SLEEPING STRANGER
NOTE: ALL chapters have been re-written. Most of the stuff is still the same, but if you notice something seems off in this or a following chapter, you can e-mail me and I'll tell you what I changed, since I imagine most people aren't going to want to go back and re-read this. :P
Chapter 10: Just Because I Say I Can
"WOW," KAGOME MURMURED softly, watching as plumes of cooling smoke and ash rose up into the darkening evening sky, banding over the stars and the slimming moon like hazy storm clouds. Inuyasha, who stood next to her, flicked an ear toward the sound of creaking wood as the eave of a roof crumbled to the ground with an ashy groan.
"What the hell happened here?" Inuyasha asked brashly. A sudden wind stirred hot ash across their faces, and the gentle, swelling smoldering of the ruined village began to recede like a timid creature returning to its home, slow and cautious. Shippou teetered on Kagome's shoulder and shuttered in fear.
"It was the strangest thing," a small voice from the ground began. Inuyasha, Kagome, and Shippou all looked down to the gritty cobbled road to see that Myouga was there, tapping his tiny fingers together and looking both afraid and distracted. Kagome recalled that Kaede had said Myouga would attempt to meet with them again during their journey, but she had not thought he would be waiting for them, nor that they would see him again so soon.
"What was the strangest thing?" Kagome asked. "What happened here?"
In a subdued voice, Myouga ventured to say, "I'm not sure exactly, but I feel certain that this tragedy is connected in some way with a little girl who came into the village earlier this day. She was strange, strange indeed. The town went up in flame just nearly an hour after her arrival."
"A little girl? What does she have to do with all this?" Kagome questioned quietly as Shippou pressed closer to her warm neck when the gentle ash stirred in the wind again. "Surely she can't have burned this place down."
"She was so strange," Myouga repeated. "I'm not sure if she is responsible, but I'm sure she is connected. She was completely pale, from her empty silver eyes, to her white hair, to her pale flesh. She wore two white lilies in her hair, I believe. She spoke not a word that I heard. The strangest thing of all was the mirror she carried... or at least, it looked like a mirror at first, but I suppose it has some kind of enchantment over it, as it showed no reflection in the surface. She must be connected in some way."
"Old man, just because she's creepy doesn't mean she's automatically responsible," Inuyasha replied.
"I have no other leads," Myouga offered. "I would suggest looking for her, perhaps she knows something if she is not directly involved. This was no normal fire."
"Do you even think she's still alive?" Shippou asked in a fragile, thin voice as his tail shivered against Kagome's hair.
"Possibly," Myouga said. Shippou squeaked as he heard a deep, somber wailing pass over the wind from the darkened forest, full and old and unbroken.
"What was that?" he whispered out, picking anxiously at his tunic when the howl faded.
"Wolves," Inuyasha answered him tonelessly. "They're probably worked up from the fire." Shippou cried out again and danced around Kagome's shoulders as he tried to peer out into the trees from the safety of his friends' company.
"Um... Inuyasha?"
"What?" Inuyasha barely gave Kagome a glance as he slowly surveyed the area once more, keeping his eyes sensitive for movement and catching only the glances of rippling shadows as burned wood fell in charred heaps to the ground.
"What are we going to do now? I mean, I'll do a burial rite, tomorrow in the sun... but what do we do tonight?"
"I guess we just stay here. There's bound to be some place to stay, and at least we don't have to pay for a room tonight."
"I don't want to stay here!" Shippou shrieked, coiling around Kagome's neck. "What about ghosts and evil spirits?"
Inuyasha grunted carelessly. "No big deal. Kagome's a priestess, right? She can take care of that kind of crap."
Kagome glared up at Inuyasha. "Not without a bow, I can't! I knew we should've stopped for weapons in Mixlevee as soon as we arrived." Kagome crossed her arms over her chest.
"Oh yeah?" Inuyasha snapped. "We were chased out of town by some crazy fox-hunters after Shippou before we even found the inn. We should boot the kid right here, right now."
"No!" Shippou wailed, clinging to Kagome's hair.
"Don't be ridiculous," Kagome warned, cutting her glare short to watch as another strip of wood gave away and crumbled to the ground. "I guess we'll just buy a new bow next chance we get," she added softly.
"Let's find some place to sleep," Inuyasha insisted.
"I don't want to sleep here!" Shippou whined once again, looking up at Inuyasha pleadingly.
"Would you rather sleep out in the woods with the wolves? Go on, I'm not stopping you," Inuyasha offered. He began a slow walk across the cobbled stones of the village road, air heavy with ash brushing past him in coils. Kagome automatically followed him, with Shippou quivering on her shoulder, and Myouga hopped silently along at Inuyasha's heels with caution, peeking around the town as they passed charred planks of wood, bent rungs of metal from wheels and halter-clasps, and stones covered with gritty ash and burn scars.
"There aren't even any bodies left," Shippou whispered in Kagome's ear as he looked sadly down at a black heap of wood.
"It's best that way," Kagome whispered back to him with a hooded voice. "For us and for them."
"Your bandage is still on tight, right?" Inuyasha asked over his shoulder. "If it gets infected, I'm not waiting around for you to get better."
"Inuyasha, I'm not a baby. It's on just fine."
"Keh," Inuyasha mumbled as he poked his head into a half-standing barn. He backed away and continued on through the village.
"You know," Kagome spoke suddenly as Inuyasha pulled back a piece of wall to a house that was standing partially up against the deep, smoky sky. "What if that girl's still around somewhere, and she really is connected to the fire? Is it safe to stay here tonight?"
"Hey, listen," Inuyasha snapped suddenly. "Before we got here, you were pouting about how tired you were, how I never let you stop for breaks, yadda yadda Miss Grumpypants. I'm sleeping right here tonight because I'm sure as hell not carrying all of you to wherever it is we're going next."
"It was just a thought," Kagome mumbled, narrowing her eyes angrily. "And besides, I'm wearing a long tunic, not pants, so I'm not a grumpypants."
"I'm surprised you're not complaining about being cold," Inuyasha retorted. "Even Shippou has the sense to wear pants under his tunic."
Kagome growled low as she followed Inuyasha into the house. She coughed lightly as the dry, heavy scent of smoke it held in the cracks of the wood and the faded, blackened threads of the rug seeped down into her lungs.
"I can't breathe," Kagome moaned. "How can I sleep if I can't even breathe?"
"Open a window or something," Inuyasha ordered.
"Oh, that's real nice, genius," Kagome barked. "There aren't any windows. Half the wall is missing."
"Then shut up and go to bed."
"You're such a bully, you know that?"
"You insist on reminding me every chance you get. Now sleep there," he directed as he pointed out a low-backed couch that was mostly intact, singed and fringed but otherwise stable.
"Why do I put up with you?" Kagome mumbled as Shippou sighed. She warily arranged herself on the couch, with Shippou tucked against her chin and Myouga curled up in the cushions, and tried to fall asleep as the scent of smoke hung around her like a veil and ash settled against her cheeks and on her eyelashes.
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INUYASHA HAD NOT meant to fall asleep that night. He had intended to remain awake and guard his slumbering companions, where they slept up on the couch stirring from time to time and coughing. But as the thinning moon worked its way high in the center of the sky, glaring down from among scattered stars, a deep sleep found him and swept over him. His breath, and the breath of his companions, grew progressively slower and shallower, unlittered by coughing from the smoke, and their sleep deepened as the night wore on.
Some time later, a dark-haired woman appeared in the doorframe, and behind her stood five empty-eyed people who might have otherwise been normal villagers. Their irises and pupils had disappeared and the whites of their eyes glowed dully and glassy in the clean moonlight, and their feet barely brushed the earth as they stood in the air above it.
The dark-haired woman entered the house. Where she stepped, a deep chill seemed to follow, and the empty-eyed villagers followed her mechanically into the room and spread out near the door like sentinels in the night.
As the dark-haired woman stepped to each of the house's slumbering guests, she brushed gentle, cold fingers against their faces: first Inuyasha, in the corner of the room, whose head turned in his sleep away from her touch. And then she went to Shippou, who slept through the caress with no inclination that he had felt anything at all. The dark-haired woman reached delicately out for Kagome's cheek, but her hand was thrown backwards as if by a blast of sudden air. She paused that way, with her arm leaned upwards, with her white, curling fingers poised near her shoulder.
"A priestess," she whispered with a small smirk gathering dark and cold on her lips. She nodded once and extended her arm again, just above where Kagome's body lay motionless. The dark-haired woman flicked her wrist and Kagome ascended into the air, leaving Shippou asleep on the couch as her neck arched backward, unsupported. The dark-haired woman gave no hint of any emotion as she stepped away from the couch and towards the door, where the moonlight spilled in and met the edges of light cast in from the broken portion of the wall. As the dark-haired woman stepped out into the town, the five villagers mutely followed after her with their empty eyes, and Kagome went along behind her. In her sleep, Kagome could feel the painful pull of her binding spell leashing her to Inuyasha, but her slumber was so deep that she could not be roused by it. Her body went on following the dark-haired woman, still and hardly drawing breath from the ashen air.
The five villagers, flanked at the dark-haired woman's sides like loyal companions, followed placidly without complaint. In the darkness skirting sharply around the wreckage, a shadow moved fleetingly, like a pulse, but the dark-haired woman did not see it.
In the cottage where he had been left, Inuyasha blinked awake suddenly, as if leaving behind a strange nightmare. After a moment in which he overcame his confusion, looking for answers to explain his surroundings, he stood slowly from where he had been slumped asleep in the house's corner. His eyes roamed over the room, to where Shippou slept deeply with Myouga at his side, and where Kagome's body had left a clean mark like a halo in the couch where the ash had fallen around her. His eyes widened and he raced from the house, out into the street.
"Kagome!" he called out. "Kagome?" His heart thumped. Only several short nights ago, he had promised to protect her. And now she was gone.
He quieted when he caught sight of her just as the dark-haired woman disappeared around a bend in the road, with Kagome trailing behind. He growled and drew his sword, and went running down the roughly grained street, his steps leaving footprints in the dried ash.
"Hey! Hey, you bitch! Get your ass back here!" Inuyasha roared as he sprinted after Kagome's shadow, while a different, unseen shadow silently moved its lips in the shape of a curse and went running soundlessly in the darkness.
The dark-haired woman turned slowly to face Inuyasha as he came around the corner with his sword laid out, gleaming cold in the moonlight, before him. Inuyasha yelled out in fury and struck his weapon down at her. The woman stumbled backward a step and hissed as she dodged the blow. Her empty-eyed villagers slumped to the ground, lifeless and still, and Kagome collapsed to the ground in a heap.
"If anything's wrong with her, you little bitch--!" Inuyasha threatened, swiping his sword down through the air again in a dangerous arch. The woman held up a thin rapier to block the strike as she drew it from a scabbard at her hip.
"Quiet, you'll wake them up," she ordered smoothly in a mocking voice.
Kagome stirred slowly, feeling sore all across her body and faintly dizzy as if her sleep had offered no rest. She could hear painful, screaming clashes of metal, and slowly her eyes focused on the moon glinting above her like a slitted cat's eye.
She sat up and gathered her senses about her in time to see Inuyasha fly at the dark-haired woman, his yellow eyes alight with anger. The woman held her rapier up to protect herself once more from the blow. Another metallic cry sounded out and the sappier shattered into steel splinters, thrown out across the night in the falling moonlight. They clipped and clattered to the ground with a dainty sound like music, shimmering. The woman's dark eyes widened, her lips parted, and then she threw her hand up into the air and flung it outward.
Inuyasha yelled out in surprise as he soared backwards as if caught by a sudden gust of air. The woman drew up her pale fingers in a tight coil just as Inuyasha landed feet away from her on the old cobbled road, and his eyes emptied while a wide wound erupted in his throat with a burst of bright blood, flecking out over the stones in thick drops. He gasped one tattered breath of air and then lay silent on the ground, the shadow leapt from the darkness, and Kagome screamed in horror.
Kagome pushed herself up from the ground, weak and shaking with fear, and ran to where Inuyasha lay unmoving on the ground with his sword drawn out on the stones, looking so weak and frail beside him, like an old piece of bent iron. She clutched to the front of Inuyasha's tunic shirt desperately, still screaming out. Behind her, a heavy voice chanted methodically, but she could not hear it. The voice went on chanting, words pouring from a young priest's lips. His eyes were full and dark and his movements light and quick, and as the dark-haired woman swore and flung her hands about and cast her magic spells down to earth, they slipped like rain drops in the sky around him and shattered to the ground like ice drops.
Kagome saw none of this as she leaned forward, hardly realizing as tears dripped down her face in pearls reflecting the moonlight, disappearing in Inuyasha's shirt. She put a shaking hand near Inuyasha's parted lips, feeling for breath and finding nothing. She pressed her ear against his chest and frantically listened for a heart beat, a pulse of life beneath the flesh.
"Inuyasha!" she yelled out at him, her voice trembling and full of fear and pain, sharp and cold as it echoed out beneath the stars. "Inuyasha, wake up!" she ordered sharply, her voice cracking off at the end with a hard break. Blood poured dark from his throat and stuck in hot smears to her face and fingers as she cried and wailed, pressed against his chest and looking for a heart beat with blind, wild hope and far wilder fear. Uselessly, she pulled herself up from him and untied the sash around her waist. The Shikon shards went clinking down to the ground, gathering in the cracks of the stones among splinters of the woman's sappier, and the purse of coins that Kaede had given her spilled and emptied around her bare ankles with soft chattering.
Metal sang out behind her, full and high, and the heavy voice continued its chanting, and the woman from time to time burst out a frustrated cry.
Kagome still did not hear any of this, or even remember that there was a woman behind her, as she pressed her sash against the wound in Inuyasha's neck. Tears rolled down her cheek hotly, brushing burning trails on her skin, and she felt no struggle of life under his skin. She slumped down once more, leaning over his body and allowing her head to lay against his unmoving chest as blood seeped through the fabric and warmed her shaking fingertips.
The world slowed and seemed to stop around her, cold and far away, as the heavy ache of loss settled over her like a sickness and made her tears feel feverish as they fell more and more slowly. Her fingers coiled into Inuyasha's tunic shirt while her other hand still pressed the sash down against his throat. Her eyes closed tightly and the tears began to fade away, until they were trembling drops that fell only from time to time from her eye lashes and washed the ash away.
"Oh, please," she whispered as her breath shuddered against him. The moonlight dripped down into her eyes and smeared brokenly against weariness and eyes still glassy and watery. "Please come back..." she whispered. "You can't just leave me... you just can't."
As she laid against him, weary, Kagome's memories and thoughts seemed to flee from her, leaving her as empty as a dreamless sleep, and she could only feel as if she was pressed against a stranger whose passing touched her much too deeply. She could not even recall her curse at all, or that there ever had been a curse laid over her. She could not recall why it made her so upset to see him lifeless beneath her. She could not remember what words, what moments, had passed between them. In her mind, everything slipped away like the smooth gliding of rain down windowpanes. There were no burned villages or captured priestesses. There was no strange world to which she suddenly belonged, plucked from the safe cradle of her own time and her own world. There was no Inuyasha. Nothing was there but the aching, and the lifeless body beneath her belonging to a spirit she suddenly could not recall, and then an overwhelming loneliness.
Metal stopped clashing and the voice stopped chanting.
"You can't leave me..." Kagome whispered again, knowing only that aching. "You just can't leave me..."
"She's gone," a voice said from behind her. Kagome's head snapped up and she turned around in time to see a priest approach where she laid hunched over Inuyasha's body. She had forgotten there had ever been a woman, and she had not seen the priest as he fought when Inuyasha fell. The priest who stood above her, towering and dark in the night, wore a sincere and patient look. He was leaning against a finely crafted staff with a holy symbol knotted in the center, dark gold, and he looked placid and tranquil. A drop of sweat rolled down his temple, looking misplaced on his solemn brow.
"What did you say?" Kagome murmured, as if everything was happening in a slow and tragic dream.
"She's gone," the priest repeated to her. Kagome closed her eyes calmly and put the side of her head against Inuyasha's chest once more, wishing for a sound of life; a heart beat, a gasp of air, a whisper. Anything that would bring him back, and not leave her mourning for a stranger.
"So is he," she mumbled brokenly, pressing her hot face into Inuyasha's shirt. Suddenly it all came back to her, aimless memories looking for a home, and filled her up full again. Her sobs poured down her face, hot and new and painful in her chest and her pulse pounded against her brain. "He's just gone..."