A/N: So I really highly recommend that you first go and watch the Second Movie : Castle Beyond The Looking Glass to refresh your memory, as this is literally based entirely on displaying the things we Didn't See going on in that movie. This was inspired by a sensation that CBLG was a chopped movie, after getting a nostalgic urge and reviewing it again. There was a blip, a Tiny Little Blip of Sesshoumaru in the opening scenes just looking over his shoulder sensing Naraku's "death" and then...nothing! He actually shows longer in the credits reel than in the movie. So I thought to myself...there's something Missing. Why else would his involvement be implied, after all, if he truly had nothing to do with the whole thing? I felt like the parts with him in it might have been chopped out for the sake of runtime...or just because we weren't supposed to know all of his mysterious secrets :))
Now remember, at this point he's still only got one arm but has acquired Toukijin, and still has a major stuck up attitude-well, did that ever actually go away? LOL.
Anyways, the suggested watch order of the series places the second movie roughly in the early middle of the third season approximately right after episode 95, which was the conclusion of the two-episode feature with the bull half-demon that tried to make fake jewels and wanted to die as a human...remember that? That means it's directly BEFORE anything that happened through the Rest of the third season, which was pretty much swallowed up with the Band of Seven mini-arc.
Now that you know where and when we are, and why we're here, enjoy your read! :))
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"Lord Sesshoumaru? Eh, what do you sense?" Jaken asked after a moment of quiet, as Sesshoumaru had turned his gaze towards the distance with a very solemn look over his shoulder, eyes narrow, a slight frown drawn on his face.
"Could it really be..." Sesshoumaru murmured, and turning his entire body to face that way now, he paused to cast out his senses, to hone in on what he felt.
"Could it really be What, mi'Lord?" Jaken ventured to prod further.
"Hn," Sesshoumaru snorted after a long pause, and beginning to summon up the wind magic that levitated him when he desired to travel faster, as Jaken hastily clambered onto his fluffy Mokomoko-sama while they rose into the sky, "we shall see," he decided, and they took off.
The journey wasn't especially long, but when they landed Jaken had at least an inkling of an idea why they were there.
"It seems a battle just recently took place here," the imp murmured as they set down, hopping off the fluff to begin walking around examining the terrain, "there's still dust billowing around that hasn't settled yet, and look at all those gouges in the ground! Why, even many of these trees nearby have been stripped of their foliage. And what's this I sense?" the imp sniffed, and though his nose was nowhere near as good as that of his Taiyoukai Dog Lord's, he could still detect enough with his own inherent youkai senses, "was it that hanyou brother of yours who did all this? I seem to smell him and his friends about here, along with...along with...is that purified jyaki? Did that miko..."
"Naraku," Sesshoumaru correctly deduced, eyes narrowing as his gaze rested upon the circular set of shockwave craters, and then, with a tiny and rather chilling smirk lifting one corner of his mouth just slightly, "playing his games again, I see."
"What?" Jaken blinked, uncertain about what his Lord meant by that.
"He has fooled them," Sesshoumaru said casually as he turned away, "into thinking they have killed him. I suppose he is a coward after all, and seeks reprieve from their searching. The purified jyaki here...was that of a powerful puppet. But it was a puppet nonetheless."
"Ooohhhh," Jaken noised in sagely understanding, "I see. You must be right, Lord Sesshoumaru, surely that mutt and his human companions would not have so easily defeated a foe that thwarts even You so often! DDyyyyaaaahhh-ii-I mean, what I meant to say was-"
"Da-ma-re," Sesshoumaru snarled out in aggravation, and with a grumbling tone, "we're leaving."
"Hai, Lord Sesshoumaru!" Jaken gulped and latched onto the fluff again as they took off, deliberately in the opposite direction of the fresh trail left by Inuyasha and his entourage.
Though Sesshoumaru was not fooled by Naraku's ruse, he did not care to tell his brother of it either. Nor did he particularly concern himself in the matter of asking why Naraku did it, as he had already assumed, naturally, that it was because the abomination was a scheming cowardly type who wanted to spirit away and hide until he hatched his next devious plot.
Little did he know that the plot had already been hatched, and that Kaguya-hime was soon to be awoken to her full power...
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Sesshoumaru's eyes widened, then narrowed in a dangerous expression, watching the cresent moon suddenly blossom into a full bright orb in the middle of the night. A beam of light faintly glowed out from it and shot down briefly into a distant place unknown to him, far to the east of where he was, but when it vanished, the moon still remained a full orb in the sky.
Jaken, Rin, and Ah-Un were all asleep, which was probably fortunate, because he didn't wish to hear Rin cry or Jaken screech.
Yet even as he did not know that Kanna and Kagura had just unleashed Kaguya-hime, freeing her from the Shrine of the Mirror of Life in the far Forest of Illusion, what he Did Know was that any being capable of doing that to the Moon itself...wasn't something he could truly ignore. He was far too fond of the moon to let someone else ruin it for him, no matter what other objectives they had in mind.
He resolved that once Rin was awake, he would take her to a safer area, deep within Bokuseno's forest, and leave her there with Ah-Un, so that no harm would befall her while he determined the cause of this unnatural shift.
Studying the lay of the land again, he estimated the beam of light had lanced out to point somewhere near Mount Fuji. He would start there.
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"Eh, Lord Sesshoumaru, why are we here, again?" Jaken queried in a hesitant tone.
They were currently perched on a ledge near the top of Mount Fuji, a few hundred yards perhaps from the ridge ringing the caldera of the great volcanic peak, and they had been there, in fact, for almost an entire day and night. Apparently there was a reason for this, but not one that Jaken was actually aware of.
"Hhhmmmm," Sesshoumaru noised aloud, eyes narrowing as he scanned the lands and skies in every direction as he had been doing for some time now in fact, and then he espied something in the distance, and tilted his head slightly as he turned to look that way.
Jaken followed his gaze with a squint, straining to see in the distance, but he could make out just barely what looked like a familiar sight...
"Is that Kagura of the Wind, Naraku's incarnation? And it seems the other one is with her, the mirror youkai Naraku made. What are they doing?"
"Naraku's bidding, no doubt," Sesshoumaru snorted absently, watching as something sparkled and fell swiftly into the depths of the waters of Lake Yamanaka, some bright glowing yellow orb that gave him a twinge of a sensation even from this distance.
"What was That, mi'Lord?"
Sesshoumaru frowned. He didn't know what it was, but his eyes followed as the feather Kagura rode upon now drifted towards Lake Shoji, where it hovered as once again something slightly shining and containing an aura he could sense was sent into the depths.
"It appears that a larger scheme is afoot," Sesshoumaru murmured as he watched them head off, wondering if he hadn't heard of something about this once before, just barely tugging at the edge of his mind...
But the events that had happened all those years ago were also right around the same time Hyounekozoku, the Panther King, had first launched a massive assault on the Western Front, and he'd been too busy dealing with his Father's old enemies to pay attention to the other troubles in lands not a part of his own territory. In truth, it was a faint nudge of a near-recollection, no more, and after a moment he shook his head and dismissed the sensation of struggling to recall-he could simply investigate himself, in his own ways.
Silently signalling that they were leaving by summoning up his own levitation wind magic and twitching the fluff impatiently, Sesshoumaru once again took off with Jaken in tow, determined to find out what it was Naraku was planning after all.
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Like I said, if you don't remember the second movie very well, this won't make a ton of sense. But if you just re-watched it or remember the plot, I included enough of what was going on for you to know the timeline and I didn't actually deviate from the movie plotline.