2020 kicked my ass. 2021 put on steel-toed boots and continued kicking. Here's hoping 2022 loses interest in making life difficult.

If you haven't read the previous thirteen chapters as of the end of June 2020, I've done quite a bit of revising. As characterizations and details have changed, I would highly recommend at least skimming them, if not outright rereading them. It's also been…about 4 years since anything new came out for this (ouch).

But it will be finished one day.

Beautiful Moon

A Question of Interest

An inflated sense of curiosity was not enough to prevent their gathering from eventually trying his own patience, and Sesshomaru felt his limit was approaching. He had not intended for this to become something so…civil, nor for particular subjects to have been granted discussion, and even if they had satisfied his errant interest to one degree or another, he was beginning to realize that Mizuki's influence was leading him to consider questions he would not otherwise. Questions about Inuyasha's life, about their father, about the future. Questions regarding Rin, Mizuki, even his brother's companions. Questions he wanted to ignore but was finding the ability to do so increasingly waning the longer he remained here.

That all of these questions were ones he had to have some curiosity over to be influenced at all was a knowledge he was aware of, and that made him that much more annoyed with both himself and the circumstances he found himself in.

Hanging about with Inuyasha and his followers needed to end, he decided, the air too casual and too open to dissuade his curiosity. Even with the circumstances as they were, he and Inuyasha had never been long for each other's company. Unbidden, he found he shared the sentiment expressed by the young priestess shortly before her departure.

He had meant only to observe the well, but between his conversation with Mizuki following its abrupt demonstration, his impromptu contest with the hanyou, and the discussion that occurred after the demon slayer, monk, and kitsune joined, he found himself unintentionally rooted. Upon the woman's return, it simply seemed imprudent to leave when he could hear the information first-hand.

What he gathered from it was little; a name he already knew, a confirmation of an assortment of powers with no precise explanation as to how they were utilized, and the existence of a battle, either in the future or already having passed. Otherwise, he knew only that Mizuki's willpower affected his curiosity (and more, perhaps, another question he could not answer no matter how his curiosity fixated on it). Why or how, these scrolls would not tell him, which meant it was time to move on.

He had no intention of granting them the explanation their gazes now demanded of him following his declaration, but Mizuki was not so inclined to silence with the topic about herself, and stepped in when the stillness that followed his statement devolved into several surprised questions and one loud protest.

"If you think she's-"

"I asked him," she said quickly, and the hanyou's jaw snapped shut, gaze darting back to her. "You don't want me to come with you guys because you don't think it's safe, and I don't want to stay here because I can't just sit around doing nothing, so I asked him."

Inuyasha turned sharply back to him. "And you're just helping her?" he asked, incredulous.

"It's quid pro quo," Mizuki continued, and Inuyasha's attention bounced back to her once again, along with the questioning gazes of all present, the words she used warping familiar syllables into something foreign. After a moment, she caught on to their collective confusion. "Right, sorry; it basically means a favor for a favor. Sesshomaru's not just helping. It's an exchange of services. Our interests align for now."

"But he's-"

"An option," she interrupted firmly. She hesitated a moment, and then straightened up, apparently finding the confidence she required. "A good option," she continued. "Naraku is less interested in him than you, too, which means there's less of a chance that I'll get dragged into the conflict surrounding him. I get that the two of you don't have a good relationship, and I appreciate your concern for my safety, but you're worrying about the wrong thing here. You don't have to protect me from your brother."

There was a pointed look shared between some of Inuyasha's companions at that while the hanyou himself crossed his arms and looked away with a sudden flush of embarrassment that he had probably hoped to conceal, grumbling out a retort to the contrary. His brother's apparent overprotectiveness was not limited to the priestess, and it seemed to be obvious to his companions as well.

"But what of the others?" he thought, returning to the question of the extent of her influence before he forced it away, unable to answer it with the knowledge he had and unwilling to entertain what it would require to gain it.

"We talked it over last night," the priestess revealed, earning herself some raised eyebrows among the group. "Mizuki's thought this through, and I think as long as Sesshomaru is willing, it's a good idea. Obviously, if that changes, she can join up with us and we'll continue together."

"He also agreed to bring me back here if he changes his mind," Mizuki was quick to add, "so you don't need to worry about that, either." His brother's companions' attention shifted to him once more at that, but he remained disinclined to engage them.

The monk was the first to give up attempting to glean answers from his silence. "With two separate groups, we can cover more ground searching for information," he noted with a thoughtful look. "This may be more advantageous than simply avoiding the potential dangers Naraku could pose to you."

"Different networks of information," the demon slayer said with a nod. "If we find something out, though, how should we get the information to them? Myoga, perhaps?"

"Good luck getting him to go anywhere near Sesshomaru," Inuyasha scoffed dismissively.

"I can persuade Hachi to deliver information, though I think we should also consider leaving any news with Lady Kaede as well. That way, if anything goes awry, there will be two other ways to obtain the information, three if you count the original source, and multiple ways to receive it," the monk suggested before turning to him. "I have no doubt as to your ability to track us down, but if you find it out of your way to do so, this will give you a second option beyond relying on Hachi. If you'd like something with his scent so that you know who to expect, I have a couple of his belongings."

The man's tactical considerations were unexpectedly competent, leaving Sesshomaru to wonder how he had picked up such skills before forcefully ignoring that question, too.

Whatever the origins of the monk's expertise, introducing his contact's scent was a thoughtful consideration, though he suspected it was more to help avoid this Hachi being cut down for a careless approach than for his particular benefit. He had not had any intention of relying on Inuyasha's companions for anything relating to this beyond the information the one from the future could obtain, and frankly wanted to avoid it entirely at this point, given the state of Mizuki's influence, but he forced himself to take a moment to weigh the potential benefits of this proposal and found no sensible reason to object. If it could help discover the cause of Mizuki's influence, so be it. Eventually, Sesshomaru nodded to the monk who returned the gesture.

Mizuki, having paid attention to the exchange, tapped her writing implement against her tome in thought. "That covers communicating between groups," she concluded, "but what about information resources? Would Myoga or Hachi know anything?"

"I'd put my money on Myoga," the demon slayer replied. "He's been a surprisingly reliable source of information in the past."

"But he's not someone we can talk to since he and Sesshomaru don't get along?"

"He's scared of him," the fox, who had seated himself beside Rin at some point, replied in a tone that suggested he found that amusing. He shrank away from his gaze all the same when their eyes met, causing Rin to smile at the child reassuringly while Inuyasha flatly pointed out that the kit demonstrated a similar fear.

"Myoga can be a little difficult to track down given he's a flea, but he will talk to us," the priestess clarified. "We can focus on finding out if he knows anything."

Mizuki narrowed her eyes in confusion before lifting her hand to show a small space between her thumb and forefinger, apparently trying to gauge the size of his father's old retainer. She received a nod in return that had her sighing in exasperation.

"I'm just going to start assuming there's a demon version of everything," she muttered, yet again scratching notes onto her paper tome. That both women from the future were literate had not necessarily surprised him, but he found Mizuki's penchant for recording information somewhat baffling, the frequency bordering on unnecessary. He wondered what brought on the habit, then forced the question away. "So, you all are on Myoga the flea demon lookout. Where does that leave us?" she asked, looking up at him.

Totosai, he supposed, though he doubted the bladesmith would be of help for something unrelated to his work. The two kept up with each other from his understanding, so the chance that he shared knowledge with the old flea was there. He had done little to keep up with most of his father's contacts, but there were a few others he might be able to track down. Whether they would have any information or be willing to offer it was another matter.

"Have you got an idea, Jaken?"

Mizuki had apparently sought out another to answer her question when he provided no open response. When he next looked, her gaze was instead trained on Jaken, who blinked up at her in surprise before scoffing to cover up what was likely some pleasure at being asked. "I'm not Lord Sesshomaru's loyal retainer for nothing! Of course, I have ideas!" He turned to him then, and the fire in his tone immediately extinguished, a habit of his he found surfacing more frequently. Mizuki's influence, perhaps? "I-if you'll hear them, Lord Sesshomaru."

If it was her influence, it was yet another manifestation of its effects. Him curious, Inuyasha protective, Jaken servile…

He could not see the common thread, if there was one at all. He still needed to know more.

"Go on."

Encouraged, Jaken spoke quickly. "Bokusenou seemed knowledgeable enough. Given his age and the reach of his roots, perhaps he has heard something of this stone?"

"Bokusenou?" several voices asked.

"That's the name of the tree demon we met, right, Lord Sesshomaru?" Rin answered, looking to him for an affirmation. He said nothing, which was enough of one for her. "He did seem very wise," she continued with a firm nod. "Good thinking, Master Jaken!"

He was skeptical of the magnolia's knowledge concerning a human artifact, but he nodded to both the child and the preening imp, nonetheless. If nothing else, the tree knew of other contacts they could seek out. A direction would have them leaving sooner as well.

"Great," Mizuki said with a nod after a moment. "We both have goals then."

After adding the information to her notes, she folded her tome so that its cover was back in place, and the others gathered the scrolls for the priestess to pack away.

Upon opening her own bag, the priestess exclaimed, "Oh, I almost forgot! I brought some of the clothes we talked about for you to try on before I head back. My mom is gathering the other stuff while I'm here, but she wanted to make sure the clothes would fit," she said, pulling out a smaller bag and offering it to Mizuki.

"Good thinking," she said with a small bow as she accepted the package.

"If you'd like, we can go back to the village for you to try them on."

Mizuki shook her head. "It's a bit of a walk, and I don't want to take up too much more of your time. I'm sure Sesshomaru would like to get going sooner rather than later, too," she added, and they exchanged a look. He was unsure whether she was picking up on his irritation or if she was simply considering his relationship with Inuyasha and just how long they had been in each other's presence.

"Kirara can take you there and back quickly," the demon slayer chimed in. Before the confusion that crossed Mizuki's features could fully settle, the small cat transformed with a burst of flame to reveal a larger form, causing her to yelp and stumble back and somewhat behind him (to hide, he realized, and could not decide whether he was amused or disappointed). The cat, concerned by the reaction, gave a calming chuff he was sure Mizuki failed to interpret, though she did seem to recover quickly enough.

The slayer apologized. "I'm so sorry, Mizuki! I should have thought to explain her second form first. I didn't mean for her to scare you."

Mizuki waved her off, a nervous laugh escaping her. "No, no, it's fine. More things to get used to, that's all." She looked at the cat after a moment. "Sorry I reacted that way. I know you didn't mean it. I appreciate the offer, but I'm just going to go ahead and hide behind some trees."

With that, the cat changed back and replied with a mew, and the priestess offered to go with her while the other woman remained behind, apparently to prevent anyone from wandering near. Once they were out of sight, Inuyasha crossed his arms over his chest and said, "Sheesh, if she thinks Kirara's scary, I got some news for her about you."

The others present of his group had never witnessed his true form, and he found himself once again pinned by their questioning gazes.

"Think you should tell her?"

"There's no need."

The silence that followed did not last long. The one who broke it, however, was not Inuyasha or the monk, but the demon slayer, who leveled him with a look that told him she had her reservations about the arrangement.

"Mizuki trusts you," she said, sparing a glance at Rin who was attentive to the exchange, "and Kagome obviously thinks this is a good idea, but I hope you'll understand that it doesn't make us not suspicious of your intentions. She says your interests align, and we understand that your interest is in the stone, but we don't understand why. What is your interest in it?"

His interest lie in why he could not escape the influence of the stone's presence, what made it so powerful, and why Mizuki seemed capable of influencing things in a similar way, but to admit that would be to admit that he was not strong enough to overcome it. The longer he lingered here, the more he questioned just how much worth there was in simply knowing he was being influenced when he still had to be subjected to it. He almost envied Inuyasha's ignorance of her apparent power over him.

He questioned whether he was truly curious enough to be bothered by the influence, or if he was influenced into being curious enough.

He tired of questions, his own and those of others, unbidden and unwanted and unwilling to leave him be while Mizuki lingered near enough to affect him. He tired more of lacking answers, and that was the primary reason keeping him from simply leaving all of this behind.

"Curiosity," he answered. "Nothing more."

/-/-/-/-/

It was approaching midday by the time Mizuki was finally prepared to set off, having had to sort through the materials provided from the future by the mother of the priestess, who was apparently overeager in her approach to helping. Her original pack could not accommodate everything. A second one was provided, and strapped to the back of the dragon's saddle upon Rin's insistence that the creature would not mind, and then Rin was gifted a bag of dried rice cakes for her troubles while Mizuki informed her that she would share the other food she was provided with whenever possible. Jaken, sulking from initially being excluded in that promise, failed in his attempt to hide his brightened expression once assured he could partake in the provisions as well. Sesshomaru ignored the look Mizuki trained on him immediately after that in the same way he avoided acknowledging his own curiosity regarding all of it, and she stopped short of guaranteeing shares for him.

"We'll be in touch," the priestess promised once everything was sorted.

"I appreciate all of your help with this, Kagome," Mizuki replied with a bow. "Give your mom my thanks, too. I'll repay her somehow for all of this."

Kagome waved a hand while smiling dismissively. "Don't worry about it. She really was happy to help. Honest."

Whether the reassurance was enough to convince Mizuki that she was free of the debt she perceived or not, he could not tell. She nodded anyway.

"Goodbye, everyone!" Rin called out from Ah-Un's saddle where she and Jaken were already prepared to leave, to which the priestess replied unnecessarily, "Take good care of Mizuki. We're counting on you!" As eager to help as she had been upon their initial meeting, Rin responded enthusiastically, though he had a suspicion that the words were meant for him.

Sesshomaru did not bother with a valediction, and upon realizing that he was walking away, Mizuki hastened her farewells to follow.

"Rin said that Bokusenou is a tree demon. Can I assume he's easy to locate?" she asked once she caught up to his side. When he did not answer with the obvious, she asked instead, "How long do you expect it'll take us to reach him?"

"A day," he replied flatly as they exited the forest. The village was laid out in the distance, the span of rice fields separating it from the dense line of trees. He diverted his gaze, defying the twitch of curiosity.

"Oh, that's not bad at all." Her tone indicated that she was pleasantly surprised by the timeframe. "I expected we'd be walking much longer than that."

"Stupid girl!" Jaken cut in, causing her to turn back with a sharp look. "We'll be flying, of course! If we walked the whole way, it'd take a week with you humans!"

She stumbled suddenly, the prospect apparently surprising her.

"I'm sorry; we're flying?"

They did. Not for as long as he had initially intended, as Mizuki's former life had indulged her with food whenever she wanted for it, and while her appetite had apparently left her while she adjusted to the experience of flying on the back of a creature (not the first she had flown, he overheard her explain as she tried to describe what an airplane was to his wards), it did eventually rear its head in the form of growling complaints and sheepish apologies.

On the ground, Rin asked him if he was bothered by something. Jaken reprimanded her while casting him a questioning glance at the same time, revealing his own concerns. "Nothing important," he told them, because it was not, much as his errant curiosity insisted otherwise, anything important. He did not realize its absence until the sound of items shifting around as Mizuki searched for the food she desired resumed in the silence following Rin's accepting hum.

They stopped long enough for the humans to eat and relieve themselves, and then took to the sky again. He listened as they conversed, Rin about places they had been and others they had met, Jaken interrupting to correct or embellish a story. At one point, the two took to arguing over the correct designation of a particular fish they had once failed to catch, and who was responsible for its escape. It was a distraction from the interests his thoughts kept veering toward, until Mizuki told them about the different foods of her time and the familiar stories were replaced by new, unknown, and altogether strange tales. She spoke of foreign lands that further invited the curiosity he wished to banish and indulged Rin with demonstrations of the various languages she knew when asked about the words she used earlier (most limited to a sampling of words or phrases, which Rin was happy enough with and he was not nearly satisfied enough by). He pushed them faster when he found himself wondering what Inuyasha may have learned of English through Kagome, cutting the thought off abruptly.

Despite attempting to reign in the outward signs of his irritation, hours being bothered both by questions he did not want to entertain and the knowledge that he was curious enough to be influenced into entertaining them apparently distracted him enough from maintaining the illusion, and he could feel Mizuki's concerned gaze on him throughout the day. She chose to avoid asking about it, but also refrained from directing any conversation toward him as a result, leaving an air of unease about her that made it clear to him that he would have to escape her influence for a while. He resolved to go off on his own before they reached Bokusenou, lest the magnolia decide to speak freely of what it would likely be able to observe of him. Whether he explained his behavior to her or not upon his return, he would decide when his head was clear of the questions that plagued him.

He scoffed to himself. One human woman and a rock was responsible for this. One human woman, a rock, and himself, lacking the strength required to escape its influence entirely.

He realized belatedly that the sun was beginning to set when Rin called up to him, "Lord Sesshomaru, Miss Mizuki's legs are very sore from riding all day," to which Mizuki sputtered, as she had meant to share that information privately with her and had yet to discover the limit of his hearing. "The sun is also getting low. I want to be able to find food before it's too hard to see."

In his effort to ignore his wandering thoughts and move closer to the end of this journey, he had neglected to keep the needs of the humans in his company in mind, it seemed. Rin was apparently just as aware that something more than nothing important was on his mind, as she would normally not have waited so long to announce her need to forage, and that further encouraged him to create some distance once they had located a suitable camping site.

The scent of sulfur hung in the air, and he recalled something else Mizuki had discussed with Rin – her desire for a warm bath – and descended toward it. The spring revealed below the canopies was humble, small and shallow, but sufficient enough. Ah-Un followed shortly after, and Rin excitedly pointed out the spring to Mizuki before directing thanks to him for finding it.

After determining the area to be free of dangers, he turned to Jaken and said, "Stay with them," before walking away.

"A-are you leaving, my lord?" the imp stammered, apparently caught off guard.

"Will you be gone long, Lord Sesshomaru?" Rin quickly followed up, already with several sticks in hand in preparation for building a fire, a worried look tugging the corners of her mouth downward.

After a moment, he replied, "Not long."

As she often did, she accepted his answer with a nod and an affirmative, though she did not immediately return to her task. Instead, she looked over to Mizuki, whose efforts to work out the soreness of her muscles had stopped upon the exchange, and who he now found staring at him.

She had something she wanted to say to him, but she could not come up with the words quickly enough for his remaining thread of patience, and he did not care enough that she may be negatively impacted by being unable to say them. He could address such things when he returned.

Sesshomaru turned and walked away, leaving her influence behind him.

Nearly four years after the last new chapter (and the help of a snowstorm), there is finally a new one. I really am sorry this took me so long to get through. The last couple of years have been rough for multiple reasons, and my desire to write anything just kind of vanished.

Sesshomaru in this story has so far been coming across as kinder than his canon counterpart, though not unintentionally, so this chapter might feel a little like it came out of left field about four years late. I struggled with feeling like I was writing filler the first several times I tried to get this down, but realizing the kind of situation I had put him in with the last couple of chapters and that I wanted to dedicate this one to being fully from his perspective prompted tugging on the irritation that cropped up after the stone-throwing and having to be in the presence of people he'd rather not hang around with on any given day.

Mizuki and/or her pendant influences something about him that can contradict his outward feelings and general disposition, and I want to make sure you all get to see the conflict he has with that.

Next chapter will finally get us into Act 2 of this whole thing, which I've basically marked starting at them meeting Bokusenou.

I cross-post on AO3 now, in case you happen to frequent there. For the most part, everything posted there will also be posted here, though there are a couple of future projects that lend much better to the formatting I can mess with on AO3 than here, but those are quite far away for me right now.