InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Bloodlust: Purity ❯ Concerto ( Chapter 1 )

Chapter 1

On a Snowy Evening

 

“Mama! Catch!”

“Ai!”

A powder-soft ball of snow exploded from Kagome's blocking hands and left her with a fine mist of frozen dust stuck to her eyelashes and the fur of her outer robe. Laughter in childish tones struck the air, and Kagome turned with a mock-angry expression on her face.

“Soki, you know I don't like the cold!”

The laughing child in front of her responded with a bright grin. She was human, a girl of only eight or nine years, obviously not the child of the youkai lady she played with. When Rin had come to an age that meant she could live and love alone, Kagome had found Soki the same way Rin had once been found by Sesshomaru- a broken-bodied, broken-hearted almost baby, all out of second chances. The ransomed power of Tensaiga's soul had flashed then, from Kagome's body to Soki's soul - and another little girl had joined a family that seemed to deny no innocent heart.

Most of the brokenness had been healed by three years of growing and life, and now a gap-toothed smile shone wide under eyes with brilliance and twice as much sparkle as nature usually gifted.

“Come with me, Soki. Kouga's awakening is tonight and your father agreed you could stay up for the ceremony. Will you dress with me?”

The girl leapt out of the snow like an artic fox in a splashing mound of crystals that lifted like new clouds into the sky. The gentle freeze that blanketed the world was as soft as wool, falling still around them in a cool parody of mist. The taste of snow ran thick in the air, fresh patterned flecks of light and fog coming to rest ice-heavy on the solemn remnants of autumn blooms, alabaster chrysanthemums glittering transparent in the winter sun.

Kagome tugged her adopted daughter through the cold and into the great fortress, unmoving against the storms, the wars, the peace. Twenty years of Kagome's habitation had softened the hardest corners, but the fortress had stood mostly unchanged for nearly twelve hundred years, and even her presence could not alter the stone. Walking down a familiar corridor to a familiar door, Kagome was filled suddenly with panic - a sense of irrational danger. It lasted less than a second, less than a moment, hugged at the light easing out from strands of her miko power and then was gone.

The intrusion pulled at her memory, drawing her back to thoughts and times that had crushed her heart as a penalty for living, cost her blood like water, salve for the wounds of the world. Intervening years had somewhat quieted the explosive terror of reaction to those thoughts - the training she received from Eldest helped more. To know finally and truly that the power she held she could wield and wield well was a precious gift.

She shook off memory with an oft practiced twist of her shoulders, and pulled open the door and shooed Soki into her little chambers, full of ocean colors, sky colors, azure, cerulean,

“Find something pretty to wear, Soki, and perhaps it won't be blue this time?”

The laughter cascaded again.

“Blue is pretty!”

Kagome shook her head and left the girl alone, shutting the door behind her. Attempting silence and watching carefully around her with all senses at her disposal, Kagome turned her attention to finding her wayward, mischievous Shippou. He had the power to make himself difficult to find if he wanted to; he was proud of it, trained it carefully - it irritated Sesshomaru a thousand times more than it bothered her, but she did find it strange how little he had changed - less than her.

Nothing was wrong with him, nothing prevented him from aging as should have been normal - for youkai, anyway - that anyone could find. He was kitsune, youkai; like her Kouga, he should be coming to an Awakening, indeed, should already have had one. But he lived through the years and seemed to suffer almost no effect from them. Kouga, who would know the pangs of his awakening youkai soul in the night's ceremony, was nine years younger than his adopted sibling and did not show it.

Only silence greeted her every subtle probe at his Shippou's soul, seeking the source of this impossible agelessness, and yet... his unexplained power. He looked so young, as young as Kystra, thirteen years. In small ways, even in this time of general peace, Kagome's days avoided boredom without any trouble.

As these thoughts crossed her mind, the wall on her left between two stunning tapestries of winter and spring moved - a moment of close peering with her peripheral vision discerned a pair of glittering green eyes tucked away against the wall.

“Shippou! It is one thing to play games, but your brother's ceremony will begin in less than two hours and you cannot dress up in stone!”
He grinned, a ridiculous expression of red mouth and pearly teeth glinting in the wall, and then he stepped forward and seemed to melt out of the stones.

“I am sorry mama, but its so much fun to play this way…if I'd been able to do this when I was small, Rin and I would have had a hundred times more fun.”

Kagome shuddered, remembering, and Shippou laughed.

“Don't worry, mama, we'll behave tonight.”

Kagome looked back at him with sharp eyes, catching all his words and rolling them through her thoughts.

“You convinced your sister to come!”

He was already off and running down the hallway to his room.

“Yes!”

Somehow he managed the word over his shoulder, running at full speed without falling on his face.

Kagome smiled, a sweet expression still innocent, and made her way down the stairs and through a mob of servants in the dining hall. The silent servants who had suffered so long unseen still kept their places - twenty years had helped heal the old sad wound, and even Sesshomaru found it more pleasant to see those who served him.

There was a change that brought laughter to her lips - her stoic mate, so proud in his silence and his mask of cold, glad for some company and so often smiling. Even if he did think no one knew; no one noticed. Even if was still the terrifying Sesshomaru she remembered with everyone outside their House. In her memories of him were the naughty and the nice, moments of solitude and passion, danger and laughter, the comforts of love.

 

~-~-~-~-~

 

Sesshomaru watched his son pull back the string of his bow, and the arrow on the string whistled down a path outlined by frozen strands of stem and twig. It thudded into the center of a drawn knot wood target with a satisfying `thunk', and Sesshomaru smiled. There were violent thoughts in the gleam of his eyes.

“Excellent. You are as skilled as your mother.”

Kouga shook his head.

“No one is as skilled as mother - she never misses a shot, never even misses dead center.”

His father's smile widened.

“Perhaps, but then she has had...a lot of practice.”

Kouga turned to him then, all of a sudden quiet in his motions, and Sesshomaru felt the stare of his son press against his skin like a hot wave. Scorched, he met Kouga's eyes, and the rippling edge between the silver and gold that he found there was muddied, dividing without separation.

“Where did she get her practice, father? I have been thinking, lately, and neither you nor mother will tell me anything about the past. All my questions are redirected; you tell the same stories, not about anything that I haven't heard before from everyone else. Why?”

Sesshomaru looked well and truly startled. The silence he had kept, that Kagome had kept, was a personal silence, a dogged silence that came from fear of the unsealing of quiet and the momentous tug of old memories that had locked themselves into patterns of pain. He felt suddenly trapped by his son's question -as if the words could bring the memory to life.

“What are you asking, Kouga? Why are you asking? Haven't you thought there might be nothing more to tell - ”

“Nothing answers, again! Listen, father, listen! I have dreams of fighting you, dying and living under your sword. I see mother, and I know it is mother, but she is...strange, changed, human. She walks by someone's side, but it is not yours - I have thoughts of violence that are intense and sacred to my dreaming thoughts, burning in my heart and clawing at my soul. I dream the end of the world in laughter, a withering soul in a darkness of purple pain. I dream my blood and burning blood, all over in silence. So, tell me! ”

Sesshomaru reeled, struck dumb by an old anguish that forsook all hope, all possibilities of prayer and sacrifice.

“When did you dream these things, Kouga?”

The burning was back in the Inu-Prince's eyes, and he let his words crawl through his father's soul with the backwards harmony of vengeance.

“Ever...ever since I can remember.”

"And you said nothing?"

Sesshomaru's question was sharp; he meant it to sting, and it did, but his eyes tracked the time of day and he shook his head.

“Your Awakening...the ritual takes place under the first hour of moonlight. I will talk to your mother after that. I cannot give you the answers you want, not unless she also agrees.”

Kouga scowled, and then nodded. He couldn't hope for more than that, not now. He followed his father in silence, leaving his last arrow still in the target, shivering alone in the winter wind. From nowhere, he was undone in himself by half of a murmur in his father's voice.

“If something is happening - if something is happening again -

Awareness rushed all Kouga's limbs, and he felt in his thoughts a sudden beginning, like the turning of a key. The gold in his eyes dilated, reddened under the strain, and then he shuddered and pulled back, away from whatever howling door was before his senses.

 

~-~-~-~

 

The moon rose over the horizon, settling into the sky like a pale, quicksilver pupil in some great eye of the night. In the hours time it took for the moon to rise and hover high and bright over the trees, a crowd had gathered outside the great unsealed gates of the castle. Kouga stood still with his father and watched his mother, standing at a low wooden altar, holding a stone knife black with old blood. Behind her old allies and family stood in silent ranks, betraying no thought to his study.

Only a few obvious faces were missing - his mother's friends, the priest and his wife, home with a daughter who was due to deliver her first child at any moment. Kinawai was there, proud tiger lord of the northlands, still head of the Great Council, though it had not been convened since the end of the Dragon War. Akira stood behind him, once Commander of the Army of the West under his father in that same war, now Lord in the East.

Many heroes had been made, as many as in the elder legends. Rumors spoke of the dead Kasuka, but never louder than a whisper; they told how she had been the mate and betrayer of Kinawai and all those who touched his life. They told how night had flickered over the world with her living, and how her death brought a cleansing deeper than the iron heart of the earth. Kouga had heard all these things, but there was no sign of them now

The gardens held more lovely flowers now, in the snow, than had bloomed in the warm season. Spectacular wraiths of opal champagne surrounded the crowd, suspended on bushes and trees of frosted steel. Momentarily, a soft distraction insinuated itself, words riding on the air with whittled malice in their sound. The deepest strings of a Chinese koto could have struck no more pulsing a note than the instant of breath that greeted a patter of wild footsteps, a shudder of low half-whispers that died under Sesshomaru's glare. His gaze whipped around eagerly, seeking some place to lay its violence.

The girl that stood before him was not often seen - a human woman, dropping by as quickly and lightly as a bird, a breeze - still, she was not unaccepted. With all the presence of a summer rain, she stepped up lightly to the Lord who was her father. For the sake of all those behind her, she dropped into the gentlest of bows, a lightening stroke of grace in her spine. She tucked a single blossom into the sash at his waist, as though she were only six again, and Sesshomaru allowed himself a rare moment of public sentiment and leaned down to embrace her.

“Rin. I did not think you would come.”

She smiled, and the expression was bright and open. Sun glinted in her hair even in the darkness.

“Not come for my own brother's Awakening? You should know better, father. Rin always comes for the important ones!”

She winked, and he scowled at her, teasing.

“Don't let your mother hear you talking that way. She was so happy when she taught you to speak properly.”

“Yes, father.”

 

Standing alone in the shadows, unnoticed, the lord Kinawai stood in awe of this dancing vision of happiness. She was nothing like the child he thought he remembered; she leapt in his vision like a goddess of the sun, alive with a radiant fire. There was copper shining in her hair until a cloud covered over the moon, and then she was dark, shadows and deep water. The hard brightening of his green tiger eyes shone just a little softer, and the waiting embers of his heart were lit. He watched the dances with unusual focus; he approached only Kagome, and she, blushing, accepted his compliments and smiled - but his eyes were on Rin; his ears were full of the sound of her footsteps, fading away on the grass.