Whoa... I hope I won't disappoint you all... If I turn this into a deathfic, I'll give a warning but else I don't want to give anything away yet :)
Sorry ajj7sunhawk it seems I really misunderstood... *claps hands together* I'm sorry!!! >___<
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Like so often Sesshomaru was lying on the floor of the working room and listened with closed eyes to the sounds around him, the warm air of first summer evening lazily sleeping around him when he heard the keys. At first he thought it to be another illusion, a mere fantasy of his strangely deprived mind but the sound of the door opening sounded too real for it to be an illusion as whoever just entered the house did it with an ungraceful stumbling over Sesshomaru shoes. The youkai opened his eyes and propped himself up on his elbows to look at the entrance to the work room. Fabric rustled in the hallway and suddenly Inuyasha was standing in the doorway, looking at Sesshomaru with eyes round of surprise.
“Sesshomaru you…”
“Inuyasha…”
Then a ball of white hair tackled the youkai and Sesshomaru's head hit the ground almost painfully from the shock of his little brother throwing himself at him. Book piles fell and the youkai found himself lying on his back again but this time with the weight of his younger brother on him. He hissed lightly before asking:
“Inuya-…?”
“Finally back… I thought ‘it’ would never end…”
Sesshomaru chuckled and rubbed the back of the hanyou snuggling against him like a little brother who hadn’t seen his elder brother for ages.
“I missed you…”
“Really?”
“Yeah… I was close to calling you I-don’t-know-how-many times… Are all the ‘plants’ alive?”
“Hmmm… all the ‘plants’ are alive and well… they missed you as well.”
“Haha... thank you.”
“You’re welcome… are you alright now?”
The hanyou looked up and after laying his chin on his hands folded over the chest that had no difficulty whatsoever to breathe, he said with a rather big and uncharacteristic grin:
“Yup.”
Sesshomaru tipped against his cheeks that were still slightly hollow.
“I don’t call that alright…”
“Oh, that’s just a question of stuffing me with good food… speaking of food… I’m starving. Do you want dinner?”
“Sure, why not?”
Inuyasha scrambled off Sesshomaru who sat up, looking at his brother beaming with joy and somehow looking stronger even if his body was almost as scrawny as before. It was bewildering as it seemed like the personality of his younger brother had been exchanged or rather reversed to its past state, if Sesshomaru had judged his brother’s character in past as good as he could now. He looked at the hanyou almost dancing into the kitchen and followed him. Inuyasha even hummed as he opened the drawers and looked into the fridge to see if there was something to make dinner. His elder brother leaned against a wooden pillar and after a while of watching him, said while shaking his head:
“Who are you and what happened to my grumpy little brother?”
“Huh, what? Ah… eeehm… don’t worry, as soon as the excitement of getting back home and seeing you - and getting dinner – dies down and I’m back at my work, I’ll be… calmer... I guess.”
Sesshomaru laughed softly and as he was a bit appeased he said:
“Fancy going out to a restaurant? It’s on me…”
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They came back a few hours later, stuffed with the grilled meat from the best youkai-held restaurant in a suburb of Tokyo where Sesshomaru was a regular customer. They had spent the evening chatting and laughing a lot, which was rather unusual for both of them. Inuyasha stood in the doorway to his work room and scratched his head.
“Ayaaa… what a mess.”
“It’s your fault.”
“Yeah, yeah… I know. Well then, let’s get those sorted out…”
“There’s an order to these piles?”
“Sesshomaru…”
“I’ll… go and choose a next book.”
“Haven’t you already read all of them?”
“Not yet… but I’m counting on you to produce some more…”
“Write them yourself.”
The hanyou stretched, visibly more at ease with his body than before his absence and began to pile up books in a seemingly haphazard way. Sesshomaru observed him for a minute before he went to the other room. There, basking in the light of the full moon was his personal favorite drug after the sight of the producer of said drug himself. The youkai crouched down to examine the lower racks which he hadn’t yet gone through so far. After selecting a book he stood up with elegance proper to his nature and wanted to leave the room when he saw the other bookshelf on the adjacent wall. It was smaller as it only contained only the notebooks of his brother, most of them in black and of a handy size, just small enough to be easily carried everywhere and big enough to draw whatever floated through the mind of the hanyou when he thought up a story. Sesshomaru thought that it wouldn’t be so bad to end his abstinence of reading with picking one notebook at random and skim a bit through it even if Inuyasha wasn’t really fond of him “sniffing around his thoughts” as he described it.
His long and pale fingers traced the backs of the notebooks lazily and yet carefully as he if waited for a whisper of the right notebook to tell and his choice fell on an old one, visibly more battered than most of them. The leather covering it was softened and the color scratched off on many places as if Inuyasha had used that book more than all the others, cherishing it just as much as the story hidden inside. A postcard was stuck in it and the youkai opened it there. It was a postcard with the picture of the half-moon Inuyasha used as a picture for himself in the books. With a gently chuckle Sesshomaru trailed over it while knowing perfectly why the hanyou had chosen it to represent himself. Then, he took it out to see what was hiding behind the piece of paper.
The picture of the moon fell to the earth as Sesshomaru discovered in the moonlight a portrait of himself, drawn with care and love for the slightest details. Had Sesshomaru been human, his hands would have trembled but keeping himself under as much control as he could, his fingertips ghosted over his own face, recognizable as if it was a photo. He turned the page and found other pictures of himself, both in armor and with the momoko, a take at his beast form and… a trial at him in human appearance. Inuyasha had given him the clothes of a noble dancer and while a certain hunch filled his mind, he glanced shortly at the first page of the book where Inuyasha usually wrote the title of the story in calligraphy. His breath hitched up at the sight of the name <A Song to the Moon>. The youkai didn’t know how long he stood there, looking at each page filled with details, mostly drawings and rather few notes about the story as if the story was less important to him than the characters of which only the elder brother, meaning both himself and the figure of the story. There were drawings of swords, mainly Tessaiga and Tensaiga, and following after it the pictures of flutes as if Inuyasha had tried to hide the deadly forms of their swords into the similarly shaped harmless instruments.
Sesshomaru found a collection of words concerning the condition of the younger brother like “useless”, “imperfect”, “faulty”, “impure” and many more and they sounded as if Inuyasha had conferred his own hanyou nature into a human’s. As he skimmed through towards the end, he found the pages concerning the ending. His brother had tried out several endings after the last sentence that had been printed in the end. The happy endings, where the elder brother would be moved by the song or by the words of his younger brother were invariably crossed out in an almost violent manner and commented with the only remark:
‘He’ll kill me no matter what I do.’
The endings where the younger brother died weren’t crossed out but often left half-finished, as if Inuyasha had lost the courage to end it completely. He just started anew again and again but in the end wrote only:
‘It hurts. End at “a song to the moon.”’
The youkai stood there, in front of the collected thoughts of his younger brother and tried to cope with the thought that he, Sesshomaru, the former Lord of the Western lands and elder brother of Inuyasha, had been the model for the character of the elder brother in <A Song to the Moon>. He wondered why their similarity had never occurred to him. Maybe it was because he himself had only recently begun to see himself as a brother. From the moment Inuyasha had been born to the moment he had become addicted to his works he had never considered him more than a bastard, a lower being who only shared a part of his blood due to a mistake of his father and had never seen himself as a brother before less than a year ago. He had assumed that it was the same for Inuyasha, that the hanyou had never regarded him as a proper brother and rather seen him as an enemy, a deadly presence he had to avoid at all costs and definitively not somebody to think of in his free time.
So why could Sesshomaru feel this great care in the drawings? Someone who was supposed to hate him, to fear him, couldn’t possibly remember even the finest details of his face and engrave them in his memories. He himself had never really paid attention to the hanyou’s face before their meeting in these times ruled by the humans; he had just kept his scent in memory like his nature as an inu youkai dictated him. And was this cold, cruel and heartless character really the way Inuyasha had perceived him? Did he do even now? Had he, Sesshomaru, done too much in the past to be forgiven? Sesshomaru pressed the book against the crescent moon marking on his forehead as if he hoped the book would whisper the answers on his own but the room remained still. When Sesshomaru opened his eyes again, he was in the doorway to the work room and watched Inuyasha walking over the now almost clean ground while balancing a stack of books in his arms. As an answer to the questioning look the youkai just held up the notebook while Inuyasha's cheeks first became even paler than they already were before covering themselves in a faint blush. The hanyou looked away like so often and began to put the books back into their place in the high bookshelf. His voice sounded sad and somehow defeated as he mumbled:
“So you found it…”
“Inuyasha…”
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I'm sorry it's a bit of a cliffie but... I'm drop-dead tired X___X
reviews would wake me up ;) (just kidding)
