Hi, guy’s. This is my new tumblr. My old tumblr was Setsuna-Maru but I had to make a new due to (apparently) technical issues with my old one. Basically, none of my tagged posts were ever viewable in the tags. I contacted tumblr about it and they said they fixed it, but my posts are still not showing up in the tags.
So, anyway, from now on I’ll be posting everything on here. I’m not deleting my old tumblr but it won’t be active anymore.
Does anyone know why tagged posts wouldn’t show up when you search the tag? I tag posts as ‘#sessrin’ all the time but they never show up in the sessrin tag.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 3/?
Fandom: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale, 半妖の夜叉姫 | Hanyou no Yashahime | Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon (Anime)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Rin/Sesshoumaru (InuYasha)
Characters: Rin (InuYasha), Sesshoumaru (InuYasha), Zero (Hanyou no Yashahime), Riku (Hanyou no Yashahime), Jaken (InuYasha)
Additional Tags: Pre-Hanyou no Yashahime, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Dreams and Nightmares, Angst, Pregnancy, Horror Elements
Summary:
Rin and Sesshoumaru have embarked on the life of expectant parents to hanyo twins but not everyone is happy for the devoted couple. In the shadows awaits a spider whose venomous bite will both rekindle old nightmares and create entirely new ones.
Zero, still resentful from the Inu no Taisho's rejection and death hundreds of years earlier, schemes to bring down his son Sesshoumaru and his human bride.
All the while, the ill-fated pair will make the most of their fleeting time together, forging a unique path and dancing to their own rhythm.
Chapter 1: the night bandits/venus; the star love, who waits for the moon
nocturne one: the night bandits
(in the darkest point of night, I want you to be here like before...)
It’s as though Rin has been sent back in time, for she finds herself walking around her old village; a small child once again. She's having trouble coming to terms with the sudden reversal. Looking down at her body she sees tiny, bare feet and a distinct lack of womanly curves. Her kimono is one she remembers well but hasn't worn in many years. A pinkish-red garment that wraps around her lithe, diminutive frame as she brushes her now child-sized hands across it in confusion and disbelief. Her view of her surroundings is that of a child’s too; once more knee-high to the rest of the world, she must gaze upwards at seemingly everyone and everything she comes across.
This isn't right , she thinks. We're all those years just a dream? Had she never really grown up? Had Sesshoumaru-sama been merely a dream? All of her adventures? The time spent living with Kaede-sama in the miko's village? It's heartbreaking to think that the entire life that she lived since leaving this place might never have actually happened at all. She wonders, sadly, what about her babies? An expectant mother—the last she remembered—at the age she's regressed to, motherhood could be enacted only with dolls and her own imagination.
She idly wanders the village, re-visiting all the old landmarks of her childhood. She passes the paddy fields, the fish preserve, the drunken old hermit who always sat beside the same rock with a bottle of sake clutched in his hand. When he drank he liked to sing songs about the good old days and he sings the same one each time she passes. “ That’s the sound of a million ships/ just sailin’ away/it can feel like before/comin’ through, either way.” At one point, Rin even comes upon the dilapidated shack that she'd lived in after becoming an orphan. She enters it and there’s a wolf, curled up asleep on her bed of straw and she swiftly but silently backs away until she’s on the main pathway again.
She remembers how to get to her childhood home; knows the path like the back of her hand. She chooses to avoid it; backtracking or taking a sudden swing in the opposite direction when she realizes she’s getting too close. It’s as if returning there would mean accepting that her life since the death of her family had been nothing more than an illusion. She’s not ready for that. She’s still in denial, thinking that if she turns the right corner she’ll end up back under a tree; her head in Sesshoumaru’s lap, their hanyo twins growing in her womb. It’s as if the village itself is waiting on her to accept her retrogradation; the villagers do not speak to her or seem to even acknowledge that she’s there. It’s like she’s caught in some strange limbo; unable to rejoin this world but prevented from moving on. She floats through the village like a spirit who does not belong there anymore. A stranger in a body she can't accept as her own; merely the puppeteer of it's bird-like, underdeveloped limbs.
Eventually, the world gets tired of waiting for her while she wanders around in circles and Rin is deposited into her childhood home. She had taken a left at the singing hermit (“ That’s the sound of a million ships/just sailin’ away/it can feel like before/comin’ through, either way.”) and walked directly into the cozy wooden house of her youth. Her mother is sitting in the middle of the room, tending to the fire pit. Her brothers play a game in the corner. Her father has dozed off on the straw mat, exhausted after a long day.
Her mother adds another log to the burning flames and addresses her daughter. “Rin, don’t be lazy. You’ve been mucking around for years now. Enough is enough. Come help your Oka .”
Rin’s cheeks flushed in embarrassment. Her mother knew; knew Rin had been gone for years. How could she have let her mother think she’d abandoned the family like that? What kind of daughter was she? Why would she ever—
None of this makes any sense. She’d had every reason to believe that her family were dead and gone forever. She’d watched them die. It had seemed so real; her most painful memory. The one that had continued to haunt her for long after. She'd watched these people die but here they were, nonetheless.
She looks at her now-living family and wants to feel happy. That horrible night; the screaming, the stabbing, the blood—It had all been just some terrible dream. And now, they’ve been given a second chance. She could look forward to the future where her family was alive and they could all be together again.
But, despite telling herself this, Rin can’t muster up a single feeling of happiness at the sight in front of her. It was like looking at ghosts. Ghosts that don’t even realize they’re ghosts.
Dead dead dead. All of you are dead, she thinks.
A bright, orange light starts to emit from outside. Rin turns around. There’s light emitting from the lone window at the front wall and from a bright square that has formed around the doorway. She goes over and pushes the doorway curtain aside to see what’s going on but the light is so bright it nearly blinds her. She reaches an arm up to cover her eyes as she lets the curtain fall.
When she opens her eyes again, everything is dark. She's still in her family's old house but it’s almost pitch-black and she struggles to make out the forms of her parents and brothers, asleep under their covers. The orange glow begins to peek through the window again and the room is gradually illuminated with the color—the color of flames, she realizes.
Against the far wall, the orange light begins to morph into distinctive shapes. Hulking men in armor with weapons in their grasps. Behind her she can hear the stomping of horse hoofs and the cries of the neighbors. The orange glow illuminates the entire room now, in a mockery of daylight. The light is oppressive and overly luminescent and makes it seem as though the house could explode into flames at any second.
The stomping noise is now dangerously close and Rin dives out of the path of the doorway moments before men on horseback crash through the front wall of the house. It's instant chaos as the horses neigh loudly, the men shout and her family screams as they scramble out of bed.
Rin’s only instinct is to escape. It makes her feel like a terrible coward but she knows she'll surely be killed if she stays. The bandits have already started on her parents. One of them roughly grabs her mother, yanking off the kimono she'd been sleeping under and stabbing her with a long spear. The painful howls emitting from her mother’s mouth are even more awful to hear than the sight is to witness.
She needs to get away. Praying the chaos will be enough to allow her to get out of the house unnoticed, she props herself up on her hands and knees and crawls as quickly and quietly as she can to the doorway. As soon as she makes it outside, she climbs to her feet and breaks into a run.
Her escape doesn't bring safety though. It did, once. In a memory she no longer trusts was ever real.
The bandits are everywhere.
There's no direction she can run to avoid them. While she stands immobile in the middle of the village, desperately considering her dwindling options, the bandits begin to notice her. They point and yell. "The little girl, let's take her too!"
"Grab her before she gets away!"
"Kill her if she tries to resist!"
"Kill her anyway!"
They begin to advance on her and Rin can think of only way she could possibly be saved.
"Sesshoumaru-sama!" She screams. But it's too early. He doesn't know her yet. If he ever really existed at all. If he wasn't just a dream she'd made up in her mind.
"Sesshoumaru-sama!" She screams again. She screams his name over and over again until she feels the bandits blade in her side and the moist flow of blood as it drips down her skin.
tarantella one: venus; the star love, who waits for the moon
(when you go, do you miss me?)
Rin's eyes snap open and in her first few manic moments of consciousness, Rin bolts to a sitting position and pulls her kimono up to examine her leg. The sensation of something wet on her thigh is still there. A quick exploration with her fingers confirms this and her heart drops. She pushes more of the fabric out of the way to get a better view and her eyes land on the trail of blood running down her leg.
Real, real, it was real, she thinks as she frantically searches for a wound. Something had really hurt her, stabbed her, and now she was going to bleed out on the forest floor. In her distressed state, she ignores what should be the curious lack of pain if she had indeed suffered a flesh wound. Instead, she continues to look for evidence of the deep cut she’s convinced is somewhere on her body.
"Rin," a low, deep voice breaks into her panicked thoughts.
"Calm yourself.” Sesshoumaru leans down on one knee beside her, his clawed hand coming to cradle her chin.
“The bleeding just started. I smelled it and was about to wake you." The voice is measured but laced with concern. She was one of the few people who have recognized the nuance.
It’s such a relief for Rin to hear that voice. Just hearing his voice and being in his presence grounds her and she allows herself to accept that the experience had only been a nightmare and she's now safely back in the real world.
She was bleeding, though. Rin examines her leg closer. She's calmer now but still disorientated from the nightmare. Not completely back to reality just yet.
"Rin was having a nightmare," she says. "Someone stabbed me in my leg. There was so much blood," she explains.
"There's no wound," Sesshoumaru reassures her. "It was just a dream. The bleeding; it’s from your cycle.” His keen sense of smell meant he could accurately judge the difference.
She gulped nervously. “Do you think the babies are alright?”
“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” he reassures her again, although they’re both well aware that he’s hardly an expert in the subject.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to her. Rin had been a midwife-in-training and knew that women were supposed to cease bleeding during pregnancy, so when she’d bled the first time after knowing she was with child she’d panicked, believing she was having a miscarriage. Sesshomaru had had to rush her to the nearest human village so she could be told by a jaded local midwife with an obvious distaste for human-yokai relations that she hadn’t suffered a miscarriage. Apparently, continuing to bleed even while pregnant was normal and didn’t necessarily indicate a problem. Though, even with this information, Rin still found herself becoming anxious each time it happened subsequently.
“Rin is going to the pond to clean up,” she says, rising to her feet. “Will you wait here until I come back?” Her nightmare had greatly disturbed her and she really doesn’t want to return to find herself alone.
Sesshoumaru nodded and Rin began to walk toward the pond. Another stream of blood rolls down the length of her thigh and she holds her kimono and her underlayer up and away from her body. They were already slightly bloodied and she doesn’t want to risk staining them further.
It’s still very early in the morning. The sun has yet to come up and Rin has to strain her eyes to tell where she's going and walk slowly so she won’t trip over anything. Treading barefoot across the lush field at such an ethereal hour, she’s able to relax slightly. The stark, cool sensation of dewy blades of grass catching between her toes is refreshing compared to the warm, sticky blood that drips down her legs.
Rin wonders if the nightmares about her family’s death will ever go away completely. They had become significantly less frequent over the years and she’d gotten to the point where she could go months without having one at all. But they always returned. There seemed to be no comfort in the entire world, not even the devotion of Sesshoumaru-sama himself, that could keep them at bay.
She reached the pond and stripped off her kimono, leaving herself clad only in her hadajuban. She carefully rinses the blood out of the cloth and then sets it aside. Splashing some of the pond water onto her legs, Rin cleans the sticky liquid from her skin. Once she finishes, she picks up her kimono and begins to walk back before pausing to admire the sky. Dawn would be breaking soon; the first hints of sunlight were peeking out over the horizon, leaving only the brightest stars still visible.
“Beautiful, isn’t it,” a man’s voice, unfamiliar to her ears, breaks into her reverie.
Rin jumps a little, startled. She’d had no idea anyone else was even out there. Even though it’s still quite dark, she pulls her dampened kimono back on. It would be improper for a married woman like herself to be seen in her hadajuban by someone who wasn’t her husband. Once she’s convinced she’s decent enough, she darts her head around in search of the voice's origin. Blinking into the fading darkness, she spots a figure perched atop a rock at the edge of the pond. Had that person been there the entire time?
Rin could just make out the man’s appearance. He was fairly tall, with chin-length hair and wearing a dark kosode under a lighter colored haori and a pair of striped hakama. Despite addressing her, the man wasn’t looking towards her. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the lightening sky.
“That bright planet that hangs up there on early mornings like this; do you know the name of it?” he asks her.
Rin looks back to the sky, where one star burned bigger and brighter than any of the others.
“Oh,” she says, “‘that’s ‘the metal star’ isn’t it?” That was the name that Rin had known it by, although Miroku-sama had told them other names for it he had been aware of, like Jīn-xīng and Shukra Graha.
“Venus; the morning star,” the man says, eyes transfixed on the celestial object in question. “The star of love.”
Rin was intrigued by the man’s description. She could understand why it would be called ‘the morning star’ but...
“Why, ‘the star of love?’”
“There exists a far-off land called Rome,” he tells her, “where they ‘do as the Romans do’ as they say!” He says this with a laugh but Rin doesn’t get the reference and isn’t sure what about it is supposed to be funny.
“The ancient Romans worshipped Venus as their goddess of love and named the brightest star in the sky in her honor.”
“Ah!” he continues, “but the Romans aren’t the only ones who associate this star with love. Travel west towards the continent and you’ll find those who refer to it by two names; sao Mai, the morning star and sao Hôm, the evening star. Because they’re considered distinct entities, existing at different times, they’re likened to separated lovers. They also have another word for the same star, sao Vượt—The climbing star.”
The sky was becoming lighter and lighter as the man talked and Rin could make out his physical appearance more clearly now. He looked young and not really like any human Rin had encountered, with his auburn-colored hair. But he didn’t look like a yokai either. Perhaps he was a traveling foreigner; it would explain how he knew so much about far-away lands and cultures.
“The climbing star?” she inquires.
The man nods. “They have a poem about it; ‘When you go, do you miss me? I am the climbing star waiting for the moon in the sky .’”
“That’s beautiful,” Rin says. It reminds her of a song she used to sing. ‘I will wait, all alone/For Sesshoumaru-sama’s return.’
That was what she was, Rin thinks. A climbing star. A morning star. Venus, with all her love, who waits for her evening moon.
“It is?” the man asks. “Beautiful?”
“Yes,” Rin nods. “It reminds me of a song I used to sing.”
“Oh?” he says, finally turning to look at her. There’s a peculiar expression on his face. “What did it sound like—Your song?”
Rin feels a sudden sense of unease at the tone in his voice.
“Was it…” he hums a brief melody, “the sound of a million ships, just sailing away… ”
Rin can feel her heart sink. She knows she’s heard that before. But where had she heard that before? It sounded so familiar to her but try as she might, she just couldn’t place it. She racks her brain, trying to come up with the memory.
The man continues to stare at her, vacantly. All the friendliness from before has been drained away.
“Rin,” Sesshoumaru’s voice says from behind her. “Is this man bothering you?”
Rin turns around to see him standing there, eyes slightly narrowed.
“No, Sesshoumaru-sama, everything is fine. This man was just telling Rin about—”
She turns back to the mysterious stranger but there’s no one perched atop the rock and the man is nowhere to be seen.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 6/?
Fandom: 半妖の夜叉姫 | Hanyou no Yashahime | Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon (Anime), InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Rin/Sesshoumaru (InuYasha)
Characters: Rin (InuYasha), Sesshoumaru (InuYasha), Setsuna (Hanyou no Yashahime), Naraku (InuYasha), Jaken (InuYasha)
Additional Tags: Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Summary:
After his fateful third encounter with his half-brother, Sesshoumaru meets, not a human girl, but an involuntary time-traveler. Determined to right the path he would've strayed from, the course of history is changed. Years later, an intoxicating scent blows in with the cold gust of a new spring and Sesshoumaru will cross paths with the woman who would've shaped his future.
And possibly still could.
Chapter 6
Sesshoumaru hasn’t seen or heard of the spider hanyo since they left him in pieces years before but he knows that tell-tale miasma stench anywhere. The fact that Naraku managed to survive is somehow less surprising than the fact that he’s confronting Sesshoumaru in person, rather than using a puppet. Or sending one of his detachments.
Everyone is coming out of the woodwork, he mentally scoffs. First he catches wind of that human's scent and now back comes Naraku and his whole bothersome existence.
That human woman was turning out to be just like her would-be daughter; a bad omen.
"Naraku," he acknowledges his newly-reappeared enemy. Sesshoumaru tries to keep his voice as neutral as possible while still maintaining an aura of obvious contempt. Jaken immediately springs into action, cursing the spider and making threats on behalf of his master.
"I'm surprised you've decided to show your face again.” A face that had not visibly changed since their last confrontation. Other than being healed and fully-intact, Naraku looked much the same from the days when Sesshoumaru had become entangled in his complicated web. The one that included Inuyasha and his companions, among countless others.
“When I, Sesshoumaru, and Kirinmaru of the Dawn confronted you years ago, you fled with your tail between your legs and did not return."
Sesshoumaru had never believed Naraku defeated for good. They had only succeeded in chasing him back into hiding. Inuyasha and his band of friends had attempted to hunt him down and finish what the two daiyokais had started but with no luck. Whatever crevice the threatened spider wedged himself into had proven too dark and deep to find.
"Only one of us here has a tail, Sesshoumaru," comes Naraku's reply.
Sesshoumaru smirks. "You'd think with all your downtime Naraku, you would have better comebacks prepared."
"You’re one to judge, Sesshoumaru,” he scoffs, then chuckles. “Why—You famously have a way with words."
"How dare you insult Sesshoumaru-sama!" comes Jaken’s squawking defense. "He is a man of brilliant eloquence. That you’re ignorant of that is only based on the fact that such a great yokai would never waste his oratorical gifts on the likes of you!" Jaken shakes his Nintojo at the spider demon during his speech for emphasis.
"Oh?" Naraku responds, skeptically. "And who does he share them with? You, little yokai?"
Jaken sputters as he tries to come up with a response.
"Well, there's uh...uh...there is no one truly worthy of my master's poetry, you see! No one with whom he can converse on his own level—"
"Jaken!" Sesshoumaru interrupts him, having had enough. "Silence."
The imp stiffens and ceases his useless chatter.
"Naraku; should Kirinmaru and I need to deal with you again? Is that the reason you've returned from whatever sinkhole you crawled up from?"
"Threatening I, Naraku with the superior Beast King?"
The spider's tone is ruthlessly mocking and Sesshoumaru narrows his eyes slightly as he imagines his claws bursting out the back of that boned armor.
Where did this vermin get off, having that attitude? Like he hadn't been scared into hiding for all this time. Like they hadn't had him on the verge of death.
"Go, Sesshoumaru," he teases. "Tug on Uncle Kirinmaru's hakama and tell Father's friend he needs to fight a battle for you again. I'm sure he's in a charitable mood."
"This coming from one who so often relies on manipulating others into doing his dirty work for him," Sesshoumaru counters. “Aided or not, you were confronted with raw power and strength. Not detachments and trickery.”
"Trickery'" Naraku repeats. “Manipulation of others.” His tone is placidly condescending. ‟You are no stranger to these, Sesshoumaru.”
"It’s true,” Naraku admits. “I, Naraku, will use anyone and anything as a tool. But you, Sesshoumaru, are a great daiyokai. Shouldn’t you have more faith in your own abilities?"
“You’re correct that I’m a daiyokai,” he responds coldly, masking his rapidly dwindling patience with this interaction.
“Unlike you, I don't derive my power from thousands of demon parasites. But all that means is that you have no right to say anything to me. You’re a disgusting thing, Naraku." He adds, "Like all hanyos.”
Naraku is undeterred by the pushback. Being much too aware of Sesshoumaru's insecurities, he moves to a subject he's certain remains a sore spot.
"I see you still don't carry Tessaiga at your hip. Am I to assume your half-brother, Inuyasha, retains possession of your father's fang?"
Sesshoumaru’s mouth tightens. He hears Jaken gasp; appalled by the audacity of invoking Inuyasha’s ownership of the Tessaiga.
"So it's me you've come to first to announce yourself, and not my hanyo brother," he points out. "Should I be flattered? Am I, Sesshoumaru, your new obsession?"
“It was curiosity that brought me to seek you out first," Naraku says. "Was it not a human woman I discovered you conversing with the other day? It seemed like she had an awful lot to say to you.”
Sesshoumaru fights to keep his face impassive. Unless Naraku had used a puppet, he should have been able to smell him or any of his detachments if they had been that close. Just what form of Naraku had been watching—And from where?
“Humans are numerous and unavoidable, even to this one,” he responds, careful not to protest too forcefully.
Naraku persists. “She approached you without fear or hesitation.”
“Are you really expecting I, Sesshoumaru, to explain the behavior of a human?” Again, he treads lightly, measuring his response. He will use no more words of explanation than necessary. For a moment, he wonders why. It's not as if he's trying to protect her.
He’s not.
Sesshoumaru thinks back to the encounter by the river. The damn woman had been so eager to talk . Would she talk to Naraku?
On the chance that she did, whether willingly or by force, what of it? Even if she told him all about Setsuna, she was entirely unaware of the girl’s true nature.
And if Naraku managed to surmise that information regardless...well, it might actually work to Sesshoumaru’s advantage.
Let the spider think he’d found a weakness of his to exploit. Let him try to use it against him. Sesshoumaru would stand proud, smugly belittle him for having such a ridiculous idea and show the fool just how little he cared.
Sesshoumaru's hand goes to the battle sword at his left side. In one swift, fluid motion, he unsheathes Sōryūjin and makes a swipe at Naraku. His target dodges the blade and floats into the air.
"Run to Uncle Kirinmaru," Naraku taunts him, his dark curling hair rising in a curtain above his pale head. "You'll find I, Naraku, will be ready for him."
With that, the spider hanyo flew away, drifting off into the horizon.
"Why, the nerve of him!" Jaken huffs.
His vassal looks up at him, radiating with outrage. "Sesshoumaru-sama, will you go after Naraku? He's getting away!"
"No, Jaken," he says to the imp's consternation. Sesshoumaru needed the opportunity to consider what action to take. Naraku was nothing but a pest, and if he was going to insist on infesting their lives once more, Sesshoumaru would destroy him for good. With or without the Eastern Lord's help.
Sesshoumaru asked Setsuna no further questions and ceased any appearance of cordiality. As far as he was concerned, this is where his business with her ended. He told her so, and in language he imagined to be as devastating and offensive as the situation deserved.
(Years later, he’ll try to recall what exactly he said to her. He’d wanted to make it brutally clear just how he felt about the existence of half-demons but, for some reason, he hadn’t really wanted to insult her personally. In the end, he can’t remember if the generic condemnations he’s thinking of are things he’d actually said to her or lines he’d taunted Inuyasha with around the same time.)
Tainted blood courses through your body...A hanyo whose mother is a human is a disgrace to all our kind...Don’t come near me again, stick to humans—It suits you...Infinitely vulgar beings...I won’t fall to a weakness of the heart...What can half-demons do? You’re useless to me...
His contempt for humans and half-demon’s had stock phrases.
Sesshoumaru had needed something to keep his mind occupied during long days of fruitless hunting for the Tessaiga. It was easy to become fixated on what had left him in that situation in the first place.
For her part, Setsuna seemed deeply unimpressed.
His cruel rejection of her is met by vacant boredom. If anything he had said had gotten under her skin, her face denied it. Inuyasha would have called him a bastard and made several clumsy attempts on his head by that point. Again, he was forced to recognize part of himself in her stoic refusal to be baited into a reaction.
“Are you finished?” she asked, after one last condemnation of her as existential terror.
“Do you understand that we are not to come into contact again? That you are to act as if we have no relationship to one another?”
“It’s not as though that’ll take any getting used to," she replied sardonically.
“Kirinmaru,” he reminded her. “Leave him to me. You’re not to seek him out for any reason.”
Setsuna shrugged. “He’s no business of mine. I already told you; I declined that offer.”
“Then there’s nothing else to discuss. We should not cross paths again.”
With that, he turned his back on her. As far as he knew at the time, that might be the last he'd ever see of the girl; her back against the tree, arms folded, her face defiantly expressionless.
Would she ever make it back to her own time, to her sister? Sesshoumaru certainly wouldn't be worrying himself with such concerns. The only thing he cared about was that she stayed out of his way and didn't draw any attention to herself.
Farewell, Setsuna; you're on your own.
He wondered once more if he should go the extra step of ending her life. It would be the most convenient thing to do. He decided against it, telling himself it was because she still possessed pertinent knowledge of future events. Things it would help to know but hadn’t yet occurred to him to ask about. Never mind the fact that he’d just deliberately set that bridge on fire.
His rationalization complete, Sesshoumaru’s thoughts turned to what to do about Kirinmaru. He wasn’t sure if it would be wise to confront him. Damn Inuyasha—The Tessaiga was wasted on him. What use did the hanyo have for such a powerful sword? What had their father expected his eldest to do if it ever came time for him to confront the Lord of the East?
His desire for his own powerful fang was stronger than ever now. Totosai, the old geezer, would still refuse to forge him one. There were other swordsmith’s—None as good as Totosai, but Sesshoumaru wielding would more than make up for any deficiencies in craft.
He wondered if his Other had ever succeeded in taking Tessaiga from Inuyasha. Or had that demoralizing failure only pushed him even further from his intended path?
Setsuna might've known the answer to that; if he had thought to ask about it. But it doesn’t matter and it’s not worth dwelling over; he's already returned to the correct path; the roads have already diverged. He was the real Sesshoumaru and it was what he did from here on out that truly counted.
All the same, the image of Setsuna's face lingered in his mind; it’s fine details memorized against his will. Pieces of their conversation play back to him and the voice that says "we’re complete strangers" with nothing indicative of caring is her own low one.
He thought back to Tessaiga; that sword meant to be inherited by a half-demon; the sword that had protected Inuyasha's human mother. It's the only semi-rational explanation for what his Other had done but...perhaps, Setsuna’s birth had been an experiment. A last ditch effort at taking Tessaiga for himself.
Lack of compassion for humans was supposedly what had repelled Sesshoumaru from wielding it with his own hands. Would he really have gone that far in pursuit of his father’s fang? If the experiment had proven to be a failure then, that would explain why his other self and his progeny were strangers.
There was a part of him that would like to believe in that scenario but, ultimately, he can’t. (Hanyo or not, he would never abandon his children.) But again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever the reasons for what the Other had done, that future wasn’t his anymore.
Regardless, as things stood then and there, Tessaiga remained stubbornly outside his grasp. He still would need a blade sufficient enough to battle any opponent; from his lowly half-brother, to Naraku to, potentially, Kirinmaru.
Sesshoumaru had a notorious swordsmith to seek out. Kaijinbo would craft him an impressive blade, he was sure of it. He just needed to locate a suitable fang.
Again, David Kaye. Oh my GOSH. Just hitting me straight in the heart.
Hearing Sesshomaru voicing his care about another person’s feelings is incredible character development in it self. But to actually sound sad himself while saying it? Heart wrenching.
Plus hearing him say Rin’s name is always touching.
This was amazing to hear, Sesshomaru has really evolved as a character. He’s aware of others emotions, he doesn’t want Rin to suffer. Even if it means losing the love of his life, he’ll end her pain. 😭
And him saying Rin.....it broke me. It’s the ONLY time he says her name, and he’s so sad. Poor Sesshomaru, he’s trying his best and everyone keeps messing with him.
So I decided how look at how popular the main ships from Inuyasha are in Japan and Pixiv looked like the best option because it hosts illustrations, doujhins and fanfics.
Here we have results of the total of works:
For some reason, the sesskag japanese and english tag are separated, so I decided to post the two tags.
So here you have it, people. Right now, sessrin is the Inuyasha ship with more works in total in Pixiv. That gives an idea of how popular sessrin is in Japan.
Update: I found this screenshot in Twitter months ago. I don’t know who took it (sorry), but this was the number of works back in november of 2020
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