InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Thicker Than Water ❯ Sowing the Seeds ( Chapter 1 )

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of its associated characters. This disclaimer shall apply for the entire length of this fanfiction.

Thicker Than Water

"The pomp and elation

the duty and vocation

the blood of the hybrid

it's just a recipe."

- "Recipe for Hate," Bad Religion

Chapter One: Sowing the Seeds

"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

- "End of the World," REM

The thud of his horse's hooves sounded startlingly loud in the stillness of the forest, the even, trotting beat pulsing in sharp relief against the gentler sounds of brush and branches catching at his clothes. By now the noises were familiar, but in this case familiarity bred irritation rather than comfort.

Just two weeks ago, he had been seated comfortably in his house, listening to his mother stir the stew over the fire, savoring the warm mesh of scents wafting from the pot, and idly wondering if the roof would need much repair before winter's chill arrival. Right now, however, he found it hard to believe he had ever enjoyed such beatific domesticity and effortless comfort. He had ridden doggedly this past half-month, staining his feet and clothes brown with grime and dust, his back and thighs in a constant ache from days spent entirely on horseback, and had been nearly waylaid by men hungrier than he more times than he could count. Horses seemed to drop out from under him, turned lanky and worn by hard travel. He himself was not much better off. The force of days spent roughing it had worn his usually monolithic patience and calm into a persistent frantic exasperation that had him twitching at shadows.

If this one lead he had managed to find proved to be nothing but hearsay or blatant lies, he might as well just keep riding straight ahead until the sea swallowed him up for all the good it would do him or his lady.

Lady Usei. It was the thought of her that had kept him on this wild goose chase over the past week, and the thought of what awaited her if he didn't manage to turn up something. Losing one's ancestral lands might not seem like much to an uneducated yokel who'd never had any to begin with, but he knew what happened to women, particularly noblewomen, who didn't have any family or money to support them. After having watched Lady Usei grow from a stuttering toddler who had played with him at hiding from the boringly polite world of the adults and with whom he had stolen the cook's pastries, to a solemn young lady with a shy smile and a gentle sense of humor, he could not consign her to that. The only dowry she could offer a prospective suitor was her land itself, and that, though lush, was not large, and offered no military advantage whatsoever. Even this pitiful incentive might have netted some poor princeling, had it not been for the taint that hovered over her family name. Shiroyama was dogged with enough rumors of supernatural trickery to make even the skeptical cautious. Unless a male heir to the territory could be found, the lords of the neighboring regions, never adverse to an easy conquest, would fall upon the land, having the ready excuse of its lordlessness.

So here was Shunsoku, the Lady Shiroyama Usei's personal courier and childhood playmate, 18 years old and already sporting twinges in his joints. His back ached, and he suffered a hacking cough worthy of any half-starved, pneumatic village grandfather, having hunted all over the provinces for the (possibly mythical) cousin of his lady. Lady Usei's grandmother had had an elder sister who had apparently been married off to someone, and though the family records mentioned a child, nothing had been seen or heard of the two since. The cousin would have been 66 years old by now, and Shunsoku, being of a naturally pessimistic bent of mind, was convinced that he had either succumbed to old age or had never existed to begin with. As the weeks went on, and the road got longer and longer and his time shorter and shorter, he found himself more and more inclined toward the latter theory. The name recorded in the family records for the cousin was the only thing he had to go on, and it really sounded more like an elaborate joke or the delirious musings of a drunken novice monk than a real name. After all, who would be so stupid as to give a child a name as ill-omened as Inuyasha?

Nevertheless, with that name the only thing he had to go on, all he could do when the message from the neighboring lords came was to take his leave of Shiroyama and set about scouring the countryside as best he could for any trace of Cousin Inuyasha's hide, hoping against hope to find the old man in the flesh, or even a competent imposter who wouldn't charge too much for his services.At this rate, neither was likely. People usually just looked at him with a quirk in their eyebrows when he asked if they had an old man named Inuyasha in their village, wondering if a name like that could possibly taken seriously. A few expressed sympathy in the tones one uses to console an individual of uncertain mental stability, and a few laughed, but none had said anything that had given him any hope until the last village he had stopped at.

Every village had its little old lady who served as a repository for the community's collective memory. They were inevitably cantankerous, querulous, cajoling, and cooing by turns, and seemed to know everything related to town history past and present, from the year the bridge had washed out to which of the local teenagers were sneaking off into the woods together. Over the course of his search, Shunsoku had wised up to the facts of life, and now had gotten into the habit of making a beeline for whichever harridan presided over town society when he entered a new village, having determined that if anyone knew anything about Cousin Inuyasha, it would be her.

The last village's old lady hadn't been much different from any of the others he'd visited. Maybe a little more wrinkly, and with a pleasantly rasping voice, like the scrape of tree limbs brushing together, but in other respects congruent with the standard model. When he'd asked her about an old man named Inuyasha, however, she'd stuck her staff firmly in the ground, squinted up at him, and rubbed her chin thoughtfully.

"Inuyasha? Funny name. Way back before you were born, sonny, they used to have an Inuyasha in the next village over. Come to think of it, there was some funny business between him and a miko back around the year lighting struck the granary, wasn't there? Hmph. Thought he'd died, but I guess not if you're looking for him. Good luck, dearie. And if you find him, tell me what happened with him and the miko. Always thought men who fooled around with priestesses were a funny lot."

After so much fruitless searching, wasted breath, and worthless interviews, Shunsoku's reaction to this torrent of information had been to stare fixedly down at the old lady with eyes the size of ripe plums, mouth wide enough agape for a spider to build a respectably spacious web between his eyeteeth. The old lady had harrumphed, informed him in a stern mothering tone that if he stayed there, his face would freeze like that, and marched back over to her seat in the village square. After that, his jaws abruptly clicked together and he spun on his heel and very nearly ran back to where his patient horse waited, tied ignominiously to a fence post. He mounted so quickly that he could never afterwards remember whether he had, in fact, leapt into the saddle as he seemed to recall doing, and eagerly turned the mare's head back into the tangled green sprawled across the road, riding heedlessly through the mire of brambles for the next village over.

But after the initial jubilation at finding anything - anything at all - relating to Lady Usei's long-lost cousin had worn off and he'd had time to think over what the old lady had actually said, his doubts had come rushing back.

The old lady had thought Inuyasha was dead.

It sounded, from the miko bit, as if his lady's cousin had considered himself pretty hot stuff in his youth. Maybe he had been enough of a young idiot to toss himself off a cliff on a dare, or get smitten by a lightning bolt for being too much of an ass or something.

The old coot had better still be around, or there would have been no point at all to this search, and no hope at all for Lady Usei.

And thinking such dark thoughts as these, Shunsoku rode doggedly through the whispering forest as the sky became golden with late afternoon.

* * * * *

By the time he arrived at the next village over, the shadows had begun to tangle across the path. The air glowed orange, soft and warm as the blush of an apricot, and hung heavy and relaxed, speckled with the chatter and calls of villagers coming back from the fields. As Shunsoku had expected, the resident wise old lady sat in state at one end of the village, a cluster of awed children around her, waiting to be sent hither and thither on the her imperiously commanded errands. As he came closer, he could see that this particular old lady wore an eye-patch that, along with her determined manner, reminded him distinctly of the captain of the guard back home.

As he approached, the children scattered, leaving him alone to face the old lady staring pointedly up at him with her one eye.

"Can I help you, young man?"

Shunsoku took a deep breath and said, as respectfully as he could,

"As a matter of fact, you can. Do you have in your village a man named Inuyasha?"

At this, the old lady abruptly straightened up, and gave Shunsoku a sharp-eyed inspection that might have left a less desperate man quivering in his boots.

"Now what do you want with Inuyasha?"

Shunsoku's heart gave a grand leap and set about doing cartwheels in his thorax. The old man was in this village! Moreover, he was still alive! At long last, he could go home with a solution to Lady Usei's troubles, and soon enough life would resume its peaceful, pleasant course.

…As soon as he got the old lady to tell him where Inuyasha was, of course.

So Shunsoku set about the task of explaining who he was and why he'd come, and as he did so, the old lady's previously grim expression became more and more open, and, had Shunsoku not been quite so engrossed in extracting the necessary information, he would have been a bit wary of the dryly humorous glint of her one eye. At the end of it, she gave a rumbling chuckle and sat back down.

"So Inuyasha's inherited a state, has he? Go on into the woods that way and you'll find him eventually."

Shunsoku, elated, jogged over to the woods in question and disappeared into them with alacrity. Kaede shook her head and chuckled once more at the thought of Inuyasha in a lord's court. Oh, the poor earnest young man had a surprise coming to him, he did. Inuyasha too.

* * * * *

As Shunsoku strode deeper and deeper into the woods, thorns catching at him with their dangerous caress, and leaves folding themselves demurely against his clothing, elation gave way to nagging worry as no sign of a house, a hut, or even a path showed any inclination of appearing. Eventually, upon reaching a clearing of sorts, really nothing more than a token absence of reaching green, he slumped down to rest against the smooth gray trunk of a convenient tree. Perhaps the old lady back at the village had been playing a trick on him. Or maybe he'd just gotten lost. Maybe the old man had wandered off somewhere without telling anyone. It had been known to happen with old folks. Or perhaps….

Thunk!

"Ow!"

"Oi! You! Get your own tree! This one's mine!"

Shunsoku quit rubbing the indentation left in his skull by the nut the stranger had thrown at him and scowled upwards, expecting to find an obnoxious bumpkin to admonish and subsequently pump for information on the elusive Inuyasha. The scolding he had had in mind died abruptly in his throat when he caught a glimpse of his attacker staring down at him with a markedly offended scowl of his own and realized that "bumpkin" was a far-from-appropriate appellation.

Shunsoku couldn't believe the twists and turns his luck was taking today. First he had finally heard news on Lady Usei's hitherto-believed mythical cousin. Then, marvel of marvels, he had actually managed to find the village he supposedly inhabited. And now there was a youkai pelting him with acorns because he'd happened to sit down at the wrong tree.

"You deaf or something?"

"It's just a tree. You don't own it. I've got just as much right to sit here as you do."

The words were out of his mouth before he really had time to think about them, an automatic response conditioned by years of childhood spent squabbling over whose ball it really was. It was only after the fateful phrase had been uttered that it occurred to him that it might not have been the wisest thing to say. From aloft, a brief rustling was heard, and a muttered, "If you want something done, you've got to do it yourself." The youkai abruptly and soundlessly landed in front of Shunsoku, causing him to start violently.

"I was here first, so it's my tree. Get your own."

Seeing the youkai up close only solidified Shunsoku's growing conviction that he had just done something irredeemably stupid. Those claws looked all too sharp for his liking.

"Well? Are you going to move or not? 'Cause I'd be more than happy to help you."

At that moment, the heavens at last intervened on Shunsoku's behalf. The youkai's ears suddenly performed a full about-face, and Shunsoku heard a mumbled "Aw, fuck." Within a few seconds, he was enlightened as to the exact cause of the youkai's dismay as the bushes on the other side of the clearing rustled and a human girl clad in the most indecent outfit Shunsoku had ever witnessed emerged from the forest.

She took one look at the situation, stomped her foot in exasperation, and called out: "Inuyasha! What are you doing? Can't I leave you alone for a few minutes without you getting into trouble?"

This earned her a sulky "He started it" from the youkai named….

…Oh no.

It couldn't be.

Named Inuyasha?

"Leave him alone, Inuyasha."

Inuyasha snorted, and so as not to be completely thwarted, reached out his foot and nudged Shunsoku into a mud puddle cradled among the tree's roots.

"Inuyasha!"

"Keh. Moron."

And with that, he disappeared back into branches in an off-handed leap. The girl let out a frustrated snort and turned to Shunsoku with an air of long-suffering patience.

"I'm sorry. Sad to say, he's usually like this. What set him off this time?"

From Inuyasha's tree came another scornful snort.

"The idiot thought it would be a good idea to sit under my tree."

"It's not your very own tree!"

"It's my very own forest, isn't it?"

At this point, Shunsoku was wondering dazedly if he had gone mad. The youkai was Inuyasha…in which case he wasn't really a youkai, was he? Not that a hanyou lord was any improvement. And this was his forest. And, apparently, that was His Tree. And right now he was watching a girl in a ridiculously short skirt have a heated argument with his probable lord, sitting up in said tree, a bit of stark white hair dangling down, snarling insults. What was going on?

All the while he had been questioning his sanity, the argument between Inuyasha and the girl had been escalating, until finally the latter rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips.

"Inuyasha, SIT!"

And Shunsoku watched dumbfounded as Inuyasha, howling curses all the way, plummeted down from the tree as if yanked to the ground by a string. A resounding thud echoed throughout the clearing, and Shunsoku winced reflexively.

Inuyasha picked himself painfully up off the ground, ground out one final "Keh," and spun on his heel to stalk off into the forest, thorns twining about his legs and finding no purchase on the cloth of his hakama.

* * * * *

Kagome watched him go, filled with the old familiar anger at his stubbornness and insults. Best to give him a while to cool down and then go and scold him. It was beyond the bounds of even what one could reasonably expect from Inuyasha in the way of civility to bully someone simply for leaning against a tree trunk. No matter in whose forest the tree in question happened to grow.

In the meantime, she had better attend to the poor man who had watched the entire scene take place. She turned to face him, and noticed the stupefied stare plastered all over his face. Arr, Inuyasha. Always had to make a scene.

"I'm sorry about that. I'm Kagome."

He snapped out of it, shook his head, and belatedly stood up, making an attempt to wring the muddy water out of his clothes.

"Um, Shunsoku, personal courier to Lady Shiroyama Usei. Thank you. I think you saved my life," he said with a somewhat shaky laugh. Kagome dismissed his thanks with a flustered hand wave.

"You'd have been ok. Inuyasha's really not as bad as he seems. Really."

"Ah…excuse me if this sounds rude or intrusive, but is Inuyasha really his name?" he asked, suddenly hesitant.

Kagome gave him a funny look, wondering if perhaps Inuyasha had clouted him over the head before she got there. Considering Inuyasha's obviously demonic features, she would not have thought he would find such a functional, honestly descriptive sobriquet odd…although to be truthful, the first time she herself had heard it, it had struck her as more of an appellation than a real name. Still, it was a peculiar question to ask.

"I've never heard him use any other. Why do you ask?"

At this, Shunsoku groaned and reached up with one hand to massage his forehead in the universal gesture of impending headache, the motion rendered somewhat comical by his size and formidable muscularity.

"I've been looking for someone named Inuyasha for the past two weeks…"

"Why?"

Kagome took a step back, instantly suspicious, and suddenly feeling a little nervous. It struck her that Shunsoku was a very large man whom she did not know in the slightest, and she had just sent Inuyasha, overprotective badass extraordinaire, off in a huff. Perhaps just as well for him. People who were looking for Inuyasha usually wanted to kill him. But it still left her in a potentially dangerous situation that she would have little hope of getting out of, should things get ugly. She didn't have her bow and quiver on her at the moment. Kagome backed warily away from Shunsoku, trying to put some distance between them without seeming overtly rude.

As she did so, Shunsoku began to haltingly explain himself, sounding as if he had to work hard not to bite his tongue on every word, and Kagome, while keeping a safe distance between them, listened a bit more sympathetically than she might have a moment ago. He sounded like Souta trying to explain one of his more drastic mishaps to her mother.

"I…That is, I've come from the Shiroyama lands. Lady Usei cannot secure an alliance by marriage, and if a male heir is not found, Shiroyama will be annexed by one of the other states. We looked through the family records, and we found a mention of a cousin to Lady Usei, long since disappeared, named Inuyasha."

Kagome's mouth opened and closed briefly as the information sank in. Oh. That made sense, in a completely unanticipated way. She had never expected trouble to come from Inuyasha's mother's family. In fact, she had thought that Sesshoumaru was the only family he had left. But…did Shunsoku have any idea what he was getting into? Inuyasha in court? Presiding over a harvest festival? Playing at intrigue? She could just hear him responding to polite diplomacy now. "Fuck off, asshole. I don't need no stinkin' alliance."

"Ah, Shunsoku…you don't really know Inuyasha…are you really sure it's a good idea to make him your lord? I mean…you just saw him right now, and, well, that's the way he is pretty much all the time."

Shunsoku groaned. "He's always rude and dangerous?"

Kagome bit her lip in consideration, trying to give him an honest answer that would make him see that Inuyasha was not a good candidate for nobility without making him sound too much the bad guy.

"Rude, yes. He's always rude. Dangerous…he can be. Usually not unless there's a good reason, but he can be. He wasn't seriously threatening you back there, he just wanted you off his tree." Here Kagome paused a few seconds to gather her thoughts before continuing. "Shunsoku, please reconsider. Inuyasha has his own quest at the moment. If, by some miracle, you managed to drag him away from it, he would not make a good lord. Even if you performed a double miracle and convinced the people there to accept a hanyou lord, the likelihood that he would not get your state into trouble is very, very small."

Shunsoku's expression, already glum, had turned almost desperate by the time she finished her speech. He was quiet for a few seconds after its conclusion before seeming to pick up determination once again. "Kagome…you seem to know him well. Could you please talk to him? I…If we do not find a lord, Lady Usei will have nowhere to go and no one to care for her. I would look after her as long as I could, but I don't have much, and in the end there are only so many possible employments for a disinherited noblewoman, none of them pleasant. I've been in her service since we were both small children, and I would not wish that to happen to her. Please try and talk to him."

Kagome felt suddenly very much ashamed. It was sometimes easy for her to forget that the freedom Sango and herself enjoyed was only granted them in this time and place because of their special circumstances, and that those same circumstances made them both outcasts in many eyes. Kagome herself did not have to deal much with it. She could always hop back through the well into a world where a woman could hold a job and speak her mind, but she had seen the looks and whispers Sango generated on the rare occasions people saw her in her battle gear, fighting with a vicious accuracy that her calm face concealed well. The thought that a woman, probably near her own age, fallen on hard times might have no recourse at all turned her stomach and made her feel guilty for the warm, comfortable life she led intermittently on the other side of the well.

"I…I'll see what I can do. I can't promise anything, but I will talk to him. If you go back that way to the village and wait with Kaede-baachan, I'll be back in a little while."

Shunsoku nodded and bid her a polite farewell. Kagome watched his shoulders slump as he walked off, clearly indicating that he thought the battle already lost. With a sigh, she straightened her back and marched off to search for Inuyasha. Think what Shunsoku might think, Shikon shards or no Shikon shards, she would see to it that Inuyasha shouldered his responsibilities, at least for long enough to arrange something for Shunsoku's lady.

* * * * *

Inuyasha ground his heel on the arched back of a fallen branch, enjoying the satisfying crunch it made as the twigs touching the ground snapped under his weight. Dammit. There hadn't been any call for that. Well, all right, maybe there had been. Maybe booting the man into a mud puddle had been a little extreme, and maybe he'd put his foot in his mouth one time (ok, a few times) too many during that argument - But he wasn't backing down on the "my tree/your tree" business. It was perfectly reasonable that he be allowed a personal tree in a forest named after him.

And he hated being sat in front of other people.

With a leap he was back up in the branches, leaning irritably against a tree trunk as he turned an ear to cup the mumbled tones of Kagome's conversation with the interloper. Not that he thought there'd be trouble or anything. Just in case. Can never be too careful. Soon enough, the sound of voices ceased and was replaced by the sound of footsteps. That would be Kagome, coming to extract an explanation from him. He could tell from the distinctive skidding noise her shoes made against the dry leaves covering the ground.

Inuyasha carefully rearranged himself into a position of brooding nonchalance and settled down to wait. After the sit, he was not in the mood to be cooperative.

* * * * *

"Inuyasha! Come down from there!"

"What for, wench?"

"I want to talk to you!"

"So do it from there. Don't feel like moving."

"You don't want me to say it again, do you?"

Kagome watched impatiently as Inuyasha shot her a dirty look and got up slowly, only to squeak and leap reflexively backwards when he jumped down to land only a few inches in front of her. His expression didn't budge from its habitual scowl, but the slightly smug glint to his eyes told her that the near-miss hadn't been an accident.

"So?"

She bristled and bit back a sarcastic retort as she thought how to best to broach the subject. "I was talking to the man you were so busy intimidating…"

"It's his own fault he wouldn't move."

Kagome cleared her throat and shot him a glare. "As I said, I was talking to him. It turns out that he was looking for you."

"He was what?!"

Inuyasha's claws tensed at his sides and his ears flattened all the way back. Kagome hurried on, grabbing the billowing sleeve of his haori to prevent him from going off and beating the shit out of Shunsoku before she could get to the important parts.

"Don't jump to conclusions! It's not what you're probably thinking!"

"Oh? And then what is it?" he inquired, sarcastically innocent.

Kagome gulped. Now came the tricky part. She had no idea how he was going to take this. Inuyasha's family was a touchy subject, and she had learned to avoid it whenever possible, finding that no matter how delicate or well-meaning the inquiry, all it earned you in the end for your trouble was a brooding dog-demon.

"His lady will be thrown out of her home and her lands lost if a male heir to the property is not found. They looked through the family records, and the last remaining male heir is you. You're apparently the only candidate for lord."

The reaction was immediate. Inuyasha's position moved not one millimeter, but his eyes snapped wide open, as if he had just been slapped, and Kagome could almost hear the barrier slam down behind his irises.

"No," he said flatly, voice dangerously even, and turned and crouched to leap back into his tree. Again her hand entangled itself in his sleeve in a silent plea for him to halt his progress.

"Please, Inuyasha. The lady is your cousin."

"I've never met her in my life. I have no responsibility to her."

Kagome's patience stretched thin and snapped like a bowstring, wire-thin loose ends whipping through her consciousness, stirring up anger and indignation at his callousness in their wake. He was being unreasonable, and this was too important for her to let him just walk away from it, even if she had to fight dirty to make him listen.

"Inuyasha, if you don't go, she will have nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Who knows what will happen to her? She's probably not much older than I am! And you're too stubborn and self-centered to set aside your pride and do what any humane, mature person would do if a relative were in that kind of trouble! I somehow thought maybe you were just grown up enough to do the right thing, but I guess I was wrong."

Inuyasha was silent for a moment, gone absolutely still. Finally, a mumbled sound of frustration escaped him and he suddenly whirled, ripping his sleeve out of Kagome's hand and bent down to her level to glare at her bitterly before barking out a reply.

"All right, dammit! I'll take up the responsibility. Go back and tell the idiot-troop we're leaving first thing tomorrow morning."

And with a snap of thick cloth, he was back up in the branches, barely giving hands and feet time to scrape rough bark before ricocheting off into another tree at a speed that rendered him near invisible. Kagome stood still at the base of his adopted tree, fists slowly unclenching and a victorious smile spreading across her face. Eager to tell the news to the others, she too turned and jogged back through the forest.

AN: Innumerable thanks to KellyChan, Merith, and Chri for giving this chapter a good, thorough critiquing. Had it not been for their help, I have a feeling that I would later look back on this posting as one of the more cringe-worthy episodes in my online existence.

And thank you also to those of you who read this. If you enjoyed it, I'm pleased and gratified. If not and you're still reading this, well, I'm grateful that you were at least willing to read it through to the end.