So, I was stuck on this chapter for a really, really, really long time (A few of you may have noticed). And then today I decided, what the heck, I wanted it to be a scene or two longer but I'll just give you all what I have. So, errr...here it is!
Oh. So, I guess in the few years I didn't update, there was some kind of land-of-the-dead storyline (along with the end of the manga and whatnot). I plotted this out before I knew about it, so, consider this to be a canon divergence from...let's say, before the shininintai storyline.
Er...I hope it was worth the wait? Eheh.
*runs*
Kagome had always had a problem with time. It had started—perhaps—when her first cat died on the day she turned six, and she had wished on her candles to not have any more birthdays.
She learned then that wishes do not come true.
However, it was not until her father died on the day she turned eleven that Kagome learned that there was something very wrong with her. She was afraid of time. She was terrified of it.
A teacher had once told her, with clinical precision, that time meant 'the progression from past through present to future', but Kagome knew that that wasn't it at all. Time meant never again. She would never be ten years old again. She would never see her father again. She would never be whole again.
Young Kagome did not believe in wishing anymore, but if she did have a wish—if she did—it would be to connect to the past. To go backward. To have just one more day; to live this and that moment one more time; to go back to when it was better. There were too many little pieces of her soul still lodged in the past, one stuck to every memory, and she drew these memories around herself like a blanket and wondered why she wasn't warm. The years yawned achingly before her, and she was afraid of them.
Then, on the day she turned fifteen, the past came to claim her.
It just wasn't her past.
Sometimes she wondered, during her travels, if she had wished so hard to return to the past that she had wished the extra five centuries on by accident. But—in the end—it didn't matter. Kagome found that by going backward in time, she was finally able to move forward in her life. And for once—maybe—she was almost whole.
Then, on the day she turned eighteen, the well burned to the ground.
And as she stumbled through the charred pieces of her life, the past nothing but smoke and memories, she wrapped herself again in that blanket of memories. Shivering.
And even though she knew better than wishing, even though she knew better than hoping, she wished, and she hoped, and she yearned for some way to connect to the past once again. She knew this was why she had obsessed over the statues. Why it had become so important to know the fate of Sesshoumaru. She just wanted something—some tie, some link. Some connection with the past that she could hold on to. Anything.
However, a scant eight weeks after her twentieth birthday, as Kagome fell screaming to earth, she found herself thinking that this had actually been a very silly thing to wish, a very silly thing indeed, and she decided that maybe she didn't really want to connect with the past after all if it meant connecting with the ground too.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard she concentrated, her miko powers did not seem to be helping her fly.
"Oh—" she screamed, her arms spread wide, hugging the air, "—shiiiiit!"
She couldn't stop tumbling. Her clothing snapped and cracked. Her heart thundered. The vaulting sky spun around her, vast and blue, and it was all she could do suck in air for another scream.
"I'm gonna diieeeeee!"
Kagome knew that she was panicking, and that panicking was a very bad idea right now, but goddammit, she felt freaking justified in a little panic this time. She was so far above the ground—miles, it seemed—that she could see from edge to edge of this hidden world.
None of it looked very soft. At all.
Everything came in flashes as she fell. Craggy mountainsides—skims of cloud across the ocean of a sky—a grinning white skull rising from the forest—spindly skeletal birds in the air, so far away that they looked like little mouse bones—sharp ragged rocks—
Oh, god, someone please help me!
Her thoughts came in flashes too, whipping through her mind. She thought of her family sleeping at home, who would never find her. She thought of the skull below, and how it grinned at her. She thought of Inuyasha, who she really wished was here right now to save her. She thought of her father. She thought of her first cat. She thought of her sad empty eggshell of a life, and how she had wasted it.
She thought of how she was going to die in a tomb.
She even thought momentarily—and quite, quite angrily!—of Sesshoumaru. Who, indirectly, was going to finally have managed to kill her off after all.
But most of all she thought of the ground and the intimate relationship she was about to have with it.
Dear God, she wrote in her mind, her throat hitching, if you get me out of this, I'll be ever so good, and do all sorts of good, good things; I can't think of anything right now, but I promise you'll be really impressed!
P.S. Any time now would be good.
The blue dome of the sky was now above her as she faced the heavens, and for a moment she seemed to be steady, suspended in quiet freefall. At some point she had stopped screaming. Who would hear her?
Instead, she felt the wind through her fingers, heard the sky roaring at her. The sun shone blurred and gold through her tears. I'm flying, she lied to herself.
Then the wind caught and spun her over again, and the forests spread before her, a green blanket from horizon to horizon. No, Kagome thought, her heart seizing up, no, there was no pretending. This was not at all like flying. Flying was happy and magical. She was going to die. She was going to die a virgin. It didn't get any less magical than that.
She could just hear the universe laughing.
—Hm.
Actually, she really could hear something. Though it didn't sound much like a laugh. It was shrill and piercing and unearthly, and—ah. At some point she must have started screaming again. Or maybe—
—Wait—
Kagome twisted around in midair.
Twenty or so feet away, regarding her with empty eye sockets, was a bird made of bone.
Kagome gaped back at it.
And as she stared, it clacked its beak twice, arched its spindly neck, and let out another blood-boiling shriek.
Oh.
For a long minute her brain lagged behind what she was seeing. Then synapses sizzled and sparked to life; her heart fired up and revved into gear; her face lit up like the sun.
"Oh!" she said. "Yes! Yes! I know you! YES!" She laughed out loud. Yes! Creepy morbid angels had come to rescue her! She was saved! Saved! Saved!
The bird cocked its head at her and drifted a little closer.
"That's right! C'mon! I'm right here!" She smiled at it. "Good zombie bird. Pretty zombie bird. Come to Kagome!"
The bird stared.
"Just a little closer. Please. C'mon now…come to auntie Kagome. Good bird."
The bird drifted a few feet back.
"Wait. Don't do that—"
A few feet further back.
Her eyes flicked down to the ground and back. Her smile became strained. "Please tell me you're actually here to save me and this isn't some kind of cruel joke."
As if in answer, the bird clacked its beak again, letting out a rattling sort of warble. Flared out its tattered wings.
And went wheeling and turning away.
"No! No, no, nonononono, don't do that! Here birdie!" She waved madly at it. "Good zombie bird! Come back!" Her throat caught on a sob. "Come back!"
She was doomed! Doomed! Doomed!
"You!" She swung her finger at the skull of the once Inu no Taisho. "This is all your fault! You and your stupid pearl and your stupid sons! Your stupid, stupid sons!" Her fists tightened. "If you weren't already so dead, I'd—"
"Skie-skrreeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiikk!"
Her mouth snapped shut. She looked down.
The bird was coming up from below her.
Coming up fast.
She spread her arms to control her fall, angling her body towards it. With a gasp she reached out—
Oh, shit, was her last coherent thought, this is really gonna—
Kagome sank to her knees. Heaved a shuddering breath. Fell forward, boneless, onto her hands and dug them in the wiry grass. Then her elbows gave out too and she flopped onto the ground, gasping, white suns still blazing behind her eyes.
"Guh," she said.
Behind her she could hear the bird clacking and rattling. Little squawks of distress punctuated the rustle of decayed feathers dropping around her. As she blinked back the hot white daze the creature set her eardrums ringing with a long, distressed, throaty shriek.
Kagome agreed wholeheartedly.
"Sorry about that," she mumbled into the dirt. Her voice was weak. "I didn't mean to hit you so hard."
The sounds of its nervous preen stopped. Kagome struggled to turn herself over, but all her muscles had turned to warm lead; all her bones to water. She felt like she was melting and flowing into the ground. The throbbing in her limbs, for the moment, was a distant sort of ache, like it wasn't really her body that was hurting. She was very grateful for that.
Hissing through her teeth, she redoubled her efforts and tried to move her arm. A wet pop followed. Her body shuddered again and she resigned herself for a long while to lying in the grass.
When she finally managed to roll herself over—how long it took, she didn't know—she lay on her back and stared into the sky through foreign trees. "Hey there," she said, giving her skeletal companion a weak smile.
Kagome felt a bizarre sense of camaraderie with the bird. She often got that way with people—er, entities?—she had almost died with. It was hard not to, when she could still feel its screams rattling up through its hollow throat and its ribs splintering under her palms.
Last time, she had had Inuyasha to take the brunt of the hit, and last time, they had only fallen a very short way before they reached the birds. This had been very different.
This time she had had plenty of time to build up momentum.
She could only remember jagged pieces of the fall, but the hit—it was all twisted metal pain and broken glass thoughts and smoldering disaster.
They had hit like a ten car pileup.
A white-hot blaze had exploded to life inside her skull and swamped her vision. Every bone in her body jolted out of place. And she must have blacked out for a second, because the white wildfire grew until the sounds were white, the pain was white, her thoughts were white.
She had probably already been screaming but at that point the bird began shrieking too, and the shrieking had been black, and at once consciousness had blasted back through her. She could feel it heaving its ratty wings below her. Could feel it claw the air. Could feel them plunge downward.
They fell a thousand feet together in a twisting, screaming tangle of limb and bone, before the bird managed to pull up, and Kagome, hanging on by only a clavicle, dared to open her eyes.
Below her dangling feet, watching, the massive skull of the former Inu no Taisho grinned.
Somehow after that she had managed to swing her leg up behind its ribcage and hook it over the spine. She then had shut her eyes tight and decided not to open them again until she was on the ground.
And here she was.
With a few more wet pops—oh, that's one's going to hurt in the morning. And oooh, that one's hurting right now—she accomplished a sitting position. She considered this to be a very great accomplishment and would have given herself a pat on the back, but the action may have hemorrhaged something. So she made it a mental pat. A gentle one.
Her body made a few more exciting twinges and a last pop as she staggered to her feet.
"Well," she said to the bird in a pleasant tone, "I really fucked this one up." She dusted her hands on her pajamas.
The bird tilted its head. She imagined it would have blinked at her if it could.
"You probably don't know what a bed is, but I could've been in one right now. But noooo…had to be curious…had to want a mystery, an adventure…" She blinked back tears and turned away. "Well, I wanted some link to the past, and here it is. A tomb. A dead place full of dead things. Just as dead as everything else I left behind. Wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something, huh?"
As if to punctuate her statement, the bird let out a thunderous squawk, beat its mighty wings—
And flew away.
Great.
She didn't know the way out. In fact, she wasn't sure there was a way out. Myouga was the one who got them out the last time, and he had to use some kind of spell. She wished she could remember what it was, but it hadn't been in Japanese. She wasn't sure it was even in words.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked around at the sun-kissed trees. "Now what do I do?"
Kagome threw rocks at the Inu no Taisho.
Actually, first she had thrown a small tantrum. "Argh!" she had screamed, shaking her fist at the skull high above her. "Shit! I'm not supposed to be here! Does it look like I've got the staff of heads? What the hell! What did I do wrong?"
Not only did the Inu no Taisho not answer, he looked entirely too smug about the whole situation, in her opinion. So she threw a rock at him. Then another one.
First defacing historical artifacts, now desecrating graves? Maybe it's a good thing grampa isn't here to see this.
Her aim fell dramatically short though, what with him being at the top of the mountain. This was highly unsatisfying.
Kagome had stomped around for a few minutes, muttering some very choice words. Then, picking up a good throwing rock, she had started to march up the mountainside.
She needed to explore her surroundings anyway. This just gave her direction and focus. Besides, from higher up she'd have a better vantage point of the valley.
And she was going to wipe that grin off the Inu no Taisho's face even if it meant knocking out all his teeth.
Kagome found it funny that, after cutting herself off from the rest of the world for so long, she was now, quite literally, cut off from the rest of the world. The forest was eerily silent—no birds, no insects, nothing. She began to have the frightening suspicion that she was the only thing alive here.
Other than the flora, of course. The thin primary forest that had been here before had thickened and matured into a vast, sprawling sea of leviathan trees. Cliffs that had been bare were now lush and alive. And of course, there was the green-shrouded corpse of the Inu no Taisho. Emerging here and there from the canopy was the top of an armored spike, or the curve of a rib; the boulder she had just passed was really a rusted plate of metal.
The creeping foliage had barely taken hold last time she was here. Back then, the Inu no Taisho had been dead for what, fifty years? This forest had had five hundred and fifty years to fill itself in.
It was no wonder the bone-bird was so confused by her arrival. It hadn't had any visitors for half a millennia.
And even though she had known, consciously, that she was still in the present, she realized then that for a moment it had felt like she had returned to the past. But that feeling was dispelled as she took in the changes. This was not the black pearl of the feudal era.
It was familiar enough to hurt, though.
As she walked, she tried to take a step back and assess the current situation, scraping together a mental list.
Pros:
1. I'm alive. Yay!
2. My instincts were totally right about that statue. I'm so smart.
3. Alive!
Cons:
1. I don't know the way out.
2. If I'd just left the damn statue alone I wouldn't be in this mess. I'm so stupid.
3. Everyone who knows the way out is dead.
4. I'm alive but in a tomb. Does that mean I'm buried alive?
Kagome crumpled up her mental list and threw it in her mental trash bin.
The climb was long and slow; there were no footpaths to follow—seeing as there was no one else to walk them—and the body of a dead demon dog didn't make for very even terrain. Her ascent had her zigzagging back and forth across the Inu no Taisho's knees and the foothills they were braced against. Some of those foothills are probably actual feet, she thought morbidly.
Even worse: she had lost her slippers during the fall.
"The joys of climbing a mountain barefoot," she sighed to herself, hopping on one foot after an attack by a particularly vicious and pointy stone. "I don't know how Inuyasha always did it. Oh, wait—demon skin."
Kagome shot the Inu no Taisho a dark look over her shoulder.
At around what she assumed to be midday (she didn't know what sort of hours the sun kept here; after all, it had been night when she'd fallen through the pearl), she started to hum just to break the awful silence. It unnerved her—this place was so peaceful, but the peace was deceptive. There would be no harsh, violent death here, but a slow, lonely one. The kind she was always afraid of.
It was so quiet that when the sky rumbled overhead she shrieked and dropped to the ground.
When it boomed again she blinked several times, then slowly tilted her head upwards.
Dark thunderheads blotted the sun; the sky was a cold iron gray. Distant lightning flashed near the horizon. As another growling rumble echoed through the valley, a single drop of water splashed on her nose.
"Oh, please don't," she said.
The heavens opened up and poured down on her.
Kagome swore and jumped to her feet, pushing her wet bangs out of her eyes. It had gone from sprinkle to deluge with no in-between whatsoever. Squinting through the wall of water, she caught a glimpse of a rock formation through the trees, deeper in the foothills, and immediately set off towards it. Rivulets of water were already forming around her feet and she quickened her pace, splashing through them.
She was an experienced enough camper to know that when you got caught in a storm on an open mountainside, you went for shelter, fast.
She broke through the trees at a dead run, zeroing in on the looming shadow up ahead. The sky was so dark now it was practically twilight.
Lightning flashed, illuminating the clearing. Kagome sloshed to a stop.
It was a tiny shrine.
There was a pair of temple dogs in front of it, smaller than the ones she had found the pearl in. They only came to about waist-high. More statues perched on the tipped-up eaves; small stone foxes. The building was otherwise small and simple. No windows.
Kagome moved to stand in front of the door, rain streaming down her face. Her hand reached out and traced the scrollwork flowers that trailed down the doorframe. Steeling herself, her heart in her throat, she grabbed the iron handle and pulled.
The door groaned and hardly moved an inch; throwing her whole weight into it, her feet slipping against the muddy ground, she managed to drag it wider. A wave of stale air rushed out in a dusty sigh.
Before she wriggled through the narrow opening, she scanned around the shrine and grabbed a broken stick from the ground. Then she slipped through and slowly heaved it shut again from the other side, leaving a thin crack for air.
Her ragged breathing sounded deafeningly loud in the pitch black of the shrine. Clutching the stick in front of her, she sent up a silent prayer and slowly, carefully, began to channel spiritual energy into it.
A dull rosy glow spread throughout the single room.
The back of the door was cast iron. The walls had been wood on the outside, but this was only a thin shell. On the inside they were lined with huge slabs of rock. Kagome held her makeshift light up higher.
The walls were covered in flowers.
They scrawled across the stone canvas in madcap loops and swirls, every kind of flower imaginable—lilies, snapdragons, sunflowers and more, flowers she'd never even seen or heard of. Engraved straight into the rock, they arced up across the ceiling and down again without break, like the artist had gone mad. The waterfall of flowers spread out under her feet in twists and clusters.
The only place that wasn't covered in them was the marble coffin that rested in the center
Kagome hadn't discovered a shrine at all. She had discovered a crypt.
Holding her breath, she carefully approached the tomb, casting the marble in dusky rose. She knelt in front of it and held the light up close so she could read it, even though by now she already knew what it would say.
She had known before she even took the pearl out of the stone dog's eye.
Rin.
"They say she was laid to rest on a bed of flowers and pearls," Kagome whispered, echoing her grandfather's words. The princess of the mountain. The princess whose house had been guarded by two stone dogs, one with a sliver of moon on its brow.
Kagome blinked back tears, shaking her head. She should have known the moment she discovered the identity of the statue. Even without a name, she should have known. Who else would have had that particular figure to guard her?
She had been thrown by the noble title, but that made sense too. Rin was, in her own right, a princess.
She was the adopted daughter of the Prince of the West.
Back at the shrine, the moment she saw something glinting inside the statue's broken eye, Kagome had guessed the truth. And she had been certain once she spoke with her grandfather. Because she had interpreted his words a little differently than he had: the princess was buried within the pearl.
Hot tears burned searing trails down Kagome's cheeks. Rin's name blurred in front of her, and as Kagome's concentration wavered, the light from the stick dimmed and died. Visions swam before her in the quiet dark, memories of a little girl in a checkered kimono, dancing through endless fields of flowers, her laughter bright and sunny.
And as the image followed of a stark white figure, standing vigil in the corners of that field, she bent over and sobbed, her heart reaching out. For one thing ran over and over through her mind:
Someone had given Rin a stone garden to play in.
She slept through most of the rain, on the floor of the crypt.
When the skies let up, she had gone outside and gathered up wildflowers, still wet from the fresh rain. She laid them on top of the coffin, beside the brittle husks that already decorated it from who knew how many centuries ago. Apologizing for her intrusion, she said a prayer over the grave, then sealed it up again from the outside.
And then she turned her face towards the mountainside above her, and began to climb.
She didn't know how long she scaled the ancient slope. The rocks were wet with rain and her movements were leaden, but her body moved as if on its own, plodding ever upwards. There was nothing left to do but go up. The skull slowly grew closer.
When she was maybe two-thirds of the way up, she found an opening. The cleft in the rock was just wide enough to crawl through. The rock, she saw, was not really rock at all, but a veneer of rust over bone. Sliding through on her stomach, she emerged between two leviathan ribs.
And found herself inside the massive chamber she had last seen so many centuries ago.
It was like the inside of some vast cathedral. Crisscrosses of sunlight slanted through gaps in the ribs, filling the chamber with muted light. Curtains of vines hung down from the bones like tangled green tapestries.
As she slid to the ground on a twisted vine, her feet touched down on a carpet of softest moss. The whispery crackling it made gave away what she knew lay beneath it.
The crunching whispers trailed her as she padded farther into the chamber, her breath taken by the immensity of it. Somehow, she had forgotten how large it was.
As she walked through the echoing vault, she found herself drawn by her memories to things that she knew. She walked past the warped and melted place where she had been bathed in acid. Past the gaping hole where a wounded dog had once fled, the opening now covered over by ivy. Past the slashes cut into the walls from a battle long ago.
And, at last, towards the dais at the end of the chamber. The one she had stood on when she drew tessaiga so many years ago, metal flames arching up behind it.
As Kagome approached it a weight grew in her chest. The weight grew heavier and colder with each step until it was like she carried an icy stone in her stomach, chilling her heart. There was something on the dais ahead of her. Something that hadn't been there before. She wanted to go back. She didn't want to know what the thing was, what it was that lay there, looking so wrong yet so familiar.
Her feet stopped at the end of the platform, the whispery crunching fading into silence.
There was a body on the dais.
He looked exactly as she remembered him, except different. He was thinner than in her memories, his tall, long-limbed form only accentuating how slender he really was. He wore nothing but white. No armor, no adornments, only starkest white, like the snowy locks that spilled over the edge of the dais and onto the ground. Vines twisted through them, and the moss that had crept up the platform was slowly taking him over, like the statues on the mountain being claimed back by the forest.
Everything was covered by a skim of dust, and Kagome thought that it was like the fairy tale Snow White, looking inside the glass coffin at the corpse that lay perfectly preserved within. His ageless face was pale as marble, and just as still.
Stiller than a forgotten tomb, stiller than death.
Far too still.
"Oh," she breathed, sinking to her knees as the last strength she had bled out of her. Her legs crumbled beneath her like her hopes crumbled into dust and ash inside her. There was nothing to hold her up any more. She'd come all this way, had dared to maybe begin to hope. But there was nothing this cursed tomb had to give her but more graves. She shut her eyes, her cheeks growing wet. "You're dead…"
"Yes," he said.
Kagome's head lifted, tears streaking her face.
"What?" she managed weakly.
"Yes," Sesshoumaru repeated, still lying upon the dais. His voice was quiet but clear, the words rolling in his mouth as he seemed to consider them. Taste them. "Yes, I am dead."
Her mouth opened, moving over words she couldn't seem to form. The moment felt unreal, like some midnight fever-dream. Like she was falling out of the sky all over again. She shut her mouth, swallowed, and tried again.
"You know," she said, her voice calmer than she thought it would be, "I've seen an awful lot of dead people, and most of them aren't nearly so…so, ah…" she sought out the right word,"…chatty."
Minutes dragged by in silence. He looked dead again. Kagome hesitated, biting her lip, but when he still didn't answer she finally inched closer, moss crunching beneath her as she crawled on her hands and knees until she could see his face. His eyes were open now, gazing up at the skeletal ceiling far overhead. Glassy.
"Sesshoumaru?"
The youkai did not move. She was close enough to reach out and touch him. She didn't dare.
"Sesshoumaru?" she repeated, voice wavering. He was splayed out funny, she noticed, like he had been tossed there, or like he had let himself drop without a care. He was so thin and pale it was unreal, and he didn't look alive but he didn't act dead. She felt herself go colder.
"Are you a ghost?" she asked.
The glass of his eyes was like sea glass, dulled and worn. "Yes," he said after a long moment. "I am a ghost."
For awhile she had to shut her eyes, squeezing back tears. It didn't seem right to mourn him when he was right there in front of her. She didn't think he'd like it. But her heart hurt, and she had the strangest sense of loss. All those weeks she spent thinking about him, wondering if he had survived, if he might still be alive…all those weeks spent hoping…and he had died, long, long ago. His soul left behind to haunt this empty, lonely tomb.
Forever.