Someone to Protect: Toga x Izayoi

Chapter 1 - The Meeting That Shifted Fate

Picture Credits: Unknown due to broken links (if you know the artist, please let me know so that I can give them credit... I also don't know what the words say?); GIF credits: Inuyasha anime (Rumiko Takahashi and Viz Media; created using Gifs.com) 

Chapter 1 - The Meeting That Shifted Fate

Fear.

The smell made Toga, the great Inu No Taisho, pause mid-step. Even he could not understand why he paused.

As a yokai in the forest, it wasn't unusual to pick up the fear-scent of prey animals. This scent, though, this scent wasn't an animal. It wasn't yokai. It was something... other.

Battlefields reeked of it. Ruined villages too. It was human, which should have smelled the same as any other human fear.

And yet --

Curious, Toga drifted towards the smell.

Nearing a town, he paused at the edge of the woods to sniff and listen.

Three men stood importantly in front of the decaying gate to the decrepit Great House. In front of them, on their knees, were an impoverished woman and a skinny man with sunken cheeks and gray hair; villagers, equally malnourished and poor, peaked anxiously from their doors and around corners to see what was going on.

"...not enough to pay your taxes this year," one of the nasal-voiced tax collectors decreed.

"Please, we are loyal to our lord and have given him everything we can. We are destitute," the woman begged.

"Karin," the tired man corrected his wife gently, "you mustn't speak to them in such a way."

"Don't you have children?" The oldest tax-collector inquired, reading down a neatly-scripted scroll. "I have children listed in last year's census. The master accepts slaves as payment."

"Shoto! Don't let them take our daughters!" The woman begged desperately.

Toga sighed and turned away.

How mundane.

He had walked only a few steps when he saw tiny toes poking out from under a bush. The fear-scent was strongest here.

"You there, why are you hiding?"

Two small squeaks answered him, and the toes disappeared.

"I'm not with the tax collectors. Are they the reason you are in that bush?"

"No, Izayoi!" a small feminine voice hissed.

Apparently the other child wasn't prone to listening to her elder sister, because small hands drew back the leaves to reveal a tiny, porcelain-like face. Warm brown eyes met his, sparking with both intellect and defiance. 

Bravely the little girl declared, "I am not leaving my parents!"

He raised a brow, "I'd say not. You're still quite young."

His attention shifted down the hill where one of the tax collectors was heading towards the woods, obviously to search for the two hiding girls.

The child with warm brown eyes looked at him intently, as if she could pry into his mind and find answers, "You're not going to take me away?"

"Izayoi, we're supposed to be hiding!" the other voice hissed, pulling the child back into the bushes.

The human male made it to the tree line. 

Izayoi's head popped back out, "They say the master has a tiger yokai that likes to eat children."

"Izayoi!" the other girl growled with frustration, "leave the man alone. He looks weird. And dangerous. We need to be hiding."