GODSPEED

Chapter 06: Eternity

"I can't believe you made it out of there without our help!" Leilani said in amazement as Kouga and Inuyasha stumbled to a stop outside of the heavenly prison. It had taken them quite some time to work their way through the endless streams of stone corridors, shadowed by the constant fear of being trapped or caught or too late to save Kagome.

"What has happened to you?" Linh asked with mild concern. "You both look so tired."

Inuyasha growled. "I lost my damn demon blood!" Inuyasha explained grumpily, inwardly hoping that the change was not permanent. Linh and Leilani exchanged bewildered looks.

"Demon blood?" Leilani repeated dubiously.

"Yeah, can't you see? No claws? Black hair? Puppy ears are gone?" Kouga said as means of helping out while Inuyasha mockingly mimicked him. Leilani and Linh's confused expressions remained in place.

"You don't look any different to me..." Leilani replied easily. "You've always looked this way." Inuyasha and Kouga took their turn to exchange bewildered glances, momentarily taken aback.

"Do I have fangs?" Kouga asked suddenly, stretching his mouth into what looked like an awkward, absurd grin.

"What, do you think you're a vampire?" Leilani asked, suddenly giggling. Linh looked bemused.

"No, you don't have fangs," she answered while Leilani continued to giggle.

When Leilani's giggles abated, several moments of silence ensued. "Well," Kouga eventually said, "let's go find Kagome. We're criminals by now, which just means we need to hurry more..." He and Inuyasha both winced simultaneously, but did not seem to take notice of one another.

"Alright, this way," Leilani ordered as she marched off in a direction away from the prison. "We'll be in lots of trouble."

"One moment," Linh said. "There's a door here that we can use." Before she finished her explanation, she had already pulled open a heavy wooden door from the balmy breeze and held it open for the small party. Leilani spun on her heel without so much as a pause and continued her march straight through the door, disappearing beyond the light spilling from it. Inuyasha and Kouga followed, and finally Linh stepped in behind them and closed the door.

Only moments later, the prison emitted a group of furious angels, eyes blazing with anger.

* * *

Inuyasha and Kouga sat by themselves on the shore of the beach, some ways down from the rest of the population. They sat far enough away from the tide line that the sand beneath them was soft and untouched by salt water. Inuyasha was picking idly at the stocky dune grass that grew amongst the golden grains, and Kouga was building something from the sand that looked like a lump.

"I've kind of been thinking..." Kouga started almost without realizing it.

"Don't strain yourself," Inuyasha replied, stealing a line he had heard Kagome use on her brother before.

Kouga scowled. "I just mean, how long do you think we've been here?"

Inuyasha shrugged his shoulders. "Don't know," he said. "The sun never fucking moves." Kouga snorted.

"What...what do you think we'll do if we've run out of time?"

"We'll find Kagome and take her home, anyway..." Inuyasha said, his voice thin but assured. "When have rules stopped us before?" Inuyasha shut his mouth after that statement, annoyed by his human state's ability to weaken his emotional barriers---he felt that he always blurted out soft-hearted, useless, reassuring thoughts when in his human form. Never would he have treated Kouga so kindly ordinarily.

Kouga gave a cocky grin. "Yeah, you're right." Kouga seemed satisfied, however, so Inuyasha said no more for some time.

When he had picked a patch of dune grass bare, he huffed. "When are those two going to be back with the boat?" he snapped at no one in particular.

Kouga stuck a tiny pebble on the top of his sand lump. "Don't know, but they better hurry. I'm getting pissed off waiting around like this."

"Keh," Inuyasha said as means of agreement. "What the hell is that supposed to be?"

"It's Kagome..." Kouga said.

"That is not Kagome," Inuyasha insisted, repulsed by the idea. "Why the hell would Kagome have a rock on her head?"

"I haven't done her head yet! That's her Shikon shards!" Kouga argued, flicking a wandering sand crab at Inuyasha.

"Well, you made her neck too damn fat, then!" Inuyasha retorted, brushing the small crab out of his hair. Kouga shaved off some sand from each side of the lump around the pebble. Then he began heaping on more sand for the head, and it began to take on the shape of two stacked lumps, conjoined by another mass of sand.

"Hrmm..." Kouga said thoughtfully, sitting back to eye his work critically.

"Get some water to make it stick together..." Inuyasha suggested, sticking a piece of grass into the collar of where Kagome's shirt would be, deciding it was passable to serve as the bow-tie of her school uniform. With the grass stuck in it, the lumps began to look something like a toad with its tongue poking out, and definitely something that would have offended Kagome should she have been there to see it.

Kouga and Inuyasha took turns running down to the ocean to get water, bringing it back in cupped hands and moving strangely to avoid from dribbling too much. With great care, they both got wrapped up in working on Kouga's sand lumps, shaping it into an even more unseemly, wet lump that Kagome might have even cringed at.

"What are you doing?" Leilani asked as she approached them.

"We're...uh...passing the time," Inuyasha said. "Sheesh, people of our caliber just can't sit around staring at the sky all day."

"Yeah...we're too mentally advanced to shoot the sky," Kouga continued, using one of Kagome's phrases.

"It's shoot the breeze, moron," Inuyasha corrected.

"No it's not!" Kouga insisted. "How the hell do you shoot breeze?" he asked.

"How the hell do you shoot sky?" Inuyasha retorted until Leilani grabbed his arm with a heavy sigh.

"Jeez, let's go! Linh's waiting at the boat!" Both demons forgot about their argument and raced towards the boat. It was tied securely to a dock, bobbing peacefully in the swells. Once everyone was settled inside, Inuyasha and Kouga each took an oar and began paddling the boat towards a lighthouse in the distance, rising from the waves like a pale tree. At about the same time they were able to paddle straight, their misshapen tribute to Kagome was run over by a dog chasing a Frisbee.

Everyone was quiet during the voyage. The further from shore they got, the darker they sky became--first it was the pink of early evening, which faded into purple that deepened and deepened into twilight, and soon they were rowing underneath the light of the clear stars framed in a black sky. The northern star blinked brightly, pulsing in the velvet midnight. The lighthouse's beam passed over the boat, circling around the water at a sluggish, tired pace.

"It feels like going home," Linh remarked suddenly, her voice even more calm and unusually quiet than normal.

"For some, it is," Leilani answered her over the gentle splashing of the water against the oars. "Those who live to be at sea may always return to the sea now." Her eyes suddenly seemed old and quiet. "But here, they cannot disappear or die in a storm. Here, they can always return to those who wait for them at shore." The beam passed over them again, stretching on the water and dipping over the waves like melted butter.

"Do you know someone who sails, Lei-Lei?" Linh asked quietly in her same shy voice. Inuyasha and Kouga remained silent---hey had spent enough time around Kagome to know when women wanted a talk without interjections. It often ended painfully to interrupt.

"No," Leilani answered. Then she grinned brightly. "But I always wanted to marry one when I grew up!" She laughed joyously and the lighthouse beam passed over them again. "This is better, though, being in heaven. But, sometimes it makes me a little sad to come out this way...I know all of heaven, but if you sail long enough, and keep sailing, you'll go sailing right out of heaven and into empty eternity..."

"Really?" Linh asked, a look of surprise on her face. "I did not realize one could leave heaven once here---once here permanently, that is."

"Sure...you can go back out the same way you came in, if you know where to go, or you can go on sailing...but I wouldn't advise it. If you don't know where the proper entries are, you can't get back in, and if you go sailing off there's no way to return at all."

"Why's that?" Inuyasha asked, curious himself.

"You know when you first came here?" Leilani started, shrugging her small shoulders. "Well, remember all those stars..? You get pushed out there...don't worry, it's not like you get burned up by the stars, but that's the nothingness. It looks terribly cold."

Inuyasha asked nothing else. After some time of silence, Linh spoke. "I cannot accompany you to the lighthouse, Leilani."

"I know," the child answered. "Only one can go with me, anyway."

"What?" Inuyasha and Kouga barked simultaneously.

"Well, Linh can't go in at all, it's impossible for her. She's a dead mortal who is just a soul right now. I can go in because I'm Leilani, guardian of this and that. But someone has to hold the door open from the outside to let me and and one more. That one can't be Linh, Linh can't touch the lighthouse, she'll be like a ghost. But one of you can."

Kouga and Inuyasha exchanged glances.

"I should go," Kouga said.

"I should!" Inuyasha insisted.

"But you're human right now, you can't protect her anymore!" Kouga argued. He and Inuyasha both sped up the thrusts of the oars, causing the boat to bob nervously on the water. Ripples spread noisily into the silence of the empty ocean, lit like bursts of white fire by the lighthouse beam.

"So, because I am human right now is exactly why I should go! What if there are more purity thingies we have to go through?" Inuyasha asked. "That way, you'll be stuck, and you'll have to come all the way back out to get me and we'll lose more time! We don't have a lot of time left!"

Kouga stopped himself before he blurted out his next argument. A moment of tense silence passed, during which the boat's speed returned to normal. All the tension seemed to leave as soon as Kouga sighed heavily and let his shoulders drop.

"Alright..." he grumbled. "But I've saved your ass countless times, so I saved Kagome, too, not just you."

"Keh, whatever..." Inuyasha retaliated, satisfied that he would be the one to rescue her. Silence resumed once more, Linh and Leilani peaceful, Kouga sulking, and Inuyasha anxious about reuniting with Kagome.

He swallowed thickly and glanced at the white lighthouse, looming nearer on the never-ending, dark horizon, splitting the sky where the ocean met it, a pillar in the blackness. Water splashed around the island on which it was built, foaming and churning around the rocky portion of it with the gasps of crashes. The smell of salt stung his nostrils with the upset in the waters.

The lighthouse beam passed over them and they rowed onward.