InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Gathering Word ❯ Luck ( Chapter 4 )

Disclaimer: Inuyasha and its characters are not mine. They belong to Rumiko Takahashi and Biz. I receive no compensation for fan fiction.

 

A/N: These stories are exercises in theme, style and structure. Please do not flame based on pairings. If you are going to roast me, I ask that you do it in a constructive manner.

 

Genre: Dark!fic with a hint of light

Characters: Inuyasha, Izaoi, Kagome (kinda)

Warning: Character Death

Rating: PG

Summary: Fate is a fickle mistress.

 

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Luck

 

When he was very small, his mother would wrap him up in the voluminous sleeves of her fine kimonos. He would snuggle into her gentle lap and bat at the cloth as it billowed around him in waves of colorful silk. The patterned leaves drew around him like forests. Though the other children did not play with him, he still had a kind and good-hearted mother to play with. While he watched other mothers steer their offspring towards waiting nannies, he had his mother's undivided attention. In his child's heart he was complete and content. He could not deny his luck.

 

In the end, she had grown dough soft. He watched her bloat and pale, the whites of her eyes turned muddy yellow, the lustrous ink of her hair graying and fine. Soon she could pull it out in great chunks clutched pitifully in her bony fingers. She would mutter nonsense, tossing her head. Sometimes she would speak of his great father, a terrible white apparition in his mind's eye. She would clutch him to her breast, and his downy ears would twitch, as she would mutter nonsense on the wind, combing his hair with long, weary strokes of her nails. He could smell the stale reek of death gather ominously on her skin; coating her body like the fine silks she once wore. Though he had never smelled death before, he knew she was not meant long for this world. He would snuggle closer, ignoring the death smell and her involuntary shudders, searching out what remained of his mother's scent.

 

The priest would paste sutras around her bed eyeing him with suspicious eyes when she called out to him, mad with fever.

 

“He has done this to her,” the voices would whisper, cutting the air with venom, “a demon's child, he curses his own mother with bad luck.”

 

It was no surprise to him when they tossed him into the night, his face still wet with grief. Inuyasha stood, turned towards the darkness and walked forward into his lonely destiny, ready to face whatever his luck might bring him. His ears still rang with the word “half breed.”

 

Many, many years later, after betrayal and trickery and murder, Inuyasha sat beneath the quiet boughs of the god tree, a lazy arm around Kagome as she snuggled into his fire rat kimono while cradling their infant daughter. In his heart he was complete and content. He could not deny his luck.