Adult-FanFiction.org : Inuyasha / Yashahime

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
- 22
- 23
- 24
XXIII: Among Friends
Inuyasha spent almost the whole of his first day back in the village going around the entire community, greeting his friends, meeting the new baby of the woman who always gave him mushrooms to eat, and playing with the children who had missed their "dog monster" – but were delighted enough with the treats and toys to obey him when he told them with mock-sternness that they were not to pull his ears. Then he had eaten a communal meal with the village elders and their families in the evening. Only after that was he finally able to sit down under the great tree for a quiet talk with Kikyo and Kaede, as the sun began to sink.
Jaken, Yuno and the demon guards were being entertained by the headman, who was treating them to meat and drinks and getting pointers from them about how to defend the village better against human-eating demon beasts.
Carefully watched over by one of the guards, the children were only just growing brave enough to approach the demons' dragon mounts and fiery flying steeds. One small boy finally patted the muzzle of a dragon, which nudged him gently and made him fall back onto the ground, causing all the other children to laugh.
Kikyo glanced at the giggling children, then turned back to Inuyasha and her sister, with whom she sat under the tree, alone together at last.
"You're not telling me everything," Kikyo said. She sounded concerned as she put her fine-boned, lightly wrinkled hand over the half-demon's clawed fingers.
"When has he ever told us everything?" Kaede muttered, putting her own considerably plumper hands to work on pouring out some tea from a pot she had carried out of the hut to the tree. Earlier, she had confiscated several of the sweet boxes and told the village headman to lock them up in one of his chests to be rationed out later, to prevent the children from gorging themselves silly on the goodies without restraint.
"We all need to keep some things to ourselves," Inuyasha said. "But I promise you that Sesshomaru is much nicer to me now. I'll admit that it wasn't easy for the first few days, but he's been kind since then, and I don't think he'll do anything to me that I don't want him to – unless what I don't want happens to be good for me."
"Are you sure?" Kikyo asked, searching the half-demon's golden eyes with her own dark pair, which were still clear and sparkling with inner fire. But her thin face looked so pale and translucent then, and Inuyasha wondered how someone so physically delicate could also be so spiritually strong.
"I'm sure," Inuyasha told her, leaning back against the trunk of the enormous tree. As his head touched the bark, he suddenly remembered Bokusen'o's leaf, which he had brought with him. Despite its separation from Bokusen'o for several days now, the leaf remained green and glossy, and Inuyasha wanted to show it to the great tree sacred to the village.
So he took it out, said "Excuse me for a moment" to the two priestesses, and leaped into the upper branches of the tree, where he stood for a while and pressed the leaf against the trunk. "Feel that?" he asked the tree. "This leaf was given to me by a tree demon, Bokusen'o. I don't think you're a tree demon as you've never popped a face out of your trunk at me, but sometimes you speak quietly and wordlessly to me, so maybe you know about tree demons too."
The wordless message that he heard from the great tree spoke of interest, and a sense of peace that Inuyasha was well and alive, so the half-demon patted the tree, returned to ground and continued his conversation with the sisters while leaning back against the trunk and reaching back to stroke the bark every now and again.
"You really do look very well," Kaede said appraisingly, looking him up and down as she handed him a cup of tea. "He's feeding you properly, at any rate."
"Did you have any trouble on the night of the new moon?" Kikyo asked in a softer voice. She and Kaede were the only two people in the village who knew his secret, and they helped him keep it secret by sheltering him indoors in their hut on those nights, behind screens and under blankets, with the emergency escape route of a window near him.
"Well… a little," Inuyasha admitted. "But Sesshomaru kept me safe. He knows too. He's always known, only he never told me that."
"He doesn't object to your human form?"
Inuyasha shook his head. "I thought he would mind. But apparently he doesn't."
"Perhaps the more important question is: do you mind being with him?" Kikyo asked. "Are you happy?"
"Keh," Inuyasha muttered awkwardly. "Happy? I'm not that ambitious. I was happy enough here, and I suppose I could be happy enough there. I don't know. I'm really still feeling my way with Sesshomaru, and it's funny, but I think it's the same for him."
"Hasn't he given you any new clothes?" Kaede asked curiously, looking pointedly at his fire rat robe, which she had always known him to wear.
"Haven't you anything better to ask me?" Inuyasha shot back in reply, only to meet Kaede's famously stubborn face, which she put on whenever she was determined to find something out.
"It's a perfectly reasonable question!" the younger of the two sisters insisted. "Great demon lord with all the wealth in the world, and his little brother going about in the same old garb as he's worn since I first set eyes on his sorry, skinny self wandering through the forest fifty years ago."
"It's a perfectly good robe!" Inuyasha snapped. "Sure looks cleaner than yours!"
"That's because I spend half my days dragging my old bones through the forest looking for herbs, and digging trenches in the vegetable gardens that are deep enough to bury a cat in!" Kaede fired back.
Kikyo sighed and stepped in with a few well-placed, gentle words: "Kaede is only concerned about whether your brother is really being good to you, if he's not even giving you new clothes to wear."
Inuyasha reluctantly began to see the wisdom of Sesshomaru's insisting on his changing into clothing proper to a prince when he had first returned to the castle, because if this was how his village friends saw it, then he could only imagine what would have gone through the minds of the castle's denizens if he had wandered the grounds in the same robe every single day.
"He's treating me fine," the half-demon said at last. "He's given me a bloody wardrobe full of fancy clothes. I didn't want to wear any of them here because I didn't want you to think that I'd grown too self-important for you. I'm your friend and I always will be, no matter where I am, how I dress, or how long I live."
"Of course. How shallow of us," Kikyo said with an arch smile, shooting her sister a warning look.
"So how have you both been, really?" Inuyasha asked. "Any health problems?"
He found himself increasingly concerned about Kikyo as she aged, for despite her fighting ability and her spiritual powers, she had always been fragile. Kaede, who was ten years younger and a good deal more sturdily built than her sister, had far fewer health concerns.
"We've been very well," Kikyo assured him, but he could see the dark circles under her eyes, and the grey shooting heavily through her hair, and he could not help but fear that she would not see many more years to come. Her old beauty could still be seen in the fine structure of her features, but it was disappearing year by year under creasing skin and softening flesh.
"You'd better be well, and stay well," he said gruffly, to conceal his fears, which he knew were real but could not help considering childish. "Who's going to take over as priestesses if you two pop off?"
"Our grand-niece is coming along very well," Kikyo said with a fond smile.
"Little Kagome?" Inuyasha laughed. "The clumsy child who's all legs?"
"Yes," Kikyo chuckled. "She may be young and silly, always tripping over everything, but she has a good heart, and more power in her little finger than most priestesses all over the country. Although I will allow myself to be smug enough to say that she hasn't as much controlled power as I did at her age."
"Kagome grabbed more sweets from me this afternoon than any of the other children did – but she also gave more of them away to the smaller ones than any of the others," Inuyasha recalled.
"That's how she is. Generous and kind, even if she seems brash and impulsive to begin with," Kaede said. "Well, she's only five years old. She'll have plenty of time to refine her personality and grow into a priestess this village can respect."
"I should be around long enough to see that she turns out well," Inuyasha said. "But I want you two to be around as long as you can. I think you're my only real friends in the whole world."
"Come now, you must have made some friends since you went to the castle," Kikyo said gently. "That kappa tutor of yours, for one, looks very protective of you, and very fond of you."
"Jaken-sensei is all right," Inuyasha conceded. "There's a racoon demon girl who's very kind, and most of the servants and staff have been good to me, really." He chose not to mention Mamoru.
"You haven't been there for long. There's so much more time for you to make more friends."
"I suppose. We'll find out sooner or later. But for now, don't you go dying on me."
"I'm not planning to go to my grave yet," Kaede said stoutly. "I'm perfectly ready to give my life for a worthy cause, but if you think I'm going to just turn my face to the wall and die, think again."
"Neither am I planning to die yet, although such things are not usually within our control," Kikyo said firmly, then stifled a yawn.
"It's late," Inuyasha said in surprise at how quickly the time had passed, when he realised that he could see the stars in the sky. "You should both be in bed. I'll spend the night indoors with you, okay?"
"We wouldn't have it any other way," Kikyo replied, as they said goodnight to the great tree and headed for the hut.
The demon guards, Yuno and Jaken were resting under a pine tree, having declined to spend the night inside any of the huts. Although they were accustomed to their castle accommodation, they were animal demons and were thus as comfortable outdoors as in. Inuyasha sat with them for a while, then went to the priestesses' hut.
The sisters had always slept with their hut door wide open whenever Inuyasha was staying with them, and did not sleep behind screens when Inuyasha was indoors. So even when they were young women, there had never been any questions asked about how they could allow a male half-demon to spend some nights inside their home. Anyone could step in and see at any time that nothing improper was going on in there. On those nights that Inuyasha was human and needed to be hidden, Kikyo and Kaede were always in view, and would give out that Inuyasha was away in the forest, or affected by some mild half-demon ailment that spiritually weak humans would do well to keep away from.
Now that they were old, they had become grandmotherly figures whose considerable spiritual powers were further proof that they had never done anything that priestesses should not do with men. And Inuyasha was still the youth they had always championed, so there was no question that if he was to sleep in a hut, that it would be their hut.
He had spent many nights in here, propped up against the door frame or sometimes lying down on a rough mat in the doorway, like a guard dog. He did that again now, and found that although it was nothing like his comfortable bed in the castle, it was a welcoming spot, and a familiar place to rest. He slept very well through that night, knowing not only that he was among friends, but also being watched over protectively from a little distance by the guards, Yuno and Jaken, who kept him in their sight at all times without ever smothering him with their attention.
~ - ~
Inuyasha did not want to try giving Kikyo the money yet, because he had a feeling she would refuse it and try to push it back to him. So even throughout most of the next day, when he busied himself helping the villagers with their heavy lifting and the difficult chores that would have taken ten men to handle, he kept the money hidden inside his robes and said nothing about it to her or her sister.
Throughout the fifty years that Inuyasha had lived in the village, he had never told anyone other than the two priestesses that he was Sesshomaru's half-brother. Everyone else – from the time they had accepted him as one of their own – had thought he was just a tree-loving half-dog-demon born to parents of ordinary status, and had been astonished to discover that he was really a prince when their demon king, Sesshomaru, arrived to claim him.
During the first few moments of his visit to the village, most of the adult villagers had been unsure about how to behave towards him. Should they treat him like royalty now? Should they serve him hand and foot? Were they supposed to be more polite to him than rough folk like themselves knew how to be?
But the children had immediately broken the ice by tearing free from their parents' cautiously restraining hands and pouncing on the half-demon the second he waved the bags of toys and sweets at them, and everyone had seen at once that he was still the same Inuyasha who had lived among them for so long.
By the morning of the second day, Inuyasha had no trouble convincing his old friends that it would be fine for him to roll up his sleeves and get down to work as he always had. He had been invaluable to the village during his fifty years there, hauling heavy items around with the greatest ease, chopping up more firewood in half-an-hour than even an entire group of men would have been able to do in twice that amount of time, and digging holes for the planting of new trees for shade, and to replace those that they cut down.
Because of Inuyasha's sensitivity to the rhythms of nature and his affinity for trees, he had also been very important to the village in terms of his ability to tell which trees could be safely cut down for wood without offending the tree that was sacred to the gods, and which should be left alone. Inuyasha and the villagers always visited the great tree before every wood and plant-gathering expedition to the forest, to seek its blessing and permission to reap the materials they required for their survival.
When Inuyasha and the priestesses received the great tree's approval, the half-demon would lead the villagers out into the forest, where he would be able to tell which trees were spiritually "dead" and ready to be felled, and which were still "speaking", and must be left unharmed. Sometimes, even a "speaking" tree would indicate to Inuyasha that it was willing to give up a few of its overgrown branches, and the half-demon would thank the tree and direct the villagers to take the branches that the tree no longer required.
Kikyo and Kaede were also sensitive to the spiritual life within the living things around them, so in Inuyasha's absence, they had been able to communicate with the great tree and direct the villagers well enough. However, Inuyasha was better at it than they were, and quicker to hear the whispers or detect the deaths of the old trees.
"You have to learn this too," Inuyasha said to Kagome, the gangly little grand-niece of his two friends. "Sometimes it helps to close your eyes and put your hands to the bark, and listen to the tree – you can hear and sense if it is alive or dead. By 'dead', we do not mean that the wood is rotten and useless, but that the tree is spiritually dead. A dead tree may have the best wood, while a rotting tree may still have a spirit dwelling in it, do you understand?"
"Yes, Inuyasha," Kagome said, putting her palms to one of the trees in the forest as he did, and trying to detect spiritual viability within it. But soon she looked up hopefully at the half-demon and asked: "Can I touch your ears again, please?"
Inuyasha said no, and the girl pouted a little. But she continued to work hard, and when he found that she was "hearing" the same messages as he was from ten trees in a row, he was pleased with her progress, and stooped down to let her put her hands to his furry ears.
The child was thrilled. After making a promise that she would not pull or pinch the triangular flaps, she carefully reached out and stroked his ears, grinning to feel their softness at the tips, and the more cartilaginous firmness at the base.
"Thank you, Inuyasha!" she laughed, then cheekily pulled hard on both his sidelocks and ran off to her grand-aunts for protection as he gave a mock roar and chased after her.
By the end of the second day, Inuyasha, as well as the three demon guards and Yuno, had done more work in the village than the humans could have managed in a month. Huts were repaired, damaged farm tools fixed and replaced, fields tilled to be ready for the latter half of spring, rice barrels stacked up in the shed, bags full of rabbits caught and housed in hutches for the meat they could supply, and the firewood stores more than fully replenished.
Only Jaken had not done any menial work, for he was a little too small to be useful. Besides, he was already fully occupied teaching the older village children to memorise and write a poem filled with difficult words and complex characters – it had been the only way for him to stop those mischievous creatures from playing exhausting games with him that all seemed to end with his dignity less than intact.
"Maybe this will last you until my next visit!" Inuyasha declared with satisfaction as he brushed the dirt off his hands, when the villagers finally convinced him to sit down and rest by telling him that they did not want Lord Sesshomaru to think that they were mistreating his brother.
The remainder of the day went well, and peacefully for Jaken, as Inuyasha admitted him into his private conversation with the priestesses for an hour or so until Jaken himself decided that he had intruded upon them long enough and returned to rest under the trees with the other demons.
As Inuyasha lay down to rest in the doorway of the priestesses' hut again that night, he felt a tremendous sense of contentment to know that he had been of use to the village, and that his efforts were genuinely appreciated. For fifty years, although he had been a mere pup in demon terms, to the human villagers, he was a powerful half-demon they looked up to for his strength and courage. Yet, among the castle's community of demons, most of whom were at least several hundred years older than himself, he was a mere child, a puppy to be protected or guided – or abused, as the case might be.
It felt so much better to be needed.
He decided that if he returned to the castle, he would insist that Sesshomaru give him some proper work to do, so that he would be truly useful.
At the very moment that he thought of Sesshomaru, he discovered to his surprise that he was starting to miss being near his brother – the scent of him which reminded him of his own being, the sense of his demon energy, the striking crescent moon on his brow and the stripes on his cheeks and wrists, the way his pure white mane of hair moved as he walked, and the sheer power and beauty of his presence were each and all incomparable. Nothing anywhere else in the world that Inuyasha had ever known was quite like it.
His eyes closed and he began to sink into a well-earned sleep, cushioned by the softly dawning knowledge that he was actually looking forward to seeing Sesshomaru in the morning.
That tiny glimmer of knowledge as his consciousness faded led him down a dream-paved path into a vision where he was wandering calm and unafraid through a garden he had never seen before, secure in the company of trees, feeling perfectly contented with his life. Then he realised in the dream that he was really walking through the garden in search of his brother, and he did not know why, but he suddenly grew fearful that he would not find him.
He found himself, in that abrupt way dreams have of changing scenes in a second, rushing towards a small, white-haired, golden-eyed child sitting in the grass. The child had a crescent moon on his brow and magenta markings over his cheekbones, and Inuyasha knew with his dream-logic that this was his brother, and he himself was Inuyasha the adult who had almost lost Sesshomaru the child. Nearly overwhelmed by relief, he scooped the little one up in his arms and asked: "Where have you been?"
As he clutched the child to his chest and rained kisses on his snowy head, the dream-logic shifted again, and suddenly he was the child, and Sesshomaru was holding him tight against him and kissing his hair. Another shift, and neither of them were children any more, but he was clasped in his brother's powerful arms, and the kisses now were on his lips, his cheeks and his ears. When Sesshomaru found his lips again, Inuyasha put his hands round the back of his brother's head to keep him there, because he knew that if he did not hold him there and kiss him as if he were the creature he loved most in the whole world, Sesshomaru would be gone, gone forever, and Inuyasha urgently needed to keep him here…
He awoke quietly, not moving from where he lay but feeling as if he had plunged a million miles through the air from the garden he had been walking through to land soundlessly where he was now, in the doorway of the hut. He could almost taste Sesshomaru on his tongue. His fingers felt naked after having buried themselves in the dream-lord's incomparable mane of silken hair, and his arms felt empty.
Inuyasha shivered from the sensations that the dream had left him with, but as he closed his eyes again, he could not say for certain if that physical response to his night vision was a shudder of fear, or a tremor of desire.
- 22
- 23
- 24
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Tale of the Demon Lord