Title: Strange & Beautiful
Author: Demitria Miriam
Rating: M
Pairings: Sesshomaru x Inuyasha
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha, nor do I make any money off this piece of fiction.
Note: This was written while I listened to, "Strange and Beautiful (I'll Put a Spell on You)" by Aqualung... Thought it was a fun and very interesting idea to explain another reason of why Sesshomaru "adopted" Rin, and why he treats Inuyasha the way he does, even though it's totally not WHY but it's nice to think a bit outside the box.
Summary: Demons, while fearsome, eternal creatures, have one fatal flaw that many do not know of. They cannot feel. One demon has now done the unthinkable among his kind in order to give his only son a chance to rectify that. SesshoxInu fic.
Chapter 1: Strange
Humans cared little to know or learn more about demons. They knew of the simple fact that they were fearsome, eternal beings that held earthly control over a god's awesome powers. And yet, while they feared them, they never sought to look beyond what they saw on the surface, to understand what was beyond (or not) a demon's cold and aloof mask. Had they tried, they may have been more empathetic... more compassionate... more understanding...
More human than how they acted toward their very distant cousins. For their fear turned into indifference, their indifference turning into spite and loathing.
They turned into the very beings they believed youkai to be.
Youkai were emotionally inept. They possessed no sense of emotion nor feeling save from physical pain. They knew no happiness, sadness, jealousy or anger. And aside from their instinctual habits regarding mating and hierarchy placement, they often roamed the lands of the world, neither holding on to ties they made with lovers as they went, or settling down to have a family like a human would do.
They roamed. They fought. They conquered, and they reproduced.
Females would bear young, see to their wellbeing to ensure they survived into adulthood and then left. The young would wander off themselves, learning, adapting to their surroundings and continue on as the father they never knew more than likely did or had done. However, there were rare and unheard of instances when a father would raise his offspring while the mother felt no need to look over her child. One such instance happened three hundred years ago.
He went by the name Inu no Taishou, and he was young, a mere three hundred years old, roaming the land yet making a conscious decision to staying on the large island he was born to. Year after year, during the first few months, when the females of his kind went into heat and males of the same specie were drawn in by their scent, he had met many a bitch, yet none had kept his attention. Save for one.
He had known Her since he could last remember. They had been born of the same litter of three pups, all having gone their separate ways when they made their first kills, their mother deeming them ready to move on from her immediate care, and her ready for another mate. Yet, while his siblings and he had moved on from their family, wandering the lands for years on end without having seen either of the others, each pup, now grown, still recognized their sibling's scents; they would sometimes run across one of the others along their senseless journeys.
Inu no Taishou so happened to run across his sister this mating season. They had rutted, conceived and sixty-three days later had a litter of four pups, three dying early on in their first three years of life. The surviving pup had been the smallest, yet strongest of the lot. The child was a curious one indeed, and this lone fact was the only reason his sire came by every so often, unlike so many other youkai fathers.
An odd thing to do indeed, yet somehow it felt natural, right.
The pup's father even allowed the boy to accompany him on his journeys when his mother strayed into her own habits. They traveled many decades together, many youkai looking oddly upon the two, for it was such a strange spectacle to see two nearly grown to grown youkai, other than pack demons such as wolves, to travel with one another.
Neither father nor son paid much attention and merely enjoyed the, mostly, silence they shared. And as the pup got older he tended to wander away every now and then, his sire comfortable with the steady growth his son showed. Yet a strange feeling encompassed him when he thought of his son turning out like the rest of their kind.
Aloof, cold, and otherwise estranged to the world.
For... some reason, he didn't want that for his son, especially not with how he seemed to be an anomaly to his own kind, what with how he seemed to have an insatiable urge to know everything, to understand it. When Inu no Taishou thought about it a little more... the pup really did act the way he had observed humans to... the word he had caught one time to describe their strange behavior was called... "curiosity."
That's what his son was exhibiting, a human tendency called curiosity. At this thought he realized something that was otherwise unheard of among his kind. His son, while a demon with no emotion or feeling, exhibited a human habit... and if he were able to... feel that one human trait... then maybe...
Though through the following years he had tried his best to unleash any other possible feelings his son unknowingly harbored, yet to no avail. Perhaps though, he pondered, he wasn't the one that would unlock the beautiful and strange things that quite possibly lied dormant in his only son, anticipating their kind being spurred into a new era of youkai and their potential to feel.
He would find a way... no matter what. He wanted better for the boy.
And until then, only his son would be able to have the capability of at least one human feeling. This... curiosity.
Though, in his journey, Inu no Taishou hadn't realized that by doing the most he could for his first son, by going to the great lengths that he would go to, that he had gone to, that he himself had obtained his own human feeling... And that was love.
Chapter end.