Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha. Not in any way shape or form, really, though I wish I did.
One for Sorrow
There is a nursery rhyme that we have never been to shake; a little piece of poetry that has followed us since the beginning. I don't know where we heard it the first time, or how it came to be an unspoken acceptance that it was ours, but it was.
It began with One. One crow for sorrow. He sat on the line of a telephone pole, just below the steps of the Shinto Shrine on the day that my family came to plead with the elderly priest to help me. The boy with no emotion to speak of. The boy who could not utter a word. I was twelve.
They suspected a curse to have put been upon me; as all Youki would, and came to beg a mortal man - at that a holy man; the natural enemy of our kind- for aid in finding a cure. I did not realize the depth of their desperation until years later. Maybe that was why they never objected to my attachment to the girl.
Most of what happened that day is a blur to me, some images standing out in sharp contrast, never to be forgotten, while others gone from my memory entirely.
Words I didn't comprehend and actions that made no since had mixed together into this cacophony of information I had no label for. So I decided to pay them no mind; content to watch the world outside of a bamboo lined window.
I had no intention of heroics, nor did I have a motive in garnering the family into acceptance of our kind in order to sway their hands into helping me.
I was just a boy, and she a pretty girl that smiled at me from the shade of the sacred tree.
I cannot be sure why my eyes focused on her out of all the things that could have caught my interest, but they did. Kagome could have been no more than half my age, resting for the afternoon on the grounds with her father, eating lunch and laughing about something or other as they hid from the overwhelming heat of the day beneath the branches of the Goshinboku.
She was somewhat of a plain child, at least in the terms of which I was used to seeing: her hair was long and sleek and black, as all other young girls her age, but with the most shocking blue eyes I had ever seen. Almost the color of the sky on a cloudless day. And I would like to say it was her eyes that drew me in, but that would be a falsehood: for a moment she looked at me, and she smiled.
I could not tear my eyes away, even once her own again strayed back to something else; her smile had captured me completely and I was thoroughly doomed from that point on; I knew she was to be mine, though the all encompassing possessiveness that filled me as I gazed upon her was startling.
For the boy who felt nothing, it was a feeling so intense that words could not describe those first few moments of truly feeling.
Frankly, if something hadn't happened then to seal our fates; I probably would have made something. I cannot lie and say that I know what would have happened next, but the man I am now knows the boy I was then; and I would have gone for her anyway.
I hadn't a second thought when I heard the crack of a falling branch come crashing toward them; my first instinct was to protect her, though at the time I didn't know why. I truthfully do not remember jumping from the window, or grabbing her from her seat to carry her to safety; those actions were relayed to me later on with the retelling of the events.
But I remember afterward. I remember the screaming and the tears. I remember the order for us not to turn around. I remember the smell of blood in the air.
It was then that I looked down to the frightened girl still cradled in my arms, -eyes threatening to overflow with tears, confusion and fear written across her expression as she fought to make since of what was happening- and I uttered the first words ever heard spoken from own voice.
"Can I keep you?"
Note: Well hello there. It seems I've been writing. Also, this is a gift for Miss Selah, who's a pretty frigg'n BAMF author... and also allowing me to eat up all the leftovers in her fridge.