Once Upon a Time Chapter 9 by Aisuru aisuru_chan@yahoo.com

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Author's Notes: Yay! I didn't lose all of my readers because of my long delay in writing Chapter 8! Oh, and I know that Sesshoumaru's "puff" probably isn't a tail, but who can resist the appeal of the severe youkai lord having a long, fluffy appendage? Especially if it was prehensile through the same supernatural powers that allow him to fly and move so fast that he appears to be a glowing white ball of light (both of which I've seen in the anime)! Rin will be a lucky girl if Sesshoumaru decides to "keep" her after she grows up... I have trouble imagining Sesshoumaru siring a hanyou pup, but that is another argument. Also, remember that the story Sango tells is her interpretation of the original one Kagome would have told her. So, without further ado, here is the next chapter!

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The startling contrast between the little human girl cuddling up in an inu- youkai lord's fluffy tail and the great Sesshoumaru that the tail was attached to was almost enough to distract Sango from the threat in Sesshoumaru's eyes should she fail to amuse Rin with one of Kagome's story. Almost.

"Once upon a time," she began. When Sesshoumaru rose an eyebrow -- again -- in recognition of another reference to time, Sango hastened to explain: "Kagome starts all of her stories that way. So, once upon a time, or so Kagome says, there was a girl of some wealth that owned a crimson cloak with a hood. It had been given to her by her mother to wear when she went horse riding, which is apparently a favored recreation of the very wealthy girls among Kagome's people. The girl loved this cloak so much that she wore it all the time -- so often, in fact, that people referred to her as Little Red Riding Hood."

Rin broke out in giggles at the ridiculous name, and Sango relaxed marginally, giving the girl a hesitant smile of her own, before continuing. "Her mother had come from another village to join with her father, and her mother's mother, of course, still resided in this other village. Little Red Riding Hood's mother received news that her own mother had taken ill, and she had gathered food and medicinal herbs in a woven basket to take to her, but then her husband forbid her to leave his side and take the journey. Little Red Riding Hood's mother sent her crimson-garbed daughter in her stead, and the girl went off alone."

Sesshoumaru gave a disbelieving snort. When Sango raised frightened eyes to him, he commented, "If her father was so wealthy, he should have sent her with a company of armed soldiers and female companions."

Sango nodded. "I said the same thing when Kagome related this story to me, wondering perhaps if this girl was a miko or an exterminator. Kagome said that Little Red Riding Hood was just a regular girl, and that perhaps she left without her father's permission or knowledge, since she went alone." While Sesshoumaru pondered the depth of human stupidity, for a father to not realize that one of his pups was missing, Kagome continued. "Her mother's mother's village was small and isolated, located in the middle of a deep wood, and Little Red Riding Hood was careful not to stray from the path. Nonetheless, when she was in the woods, too far for either her father's village or her mother's mother's village to hear her cries of distress, she came across a wolf..."

Rin's sudden scream of fright echoed off the cave walls. Sango jumped, Shippou gave his own cry of surprise, and, in the depths of the cave, Inuyasha's ears flattened against his head as Kagome stiffened in his lap. Miroku gave a grunt of pain and slowly started to regain consciousness. Sesshoumaru's face remained without expression as Rin tried to bury herself in his meters of fluffy tail. "Rin does not like wolves," he stated.

Sango gulped, her heart still racing from Rin's startling cry. "The wolf did not attack Little Red Riding Hood on the forest path," she quickly explained to Rin, although her eyes remained on Sesshoumaru. "He spoke with her instead."

Rin's face popped up from under thick strands of white fur. "A youkai wolf?" she asked.

"How else could it talk to her?" Shippou asked, an air of superiority in his voice, for he did not share Rin's fear of wolves, and for once he was not the most cowardly.

Rin gave another squeal, apparently more afraid of youkai wolf than she was of the natural animal, and ducked back under Sesshoumaru's tail. Shippou smirked in amusement. Sango frowned at him. "Shippou, you know for a fact that there are no youkai where Kagome lives. Why are you trying to frighten..." She was cut off when Sesshoumaru rose to his feet in a blur of white and a rustling of expensive silks. She looked up just in time to see a darkly striped, long-clawed hand grip her around the throat and lift her off her feet. There was a muffled squeak of surprise from Rin and Sesshoumaru's tail suddenly vanished from around her.

"You will tell this Sesshoumaru how it is possible that there are no youkai in this place," he growled, flexing his hand just a bit in case lifting her off her feet by her throat was not threat enough. Then he heard a growl and saw a streak of red, and Sesshoumaru found his grip removed from the youkai exterminator's throat and his person shoved towards the cave entrance and tackled to the ground; his snarling, red-eyed little half-brother was above him, one clawed-hand pinning his only arm to the ground, the other clawed hand raised to shred him to pieces.

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Kagome found herself tossed on the cold stone floor of the cave as Inuyasha rushed forward to protect his pack-member from a blatant outside threat. Afraid of the blood-lust that seemed to inevitably follow any shedding of blood by youkai Inuyasha, she jumped to her feet and ran forward at her much slower human-running-on-rough-rock-in-bare-feet pace. "Inuyasha!" she yelled. "Sit!"

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Sesshoumaru was having a bad day. Oh, the day had started well enough, resting lazily under a tree and watching the sun rise as Rin snoozed on, curled up at his side with his tail wrapped around her for warmth. It did not matter where the child fell asleep, whether on the back of the two- headed lizard youkai she had named Ah-Un or on a soft carpet of grass, she never failed to wake during the night and creep to his side. Of course, no amount of stealth on the child's part would allow her to surprise Sesshoumaru, but she would pretend he wasn't watching her as she approached him, her bare feet crunching on dried leaves, the sounds of her breathing and heartbeat loud in his ears.

The sound of her own stomach growling had woken the girl, but when Sesshoumaru suggested she go find herself something to eat, she had looked amazed that he had realized she might be hungry. Her foolishness -- her innocence -- had almost brought a smile of amusement to his lips. Almost. It was hard to be amused by innocence when you had lived as long as he had, had seen as much as he had seen, had done the things that he had done...

When Rin had eaten a generous share of some wild berries and washed her blue-tinged hands and face in the chilly water of a creek, they set out. They encountered the smell of non-Rin humans uncomfortably close to Sesshoumaru's borders, and he scratched deep gouges into the trees on his borders to frighten the villagers from extending their boundaries into his. Jaken complained about their stench until he turned away from Sesshoumaru, telling Rin that she smelled just as bad as any human. Sesshoumaru threw a rock at Jaken's head, and for the next hour he had to listen to Jaken mumbling about who could have thrown that rock. Sesshoumaru came across a nest of young snake youkai shortly after that, foolish things that challenged Sesshoumaru's leadership, and as the young snakes have the most poison, and their number was great, they were bothersome to disperse. One bee-lined towards Rin, and as the girl screamed he cleaved it lengthwise in two with his whip. Most of the others he melted slowly with his poisoned claws, the snakes' writhing bodies spurting foul fluids about as they shrieked pitifully. Frightening humans, throwing a rock at Jaken, and gruesomely destroying enemies -- all in all, it had been a wonderful start to a day.

The troubles began when he continued his survey of the border of his lands, with Jaken, Rin, and Ah-Un following behind. Jaken had resumed complaining about how badly humans smelled. Rin was picking every pretty flower she saw, studiously ignoring Jaken. Ah-Un was typically the least of his concerns, not that he would let Jaken or even Rin concern him overmuch, but one of Ah-Un's head's suddenly sneezed, sending out streams of the fiery energy that was the lizard-youkai's defense. If Sesshoumaru hadn't been alerted fractions of a second earlier -- by Ah-Un's rapid whiff of breath before the sneeze -- and used the Tensaiga to shield them all, Rin would have been reduced to ash and memory. Then Ah-Un's other head had sneezed, emitting another potentially-deadly assault. When the two heads sneezed in unison and the effort of using the Tensaiga as a shield actually caused Sesshoumaru to blink involuntarily, he sent the mount away with Jaken, who had sneezed a few times himself and was loudly blaming Rin for giving him some dirty human disease.

Surprisingly, Jaken had almost been right. Sesshoumaru's resistance to such things was unmistakably much higher than that of a speechless two-headed lizard youkai and whatever Jaken was, so when he gave a sneeze of his own, he endeavored to find the source of the problem. It was not exactly Rin, as Jaken had predicted, but a bunch of flowers she gripped in her tiny fist, flowers that she had been carrying since before Ah-Un's first sneeze. Sesshoumaru actually took the effort to scowl at the plant, whose stems were slender and a color similar to that of moss, whose leaves were veined in purple, whose tiny flowers were pink in petal and golden-yellow in the centers, and whose roots, which Rin had pulled from the ground, still clung to clumps of dirt. He made Rin bury the flowers and wash herself and her clothing in a stream to rid herself of the pollen. Rin hadn't yet air- dried, and Sesshoumaru was still sneezing at irregular intervals -- the loss of control was unpleasant -- when the rain started.

The flower pollen had a more serious effect on Sesshoumaru than the annoying sneezes. It had affected his typically impeccable health, making the rain and wind feel unpleasantly cold. It had also made him a little tired, to the point that he began searching for shelter before the moon's rising, assuming the moon came out at all tonight, given the heavy clouds that blanketed the sky in darkness before its time. The most disastrous effect of the flower pollen, though, was its other effect on Sesshoumaru's nasal passages. His sense of smell was so badly hindered that he would not have known that Inuyasha's traveling companions were in the cave he had chosen for shelter had he not heard them speaking.

He had ignored their conversations, which might have been a mistake, as he had had no idea that his half-brother was even in the cave, let alone that he had transformed yet again, until he found himself pinned under him quite effectively. If that embarrassment hadn't been enough, he was forced to recognize the arrival of Inuyasha's human-miko-bitch -- who was apparently from some realm that was without youkai, might have existed outside of time, and had something to do with a well, if the reactions of the youkai exterminator and kitsune kit to his mockery of them was any indication -- when she spoke a degrading word of power and brought the worthless half- breed crashing down upon him with more force and weight than the hanyou should have possessed, effectively knocking the breath out of them both.

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Author's Notes: I NEED SOME HELP!! Actually, all I need is for people to tell me if they want me to finish this story up in the next chapter or so, or leave the next chapter open-ended so that a little adventure can follow (Sesshumaru-rich, but maintaining the focus on Kagome/Inuyasha sexual tension). Let me know in your reviews, please. Take into consideration that I tend to write very slowly... but I've already written a 17 page chapter 10 that expands the story, so don't be mad that this chapter is so short. (And, since I'm sure someone will comment on it, Sesshoumaru isn't calling Kagome a bitch because he doesn't like her, but is using the term neutrally to mean female, as I suspect a dog-demon would).