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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
- 6
- 7
- 8
Chapter VII: In my mind's eye
It was the middle of the afternoon on the fifth day following the new moon when Kaede, Shippo and Rin returned to the village.
"Inuyasha!" Shippo called out happily, his bushy tail quivering with delight to see the familiar sight of the red-clad hanyou slouching in a tree, resting on a high branch from which he could look out over the village.
"Inuyaaaasha!" Rin echoed in greeting as she raced Shippo to the foot of the tree.
"Hey, you're a day late – but you all actually made it back in one piece!" the half-demon said, raising his eyebrows to express feigned surprise, as he landed lightly on the ground to let Shippo hop onto his shoulder and to pick Rin up, tossing her into the air to make her squeal.
"That's much more fun than riding on Hachi or Ah-Un!" she giggled when he caught her. "Please do it again!"
He obliged, and the peals of laughter which rang out from her made him chuckle. She was much more playful now, more accustomed to village society, and a tad less obedient than she had been when Sesshomaru had first left her here. She had also grown taller, and looked better-nourished under Kaede's care, though she was still noticeably smaller than other human children close to her in age – and a piece of cake for Inuyasha to toss. Rin herself did not know how old she was, but Kaede had guessed that she was now about nine.
"Did you know – we saw Sesshomaru at Sango's village!" Shippo told Inuyasha excitedly.
I know. He told me.
"Sesshomaru-sama went there to see me. He gave me that plant!" Rin twisted in Inuyasha's arms to point at a little cloth parcel which Kaede was toting separately from the large bundle slung across her shoulders. Kaede raised her arm to give Inuyasha an unimpeded view of the carefully wrapped-up sprig, growing from a little ball of earth, which she carried in her hand.
Shippo teased Rin over Inuyasha's shoulder about her transparent pleasure at seeing Sesshomaru in the slayers' village. "And she cried after Sesshomaru left!" the kitsune sang as Rin tried to grab his tail to make him shut up. "She tried to hide it, but I saw her tears!"
Tears.
No bawling, thank the heavens. No sobbing. Just rivers of silent tears as I hid my face in his sleeve and got the silk all soaked, and he held me as if he would never let me go.
Dragging himself away from the thoughts that had ambushed him, and which he could share with his friends only inside his head, the hanyou turned to the old priestess as he juggled the squirming kitsune and girl, and asked her: "How are Sango and Miroku?"
"They're very well, Inuyasha. The village is still deserted apart from them, Kohaku and Kirara, but they are doing what they can to make it more comfortable."
"Are they going to live there for good?"
"I do not think they have arrived at a final decision. I don't know that it would be wise for them to be surrounded daily by so many things that only bring sad memories."
Inuyasha knew that Sango and Kohaku still wept over the graves of their father and the band of demon slayers wiped out by Kohaku under Naraku's spell, and all the other villagers who had been killed in the massacre timed to coincide with the absence of their best warriors. Kohaku had never let go of that guilt.
Guilt.
He didn't say so, and his voice remained as cool and even as ever, but I knew he was thinking about the time he made a demon masquerade as my dead mother, and how much that had hurt me. I knew it when I rested my head in his lap after I was done crying, and said I was sorry I'd called his mother a bitch, and I had to do my best not to laugh when he said it was of no account, because she was in fact a bitch. Then he said: "Father loved your mother very much." And he didn't have to say more for me to know what he meant.
He tore himself back to the present conversation and joked: "Well, we'll leave it to Miroku to persuade Sango that they need to make a village's worth of babies to repopulate the place – that would be right up his alley!"
"Inuyasha," Kaede cautioned. "Less baby-making talk in front of the children, please."
"It's not as if they're not old enough to know where babies come from, you know," the hanyou protested, pulling a face. "Say – you three didn't walk all the way back from there, did you? You'd have had to start out a month ago, at your pace!"
"Of course not," Kaede said reproachfully, glaring at him for making fun of her physical slowness. "Hachi flew and carried us up to the edge of the village. He didn't want to come through the barriers although I offered to remove them for him, because he said they would make him feel ill."
"Bah, what a wimp," Inuyasha snorted. "Only brainless, human-eating youkai would be fried by your barrier. A demon like Hachi would have no trouble with it. Even Shippo can easily cross it now without feeling so much as an ant-bite."
Sesshomaru probably wouldn't even notice it was there.
Kaede had long ago worked out that Inuyasha's habitual insults were a display of friendly affection, and she merely rolled her one remaining eye skyward before they continued on their way to her hut, distributing to various villagers who came up to greet them parcels of herbs and medicine that they had collected during their trip.
"Sango and Miroku asked after you," Kaede told Inuyasha, when they reached the doorway of her hut, where he let Shippo and Rin off his shoulders.
Rin took her precious plant from Kaede and ran off to find a good patch of earth to grow it in, with Shippo in tow.
"They were very concerned about you, but I assured them that you were perfectly fine," Kaede continued once they were past the screen hanging in the doorway, and the children were out of sight. "You are all right, aren't you?"
The look the old miko gave him – even with her single eye – was expressive enough for him to know that she was thinking about the well, probing to find out if he had been haunting the place all day and night as she and Shippo had feared he would.
"Old woman, I'm fine," Inuyasha insisted, succeeding in sounding offended, as he crossed his arms and looked her straight in the eye.
"Hmph. You had better be. So what did you get up to while we were away?"
Let's see… went to the well exactly like I wasn't supposed to, turned human, almost got eaten, got kissed by Sesshomaru… hmm, where to start?
"Nothing," he replied. "At least nothing that would be any of your business."
Kaede huffed in exasperation and chose to leave him be until he was in a more communicative mood. As she turned to unwrap her bundle and sort out the clothing, herbs and edible mushrooms in it, Shippo came running back into the hut and jumped onto Inuyasha's shoulders again just as he seated himself on the floor.
"Inuyasha! I almost forgot to tell you – we saw a ghost at Sango's village!" the fox-child announced.
"Huh? A ghost?"
"Yeah, we –" the kitsune broke off abruptly as he sniffed once, sniffed again, put his nose into the hanyou's hair and neck, and snuffled around a bit more.
"Hey, hey, hey – what do you think you're doing?" Inuyasha demanded, reaching an arm back to remove Shippo from his head and dangle him before his face.
"I thought I detected it earlier at the tree, but there was so much going on I wasn't sure. Now I'm sure," the fox said in a too-loud voice. "You smell all over of Sesshomaru!"
Kaede turned from her unpacking and stared at Inuyasha. "Did you meet Sesshomaru-sama?"
"Uh, yeah – we kind of got into a fight."
And made up.
"What?" Shippo exclaimed, still dangling there after having failed to get out of Inuyasha's grasp. "I thought you two had stopped all that! What did you fight about?"
"The same old stupid stuff, as usual. Insults, more insults, that sort of thing. But it's fine now – the fighting stopped after a bit and we didn't part on bad terms. Really."
Really.
"Hey, Shippo – don't tell Rin. And lower your voice. She'll be upset if she knows I've been fighting with him."
"Did you get injured?" Kaede asked.
"Sort of – he got me with his whip, but as you can see, it's all healed."
All kissed better.
"Isn't that whip thing of his poisonous?" Shippo asked as Inuyasha set him down on the floor.
"Yeah… but you know, he's used it on me tens of times before, and he's tried to melt me with his claws, and kill me with his dog-breath and all, and somehow none of it ever really affected me that much. Maybe I'm more immune to his poison than most."
Besides, this time, he licked every last bit of it out of my wounds.
"By the way," Inuyasha said, changing the subject. "I thought you were supposed to get back here yesterday. I decided that if I saw no sign of you by this evening, I'd go looking for you."
"Oh, that's what I was trying to tell you when I came back in!" Shippo said. "We were late because of the ghost!"
"Not necessarily a ghost, Shippo," Kaede corrected. To Inuyasha, she added: "We were delayed because we stayed back one more day to investigate a suspicious figure that appeared briefly in the village. It looked like a human child, but it wasn't human or demon. Sango and Kohaku were very certain that it did not resemble any of the children of the village who had died in the massacre, so we did not think it was a ghost. However, it had no scent and gave off nothing by which it could be traced. An apparition."
"Yeah, it definitely had no scent and no youki," Shippo concurred. "Neither Kirara nor I could detect it except by sight. And we didn't see it for long."
"An apparition?" Inuyasha echoed thoughtfully. He preferred to steer clear of such things, because there was no way to tackle them with claws, fists and swipes of a weapon. Dealing with them required research and study into why they had appeared and what would work on them – and research and study had never been the hanyou's strengths. He left that sort of thing to Miroku and Kaede.
"I've seen such things before," Kaede continued. "They normally cannot hurt us physically as they have no bodies, but they can be raised through spells, or spells can be put on them, to carry out certain instructions from their masters."
"And you didn't see any sign of it again?"
"None. It was looking around near the graves when we spotted it, then it was gone, and never reappeared. Anyway, that's why we're late. We left after Kohaku assured us that he and Kirara would stay there for at least the next few days. Hachi is also heading back there right now in case his help is needed."
"And there I was thinking you'd stayed longer because you were having such a great time."
Time.
He caressed my ears, smoothed down my hair once more before dawn, and put his armour back on. "You can come with me if you wish," he said, his face as hard to read as always, but I told him no, you lot were due back that day; you'd worry if I wasn't here when you returned. Didn't he wish to wait at the village for Rin? I asked. And he said: "Another time." Then he kissed me on the forehead and left.
For the rest of that day, they sorted through the things the returning trio had brought back, worked to get the evening meal ready, and helped Kaede check that the barriers and spells she had put up all around the village had held up well in her absence.
Ready at last to retire for the night, Kaede lay down in her usual corner of the hut while Rin and Shippo unrolled their mats and blankets near each other, and Inuyasha rested as he typically did, sitting up against the wall near the doorway, the Tetsusaiga securely clasped in his folded arms.
He needed very little sleep, and occasionally spent nights up in trees, but tonight he stayed indoors, taking in the sounds and movements of his friends sleeping nearby, the warm smells of the herb-filled hut, and the lingering scent of Sesshomaru all over his clothes and hair and skin.
He waited till the others were deep in sleep, till he was sure they wouldn't see him, before he let himself lie down on his side, on the floor of the hut. He was not weary, but it soothed him to curl up a little as he had that night, his cheek pillowed by Sesshomaru's silk-clad thigh, the back of his head pressed up against his brother's abdomen, while the taiyoukai, pale as moonlight, sat cross-legged on the grass, sleepless, untiring and watchful.
The night was still hours away from ending, and my head still rested in his lap as his length of fur curled about me, while he gently raked my hair with his claws to untangle it.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
He took a long time to reply. But at last, he said: "If I were to give you a trite answer about how I have changed, or how I realised that my former treatment of you was despicable, it would be too simple to be an accurate answer. I do not think I have the words to express the truth in all its complexity. Suffice to say that I want you to be strong, and when you are not, I want you to heal, and when you cannot, I want to be able to protect you until you can. Will that do for now?"
"It will have to," I said. "You never were one for words – I'm not sure that I've ever heard you say so much thoughtful stuff in one go."
We were quiet for a while, then I asked: "But you weren't watching out for me on the night of the new moon, were you?"
"No. It was a coincidence that I was nearby when you were attacked."
"I'm glad you were there, anyway."
"Inuyasha, you were always able to take care of yourself, in the days when I wanted you dead, as well as later, when I no longer wished to destroy you. You also had your friends. I did not think I was required to watch over you, and I did not want to. I knew about your foolish behaviour at the well after the miko disappeared, but at the time, I considered it none of my affair if you chose to waste your life. Only on the night of the new moon did it strike me how vulnerable you could be. And I wanted to be there for you. It was not an obligation. It was a choice."
"So you started caring what I did with myself only after that night?" I mused. I had to bite back a grin, but I couldn't stop myself – I simply had to say it, even if it made him mad: "Don't tell me you suddenly found me irresistible after seeing me naked?"
He would have been well within his rights to punch me, or drop my head on the grass for being cheeky, but again, he surprised me. He said nothing, and didn't hit me, so I peered up at him from where I lay in his lap, and he inclined his head ever so slightly to look down at me, and he had just a hint of a trace of the tiniest smile possible on his face.
I'd never felt safer in my life.
- 6
- 7
- 8
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And You, My Brother