Summary: Kagome had never been normal by any definition of the world. After all, how many people can say that they've had an acute interest in poisons and chemicals since childhood? Eventually she learned how to pretend to be normal, but then she fell down a well and ended up in the past. Then the strange dreams of a young English nobleman started…. CainxRiff/KagomexRiff
Warnings: language, violence
Disclaimer: Yoruko Rhapsodos doesn't own anything recognized in this fanfic.
Reincarnation Chronicles Special:
The Count Who Overcame Death
When Kagome was a young child, it hadn't occurred to her to pretend to be something she wasn't. How could it? No toddler properly understands or accepts concepts like 'normal' and 'fitting in'. It took her a very long time to realize that others found her strange, and that people's reactions could be so annoying that it was easier or at least less awkward to pretend she was like the other girls her age. At first it had been annoying but eventually she decided that it was actually more amusing to save her true personality for when it would catch people off guard. She brushed off the thought that it would be less troublesome to be underestimated.
One thing in particular that she noticed early on was considered strange was her interest in poisons, chemicals, and liquids she learned in school were actually types of drugs. That, though, was impossible to miss because her hobby sent most of the adults who were less confused upon finding out into a panic. So she started to add herbs, medicines, and powders to the list of things she studied by the time she was five. When Kindergarten started was when she finally learned that few things about her were normal, however. No other girl her age refused to wear a dress or skirt, a concept that was as foreign to her as the thought of even considering getting a tattoo was to her mother. She only learned that she was unusually calm and quiet when a girl who sat in front of her called her shy. By the time summer break came around the fuss Kagome's teacher made over how she could already read and count taught her to do well in school without drawing attention to herself. To this day her head has never hurt that much.
The decision to pretend to be normal didn't come until her father died. Kagome, by that time, had turned eight and was aware enough of the world to see that her differences made her mother worry about her. So she used the grief she shared to let her mother pick her clothes and, realizing most adults thought she was too young to understand death, took advantage of everyone's assumption that she was a late bloomer to put up a mask. It was a success, and seen as 'coming out of her shell' by all except for her grandfather in an attempt to cheer up the older Higurashi female.
Kagome didn't mind putting up with it for her mother's sake. But the reality was that she was more alone than ever without her father there to tell everyone that it was best that Kagome was different. So she put up the mask because she knew it would make them closer. She restricted her hobby to reading up on various poisons, chemicals, other such substances, and their effects in private. She never expected that her mask would cause a trio of girls who never seemed to separate to make her their friend further easing her loneliness. But even getting over her father's death didn't get rid of the feeling that something or someone was missing.
Kagome had always had strange thoughts and urges. A feeling that her life was strangely nice and peaceful. (She had lived first in Oosaka then after her father died on a shrine with a possibly senile grandfather who acted like a priest when he was only the shrine's caretaker, after all.) A thought which never left the back of her mind that claimed that having a family so kind, caring, and understanding was an amazing stroke of luck. The follow up impression that maybe it was karma, the gods making up for lost time. How Kagome's first thought when her brother Souta was born was that his hair was too dark and that he was the wrong gender. Then when he was older it felt strange that he was so hyper. It took her third and final year of Jr. high to get used to these feelings enough so that ignoring them was second nature.
When her fifteenth birthday rolled around, she found that ignoring those thoughts was a very good thing. It would have been a very bad thing if she flinched just because Inuyasha's and Sesshomaru's hair color combined with the unusually long length was both familiar and awkward. Sometimes it was simply because she felt like it should be as short as she used to want hers, but if Sesshomaru was being particularly fierce or sinister it felt like two very different people's looks had been combined into one person. Years of practice made it easy to resist collecting every poison Kagome came across. But she found herself asking Sesshomaru about the poison that made up his signature attacks the moment they were alone in a non-confrontational situation.
To Inuyasha's eventual dismay, this would eventually lead to an unholy alliance after the disaster at Mount Hakurei. The hanyou had had a temper tantrum of ridiculous proportions and accused his half-brother of trying to turn her against him. Her other friends would simply claim that it explained the time traveler's knack for finding or making antidotes. Kagome only concluded that such oddities seemed connected to dreams of a young earl in Victorian England, his butler his only constant companion. The people in the dreams varied greatly at times, and death- usually strange murders or supposed 'accidents' at that, were the only constant. She didn't know why, but it was just the only explanation that made sense even though there was no reason for that line of thinking. Naturally, years of teaching herself to ignore the strange thoughts and instincts made for a very surprised Kagome when she not only was indignant at having fell victim to the Band of Seven's poison but felt it was ironic and almost amusing that she had been the one poisoned. Almost as strange was the impression that such irony had happened at least a few other times.
Finding Kikyou after her supposed death at Mount Hakurei changed everything. Kagome's inability to help the undead miko recover faster proved once and for all that she wasn't Kikyou's reincarnation. Any real resemblance was probably just either a prank by a deity, the doing of the jewel, or a shared relation. After that, Inuyasha's attitude changed. It was finally decided that they were just friends, (She had never loved him anyway so she wasn't sure how that had ever been an issue) but rather than bring them closer by the increased stability the hanyou was more distant than ever.
Sango, Miroku, and Shippo seemed angry at Inuyasha but Kagome was happy that she could finally spend time in own her time period without being dragged back to the Feudal Era sooner than she intended, and while she was at it catch up on her schooling. The flipside was that she had to step up her attempts to be able to defend herself as Inuyasha's decreased motivation meant she was in more danger than ever. So she took to poisoning the tips of her arrows and the small dagger Sango gave her. She also went through her time's legal process so she could carry a pistol which while modern still had an old-fashioned design for its appearance. Naturally, when she was in her time the gun never left the shrine grounds.
The quest could have lasted past Kagome graduating high school. (Something she had noticed her friends never realized.) Naraku was that hard to find and kill, and Kagome was in desperate need of training to control and manipulate her spirit energy. Luckily, however, an alliance with Sesshomaru meant that Naraku was dead just before Kagome's first year of high school. The instigator had been Sesshomaru ending up saving her for the fourth time. As it turned out, the two times she protected Rin and the way she dealt with Jaken gained Kagome his respect. Who would have guessed that Jaken was annoying and difficult to that high of a level? It was a miracle Sesshomaru hadn't killed the toad.
After everything was said and done, Kagome found herself not only unable to return but with no real reason to return. Sango and Miroku had finally gotten married and Shippo's relatives had come for him after taking a ridiculously long time to find out his parents were dead. As for the impossibly rash hanyou, Inuyasha had finally decided that she had broken the last straw. He would never forgive her for wishing for the jewel to lose its power. All of her friends had been disappointed in her, but Kagome hadn't cared. Something seemed normal about a friend with shattered misconceptions abandoning her once they either discovered what she was really like or that they had jumped to inaccurate conclusions. So with some genuine and heartfelt goodbyes and well wishes that were more warm and emotional than she felt comfortable with- she didn't mind affection, but when it gained a fire-like intensity it just felt wrong somehow- she returned home for good, putting her time traveling behind her. There had been something about Inuyasha and Sesshomaru's looks that had always made her uncomfortable that never went away anyway.
The revelations the Feudal Era had gave Kagome had woken up something within her. It was strange, but she had finally come to terms with what made her different and gained the courage to be true to herself regardless of the consequences. (A thought that had confused her was that it was bound to be better than what she'd had to put up with before. She had no idea where the thought came from or what it was talking about.) The first thing Kagome did was cut her hair. While she took pride in her appearance, more specifically her hair, she had always felt awkward having long hair. It had taken her three years to talk her mother into keeping her hair as short as it had been during the Feudal Era. If the older woman had gotten her way, Kagome's hair would be twice the length girls usually kept their hair.
As a result of dropping the act, Kagome finally managed to get rid of Hojo. And in the process, not that she cared, she had accidentally chased away Yuka and Eri with her change in attitude as well. To her astonishment, Ayumi had only apologized to her and started asking amusing and surprising questions regarding her finally expanded poison collection, which she had never gotten rid of.
"Why so curious? You don't have designs on that teacher you complain about, do you?" Kagome teased, "Or are you going to kidnap your crush?"
"K-Kagome-chan!" Ayumi stuttered in shock, "T-that's not it at all!"
Kagome's smirk had just widened in response, but her eyes softened. She would do her very best, she knew, to protect her friend's innocence. With her life, though? If it was the only way, Kagome supposed she probably would, but somehow she wasn't sure. For some reason, the thought brought her more dreams and a sensation of weariness and longing. The butler wouldn't leave her thoughts. Even though separation through attending different high schools kept Kagome from ever finding out why, her life in her time didn't stay peaceful.
Two weeks after her first year of high school restarted following Golden Week break, trouble brewed for Kagome's class. The class representatives lost the money for an upcoming fieldtrip. The female representative was the one accused after a letter fell out of her bag that was reportedly from a boy from another school she met during one of her swim team's competitions. But the smell coming from the empty box, Kagome noticed, wasn't the scent of a high school girl's perfume. It smelled of medicated lotion. It proved to belong to the history teacher who had been creeping out the first year students with constant complaints of a non-existent rash on his hands. (The itch had a very different origin, the science teacher would inform the more vocal new students.) Kagome found the money in his desk in the teacher's lounge. It turned out he'd gone broke from medical expenses and tried to blame the class rep out of revenge over the fact that she had rejected him. Needless to say, he lost his job after he tried attacking Kagome.
'…. I think I'm becoming a trouble magnet.' Kagome thought as she ignored the math teacher marveling over how she had taken out a man almost twice her size, 'Why do all of the crazy things happen to me?'
Apparently, that had triggered one of the dreams, because the moment she thought that she saw the earl standing outside of a burning house with a blonde girl, his sister it seemed, "Merry Weather… wherever I go, incidents like this follow… You also have the _ blood; it's possible you inherited the curse along with it. I wanted to keep you out of that shadow, even just a little bit… I didn't want you dragged into what happens whenever I go out."
It was like that one simple incident was a trigger that opened some sort of door and then broke it so that the door couldn't possibly close ever again. The dreams intensified yet again. They were incredibly painful in a variety of ways, mostly emotionally. Many times she woke up with tears the earl had never allowed himself to shed- or quite possibly had ran out of when still a child- streaming down her face or gasping and clutching at her chest. The silver haired butler had changed, was someone else in the earl's precious companion's body. His butler and dearest friend Riff was essentially under the control of the earl's heartless father. At times thinking of it made Kagome feel as if her heart had been ripped out or crushed.
'… It's strange, really.' Kagome had pondered one time, 'I don't get why nothing can get as strong a reaction out of me as that butler. It makes me feel like one of those ridiculous Shoujo manga heroines.'
When Kagome was eighteen, she decided her different life seemed to be turning into a mystery novel or something out of Detective Conan or one of her dreams. Kagome had been invited along on the gardening club's weekend trip. They had gone to a pharmaceutical company's greenhouse and had plans to see some American movie that had come to theaters. But when they were about to leave the greenhouse the man who greeted them when they arrived was killed. Kagome offered her help when every member of the staff was hesitant to help the police navigate the ridiculously big greenhouse and the office, and discovered that he'd been killed by an angry co-worker who had discovered him selling research notes to a rival company.
As she watched the culprit be taken away, Kagome could hear girls' voices talking about the earl in her dreams, calling him- "… 'the earl who courts death'…."
One of Kagome's classmates looked at her with a puzzled expression. "What was that?"
"Nothing of importance." Kagome dismissed as she made to leave, deep in thought, "I'll head to the hotel first."
Later on, Kagome's roommate during the trip returned early. Kagome had just taken a bath and was changing, so the girl saw the scar from when Mistress Centipede bit her. She just finished put her clothes on while the girl was frozen in shock, staring at the spot on Kagome's side where her scar was located. She stepped closer to Kagome, a hand raised as if she wanted to touch it. But the former time traveler didn't say a word and picked up a book in a thinly veiled dismissal. Embarrassed, the roommate awkwardly stumbled to her mostly packed suitcase and retreated to the bathroom for a shower.
Meanwhile, Kagome remembered words from a dream where Riff and the earl talked about an incident from said nobleman's childhood. "You're the only one in this world who can touch my scars, Riff."
Kagome opened the book, but only half paid attention to the words. Again with the dreams. The amount of similarities between her and the earl were eerie. The earl never drank tea Riff hadn't made and Kagome thought every tea she'd tried tasted watery, too strong, or simply strange. A shared affinity for poisons and chemical substances. Getting dragged into dangerous and often strange situations. It was so odd, even for her, and importantly, the sound of people's voices went away in her dreams whenever someone said the earl's name or even family name. It was so strange and no matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise she couldn't shake the feeling that both the drams and how the earl's name was missing was significant.
She sighed and ran her fingers through her hair. 'I wish that I could make sense of it. What do these dreams mean?'
That weekend proved to have lots of bad luck for Kagome. First, the movie was part of a double feature with a sports film. She spent half of the time bored and a quarter of the time annoyed. Then a boy slipped on some iced tea he had spilled, and because he dragged Kagome down with him while trying to steady himself only to push her out of his way he broke his wrist and she ended up with a nasty gash from a piece of metal that was poking out of a seat and she was sure she had sprained her ankle. She was very annoyed, as it would make her last few months in high school difficult, and getting around would be a nuisance. She hadn't even decided on a college yet.
Half an hour later, Kagome was in a room in the hospital. The nurse had done nothing but give her some paper towel to hold to her still bleeding shoulder. And her ankle was throbbing because her classmates hadn't been intelligent or considerate enough to ask how she was and left her to walk on her own, which made her ankle worse. There was a ridiculous amount of blood for a cut that wasn't particularly deep. The blood had even soaked through the paper towel and was even starting to get on her fingers.
"Who exactly hired these incompetent medical personnel?" she muttered, "I've been in here ten minutes and my classmate is still waiting, yet the waiting room is nearly empty. And we arrived at six thirty."
"My apologies." An eerily familiar voice said, then added, "I'm just an intern yet I seem to have more experience than half of the younger staff."
"That must be hard." Kagome commented as she turned her head towards the voice.
Her eyes widened when she saw the intern. He was only three or four years older than her. But the short silver hair that was still a longer than most males had theirs, the blue eyes darker than the ocean at midnight, semi casual attire hidden under a white lab coat that didn't seem out of place at all even though he was apparently a college student or a graduate student. In spite of the annoyed and stressed tone his expression was neutral, making him seem apathetic. Yet to someone observant like Kagome his eyes betrayed a hint of kindness. The man's voice and looks, the expression, the way he held himself… Something about it was familiar… She felt nostalgic. For a moment when he saw Kagome he paused, as if surprised. With a frown he attended to first her ankle and then her shoulder. When he was done his blue eyes met her green-gold ones and there was a spark. It was like Kagome had opened yet another door. Images related to her dreams flashed through her head. Then they slowed down to show the butler and earl in a building that was collapsing around them. Riff urged the teen to run and save himself and let him take on the younger man's fate. But the earl refused, choosing instead to stay by Riff's side and embraced the dying now former butler. Meeting his death with a smile on his face, content that finally, everything was falling into place...
Riff's final words made everything finally click into place. "Forgive me for being away from you so long… Cain."
Kagome finally understood. The earl was her real incarnation, Cain Hargreaves. She had been having those dreams and moments of déjà vu because she had been slowly regaining her previous life's memories. And this strangely familiar man, who was now looking at her as if he knew, knew her and what she'd been hiding about herself, who looked strangely hopeful now as if he had been waiting or searching for her, he was….
"Riff?" the question came out more quietly than Kagome had meant it to, she was terrified that she was wrong or that he hadn't missed her the way she had only just realized that she had missed him. (Memories of moments with Riff that were often more intimate than they appeared to friends and strangers alike yet still weren't enough for the nobleman who had been cruelly deprived of affection as a child drifted through her mind...)
His expression softened, a hint of guilt briefly entered his eyes at her thinly veiled uncertainty before leaving just as quickly. "It's been a long time, Cain. I'm happy to see you're doing well."
"It's Kagome now." she informed him, "I'm doing better than ever, in fact. Things were crazier than ever a couple of years ago, though. And I missed you, Riff."
He pulled her into his arms and embraced her. "I missed you as well. We have a lot to catch up on and make up for."
Kagome chuckled, and flashed Riff that cheeky grin he had never seen Cain give anyone else, he had never thought he would miss the look that promised mischief or trouble. "You have no idea."
Then their lips met in their first kiss at long last. The moment should have been bittersweet, the prelude to a long and difficult road to repairing, improving, and redefining their relationship. But for two formerly lost and confused souls that fateful meeting was like that first breathe of fresh air after being trapped in a damp, moldy room for an extended length of time. After being separated for more than a century they had finally found their own happily ever after in each other's arms, free for the first time of all worries. From then on happiness would never be out of their grasp again.
Owari