Regenerist

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April 21, 1991

Dexter, Maine

 

Sesshomaru didn’t know if it was fortunate or unfortunate yet that the collision that broke his left femur in three spots happened.

Right now he was leaning towards the unfortunate, because leaning on anything was not as good as standing on his own.

“Sesshomaru, if you had just paid attention to the nurse staff you wouldn’t be having this problem. You have to lead with your injured leg…” Kagura was saying exasperatedly behind him. Her hands were clenched onto the crutches that he hated as if she was going to move them forward and walk him step by step through them. He hated hand over hand instruction. It made him feel like he was three again.

As if that wasn’t annoying enough…

“Ah… does super mutt-face need to be carried up the steps?” The altogether too familiar sound of Kouga’s voice was jeering at him from the porch. The porch to Sesshomaru’s home, which only had three stupid steps that he had to climb in order to get inside, was a pitifully annoying obstacle. He considered jumping the steps, but thought better of it since he was very lopsidedly casted from the hip down on his left side. It didn’t lead for good balance, but the bigger problem was the lack of mobility it allowed. The cast did its job. So even though he would make the leap the landing might be less than pleasant if he couldn’t get his injured leg out of the way.

“Maybe you should carry him up, Kouga.” Kagura was saying behind Sesshomaru.

Growling he let go of the crutches. They would have dropped to his sides if Kagura wasn’t already holding them in her futile attempts to try to teach him how to use them. Propelling himself upside down into a handstand, Sesshomaru found the stairs much easier to traverse walking on his hands. A sharp pain lanced through his leg, probably at the shifting of gravity. One grainy splintery step after another passed under his fingertips. He needed to get the porch refinished, he decided in the haze of his own thoughts. The splintering wood was a little hazardous to his hands, and yet he let his pack run around this porch every day. Their paws were much more sensitive.

For a moment Sesshomaru berated himself for not having noticed the poor conditions of the running grounds. It was his job to protect the pack.

One mission accomplished: stairs traversed and standing on his own. He willfully ignored that said standing was on his hands. At least it was by himself. And he only had one more, measly step up into the trailer.

 His field of vision was suddenly blocked by dirty bare feet barely covered by ratty grass stained jeans.

“Get out of my way.”

The person attached to those feet squatted down so that Sesshomaru could see his face. Kouga was resting his chin on his hand and pretending that his knees were a tabletop to which his other arm laid across.

“I always knew you had shit for brains, mutt. Now how do you think you are going to get back up without needing help?”

Sesshomaru didn’t answer, instead he let his mind numb a little. He wondered absently if he ignored the wolf long enough how long would it take for him to go away. Another not so detached part of himself was giving his pride a mental beat down.

The obnoxious wolf was right. Sesshomaru was virtually stuck. He spent a moment pondering how to get unstuck without the obvious and humiliating answer of asking for help.

He glanced to his left to see Kagura still at the bottom of the stairs that he successfully – and independently – traversed. She was leaning on his crutches. He couldn’t look up too far to see her face without loosing his balance, but he was sure she wasn’t amused. Besides her breasts never gave him problems, in fact the curve of them underneath the tight cotton of one of his undershirts was a nice view. He could even pretend she wasn’t peeved while looking at them.

Back on topic, he groaned mentally and looked to his right. The railing and a beat up old grill he found in the garage. Neither of which were helpful. They were both too high from his current position to wrap a leg around and muscle his way up.

“This is more fun than putting a blanket over a puppy and watching them try to escape,” Kouga grinned down at him. “You know, I’ve heard that how long it takes them to get free is supposed to be a measure of intelligence.”

 

Sesshomaru snapped a glare at him.

And then something clicked. Strength, intelligence; his currently in question pride blinded him to the simplest option earlier. But he really couldn’t blame it. Until last night that simple option had been unavailable to him for decades.

Without any theatrics Sesshomaru concentrated, probably more than he needed to, but he was still a little distrustful that this would work. He felt his body speed up in a metabolic sense. He could feel the inner gears of his body grinding against disuse and with less prodding than he thought would have been necessary his youki increased into an exponentially great force.

He let it form into a fine mist around him a cloud to cushion his fall. He had not used his youki in this manner is a very long time, and he wasn’t sure his youki was catching up to speed with his wishes anyways. It hadn’t readily flared up when he was unsealed by the Syndicate doctor. His body was sleeping still.

He opened his eyes satisfactorily to see Kouga’s surprised visage still looking down at him.

Sesshomaru let himself fall and was immediately blanketed by the weightlessness of his youki. Just as he imagined there was no unpleasant jostling at all as he was virtually landing in a cloud of his demonic energy. In fact he felt giddy to have this power restored to him.

Pulling himself up to a seated position on the nearly imperceptible cloud of his very missed powers Sesshomaru glared at the wolf as if telling him by the force of his gaze to get out of the way.

Kouga rolled his eyes, uncurled himself from his crouched position, and stepped aside holding the front door open with one hand.

Sesshomaru, feeling pretty damn proud of himself, glided in with an air of superiority and quickly landed himself on his couch. Satisfied he lifted his cast leg up onto the couch. The blood throbbed under his skin from the tumbling of his body from right-side up, to upside-down, and back again.

“Oh! Welcome home, Sesshomaru.” The soft girly voice of Kouga’s mate spoke to him. Sesshomaru looked towards the kitchen to see her happily scrubbing down a dog that Sesshomaru only recently acquired in the sink. The dog looked absolutely miserable with a mound of shinning white bubbles weighing down its fur. The shampoo smelled like chemicals and green.

“I didn’t know you could still do that, mutt.” Kouga quipped arms crossed over his chest as he entered the house. Kagura stepped in a moment after him. “You know you really shouldn’t be doing that in public though. If a human saw that…”

“Kouga, leave him alone.” Kagura finally said, though she sounded exhausted. “The service providers decided to remove his spells so that he could recover faster.”

“That is very fortunate for you,” Ayame said from the kitchen before spraying down the soapy dog she held in the sink. “I have heard from our sisters in the Coyote packs that the PrairieDog demons are massive in numbers. You’ll be able to get though this faster with your full powers.” Ayame smiled at him with a sad understanding.

Sesshomaru liked the feeling of being without the spells. He was certain he never appreciated the natural feeling of his uninhibited self so much as he did now that he knew what it was like to be bound. He felt like himself in body even though the feeling was dampened by the disassociation he was experiencing, disassociation that was only deepening into a lake with Ayame’s sad words. Sesshomaru was feeling far away in his mind, and it logically repeated to him that there was danger in coming back into that part of him.

It was dangerous because then he would be forced to feel. Sesshomaru was never the kind of person who took much stock in fostering strong emotions. He wondered blandly if ones emotional outlook increased because of age, or if it was just the severity of situations that caused useless debilitating flares of intensity inside of him.

He felt a little broken.

In that brokenness he felt the dredge of helplessness crawl through him. Yes, he supposed, maybe it was fortunate that his powers were returned to him just when Kagura decided it was time to exact revenge. But he wasn’t sure if he liked the plan of whatever god was using him as a marionette.

Without the spells a fight that would have been risky was becoming realistically winnable. Just as long as his leg healed anyways, the human doctor that originally saw him in the emergency room claimed that he was going to need immediate surgery to screw the bones back together and possibly a metal rod to hold it all together.

A Syndicate endorsed doctor saw him an hour later, ordered for his spells to be removed and then roughly shoved his bones back in place. He stayed in the hospital overnight, and was given paperwork from the office in Bangor saying that he was officially ‘on leave’ for six weeks.

They were insulting him by insinuating that it would take that long for him to heal.

“Are you just going to sit there and ignore us, dog-breath?” Kouga growled standing in front of the couch with a brash smile and his arms crossed.

“What?” Sesshomaru asked confused. He didn’t feel like he was ignoring anyone. He simply wasn’t in much of a mood to talk. Something warm settled on the couch next to him and Sesshomaru found his side being used as a pillow by Kagura. She hadn’t been so hurt in the car crash. Bruises, a few cuts, nothing serious. Sesshomaru was glad for that. He didn’t like seeing Kagura hurt. He glanced to his side not being able to see her face because it was turned down. She didn’t seem right though. He was surprised she stayed after their argument.

“I was asking you if there was anything you could tell us about the regenerist?” Ayame asked gently scrubbing the wet dog in the sink. Sesshomaru wondered why that one was getting bath duty when the rest of the pack was outside tumbling around in the relative wilderness of the woodsy backyard. “Kouga’s seen her already…”

“She growled at me.” Kouga huffed. “She’s got one heck of a nose on her.”

Sesshomaru felt his heart shuddering in the cold ice of his blood. His attention was snared and the tangle of it was suffocating him.

“She growled at you?” Kagura questioned from by his side acting like a little conduit for one of the billions of things he could have said in the moment. But her voice was listless and tired. Kouga shrugged as if it was no big deal… as if it wasn’t a big deal that he probably just cost Sesshomaru everything.

Another slosh of emotion, this time new emotion that was raw and cutting made Sesshomaru’s skin tingle.

“Yeah, the pup got taken out of school yesterday because she got sick, and her mom decided to take her to the supermarket. I ran into them at the checkout.” Kouga huffed.

Sesshomaru growled. Damnit. Damnit… They were found out.

“Sesshomaru?” Kagura whispered beside him. Her hand found his and squeezed.

“If you cost me this job I will kill you.” Sesshomaru addressed the wolf coldly. Kouga snorted waving his hand about as if nothing Sesshomaru said mattered.

“Feh, whatever doggy. It was an honest mistake. The pup has no idea what’s going on, she’s like a newborn with her senses closed. I don’t get why you are so tied up about this. It’s not going to happen again.”

The insolence only made Sesshomaru feel more bile come to the back of his throat. He was going to puke or destroy something, and he wasn’t entirely sure which way it was going to go yet.

“Sesshomaru…” Kagura spoke again a whisper of wind beside him. He barely heard her.

“You are right. This will not happen again. I am staying here. I will not let Rin be taken away from me again.” Sesshomaru growled still imagining that he could throw the tactless wolf from his house with just the force of his words. He tried to picture Kouga tumbling headfirst into the grass of the front lawn.

His words did not banish anything though.

For a long moment after the words left him all he could hear was the faucet running where Ayame had stopped rinsing the soapy dog to stare at him. Kouga’s expression had melted from carefree insolence to something that Sesshomaru couldn’t quite pinpoint, but looked an awful lot like pity.

Beside him cloth rustled on cloth and Kagura stood up. Her shoulders were stiff and her hands clenched into fists. She smelled upset, she smelled like tears.

“Kagura?” Sesshomaru ventured as she walked past him towards the back of the trailer. She paused for a moment and looked back at him.

Her angry face was filled with tears. She was biting onto her lower lip, and when she blinked the salty water of her sorrow poured down her cheeks. Opening her mouth she looked like she was going to say something and then sighed averting her eyes.

Quickly Kagura grabbed a purse that must have been hers off of one of the seats at the kitchen table. Sesshomaru watched wearily as she wiped her eyes and turned to Ayame.

“I’m sorry to have dragged you into this.” Kagura began. “I’m going to the airport now.”

 

“Um…” Ayame began looking uncomfortable as she fumbled to shut off the faucet. “You’re flight doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning…”

“I’m sure I can find something to dismember until then.” Kagura said and then turned to shoot an evil glare at Sesshomaru. Raising an eyebrow Sesshomaru huffed.

“You are too quick to anger.” Sesshomaru scolded half hoping that she would leave so that he didn’t have to smell her tears, and half hoping that she would stay. Damn attachment, she was pack and she was hurting. Sesshomaru grappled with himself wondering how to make her tears go away. He wasn’t even entirely sure why she was crying.

“You’re such an idiot, Sesshomaru.” She whispered even as a new film of tears coated her eyes, “You would have avenged them if they were her children.”

Confused Sesshomaru watched as Kagura tugged open her purse and dug around for her keys trying not to blink so that her tears wouldn’t come out. It didn’t work and with every warm drop that fell from her eyes Sesshomaru felt more and more like he was going to implode. Her children? Was she referring to Rin?

“What?” He asked when she finally found her keys. She tugged them harshly out of her worn purse. The jangle of them filled the air. Her hand rested on the doorknob. “That came out of nowhere.”

Kagura paused for a moment. All he could see was her back turned towards him. She was wearing his clothes, wrapped up in his scent and her tears. And she was in pain! And he needed to root out what caused that pain and make it better, because he knew this didn’t just have to do with the old constant pain that they both felt when remembering the twins.

It was still slinking away from his brain the connections to her words. He was wandering in the ignorance of the real meaning of her words. Ignorance was not bliss, ignorance was torture.

He heard her sigh and waited for an explanation, but she just opened the door and walked out. She shut the door quietly as if trying to sneak out.

Mouth twisting into a scowl Sesshomaru contemplated getting up and going after her, demanding that she tell him what the hell got her so strung up… Now his insides felt like jelly and his instincts screamed for him to retrieve her.

His leg hurt.

He was so wrapped up in it that he almost didn’t notice the derisive laugh that came from the wolf prince.

“Damn, Sesshomaru, you really are an idiot aren’t you.” Kouga chuckled darkly into the thick air of the trailer. “You’re worse than your brother.”

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