"A call for Mrs. Higurashi!"
One day, Higurashi Satomi gets a call from home from a very worried son. He's sobbing slightly and she can hear the panic in his voice but it's what he says that gets to her the most.
Mama, Kagome's not waking up.
She tells Souta that she'll be home soon, and grabs a passing nurse to take her shift. The nurse protests, but she doesn't care, and soon she's wishing that the subway could just go faster because she has to get home, now.
Her son has tear tracks on his face when he opens the door for her, and he leads her to the well by the shrine where her father is pacing with worry. She doesn't see Kagome, though, and with dread and realization in the pit of her stomach, she looks down.
Her daughter is lying at the bottom of the well, her eyes closed and her hair spread around her head in some mockery of a halo. There's something weird about the situation, and as she watches, splotches of dirt appear and reappear on her uniform. Her socks rip, her knee bruises, and suddenly she knows why the paramedics haven't been called.
Satomi grew up in a shrine. She works in a hospital, surrounded by science, but that doesn't mean that she discounts the supernatural. She can't, surrounded by life and death as she is, and as she sees her daughter's all-too-still figure start bleeding from the hip, she feels a chill run down her spine.
She sends Souta back into the house, and talks to her father. And listens to him, properly. Neither of them think it's a good idea to move her—not to mention, they don't know how to get her out of the well. They're even afraid to retrieve Buyo, sleeping as he is next to Kagome's prone form. She looks down, and a trick of the light almost makes her believe that he has two tails.
Almost.
Her father is old, and she sends him back to the house to sleep. She'll keep watch, she promises both him and herself, over her oldest child. And she'll be there when Kagome wakes up—because Kagome has to.
She looks down as rope burns appear around her daughter's wrists, and tries to prepare for a long night.
She must've fallen asleep at some point, because when she blinks open her eyes her neck is incredibly sore and there is sunlight pouring through the cracks of the well-house door. She jumps up and immediately checks on her daughter, but Kagome simply lies there. She is dressed in a miko's traditional clothing now, and the Higurashi matriarch has to concentrate very hard to not think about how much her daughter looks like a sacrifice right now, vulnerable and frail and pure.
Her father offers to take over and she lets him, but she still doesn't go to work and instead busies herself in household chores. Souta she sends to school, telling him that everything's fine in a voice that almost lets her believe it herself. He still looks slightly skeptical, but allows himself to be steered out of the house.
She cooks her daughter's favorite dishes without realizing it, going through the motions with a sort of mechanical efficiency. She brings some to the well-house where her father sits and they eat together, casting worried glances down at the child that hasn't gotten any better. Scattered around her father are ofuda, covered in barely legible script and tears. She doesn't mention them. He, in turn, doesn't mention that nobody likes broccoli tempura in their house except Kagome.
Souta is back from school when it happens. A final cut appears on Kagome's cheek and a few minutes later she opens her eyes, seemingly no worse for wear.
"Mama! You wouldn't believe what happened to me!"
She smiles at Kagome and leads her back to the house, asking where her daughter was even if she didn't go anywhere at all. Behind her, she knows that the well is being sealed closed, and she hopes that it's the end of it all.
It's not.
Kagome is jerked upright at dinner that night and starts talking to someone that only she can see. She argues and yells and her hand bleeds a little, and she's dragged to the well-house by the back of her shirt. Mrs. Higurashi arrives just in time to see Kagome lifted into the air by what she swears for a moment looks like a mass of hair, and then her daughter is slammed into the dirt as if something expects her to go through it. There's a dull thud, and Kagome is still.
Kagome tells them stories, about wild white-haired hanyou and small, lovable kitsune. She tells them of a inhumanly strong human demon slayer, and a monk cursed with an endless void in his hand. Her eyes glow with happiness as she talks about them even if her face is tired and worn, and her mother can't bear to tell her what it looks like from her side of the well.
Kagome doesn't talk about the times she gets hurt, but Satomi knows when they are even if she doesn't know why, because the dirt at the bottom of the well is slowly becoming saturated with her daughter's blood.
When Kagome lies at the bottom of the well—and she's there for longer and longer every time—she looks up the names that her daughter tells her, hoping for a clue, a hint, anything that will tell her what is happening.
Inuyasha is the name of the one her daughter loves, and the name of a demon sealed forever in the tree in her front yard. Shippo is the name of a young pet fox, drowned in their well for being a demon 200 years ago. Sango and Miroku are the names of a monk and his warrior wife, driven to suicide in the same well by the village they cared for.
When Kagome doesn't move for months at a time, Satomi lets herself cry.
They try to move her, once. There's a flare of something dark and malevolent, and Kagome breaks out into a cold sweat, whimpering piteously. They can't lift her, or move her, no matter how hard they try. It's as if Kagome herself is part of the well, unable to be separated from it.
And after, when Kagome wakes up for all of one night with her family, she tells them of a dark priestess who attacked them for no apparent reason, who tried to control her and make her move against her will and… She doesn't say that she was in danger, but Satomi recognizes how the hand gripping her teacup is almost white, which has always translated in these stories as I could've died.
They don't try to move her again.
The well disappears one day, and Kagome with it. They tell Souta that everything is fine—they haven't let him into the well-house since that first, awful, day, and he believes his sister's stories of travelling through time to save the world. For the next three days, she doesn't go back to work.
On the first day, she helps her father dig, as far as they can, where the well used to be.
The second day, when nothing changes, they fill it back up.
And on the third, final day, they just sit there and hope. Souta sits with them because they can't keep him away anymore, and he just trusts his sister to return.
"Inuyasha will bring her back. He'll save her."
She doesn't say that what's she's afraid of is that the mysterious Inuyasha will keep her, and she'll lose her daughter forever. If her son can trust so blindly in something he's never truly seen, then maybe it'll help bring Kagome back.
Please, she thinks. Please, please, please.
And it's as if something hears her, because in that moment a great pillar of light appears, so bright it makes her wonder how anyone else could possibly miss that something is just not right in this cursed well-house in her back yard. Kagome appears in it, and floats down gently to the ground in front of the well. She rushes into her arms, and Satomi hopes that finally, everything is over. That maybe her daughter is safe now.
"I was so worried," she whispers into her daughter's hair as she folds her arms around her as tight as they can possibly go. Hair that smells of smoke, and ash, and blood, and she's just so glad that her daughter is awake.
"Inuyasha saved me," Kagome says, and she glances at the well. For the first time, Satomi can see him, his fierce golden eyes looking softly at her daughter. He loves her, she realizes, and that's the only reason that Kagome is alive and awake and here where she's supposed to be, and so she whispers a thank you to a ghost and watches him disappear.
And that's where it is supposed to end. Life goes back to normal. Kagome studies hard to make up for all the time that she's missed, and seems to forget about her strange adventures that never really happened. Sometimes if she's startled, though, her daughter reaches for a bow and arrow that aren't there, and it breaks Satomi's heart that her child has battle instincts.
Sometimes, when Kagome thinks that none of them are watching, she can see the darkness in her eyes, sad and lonely and wondering. And waiting for something. She thinks she knows what, but she doesn't want to believe it, and resolves herself to enjoy her time with her daughter as much as she can.
Three years pass this way, while Kagome studies and she works and her father takes care of the shrine and says prayers over the well and Souta remains blessedly, beautifully ignorant to it all. But they're all waiting for something even if they're all in denial about it, and the day that Kagome graduates her mother wants to cry again.
Because they've lost her, to a dream and a curse and a haunted shrine. Kagome isn't happy anymore, like she was before everything happened, and even if it was a hanyou's love for her daughter that brought her back to her for three precious years, it's her daughter's love for a hanyou that will take her away from her again.
"Mama…" her daughter says to her, pleading, staring down the well.
"One more day?" she asks her, and she wishes that she didn't. She wishes that she asked for forever, but Kagome doesn't belong to her anymore. After a dinner of all Kagome's favorite foods and just before going to sleep, she folds her daughter into her arms one last time, and whispers a goodbye.
They find her at the bottom of the well the next day. Kagome looks like she's sleeping, her peaceful face smiling slightly, her body unmoving.
She's not breathing.
-END-