Chapter 10: My Eyes on the Sky
"THAT LOOKS CREEPY," Miharu commented with a childish shudder as she took her turn peeking through a fissure along the fortress wall. Taro across from the small girl had his arms crossed against his chest and was staring back at the city stonily. Even Amaya looked a little more worried than usual. Susumu looked carefully indifferent.
Kagome, on the other hand, was excited and grinning brilliantly and almost overpowered by relief. The Shikon shards were at the edge of her senses, like seeing a candle glow from a great distance. They were there--which meant that Amaya had correctly guessed where to go, and also that Kagome would have an easier time finding Inuyasha... as long as the shards were still with him, but Kagome pushed aside any doubts to the back of her mind. She would just have to rely on her observance of the Shikon shard's power.
However, despite her joy, she was growing increasingly aware of how dangerous their next task was going to be. She took a second peek through the crack in the fortress wall when Miharu stepped away.
The fortress wall itself was huge. Kagome and her companions had spent several hours wandering around the edge, looking for a more subtle entrance than the front gates, and had eventually come along a crack running through the side: it was just wide enough for them to squeeze through. Inside the fortress, as Kagome saw while peeking carefully inside, was an entire village. Small huts with thatched roofs circled around the castle itself, and in the town centre were several peddlers advertising bones and body parts and bottles of different kinds of energies and passports to the human world and enchanted relics. At the edge of the town centre was a long scaffold from which dangled a broken, flogged, and limp body. One one corner of the scaffold a group of devil children sat playing a hand game from which the winner drew prizes of mixed currencies of origins Kagome could not tell from her distance. The sky just over head the fortress was dark, but an orange glow arose from the ground and faintly illuminated everyone and everything inside. From the angle at which she stood, Kagome could see the top of the infamous guillotine after which the place was named, poking menacingly out from around one edge of the castle.
Devils of all sorts wandered around, either laughing with one another or brutally shredding each other; all over the fortress, more and more beings were crackling out of existence as souls were shattered. Some were fighting to the soul-shatter simply out of sport, and the winners and onlookers jested and cheered each time a soul was completely ruined.
Kagome pulled her head out of the fissure and turned to address her companions. "You guys stay here," she ordered. "I'll go in and get Inuyasha by myself."
"Ridiculous," Amaya responded. "You do not know how to go about this."
"Miharu is definitely not going in there," Kagome insisted. "Anyway, I can sense him now... I can get to him. There's no reason to endanger more of us than we have to, and I think the fewer of us that go, the better off we'll be."
"Yeah, but if you get offed who will take us back to earth?" Taro grumbled.
"How about we split into two groups," Susumu suggested. "Since I'm supposed to be here, I can go under the guise that I've capture Kagome and Amaya and am using them for my own devilish purposes." He grinned at his own play on words. "Amaya can go with us half way and keep guard where we need her to. Taro can stay here with Miharu and protect her."
"Alright, let's go," Kagome affirmed, contented that at least Miharu was being spared. Kagome brushed her bangs away from her eyes and carefully followed Susumu through the crack in the fortress wall, Amaya trailing her listlessly. No one seemed to take any notice of their entry.
"So, how is this to be accomplished?" Amaya questioned Susumu airily, glancing blankly about the village that sprawled out before them.
"Where is he, Kagome?" Susumu asked.
Kagome pointed toward the castle confidently. With the two girls following him, Susumu led the way through the village. They did not attract too much attention to themselves, which made Kagome a little uneasy. The demons in the village sometimes threw glances or glares at Susumu and then went back to what they were doing once he smirked at them.
Kagome just shook her head and followed, glancing up at the castle and smiling when she caught sight of the Shikon shards' glow.
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WHEN KAGOME, AMAYA, and Susumu approached the castle, Kagome was able to verify that he was indeed inside it rather than somewhere around it. With some resignation, they decided to venture onward. Entering the castle was easy enough for them to do--they entered simply and without any interference from a side passages, since the doors were rotted, dusty, and nearly useless at keeping anyone or anything out.
Kagome was thankful that their passage was unmarked by trouble, but she was also uneasy by how smooth it had gone. However, she kept quiet on the situation and merely went with the others.
"Alright," Susumu whispered as they entered the castle into a small, dark storage room with cabinets of moldy food. "Amaya, you stay hidden down here and try to deter anyone who might be on our trail. If danger arises, get yourself out of here. Kagome and I will go on."
"Agreed," Amaya said with a nod of her head, sinking into the shadows made by the door and a wall of shelves.
"Let's go," Susumu said to Kagome. "I'll follow you." Kagome nervously took the lead and carefully began picking her way toward the direction she could sense the Shikon shard. They entered a vast, dim hallway that turned and twisted into different branches; if Kagome did not have the shard to follow, she knew she would become lost in the corridors.
The closer she got to the Shikon shards, however, the more confusing finding them actually became, so she felt lost despite the focus. Their direct location seemed to alter whenever she paused in front of a door, as if the contents beyond the door were called in from some other plane and did not belong. Sometimes, the shards faded entirely when she stepped before a door; in other places the Shikon's light spiked up with such flare and abruptness that it left Kagome a little dazed.
Finally, the dark hallway led to a door about which Kagome felt comfortable. She gently teased open the handle and looked inside. The room beyond the door was nearly completely pitch and void, lit only by small torches hung along the wall, whose faint glows seemed more like specks of burning dust than light. However, it was just enough to show Kagome what was inside. She swallowed thickly. If she had just rushed forward as fast as she had wanted to, she would have ended her life. The entire floor was missing; instead, an endless blackness loomed downward like a yawning mouth.
Susumu growled grumpily. "Who the hell keeps a fucking pit in their damn guest bedroom?"
Kagome huffed and shut the door, and the two pushed onwards. Some time later, Kagome could again feel the Shikon shards clearly. Carefully, she opened up the door she had come to and peeked inside to see a brightly lit hallway--almost painfully so after the dimness of the hallway--lined with a series of white doors with plastic black numbers on each one. The bars of florescent lights mounted on the ceiling hummed and popped and the thin blue carpet lining the hall was clean and well-kept, but obviously old and a little ragged. It looked like a cheap motel.
"I have something else to take care of while you do this," Susumu said before Kagome could take the first step forward. Kagome looked back at him, mildly surprised by the sudden seriousness of his tone. "If you come across trouble, get yourself out of here and don't worry about me. I'll meet up with you later."
Kagome blinked after him as Susumu raced off in the other direction, turning down a branch of the hallway and disappearing from sight. With a shake of her head, Kagome cautiously tip-toed into the bright corridor. She was alone now; alone in a place she did not understand, and fear made her heart pound hard in her chest. She took in a deep breath and steeled herself, and then carefully took each step one at a time, following the shards' trail. One fear fell into another.
It had felt like years since she had last seen Inuyasha. Nothing will be better than seeing him again, she told herself, even though she was still afraid. Nothing will be better than the relief of knowing he's OK.
With that needy desperation, and filling with the fear that he would be gone, Kagome gave up the caution that was only allowing her anxiety to grow and took off in a reckless run, pushing herself as fast as she could go and taking no notice of the tears falling down her cheeks as she rushed down the hall, wanting only to see Inuyasha again.
Eventually, she came to the room where she knew the shards were. Nervously, she let her fingers hover over the steel doorknob and simply stared at the reflection of the bright florescent light reflecting off the handle.
What if I open the door and he's not there? she asked herself, furrowing her brow. What if just the Shikon shards are? What if this is another trap? What if someone knows I'm here and lured me here? Then she swallowed thickly. Or what if I open the door, and he's worse than dead? What if his soul is shattered and gone for ever?
Kagome shook those thoughts away and opened the white door slowly.
The room beyond was much different than the hallway she had been standing in. It looked like a stone prison cell, with one window in the far corner where, upon inspecting it, Kagome saw slips of her own life pass by. There were good moments, which only seemed to mock her; and then the bad moments, serving to remind her. There was no light in the room except what Kagome allowed to leak in from the door, and tiny spikes of stained-glass colored light dribbling in from the window playing her life. The inside smelled like a strange mixture of things, of tears and blood and old lilacs and hemlock and oranges and the sea, but mostly of the forest.
She hardly paid mind to all of that. None of that was important anymore when she saw Inuyasha sitting against the side wall, with his back facing the window and eyes half-closed. His mouth was quirked downward in a tired frown and his posture was weak. His fingers absently turned over purple-stained Shikon shards. His ears were down-turned and, even though he was partially lit by the small beam of light Kagome was letting in, he did nothing. He did not raise his head, even though Kagome knew he should be able to smell her. Maybe whatever I smell like blends in with the room, she consoled herself. Maybe he can't distinguish the difference.
Quietly, Kagome slipped one shoe off to prop open the door to keep from locking herself inside, and then she walked over to Inuyasha, the calluses on her toes sticking slightly to the cold stone and an awkward limp in her gait made by the height difference her shoe gave her.
The pain along the back of her legs was forgotten now, the memory of crossing dangerous places remote. The frustration and the edginess of constantly being at risk for her soul was gone. The fear that he would be destroyed, the fear of what would happen when he knew Kikyou was the one who had helped her. The fear that he might be angry with her for betraying him, that he may never trust her again. Those thoughts, those worries, were all gone.
Standing there in front of him as no more than a normal teenage girl who had done something extraordinary, she showed all the wear of her journey. Her legs were raw and torn and covered in scars that would never heal, her hair was dirty and matted as if she had lived on the streets for years, her clothes were ripped and bloody; she was so exhausted that breathing felt like a torment for her tired body. She was missing one shoe, and so she limped when she walked. To anyone else who might have seen her, she looked broken and detached. However, she was filled with a much different feeling--she did not feel broken or detached or exhausted or hurt, or anything she should have felt. Instead, she felt a sense of home that only came from being with the half-demon in front of her. She felt that something she had strove to do in life was finally done; her long journey was ending; that if she died tomorrow, she would die with her heart complete.
Even if he did not love her now, even if he had never loved her or would never love her--that did not seem as important anymore, not as important as loving him did. Her heart beat calmly now.
"Hey... Inuyasha?" she called out in a hushed tone. Inuyasha's gold eyes snapped open at once and he lifted his head. He looked at her first with an amazed, wide-eyed disbelief that quickly melted into suspicion.
"Ka... Kagome?" he finally whispered, watching her cautiously as she bent down to her knees and looked up into his eyes imploringly.
"I'm right here," she assured.
"Why the hell are you here? What the hell happened to you?" Inuyasha demanded after his shock had worn off. He was quickly examining her appearance and the weary sort of contentment on her face.
"I came to save you," Kagome said, licking her lips. "So let's get out of here, Inuyasha, please, let's go home now."
Inuyasha opened his mouth and then snapped it shut again. He was unsure of what exactly he felt; shock, shame, joy, disbelief, pride, amazement all touched him. But the moment that Kagome grabbed his blood-stained, clawed hand and pulled him up from the ground, her fingers smaller and more delicate than his but just as blood-stained, that moment that he finally knew it was really her then and not some figment of Hell, as her life dripped into him, all of those emotions melted down into something else entirely.
Knowing what happened to the living in Hell, knowing the lengths Kagome had gone just to find him, made his heart ache in a way that filled him with a sense of need and relief, and something else he could not quite explain.
"Kagome," he said finally, "I can't protect you here."
"I know," Kagome consoled with a small smile. "Nor are you allowed to. Don't you dare draw that Tessaiga, you're corporeal now. So, let's get out of here and go home, I have help waiting--" she stopped abruptly when Inuyasha's eyes widened in shock.
"Well, well, well... what have we here?" a cold voice cooed from behind.
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Author's Notes: I've never watched YuYuHakusho (is that the name?) before, so I'm sorry! I didn't mean to steal names or such. I usually use a name generator for picking out new names. (: Everyone, don't worry! I'm very canon about relationships. I'll never make an original character to take the place of Rumiko Takahashi's, trust me!
XOXO,
Kyubi Kyebu