Welcome back all!

Check out my other stories if you're interested in reading more InuYasha fics. I have a Bankosu fic Perfidious, a Koga fic Into The Jaws Of The Wolf and an InuYasha fic Chase The Rain. I try and post on at least three of them every week. Check those out if you're needing an InuYasha fix

Now, onwards we go!

Miasma

Here the power is ruthless and the truth is deaf. Here the air is filled with the miasma of sin. Sinning with him is a pleasure I hadn't known I needed
-Jean Racine

I smiled into the bowl of rice I had up by my lips.

For the past few minutes, Kagewaki had been plucking at stray hairs on his lavender kosode. It wasn't uncommon for him to be doing it. We both spent a lot of time trying to clean each other up after his hair had shed all over us. His sheer amount of wild curls never seemed to diminish, though. It was a wonder he had hair as thick and long as it was with the amount of breakage he dealt with.

"Eat," I urged. "We can try and get rid of all that hair later."

Still, it was getting less. In the first weeks here, I could create a whole new Kagewaki out of the hair he shed daily. That was basically how I had diagnosed him - that brittle hair amongst all his other issues. Now, while he was still shedding, it wasn't nearly as bad.

The diet I had him on wasn't working miracles, but it was helping. Slowly.

I wished I could fix him. I wished I had the access to good medications that I wanted.

Why couldn't we have met in a more normal way? Why couldn't he have bumped into me at the train station, or at a bar? Would he even be in a place I was in my time? He was a Warlord's son here. What would he be back home? The son of a business tycoon? Some bigshot. There was no way I would have met him back home.

It was the most incredible luck at all that we met at all, here in this strange, strange world.

He looked up from the rice in his bowl and I couldn't help but to smile at him. His smile was more muted, but no less happy.

Smiling at my husband over breakfast, and really meaning the happiness - I never thought I would have this. I had been a bit of a late bloomer. My career - my doctorate - was what I had been focused on for as long as I could remember. Then when I'd been dubbed a doctor, I had to play catch up with my social life. I had few friends, hardly any dates. I had to try and push through that had do all those teen experiences in my twenties. Dating was the hardest. It wasn't something that ever went well for me.

Even with a husband now, that track record still was terrible. Kagewaki and I hadn't met and fallen in love and had to do the awkward talking to my parents about marriage thing.

It was different here.

I didn't know whether I liked that more or less. There was none of the awkward second-guessing and wondering here. We had been married and that was that. I didn't even have to worry about having to give up my job as a doctor here. Doctors like I was didn't exist here.

Here I was a warlord's wife, a Lady, who would aid my husband and keep him healthy.

This wasn't the life I imagined for myself.

Should something befall your dear Lord husband, it wouldn't be such a difficult feat to convince the castle workers that he was alive and well.

I set my rice bowl down to hide the shaking in my fingers.

"Kagewaki." I had to tell him. This was dangerous for him. I didn't know what Naraku was actually capable of. Something incredible if he was a demon, if he had so many of the sacred jewel shards. Kagewaki didn't deserve to become a victim of him. Kagewaki was a sick young man caught in a big position in a violent world. He was lost, but he didn't deserve threats like that against him.

But when I looked back up at his curious brown eyes, I froze.

How could I tell him? What could I say?

"What is it, Nori?" he prompted.

"Uh, nothing," I brushed off, giving him a strained smile. I wiped my sweaty palms on my kosode and rose to my feet. "You have a meeting with the general soon. I'll come and find you for lunch."

The koto strings cried under my fingers.

Knocking on Heaven's Door wasn't an easy song for me to play at the best of times, but as my fingers stumbled over the strings, I felt the cathartic release of playing. This always hit me better than throwing around a sword. There was just something about making music. I'd thought it before and would again.

I hummed along with the song, plucking away at those strings. I could feel the stress lifting from my tense shoulders.

"Knock knock knocking on heaven's door," I sang quietly to myself, wincing when the sound came out of my mouth.

Yeah, that wasn't my vocation.

Everyone in my family was musically gifted. All four of us kids did something. Tomo and I had learned the koto together, but neither of us were particularly great singers. We were... passable. Karaoke wasn't a painful experience, but it wasn't something we frequented, even drunk. Botan was slightly better prepared for singing than we twins were, and he had taken on our love for stringed instruments with the guitar. Not as traditional, but he was good. Ayumi had foregone instruments, but had a voice that could make a man weep, and an ear for music.

Playing music when we all got back together always ended up in Ayumi directed a whole mini-concert.

My fingers paused on the strings.

I missed it. I missed her - them. I missed my entire family.

It wasn't often I let myself slow down enough to think about them. I wanted to keep from falling into that mess of emotion and pitying myself for not being able to see them. I wasn't a pity party person. I never would be.

But what I wouldn't give to hear my sister's voice, or feel Tomo's arms around me.

I plucked at the strings again, trying to get lost in the song.

My next interruption wasn't from my own mind this time around. The door to the music room slid open. I looked up without stopping, expecting to see Naraku's white-furred self. Naraku wasn't the one that came to join me, though.

Sango stood unsurely at the door, peering in.

"Take a seat," I offered, nodding to the pile of cushions on the floor on the other side of my instrument.

She hesitated before she made her way through the room. "You play beautifully," she complimented quietly as she knelt on a cushion. She was moving gingerly, but moving around was a good thing.

Talking was a good sign, too. It had been two days since her surgery, and she had little in the way of words to say to me in those two days. I'd barely got more than a few words per conversation out of her. She was a stubborn girl, focused on avenging her family, and probably sulking a little from my denials. She wanted to get away and find this InuYasha, and I was stopping that.

"Thank you. How are your wounds?"

She turned her head away. "Fine."

So not fine at all then. I knew how to speak teenager. Two teenage siblings helped with that.

I let it go this time though, focusing on the strings my fingers plucked at. The music was a nice distraction. I wished I could have every difficult conversation over a koto. It would make things just that little bit less stressful if I could. That was a little bit of a dream, though.

"I have not heard music like that before."

I smiled at her. "That's not the first time someone's said that. It's something from my home."

"How is it you are a surgeon and do this as well?" she asked.

"I'm a swordsman, too," I tacked on, running through the chorus of Knocking on Heaven's Door again. "Being a physician is hard work. Especially when you put so much of yourself into it. To be an accomplished surgeon at twenty-eight is... It's not easy. So I needed a stress reliever - the sword fighting. Then I needed a stress reliever for my stress my reliever. My brother taught me, when the sword fighting got too much, back when I was young."

She nodded slowly, eyes on the strings. "You have a brother?"

"Two. And a sister. Well... had." Was I ever going to see any of them again? No... Not likely, no.

Her eyes shot up to my face.

"I had to leave them, and my home." Not quite right, but it was as close as I could get to my situation without freaking her out with time-traveling and weird magic. I hadn't exactly left my home and come here out of my choice. "I won't get to see them again."

Sango stared down at her knees, hands fisted atop them tightly. "I see. I am sorry... for your loss," she added after a breath.

I nodded slowly, plucking at the strings. "Have you visited the gardens yet?"

She shook her head, still looking down.

"Would you like to?" I asked gently, my hand stilling on the strings. The last note rang in the air for a few seconds, before I pressed my palms down on the strings to halt the vibrations. "I can go with you."

Ignoring the fact that her family was buried just outside the room she was staying in - the room right beside Kagewaki's - wasn't healthy. I understood not going out to visit them. It had been weeks before I had plucked up the confidence to sit at my father's shrine after his death. I just hadn't been able to face it alone, and couldn't reach out to family that was already hurting.

I didn't have to let someone else going through that do it alone now, though.

She shook her head again slowly. "I-I can't."

"Alright." You couldn't rush healing in any aspect. "Alright."

I bit my lower lip, tapping the picks on my fingers together. "It gets easier."

"What?" Her brown eyes turned back up to me.

"The hurt, the pain. It gets easier. Not... Not right away, not even after a year or two." I let out a shaky breath, shucking the picks on my fingers and setting them down on the decorated edge of the koto. "Losing your family is hard. Somehow it's worse when it's from something you had no chance of controlling. I was your age when my dad died, and I was so angry at the world. I wanted the whole world to just... just fuck off, let me disappear, or fight everything. I didn't care which as long as I could escape the pain."

Her shoulders straightened up a little as she watched me, her face drawn, eyes wary.

"I got into fights. Well, more than during sword fighting practice. I did stupid dangerous things that I regretted for a long time. I moved across the city, stopped talking to my family and friends. Did anything I wanted to, without thinking about any of it."

She was quiet for a long moment. "Why are you telling me this?"

A solid question. If I'd had an adult talk to me back then about the situation, I'd probably have been asking the same question, probably a lot less politely, too. "You don't have to make my mistakes, Sango. I did a lot of shit trying to run from my grief that I'm so glad I never got caught for." I couldn't imagine how different my life would have turned out if I'd gotten caught. There was no way I would have been accepted into Todai. "I didn't have anyone to help me, and I spent years hurting and lashing out and hiding. I know what it's like to go down a dark path after grief. You're not alone here. If you feel lost, or hurt, or overwhelmed, you can find me, or Kagewaki, or Naraku."

She winced at the last name that was volunteered.

"Don't like Naraku?" I asked with a little smirk.

"It is not that I do not like him," she denied, holding a hand up in a placating gesture. "He is just... unsettling."

Unsettling. I could see that. "It's the fashion, isn't it? Not a lot of people can pull off a dead animal as a fashion statement. It's just... kind of creepy, right? The man's a strange one." Was he strange for a demon? Who knows. But he was absolutely strange for a human.

She absolutely didn't mean to giggle, and that was clear in the way that she tried to cover up with a hand across her mouth. I was glad she had it in herself to giggle, though. The dark atmosphere in the room wasn't helping her. This was miles better.

"He is the Lord's vassal. We should not be talking about him like this," she said, trying to reign us both in.

I wasn't having any of that, though. "I don't think we'll hurt his feelings. I know Naraku well. He knows I prefer that cloak off him better than on."

Sango's cheeks immediately filled with colour.

"Teenagers," I tutted. "Anything can be misconstrued nowadays."

Her apparently somewhat dirty mind was right on the money, though. Perhaps I needed to think about what I say about Naraku before I say it. I definitely didn't want to have to try and explain something even somewhat innuendo-like to Kagewaki if I slipped.

"No! I wouldn't dare insinuate-"

"Chill out, sweetheart. I won't be happy if you pop a stitch." I rose to my feet and stepped around the large instrument between us, then held a hand out to her. "My stomach says it's about time for lunch. Let's go see if we can convince Kagewaki to take lunch outside by the pond. It's a lovely day. Let's not waste it. What do you say?"

"I would enjoy a view of the lake," she replied, placing her hand in mine.

I helped her stand, smiling as we began towards the door. "Great. Perhaps Kagewaki can tell you about the great war that was waged there in the pond while we eat. He can be quite a good storyteller when he wants to be. It's the noble upbringing. He can spin a story with the best of them."

"A war?"

The two of us ambled down the hallway slowly. "Oh yeah. A great war. Kgewaki tells it better than I do so let's get going." I licked my lips slowly. "Sango, just remember what I said. If you're lost, you can find Kagewaki or I. We'll help you."

She nodded, eyes dropping to the floor again.

The poor kid was so hurt. "Alright, let's go get this food before I starve."

Information Time

Shrine - Cremation is a common practice for the dead in Japan. In many homes is a thing called a butsudan, a shrine used to pay respects for Buddha or for the dead in Japanese homes and temples

This chapter was another difficult one for me to write. I think I might be hitting a bit of a wall with this story. I have a few little things planned, but I don't have a lot of solid story and direction that I do with ITJOTW and CTR. I'm floundering a little and I think it's showing with the way I write this story right now. I don't want to give up - someone needs to give Naraku the twisted love he deserves via fanfic - but I'm struggling here. I don't know whether to try and push through, or to swap Thursday's posting spots with Perfidious while I try and figure out what I really want to do with this story.

What are your opinions on it? You guys are the readers, and I wanna do what you guys want. I know a lot of my readers overlap reading with most of my fics. If you're more interested in Naraku than Bankotsu, I'm happy to put some extra time into working on the direction for this story and keep writing this weekly, but if you want me to take my time and be thorough, moving the Bankotsu story, the one I have a more solid direction on, to the weekly slot can be done, too

Now the important talking is done, let's talk about this chapter. Most importantly, how much I love how Nori is with Sango. I just love Sango as a character and Nori got that from me