Omigosh thank you so much for the reviews and I'm so happy people actually like it ^.^
I'd like to thank MisakiBlossomslove, Dida, princessbinas, 4fireking, RubyRose101, fireandcrystal101, dragneel49, Kosmos615, and yes even you Guest for reviewing :D
Disclaimer: None of the characters or basic plotline/setting belong to me, Inuyasha goes to Takahasi and Tangled to Disney - may they both continue making amazing things for me to enjoy
The Princess trapped with her Delusional childhood Dream.
Kagome awoke with a start, a feeling of dread she couldn't manage to shake off settled deep in her stomach.
She shook her head as if to clear the thoughts away. She shouldn't be stressing, it was her eighteenth birthday. Today Urasue would give her the special present she'd been promising Kagome for the last three months. And today she would get to eat that delicious sugary thing that Urasue always brought to her on her birthday.
Today was going to be perfect. So why did she feel like her smartest course of action was to turn and run?
She shook herself again, and reached for the hairbrush sitting on her dresser. She smoothly pulled her hair out of the braid and let it flow loosely around her shoulders, the soft rays of the early morning sun lighting up her black hair, giving it an almost orange hue. She pulled the brush through her hair repetitively and without thought. Instead, her mind wandered to a dream, one she hadn't thought about in almost two months.
She still remembered how he had looked in the doorway the first time she'd seen him, his black hair framing his sculpted face and his forelocks hanging over his shoulders. His eyes had looked so cold and distant at first. But then he'd spoken, and she'd answered, and she'd had an actual conversation with someone who wasn't her grandmother. And then… then he'd promised her he'd be there in the morning.
But she'd woken up, and realized it had all been a dream, and she laughed bitterly. No one would ever find her in the godforsaken tower. Still, she couldn't help but wonder at how real it had seemed, and how much he'd known and told her. Her mind couldn't have come up with all that on its own, right?
So she'd stood eagerly every night at her window, watching the trees with the hope of catching a glimpse of red and black.
She'd done so for at least six months after the dream. It was silly, she knew it was silly. It had been a dream and nothing more. But her mind refused to let her sleep at night if she hadn't stood by that window and watched the moon's phases for at least half an hour, sometimes more. And every new moon, she'd feel something in the pit of her stomach and it was moments like those when she could almost swear he had been real, that she'd really met another person.
But then dawn would break and she would shake it off and scold herself for being so childish, and push the brush through her black locks like every morning and replay the same memory of him she'd etched into her mind in her head till her grandmother came knocking on her door, telling her to do chores.
But today was her eighteenth birthday, and maybe something would finally change.
Like always, Urasue knocked on her wooden door, and Kagome answered with a soft "come in." The old woman somehow looked even more stretched today, her wrinkles weighing down her sunken eyes, and her clammy fingers intertwining nervously.
"Good morning, child. How do you feel on your eighteenth birthday?"
Kagome flashed her a smile. "Great," she lied. The feeling in her gut had not gone away.
"Good, good. That's good. I imagine you want to eat your birthday cake, and then we'll see about opening that present."
Kagome nodded and followed her grandmother out the door, and down the stone steps to the small room they called the kitchen. Atop the wooden table was a piece of cake, and next to it the regular green tea they had for breakfast. Kagome smiled and walked toward the table, lifting her chopsticks and eating the sugary treat.
"I bought that from the Western traders, you know. Be grateful."
"Thank you, oba-san," Kagome said through mouthfuls of the desert, after taking a long gulp of the hot tea.
Urasue stayed quiet and watched her eat, looking distinctly anxious and a bit uncomfortable. Kagome thought nothing of it, for one the feeling of doom had not left, and the cake was too good to focus on anything else but the food and her intuition.
Once she'd finished, Urasue began. "Kagome," she walked over to the table and avoided the girl's eyes. "Kagome, girl. It is your eighteenth birthday. And that means, Kagome… well it means many things." The old woman sat down across from her in the wooden chair. "For one, you are now an adult. You can make your own choices in life."
Kagome's heart skipped a beat, long gone hope rekindling in her. Could she be saying what she thought she was saying? 'Is she going to let me out of the tower?' She didn't dare voice her thoughts aloud, afraid any interruption might change the elder woman's mind.
"And so I am going to give you a choice, Kagome. I hope you make the right decision, because it could cost you… it could cost you a lot."
Not making sense of her most recent words, Kagome watched in muddled confusion as the old woman stood up again, seeming to not be able to stay in one spot for too long. "I have kept things from you, Kagome. Things about the outside world, yes. But not just that. Things about yourself. And things about me. But I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I need to ask you a favor, Kagome."
The girl in question was now on edge, sitting with her back stiff and her eyes alert. This was not what she had expected. It sounded almost like Urasue was… she didn't know. She couldn't understand what the woman was trying to tell her. She was keeping things from her? Well of course. She'd always said so, that she kept the dangers from Kagome. But she was hiding things about herself? About the old woman herself? Kagome furrowed her eyebrows and watched the older woman make her way across the room, looking like she was struggling with words. Not for the first time, Kagome wished she knew some way to defend herself. Something was off with Urasue, something was amiss.
"Kagome, you have a lot of power, power you were born with. And I have raised you in a manner that has cultivated that power, strengthened it, prepared it for your eighteenth… for now. Kagome, do you trust me?"
Kagome nodded in silence, even though her gut was screaming at her to not trust the woman she'd known her whole life. What was wrong with her today? How could she not trust her own grandmother? Ashamed of herself for her distrust of her own grandmother, she nodded again, with more vigor.
"Well then, I need you to use that power, and help me."
Kagome froze.
"I need to cultivate your power, Kagome. It's been sixteen years, I deserve it. I DESERVE IT, GODDAMMIT!"
The old woman's sudden outburst caught Kagome off guard, and she jumped out of her chair and looked about ready to flee. Urasue realized her mistake, and tried to calm her racing heart. "No, do not fear, child. I will simply take… take your power out of you, and bring it to the surface, and then you'll be able to use it! I promise! And you will stay with me the whole time. You trust me, right? Of course – of course you do, you said so. So just come here… come here, girl."
Urasue advanced on the young woman, her hand resting ominously inside her sleeve, as if she had something in there she was prepared to pull out. Kagome felt fear creep in, but she pushed it away to look for the smartest exit in case she had to escape. 'But this tower… I've lived in it for eighteen years and I still don't know where the exit is!'
While she reminisced and recalled, Urasue walked up to her cautiously, her hand still in her sleeve, and before Kagome could think to run, or scream, or fight, a gleaming silver dagger was pulled out, and she found herself at the endpoint of the sharpened knife.
Swallowing her scream, Kagome looked up into the eyes of the woman she had thought she'd known her whole life. Her face was almost unrecognizable now, the eyes glinting dangerously, and her chapped grey lips curved upwards in a maniacal smile, the smile of someone who'd waited too long to claim her long overdue reward. And now she was close… so close.
Urasue took another step forward, pressing the tip of her dagger lightly against the flesh of Kagome's neck. "You will work for me, Kagome. After everything I've done for you? After everything I've suffered in these sixteen years? I won't let you go now."
Kagome paused. Sixteen years? Wasn't it eighteen? Urasue had said she'd raised Kagome from birth, but today was her eighteenth birthday. Kagome inwardly shrugged and blamed it on old age and bordering-on-psychopathic sanity.
Instead of stabbing the young woman through the neck, Urasue dropped her dagger down to her arm and gave her forearm a deep cut. Kagome cried out in pain and clutched her injured arm closer to her body. Urasue chuckled. "I'll just keep cutting until you agree, Kagome."
Wincing from the pain, she tried to answer. "Agree to what? I don't even know what you're trying to get to!" She cried out, hoping it would be enough to knock some sense into her grandmother.
"The jewel, baka! Give me the jewel!"
Kagome's right hip throbbed unexpectedly. The jewel? What jewel? She was about to ask the old woman the same thing when she felt a stinging pain in her lower torso. She looked down to see Urasue cutting a slit in her stomach. The blood that escaped and flowed down her white shirt made her face turn a pale white and her eyes to widen in fear and pain. Letting out a small whimper, she looked around at the nearest door.
Urasue seemed to not notice anything, but was staring at the cut on her stomach like it was precious to her. "So long… I've waited so long…" She whispered more to herself, then advanced on Kagome, raising the dagger over her head in the typical axe-murderer pose, which then descended upon Kagome. "He's just going to have to deal with not having you alive with it!"
Suddenly, Kagome felt something, a stirring in her fingertips, and her reflexes brought her hands up to shield her face. But as she did, she felt the stirring intensify and grow, until it released and both women were engulfed in a bright, pink light. Urasue was thrown across the entire room, and she now lay slumped over near the opposite. Kagome remained otherwise unharmed.
Whimpering again, Kagome had to resists the urge to run and help the old woman. She turned and ran instinctively to her room. She wasn't sure what she was planning to do. There was no escape from the top floor, and once Urasue woke up she would just come up and kill her there instead of in the kitchen.
'And the jewel, what was the jewel she was talking about?' she asked herself as she wobbled up the stairs, the intense burning pain from her stomach and forearm forgotten in the midst of the adrenaline and panic she was experiencing.
Reaching the familiar old wooden door that led to her room, she looked back down the stairs to see if Urasue had followed her. She could not see her, but she could hear low curses and whimpers from the old woman down in the kitchen. She would no doubt come up to look for Kagome soon. Kagome gulped and turned back to open the door and enter her room.
She locked the bolt on her door and rushed toward her bed, unsure of where to go from here. On the way, though, she was walking to fast and too unbalanced, and her long unbraided hair got in her way and the girl tripped, falling with a soft thud on the hard ground. Wincing now from the ache in her leg muscles, she pushed herself up from the floor, only to cry out in pain as the cut in her arm stung from the motion.
She looked around her room, desperate for something, anything that would give her a clue as to how she could get out of the room. She could hear Urasue climbing the steps noisily but slowly due to her old age and newfound injury. If she'd had time, she would've wondered about the bright light that seemed to have come out of her in the kitchen, but she was currently too preoccupied with survival.
Her eyes landed on the window, and then descended down to her hair, and she threw herself toward the opening in the wall as fast as she could. Looking outside, she saw it was indeed too big a jump, but… 'maybe not too big if I use my hair as leverage,' she mused. She looked up quickly and caught sight of a small hook over her window. Grinning in victory, she threw the end of her hair up and tangled it with the hook. She let her hair down, tugged on it twice to make sure it was stable, and then, without a second thought, launched herself out the window.
So I dunno if anyone's been keeping track but just to clear it up Kagome was kidnapped when she was two, then she meets human Inuyasha when she's 14, and now she's 18, in keeping with Tangled. So it's been four years since she last saw the guy.. beginning may've been confusing due to the sudden time skip (I've been watching way too much Doctor Who considering i wrote 'time' and then had a mini seizure -_-)