Turn Back
Thrice, he heard those words.
The first time, he stood before the whipping waves, silhouetted in moonlit perfection, young and proud with the arrogance of youth, and told his father that he was a fool, and that he needed no one to protect, tossing that question away as if it were filthy to the touch. He saw the grief in his father's eyes and stood straighter, despising his weakness. And as his father sped away to his dying wife and unborn child, he made to leave – but a voice whispered, turn back, soft and insistent, and he despised that voice as well, and kept walking.
The second time, he faced a human woman with a white-haired child in her arms and listened with icy disdain as she pleaded for his help, for his protection against the humans who were persecuting her son, that it was his father's last wish, the boy was his brother, for heavens' sake, didn't he have a heart? And he looked down at her with ultimate contempt and said, 'No.' He watched as she wept, stubbornly silent, and the child – the hanyou, he reminded himself – asked her what was wrong, and wiped the tears from her cheeks. As he walked away, the voice whispered again, turn back, hopeful, and he ignored it.
The third time, it was the body of a girl, small and bloody, lifeless. She asked him no questions, made no plea, but still he watched her, and time seemed to slow. He remembered the fish she had brought him as he looked at the half-starved limbs; the shy, bumbling gestures of friendship she had offered as he saw her blood; her inexplicably sincere generosity as he stared unseeingly at the red, red ground; the strange…annoyance…he had felt when she had come to him all bruised by unknown hands; her soothing presence. Tenseiga hung invitingly at his hip, calling him to restore her life. It felt to him as if he had been there forever, before a dead child whose name he didn't know, puzzled by the mystery of her as he had never been puzzled by anything. Again, he replied, 'No,' denying more than the question Jaken had asked him, and moved on. One last time the voice whispered, turn back, and there was desperation in it. He remembered her smile. He remembered her face.
And the third time, Sesshoumaru listened.
A/N: hmm, what do you think? Read and review!