Part One
They called him a lot of things, but they could never bring themselves to use his actual name; it humanized him too much for their comfort. After all, people always craved an excuse to mistreat someone as long as it suited their own twisted needs.
When he had been nothing but an infant, they referred to him as the half-breed. The vermin. The trash. Something to be thrown away or drowned before it could mature into a creature no one could love or tolerate. As he got a little bit older, they called him a bastard. A monster. A filthy hanyou. The faces would change, but the response to him never did; people were scared of what they couldn't understand, and he was the anomaly that they failed to wrap their heads around over and over again.
A half-human, half-youkai child. Not one, and definitely not the other. He was an outsider before he had even been born.
Those feelings and memories were magnified the moment he blinked open his eyes and stared at the beautiful woman who knelt down in front of him. He was waiting with baited breath for her to call him one of those wretched names.
Which one would she choose first? Vermin? Half-breed? Monster? He wished she would pick already and get it over with.
Instead, the woman looked like she was close to tears. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks were pink, and she seemed to be lost in thought as she struggled to figure out what to say to him. When the words that finally pleased her manifested themselves on her tongue, her gentle voice sounded sad and defeated.
"Oh, Inuyasha…" she whispered. "What happened to you?"
Word count: 295
A/N: Am I back? We shall see ;)