Especially if I was in the habit of wandering around on foot all day every day, getting from imaginary appointment to imaginary appointment.
Sesshoumaru is about to show Inuyasha how to play the "airplane coming in for a landing" game properly, though. He gets right up beside his little brother, hand raised and fingers loose at first. The next thing anyone knows, let alone Inuyasha, that hand has balled into a fist and swung, sending Inuyasha skidding through the dirt backwards like he just got kicked by a turbo mule. Inuyasha's party all stare open-mouthed, and Toutousai has the most amazingly classic gape I have ever seen in my life, like he's watching his wife make out with his next door neighbor. It's fucking incredible.
As Sesshoumaru lunges toward Inuyasha's place in the dirt, he sarcastically asks what's wrong. Wasn't the little brother supposed to punish the big brother like Toutousai in his hilariously backwards way suggested? Inuyasha barely dodges a swipe of Sesshoumaru's claws by pivoting out of the way on a single hand, which I thought was kind of cool. Sesshoumaru, on the other hand, just says that Inuyasha is a basic bitch performing basic moves. What made that punch of his so advanced a move I suppose we'll never know. Inuyasha calls him a bastard and swings Tessaiga again.
And lacking this context, Toutousai makes the hopeless assessment that Inuyasha is no good at all. He looks down at Myouga hanging out on his shoulder and asks if he hasn't been lying about Inuyasha mastering the Tessaiga. Myouga makes the excuse that he DID say it was only the once, and Kagome insists it's not a lie. She goes on to say that Sesshoumaru never actually wins any of these fights anyway, in the end getting his ass handed to him, and she doesn't really expect it to be any different this time.
Sesshoumaru stops fighting with his brother to give her a glare so terrifying, she's actually hiding behind Toutousai. Instead of honor Kagome's partly accurate words (I mean the second time he just kind of gave up before actually losing the fight) with a discussion, he addresses Toutousai instead. He pontificates about what a shame it is that Tessaiga is being swung around by a moron using nothing but his brute strength, making the famous sword no different than a log in practice. Kagome comes out of hiding to piss and moan at her shield that he's nodding in agreement with Sesshoumaru, but he just continues to bob his head, framed by his hands, admitting that it's a fair opinion.
Inuyasha scoffs, yelling at Toutousai that the battle is only beginning. He raises Tessaiga above his head and races toward a completely unfazed Sesshoumaru, telling him to say his fucking prayers. Do youkai have gods? Do they do the worship thing? Am I just reading far too much into this idiom? Likely. Sesshoumaru raises a clawed hand, poisonous striping on his wrist extending, complaining that its the same thing every time. He then catches Inuyasha's wrist before the sword can come down on him and his Dokkasou starts eating away immediately at the tender flesh there. A bleeding welt forms in no time, and Inuyasha winces in pain.
Sesshoumaru glares over his shoulder at Toutousai, asking him if he still doesn't want to make a sword for him. Toutousai sweatdrops.
This is the best part though, because Toutousai loses his SHIT. He tells this entitled fucking brat to shut up, because he's already got an awesome sword.
Toutousai continues his diatribe by reminding Sesshoumaru that it was his father's WILL that the elder sibling be given Tenseiga, while the younger be given Tessaiga. Meanwhile, Kagome marvels that this newly identified sword was also made by Toutousai, and Miroku comments that he's never seen Sesshoumaru draw said sword. Uh, yeah, that ONE time you saw him before this, he didn't draw this sword. You're a real expert on this "Sesshoumaru drawing Tenseiga" phenomenon, aren't you?
Anyway, Sesshoumaru doesn't want to hear it from Toutousai, and tells the old man to fuck off, because Tenseiga's blunt edge isn't at all suitable for him. Well if you sharpened it once in a while... Toutousai has observed that Sesshoumaru is pissed off now, and declares simply that he's out of there. Inuyasha and Kagome give him a bewildered look, just before the old dude jumps in the air and slams the head of his mallet into the ground between them and Sesshoumaru. Sesshoumaru recoils from the resulting fissure in the ground, from which boils a substance that JAKEN identifies as lava while he scrambles back from it as well.
Where the fuck did Jaken come from? Was he even there before? I know Sesshoumaru's ride, the two-headed dragon, was there, but that thing seems to have disappeared now. Where did it go? Why is did it go away, with Jaken suddenly replacing it?? ARE THEY THE SAME PERSON??? This is the stuff of conspiracy theories, guys. I'm freaking out.
What was in those brownies I ate???
Just keep going, Writch, keep breathing. Anyway, up in the sky, Sango, Miroku and Shippou are all hitching a ride on Kirara's transformed back, and Inuyasha and Kagome have done the same with Toutousai's three-eyed bull, sitting closely behind him. Kagome flatters him by saying that he's quite strong, and Miroku agrees, suggesting it was to deliberately protect Inuyasha. Inuyasha glares at him while Toutousai lets out a troubled sigh, admitting that this was not what he had hoped for. He whines that he never thought Inuyasha would be so weak, earning the treat of Inuyasha turning his glare back to him. He then complains that Sesshoumaru called the sword he made for him blunt too.
When he's done sighing, he tells Inuyasha that all the lumps he's causing with continuous whacks with his fist actually hurt, and Inuyasha simply barks back that he's not weak.
Possibly-decoy-Jaken asks what kind of hell-blade this sword that's always just been at Sesshoumaru's hip is, and Sesshoumaru asks him if he really wants to know after a short pause. He doesn't give the little guy the chance to take back that fatal bit of curiosity.
Almost-certainly-decoy-Jaken has been murdered! To cover up the truth! That he's a CLONE of... Kermit the Frog or whatever!
But wait! No he hasn't! After Sesshoumaru tells this fool to get his ass up, Jaken makes a questioning noise, and actually gets up, looking down at his intact body and marveling at the fact that he wasn't actually cut. He waves his arms, still examining the lack of a wound down his front, asking how. He was so sure he was cut.
It's because he's actually been obliterated and replaced with an exact copy within a millisecond in order to cover up the reality that there were actually two of him living under the...
Okay, conspiracy theories are too complicated, and Sesshoumaru gives a much simpler explanation anyway: Tenseiga isn't a sword that can kill. He glares down at it like it murdered SOMEBODY, though. Probably the part of him that told some pretty funny jokes in the past. Way to be a dick, sword.
Elsewhere, Inuyasha has also been clued in on the fact that Tenseiga doesn't cut, and asks dumbly how someone is supposed to fight with it. To be fair, Toutousai's answer that Tenseiga isn't a sword for fighting enemies but one of HEALING doesn't make a whole lot of sense on the base of it. It must be why Kagome has to repeat the word "healing" while she, Inuyasha and Shippou sit around a fire roasting a wild pig, stoked by Toutousai's fire-breath.
When he's bitten off another stream of flames, Toutousai explains that while Tessaiga is a sword that mows down the strong, Tenseiga links life for the weak. Sango has to repeat the phrase as a question, asking if he means that Tenseiga can restore life. Toutousai simply says that it can if you master it. In fact, if someone possesses a truly caring heart that cherishes others, they can save 100 lives in a single stroke. Opposite of Tessaiga.
The word "cherish" really sticks with Kagome, the sweatdrop at her temple saying all she WON'T about how that word connects with Sesshoumaru. Inuyasha spits it out though; this must be why Sesshoumaru is so desperate for a new sword, given that the one he has is useful in a way he can't understand, and it would oppose his flippant attitude anyway. Toutousai supposes that giving Tenseiga to Sesshoumaru was a bad idea after all, and Miroku says this isn't wrong, with the personality Sesshoumaru has. Kagome adds that Sesshoumaru would probably be irritated with the fact that he COULD use it, if it were possible in the first place.
Around nightfall, we head for the hills, which as it turns out, is a shitty place to be. Not only is the setting a remote building in a bit of disrepair, bald spots between shingles on the roof, but also there's a whole bunch of diced and sliced corpses lying around. Jaken kicks the head of one calling him and his fellow dead a pack of foolish thieves. He claims they're 100 years too early to attack Sesshoumaru, who sits on the edge of the floor opened to the outside, wrist propped on his knee as it drips the thieves' blood. There's also a statue in the background with arrows sticking out of it? This raises SO many questions...
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? I may have overdone the conspiracy Jaken jokes, but I do find it kind of hilarious how obvious it was that RT suddenly realized she needed Jaken around after leaving him out of the last chapter and just sort of stuck him in this one hoping no one would notice. Like Jaken would be so invisible and quiet for an entire chapter. Yeah right. His absence couldn't have been MORE conspicuous if she'd beamed him down from a UFO.
But if she hadn't shoehorned him in at the last possible second, she wouldn't have be able to pull one of her classic scene strobes where she switches between two sets of characters explaining the same thing multiple times. To be fair, this one wasn't as annoying as the others, given that the information given in the switches is fundamentally different between the groups. On one hand, you have the blunt Toutousai telling Inuyasha's group point blank what Tenseiga does and what it takes to use it, in a verbose way that Sesshoumaru would avoid if he cared to go into the topic in any depth whatsoever. On the other hand, you have Sesshoumaru demonstrating outright what his problem is - that this sword of his doesn't cut anything.
So, that begs the question, why has Sesshoumaru kept the thing around if it doesn't serve any use for him? As I said above, we tend to keep things around that mean something emotional to us, even if we can't use it, but if we have limited space or have to carry these things around with us PHYSICALLY, there's a limit to how long we can stand to hang on to it. We know Sesshoumaru has kept Tenseiga for a really long time, considering Inuyasha has been nailed to a fucking tree for a good 50 years, and their dad's will would have kicked in even long before THAT. We also know that he's always had the sword on him, even back when he was rooting around in his dad's bones looking for one that could slice people open.
This means that Sesshoumaru must have a really strong attachment to his dad's memory, and it's not unlikely that despite the fact that the physical embodiment of this has been rusting in a sheath for decades on his hip, he hasn't been able to bring himself to get rid of it. Considering how little regard Sesshoumaru has for everyone else compared to his father (even bearing in mind said rooting around in his bones), he must have really CHERISHED the guy, and this was likely the only functional relationship he's ever had.
RT clearly understands how formative relationships in younger years can inform a person's relationships later, as evidenced in how she's written how Miroku and Inuyasha interact with the women in their lives. Similarly, Sesshoumaru's relationship with his father indeed informs how he relates to others, and how his character development proceeds, but it doesn't really fall in the same category as the examples I mentioned, either. It goes into an underexplored territory for a lot of stories, actually.
Which I, for one, am excited about. And it's not just because of those brownies I ate.
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