I'm sorry I took so freakin' long to update, everyone! Things have settled down a lot since you last heard from me, so hopefully I'll be able to churn out chapters on a regular basis. If not, just smother me with reviews and I'm sure I'll get to work . Thanks to everyone who reviewed last time, to all my old fans, and to all my new ones who are checking this story out for the first time. Y'all give my writing meaning.

As always, be sure to pay attention to the flashes between times. If you don't, you'll be easily lost.

Disclaimer: I own it not; sadly, this is true.

…

Sixty Years Ago

Inuyasha howled with pain, scrunching his eyes closed and tilting his head up to further belt his agony toward the ceiling. Adding insult to injury, he felt a hand sharply slap him across the face, immediately silencing a second howl in his throat.

"Silence, mutt, or we'll make this even harder on you," a cruel voice sneered, devoid of any trace of pity. Another voice joined it, "Mark our words, we can make this more painful than your most gruesome nightmares."

Inuyasha's fangs dug into his bottom lip to hold back a snarled response. Two fierce pairs of golden eyes were boring into his, daring him to make even the slightest noise. The babe held them back, through some small miracle, and the four hands belonging to the two sets of eyes began to work again, wringing pain from his every pore.

White gauze wrapped Inuyasha's wounds tightly, ebbing the trickle of blood that came from a thousand wire-thin cuts. The hands that wrapped the white gauze about him belonged to the two female servants Sesshoumaru had assigned to him, named Lena and Gabi. Inuyasha could say with a clear conscience that he'd never met two more evil creatures in his entire life. All the villagers combined had never come anywhere near this kind of torture.

A smattering of weeks had passed since Inuyasha's first day in the fortress of Inutaisho, and his situation had taken such a steady plunge into utter misery, it made him want to cry. Lena and Gabi—his "personal servants"—were there at every turn to add some new humiliation to his day. They tripped him as he walked, and dug claws into his wrists when he demanded they help him up. They ripped his hair out in clumps when they brushed it in the morning, and shredded his clothing, blaming it on him and his "pathetic excuse for claws". Sesshoumaru had already had to replace his wardrobe several times, and every time he did he lectured Inuyasha in a way that made his stomach churn.

This was why he needed so many bandages.

Whenever he made a mistake, whenever he blundered, whenever he revealed even the smallest flaw…Sesshoumaru would punish him. His skin was sliced open in razor-thin cuts that stung horribly and bled profusely but healed in a matter of seconds. As soon as the old rows were healed, new ones would be made, deeper than before. Even while the cuts faded quickly away, their sting lingered for hours afterwards until Inuyasha ached all over. The bigger the crime, the deeper the cut. Inuyasha's worst punishment of all had come hours before, and he smarted as if Sesshoumaru's hands were still upon him.

Sesshoumaru had ordered Inuyasha to attend tutoring sessions with other demon children in the castle, insisting that the education his mother had provided for him could only be inadequate if it came from a human. He refused to have a brother who was both ignorant and a halfbreed. The shame of one was enough. This morning was supposed to be Inuyasha's first day, and pupils were instructed to rise at dawn. Eager to get his hands on such a tempting education—one that the children back in his village would never come anywhere near—Inuyasha had instructed Lena and Gabi to wake him an extra hour before he needed to be up. In response…they had failed to wake him at all.

Hours later, when it was reported to Sesshoumaru that his disgrace of a brother had not shown up for his lessons, the Taiyoukai furiously questioned the twins. With feigned expressions of surprise and ignorance, the horrid females claimed Inuyasha never told them he had lessons that day and had even gone so far as to instruct them not to wake him until afternoon had well set in.

Inuyasha had been unable to recount his side of the story before Sesshoumaru's hands had a chance to clamp around his neck. He was dragged from bed and taken into the dampest dungeon he'd ever been in, moldy and satiated with tortured screams. There, Sesshoumaru had beaten him more brutally than every beating he'd ever gotten all done at once. His skin crawled with twisting snakes of pain, his blood splattered the ground in warm drops of rusty scarlet, and his every shuddering breath wanted to erupt into a scream of pain.

Inuyasha couldn't stand the look of pleasure in Sesshoumaru's fierce eyes as he flayed his little brother's skin open like raw meat. He couldn't stand the satisfied smirks of Lena and Gabi as they watched on, licking their lips. He couldn't stand the sound of his own weakness as it echoed off the dungeon walls in the form of groans and cries and sobbing.

But most of all, he couldn't stand what Sesshoumaru did next. When his rage was finally spent, and the blows stopped falling…Sesshoumaru would do something Inuyasha couldn't understand. Inuyasha's body lay broken and bruised on the floor, wracked by brutal coughs that shook his whole form like a quivering mass of scarlet. His white hair stuck to him in clumps, matted with blood, sweat, and tears. His eyes stared wide open at Sesshoumaru, terror showing plainly in their youthful depths.

Sesshoumaru stalked closer, kneeling down next to the body as the coughing gradually stilled to ragged breaths. The Taiyoukai reached a clawed hand out, causing Inuyasha to flinch away from what he saw as one final blow, but Sesshoumaru only stroked his hair, tucking a loose strand neatly behind his hanyou ear. And then he would do it. The thing that Inuyasha couldn't stand. When he was finally too exhausted to cry anymore, to hate anymore, to wish so much death and destruction upon his brother that he could hardly stand himself, Sesshoumaru would do it.

Just before Inuyasha slipped away into unconsciousness and Lena and Gabi stepped forward to drag his body back to his room and begin bandaging it with biting nails and rough palms, Sesshoumaru would lean down and press his lips to his brother's. The kiss was tender, sweet in ways the young hanyou couldn't understand. He could hear a purr in the back of Sesshoumaru's throat as the inu youkai leaned so close, close enough to fill Inuyasha's nose with his masculine scent. The hanyou would drift into a black world with his brother's lips still caressing his own, licking every drop of blood gently away.

Present Day

Inuyasha could no longer claim to know where he was going. When he'd first torn himself from Miroku in a fit of rage and confusion, he'd intended to head back to the camp and rant some more. As he ran, however, his legs pumping wildly and his hair streaming behind him like a white pennant, some strange instinct seemed to be guiding him. He was turning westward at the whim of a nagging voice in the back of his head. His nose caught no conspicuous scent in that direction, and his eyes had similar trouble finding something unusual. He could come up with no reason why he suddenly felt the need to head in that direction.

Abruptly, the reason appeared before him, just as he broke through the outer edge of a clearing. A figure stood in the dead center, as if waiting for the hanyou to appear. Inuyasha skidded to a halt a few feet in front of the figure, a growl already rumbling in the back of his throat.

"Sesshoumaru," he spat, for the silver-haired Taiyoukai did indeed stand before him. A smug smirk tugged at the corners of the demon's lips, and his gold eyes regarded his younger half-brother with casual amusement. Inuyasha was nothing more than an interesting bump in the road to him. The hanyou hated being pinned under that calculating stare, like a butterfly with wings held firmly in place with contempt. The hanyou hunched low to the ground, ready to spring into an attack if the need arose.

"Yes, brother," Sesshoumaru replied calmly, his voice low and melodic, "it is I, though I dare say you do not seem pleased to see me." Inuyasha snarled at this, feeling his face grow hot with anger. The bastard had a way of talking to him as if he were still a child. The mere sound of his voice lifted the years away and sent him tumbling back to a time when he was just a beaten pup lying in a sticky pool.

"Why, in all the rings of hell, would I be happy to see you?" Inuyasha's voice was so quiet no human would have been able to hear him. Sesshoumaru heard him plainly, though; he could see it in the way his brother's pointed ears twitched in the direction of his voice. Inuyasha defiantly raised his chin, meeting the cold eyes that had so often haunted his childhood dreams. He was no longer a child, and he would prove that if he had to.

"Why, Sesshoumaru, would you think that I have anything but hatred for you?" he continued slowly, lowering his voice to a slick drawl. He rose from his haunches, standing as tall as he could make himself, though he would never match Sesshoumaru. He took a step back, making sure the fierce look in his eyes would plainly tell his pure-blood brother that this was no retreat. He simply wanted space between them. "You were everything that made my life hell. You rescued me from one evil just to send me plunging into another. You tortured me." Inuyasha spat the word as if it were a curse. His golden eyes blazed with fury; the memories were catching up to him now.

The smirk on Sesshoumaru's face never flickered for an instant. His eyes were sweeping down Inuyasha's body, sizing him up as if he were a piece of property the inu youkai had a mind to buy. A soft chuckle sounded through the air, matching the ringing tenor that was Sesshoumaru's voice. "Little brother, it is your decision if you choose to dwell on the past, specifically the bad parts. This Sesshoumaru would think someone who has overcome as much as you have with only your feeble hanyou strength would be more willing to look forward."

"How can I look forward when you won't leave me alone?!" Inuyasha snarled, his fingers clenching into white-knuckled fists. Image after image flashed before his eyes until rage boiled within him. He'd thought before that he could handle himself. He'd sworn that he wouldn't let Sesshoumaru get the best of him. He'd vowed a thousand times that he would never again be reduced to the rank of a sniveling child.

He'd lied.

"It's your fault! It's all your fault!" Inuyasha was breathing hard now, battling against the demon blood in him as it surged forward to meet his wrath. "I am what I am because of you. Everything you did to me made me into this thing, this untrusting, beaten, defeated thing that can't even tell if he's really worth something or not! You did this to me."

"That is where you are wrong, little one," Sesshoumaru cooed in that maddeningly calm voice of his. "If I had made you what you are, you would be better than this." Sesshoumaru had taken a step closer, and then another. Inuyasha could feel the distance between them closing like the tightening of a noose. He stepped back, keeping the space between them even.

Sesshoumaru's grin grew broader. "Keeping your distance, mutt? Afraid of what I might do to you if I were to get too close?"

"I will never be afraid of you again," Inuyasha swore with vehemence, but Sesshoumaru only laughed. His golden eyes locked on the hanyou with unidentifiable emotion. "I never said you would be afraid. If I were ever near you like I was back when you lived in the castle of our father, fear would be the last thing on your mind. You remember what it was like back in the old days. I know you do; you think about it even now. Back when you were a child and you let me stroke your hair and brush your cheek against mine. You treasured the rare moments when I had no blade pressed to your skin."

Inuyasha had visibly deflated. The things he had been too afraid to tell his friends were coming to surface, along with all his old confusion. His relationship with Sesshoumaru…when he was merely a babe of no more than six years…and later when he had finally grown up…. All of it was so confusing. Sixty years ago, fifty years ago, it all seemed the same to him, the same blurry streak of past.

Abruptly, he realized Sesshoumaru was closing the distance between them while he thought. The demon moved too quickly for Inuyasha to step back again. His brother was before him, scant inches away, boring down into his golden eyes with a look of amusement that belittled Inuyasha to his very core. Slowly, the demon brought a hand up, tucking a strand of Inuyasha's silver mane behind one of his hanyou ears, just as he'd done so long ago. Inuyasha shuddered under his touch…remembering so many other touches…from when he was a babe…and from when he grew up.

"You remember this," Sesshoumaru whispered, never letting his eyes waver for even an instant. "You remember this as if it happened yesterday instead of sixty years ago. You remember what it was like fifty years ago, before you ran off and got yourself sealed to that tree."

Inuyasha opened his mouth to deny it, but Sesshoumaru silenced him with a single slender finger held to the hanyou's lips. The skin was firm and warm and it tortured Inuyasha. Sesshoumaru's lips parted one final time with a murmured goodbye, "You will never forget." And then he was gone.

To be continued….