Unscathed
Part .02 – Renewal
With a sigh, Kagome leaned back in her chair, staring at the ceiling. They had been at this for hours (or so it seemed). Didn't the doctor know that when they spent time alone, outside of the office, it was not supposed to constitute treatment?
"I don't know," she whined, "It all gets fuzzy after being in the hut with the bandits."
"Well, that is one of the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder –avoiding stimuli associated with the event. But repressing your memories won't work forever," declared Naraku. It sounded reasonable and true, what he said, but it also sounded contrived. As if he was forcing himself to think of another reason why she wasn't trying hard enough to regain her fallen memories.
Poking at her dinner plate with a fork, Kagome wondered why psychologists insisted their patients should talk about terrifying memories. Wouldn't it help, to repress horrible recollections in the darkness of one's mind? It was a safety maneuver. Which meant it was safe. Which meant it was good and should not be undone.
"All right, let's try another method." If nothing else, Naraku was incredibly perseverant when he focused on a particular subject. And it seemed like he truly wanted to assist her in recalling what happened to the Shikon no Tama. "Try and picture what the scene would have looked like to someone else."
With a sigh, Kagome slid her fork across the empty dish in front of her. Right. This was supposed to help. First, he had asked her to try to remember all the other sensory input from that day. For example, what did the wood in the hut feel like under her fingers? What did the other bandits sound like? What background noises did she hear? That sort of thing.
When this did not lead her to the memory, they had tried working backwards from the ending. What was the last feeling she remembered that day? But, no. The second technique had not worked either. She very firmly did not recall anything after leaving the bandits' hut in the forest.
"Um…" murmured the ex-priestess, unsure what she was supposed to do now. "Imagine what it looked like to Inuyasha?"
"Yes," agreed the neuro-psychologist calmly, "That will do."
For some reason though, this frustrated Kagome further. Envisioning what Inuyasha might have thought or what Inuyasha might have wanted was nerve-wracking. She threw her fork at the plate, rising to push her chair toward the table.
"Why would I want to know what he was thinking?" the dark-haired girl spat, traces of anger and bitterness seeping into her tone. Then, quickly her cheeks flooded with color. He was only trying to help. She should not be rude to a doctor. "May I be excused?" she finished politely, meekly.
Red-eyes absorbed her rage, noting it with interest. For a moment, Kagome felt distinctly like a science project or a puzzle that he simply ached to dismantle. But eventually, he nodded and she slipped away, attempting to subdue the panic that suffused her at the thought of remembering what she had forgotten.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
Ayumi was not there, Kagome noted sadly. Eri and Yuka had joined her for lunch, but the quiet girl who usually made the third part of the party was missing today. Still, Kagome felt very proud of herself. She had set up this lunch-date all by herself!
That might not sound like such a huge achievement. Yet truly, it was. She had not been out with her friends in a long time. And she certainly had not arranged a meeting, since her accident.
Forsaken by her own mind, she was lost. Every day was a broken fragment, filled with shattered images of reality and fiction. To be honest, sometimes it was hard to tell what was actually occurring around her. After all, if trips to the feudal era, magic, and reincarnation were real, then how could she grasp what was possible and what was not? Without being able to rely on her brain as a reliable source of knowledge anymore, and unwilling to admit that what she saw comprised the sum-total of existence, Kagome had difficulty taking action or making decisions.
Despite the brain-damage, though, she had managed to organize a reunion today.
It had started when she caught herself thinking about Ayumi that morning, and she realized that she had never called the girl back about their Algebra problem. After the Last Class, they had been discussing a math problem in the hallway. But Kagome had run off, because she was eager to return home and see what her mother was preparing for her birthday. Lackadaisically, she had waved at her friend, promising to contact Ayumi later. There had never been an opportunity.
Rather than telephone Ayumi about a homework assignment that was completed, long ago, Kagome had decided to use this opportunity to instigate a gathering with her friends. First, she had dug through her belongings for her cell-phone (yes, she did have one!). Then, she had told one of the girls to pick her up at the footsteps of the shrine, rather than reveal the fact that she was living with her neurologist (which seemed a little bit weird). Finally, she had found a bus-stop, mapped out the directions to her old family home, and spent some of her pocket change to take public transportation to arrive there.
It had taken all morning, but Kagome had successfully managed to go out with her friends for lunch! She knew how long it had taken her, because she had written down each step that she took in her calendar, crossing it off when she finished the task. And now… sadly, Ayumi was not even present. The one girl that she had been thinking about, while she achieved her goal, and Ayumi never even appeared.
Yuka and Eri were more than capable of filling in the gaps in the conversation, however.
"It's awful, you know?" the short haired girl was commenting rather loudly, from where they sat in the WacDonald's booth. "I know, I know. But the idea of so much misfortune heaping up against our peers – it's so tragic."
Sipping her soda, Kagome nodded, as though she understood precisely what they were discussing.
"It's wonderful the way the rest of the school came together to help her, though," Eri concluded grandly. The headband on her shoulder-length hair had been replaced by clips today, Kagome noted. They both had longer locks than she remembered.
Carefully, she inquired, "What did the rest of the school do?"
"Oh!" exclaimed Yuka. "It was so nice! After the aneurysm, all the teachers encouraged students and their families to donate money to his family. They managed to collect 200,000 yen, to help the family pay his medical bills."
Upon hearing this, a sharp pain lanced through Kagome's heart. She was unfamiliar with the emotion, though, and she didn't understand what she felt. Filing the sensation away for later analysis, she paid attention to the dialogue.
"Aneurysm?" she asked gently, hoping that the question did not make it obvious that she had no clue what they were discussing any longer.
"Yes," Eri stated. "Where one of the blood vessels in the brain bursts open and starts bleeding. He almost died."
"It was extremely eerie, after the way you suffered a coma," added Yuka, the words following her companion's in rapid fire. "One of our teachers has an aneurysm! He's only twenty-eight. And there isn't any way to prevent an aneurysm!"
"Mm," Kagome agreed mildly. "Is he okay?"
Staring at her oddly, Yuka told her, "Yea, he lived. They got him to the hospital very fast. He'll make a full recovery."
Obviously, she had slipped up somewhere, Kagome thought. They had finally noticed that she didn't remember the outcome. They had to repeat it twice – yes, he was fine. Yes, the surgery went well.
"Good," she noted, looking down at her empty drink cup. "Good."
But it wasn't good at all. That unfamiliar feeling was welling up inside of her again.
Why did this news bother her so very much? Rage, hatred and envy knotted themselves up within her chest, as soon as she heard that the professor was 'fine' and he would recover. God! What was wrong with her? Didn't she want him to recover? Somehow, the only thought that she could grasp within the storm was this – No one helped my family pay the medical bills.
It made her feel ungrateful and small to compare her misfortune to someone else's near-death experience. But she did. And she could not stop.
0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0
That night, she woke abruptly in the middle of the night. For what seemed like no reason at all, Kagome found herself breathless, gasping for air. An image filled her mind, like a splintered shard of glass lodged between her eyes.
It was a memory, she knew. There was no way that it could be anything else. Too much terror filled the image, gathering behind it in ever-thickening layers, for this to be part of her imagination.
At her side in the memory, there was something hard, pushing against her ribcage like an armrest. But it was too high in the air. Wood pressing into her chest.
As though a flash of lightning had lit the sky, the background looked bleached out and wrong. The colors were over-exposed, bleeding into a massive blur of white toward the left of the picture. Never in her wildest imagination had she dreamed of painting a landscape with such hues.
The most prominent part of the memory was a claw, like metal, approaching her right eye. Kagome had literally yanked herself out of the dream, turning her head away from the threat with all her might. But in the back of her mind, she knew it would not be enough. As a human, she was not fast enough to avoid such speed.
A flash of red flooded the lower half of the image. But there was no sound. No sound at all.
She thought she could die, and it would not hurt too much. Death brought peace and nothingness. Sometimes, it was better than agony.
But she hadn't died, had she? Kagome had lived. Broken and different now, but alive.
It was just a memory.
