Disclaimer: Yada yada yada. Don't own it, never have, never will, don't intend to.

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It was raining. It fell quickly in hard droplets, crashing towards earth like miniature meteorites, making water fly up as they hit the puddles in the dents of the sidewalk. 'How odd,' Kurama thought, listening intently to the sound of the rain and the occasional car that flew by. 'That one single raindrop makes so little difference. It creates only a pinpoint of dampness and barely a sound as it hits the earth. And yet, as these thousands and thousands of raindrops hit, they sound like a collapsing house, and all their tiny pinpoints of wet completely cover the entire world.'

The fox was walking home from Koranu's house after another grueling session of training. The rain felt nice on his sweaty body and he took off his brown sweater to enjoy the most of the cool weather. As he walked, some of the other pedestrians stared at his thin blue t-shirt and shorts, and huddled their jackets closer around them, pulling their umbrella's tighter over the tops of their heads. It was as though the very sight of Kurama getting skin soaked made them cold, regardless of the fact that the demon himself was boiling hot.

Suddenly, from behind a water-filled trashcan, Kurama heard a soft noise, barely heard over the thundering rain. Stopping to look out of pure curiosity, what the fox saw nearly broke his small heart.

There, lying behind the top of the trashcan, lay a small puppy, brown and mud-streaked from the pouring rain. As the puppy noticed him, it whimpered pitifully, trying to scrunch itself deeper into the corner of the fence and trash. The demon/human knelt down, trying to make himself smaller and less menacing so as to not scare the puppy any more then it already was.

Reaching out, Kurama picked up the small lab, and felt its tiny body quiver in the rain. 'It needs to get inside,' he thought desperately. 'He's freezing.'

Taking his sweater from around his waist, he tucked the puppy inside, bowling it up into a tiny ball and rubbing it with the sweater sleeves. "Come on," he whispered to it softly as a tiny nose stuck itself out from inside. "I'll take you home with me."

Kurama stood up as smoothly as he could so as to not jumble his tiny package and set off towards his house at a quicker pace then before. When he reached his rain soaked door, he pushed it open with one arm, carefully balancing the sweater rapped puppy in his left hand.

His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, drink a steaming cup of hot tea and reading thick book. She looked up as the door opened and a gust of wind pushed its way inside. "Oh, Shuichi!" she said, smiling at the boy. "Would you like some tea, love?"

Then, she noticed the wet sweater ball in his hands move slightly. "What's that you've got there?" she asked, frowning in curiosity.

"A puppy," he told her, unwrapping the sweater enough for the chocolate labs head to poke out from the top. His mother smiled in joy as he carefully handed her the bundle for him to take off his mud-stained shoes. "I found him huddled by a trashcan a couple blocks down. I thought I'd take care of him at least until the rain stops."

"He certainly is a cute thing," she said, handing him back to her son. "You're welcome to keep him as long as you need to."

Kurama smiled fondly at his mother, clutching the puppy close. "Thank you, Mother," he said, skipping up the stairs by twos.

"You need a bath," he told the pup, wrinkling his nose in distaste at the putrid odor. He went into the bath room and, carefully unwrapping the puppy from the dirty sweater, set him carefully in the bath. Then, he turned on the tap water to warm and let it run on top of the mud-soaked puppy.

When at last the water was a couple inches high, he turned off the tab. He rubbed the small lab's fur between his fingers, scratching underneath in an effort to get all the grime out. The pup whimpered a few times, but for the most part let Kurama wash him without too much fuss.

But the little dog wouldn't stop shaking. Even after the water was nearly scalding hot, he just sat there, shaking like a earthquake and whimpering pitifully. The demon frowned, leaning closer towards the little puppy. 'He should be fine by now,' he thought worriedly. 'What's wrong with him?'

At last the pup was clean enough to suit Kurama's taste, he drained the water and scooped the shivering lab into a dry beach towel. He walked to his room and pushed the door open, holding the puppy and rubbing it dry with one corner of the wash blanket.

Sitting on the small, shaking bundle on his bed, Kurama scrounged around in the back of his closet. When at last he found what he was looking for, he pulled out a small shoe box and a soft, fluffy blanket. Making a little basket out of the materials, he picked up the now dry, but still shaking, pup. Pressing a crater into the blanket inside the box, he laid the small dog inside and rapped the corners up around it.

Then he set it down by his bed, next to his head. After throwing the damp and dirty towel into the wash, he pulled back his covers and lay down in bed, looking down on the puppy. It looked up at him once, its small eyes watching him sadly. Then it tucked its head down into the corner and Kurama watched as its breathing evened out as if fell asleep.

The fox sighed, curled up in a ball, his head still facing the tiny dog, and let himself fallow the pup into dreamland.

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Kurama woke up with a start. Something was wrong. He felt it like an illness in his gut and it hurt him deep inside. He rolled over and turned on the lamp, as the luminescent light made him blink his eyes.

Letting his feet drop to the ground, his right foot hit something with a start. His head jerked down in surprise, but quickly relaxed as he realized it was just the puppy's box.

Then he noticed something. The blanket wasn't moving at all, not from the puppy's shifting limbs or the slight breathing as it slept. He knelt down and peeled back the blanket.

What he found made his heart drop in heaviness. The small puppy he had worked so hard to take care of and had grown so attached to was dead. He wasn't sure exactly what killed it, but it wasn't breathing in the slightest. The animal was certainly dead, and Kurama could do not but feel responsible. 'What did I do wrong?' he wondered heavy-hearted. 'If I had done more, would the puppy have lived? Am I to blame?' But he knew, somewhere in the depths of his soul, that he couldn't have done anymore then he had. It was the puppy's time to go, and no one knew death like Kurama did. He closed his eyes and gave the soul a tiny prayer, wishing it luck on its journey to spirit world.

The next day he buried the puppy's corpse in the box it had slept in. He dug the hole exactly three feet deep so that no animals could get it, and carefully padded the top dirt when he had finished.

And from that time on, if anyone ever walked by that ground, they would have seen one single red rose on the gave, a new one replacing it each day, like the new beginnings happening all around them.

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---- Dedicated to my dog, Otis, who will be put to sleep tomorrow because of cancer. I love you very much.