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"Shut the fuck up. I know what I'm doing." Silver hair flowed from under the beanie that he wore when he was tired of the feel of his concealment charm. Sweat beaded on his brow and dripped into his golden eyes.

"But this is the fifth attempt to make a working prototype! The instructions were very—" The answering voice came out more as a hiss than a whisper, from a man in a heather hooded sweatshirt shaded darker from his perspiration.

"Then why don't you try reverse-engineering a theory, Onigumo?" The silver-haired man snarled, his clawed hands delicately curled around the copper coil he needed to solder into place.

"Who was it that found you that book, Inuyasha?" Onigumo rasped, truly a hiss this time around. "Who found you a way back to your world?"

Inuyasha growled in response. He didn't want to talk to Onigumo anymore. He wanted to work. And every moment he spent with the small rat-like man with the sunken gray eyes and the stringy black hair tore a little bit more of his soul away. He couldn't explain how the fuck a human, especially one with no spiritual power, could be so fucking draining, but Onigumo was.

He never did quite understand how Onigumo knew what Inuyasha was, or how he'd convinced him to keep trying, or how he came upon the book with all the answers. All that mattered was that for the first time in ten fucking years, Inuyasha felt hope again. Even as the rest of his life force was drained by Onigumo, the hope that he'd finally see his home again, his family again, grew.

Ten fucking years.

Ten years ago Inuyasha was ripped out of his world, away from his family and deposited cruelly into a new world, the human world, on the other side of the barrier. Inuyasha still had moments that the memory of that trip would eat him alive. It invaded his mind with such power that it drowned out everything else: the feeling of the tug that invaded his gut, the feeling of sizzling pain flooding over him, the moment he landed on the ground in an entirely alien place. The moment… he realized that he couldn't go home.

There was something else. Something on the edge of his recognition. The scent of cherry blossoms and vanilla. And a flash of a girl. But those things didn't fucking matter. Because now he was alone.

At least he had landed in New York City. He thanked his lucky stars that his mother had insisted on teaching him her language—English. Because that was what all the fucking people in that place spoke. He remembered people laughing at his ears and asking him "where the convention was;" he remembered how fast he got his ears under a hat, how hard it was to figure out how to get a job and a life.

Ten fucking years ago. Inuyasha was brought into a world indifferent to him, and he had to learn to survive. He quickly discovered that he was "undocumented", but that New York had lots of "undocumented" people. He learned that the only features that truly set him apart were his ears and his claws, so he wore a cap and he trimmed his claws every morning. He learned that his strength made it easy for him to find work, because he could do the labor of 10 men (keh, probably more, but he didn't want them to figure out just how strong he was).

Two months after he landed in the world he never wanted to see, Inuyasha had an apartment, a routine, and a quest. He stood on the corners with other "undocumented" and waited to be picked up for construction jobs. He learned to speak Spanish (a language close to his native tongue), to find out how often he was being ripped off. He learned to go unnoticed, and even started to dye his hair (the memory of the black hair dye smell still upset his stomach).

Six months into his imprisonment in the wrong world and he'd found regular gigs with employers that paid him fairly. He'd gotten himself a library card, and upgraded from a dingy room in the Bronx to a reasonable apartment in Alphabet City, and he'd started studying to create concealment charms.

Within a year, he had a concealment charm that worked. The world he was stuck in did not have demons, so he never had to disguise his yōki, only those features that marked him as demonic (He disguised his yōki anyway; one could never be too careful). Indeed, he'd managed to use his power enhanced by a charm to look entirely as he did on his human night. (Well, that was one benefit to this world. No one knew of demons, so no one knew of half-demons.)

Now though, as Inuyasha worked the odd jobs he needed to make a living (half-demons ate a lot, so it was lucky that he loved the dollar-a-dozen instant ramens), he dedicated all of his remaining time to figuring out how to get home.

Where the concealment charm had been simple, finding a way to open a portal to the other world was impossible. He wished he'd talked more to his mother about her own journey from the human realm to the demon realm, wished he'd been paying closer attention on the night it happened to him. Wished he had fucking papers so he could go to fucking college and study this shit.

Then he met Onigumo.

The sunken-eyed human still gave him the creeps. Onigumo sensed his yōki, and recognized it for what it was, and he never could figure out how. Even humans who still had reiki didn't recognize his energy. But the strange man had.

"You're looking for a way home, aren't you?" The words had come as a whisper from an alley, too low for a human to hear them, meant for him.

"Who's askin'?" Inuyasha had followed the shadow into the alleyway. He'd learned long ago that humans couldn't touch him, and usually needed to be taught a lesson if they were stupid enough to try.

"A friend," the man whispered. "One who… wants to get to the other world too."

When Onigumo had finally emerged from the dark that shrouded him, Inuyasha instinctively bared his teeth. His demon did not like the man with the stringy hair and the sunken eyes, but if this man truly could get him home, Inuyasha would accept the help.

"For you." Onigumo had pulled something out of the bag he was holding and offered it to Inuyasha: a book. "It has some of the answers you are seeking. This will help. This will get you where you desperately want to go." The man let out a yellow-toothed grin. "Seek me out if this book has your answers." He handed Inuyasha the book. "I wrote my phone number on the inside cover, should you want to continue."

Then Onigumo had disappeared back into the shadows, leaving nothing but a wisp of foreboding in his wake. Inuyasha looked down at the book. He did not want to see Onigumo again, but if that book held the answers, held the path to him getting home, then Inuyasha would follow its words, back to the sunken-eyed man.

That was what brought them to their present location, into that secluded alleyway, with a device based on a theory in a book.

Onigumo was hovering over the half-demon and stifling his ability to think. He made Inuyasha want to slash his face and be done with him, but Inuyasha also knew that he couldn't. There were things that Onigumo just knew. And they were things Inuyasha needed, so he put up with the rat-face and the suffocating aura. Because getting home was more important than anything else.

"Fuck!" A little spark snapped at Inuyasha's finger, but it was quickly followed by a hum. "Yes! Fuck yes! It's working!"

The device shuddered to life, humming and whirring as the circuits finally made contact with one another. It started to glow red and radiated a stifling heat, forcing Inuyasha backward.

Before his eyes, a small ring of bright blue light, as feeble as smoke rose up from the device, growing ever brighter and more solid as the device hummed and shuddered ever more violently. Finally, it began to spin. The space inside the ring became darker and darker, until it was completely black.

Inuyasha's eyes widened as he saw something on the other side, trying to break through the ring; a minute head with shocking pink eyes and pale pink hair; an infant, but somehow far more menacing. Around it were filaments of black, pulsating-like veins from the energy of the other side. The infant kept scrambling forward, trying to push through some invisible barrier inside the ringed blackness.

Then with a pop, the infant, the blackness, and the ring were gone. Inuyasha's device screeched, then quaked, then with one final violent shudder, came entirely apart.

"Shit!" Inuyasha bounded toward the device, trying in vain to hold it together, then howled and let go as the pieces burned his flesh.

It was a fucking failure. Like all the other ones. The fucking piece of shit overheated before it could stabilize.

And what the fuck was that creepy infant that he'd seen trying to crawl out?

"This is the best test we've had!" Onigumo slid next to him. "Yes, yes. I think we've gotten closer. I can feel it."

"It fucking failed," Inuyasha snarled. "Maybe we should—"
He didn't want to admit that watching a creepy baby almost escape from the blackness had unsettled him.

"No. We keep going. You're almost there." Onigumo placed his hand on Inuyasha's shoulder, causing him to shudder. "It's been a long night. Maybe you should sleep on it. We can… start up again tomorrow."

Inuyasha didn't want to. For the first time, on the cusp of success, he didn't want to continue. But… he didn't have a choice. He would do anything to get home. He had made his choice.

Inuyasha nodded at his partner, then began to gather the pieces of the broken device up to be brought back to his workshop and inspected. Maybe he needed to reinforce the motor better, maybe include some better heat insulation? But… his mind kept wandering back to that endless black and those violent pink eyes. It felt wrong. Like he was walking down a path he should not be walking.

He would continue. He would work with Onigumo to open the portal. He would shake off the visual of the strange baby. He would improve the device, stabilize it against the vibrations, and insulate it against the heat.

Onigumo was right. They had opened the portal to the other world! The only thing they could do now was keep going forward. Whatever lurked on the other side was… besides the point. His family was on the other side. And he was going to get there.

And the book in his hands provided the key.