Dying to Live
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.
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"The mountain flower I left behind
I strive but vainly to forget,
Those lovely traits still rise to mind
And fill my heart with sad regret."
-From "Young Violet" in The Tales of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
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The next morning Sesshomaru stared into his bowl of ramen while Rin stared at him. Neither of them were eating, and their soup grew steadily colder but for very different reasons.
"Please tell me you're not NOT going to eat that," Rin said in a very dry accusatory tone.
"…I might not be hungry right now," Sesshomaru answered, unenthusiastically watching a piece of seaweed float up from underneath a noodle.
"Sesshomaru, you need to eat," Rin sighed in irritation.
"Why does it matter if I eat this or not?" Sesshomaru questioned. Genuinely, he didn't know why Rin fussed so much about his food; he certainly didn't care much for any of it.
Releasing what sounded like an angry roar-part-moan, Rin brought her fists down against the table on either side of her bowl. Yellowish broth splashed out onto the table. "It matters because this is what I bought for you to eat, and otherwise, I have no idea what else to get for you!"
To this Sesshomaru replied, "Then just don't give me anything."
Was that attitude? Rin wondered. It was hard to tell because it was in his usual monotone delivery.
Rin gritted her teeth. "Forget it," she snapped and stood up from the table, leaving her own partially eaten ramen behind. "I'll just see you back at the inn later," she grumbled. With that, she walked off to go find all the rations they needed to get while in town.
Sesshomaru stayed at the little table in the big market square where they had found the ramen stall. For a few minutes, he just people watched, an activity Sesshomaru never really had even the slightest interest in before. Now, he did it quite frequently, though, mostly for a lack of anything better to do. Against everything he had originally thought and felt, he had to admit that perhaps he didn't find human activity as dull as he had presumed.
What do we have today? he asked himself, as his eyes scanned the immediate area. A group of be-smudged children skipped around and pulled on the skirts of a woman picking out vegetables at one of the stands. At a shop front across from his table, an old woman wearing a greasy apron laid out skewers of steaming, blackened cubes of meat on metal racks to entice would-be customers. Nearby, two coarsely, but warmly, dressed men approached with steaming bowls of ramen in their hands, laughing throatily about something. They took the table directly in front of Sesshomaru, and he watched them tuck into their meal with gusto, as they continued their animated talk.
He sighed, as he looked back down at his own lukewarm noodles. Little circles of grease had collected on the surface of the broth. While he didn't want them before either, at least they had been hot. He knew Rin had been right. He was going to get hungry, no matter how much he denied it or didn't want to care. And then there was the fact that he had to keep up his physical strength at least enough until he accomplished what he had set out to do with this trip…
So, he choked down a few more tangles of slippery noodles and cool broth before heading off to do his share of that day's chores.
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"She's a beaut', isn't she?" the old stable keeper said, as he noticed Sesshomaru stroking the neck of a dark brown mare. The horse looked to be of a good height and temperament for Rin. He had already cursorily checked the eyes and legs.
"Show me the mouth and hooves," Sesshomaru directed, and the man complied despite being slightly taken aback at his customer's unusual forthrightness. Then, they finished the same inspection on a second horse for Sesshomaru himself and bargained out a price for the Sesshomaru and Rin's spent horses in exchange for the new ones.
"Ye want straw shoes for yer horses, too?" the old hand questioned.
"Yes, just for the fore hooves, though," Sesshomaru decided.
"Alright, ye can pick'em up this afternoon, and I'll put the shoes on 'em while yer gone," the man answered, before he decided to say something else to this unusual customer. As Sesshomaru approached the entrance onto the main street, the man stopped him: "Okyaku-sama, if I might ask, where're you ridin' with these horses?"
Sesshomaru lifted an eyebrow in interest. "Toward Edo," he replied tersely.
"Aye, on the Big Road, I take it? Best watch out for horse thieves along that stretch," the old stable keeper warned. "Had some people comin' in with bad stories about such along there. Keep an eye out."
Sesshomaru paused for a moment waiting to hear if the man would say anything else about it. When he didn't, the younger man hn'ed and stepped into the street.
From there, Sesshomaru was to buy new woven shawls for himself and Rin as well. He wandered the street for several minutes, looking into shops here and there, until he finally asked someone where he could find a clothes merchant. The place he ultimately arrived at was posted with the words "Textiles, Seamstress, and Clothes".
Inside, he found the shop long and narrow, the walls lined with dark wooden shelves crammed with everything from coarse linens to the shiniest, brightest silks. At intervals along the wall, in alcoves between the shelves, finished men and women's kimono hung on display racks, a source of inspiration for indecisive customers.
Sesshomaru was not one to linger, so he headed straight for a rack hung with rough, pre-made shawls. He rubbed a bit of the thick, slightly scratchy material between his fingers. Not particularly attractive, Sesshomaru scowled internally. Along with everything else, he felt that his wardrobe too had taken a serious dive lately.
The tinkle of a young girl's laughter: Sesshomaru looked up from the drab fabric in his hand, directly at the obvious owner of that happy sound. At the far end of the store, she stood atop a short pedestal. She wore a long, over-jacket of icy pink and silver patterned silk. A young man stood beside her, teasing her, as a seamstress circled around her, fussing with final alterations to the bottom hem and sleeves. The girl glowed, as she continued to giggle at the smiling young rogue beside her. Her companion thought she was beautiful, and she knew it. She was about Rin's age. Sesshomaru suddenly caught himself wondering if Rin would have similarly been chased by young men like this one, if he had left her to live a normal life in the villages after reviving her. In comparison to this girl's easy smile, Sesshomaru thought almost automatically of that increasingly familiar, callous expression that was on Rin's face yet again this morning, as she had hunted through the busy street for his breakfast. An unanticipated pang of worry washed over him.
Well, she will be in the villages again soon, he told himself solemnly, so her popularity will be known soon, perhaps just not to me.
With that, Sesshomaru made a decision. He wouldn't be buying the ugly pre-made shawls. Instead, he approached an older female attendant where she stood unoccupied at the order counter at the back of the shop.
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Before she even saw the cave, her senses told her the enclosure she lay in was large and stony, a place where sounds ricocheted in echoes all around. The drip-drip of falling droplets hitting flat rock rising above the loud, surrounding hiss of rushing water played percussion on Kagura's subconscious.
She also felt the presence of another inhabitant of the cave: the whisper of someone's footfall; the sigh of someone's breath and even sometimes its fleeting, ticklish heat near her skin; and most noticeably, the touch of someone's hands, their grasp warm like the sun, sometimes moving her limbs, cleansing her face, or wetting her lips.
At last, she opened her eyes, and there sat that someone.
"Sawat dee," said the stranger, smiling and craning his head to meet her gaze.
Stiffly, Kagura turned her head to the side on the pillow on which it rested. Slowly the muscles in her pupils contracted and relaxed for the first time in weeks, and she saw the individual crouched beside her more clearly. She looked into a pair of dark eyes the color of burnt red clay, their hue sharp and obviously non-human but their shape soft and round like two almonds. His dark skin was tanned nearly the shade of tree bark but with none of its roughness, while midnight black hair tied up in a bun framed gently curving cheek bones that added to the stranger's appearance, which was decidedly amiable even before he spoke. Still, Kagura didn't wish to hang around any longer than necessary to find out his intentions. Awkwardly, she started to maneuver her upper body around in attempt to sit up only to be held firmly back by one of those warm, brown hands.
"No, no, you are alright. All is alright," said the stranger, withdrawing a little to give her space. "Please careful. Your arm," he said, indicating her appendage stretched out by her side. She turned her gaze in its direction. Her nose suddenly registered the medicinal odor coming from the pile of green herbs and bandaging that surrounded the flesh.
"Very…" he seemed to be searching for a word, "disgusting and much pain. You become sick. Very difficult injury," he concluded, by way of explanation.
However, Kagura didn't really hear him. She was searching his face again, trying to understand who this stranger with the broken Japanese was and what he could possibly want with her. Why couldn't I have just died? she lamented.
"Who are you?" she choked out.
"I am Anurak. I am a foreigner. I come from Ayutthaya. Recently, I go to Japan and learn Japanese," he replied happily, sitting back on his heels, as casually as if they were just meeting in the street for a chat.
"Wha- where…" Kagura struggled to collect her scrambled thoughts. "How did you find me, how did you find this place?" she finally asked only to find her host looking very confused. She tried to rephrase her words more simply: "You found me? Where did you find me?"
He nodded at the first question, and pieced together an answer to the second: "I find you in a… a dark place with rocks. You are very bad health. So I take you here. Take care of you." He looked at her hopefully, obviously waiting for her to burst out and thank him. Instead, Kagura only felt sick. Why could no one just leave her in peace, let her finally lose her mind and forget all the terrible things, visions, and people that made her life a living hell?
Suddenly, she shivered violently, and her self-appointed caretaker's face turned serious.
"Because of your arm's sickenss, you become hot… You have-have—" he tried to say more, but he wound up only creasing his brow deeper in frustration. Unable to come up with the word in Japanese, he spoke several words in a language she didn't recognize before grinning in sheepish apology. Reaching for a wet towel, he hm'ed decisively and placed it on her forehead. Then, he ordered, "You rest," before moving away, leaving her to confusion and sleep.
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Two days later, the evening before they would set off on the road again, Rin walked back toward their inn in Kyoto, hugging a small, paper-wrapped parcel. Having completed all other necessary errands, she found herself with extra time to spend in the capital, and so she had passed the afternoon at a large literature market outside a nearby temple. Everything on sale seemed to be arranged in a completely careless order, giving the impression that the monks were practically dumping the old, ragged texts on the street in some form of early spring cleaning. Her original intention had been to find a more challenging writing primer, but after spending two-hours sorting through the piles, she had also come back with a collection of once popular song poems and a short anthology of local ghost stories, which one of the market volunteers promised contained a satisfying amount of intrigue, thrills, and chills.
Having dropped off her new purchases in the room to find Sesshomaru nowhere in sight, Rin headed directly for the women's bath for a long, hot soak, knowing that it could be quite a while again before they encountered a similarly well-appointed inn. When her head was practically spinning from the steam, and she thought she might actually fall asleep and drown in the bath, she found just enough strength to dry off and shuffle back to the room before passing out for an early night in bed. That was how when Sesshomaru returned to the inn later that night, he found his companion already too deep asleep to receive her present. Quietly, he laid the two simple paper boxes tied with hemp down beside her pillow and climbed into bed himself.
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In the morning Rin woke with a start to the snap of the shoji door and sat up.
Aye, kami! I feel like I've been dead! she thought blearily, blinking at the morning light radiating through the rice paper covering the door. She finally made out Sesshomaru's face in the shadow of his silhouette where he stood at the door and realized that he was looking down at her, his facial expression unusually amused.
"What time is it?" she croaked.
"Time for you to wake up," he replied almost smugly. "I decided to order new clothes for you the other day. They're in the boxes by your pillow. Once you're dressed, come for breakfast, and then we'll set off," he stated. Then, he was off again with another snap of the shoji.
As she shrugged off the covers, she was just starting to suspect that he had initially shut the door so noisily for his own sheer entertainment of getting to watch her startle awake. He has always had a rather mysterious sense of humor, she mused, when her eyes fell on the plain paper boxes beside her futon. They were bigger than she had expected. What did he buy? We only needed shawls, she grumbled, tugging on the hemp twine.
She lifted the lid on the smaller, top box, and her heart skipped a beat. Mechanically, she reached into the box and lifted the decadent item up to get a better look: it was a gorgeous light brown, mink stole. "What was he thinking?!" she exclaimed to the empty room, practically dropping the shining pelt back into its box. She now grabbed anxiously for the other box, opened it, and had to stop herself from having a duplicate reaction as she had to the stole.
There it sat, folded, looking so unassuming in its average paper box, the most beautiful kimono and matching hakama pants set. Reverently, she lifted the kimono out of the box, feeling the heavy but quality crepe silk between her fingers. Having spread it out on her futon, Rin saw that the base color was a rich shade of muted burgundy with images of regal, cream-colored peonies spread over it, the largest and most prominent blossoms placed near the collar, shoulders, and the bottom its mid-length hanging sleeves. The matching under-kimono was also made of the smoothest mono-chrome, cream-hued silk, stitched sprigs of some delicate, ornamental tree covering it, meant only to peak out ever so slightly at the collar of the wearer. Meanwhile, the hakama pants and matching waist sash were the color of dark moss, their tasteful pleats finishing in a wide leg at the ankle. Still in the paper box lay folded a set of plain quilted long underwear, which Rin removed to find the last present at the very bottom: a beautiful, foreign-looking, tassel-like decoration featuring an embroidered silk butterfly in shades gold, pink, and green and strung with three beads of off-white jade.
The hot tears were on her face even before she felt them streaming out of her eyes. A couple drops fell onto one of the silken peonies. Stop it! she reprimanded herself half-heartedly, but she started to laugh a little, overwhelmed by how charmed she was by the thoughtfulness of her lord's gift.
"Before you didn't cry for months, now all you do is cry all the time," she muttered to herself. Still feeling bemused but terribly emotional, she started to think about how she wanted to wear her hair with her new outfit.
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Note 1: There it is! Our latest chapter! There's even a little suspense woven in there. (Anybody starting to wonder what Sesshomaru's up to yet?) I really had a lot of fun researching the clothes and materials for Sesshomaru's gift to Rin in this one. Not all of it's perfectly accurate or anything, but I felt very satisfied with the details I could include. I realize I must really love writing about clothing…
Note 2: Hooray, I finally got to introduce Anurak to you all little more here. I'm actually very excited about his character. I started to come up with him after I visited Thailand (a large chunk of its territory once part of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, if you hadn't already guessed) earlier this year. I hope you'll like him as we go on. I decided that Kagura really needs someone in her life… friend or other, we'll see…
Note 3: A little note about the peony: From what I could gather about the peony flower from the Great Wikipedia and other sources, the peony generally blooms in the month of May. When cared for properly, it will bloom year-after-year for a long time, making it known for its longevity or honorability as a flower. Across Asia, it was associated with nobility, wealth, good fortune, purity, and even bravery- all things I think Sesshomaru would wish for Rin when giving her a gift he would anticipate she would use well into the future.
Note 4: Finally, and most importantly, thank you much to my lovely reviewers (particular shout outs to Chocolatte and Caloola, who have been very loyal) and favoriters and all of you who are now following Dying to Live. Welcome to anybody who's new,too! Drop me a review, let me know what you think, and read on