30 Shards

Title: To Live a Life of Failed Lives
Rating: PG
Genre: reflection/angst
Squicks: Vague violent images. Overuse of the word "he".
Couple: Sess + Swords (Tenseiga)
Theme: # 5 - Memories
Word Count: around 1,150, give or take a few edits.
Notes: Hints at InuPapa/SessMom and InuPapa/Izayoi

Summary: It wasn't one long life. It was hundreds of shorter ones chained together.




---

Tenseiga was made at the insistence of his wife. It was her idea that one could not create a sword of destruction without a sword of renewal. She understood the Ying Yang, the take and give, balance. She always was wiser than her years, a tremendous mind crushing a miniscule heart.

She was his opposite, his balance. What was he to refuse her? She was the mother of his only son.

A son who walked the line between them both, teetering on tiny bare feet as he tried to make them both happy. A push one way and he would bend, but never fall off his neutral ground.

Then she died -- ironically before her sword's completion -- and the rope broke. The boy was forced into his lap and he never was a good parent.

It didn't help that the brat was so reckless. His mother had called him "inquisitive", but he could only label his son as a "pain in the ass". He'd dig a claw into anything, as long as it moved, and he always wanted to know. To understand. To do.

It was only after her death that the boy would dothings on his own. Still young, he'd thought he could do anything, had to do everything, and it was all to be his own. Because that's what he thought his father wanted.

When that bear lopped off his head, the boy realized that he wasn't strong enough for everything.

But the father had learned something, staring down at his only son spilled across the ground. He'd learned that his wife had been right.

Tenseiga did have uses after all.

So the boy was alive again and now he stared at sunsets. Was if because he'd already faced the end that he'd calmed? Or was he just anxious to reach the sky now?

He never really understood his son. Now he knew him less. He missed the curiosity.

What he didn't miss was the death. Yet, when the boy was down again, left to bleed by a stronger foe, he'd felt the pang of recognition.

Why was he only noticed the boy he'd once knew when he was dead?

One swing and the boy was up again. And again he died. Then again. Each battle he grew fiercer, stronger, and so very determined that sometimes that had to be what killed him. His combatants were leagues above him but now he always dragged them with him, smeared and stinking as they waited to rot. He could stop failing now. He could die the battle hero.

Then he brought his son back again.

Now he looked into eyes so like his dead wife. But for his son it was not one life to cloud his gaze; it was hundreds of shorter ones chained together.

And in each one he failed.

Sometimes he'd wonder, watching his son as he stared at the moon - he'd taken to doing that now after missing the sun - if the boy was even alive anymore. He was so still, so silent, and so very withdrawn that he was sure those devils had managed to steal something one of those times.

What they didn't take was his will. His strength. So, when he'd found his son standing over one of his father's enemies, bleeding only from besmeared claws, he'd felt elevated at his boy's triumph.

His son didn't seem to care. In fact, that was a common occurrence now, where death was concerned.

He saw those thoughtless eyes and shivered. For the first time in his long years, he was wary. Afraid.

His son barely spoke to him anymore. He was always thinking about something. Contemplating. Maybe even wishing, but he would never know.

His son was his strongest ally now, impelled to action with the barest word and the work was always done impeccably. Then he'd return with nothing but bitter words --the only time he really spoke was to scorn. As if that his only amusement.

He was beginning to hate this; there was no warmth in his life now. His wife was dead and his son had died. Then died. Then died.

Then he met that girl. She was human, but oh so warm and fiery and everything his memories of his life were not. He didn't love her--he'd left that behind with his frozen family -- but that didn't mean she couldn't brighten his nights.

His son had only stared at him with those placid eyes.

It was only when his son called him a fool that he got angry. Not so much at the disrespect and insubordination, but at the tonelessness, the triviality of the words that were spoken only for the taste of bitterness.

His son was a flawed perfection that sneered at anything blemished. He spit out harsh criticism that really meant nothing except for recitations of his own learned lessons.

I've never made the mistake of a human, the boy had said with nothing on his tone. Only one small exclusion out of all I have done, he did not say. He wanted to see his father's failure, wanted to know there was someone worse than he was.

And this mistake couldn't be rectified with a simple sword.

He realized this, holding the squirming child in his arms as death breathed down his neck. That girl smiled at him and his heart thumped with just a little bit of life even as he knew he had to leave. But at least this moment would be able to overshadow all his cold memories--memories of a cherished face drowned in blood.

And he'd turned around and that blank face had stared at him and said nothing as he waited. His son - no longer a boy by any means- knew what was to happen.

And he didn't seem to care.

So he'd gazed at the face of his little hanyou child and wished for fatherly memories. Those babe-dark eyes were so promising, but he couldn't stay.

But maybe…

He gave his son that infamous sword. From me to you, he'd told him. A change of roles, he'd said. Then he left.

He was dead in less than a day. And dead was how he stayed. It was only fair. At least he wasn't going to live a life of failed lives. His son saw to that.

For one such as Sesshoumaru, to live as such was a fate more agonizing than any death.

He had never understood his father, either. Or he had forgotten; it was lost in his bitter death-twined memories.

--

I hope this makes some sort of sense…it seems like a bunch of ramblings to me.

Even I find the sword relationship kind of vague here, so I'll explain: Tenseiga spoils the relationship between Sess and his father. Tenseiga is always what helps to make Sess so cold, since he has died so many times. Sess would rather be dead than live with the failures of his deaths. InuPapa doesn't see it that way at all.