Week 95: Topic: Shade
Title: 650 Moons
Author: Caitriona695
Word Count: 625
Rating: G
Pairings: None
Summary: Whispered words of silent friends.
AN: I couldn't decide on a single definition of shade, so I think I may have touched on almost everyone of them here.
650 Moons
Those who knew I whispered in the white, furred ears of the hanyou considered me quite mad. They assured me he was dead and couldn’t understand a word that I said. But I had the time, and the patience, and I knew that someday he would awaken. I hoped he would remember my words and know not all was darkness.
I first noticed him hiding in the highest branches; a specter, a shade, a ghost in red. He must have been watching Kikyou, the miko of the little village, as she meditated atop the hill beside me. I thought she was being kind when she whispered she would return, but then I realized she had noticed him. I heard cold, harsh words come from her lips. I would hear them repeated in gossip from those who lived in the village and would come to visit me.
Evil. Impure. Hanyou.
Things changed quickly for the two. In a blink of time the words lost the sting of disgust when they came from her lips. She whispered to me that he would meet her in other places: sitting in tall branches when the blossoms could form a curtain for them, far into the woods when the leaves were deep green, across the lake when the leaves matched the shade of his clothes, and in the village when the leaves were gone and only snow remained.
Not even a full cycle of moons had passed when she pinned him beneath the same branches where he had once watched her. I am still not completely sure what happened between them. I did not understand such things as love’s betrayal and I was wounded at the same time he was. It caused me to be confused on some of the events surrounding that day, but I do remember the particular shade of red her blood turned when it mixed with the soil. I also remember the flames that flickered near us from her pyre.
I did not talk to him at first. Each moon, when I was able, I would brush away the bits of leaf and twig that would become tangled in his hair. But I was ancient and could not move as I did in the spring of my youth and some always remained. I also watched the moon’s orb reflected onto his childlike face. I can not say I know hanyou faces well, but it seemed to be the face of an innocent, not something evil or impure.
One moon, I awoke to discover that he had received visitors. I did not know who they were or why they wanted him. I only knew that the visitors had tried to remove him from the arrow. They even tried to destroy the arrow with acid. All it destroyed was bark and that has not grown back. It was that moon when the one-sided conversations started.
I whispered to him that I would try to protect him. I told him he was worthwhile. I told him that he was not evil or impure, for the arrow would have purified him totally if he had been. I told him to wait for release a while, just a shade longer, and in the meantime we would become as one. All I could do in the end to protect him was train the creepers around his form and to shade him from the sun.
We were together for 650 moons, truly a short time for me. But, in that time, I became attached to the hanyou, Inuyasha. I wonder, does he remember the words I whispered in his ear? I wonder, now that he is free, will he ever return under the full moon to rest in the shade of my branches?