Never The Twain Shall Meet
"How are you, my friend?" Koga greeted Shippo with a relatively civilised slap on the back. The wolf demon had been known to show affection in far more violent ways in the past, but had greatly toned down his body language in the last century.
Still, Shippo felt his insides jarred and jolted most unpleasantly. "Hey – are you greeting a friend or an enemy?" he demanded, glaring at the wolf. He suddenly felt a bit like the runt he had once been for so long, constantly getting pounded by a hot-tempered Inuyasha who was himself very much a child.
"Come on – you're big enough now for me to smack around a bit without doing too much damage," Koga laughed good-naturedly.
"You and Inuyasha always did believe in letting your fists do the talking," Shippo muttered.
"And you were always up to your tricks and talking your way out of things – I think you spent too much time with that monk all those years back."
Shippo did not think of Miroku all the time, but whenever the incorrigibly flirtatious, smooth-talking, con-artist of a man came to mind, he would be gripped by a mixture of amusement at all the good memories of him, and sorrow at the reminder that he had been pure human after all and was long dead, his remains committed to a holy fire, then to the earth, several years before Kagome's passing.
"So – how are you doing?" Koga repeated his question, while letting a tiny bit of his concealed youki flare for just a second. It was evidence that he was who he was under the human disguise – a necessary habit all the demons in their circle had developed over time.
"Good. And you?" Shippo asked, as he looked into the familiar blue eyes, their otherworldly depths spelled now to look like normal blue human irises, under a short but bushy head of black hair. He released a little of his own youki likewise.
"No different, and that's a good thing," Koga said, "So much keeps changing around us, we need some things to remain the same, even if it's ourselves."
They entered the cafe that was a regular meeting place outside of one another's homes for members of their extended pack.
"No new adventures?" the fox asked.
"Of course not," said the wolf, taking his seat at his favourite table. "The old ones were more than enough to last me a lifetime."
Koga had not chosen another mate since he had lost his first and last some three hundred and fifty years ago. She had been a fully human granddaughter of Rin and Kohaku, the very image of her grandmother in her youth. Sesshomaru, silently grieving the loss of Rin to age and an incurable illness, had doted on this child who turned out to be so much like her, giving her nearly as much attention as he did his blood relations. As she had been born after Rin's death, Shippo suspected that Sesshomaru wanted to think she was his human daughter reincarnated – although those knowledgeable about such matters had determined that it was unlikely.
When the girl grew up and took a liking to the wolf-demon family friend who had always been part of her life, Sesshomaru had nearly bitten Koga's head off. But he had come around and consented to his great-granddaughter becoming the wolf's mate, and she had given Koga strong half-demon children who continued to spice up their father's life to the present day. Sesshomaru too was glad for them (although he would never say so directly to Koga), as their existence meant that in some way, something of Rin had become part-demon through the most natural of means.
All his friends knew that Koga deeply missed the old days, when he'd had the freedom to run wild and boldly proclaim his identity to whoever cared to ask. But his hanyou children, the more forward-looking members of his wolf pack, his inuyoukai in-laws and other friends had dragged him kicking into the modern age, and he was coping as well as could be expected.
Koga ordered a rare steak and still water with ice, while Shippo asked for chicken kebabs and a coffee, which the wolf demon shook his head at when the dark beverage was served to the fox.
"You always took to new things so much faster than the rest of us – you and mutt-face both – but it was understandable for him, as he'd actually visited Kagome in her time from way back when. You never went through that portal, did you?"
"No one could apart from Kagome and Inuyasha. It was closed for good even to them after Kagome came over to live. As a matter of fact, Kagome is the reason I wanted to see you today."
"Oh?" Koga asked, taking a sip of water. "Have you seen her? The other her, I mean."
"Yes. A week ago. She looks exactly like her."
"That she does."
"You've seen her too?" Shippo growled. "Why has everyone seen her years before me?"
"Inuyasha alerted me to her existence a few years back. He said the girl was her but not her, and he wasn't about to turn her into his mate, cos in some convoluted way, she's become his descendant. But he said that I ought to know, considering that he and I were rivals for her five hundred years ago."
"And?" Shippo demanded.
"I stole a look at her. It damn near broke my heart to see her all over again, so happy and full of life. But I didn't go near her. She wasn't meant for me before, and she isn't meant for me a second time round. I still love the mate I lost, every day I wake up, you know. Besides, this girl's not Kagome. I imagine that even if she were, she'd probably just fall in love with Inuyasha all over again – they were fated to be together."
"Inuyasha tells me she's not her," Shippo stated. "If anyone would know, he would."
"He would. So what did you want to ask me about her?"
"You've already clarified matters for me," Shippo admitted. "To be plain, I just wanted to know if you would stake a claim on her. You've said no, so I have my answer."
"Why would you want to know whether I would stake a claim on her or not?" Koga asked, a twinkle in his sky-blue gaze.
"Just curious."
"Bullshit."
"I'm really just curious."
"Sure, fox-boy. And I was born last century."
...
Two days after his meeting with Koga, Shippo decided that taking a closer look would do no harm.
He took a long walk across Tokyo and concealed himself amongst the trees surrounding the Higurashi shrine, watching Kagome's mother sweeping the courtyard between the Bone Eater's well and the Goshinboku tree. Looking at the woman's kind face, he felt happy for her. This Mrs Higurashi would never have to lose her daughter forever to the past, a past that would never catch up with her present.
Inuyasha was the only one of their pack who had met the mother, grandfather and younger brother of their Kagome. After Kagome left her family for good to live with them, Inuyasha had from time to time wondered how they were getting along without her. It was rather mind-twisting to have to think that somewhere in the lost thread of time severed for good by the disappearance of the Shikon Jewel, another Mrs Higurashi had let her Kagome go through the well, never to return to her. That mother had probably lived and died never knowing for certain what had happened to her daughter.
Shippo, with the best understanding he could acquire of how time-travel worked, had guessed that some of the things his Kagome had done while in the feudal era would have reached her family somehow. After all, he remembered Kagome reporting how her mother, grandfather and brother had told her that at the same time she was trapped inside the meidou by Naraku, and the Bone Eater's well had vanished in the feudal age, the well had also disappeared before the eyes of her horrified family in the future.
Therefore, some things done in the past could reach the future. Kagome had occasionally etched brief messages on the wood of the well in the hope that they would appear instantly on the well in her family's time, and be seen by the loved ones she had left behind. In her old age, and after her death, her demon friends had kept the etchings preserved out of love and affection for her memory, so that they would survive through time. Unfortunately, none of them ever knew if such an act would or would not improve the chances of her family finding and reading them.
Even now, they had no way of knowing if the mother, grandfather and brother she had left behind had ever read the messages, because just as time moved forward for them, time had also moved forward along a parallel path for the family which had said goodbye to its beloved Kagome. There was no means of bridging, in person, that parallel path other than through the Bone Eater's well. The well had never worked again after Kagome went through it one last time to become Inuyasha's wife and mate.
The linear path along which their demon and half-demon pack had travelled into this present future they were in remained parallel forever to that alternate stream of time. Somewhere in that other stream, Mrs Higurashi had grown old without her daughter beside her, Grandpa Higurashi had died without ever seeing his beloved granddaughter again, and Sota had grown up missing his sister every day of his life. Awkward excuses would have been given about Kagome's disappearance. The girl would have been untraceable forever. Friends who were told that Kagome had got married and gone to live in another country would have asked for her new address, or how they could e-mail her, and would have found no satisfaction in the answers given to them. Perhaps someone who received one too many evasive replies from her family might have called the authorities to report the matter. The Higurashis would have faced a good deal of trouble, and no one would have been able to span the gap of time to help them.
This Higurashi family, however, would face no such problems. Their daughter, granddaughter and sister remained with them, and her life and death would be accounted for in this timeline.
Although Kagome had known that the family that was to come in this timeline would not truly be the family she had grown up with, she had still chosen to leave documents for them that would help them establish this shrine in modern times. Her gravestone had had her first name etched boldly on it, an instruction she had given in the hope that the family of the future that came to occupy this part of Tokyo would see it and think it a good name for a daughter they might have.
"Wouldn't it be nice if whoever is born in the time to come that is equivalent to the time I left could also bear my name? That is, if she is anything like me!" she had said, not long before her death.
Her demon friends and her own part-demon descendants, some of whom had married the descendants of Miroku and Sango, Kohaku and Rin, had all loyally protected the things she wished to leave to the shrine, so that when the Higurashi family came to own the shrine in the future, they would have relics and artefacts and antiques handed down to them.
By keeping an eye on the generations of people descended from Kagome, half of whom married humans and watered down their demon blood to almost nothing, their pack had learnt that Kagome had in fact become an ancestor to the Higurashis and to the present-day Kagome. This had not been the case in her original family – she had certainly not been her own ancestor! But she and Inuyasha were definitely forebears of this clan.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how Shippo looked at it, these Higurashis did not know their own demon origins.
That ignorance was hatched as a result of one of Inuyasha's and Kagome's almost completely human great-great-granddaughters severing ties with her kin one day, announcing that she had fallen in love with a priest who disapproved of anything associated with demons. They were never to see her again, she said, and she would deny all affiliation with demons and part-demons from that moment on. She had left the town they lived in at the time, and they had respected her wishes and left her alone.
It was that determined girl, Michi, from whom the present Higurashi family came, many generations later. Shippo had thought that Inuyasha had merely watched over these human descendants of his from afar. But now he knew that the hanyou had been keeping a much closer eye on them.
Inuyasha had admitted to Shippo in a quiet moment after their discussion about why this Kagome was not their Kagome, that he had often secretly observed this Higurashi family – not only during the past fifteen years but longer than that – and could discern few differences between them and the family he had known in the past. Mrs Higurashi was as kind as her alternate-timeline counterpart had been; her husband had also died of cancer when Sota was only a baby; Sota was just as good-natured and sensible; and Grandfather Higurashi was as ineffective a priest as the other had been – except that now, he had a valid reason for not being a good priest, as unbeknownst to him, he had minute traces of demon blood in his veins!
Shippo looked at the calm, peaceful look on Mrs Higurashi's face now, and wished that his Kagome could be here to see this. She had missed her mother so very much at times.
At that very moment, the fifteen-year-old Kagome skipped up the stairs from the street to the shrine after coming home from school, and greeted her mother cheerfully: "Mama!"
"Kagome! How was school today?" her mother asked.
"I seem to be coping fine so far! It helps to be in the same class as Eri, Yuka and Ayumi – we push one another on. I hope this will be a good year."
"I am sure it will be a good year for you," Mrs Higurashi smiled. "Go on inside and have something to eat – I bought your favourite cakes from the bakery while you were at school."
"Thank you, Mama!" the girl chirped merrily, hugging her mother before entering the house.
Shippo's naturally foxy mischievousness and the powerful urge to recreate Kagome as he had first known her struggled against the maturity and levels of common sense that he had slowly built over the centuries. He wanted to spring out at her, laughing, perhaps snatch her books from her the way he had first stolen her jewel shards; he wanted to astonish her with a burst of fox fire, to see if it would awaken in her a memory of another life; he wanted... he wanted so much that was impossible.
Eventually, his hard-earned common sense – and the cautionary advice of his fathers and Koga – won the battle.
He smiled to himself. He wished the girl a good year, just like her mother did. It would probably be a better year for her, whatever else might happen, if he did not let himself into her life. Although his fathers had given him permission to proceed, and Koga had blessed whatever he chose to do, he decided that they were right to say that their lives were too complicated to drag this innocent girl into.
He turned quickly away from the shrine and slipped easily through the thin rows of trees – so different from the thickly forested area this had been hundreds of years ago when he had last lived here, leaving the teenager to her happy life with her family and school friends.
