AN: Okay everyone! Here we go. This is something I've been working on for a while. It's only semi AU, as you'll see later. Taking some good advice given to me by reviewers of my last story, Witnesses, (Thank you POAS and inu-yasha4ever89!) I am resisting the urge to point out the flaws I see in this chapter. But feel free to point them out yourselves. Please review! It's not that I don't write for myself its more that myself wants to write more when encouraged by reviews. Hmm, did that sentence make sense? The point is, while I do worry about the flaws I see in my writing, I am also proud and happy to write so I'll hold back and leave the critiquing up to the (hopefully many!) reviewers.

Anyway, strange as it may be, this story has two prologues. I could have combined them, since both are really short, but I thought they were better as individual chapters. Who knows, maybe I'll end up changing my mind. Anyway, about the prologues, this one in particular: Things that aren't clear will become more so very soon, so bear with me. Well, enough of this. Please enjoy!

Oh, wait…I don't own Inuyasha. Or Kagome. Or any of the characters/ situations/plots that we all know belong to Rumiko Takahashi. Or much of anything, if you must know. But that's another story.  (Disclaimer). Now finally…

Prologue A: Her Solitude

Delicate hands deftly folded the final details. Slim fingers pulled apart the wings and the crane revealed itself. A mouth turned upwards tenderly, just as it always had, as it always would, at her creation. The same delicate hands threaded a dull needle with thread as white as the paper crane in her lap. With practiced ease she threaded it and then hung it from her ceiling by standing on a plush pale pink chair. On the ceiling it was indistinguishable from the thousands of others.

Clutching a faintly glowing jewel to her chest, the graceful face flickered with happiness again. Pale lips turned up in a smile. The girl twirled a little in her dress, her new dress, dark hair flying out parallel to the skirt. She wondered where the dress came from, where anything came from in her peaceful, beautiful little world. She brushed that thought aside a moment later. It was a perfect dress, like the one she had dreamed of. She had never owned something so deep with color before. It was amazing that her mind had even known that such a color existed.

She knew that by speaking in hushed tones, seemingly to herself anywhere in her solitary world, she could receive what she desired. And so she had spoken loudly to the warm jewel that never left her side, day after day, of the glorious enveloping green dress that she had worn in her dreams, the dress in which she felt so perfect and at peace. Of course it had appeared for her soon, she was given almost anything that she desired. There was not much that she asked for. What could she want? Still she enjoyed the gifts as much as she was able, with detachment and complacent contentment. They were, to her mind, proof that the vague hope within her, that there were other people in the world was true. The crane was something from them, someone must have first thought of it, for her to have dreamed it, for her to have been able to create it.

She had very few memories, and those she did have seemed faded unreal and often times unconnected and contradictory. But somehow she knew the crane, and knew it had been important. She had two distinct memories of it. The first was of a hospital, how she knew it was a hospital she knew not, where gentle female hands guided her own, or at least what seemed to be her own, smaller and clumsier hands. The other was more disturbing. Emotional on a level that she could scarcily comprehend. In this memory the hands guiding were hers, and she held the hands that were clawed and inhumanly pale, not that she really knew how she could know what was and wasn't human. It was touching and painful and she didn't know why.

The second memory was the stronger one, the one that she felt resonate inside her, locked just out of reach yet inarguably hers. It was also the more confusing, since the hands in that memory were the hands of her present, and she had certainly never met anyone recently, let alone felt what she felt in that memory.  The first was more faded and she watched it as one would watch the memories of another, or some sort of make believe show, in detached comprehension. She knew it had allowed the other memory to be clearer though, somehow, so she continued to hold onto it. Memories and cranes both held her hope of not being alone, told her there was a time when she had been with others.

The cranes she made now were always white, though they could probably have been any color or mix of colors that she chose. She chose white for the pureness and because she felt no natural inclination toward any particular color. She chose white as the color of a blank soul. She chose white for a world that might have only been in her head, a world which could be beautiful, and adventurous as she remembered, or dark and hard as the distant memories told her. For this she labored, for this she dreamed. She sat down on the soft bed provided to her, face blankly content.

She never told of the rest of the green dress dream, the disturbing parts to which she had awakened gasping and crying silently. Only flashes, she recalled, dreams or memories, or a mix of the two.

Across her mind the dream flowed, teasing her with the stark reality of its deep colors and passions. There was a red more brilliant than blood. What looked like silver threads stretching in a breeze. Endless gold pools. And what looked like a mouth, moving mutely, seemingly separate from the word it spoke. One word, whispered to her, for her, in reverence, "Kagome…" And claws cradling her green clad figure.

Kagome wondered what it felt like to be held.

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Okay…so there you go. What do you think? Come on! I really want to know!