Nope, still not mine.
TREASURES
Inuyasha absently pushed hair out of his eyes as he carefully stowed another piece of his life away in the painted wooded chest that contained his most prized memories. It was a black-and-white photograph, and he was uncharacteristically gentle with it. It had been a secret possession; if it had ever been circulated, there would have been hell to pay. Sixteen runaway slaves crowded together around Rachel, Soloman, and himself, sad-eyed and dour, but well-fed, healthy, and because of the Underground Railroad, free. It had been one of his finer decades, one he felt had been well spent. Soloman, himself a manumitted slave, had religiously plowed through the forested hills of southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, tramped through tributary rivers to throw off dogs, and even fought the slave-catchers hand-to-hand on more than one occasion. Always in his adventures, he was accompanied by his friend, Ian Tynte, the curiously dark-headed Irishman who stood beside him in the photograph.
He found he couldn't quite close the chest over the photograph, and stared at his two friends for a good long while, lost in memory.
"Soloman!" Rachel screamed.
The mob circled in closer. Two men held Rachel fast, despite her best efforts. He – no, Ian, he reminded himself, shaking his head to clear it – stood back to back, each with fists raised. Soloman was a big man, finely muscled, made so by years of hard labor, and Ian, though slighter, was no pushover. But the bastards surrounding them were armed with pistols and shotguns, and no amount of skill would suffice against a gun-barrel leveled at one's head.
Soloman attacked first, characteristically brave.
"Don't you worry, Miss Rachel," he called out confidently, wrenching a sawed-off shot-gun from of the hands of one of the startled mob.
Ian wasn't far behind him, and had a pistol of his own in seconds. The shots began to fly.
Ian wasn't sure how he and Soloman avoided being shot full of holes. It had been dark, that was true, and certainly the nine men weren't professional marksmen, but even so, they weren't but a few feet away. Soloman and Ian made every blow count, knocking weapons away right and left, hoping to keep the crowd away from the house and the four escaped slaves within long enough for the two brothers and their companions to quietly disappear. This they managed, though Rachel's rambling manor and all the subsidiary buildings around it were burned to the ground that night.
No one counted on Rachel being the one real casualty of the firefight.
Inuyasha's throat constricted painfully. She had been a lot like Kagome, and maybe that was why he'd been so drawn to her that first week in Ohio, even though he couldn't have realized that at the time. Innocent but full of faith and conviction, she'd gotten involved with the Underground Railroad at the tender age of thirteen, when an injured runaway had stumbled upon her while she had been gathering flowers for her mother. Terrified and desperate, the slave had threatened her life.
She did more or less what Kagome would have done. She pooh-poohed him and demanded to see his injury, whereupon the astonished slave shut his mouth and let the girl attend him. After binding his wounds, she hid him in her father's stables until the slave-catchers that had been on his trail retreated. Her father was an abolitionist, and though until that moment he hadn't been involved with the newborn Underground Railroad, he eventually threw himself and his resources into it in the face of his daughter's courageous decision to save the runaway.
Soloman cradled the bloody Rachel to his breast, eyes stricken, fearful.
"Miss Rachel," he whispered brokenly.
"I never expected to be a martyr," Rachel commented, eyes tight with pain. "No, I certainly did not."
"You're not going to die, Rachel," Ian swore, crouching beside them.
"I don't think that's up to you, dear," she returned, and coughed weakly. "Poor darlings. I hate to leave you alone."
"No, Miss Rachel," Soloman asserted. "I don't believe I'll let any such of a thing happen to you. You're more use to this world as a savior than a martyr." He gathered her up in his arms and began to make his way to town. Ian saw what he was doing, and raced ahead to alert the town doctor that he had a serious case on the way, and to get ready.
Rachel had lost consciousness by the time Soloman reached the doctor's house. As Ian watched his big, dark-skinned friend suffer quietly beside her bedside over the next few days, he saw something he had somehow missed in the years that had fomented their friendship. Soloman, though he would never, could never admit it, was in love with the beautiful white abolitionist.
And when she began to stir restlessly in disturbed delirium, the name she called out most frequently, most passionately, was Soloman's.
How he could have been so oblivious, Inuyasha didn't know. But after Shippou lifted the illusion of Ian Tynte from him on the night of the new moon, he offered to help smuggle the pair to Canada, confident that he could convince the kitsune to disguise him to continue to look like his human self. In Canada, the French had freely intermarried with Indians; he hoped that perhaps a love considered taboo in Ohio might find some peace in the cold north.
They refused to go.
"There's too much left to do, Ian," Rachel said sadly.
"We thank you for the offer," Soloman added, "but we just can't pick up and go. There's still too many people out there who need us.
"Like we need you," Rachel added, a little flash of fire in her eyes. "Why can't you tell us where you're going?"
He didn't answer, but instead pleaded with them one last time, "Think about it, please – I can only do this for you this once. I won't be around to help you anymore after tonight."
It killed him to have to say it, every time he had to make his goodbyes to the people that had cared for him. They didn't usually take it well, and when the friendship had become as deep as what he shared with Rachel and Soloman, he didn't take it very well either.
"No, my friend," Soloman maintained in his slow tidewater drawl. The basso sotto voice was one of the most comforting sounds Inuyasha could ever remember hearing, but now it tore at his gut accusingly.
He drew Rachel roughly into his arms, and did not protest when the big black man wrapped his own thick dark arms around them both.
"Then I have to say goodbye."
Inuyasha touched Rachel's face one last time before closing the chest.
"You really need to clean this place up," Shippou noted, perched on an armoire in the corner.
"There's over three hundred years worth of stuff piled up here," Inuyasha groused, trying to push the doomed lovers out of his mind. Shippou usually tried to keep up with the people he'd become closest to, and the news he'd eventually offered about Rachel and Soloman was bad. The town had discovered that Soloman and Rachel were lovers.
And they hung them for perverse relations between the races.
That was sixteen years back, now, and guilt gnawed viciously at him. If he'd been there, it wouldn't have happened. He'd have moved heaven and earth first. He'd have killed everyone who tried to hurt them. He'd have –
Made a big mess, Shippou usually broke into his tirades.
Shippou was probably right. He'd made a special point to place Inuyasha in a very quiet, very peaceful little town in China during his next cycle. No wars. No deep-seated hatreds. No real violence to speak of. No real friends, either. It had been a sweet, dull existence, his clearest memory of which was the sunshine on the wet rice paddies. That was the illusion he'd just woken from two days ago, before retreating to his castle.
That had been Shippou's idea, the castle, though Inuyasha had probably taken the idea much further than the kitsune had expected him to. The aristocracy was in its twilight years, out of power and out of money. Many were leaving and selling their ancient ancestral fortresses all over Europe, while Shippou, on the other hand, was becomingly phenomenally wealthy. He proved to be as shrewd a businessman as ever he had been a manipulative child. He'd uncovered the clever scheme of developing the persona of a successful merchant for himself back in the sixteen hundreds, and since then periodically took on the guise of that person's descendents. It was a little tricky, playing two – or sometimes even three – inter-generational roles at once, but the game suited his mischievous nature and clever mind superbly. At any rate, he had tired of stowing all of Inuyasha's possessions from his multiple lives, and finally demanded Inuyasha find his own place. The castle was the result.
It was huge, and Inuyasha was privately rather proud of it. He bought it himself – any amount of money left alone long enough in a bank will make more money, and, having no real use for English pounds in India, or German marks in the Americas, the money he had earned for himself in the past three hundred odd years had multiplied nicely. It was nowhere near enough to rival Shippou's fortunes, but then, Shippou hadn't ever been to Kagome's time, and Inuyasha had. One day, not very many lives in the future, he would make a killing in the electronics market. But that was yet to come. For the time being, his castle was the only thing he felt compelled to purchase.
It was French, for France happened to be a nation he had special memories of. Constructed in the fourteenth century, it had become rather rundown in the four hundred years that passed before Inuyasha took possession of it. It had been besieged at some point, and the village below had withered and dried, leaving Montesquieu Castle alone against the towering Alps beyond. It was a lonely sort of place, where the soil wasn't especially good and the skies were generally pretty gray, but it suited Inuyasha. The frou-frou architecture, with its soaring arches and skinny towers, didn't appeal to him, but the chapel on the eastern side of the complex had the most beautiful stained glass windows he had ever seen, and the rose windows that adorned the inner palace were only marginally less stunning.
Inuyasha had taken almost an entire decade of the forty-four years he had available to him to make the castle into a home, though he would spend little time there after he finally had it arranged to his liking. Shippou hadn't been thrilled about the idea of his wasting that time – "What if something were to happen to me?" he'd demanded – but still Inuyasha devoted over nine years to the castle and its grounds. Someday, he would find Kagome. Someday, he would need to provide her with a home. And Montesquieu was the perfect place. She deserved nothing less than a palace, and he fully intended to see that she got exactly what she deserved.
After he left, to fade away into yet another life, Shippou had taken the responsibility for caring for the castle into his own hands, choosing caretakers for Montesquieu as carefully as he chose them for his own estates. These had to be extremely trustworthy individuals, for as time passed, Inuyasha's memorabilia became rare and precious, and some rooms within the castle Shippou locked off entirely, never to be breached by anyone but himself or the half-demon he protected, and so Montesquieu's treasures were always well cared for.
Montesquieu possessed a treasure of an altogether different nature as well. In the southernmost field, surrounded by a simple ring of large quartz crystals, there were two gravestones. One bore the name Solange d'Allaise, the other Maurice St. Julian. A white marble plaque rested between the two stones, and read "Together in death, as in life; beloved in death, as in life." Like Rachel and Soloman, Solange and Maurice were some of those important friends that forever haunted his memories. Unlike Rachel and Soloman, he'd encountered Maurice and Solange long before his revolutionary days in late eighteenth century France.
Only back then, their names had been Miroku and Sango.