InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Sesshoumaru's Baby ❯ Chapter Eleven: Consulting the Gods ( Chapter 11 )

Sesshoumaru's Baby

 

Eleven: Consulting the Gods

 

East of Musashi, a road curves into the higher reaches of the mountains and along the ridges that nobody usually notices; though charcoal-burners, wood-cutters and itinerant monks travelling between temples and to the capital often cross close to it, curious as to the shimmering of the air, yet unable to discern its mysteries. Only youkai have ever been able to utilise it, because it was built by their ancestors thousands of years ago. It passes, in great loops like the belly of a sidewinding snake, through mountain ranges and around the shores of lakes, skirting farmland and towns; along its edges in remote places, hidden towns and even a great city sprang up, equally as difficult to see as the road itself.

 

Sesshoumaru, the eternal wanderer, had spent years on the road since leaving his ancestral home with little intention of returning. The idea of ruling bored him - the dim evenings of his childhood, long distant, watching his father work laboriously over mounds of paperwork and through meetings with squabbling guilds of merchants and obsequious vassals, had put paid to any desire to take up the previous lord's mantle. Under the law, the throne was reserved exclusively for him - if and when he returned, he would be heir apparent unless somebody killed him during the kingship challenges. Once, he'd spent a while finding out potential challengers and wondering if they were up to the task of matching him, but he grew tired of it like everything else.

 

Inu-Yasha, he thought as he descended with the road into the Waseya Valley, would head for the ancestral seat: being completely out of touch with the Clan, his own history and Sesshoumaru's past, he would assume that his half-brother had a permanent residence there from which he based his excursions. It wasn't an unreasonable conclusion. Rin was far too well-fed, clothed and cared for to live continually on the road and whatever sometimes scarce pickings could be found; Sesshoumaru's own supplies, clothing and appearance were too much of a contrast with the hard life on the road Inu-Yasha would be familiar with.

 

The half-youkai had no idea of the bad blood between Sesshoumaru and their shared father, nor of his avoidance of the upkeep of his father's vast estate and subjects. He didn't know of the other duties and desires that drove his brother, because all they had in common were a desire to kill Naraku, a desire to possess the Tessaiga (even that, Sesshoumaru mused ruefully, had waned in recent months), and their love-hate relationship, with spikes of sex and uneasy cooperation, and troughs of attempted fratricide.

 

Inu-Yasha had lived a poor life. After the death of their father, he had been carried away as a babe in arms back to his mother's family and their residence, where a small amount of his childhood had passed. Sesshoumaru had observed this for himself; free to go where he desired, he had come back several times over the years to stand on the branches of a twisted pine overlooking the ornamental lake in the grounds, where Izayoi sat in melancholy state underneath one of the porches, watching her pale-headed child run around and be summarily rejected by the other children, and bullied by the adults.

 

After Izayoi had died - sickness or murder? Sesshoumaru didn't know, hadn't cared to find out - Inu-Yasha had found himself without a home. His human relatives didn't want anything to do with him. He went into the wilds, scratching a living like an animal, occasionally staying or stealing from a village before something bad happened and he had to leave, or was caught and driven out, beaten and bleeding. He grew angry and embittered, with no memory of ever being properly cared for, and attributed his failure to live to his hanyou state. If he had been really human, he would have fitted in with Izayoi's relatives - or at one of the villages who feared him. If he had been really youkai, as pure in blood as the brother he'd never seen (but heard stories about from Izayoi), he would have been accepted into his father's family.

 

Typically, Inu-Yasha doesn't have the depth of thought to realise that becoming full youkai - through the Jewel, or another medium - will do little to change his life. Sesshoumaru stopped at a fork in the road, surveying the valley. He knows nothing of the ways of youkai. With his human upbringing, he cannot begin to imagine how the two cultures are different from each other. It is not merely the weakness of humans that prevents a true union of youkai and ningen from occurring - but much deeper, older factors.

 

It was the right path, the one that rose back into the hills again. Sesshoumaru followed the road as it climbed, forced to pause every so often to recover breath that seemed to slip from his lungs like water through fingers. He was always completely honest with himself; ignorant delusion had no place in his personal philosophy. He could never win battles by believing to the last that he still had the strength to go on when he really didn't. There was a clenching in his belly as if somebody had twisted a fist there, and an unpleasant feeling as if his body was reshaping itself - similar, perhaps, to the sliding and growing of Inu-Yasha's body at the human transformation. His own assumptions of different shapes weren't accompanied by physical discomforts, only a dissolving sensation, as if he was collapsing into tiny components of self beyond normal sight, and then being rebuilt from scratch into something else.

 

Was he pregnant? Sesshoumaru wondered. The air grew colder; stray strands of glistening hair, the translucent colour of frosted dew, sliced shallowly across the high curves of his striped cheekbones. Was it possible outside of stories and children's fables? There were stories of his gods that spoke of male beings who gave birth like women, except they were fanciful - a child-deity came from a severed finger, perhaps, or seven drops of blood that fell in the sea at the night of the full moon. Their stomachs didn't ache or swell; their bodies did not become queasy or achy, and they never physically accommodated a growing child, only gave rise to them fully formed.

 

The sky was darkening when he came over a rise and was faced with the familiar white columns - a vast pillar on either side of the road, each easily as thick as six men roped together. Ancient writing, weathered into indistinguishable shapes over time, and intricate pictograms formed linear stripes across the face of the pillars, and a third lay over the top of both, fixed in place by heavy iron pegs. In the middle of the top pillar, more square than its circular brethren, was a single set of kanji - it spelled out a name: Susuki. New writing had been added beneath it in peeling ink, clarifying the entrance to the Yorou Temple of the demon war-god Susuki, great deity of the youkai peoples.

 

Beyond this gateway, the path had changed in colour and texture: now it was laid neatly with stone flags, each perfectly rectangular and uniformly white, though spotted in places with old blood. The road had also been fenced in with round pine poles, white rope with paper tags strung between them. A syrupy mist stretched into the middle distance, and through it loomed the dark, squat shape of the temple itself.

 

If Sesshoumaru had ventured further west of his home country than China - which he had visited with his father in his youth, and again after the death of his sire for training - he would have said the temple looked Grecian in structure, at least at the front. It was unlike anything that existed in human architecture in Japan, both because of its vastness and its departure from Shinto and Buddhist principles regarding the construction of shrines and temples. There were no torii, only these pillar gateways that looked like a distorted version of them; the temple itself, up a long flight of dark stone steps cut directly into the cliffside, rested in the middle of a simple courtyard by itself, unattended by other buildings of any kind. The priests lived inside, on very little at the back of the temple, and there was no space for worshippers to stay.

 

The roof was flat, covered in a deep carpet of snow that was hardening into ice; it was supported at the front by four pillars, two on each side, and by one on each side at the back. Beneath this front porch, still exposed to wind, rain, snow, and sleet, were the altars maintained by the priests for simple prayers and requests - covered by clusters of candles and incense sticks clumped together behind screens, each with an icon of the god himself upon it. There was more old blood here, beneath Sesshoumaru's boots as he walked between the small altars - rather like low tables, dotted here and there - and new blood too. The coppery smell of it, though, had been swept away.

 

The grand doors led into the sheltered room of the temple, and the only indoor area for worshippers: they were gilded and decorated with stylised images of people in various stages of injury or death. Inside, a vast statue of the god took up the far wall, rising until the top of his head brushed the ceiling - it was far more lifelike than any other image or idol displayed, and the expression on the god's face was one of dark, discerning displeasure. In his right hand, he held a sword by the hilt, marked by the shapes of snakes up and down the blade; the tip rested between his booted feet. In his left hand, he held a spear whose shaft crossed over his chest, narrowly missing bisecting his face. Straight tresses had been pulled to the side and bound with cloth at his right shoulder, draped across his chest, and partially plaited with beading.

 

Priests moved silently out of Sesshoumaru's way as he came in, and closed the doors behind him. It was unnaturally cold inside, even with the huge fires burning in dishes raised to head-height off the floor, a line parallel to the right and left walls. The raised dais where the god's feet stood was marked by a triplet of stone altars, slabs on small, squat pillars; the strongest smell of blood was from them. Sacrifices were made there - usually animals, goats or cows, chickens if in quantity, but sometimes humans who had been captured and kept for the purpose. Susuki was the god of war and battle to the youkai - but to such a warlike people, these jurisdictions had far reaches. They believed blood made the grass grow, and the sacrifices were as much about fertility for people and land as they were for offerings for Susuki's favour.

 

Sesshoumaru hadn't come with an offering. He had stopped bringing his gods gifts a long time ago, for good reason, and he wouldn't break the habit simply because he really needed something from one for once, having spent decades avoiding their attentions.

 

He glared at a dark-robed priest who stood in the shadows nearby; the man shrugged, the firelight reflecting off his auburn hair - plaited into a crown circling his head like a halo - and disappeared through a nearby door set low in the wall, down a flight of steps.

 

“Susuki,” Sesshoumaru said into the silence, voice echoing across the cold space and bouncing back to himself, “you owe me an audience, I think.”

 

There was quiet - and then the fires flickered sharply all together, veering towards the right when there was no wind. The smoke rising from them became a pale, ashy blue, not dark grey, and a heavy fog began to appear along the floor, seeping around Sesshoumaru's ankles like the tide coming in. Tilting his head back, hair sliding across his shoulders, he watched the ceiling warp and reshape itself like clay into an approximation of the wintry night sky.

 

“You want something, Sesshoumaru?”

 

From between the feet of the great statue, a glowing figure stepped; a long black plait, bound at the end by jingling finger bones, hung down the visitor's back against the soft fabric of a long coat whose fabric didn't seem to have decided what it was supposed to be. His clothing, when he stepped into the sharp relief of the sanctified fires, was simplistic - long dark pants stuffed into knee-high boots, a long-sleeved coat with an overlapped collar, brushed by an earring composed out of delicate bones in the left ear. His eyes, unlike the azure depiction of his icons, were a pearly colour like the substance of a departed soul, matching the glow that lit up his unearthly flesh from the inside.

 

“Susuki,” Sesshoumaru said quietly, his voice mocking. “Forgive me if I don't prostrate myself at your divine presence, O kami-sama.”

 

The god wagged a finger at him, in much the way a parent would a misbehaving toddler. “I don't believe that's the way, Sesshoumaru. My Father, Teishu, indulges you in a way that I wouldn't if you were my vessel in this world. He doesn't discipline you when you step out of turn, and you've grown arrogant.”

 

“Teishu-kami has always had more brains than you. That's why he's king of the gods.” Sesshoumaru gave him a disdainful look from his yellow eyes, beneath the long sweep of his lashes, and looked away across the room. “But that isn't what I came to talk to you about.”

 

“Or insult me about either?”

 

“No, not really. Another time, perhaps.”

 

“I might be more interested in hearing you out if you'd brought an offering,” Susuki-sama said with some dislike. “I have many faithful worshippers who have endeared themselves more to me than you have, simply because they paid me the proper respects. Simply being Teishu's favourite servant is not enough to protect you from the gods, Sesshoumaru. I hear you have been as neglectful in your worship to your Clan's patron deities as you have been to me. In fact, you only seem interested in paying lip-service to Teishu, and my brother Saishu, lord of the dead, and that which passes between.”

 

“I may see him one day.”

 

Susuki began to tick his finger back and forth again. “You forget Sesshoumaru, I judge the mettle of the dead. Where will you be then?”

 

“Dead, and therefore beyond caring - are you interested in hearing me, or are you just going to whine about yourself? I could take this to Saishu's temple in the city instead, and he will have my worship for eons in my father's house, while yours lies dusty and neglected.” Susuki snorted. “A god is only a god if he has worshippers; without them, he's only a memory.”

 

“I'm sure you'd talk Father's ears off if you could,” Susuki said irritably. He began to pace up and down in front of his own statue. “What do you want?”

 

Sesshoumaru sat down on the floor, drawing his knees up to his chest, and laced his fingers in front of them. “Come, you'll find it amusing, I'm sure. Tell me - is it possible for me to be pregnant with my brother's child?”

 

 

 

 

A/N: To inform my readers of the story's direction: though I will write yaoi quite happily, that isn't the focus of the story; rather, the moral deterioration of the characters, and the fabric of their frail relationships. My intention of the moment is to keep up original canon partnerships, coloured by my own bias against Kikyo, and my sympathies with the character of Kagome. The intention of this fic is not to end up with Inu-Yasha and Sesshoumaru in a romantic relationship; it never was. Anyone who was waiting for this outcome should probably stop reading now.

 

As the story progresses, the real nature of the strange relationship between Inu-Yasha and Sesshoumaru will be explored - their individual and shared pasts, their individual and shared presents and thoughts about their futures and what they want out of life, the incestuous sexual relationship that catalysed this uncomfortable situation. The fic will continue to make readers uneasy about main characters like Sango and her motivations, because their opinions or disapproval do weigh heavily on Inu-Yasha: even in the manga, he does often appear to be bullied into apologising to Kagome with very bad grace, and he certainly respects Miroku's and Sango's opinions. Shippo will feature less heavily as he's a child, and his relationship with Kagome is similar to Sesshoumaru's with Rin, thus a certain amount of mirroring can be used.

 

Justifying my unusual characterisation of Kagome and Sango: Kagome is a teenage girl with little experience of life, portrayed in the manga as socially demure and polite (like a traditional Japanese woman), offended by Miroku's overt sexuality and by Inu-Yasha's crudeness. She has courage, and can be intimidating to other characters when riled, but emotionally she's quite weak and shies away from conflict about relationships. Therefore, the idea of this fic was to show Kagome when she could no longer lie with a happy face to the others that everything was okay, and to show just how inexperienced she is of life. She comes from a society that, influenced by the West, is constricted by sexual prudery, which shows in her reaction - and unlike Sango and Miroku, focuses on the sexual betrayal of Inu-Yasha because of contemporary Japanese attitudes to incest and homosexuality which in the feudal era would have actually been relatively commonplace. She equates Sesshoumaru to another Kikyo, and acts towards him thus - as a rival for Inu-Yasha's affections, particularly with the baby, but not one she would hurt. Her inherent desperation to resolve problems and to be fair leads her to impossible or naïve solutions to the situation.

 

Sango, the demon slayer, is a feudal woman outside of society's strictures - she already defies normalcy by being a woman who bears arms, so the unusual sexual nature of the relationship doesn't bother her, coming as she does from a climate accepting to homosexuality and, to a certain level, familial incest. In the manga, she made a move to attack Sesshoumaru before during one of his battles with Inu-Yasha, and has kept an uneasy distance from him - she may not view him as she does Naraku, the absolute enemy, but as an uncertain element that may or may not bring danger. Therefore, I thought she'd judge him by the aftermath his appearance brings to the group - not a particularly pleasant one with the fighting caused in Inu-Yasha and Kagome. And because of her sisterly affection for Kagome, this reaction is heightened. She's also a demon slayer and trained to kill youkai, so I think this would be a natural (if extreme) reaction to the potential destructiveness Sesshoumaru brings to the fragile group. Nor is she done with simply aiding him in leaving!