Dying to Live
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.
Rain fell from the sky in a dizzying spiral over Miroku's head. Though it was overcast and stormy, bright, grey light flooded his eyes. He winced against it and immediately the thud of blood pounding painfully through his temples hit him hard.
Ah Buddha, he put his hand to his face to wipe water from his brow and eyes. The soggy weight of his sleeve and the stiffness in his neck told him he had sat in this spot without moving for quite a while.
It wouldn't be the first time he had awoken someplace unexpected, unfamiliar after a particularly rough fight. He didn't think he had taken any deep flesh wounds, but really – what was with this headache that had stuck with him since even before the fight last night?
Gingerly, having learned from past experience, he craned his sore neck to look over to the side. He had realized he was apparently seated on a tree branch. Too much time spent on tree branches recently, he mentally sighed.
The most important question though: how high up was this little perch?
His eyes grew wide as the view dropped away into a verdant haze – far, far below. The monk's hurting head spun sickeningly, and he leaned back quickly. His tired abdomen barely tightened in time to steady himself. A frightened squeak and jostling on his lap alerted him that Kirara had not been expecting his sudden movement. Quickly, he put an arm around her body on this lap so she wouldn't fall either.
Tilting back his head against the hard trunk of the tree, Miroku closed his eyes and inhaled, expecting to take a deep, fortifying breath of the damp air. However, he felt an odd hitching in his diaphragm that stilted it instead. Raindrops slipped wetly off the end of his nose, as slight worry took up residence in his aching head. Meanwhile, Kirara, who had been woken up with all the wobbling, poked her little head out of the folds of Miroku's robes. She looked up at her master's mate, quietly observing and trying to warm his cold lap. She also blinked falling rainwater out of her orb-like eyes.
What time could it be? How long had they been here? Miroku forced his mind to work despite the throbbing sensation squeezing in on his brain and the niggling stuffiness in his breathing.
He had passed out after his ki explosion. It made sense that Kirara had brought him to this high up hiding place in the forest. This may have been the best that she could do with him being unconscious. He felt thrilled that the technique had likely worked, but at the same time, his stomach flip-flopped. He disliked the thought that he had likely been out of commission for some time if day had already broken. Only Kirara knew how much time had passed, but unfortunately she could not tell him.
"Kirara, thank you for protecting me, but we must get back to the others and find out how they are," Miroku wearily patted the nekomata's head. Delicately as ever, Kirara unfolded her small body. With ease, she leapt off the monk's lap, landing a little further out on the branch they were seated on before dipping off into the air. As if dancing in a whirl of demonic fire and sparks, the little cat demon transformed gracefully into her saber-toothed form.
Carefully, Miroku sat up as Kirara drifted near enough for him to mount her. Without thinking, he inhaled as he leaned forward. Instantly, he clearly felt the rattling sensation taking up residence in his chest. It started as a low rumble – then without warning, exploded as a fit of coughing.
Kirara roared her concern, as Miroku fought against the desire of his muscles to shrink and contract. He hacked away but still pushed himself up onto the nekomata's back from the tree branch. The cat demon flattened her ears and twisted her neck around to gaze at him with her huge, red-orange eyes.
Urging the fit to stop, Miroku shook his head. Thankfully, he felt his lungs clear, as he thumped his chest harder. Still, the look the nekomata gave him was an easy read.
A moment later, Miroku forced nonchalance, "Really, see? I'm fine. Now please take us back, Kirara."
Kirara growled lowly, but as his coughing had quieted, she gently lifted them up over the treetops and off they soared toward Harumura Village.
::
Back in Harumura Village, from beneath a fringe of slate-grey hair, dark, muddy-grey eyes stared intensely through the gloom of a ramshackle village hut. The hut wasn't too far from the center of the village. The village women had led him to the closest available hut away from the danger of the fire raging within the remains of the village hall.
The moments of the prior night, right after the slayer deposited Rin in Sesshomaru's arms - where he had knelt, seemingly hopeless, in the dirt - replayed in a phantasmic blur in the Former Lord of the West's memory.
Bright flames and sparks leapt to life vividly, like they were right before him. Foreign, dramatic emotion rushed him at the arching cut of the slayer's flaming blade through thick, black night. Bitter tears shined in the hot light on the frightened, grimey faces of villagers, as they also watched the youth pass. In spite of himself, Sesshomaru was just as transfixed. The fact was Kohaku's movements had been suddenly inspired, seemingly set and choreographed by the ethereal – a brilliant dance fit to honor the great kami Hinokagatsuchi himself.
His eyes drying from the heat of the inferno raging paces from him, Sesshomaru mistakenly blinked, and in that moment, the slayer had cut into a loping run. Like a sharp-beaked sea-fowl descending on its ocean prey, Kohaku had swept down viciously on the possessed wolves.
Metal to necrotic flesh, fiery mites of flickering light exploded in the air. Mysterious strains of infernal screeching radiated and ricocheted off the wooden walls of all the surrounding village buildings.
Sesshomaru recognized it as the bleating protests of dark energy corroding and squelching under the purifying burn of the weaponized flames. The other humans around moaned and clutched their heads; even their dull ears couldn't bear the malevolent, demonic shrieks. The Former Lord of the West marveled even as the awful sounds stabbed at his own mind: the young slayer appeared unaffected though he must have felt his own ears threatening to bleed. Still, with the kitsune acting fast to help reignite the oil on the slayer's blade, Kohaku coolly lopped off ugly wolf heads in delicate flashes of golden flame.
Sesshomaru could hardly look away, as the young slayer and his allies let no beast escape. Rapidly, they slew, one after another, the beasts that had dared stay behind. They now methodically took out the bodies even after the heads had rolled away...
At last, the heroes claimed the last head of the remaining possessed wolves. Rolling clear away from the searing cut of Kohaku's sharp blade, the nasty disembodied head left a smoking trail and rolled off into the dark shadows beyond the light of the blazing village hall. Unthinkingly, Sesshomaru's hands curled around the body of the girl draped across his lap. An instinctive sigh of relief escaped his lips.
Slowly, villagers dared to look up at the remains of the proceedings to which Sesshomaru had borne witness to every moment. Though it had already ceased, his ears continued to ring from the horrid screeching emitted by the terminated, demonic flesh. Stunned, he barely registered the immediate change in tempo: automatically, the demon slayer and his allies took charge, mobilizing the housewives, the old, and the young.
"Move these bodies"; "Make a pile there"; "Reform the bucket brigade in case the fire from the hall spreads". Sesshomaru heard the orders, but it didn't process. Instantaneous like the crack of lightning, Rin's still elevated body heat jumped up a notch in his arms, begging his attention. He had looked down at her ash covered body, and his head swam. What now? He looked up and around. He needed -
"Do you need help?" an older woman tailed by three youths had approached and stood over him. He gazed from right to left, noticing that people appeared to be watching him. He blearily recognized a few of them as people he had roughly dragged from the burning building not too long ago.
"Not for me, but -" he stumbled over the words, but the young people with the woman were already pulling him up by his arms. No one spoke to him, but they steadied him, as he cradled the girl in front of him.
Joined by a few more matronly looking women, he was led to the hut. A rough looking bed roll had been quickly produced and unrolled. He had barely put Rin down on top of it, when his helpers were pushing him away through the door. At last they spoke directly to him again. They had to clean her body – it wasn't proper for a man to stay there, he had to leave for now.
Unable to think clearly, he waited dumbly outside the hut. Where else was there for him to go, what else could he do? Passing villagers with streaks of ash on their faces threw him cold looks where he waited. The slayer and his allies were preoccupied with the residual calamities of the vicious attack and the insatiable hellfire consuming the hall.
The building couldn't be saved. Sesshomaru could have told them that, but feeling even less like talking than usual after all the exertions of the past hours, he just watched. The villagers' buckets of water just disappeared in wisps of steam against the flames.
Finally, the women bustled from the hut, averting their eyes. Clearly, they only wished to make themselves scarce, and he couldn't have cared less. He glared over his shoulder before going fully under the roughly-hung door covering. Fuck'em, he thought more angrily than he should have. He was too aware of how wild his state of mind was, and yet he left too tired to control it.
Thinking about it now as grey morning light seeped through cracks in the rough wooden structure, Sesshomaru closed his tired eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose to steady his thoughts. The racket of rainwater falling loudly through a hole in the roof into a wooden bucket and overflowing onto the sagging corner of the dilapidated flooring chafed his raw nerves.
Slowly, he looked up again at where Rin lay motionless. He couldn't keep his eyes off the edge of the heavy fabric of his dark blue haori that lay in view. He remembered again how he reentered the hut and immediately thought, It's all a mess – and they call these blankets?
It was impulsive, and now it scared him, but with no hesitation he had stripped off his own jacket and thrown it atop the threadbare blankets covering the girl.
Without a thought, he, the former Lord of the West, had offered up the clothes off his back to that girl.
His skin crawled with foreign emotion, as a recent memory suddenly haunted him. Hadn't he had just tried to remind himself yesterday that she had only "just followed him around for six years"?
But if she was only a simple, "loyal" but "useless" hanger-on, then... What am I doing? he obsessed wearily.
Obviously, it wasn't just the so-called blankets: the thing that was truly "a mess" in this hut was himself.
Why.
The questions that seemed clear a few hours before to him, kneeling in the dirt before a burning building where he believed Rin would die, burnt alive, didn't make sense now.
Why had he not been more careful about Rin? Why had he not stayed with her?
Why did it matter so much if the girl died because his plans went awry?
Why did he not want to be parted from her now?
Again, his newly overactive heart squeezed: Feelings - he shouldn't have, couldn't have.
As the Great Lord of the West, he had not been raised nor trained for this - weaknesses and liabilities were always to be eschewed.
Sesshomaru's head felt heavy like he'd never known before. He pondered unceasingly the mistakes he felt so sure he had made. Now, it all felt just like a slippery slope he couldn't stop falling further down, no matter how hard he tried.
He tried to close his eyes and shut it all out. Despite yearning to remember how he'd ever maintained such even, cold composure for centuries, he could not do it now.
Whatever mush resided in this human head that rested on his shoulders now was definitely not the same contents that had been there before the transformation...
Oh definitely, Sesshomaru would shake the monk extra hard in punishment next time he got his hands on the man.
He cracked his smoke-stung eyelids open again. Sleep and meditation evaded him consistently.
His legs were pulled up close to his chest, where he sat against the wooden exterior wall. Forcefully, he ignored the draft passing through his kosode shirt because he wouldn't go reclaim his haori from the unconscious girl.
As his head felt like it would split from all his thoughts, he turned his hands over in front of his knees, not far from his face. The weak fingernails he looked down at were split and packed with dirt from scratching anxiously at the earth not long ago.
What was going through his head? The sight of the slayer gracefully beheading possessed wolf heads in a twirl of controlled flame and steel burned against his mind's eye, uninvited. Sesshomaru couldn't avoid acknowledging unfamiliar feelings of gratitude to the slayer for saving Rin; but the human youth's sense of precision and control inexplicably made the ex-demon's blood boil a degree higher each time he replayed the mental image of him wielding his blades.
Shouldn't he have been glad for the slayer's capability? As contradictory as it had been to his prior derisive opinions, he had recognized the prior night that Kohaku was not only brave enough to be a protector for Rin, but his acts had more than proved his fitness as a fighter. This level of competency was not something Sesshomaru had really dared hope for from anyone closely acquainted with the monk or his own half-brother.
No indeed, Kokahu was a formidable fighter, but still he could talk to Rin and make her laugh. The girl seemed to actually like the slayer enough too - it should have been perfect in Sesshomaru's mind.
But somehow, some way, it bothered him.
Was that not the exact type of person I had been looking to leave her with after all? Sesshomaru struggled and wondered all at once.
Conflicted, he angrily reached for and fisted handfuls of the loose fabric of his trousers where they covered his thighs.
Suddenly, Sesshomaru froze - his ears, such as they were, managed to detect a sigh from across the room.
Rin.
She turned in the blankets, and instantly, the former demon's pupils contracted anxiously, while his mind reeled at the hope that she would revive soon.
He waited silently.
Her body went still again.
He didn't dare to move and get a better look, but he edgily watched the resettled blankets piled over the girl. It appeared that moment wasn't here yet for her to awaken.
This girl of whom he had once told Jaken, seemingly a lifetime ago: she "never had any obligation to me, or I to her".
He wanted to be right about that – how much simpler it was when that was the truth to him!
Thinking about it now, he wanted to be angry and indifferent toward Rin, even as she slept recovering from the fire, but he couldn't.
The day prior, it had been comparatively easy. He had been able to keep his thoughts cold and unattached, as he had been thinking about Rin while he walked, stewing in Harumura Village. That was right before he ran into and talked to Tsukiko...
But now, it was as if her near-death experience had unhinged something deep inside of him that he had been too caught up to notice before then.
It was too apparent that the Great Demonic Lord Sesshomaru could not have predicted this improbable future. It left him woefully ill-equipped to face what he had willfully ignored, in his need to be in control: how deeply it had affected him that this mere follower of his refused to let him die of strange but lethal wounds.
Rin had arduously nursed him back to health, even cared about him and stayed with him, as he planned to ditch her and snuff himself in what he assumed would be a meaningful suicide.
Though it pained him, slowly, he thought it out.
Undeniably, it had embittered him that Rin had "saved" him in such a way that he despised.
She had decided his fate without his permission, something he had never allowed anyone to do.
And all this she did because he had done the same thing to her in the past, Tenseiga in his hand on a dimly lit forest pathway blocked by a young girl's corpse.
The irony was stifling. Sesshomaru's thoughts had come full circle again from the night before, yet he understood the cycle better now.
Rin had definitely come to matter to him, and perhaps it was that for some reason, they were unavoidable to each other.
Just like he found and could not resist resurrecting her the first time he saw her, he could not deny that she had similarly blocked the way between him and Death. Moreover, she had cared for him, even while he vacillated between weakly taking advantage of her soothing kindness and actively blowing off her attempts to help him as inappropriate "failures" whenever the mood struck him.
By the hells, I might actually be the "idiot" for once, he realized as his stomach turned over with that steadily more familiar hot-feeling that had begun settling there whenever he thought for too long of Rin.
Worse yet, somewhere in his mind he heard an echo of his obnoxious half brother's grating, rueful laughter.
Sesshomaru would have scoffed at the apparent cosmic satire of it all, if he wasn't so upset by it.
What now? The question from the night before came soaring back at him again like a boomerang.
Not really seeing his own hands, he picked at his ruined fingernails, hoping the odd, tumbling of heated emotion in his core would settle down.
He sat for a while like that. He finally distantly observed that he had continued destroying his nails in a fit of uncertainty that would have normally never become him.
He hissed seeing where he had picked at at least two of the weak things until his nail beds actually bled. He had not intended that…
He had not been careful with them.
Or was it that he had not had the opportunity to do something different?
No, no... that wasn't it. He leaned his head back against the splintered wood paneling.
This wasn't about the nails anymore, he decided and slowly felt his mind cooling and clearing as he forced himself to think.
He had to plan - he would circumvent his new and growing deficiencies.
He had to be sure Rin would be safe.
Then no matter what mixed up feelings he felt as a result of his predicament, or even if Rin refused to forget about him, he would force himself to go.
But how? How?...
Sesshomaru continued to think until his mind was beyond exhausted. He supposed he may have slept, but he couldn't be sure.
A while later, outside the hut, people's voices increased in volume, and Sesshomaru heard shouts of "Monk! Monk, you have returned!"
As he turned his head toward the sound, a version of his former, familiar, stony calm had finally returned to him.
At last, he believed he understood the problem:
He hadn't really been trying.
And for the girl that had so implausibly come to matter to him, that was something Sesshomaru would change.