Title: Once a Moon
Character/Pairing: Inuyasha
Genre: General
Rating: PG
Theme/Prompt: 20. the village awaits the new moon
Wordcount: 283
Author's Notes: Originally written January 2007 for 31_days. I think. I've long lost the original details of the prompt aside from what was left in the file.
Once a Moon
The cry went up, raised by a little girl who was up way past her bedtime. Nobody complained though, rushing to the regular stranger's side.
As always, four deer, all young bucks; were dragging behind him, their bloody hides ripped and slashed, oozing blood out and staining the ground. The villagers quickly retrieved these sustaining corpses, a select few staying behind to support the black haired stranger clad in a hitatare similar in colour to the blood of the bucks he had brought with him.
They let him lean on their shoulders as they half carried, half escorted the almost faint outsider into a nearby building. There they set him down, fed plain rice and broth before a futon was laid out and the stranger was soon stretched upon it.
Several of the women watch the young man cautiously, admiring his features as they sat sewing their winter clothes.
He was handsome, ears and nose unusually delicate, eyelashes beautifully long, fluttering against his cheeks as he dreamed. His fingers were long and some of the women with children thought the nails should be cut. Hair was black, cut and kept in an unusual style.
-o-
Starlight shimmered, not quite illuminating the village on the first of the few moonless nights of the month. Sooner or later everyone inhabiting it falls asleep, even the women relegated to watching the stranger.
When they wake, they'll find the stranger has left, a couple of rabbits left behind, their small bodies still warm and leaking blood onto the ground outside where the stranger slept.
And sometime in the future his visits become less regular and then stop for fifty years before the black haired provider visits again, occasionally and very briefly.