Title: Snowfall
Genre: Action/Romance
Pairing: Sesshomaru/Original
Others included: Jaken, Rin, nameless demons, more to come
Disclaimer: InuYasha characters are property of their original creators. I make no money from this and greatly thank those creators for making characters wonderful enough that our imaginations have gone wild with them! Akatake Nyoko is my original character creation. Please don't steal her.
Warning: PG-13 for a bit of blood, belly flutters, and implications of more (Rating may change at a later date when I add more to the story)
Notes: I'm trying my hand at writing a fanfic for the very first time. I've chosen Sesshomaru as my inspiration and have started setting the scene. My original character's name (family name first) is Akatake Nyoko. Roughly translated, it means Gem of the Red Bamboo.
In this setting, Sesshomaru has regenerated his left arm and Rin is still rather young, probably having only been with him for less than a year. The other details will be revealed in the story. Here's what I've got so far. Enjoy!
As a wandering snowflake fluttered from the sky and came to rest on the bridge of her partially hidden nose, Akatake Nyoko held her breath still and her earthen-brown eyes on the beast lumbering in the snow before her and her clanmates. The large bear-demon sniffed the ground a mere twenty meters in front of the human trio that lay prone in the knee-deep snow. With the demon unable to get a fix on their scent, he stood on his hindquarters and rose to his full height, his head matching the height of the trees that dipped slightly from the weight of the snow. When the beast sniffed the air, Nyoko's focus wavered for the briefest moment, silently thanking her clanmates for having made the solid white garbs she and the clansmen with her wore this evening, allowing them to blend perfectly with the snow as they waited patiently with their weapons clutched beneath them.
A shifting breeze billowed past Nyoko and the two with her, lightly tossing the loose ends of the scarves tied around their heads and faces. "Damn it," Nyoko thought to herself as the breeze carried their scents straight to the demon before them. Taking a deep sniff of the air, the bear demon caught it and allowed himself to come back down on his front paws, the snow giving an audible crunch beneath his massive weight. Turning in the direction of the scent's origin, the creature lumbered forward, sniffing the air repeatedly with each step. Nyoko watched carefully as he approached, immediately catching the hunger in his eyes. She had seen it countless times before; the hunger to eat, to kill, the desire for human flesh. It was because of this hunger that two villages had already been slaughtered, the bear demon's appetite insatiable, and caused the elders of Nyoko's village to order him destroyed even though there were no survivors to offer payment for the kill.
When the demon stepped within eight meters of the hidden humans, Nyoko took a deep breath and clenched her weapons tight, her eight-pointed shuriken in her left hand, her grandfather's katana in her right. Holding that breath, she waited precious moments for the creature to turn its head to just the right angle. When he looked almost directly at the clansman to her right, Nyoko's left arm thrust out from the snow beneath her, the shuriken slicing the chilled air as it spun in a tight spiral before it hit its mark. A savage cry erupted from the bear demon's mouth, searing pain shooting through his body as the blades of the shuriken cut deep into his right eye. As the beast stumbled backward from the shock of the sudden pain, the human trio nearly flew from their hiding places, flurries of snow released into the wind as they bared their weapons and charged at the beast. Having lived in this region of the valley within the mountains all their lives, all three of them had been trained in how to run in the snow, pointing their toes directly toward the solid ground beneath the loose snow, finding a firm placement on the balls of their feet, and launching themselves forward with only a thin hole left in the snow to reveal where their step had been.
"For those you have murdered, we sentence you to death!" cried Tani Taro, the one who had been hiding to Nyoko's right side, as he swung his naginata through the air and brought it hard into the demon's left shoulder. It sliced through fur, flesh, and bone alike until the blade finally stopped and the beast's left arm hung from its body by only a few shreds of muscle and flesh on the opposite side and the beast was forced to place all of his forward weight on his right arm. As Taro withdrew his blade and prepared for his next strike, Tani Kano, the one that had been hidden in the snow to Nyoko's left, deftly slipped beneath the raging beast with his legs first, controlling his slide. When he was directly beneath the demon's belly, the creature having not noticed him for his blindness on that side of his body, Kano thrust his wakizashi directly up into the creatures stomach, almost immediately covering Kano in the beast's blood. As the demon thrashed from the pain, Kano held his blade firm, allowing the movement of the creature to do the job of slicing this way and that, making the wound so severe that the organs of the creature started to seep out of the wound. When the demon started to thrash enough that Kano knew he might be stepped on and crushed, he quickly flipped onto his stomach and scampered from beneath the beast, holding his wakizashi over his shoulder with the blade facing front as to slice the creature a bit more as he slipped from beneath the beast.
The demon bellowed so loudly that the snow from the trees faltered, falling to the ground just as the creature did. As the demon tried to place his still able arm on the snow-covered ground and raise itself up, Nyoko seized the opportunity and sprinted toward it, quickly climbing up its shoulder and onto its back. Taking a firm grip of the demon's fur with her left hand, she declared, "For all you have killed," before driving the katana into the back of the creature's head, slipping beneath the back of the skull and through the demon's head before the tip pierced through the front of its skull only slightly off-center from between its eyes. The beast gave one last shriek of horror as Nyoko withdrew her blade and quickly launched herself forward away from the beast, flipping in midair to land facing it. As she landed, Taro made a round stride toward the beast, raising his blade to slice open its throat as it cried out, then quickly stepping back to rejoin Nyoko and Kano. The three of them stood with eyes fixed on the beast, weapons ready in case their blows were not enough, or perhaps if the beast was not in true form and would shed its bear-form to become something far worse. Their breath was seen in small puffs in the chilled air as they took in and let out small, quick breathes, waiting to see the beast fall. After only a few seconds, the bear demon fell forward, the sound muffled to be only a loud crunch in the snow of the field in the shallow valley. The trio knew better than to breathe easy right away, still keeping their gaze firmly on the fallen creature. Nyoko slowly circled around the beast to the side, her grandfather's katana held outward as she studied the beast. After a few moments, she stepped up to the side of its head and held her blade high. "In the name of the innocents you have murdered, we send you to the afterlife," she said quietly before bringing the honed blade straight down on the beast's neck, severing the head from the body. As the head rolled a short distance away, the bear demon's body began to steam and melt away into nothing, producing a foul stench that might have incapacitated Nyoko and the men if not for their scarves that protected their faces. Even so, the smell was terrible and Nyoko quickly grabbed the head with her free hand to drag back to her clansmen. "Ug," she said in protest to the stench. "Why must the most foul of demons smell so foul as well?" she asked the men as she handed the head to Taro.
Taro gave a chuckle as he took the head from Nyoko, the blood slowly dripping onto the pure white snow between them. "It makes sense, does it not?" he offered with a smile hidden behind his scarf, though that smile shone in his brown eyes so dark that they seemed almost black. Plucking the shuriken from the beast's eye, he handed it back to Nyoko carefully, trying not to chuckle again. Nyoko simply gave a sigh and shook her head as she took the small blade and slipped it into the pouch tied to the back of her waist. She then brought her sword up with the blood-stained blade pointing upward as it rested on her shoulder, her gaze shifting between Taro and Kano. Kano tried to hide his chuckle regarding Nyoko's sensitive nose, carrying his wakizashi at his side, though keeping the blood-covered blade out of the sheathe for the time-being, as all three of them started their walk home side by side.
When the trio finally made it back to their village, the half-moon had just started to rise into the starlit sky, but they had little trouble finding their way home, as the torches that their fellow villagers kept lit were always waiting for any who were out hunting. Only when one of them failed to return home was one of the torches extinguished and left outside the village as a sign that their mortal light had faded, but that they were still remembered. As Nyoko and the two men approached the gates of the wall around their demon-slayer village, she found her gaze drifting over the dozens of long-since-lit torches that stood on either side of the gate. Taro caught the movement of her head and gave her a nudge with his elbow as he carried his naginata with that same arm. "Do not worry, little one. It will be many snow-falls before your torch stands alongside those," he offered in a gentle tone.
Nyoko looked up to Taro's face, nearly half a meter higher than her own, and gave a small smile behind her scarf. "Thank you, Taro. I hope it will be the same with yours," she replied in a small voice, though the weight of knowing a torch waited for each of them suddenly weighed heavy on her mind.
Holding his arm in front of himself and looking to the dried blood that covered almost his entire body, Kano gave a slight huff before speaking. "I just hope it is not that long before I get a hot bath," he said in a light-hearted voice. "This demon stinks to the high peaks." Kano always seemed to know exactly what to say to lighten Nyoko's mood. Both men had come to think of her as a little sister; watching out for her, but still making sure she was strong enough to stand on her own two feet.