much as a tenth of that gaping hole yet."
"You forget that Father left a gaping hole in my heart too."
"Such a fool you are – you dug the hole there yourself by refusing to look past your father's outward manner through to the love he had for you inside. I'm not saying he wasn't to blame too, but you didn't have to dig quite so deep, did you? You're like your mother, you are, taking everything to heart and letting things fester. At least she learnt to let things go as she grew older – you haven't mastered the art of that yet! But you'll heal yourself as you heal your little brother. You had better, because enough wounds have been inflicted in this family. Honour your father's sword, and don't insult it by pairing it with that abomination of Kaijinbo's."
Sesshomaru nodded, knowing that while he now had his two godfathers' guidance once more, he was the one who would have to do the work and walk the path they were helping him to map out.
The demon lord returned to the castle after leaving Totosai in Bokusen'o's company. He went to the small training room in which his own battle armour was kept, and there he hung up on the wall the sword Kaijinbo had forged, Tokijin, chaining it to its holder and placing a barrier spell around it so the servants would not accidentally touch it while cleaning the room, for the sword was powerful and dangerous.
From his personal armoury, he selected a simple but well-crafted metal sword with no magic in it, which he could use as an offensive weapon in an emergency, and sheathed that in his sash beside his father's Tenseiga.
Then he went to Inuyasha's room and knocked on the door before turning the handle and entering.
"Are you about to go to bed?" Sesshomaru asked, trying not to stare too hard at his brother, who was crouched on the carpet for some reason, looking invitingly tousle-haired and extremely undressable in a light, thin robe woven from a soft, white fabric.
"No, I'm wide awake. I was just writing another letter to Kikyo and Kaede when the wind blew the sheet under the bed."
"If you're not about to sleep yet, may I show you something?" Sesshomaru asked.
"Sure. What is it?"
The demon lord latched Inyuasha's bedroom door, then said: "Come here," as he moved towards the wall in which Inuyasha's bathroom door was set.
Puzzled, Inuyasha got up and padded along barefooted behind his brother, who was moving towards the wall.
Lowering his voice, Sesshomaru said: "Put your hand here – exactly here, on this stone, and let the stone feel that you are of our father's blood. When you sense that it has responded to you and that it acknowledges you, push the stone into the wall, firmly but steadily."
Inuyasha, thoroughly intrigued by now, did as instructed. To his amazement, the stone glided into the wall with very little resistance, and something clicked softly within the thickness of the stone structure.
"It works through an ancient spell created by our grandfather. It obeys those of our blood, provided that we know how to use the spell. To draw the stone back towards the surface of the wall and re-seal the door, position your hand over the gap and call the stone back with your mind. I will show you how that is done later."
"Door?" Inuyasha asked in a whisper. "This opens a door?"
"Yes. Look."
Sesshomaru pushed open the stone doorway to the secret passage, stepped inside, and beckoned Inuyasha to follow. The stunned half-demon prince entered the passage after him, and walked through it until Sesshomaru opened the door at its other end, and they emerged in the demon lord's bedroom.
Sesshomaru held a finger to his lips to tell Inuyasha that he should remain silent, as he did not want the guards outside to hear any voices within when no one was supposed to be in this room. Although the doors were very thick and would keep even fairly loud sounds from reaching the ears of the guards outside, Sesshomaru knew there was a chance that Inuyasha might get angry enough to start bellowing at the top of his voice, and that would not go unheard.
The half-demon remained silent, so Sesshomaru closed the door on his side and led him back down the passage to where they had begun. He showed him how to draw the locking-stone back to be flush with the wall, and how that triggered the stone door to move back into place and merge flawlessly again with the rest of the stone it was set in. Everything operated almost soundlessly. If someone did not know the passage was there, they would never pay any attention to those soft noises, for they would think them sounds from other parts of the castle, carried through the stone.
Inuyasha stared at Sesshomaru, not speaking for some time, before asking in a voice that was still hushed: "What the hell was that? How long has that passage been there?"
"It has been there since the castle was built. Our grandfather included the design of such passages in certain parts of the castle, intending them to be used as hiding places, or perhaps as escape routes for the children of the family in an emergency, although our family has long been powerful enough not to require their use."
"And one of those passages lies between your bedroom and mine?" Inuyasha asked in a wary tone that threatened to turn fierce.
"Yes. You have every right to be angry that I did not tell you about it before. I confess that I used to use the passage to look at you while you slept by night, especially when you were a child. But I give you my word that I shall never open your side of the door again without your express permission. There's no need to pile cupboards and cabinets in front of it. I will never open it again if you do not say specifically that I can, do you understand? But I am giving you permission to come through to my room whenever you need to or want to, for any reason. I will not give myself that permission to do the same to you. I hope you will not stay angry with me for long."
The secret passage and Sesshomaru's former use of it made up yet another phantom from the past that the demon lord knew could threaten all that he was trying to build with Inuyasha. But better out than in, Totosai had said, and Sesshomaru had no intention of allowing Inuyasha to find out about the hidden doors later and feel a hundred times more betrayed than he would if he confessed to him now.
Inuyasha glared at Sesshomaru in silence before asking grimly: "You used to watch me in secret while I slept?"
"Yes I did. I'm sorry. I won't do that again."
A longer silence followed, broken at last by this blunt statement from the prince, accompanied by blazing golden eyes: "You are one seriously screwed-up bastard, you know that, Sesshomaru?"
The demon lord felt less inclined to agree immediately with that fierce statement, for letting go of his old arrogance and selfish behaviour was not a quick or easy process, and it had not been long since he had embarked on what looked to be a long and humbling road for him.
"I wish I were less of a disappointment to you as an elder brother and king," he responded at last. "I have only just begun to behave as my godfathers have long suggested that I should, and as I believe you would want me to. I ask for your patience, and I hope with all my being that this will not drive you away from me. I hope you will find some reason to come back to me."
"Come back to you?" Inuyasha asked. "What do you mean? I'm stuck here, aren't I?"
What Sesshomaru had to say next cost him greater effort, and the unpleasant tingle of fear that every powerful being feels when he voluntarily deprives himself of the control of something he desires. But the demon lord had never lacked the courage to do what was unpleasant, so he opened his mouth and said to Inuyasha: "Wouldn't you like to visit your friends in the village?"
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The Tale of the Demon Lord