Five in human terms

…

an Inuyasha fanfiction by mkh2

Disclaimer: Yup. Here I am with another one-shot. Another Inuyasha one-shot. So… is it obvious yet that Inuyasha doesn't belong to me? After all, if I owned Inuyasha, I'd be pretty busy working on it right now and not this. So, just to clarify things, I'll state this just real fast: Inuyasha does not belong to me but instead to Rumiko Takahashi, wonderful person that she art… (No pun intended – Tippy laughed at the art thing and said, "Think you're being punny?" Grr… so she used one of my stupid lines on me. How rude.) Where doth she art? She art in Japan, a-yup yup yup.

I was five, in human terms, anyways. Okay, I was also five in human years. I was five all around.

So, naturally, being five, it hurt when my mother died. It hurt that she died and I suddenly found myself all alone in the world. My father had died before I ever had the chance to get to know him. I was barely old enough to take care of myself when my mother died. My elder brother, for reasons unknown to me at the time, hated my very being, but at least he didn't try to outright kill me, preferring to just not acknowledge my existence.

Which hurt since I was only five.

My mother had only just been given her burial, which, I might add, was quite a lovely procession, considering that, despite her having been mated to an inu-tai-youkai, was still a much beloved daughter of some humans of noble breeding and was thus still highly ranked in the courts… where was I? My mother was only just recently cremated and enshrined in the funeral grounds of her, our, her most noble family, when I was run out of the only home I had known, left to fend for myself. I knew some of the basics at the time, cleaning, basic feeding, how to hide myself away during the new moon, you know, the basics, but I didn't know how to defend myself, how to hunt, how to… socialize. Naturally I had tried in my old home, my mother's home, but I was shunned, though I hadn't known why. All I knew was that when I asked mother why they called me hanyou she had wept silently and held me tightly to her bosom. Mother had a lovely scent.

I had stood near the village silently for a day, wondering what I could have possibly done to warrant my immediate removal from my home, before I turned and left. And ran. And ran and ran and ran. It wasn't until I had left the safe harbor of mother's village that I had found out what youkai were… and what I was.

I was scared, frightened out of my wits. I ran blindly, aimlessly, hiding and sneaking and burrowing and using and doing every thing and trick I could think of to get away from my youkai pursuers and not get maimed, killed, eaten… or worse. To youkai, I was the lowest of the low, filth that was not worthy to wipe the scum from their feet after traipsing through a stagnant, foul bog for a month. I was lower than a ningen; a half-breed, a hanyou, the lowest of the lowest of the low, bred from the joining of youkai and ningen, half-blood, a smear on the youkai and ningen races alike. I was an oddity. I was hanyou, and thus would always be an oddity, a hated outcast.

I longed to become a youkai and never have to live in such horrid fear again.

Months passed. Mother's death still stung though as I never had the chance to properly mourn, living in fear and always on the run tends to put things out of your mind, whether or not you want it to be so. I came across several villages and hoped they would take me in, but none had. Then, as I had said, months had passed, and for a moment I thought I had found a safe haven.

She was an old woman, not much older than Kaede-baba is now, for sure, with a lively twinkle in her eye and a bounce in her step. She had a younger sister who always watched me wearily and always seemed to shuffle sideways in the direction that would bring her the farthest away from me. She never contradicted her sister though, about her decision to let me stay and for that I was grateful.

If only the rest of the villagers were as lenient.

"It's a horrible beast! It's a monster! We must drive it away quickly before the gods strike us down!"

"Don't be so foolish – surely your life will be cursed and your sister's life will be cursed for harboring such a foul demonic wraith!"

But the old woman was firm and set in her ways. She let me stay till she passed on. When she was under the ground for a week the woman's younger sister gave me some rice balls in a piece of cloth and bade me go in her usual crotchety voice, though this time with a pitying look at me – she fell quite easily to the villagers calls but was respectful of her sister enough to wait that amount of time before sending me off.

Ningen were kinder than youkai; this was a strange truth that I learned quickly. I would have thought that youkai would be more kind to me – I had comparable looks and abilities, though it should be obvious that I was in no way a threat to them. Instead humans had a softer heart and were more likely to leave me be – true, perhaps they'd run me away from a village or yell words at me, but I never truly had to fear physical harm from them.

Except for those like miko or houshi or taijiya.

And not even then not usually… The old woman was a miko and I soon learned that if I made myself as unthreatening as possible they might let me pass through in peace and sometimes even spend my human night near their grounds, not that I actually let them know it was my human night… When I would spend my human night at a village, I would wait till I had already turned, and even then most miko or houshi would notice that I was not quite human – one said that it was the eyes that made me a suspicious one.

"He reminds me of a tanuki I once knew…"

"It's evil! We should get rid of it!"

"Not all youkai are evil! There was this one kitsune I played with as a child…"

"And kitsune are horrid, fearful creatures!"

"It is true that kitsune are mischievous, but there is nothing to fear from them so long as you don't break a promise to them…"

That was the sort of babble I'd hear from the villagers when I'd get caught. Usually I was let go without much fuss; sometimes I was given a treat – a rice ball, maybe, often a fish – and bade to go. Then there were times I just had to make a break for it and hope for the best, though, looking back at those frightening moments, I truly had nothing to fear. Humans were afraid of me, at least sometimes they were, but they wouldn't have hurt me. Sometimes I think it was because I reminded them of a harmless, often friendly, type of youkai, but more often I think I reminded them of an even more harmless child they knew.

After all, I was only five, in human terms.

= Owari =

I had written this in early February… heh, took me long enough to post this, didn't it?

-

Youkai: demon, though not necessarily in the Christian sense.

Ningen: human, I used it interchangeably with the English word "human" as I saw fit.

Hanyou: half-breed/half-blood/half-youkai/half-demon; usually, a person born of youkai and human parentage where his/her blood is exactly half-youkai.

Miko: a priestess, Shinto/Buddhist; a young girl who takes care of shrine grounds; a virgin girl.

Houshi: a priest, Shinto/Buddhist; of higher ranking than a bouzo, which, though meaning a priest of a lower ranking than a houshi, could also simply mean a young man.

Taijiya: demon exterminators; a reference to the village of demon exterminators that Sango is from.

Kitsune: fox; often used alone to refer to fox demons in general.

Tanuki: a type of wild dog with raccoon markings found predominately in Japan, usually referred to as "raccoon" or "raccoon-dog"; often used alone to refer to "raccoon" demons in general.

inu-tai-youkai: a reference to Inuyasha's father, a dog demon of high ranking, the previous Lord of the Western Lands; no name has officially been given to him.

-baba: old hag; or, a rude way of saying old granny; should probably use "-ba-chan" in its stead.

I had had the idea for this piece quite some time ago, after watching the episode with the bat-hanyou girl whom Inuyasha helped save – there were some flashbacks to his childhood where he had been chased down by youkai. I recalled in another episode that while he had been snubbed by some humans as a child he had never been hit by them – they all looked to be of noble blood or at least of a high-rank in society; his mother looked to be of high-caliber as well and that is probably why none of those humans raised a hand to him. However, Kikyo didn't try to really hurt him, and supposedly many miko and houshi would take in orphan youkai that were similar to kitsune or tanuki, mischievous, fun-loving tricksters who could be dangerous (especially so in the kitsune case if you willingly broke a promise to them – you'd earn yourself a horrible life-long enemy if you did) but were generally good-natured.

I also often wondered why Inuyasha was as kind to Kaede as he was in the beginning when Yura of the Hair first struck. He had no obvious attachments to her and the "guilt" he had about Kikyo's death probably wasn't strong enough to let him take care of her after he garnered the information he needed to defeat the enemy and retrieve the shards – if he wanted to reside near the village he could have simply said he wasn't able to save her, she bled to death or was caught on more hair or something – instead he went out of his way and took the time to ensure her safety. I figured that he must have at least some small soft-spot for the elderly but I still decided to cut out this one line: "She was one of the reasons that I have a soft spot for the elderly, not that I'd ever make it admit, so I try to hide my affections for them." It came after the line "She was an old woman, not much older than Kaede-baba is now, for sure, with a lively twinkle in her eye and a bounce in her step."