"I'm going to write and post this before school starts in August." – Me, dreaming, 7/13/22

Edited 11/30/2024

Beautiful Moon

Amends

"Your blood of ice may not protect you."

The idea had been so absurd, he had scoffed and called it ridiculous in near the same breath, and yet that had somehow failed to convince either of them that the tree's parting words were meaningless. Mizuki he could forgive for being skeptical of his response, given her habit of worrying over nothing and the short amount of time she had known him, but Rin looking at him with eyes that begged he make a promise beyond his words was another matter entirely.

He refused to lower himself to clarify what should have been understood so plainly, and left the both of them to their dissatisfaction. Jaken dared not add his own thoughts, having already endured his ire, but was not dissuaded enough to keep his own concerns clear from his face.

His own mind betrayed him as well, lingering on Bokusenou's parting words to him and how they might relate to the warning he conveyed to the humans. Eventually deciding it must be something of Mizuki's influence, he wandered off on his own only to find that the silence simply afforded him less to be distracted by, and the question of what the old tree had seen to make such a statement still plagued him. Resigned to the effort, he set about examining the need for such a forewarning.

"My blood of ice, huh?"

It was what the tree had named his ability to remain unconcerned if cornered in battle, an ability Inuyasha did not possess as a hanyou with such a disparity of power in his blood, and the apparent reason he had been given Tessaiga. Bokusenou's greeting had referenced the topic of their last conversation, so perhaps he found it fitting that his parting words did as well. Regardless of the magnolia's thoughts, Sesshomaru could not immediately see what led to the warning that suggested he might lose control of himself in the same way Inuyasha had in his fight against those bandits.

Mizuki's power affected his curiosity above all else. What he became curious about was an annoyance, and perhaps it could be a distraction were he to battle within her range of influence, but he could not see himself becoming fearful because of it. The opposite seemed more likely; he still found it foreign and revolting, but he had enjoyed provoking Inuyasha with pebbles. It seemed much more probable that he would find himself caught up in the rush of a slaughter than anything else.

To suggest that he, Sesshomaru, could be made afraid because of mere influence was absurd.

As one of his father's oldest friends, Bokusenou had often gotten away with being vague or pointed as he deemed fit, and while this certainly was not the first time the tree had been critical of him or his actions, it was much more often that he delivered such criticism more tactfully. The warning was one thing, but having his frustration outlined as though he did not understand it himself was something far more unnecessary, and then accusing him of doubting his own power…

…Was that it?

Cornered, Inuyasha might doubt his ability to survive, and the instinct of his blood would win out. Sesshomaru never doubted. It did not prevent him from being surprised by an opponent once in a while, but it certainly contributed to his composure in battle. If Bokusenou mistook his frustration with the influence as fear or doubt in his own power, then that would explain the origin of his words.

"Ridiculous," he repeated.

Sesshomaru did not doubt. Bokusenou was a trusted source, but even his perception was not infallible.

Upon returning to the campsite, he found Mizuki sitting by a dying fire, eyes closed and the stone in her hand instead of its usual place around her neck. Rin had fallen asleep with the thin futon the woman had procured half folded over her, as had Jaken, his snores echoing in the silence. His arrival disrupted the focus Mizuki had maintained despite the noise, and her eyes snapped open and up to him.

"Oh, welcome back," she said quietly. It was somewhat unexpected, and he gave a slight nod in acknowledgement before making himself comfortable at the base of a tree.

Her greeting had only come as a surprise because it was the first bit of casual communication she had offered him since they had departed Inuyasha's village. He would call their partnership strained, between her general reluctance to speak to him since yesterday and the revelation that he had been keeping what she considered important information from her, but there had been a shift in her silence towards something more analytical and less apprehensive now that they had met with Bokusenou. Had it continued, he might have had to consider making some attempt at amends if he wanted to reach his goal, but as it was, she relocated herself closer to him just a few moments later.

"Between what happened with the kodama and my conversation with Bokusenou, I've come to some conclusions we should talk about," she informed him quietly, fiddling with the stone that was hung once again from her neck. He expected they would be speaking more about what had happened at some point, and supposed she had thought better of trying to hold said discussion earlier. She spared a glance at the two sleeping across the clearing before asking, "Is here okay, or should we move?"

From the pace of their breathing, they were sleeping soundly, and Rin likely wouldn't be bothered by them speaking any more than she was by the sounds of Jaken's snores.

"Here is fine," he concluded. She nodded back, her face set with a somewhat serious expression, and took a seat to his right. She did not immediately speak, though, instead taking a long breath and nervously smoothing out wrinkles in the fabric dressing her legs. Rin sported a matching color, he had noticed, her kimono hanging among Mizuki's clothing from the day.

He found himself analyzing the camp as he waited for her to muster up the courage to speak, curious about the change. The smell of fish and dampness lingered. They must have sourced their dinner from the nearby river, and had not been careful enough to avoid getting overly wet. Rin would normally have just remained in the clothing as it dried, but it seemed Mizuki had convinced her otherwise, another new experience he would likely hear about once she woke.

He had thought the experiences to be positive, as the company of another human was something Rin lacked even if she did not express any want for it, but today had him revisiting how he viewed the matter.

The contrast between Rin's expressions this morning and after they had caught up with him following their meeting with Bokusenou bothered him, he realized. She had argued with him in the past, as being left behind was not something she had agreed with the first few times it had been required, but he couldn't recall a time when she had not accepted his words once trust had been established. Between her worry despite his words and the look he had caught from her while Mizuki had confronted him in Bokusenou's forest, it seemed as though that trust had somehow diminished, or that she was suffering her own doubts…

…Oh.

It should not have taken him this long to consider that Rin might be influenced as well.

Mizuki had intended to start speaking as soon as she sat down, but her nerves had gotten the better of her, and now the silence was dragging on longer than she was comfortable with. This was a conversation they had needed to have a long time ago, one Sesshomaru could have initiated himself were he less prideful, though she felt as much to blame for not just asking during any of the times she felt weird about his motives. She hadn't thought that much about what the stone could do so much as what it had done, with returning home her main focus, but now that she had the revelation sitting in her gut that its existence was responsible for several things beyond trapping her in the past, it suddenly felt imperative that she try to understand better what she was carrying around her neck, for the sake of everyone around her.

Sesshomaru knew he was affected by the stone, and she needed to know what that entailed.

Looking back, he had probably known from the start, or at least suspected it by the time she had been sent to talk to Kagome, probably testing whether proximity factored into it. It might have annoyed him to be around Inuyasha, but he had said it himself; it would have been shameful for him to be driven off by him simply being there. Inuyasha had found it strange, too, she remembered, and she had suspected ulterior motives because of the shift from helping her because maybe he felt indebted for Rin to helping her because question mark.

She had been able to infer a few things about its effects based on his attitude. Distancing himself from it for a while might help him regain his tolerance, though if that also explained his shifts in personality, she wasn't sure, given that his indifference didn't always give way to something more amicable. It was more likely that it was annoying, if he and the kodama of those trees had anything to say about it. She knew it didn't have to be actively calling out to make things react to it, as the goshinboku and Tenseiga both had responded without its voice, and that might explain why neither reacted as violently. The well was still difficult to explain – it worked while it was calling out and then almost worked, and then didn't, the stone being wishy-washy in how it felt about her using it – and then Sesshomaru himself seemed to be affected while it was mostly silent.

Aside from that, though, she couldn't get much further alone. She didn't feel like the stone affected her physically with the exception that it made her feel whole in a way that she had yet to be able to explain. Hearing its voice or intent didn't feel like much, and while it had certainly upended her life enough that she was annoyed by its existence, she didn't find it annoying in the way Sesshomaru seemed to, so her own experience wasn't enough to draw any conclusions. Asking Rin and Jaken if they felt anything from it yielded nothing noteworthy, with Jaken refusing to believe a human's artifact could do anything worth noting (and swallowing his words when she pointed out that Sesshomaru clearly felt something from it). Rin tried to concentrate on it with earnest, but eventually ended up shaking her head, disappointed that she couldn't be helpful.

Thus, Sesshomaru was her last option at the moment, and she didn't think he was willing to explain.

Jaken had a lump on his head about the size of his own by the time they had caught up to them, a sight that made her wonder just how well Rin was connected to the two demons, and had apparently driven the imp to silence even upon their late return. Sesshomaru had then dismissed Bokusenou's warning about as easily as the tree demon seemed to suggest he would, which had left her trying to figure out how the stone could unsettle the heart of someone who seemed so sure of himself. There wasn't a spark of anger, or youki, as Bokusenou had deemed it, but between Jaken's head and the outright dismissal, it read pretty clearly that he was done with the topic.

Rin remained worried throughout the day, a matter Jaken had eventually tried to dismiss by telling her to stop simply because, "it's Lord Sesshomaru!" The demon in question did nothing to assuage her concerns beyond his initial dismissal, and Mizuki, not sure what to say given that her pendant was the cause of the whole thing, tried instead to distract her.

It worked eventually when it came to dinner, and the girl's penchant for helping came through with fishing and foraging lessons. They'd ended up soaked, but once she'd gotten the hang of grabbing fish with her bare hands, they finished up with quite the catch. Seasonings provided by Kagome's mother were tried and their rankings debated on, and then Mizuki convinced Rin to make use of some of her own borrowed clothes while her kimono dried. None of them fit her, of course, but one oversized shirt meant for sleeping in worked well enough, which left Mizuki wearing the pants that matched it and the bloodstained shirt she had originally come to the era in.

She caught the onceover Sesshomaru gave her when she sat beside him, and was reminded of how much Kagome's pink pajamas stood out here. Her borrowed sleepwear being a light blue did not prevent her from feeling a little ridiculous.

"You should look presentable for such discussions," her parents' voices demanded suddenly, and she shooed them out of her head. She didn't have the headspace to spare, too full trying to work out this conversation.

Him withholding information made her angry, but between Rin being worried now and her having pointed out how much they argued, she wasn't keen to add more concerns to the poor girl's list, so she knew she needed to figure out an approach that was less "you're being stupid" and more "let's meet halfway." She needed his cooperation, too, not to drive him further into silence on the subject, which led to her trying to examine the reasons behind his reluctance.

Not sharing with her, she could see. They hardly knew each other, and this was basically a business partnership; displaying all one's cards wasn't necessarily advisable. Not sharing with Bokusenou, though, seemed a different matter entirely. She didn't know what Sesshomaru's relationship with Bokusenou was, but they clearly knew each other for a long time, and well enough that he was able to ask him about the swords he and Inuyasha had inherited from their father. If he didn't want her to hear about it, he could have just asked for a private discussion, but neither he nor Bokusenou had, which she took to mean that the tree knew he wouldn't speak on it either way. That gave Sesshomaru's insistence on avoiding the frank discussion the tree had demanded from him a weight she shouldn't ignore, and highlighted how much his pride meant to him, along with how stubborn he could be about matters concerning it.

She couldn't make sense of it herself, but that made sense, much as it annoyed her. He had already established that a demon's pride was something she couldn't understand, and while she understood pride in her own way, she didn't think it would ever prevent her from sharing pertinent information with someone in her own position. His and Bokusenou's explanations of a demon's pride gave her insight, at least, and that was something she was lacking in where it came to her traveling companion.

Sometime during the evening, she'd come to the conclusion that she was being pretty unfair to him.

"First of all, I wanted to apologize," she started with a sigh and another pass of the wrinkles in her pant legs. She didn't give him space to ask her for what this time, instead pushing through the pause in her words quickly. "Rin pointed out that I argue with you a lot. I told her it was because we didn't understand each other very well, but I've been thinking and realized you've put more effort into understanding me than I have trying to understand you, and I need to be better about that."

He seemed somewhat off-put by her words, eyes narrowing slightly, but he didn't speak, so she decided not to ask him to explain.

"I've had a lot to think about since the whole thing with the kodama, and I've been trying to work my way around your point of view on this thing. I may not agree with your choice to keep its effects on you to yourself, but I can understand why you didn't tell me until then, and I'm sorry it took me saying something rude to get you to disclose that information.

"I don't want to dismiss your pride just because it's inconvenient for me, but I also have very limited options when it comes to understanding what this stupid thing can do, so I feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place and that I have to ask you to explain how you're being affected. You're the only one I know who both knows they're being affected and can speak in a language I understand. I don't know what to offer in exchange for the information, but I'll do what I can to make up for it if you're willing to tell me more."

Sesshomaru let the request hang in the air for a while, and Mizuki, though clearly not content with the silence, did not try to fill it.

Something had shifted since their meeting with Bokusenou, beyond the tension between them that began since he'd succumbed to his irritation too visibly. The tree's warning had, perhaps, unreasonably unsettled her, but the somewhat desperate tone her words had started to take on spoke of something deeper than that, and the shift into wanting to understand the artifact she bore instead of simply seeking out its original owners was not lost on him. She had no particular regard for its power or why she could wield them, even while she had made the effort to decipher information from the scrolls. "I guess I'll find out," had been her response to the others' question about her own power. She had no ambition for it.

Now, she was presenting to him a show of how respectful she was attempting to be and how that conflicted with what she now needed to know. He believed her sincerity, sure. Her apology was meant, and Rin's feelings probably held some weight to her, but she built upon that respect so much that it was clear she valued the information now much more highly than she had previously, and it was obvious that she had come to some information that had her desperate for more.

"What did you speak with Bokusenou about?" he asked.

She frowned for a moment, then with some reluctance, admitted, "You, at first. He wanted to know what you wouldn't tell him. He seemed worried, so I told him what I thought. The affect was probably annoying, and distance factored into its influence. He helped me understand a little of how your pride prevented you from saying anything about it.

"After that, he wanted to know what I had observed of the stone and its effects so he could speculate, but I had already been doing a lot of that after the kodama, and realized everything that it had some influence on might have a will of some kind, and maybe that was what those scrolls meant by willpower, so I just asked him outright if he thought it could affect anything with a will, and he didn't say no, so that's…a lot to think about."

That was it. The implications of that information likely threw someone who preferred the scope of her decisions to encompass only herself. Sesshomaru wasn't sure he liked the implications himself, but found the thought intriguing, nonetheless. Did the well have a will?

"I've heard that sort of white-noise from everything this thing has affected so far except from you," she continued. "Bokusenou thought it might be because you talk, so I'm not actually listening for it. When you came back, I had been trying to focus on whether or not I could hear anything from Rin or Jaken, or even Ah-Un."

"Could you?"

She shook her head. "No," she replied, "but I also have no idea what I'm doing. I can hear this thing just fine when I focus on it, but…really, I just don't want to find out that I can hear it from them, you know? Because then what? It's bad enough that it's annoying you; I don't want to end up hurting anyone else."

"It's an inconvenience for me, but it does not hurt me," he clarified, prickling at the suggestion but keeping his tone even. Despite that, Mizuki seemed to withdraw. His word choice, he concluded, was likely to blame, remembering their conversation about why even making the request for an escort was difficult for her. "Even if it is affecting them, it may not be a negative influence," he noted, thinking about Tenseiga's response to her. Her influence on Rin was still simply speculation on his part, so he couldn't say one way or another whether a third entity had found the influence intrusive. "Has anything other than the tree spirit had such a reaction to its presence?"

Mizuki tipped her head back and thought for a few moments. She had gotten caught up in the overwhelming scale of what she was speculating that she hadn't considered that only two things the stone had affected were influenced outright negatively. Other things just…responded. She couldn't call them positive responses, necessarily, as they had been mostly neutral acknowledgements, but they weren't necessarily negative. If the tree spirits were more amiable to being roused, they might have had a similar response to the stone that the goshinboku had.

"Aside from what were probably more kodama, no," she replied. "Are there a lot in the forest near Kaede's village?"

"They tend to congregate in areas of power," Sesshomaru replied.

Mizuki supposed there was a reason that tree had survived more than five hundred years. "They're what helped me get away from the demons that wanted to eat me," she explained, finding herself fiddling with the stone again. "I thought both demons just had bad eyesight because they kept running into branches, but it turns out the kodama were just angry I accidentally woke them up and got in their way as a result. I really was a lucky idiot."

Sesshomaru didn't say anything in return, but she wasn't expecting him to, so she instead moved on.

"I didn't think about this not necessarily being a bad thing," she told him, tapping the stone around her neck. It hummed brightly for a moment before settling back into simple existence, content either with her acknowledging it or with the designation that it wasn't malicious. "I still don't like the idea of how much it could be affecting, but…it's really not hurting you?" she asked him.

"You think it could?" he asked in return.

She frowned. "Would you tell me if it was?" she returned instead, and then gestured physically to the silence between them when he didn't respond, deciding to show rather than say there you have it. She tried not to be frustrated with him. He probably felt like he had demonstrated to her that she didn't need the information from him because it might not be as pressing a discovery as she had thought, but she still had a difficult time with his stubborn insistence on remaining silent on the matter.

"It annoys you," she pointed out, deciding to share with him her thoughts and speculations about his relationship with its influence. "Bokusenou said your heart was unsettled by it, so I imagine it's a lot to deal with. You're the kind of person who's very sure of himself and it probably takes a lot to change that, so maybe it does something that makes you unsure somehow. And it's a stupid rock that gives powers to humans, not demons, as far as we know, so that's insulting."

His eyes narrowed at her at that, and she tried not to look away from him.

"I'm reduced to speculating without your input," she explained. "That's what's going through my head. I know you don't think Bokusenou's warning was worth hearing, but he said it for a reason, and I only know so much about you. I want to trust you and believe everything is going to be fine, but I worry. I get anxious. It's not easy for me to put it out of my mind, all those what ifs, and while it's a little better now because you're right, most reactions to this stone have been neutral, that part of me that insists on telling me that I'm the danger is still pretty loud. The less information I have, the worse it is. Can you give me something to work with so that I at least know what it's doing?"

Sesshomaru continued to stare at her for a long moment before closing his eyes and turning his head away from her. As the silence dragged on, her hope that he would understand and give in did with it, until she was sure he had decided to remain tight-lipped.

She sighed and made to stand, fighting to respect his choice despite the issues that came with that decision, but then he spoke.

"Quid pro quo."

She stopped, frozen, and just looked at him. His pronunciation was off, the Latin words taking on a much more Japanese accent, but not enough that she didn't understand what he was saying. Still, she didn't know what to say in return even when his golden eyes stared back at her.

"Tell me of your era," he said, "then I will tell you more."

I decided to stop here because I liked where this ended and how it shifted the contents of the next chapter. This is now the shortest chapter, though, so apologies, especially after that last one. I really wanted to get something out so that everyone knows this story is still alive, even if I'm taking forever.

I participated in NaNoWriMo back in November of 2022 (which I realize was now forever ago) and actually wrote a ton for the novel I've been trying to write for…a long time now. It's nowhere near complete, but it's 50,000 words more complete than it was the morning of November 1st, and I'm very happy about that.

I'm less happy to discover that deadlines are actually helpful. When I have the capacity to do more with my life again, I'll try implementing something to that effect to get this done sooner. We're halfway, I think? At one point I was guessing 30 chapters total. We'll see where it ends up.

Anywho, I'll hopefully post again in a couple of months, but I hope this satisfied something for now.

Until next time!

-sf

(Update 11/30/2024 – So much for posting in a few months. I got distracted by Hazbin Hotel, changing jobs, and other life issues, but I'm diving back in here and will get moving on this again. Not gray yet! The old is creeping up, though.)