Canine

He is the only child for now, the last of the litter, the runt that actually survived by finding nurtrients that didn’t come from his mother’s tit. If he hadn’t, then he would be dead like the rest of his brothers and sisters that he doesn’t remember having, because Mother really didn’t want to have pups. But Father was Alpha, so Father was God, and whatever Father said was law.

Even Mother accepted that.

Which was why, when the tiny white runt lay in a circle of his sibling’s limp bodies, Father smiled and christened him Sesshoumaru, and he forbid Mother from ever harming him. Mother, the bitch, stretched out on her stomach like the dog she was and leaned up, licking his chin, begging for him to love her. Father scowled, and took the pup, and Mother’s dog wanted to die, because FatherAlphaGod doesn’t love her anymore. Perhaps he never did.

Sesshoumaru is stumbling on paws that are too large for him, wondering why Father doesn’t want him to keep all of his lovely white fur. It’s cold in this naked body, even with the skins of his kills covering him. His fur is gone off of everywhere but his scalp, and he whimpers as he fights to stay in this form that Alpha Father God has picked out for him.

It’s hard. He’s trying.

Sesshoumaru is fighting, fighting, fighting, just like he was born fighting. He uses a bit of metal, a foreign and akward object that is an extension of an equally foreign and akward limb.

His enemy’s aren’t pups, they are men just like he is pretending to be. They are huge and bulking and Sesshoumaru is still just a runt that wants to crawl back inside of his dog body, his natural body, and slink away, belly on the ground, and find a place to bed down until everyone else is done picking their spots and he can just be Omega.

He tells this to Father in the language of the Dogs, his eyes darting about, looking everywhere but directly at him, his human shoulders and human arms relaxed, and he wishes not for the first time that he had a tail, because it is so much easier to grovel when you have four paws.

Father does not take the news well.

He reaches out to attack Sesshoumaru, not bothering to use his full strength, just swiping a hand at him, letting a little bit of dog seep in to him, causing his nails to grow and slash Sesshoumaru’s cheek open in three smooth lines. Sesshoumaru whimpers and drops, showing his belly, but it is not the way that humans talk and so Sesshoumaru earns himself a kick in the gut.

He is learning the way of humans. Or at least, he’s trying.

At night Father takes leave of him, and Sesshoumaru yips with joy as he transforms, letting his tight flesh melt in to fur. His bones rearrange himself, and he feels his vertebrae unstacking as he makes the change from Homo Sapien to Canine, and revels in every painful moment of it.

Sesshoumaru loses his name as he shifts, and in those vulnerable, painful moments, he is torn between ‘I should be’ and ‘I am.’ Sesshoumaru wonders, in his human body, if he is doing a good enough job. Why am I here? Where am I going? Who am I going to be? The dog knew no such questions – the dog knows that pleasing Father is first, keeping himself alive is second. The dog doesn’t know about tomorrow, because the dog lives in the light of the moon, racing through the trees when no one is watching.

When the shift is complete, he runs.

The runt is not a runt anymore, but a dog larger than any wolf could ever dream of being. He has almost grown in to his paws, which he pads along on as he runs. Although he could never dream of being as large as his Father, because Mother was such a tiny thing and he looked so much like her that it was entirely possible that Father wasn’t his father at all. For the dog though, that didn’t matter – Father had taken him in. Father had saved him from Mother. Father was Alpha, so Father was God, and it doesn’t even occur to the dog that they should be related. The heavy thumps are muffled by the thick bottoms of his feet, and he races between the trees and shafts of moonlight. He races and dreams.

There is something missing, he knows, even if he doesn’t know exactly what it is. He knows that when he runs, he shouldn’t be running alone. He knows that there should be more dogs here, and that they should be pressed shoulder to shoulder, haunch to haunch, and they should skim the forest floor as one being.

Pack. Not just Dog.

He reaches the apex of the tallest hill in his territory – he knew it was his, and no one else was allowed to come here – and stops, finally, to stare at the moon.

It matches his, a crescent at it’s crest, the light reflecting off the sun so brightly that the dog has to avert his eyes. It is beautiful, hovering in the sky, and the dog wishes that he could leap up and dance on it’s smooth surface as well.

Instead, on the apex of the hill, he tilts his head so that the moon can see his throat and sings. If the dog was Sesshoumaru, he would have wondered why it felt so wrong that he was singing alone – why his voice was the only one crying to the moon. But when Sesshoumaru is the dog, like he is now, he knows better than to wonder about things like that. He knows it’s wrong, that pack should be there to sing with him, but pack isn’t there, and he is alone and therefore a rogue. He accepts it, even though he doesn’t like it, because that’s the way things are.

He trots to back to the citadel, wishing that there was pack here to be with him. Wishing that their fur would rub against his fur, and that they could all just be one dog. He slows now that he can see the citadel, because he knows that Sesshoumaru wont let him have free reign for a while yet, and the dog doesn’t like the idea of being on a leash. His steps are painfully slow now, as he walks up the steps, and he stops, hackles raised, when he sees another dog.

She is white, just like him, and she has the same markings as he does. Mother, he knows. Pack. Whimpering, he drops to his stomach and crawls towards her, tongue out and tail whipping quickly.

Mother turns her head to the moon, and the dog recognizes the look of longing in them he has known. He calls to her, a yip, and licks her chin. He is telling her, in the language of the dogs, that he is pack, and that he wants to run. He is asking her, his Alpha, his Goddess, to run too.

Mother raises her hackles, offended that the runt has asked her to run with him, and shows him her back as she returns to the citadel, shifting from fur-coated dog to moon-clad human with little more than a thought.

She turns to him, glaring, and the dog resists the urge to give her his stomach.

“You are run by your emotions, Sesshoumaru.” The dog knows this name. Father is God, and Mother is Goddess, but Sesshoumaru is Master. “You will never have your pack until you learn to control yourself.”

The dog is confused, because he does what his instincts tell him to do. Right now, they are telling him to do whatever it is she wants.

He shifts back in to a human body, his vertebrae restacking themselves, his fur melting away in to flesh until he is crouched, dog-like and naked, on the steps of the Citadel.

“Yes Mother.”

She leaves him, but not without one last, wistful look towards the moon. Sesshoumaru does the same, and because he is human right now, he wonders what it would be like to live there all alone, where no one would force him to be Alpha, where he could just be the dog and not Sesshoumaru, where he could shift and go in to the forest and never come back.

Lonely. His dog tells him. You would be lonely without pack.

Sesshoumaru wishes he knew what pack really was.