Chapter Text
When Miroku was a boy, he went everywhere with his father, whether he liked it or not. Impromptu trips were regularly thrust upon him when a wanderlust struck his father and the quiet of Mushin’s temple no longer suited him. With nothing more than the clothes on their backs, his father's staff and a weathered shamisen, they took to paths unknown. Miroku loved and hated it. His father was skilled with the shamisen and his years of busking made it easy for them to earn money. However, it wouldn't be long before someone came with the complaint about a false exorcism or his father prodded some wealthy man into believing his home was haunted.
Living anywhere and nowhere was hard, and long hours on roads where dust wedged itself in places Miroku could feel for days until they had an opportunity to bathe.
And when those opportunities came, it seldom was in a place monks were known to visit — or proper.
Mushin once told him that monks in their sect abstained from worldly desires. But, he was a drunk. And Miroku's father was a lecher.
The inns they visited were his father's favorite place to stay. While he entertained the women who flocked to him, Miroku grew accustomed to women pinching his cheeks, cooing over him, or asking his father whether he was too young to be there. But his father, coy man as he was, would remind that Miroku would one day be a man, and there were things that he would need to understand — such as how to treat a woman with dignity and respect. What better way than accompanying his father to an establishment with fine women to dote on.
While the courtesans would fawn and swoon over his words, Miroku wondered if his father said them for their benefit or if it was another lesson for him. Before he could ask, enough sake would be down his father's throat that he'd be an incoherent mess by nightfall.
Sometimes, he wondered if one of those courtesans was his mother and whether or not that was why his father treated them so well. While Miroku never knew his mother, and no amount of drink or good food could put his father in a mood to speak of her, he couldn’t imagine his father was ever cruel to her as some men were to the women they met on their travels.
“Never turn a blind eye to a woman’s peril,” his father once told him as he hoisted Miroku under his arm, bolting away from the scene of a fight where his father’s freshly bloodied knuckles connected with the face of a man who’d been dragging a young woman through the streets. No one else took up a word in her defense though they looked on with disdain at the disturbance. For his life, Miroku couldn’t understand why they didn’t do anything, and when Miroku asked his father as he helped washed his hand in a river's water, his father said it was because doing something meant placing themselves in debt.
Karmic retribution came to those who did good and evil, and so many people had little to go around. Why give up what good will they’d stored to take upon someone’s misfortune?
“So ignoring it is the best thing to do?” A young Miroku asked, and for the first time in his life, his father looked at him with such ferocity that Miroku feared his father might strike him.
Then, in a quiet voice bellying the anger in his eyes, his father said, “If you can live with it….” He pressed his hands to his knees, staggering to his feet with a firm grasp on his staff. Miroku stepped forward to try and steady him, but his right hand was the closest part of him in reach. The one Miroku was warned never to touch. So, he watched with bated breath and an aching heart as his father struggled to his feet, no doubt bearing bruises from the fight.
In the tense atmosphere left by his father’s words, and the eerie stillness of the woods, Miroku could only hear his pounding heartbeat but even softer; there was a quiet whispering sound like wind coming from his father.
“Miroku,” His father murmured, shifting his staff from his left hand to the right. Then with his left, he reached out and gently laid his rough palm atop Miroku’s head. His voice, strained with pain, rang clearly in Miroku's ears as he looked at him as if he were the only person in the world. “If you remember nothing else, know this. Your life is your own, and with that, you should do what you want so that you die with no regrets. I only wish….”
Miroku wasn’t brave enough then. Not to ask his father to finish what he was going to say or inquire why he felt something warm and wet dripping onto his head. But he remembered how it felt like rain when there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky.
After that day, they spent winters at Mushin’s temple, returning at random even before his father's wanderlust waned. Miroku didn't mind particularly. While Mushin was a drunk, he was always kind to him when his father was strict. And it seemed that day changed something in his father as well, as he took a deeper interest in Miroku's studies.
While his father wasn't neglectful, he tended to take a light-handed approach with rearing him. Discipline came in words and his father's disappointment was worse than his anger. However, freedom was what Miroku had most. Sometimes, his father would leave him to go elsewhere with only a note to tell when he would return. Occasionally, he passed on a few strings of coins for him to use for food and to repay the innkeeper should his father be gone longer.
Questions of his intentions on returnin were often met with confusion. His father believed in practical lessons rather than theoretical, but he wouldn't put Miroku in harm's way, so to have him stay behind was obvious. If not irritating.
However, something changed. Their life in Mushin's temple was different now, and to have his father so close and at hand was stifling. His lectures were endless. He reminded Miroku that the stories passed down were essential to his understanding when Miroku whined about being told the same tale repeatedly. During meals, his father poked and prodded that he should eat all he received and be grateful for the animals and plants that died to sustain his body. When Miroku insisted he could keep going with practice after demanding to perfect a certain skill, his father told him rest was necessary so that his hara could have a moment to replenish itself.
His refusals were met with being hauled up under his father's arm like a misbehaving dog, and carried back inside where Mushin would have already prepared a meal for them. His father's words were always harshest then.
Miroku could recall most when his father said that if he hadn't learned when to care for his body, then clearly he wasn't taking his lessons seriously. It was all a younger Miroku could do not to seethe at his father's back when the man hauled him back to bed every time he escaped, standing watch over him without budging a single sun[ 1 ].
Yet, the folly of youth was unawareness. Miroku railed against it all, believing his father thought him incapable. When he asked Mushin why his father was behaving so strangely, the older monk merely patted his head and told him that he would thank his father for these moments when he was older. Bitterness conflicted with affection often but when he glanced back at those days, he realized that Mushin was right. He just didn't know how right he was until tragedy struck.
It had been an ordinary day where Miroku committed to his readings while his father sat on the veranda. A sound like whistling wind interrupting the tranquility of their studying space, annoying him to the point that he wanted to ask his father to shut the door. Mushin looked pale as Miroku's father stood up, taking hold of his hat. His bound hand held close at his side as he reached out with the other, patting Miroku's head in passing. The whistling following him.
Miroku got to his feet then, ignoring Mushin's call as the wind grew louder and he hurried after his father. His father outpaced him with each step, distancing further and further even as he called for him to slow down. That terrible, whistling wind became louder until it grew into a howling vortex, with his father in its center.
At that time, he hated what he lacked. His legs were not fast enough to outrun Mushin before the old monk grabbed him. His arms were not long enough to catch his father by his robes, and he knew from being unable to beat him so often when they trained that he wouldn't be able to stop his forward march towards death. But he would have tried. If only his father had told him sooner then they could have faced it together. He would have done anything to save him if only he had the chance. Perhaps, it was his karmic retribution. For that tunnel of wind left nothing of the father he loved.
There were no ashes to gather, no body to bury, nothing but a hollowed-out crater and a startlingly blue sky. As he fell to his knees and cried to the kami to return his father to him, he wished it would rain, thunder, storm - anything, but the sky remained bright and blue without a hint of a breeze.
Such a wish was too selfish. Then, he would give something else of himself. He promised not to complain. He would eat what he was given, sleep when needed, and rest when his body ached. He would listen to all the stories his father told him and commit them to his heart for the rest of his life because he couldn’t bear the agony of one day not being able to remember his voice. He wanted to see him again and apologize, open his eyes and see without youthful ignorance blinding him. He wanted one more night with his father watching over him so he wouldn't feel alone as he drifted off to sleep.
Most of all, he would have done anything to take back what he said. But the wind had carried his father away from him, and there was no hope he would return.
Time marched on. Once his father passed, the Kazaana appeared to gouge into Miroku's bones and pierce him with a fear he'd never felt a day in his life. Mushin's cautions as he helped him seal the tunnel with a rosary identical to his father's fell on deafened ears as he struggled with the desire to cut off his own arm, if only so it would be furthest from his body as possible. Mushin forbade him from doing so by telling him the one thing that would have made the Kazaana worth something in his eyes. It was the same curse that consumed his father's life, passed down from father to son for generations.
Before he succumbed to the curse, his father hoped to defeat their ancestral line’s greatest enemy and free Miroku from his clutches. But when it all proved for naught, he decided to spend what time he had left with his son. Miroku's hand trembled as he brushed his fingers over the beads, remembering how his father worked day and night on a project he wouldn't allow him to see. His craftsmanship was unmatched, the spell tied to the rosary quelling the Kazaana's spread sealed into one hundred and twelve beads blessed by his father's own hand.
The pain his father endured would forever remain a mystery to him. He couldn’t remember him crying or distressed. He didn’t yell, shout, or strike him when he did wrong. It never occurred to him until he was gone how calm his father made his life feel. How much he sheltered Miroku from the storm waged within his heart until it consumed him and swept them apart.
Adrift, Miroku tried to find steady ground, but he couldn’t keep hold of any one thing for long. Not until he heard Naraku’s name and understood that it was the only way. He couldn’t ignore it. He couldn’t turn his eyes away from the wreckage left of not only his life, but the lives of so many others. As Miroku traced his fingers over each bead, he could hear Mushin promising to show him how to do the same for if he should have his own son in the future. And should he fall before Naraku's defeat, he would tell his son the same as he told him now.
However, Miroku didn't care about that. What if he had a daughter, and he passed before she could come of age? What would he do if the mother of his son was left with the memory of him in their child's face and the hopelessness of knowing she could lose him to a madman's curse? He couldn't bear the thought. A little fooling around would be enough to distract, but he couldn't sire a child. Not yet, not until the Kazaana was gone.
If only he could kill Naraku, and spare another child this pain, then he would die with no regrets.
When Miroku opened his eyes, golden sunlight blinded him. It wasn’t often that he slept so late in the day, and he couldn’t fathom why he had for a moment. Then, he felt something warm and airy glide across his chest and realized that he wasn’t alone. He tilted his head slightly, glancing down at the top of a woman’s head resting atop his collarbone. Her hair obscured her face, but he could tell who she was from the roughness of her palm where it laid over his heart.
A small smile touched his lips. She wasn’t prone to sleeping in like this either, yet recent matters seemed to force both their hands. He wrested his arm free of their blankets and then brushed her hair away from her face with his knuckles, careful not to wake her. Even now, she was prone to waking at the slightest touch, and he wanted her to sleep a little longer.
She more than deserved it.
But to his dismay, her brows drew together, signaling her stirring.
“Miroku…?” She grumbled, the silent question of what was wrong lingering in the shade of concern. He wondered if a day would come when they could wake in the morning without the fear that the world was tumbling down.
“Ssh…” Miroku skimmed his fingertips against her nape, pressing gently to push her forward where his lips waited to kiss between her brows until the wrinkle formed smoothed out. “You’re beautiful like this, and I was only admiring.”
She snorted. “Flatterer…”
“I prefer to be called husband….” He couldn’t help smiling when her cheeks dusted pink even without her being fully conscious. The hand covering his heart curled into a fist, lightly thumping against his chest with not even a shred of her actual strength to back it. “Sleep, dear Sango… I’ll start breakfast, and….”
Her fist pressed lightly against his chest, weighing him down like a stone, and at last, he was able to see her eyes — beautiful but bearing a stroke of righteous disbelief and blatant refusal. “You aren’t going anywhere.”
Miroku blinked slowly, unsure if he should explain that he wasn’t going far or comply until Sango fell asleep again. Then, it crossed his mind that perhaps she might have had a questionable night’s rest as well. Though whereas his concerns manifested in thought, Sango's was in action. So, he decided to follow her lead and take action.
“… Not without you,” he said. The words had their intended effect, he noticed, when her palm laid flat against his chest and pressed to leverage her ascent. Her body blocked the sunlight from showering over him, but as she draped herself over him, pressing her mouth to his own, he couldn’t find it in himself to complain when he had the chance to revel in her affection another day.
He could understand now why his father dragged him everywhere and invested so much time in raising him, clumsily though he did. Because if Miroku were to die, his greatest regret would have been the time he hadn't spent with Sango.