Sitting Amongst Weeds and Wildflowers
The cool breeze was blowing westward, a calm reassuring sweep that tinkled across his face then traveled inside and throughout his long strands of silver hair. The field around where he was sitting was stirred by that same breeze that caused an array of petals to flounder around him. He was allowing himself to briefly take pleasure in his current location, sitting in a clearing littered with an assortment of weeds and wildflowers. The spring was probably a welcome reprieve to the human settlement that was only a well placed jump away from his current location.
Spring was a season where things rooted gave life, and where things whether intentional or not grew; similar to that of a wildflower.
Ah-Un was lazily resting a few yards from the center of the clearing. They preferred the shelter of the trees that gave them ample blockage from the sun. The beast almost looked peaceful from his viewpoint, as if he weren't in close vicinity to a species who would either run in fright or purify him on the spot without the slightest provocation, whether he be a "good" demon or not. Au-Un had the mind to understand human speech, but he always wondered if they had the ability to speak with human tongue, what madness they could attest to on behalf of their odd company their master kept.
They have had to play babysitter, protector, and makeshift bed for one weary mortal girl in these past years.
He recalled a time when he had first saddled her into their group, he was slightly nervous to be leaving her alone with just Jaken and Ah-un for protection, and he still didn't completely know how they were to take to her. When he returned from one of his encounters with Inuyasha he approached her first inquiring on how she had faired in his absence, not even worried about how such a thing might have seemed odd on his part.
She didn't complain about him being gone, or that she was scared without his protection, or of the unwanted grumblings of the toad. She had said that she was well with Ah-Un and that she had taken care of him.
One wouldn't think with the way she coddled and taken to the dragon, that Ah-un could darken a sky with malice and jolt a being into an early grave.
But Ah-un never minded giving the child a place to rest when the travels became hard on her human feet.
He didn't mind even when the load over the years grew heavier.
Sitting beside one of the dragons muzzled lightning blowing heads, was the fumbling toad. Due to idiocy alone one would have thought he would have thrown the frog in the deepest lake in the farthest corner of Japan, or dragged his cowering form through the barrier at Mt. Hakari. So why hadn't he? Years before Jaken, when it was just him, when he had no one else to boss around, no one else to threaten on a regular basis, and no one to do trivial task he simply didn't care to do, Jaken came into his life and took it all with as much grace as clumsy toad could, and at the end of the day he still come back for more. If that wasn't loyalty in its truest form then he didn't know what was. Even Inuyasha had trouble keeping track of that damn insect he called a vassal.
And who else would have been company for a lonely orphaned girl belonging to a busy youkai lord.
Jaken, even though failing every attempt to keep the girl from any danger, had been laid prostrate on the ground before him for every wayward scratch that graced the child's skin. He could tell Inuyasha's group never could understand Jaken's rambling about the death of him if anything happened to the girl, for all they saw he was indifferent to everyone in the group besides letting anyone else take them from him. Unbeknownst to all of them Jaken knew the value she held to him even though no one else could see it.
And in recent years when he thought Sesshomaru didn't notice, her personal confidant.
Au-Un and Jaken had been of some use over the long years of wandering. And in turn he was their Lord and safeguard.
But it was the one sitting a few shy feet away pretending to be enraptured in a white and yellow wildflower, the ones she used to spend hours picking on their brief but necessary stops in their travels.
It was her that made him adjust, it was her that made it okay for him to slow down and "smell the flowers".
She was their wildflower.
She was wild enough to be amongst weeds and to flourish alongside them all while adding her own special aroma of calm contentment in a group of demons that would be no more than just that; weeds.
He glanced out of the corner of his eye still noticing her vague attempt of subtly and wondered what the next decade of his life held for him, his weeds, and this wildflower who he was about to allow her once again the opportunity to be by his side.
The reason he was ever in any range of a human village, who knew that his offer would be reciprocated, and obviously so did the careless dragon and fumbling toad who slyly gave the two some space on this particular visit.