Galatea by swasdiva

She Who Is Milk-White

Originally posted on Single Spark. This was inspired by the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, although rather incongruously. It's pretty much fanon themes (aka one big cliché), presented in a hopefully unique way. I do plan on continuing it in a 3-4 part series, but the other parts aren't as solid as this one and it may fall flat on its face. I consider this more a writing exercise than anything else, but your input is much, much appreciated.

Note: The name Galatea means "She who is milk-white"

Disclaimer: I own Inuyasha about as much as Clinton owns the Democratic Presidential nomination. Ooooo, Political Snap. Also, the quote "A warrior's ultimate destiny is to lay down his sword" belongs to the Jet Li movie "Hero".

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"Art is never finished, only abandoned." - Leonardo DaVinci

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By his hand, she came to life.

He had found her as a model of mottled skin and tangled hair, a stiff plank of driftwood flowing down the river. Bent against the pebbled riverbank, snarled in lines a banzai artist could never master, she had ebbed against the most hidden part of him. For a long time he studied her composition in the moonlight, surreally aware of winter's dry smell and the hoot owl's cries. For an eternity he felt the world wallowing in denial.

In hiding, he reached for her and carried her to shore. Her marble body left an impression in the sand as he shook the grit from his sleeves. In that arrangement, he studied her again, then nudged her to the left. The night's dark drapery shifted with his guidance, getting comfortable and hugging her close.

He wasn't be able to do that, so he sat back on his heels and surrendered them to each other.

In the annals of memory, Sesshoumaru was an artist. He had trusted an old sable brush like a sword in his youth, rinsing pigments from its bristles until they had split from overuse. He could've recreated everything Naraku destroyed with all the color he'd washed away. As he aged and life bled through his fingers, paint was no longer solid enough to tame him. He needed something to mold, something to rend. With no strength in his heart, he could only depend on the strength in his grasp.

Wood came first, then stone, then metal. Each had brought its own lesson.

Wood bore patterns like a river current, an eternal, flowing order to life even when he scored its corners sharp enough to slice a dragon in half. The dichotomy of what it was and what he could fashion it to be enthralled him. With wood, he became apprentice to Immortality; its rings, each, a sutra. One body after another dies but the mind carries them forever. It was comforting in a deeply cynical way, so he gathered his stockpiles and dropped them in the nearest human village right before the first snowfall. Their festival fires had never burned so bright before or since.

Stone was more fascinating, its riddle more subtle. He rummaged for hard varieties like flint and granite. He scoured for porous pieces like limestone and pumice. So many colors of brown and gray, a starry night full of different textures and origins, each one - a boulder here, or a grain of sand - the answer hidden in plain sight. How many living things passed these by every day, or walked all over them, or enslaved them as weapons? He set them free, constructing monuments in the far corners of his mother's gardens. His father called them piles of shit, and confiscated them for use in the fortress of his citadel. Years later he died miles away, with the fortress guardposts vacant and useless.

Sesshoumaru wasn't so good with metal. Instead, they changed hands. It kindled him in the fires of spite. It hammered him into a single obsession. Metal put him on a spit and burned him, curled him into filigree, made him priceless, coveted, sharp and brittle, but even as it poured him into a frigid mould he searched for it desperately. His drive was deeper than desire. It ran through his blood with the memories of his childhood, when safety and fulfillment was a jump up and away into arms so soft, so warm and so strong. He had vague recollections of what it was like to be loved, but it had been so long, and metal was so momentous. A warrior's ultimate destiny is to lay down his sword. Even though that was his father's most repetitive lesson, he couldn't die without learning it for himself. He would wield it in sorrow and drive it through his heart with a smile on his face, defying his father and embedding it there forever.

Or so he planned, but he should have known better. The greatest inspiration never comes when sought. The most enduring story is never predictable. He remembered that in a flash and knew Tetsusaiga would never belong to him, no matter how hard he forced it otherwise. In that moment, a young human woman drew what he couldn't and ripped the sketches of his new life to shreds.

He looked down at his hand as it wandered along her face. She was so pale there, paler than him, which was magic in and of itself. A block of ice, he decided, was something he had never thought to polish, and there she was, why not? Already cold and condensing, already slipping into the earth.

He didn't want to let her go, but he had to. She wasn't his to mould. She wasn't his to mourn.

"I never hated you," he whispered. The words formed diamonds right in front of him, a thousand miniature souls hanging on the frigid wind, dissolving into dust.

"In truth, I think you beautiful." He'd been told not to touch the ancient tapestries hanging in the tea house, but at night he crept back in and did it anyway, again and again.

He brushed her hair. And again.

"You are made of every material I used to love. I mastered some. Others mastered me."

Tenseiga chilled his thigh with passive silence. He ignored it.

"I would have shown you with pride." His throat seized. "To my eyes, you would have been immortal."

Metal was used for mirrors or swords. Both showed a false reflection. Both promised death, one slow, one quick, but he had tried to outwit them. His hunt for Tetsusaiga was his need to melt down his father's legacy and refire it with a permanence all his own. He had been damned with Tenseiga, a blade that wouldn't work in his hands. He thought it proof of his father's enduring condemnation. Sesshoumaru had hoped Tetsusaiga had been the answer, the mighty pen.

What tales he would have written with that blade, until she held it, that is.

She was too much for mirrors, too potent for swords. She shot him, broke his armor and made Tenseiga roar like a chisel in a canyon. The night when he had recovered in the forest, Sesshoumaru took another look at the blade his father gave him. He flipped it in his hand and held it like his old paintbrush. The position was awkward and cumbersome, but inspiring. Perhaps his father understood more than he let on. Perhaps he regretted the citadel walls as much as his son loathed them.

The next night he used Tenseiga with passion for the first time. The results were incredible. Suddenly every avenue held the beautiful disproportion that had always brought him purpose. Chiaroscuro giggled in the night. Wabi-sabi followed him along on loyal little human feet. Ancient Hellenism danced on the battlefield in a kimono he could never have dreamed, firing arrows through his attention, pinning it in place.

The girl that traveled with his brother was more than a muse. She became his subject.

Like all subjects, she was relegated to the distance. He watched her nonetheless. As a lord, wasn't that his responsibility? Always appearing serendipitously, but never striking the killing blow. Teaching lessons, composing epics. His themes were in his movements, his declarations sculpted in the surprise she showed when he materialized in the room of the Shinchinitai poison user.

He savored that image even now. He'd never captured anything so moving.

"Did you see me that night?" he asked her quietly, even though he knew she wouldn't stir.

"I lingered there for one more moment than I should have. I gave myself away. You had rendered me senseless, but I couldn't not see you."

Eyes sharpening, he followed the scribbles of brown blood crusted down her chin. He trembled.

"Forgive me."

Sesshoumaru knew it was cowardly to plead such a thing then, but he'd been holding on to those words for so long that the moment seemed as worthy as any other. She wasn't really the one who needed to hear them, so in every sense, he would keep his secret.

Shivering discreetly, he glanced up and looked to the distance. Miles away, Inuyasha lay unconscious, recovering from wounds that had killed this woman. Most likely, he had no idea she was dead, much less separated from their group. Sesshoumaru had held back with a petrified Rin in the shadowy canopies while the monk cradled the taijiya outside the old miko's hut as she wailed the details of her 'sister's' demise. Incensed, he'd sheltered Rin, Jaken and Ah-Un close to the village and returned to the site of the final battle for the Shikon, the charred wasteland, Naraku's funeral pyre. Scents led him to the river. Adrenaline guided him down its banks. The compulsion was so eerie, it was almost hysterical. He must be damned to covet everything that belonged to his brother.

The second before he spotted her bobbing in the shallows he considered what had defined that curse. It could've been the night, not so dissimilar from this one, when he cast the human princess and her hanyou toddler out of his castle and his family. Or maybe it was the morning he approached Inuyasha for the first time in years, and when the boy ran to him smiling, he swatted him across a meadow into a tree. No, he was sure it fossilized the moment he promised the hanyou's death in front of the boy's mother, in front of his father's vassals, in front of his kingdom. That had to be it.

The cunning behind it didn't matter. The studies drawn in preparation were worthless. The human hime had never been aware of his uncles' plotting or her own father's declaration of war, of how many people would have ripped her son to pieces had he not formally vowed to do it himself. Inuyasha wasn't aware either, and that's how Sesshoumaru intended it to stay. The uncertainty kept the hanyou on his toes. It opened his mind and alerted his senses to every nuance, every possibility. It wasn't much different than converting a blank canvas to the blinding throes of sunset, or erecting a mountain from a crude block of plaster.

It kept him alive. More than that, it kept him strong.

Tenseiga mewled and stretched awake. Sesshoumaru figured the sword decided his moment with the woman was over. It was time to make amends, for so many reasons, with so many regrets. And there was no better way than to hand over the one thing he wanted more than anything - his mother's beloved Ming vase, splintered on the floor, his father's punishment in the dojo - to someone else. He alone could refinish the cracked pottery and lacquer it with blushing life. He would leave it on the doorstep as the apology his brother would never otherwise believe.

Without thinking, his hand made one last pass along the starlit silk of her skin. He knew now, tonight, that he could paint her from memory if he wanted to, but that wouldn't do her justice. He couldn't hold her prisoner that way, at least not on a wall in his castle. She belonged in something warmer, some place burning brighter than forever. She belonged in a home near an ancient tree and an afternoon jog from a weathered well.

Tenseiga culled loudly, impatient, but for the first time his hand faltered.

Sesshoumaru didn't want metal in his hand. He wanted the promise of his brush, the beauty of his art.

But she wasn't his to want, so he had to adapt. He was good at that, the best at it, so he stepped up and acted upon it. With no strength in his heart, he could only depend on the strength in his grasp.

He pulled his sword, and it kissed her in his place.

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