Inuyasha looked down at his charred hands, frowning at the rivulets of blood that channeled between the cracked and peeling skin. They hurt like a bitch, but he didn't care. He was too elated to pay attention to the sting of his demon blood knitting them back together. It had taken an electrical current nearly arcing through his heart to get him there, but… it fucking worked! The reverse cyclotron was finally emitting enough power that it could sustain the portal!

Unfortunately the goddamned thing was still overheating, but that was just an engineering question, rather than a supernatural question. Inuyasha waited for his hands to become usable once again, then he set back to work. He needed to add a cooling system and get a few more silicon insulators and that would be that, or so he hoped.

All because of that goddamned book.

He could fucking taste it. It was within his grasp. This time it would work. This time, it would open long enough that he could crawl back through it and back to his family. His family would mean no more of that fucking world; it would mean no more Onigumo.

No one had ever raised his hackles the way Onigumo did, but looks could be deceiving. After all, he would never have assumed that a book called Demons Among Us! would hold all the answers for him, yet it did. It was thorough, written by someone who had figured out how the parallel universes manifested, and who'd worked out the physics to open the portals between the two.

The book explained how his mother had ended up in the demon world, and it explained how he ended up in the human world. It required a highly magnetic event happening in exactly the right place, combined with an injection of either yōki or reiki, which would then connect to something on the other side. The power of the magnetic fields was able to create the tunnel, and the spiritual energy acted like a homing beacon, finding its way to one or the other realm.

So… that was what he was doing. The device he'd made was creating a large magnetic event, which he hoped, if he placed it just so, then added a spark of his yōki, it would bore a tunnel through whatever-the-fuck separated the worlds and let him get home.

The pieces were falling together. And, sure… the device was still unstable as fuck, but it was almost complete. It was to the point where the path needed tweaking, rather than thrashing about in the wilderness and hoping the right path would appear. And he could do that, because he knew at the end of this ordeal, his family was waiting for him.

Got it working. It will be ready by tomorrow. Let me know the next address.
Inuyasha texted Onigumo.

Onigumo was insistent that he knew where to fully activate the devices to open the portals, even though Inuyasha begged to let him test them out in places that were not near people. When he suggested running the tests at a junkyard on Staten Island, Onigumo had nearly erupted in his refusal, stating that it must happen where he directed. It was the first time Inuyasha had actively been afraid of the sunken-eyed man who was his partner, and unfortunately, it had not been the last.

Excellent. 2pm. Bring bolt cutters.
Inuyasha scowled at Onigumo's reply. He hated breaking into buildings. Especially as an 'undocumented' and especially as a half-demon. But… when Onigumo insisted on something, Inuyasha had learned not to argue.

It would get him home.
It would get him home.

That ominous thing about Onigumo that prickled the hairs on the back of Inuyasha's neck had only gotten more pronounced after their first success. Inuyasha remembered seeing the pink hair and magenta eyes of the thing that was trying to crawl through the portal. For Inuyasha, it created an instinctual need to run away as far as he could from it, but Onigumo's eyes only reflected jubilance. As if he was seeing something familiar— something he wanted to celebrate.

And Onigumo had redoubled his harassment to get Inuyasha to work harder, read deeper, study farther beyond where he had already gone. Inuyasha wanted to bark that he already knew enough about physics to be a fucking major if any goddamned college would accept him, but… he didn't. Because for some reason, challenging Onigumo felt like throwing sparks at a powderkeg, and never knowing which spark would ultimately set it off.

So Inuyasha did what he was told.

But that was not all Inuyasha did. He also… looked at that photo of the two women on the back cover of Demons Among Us!, picturing them cheering him on to make it home, picturing the shorter one, the one with the wavy hair and the wide, sparkling brown eyes telling him that he was doing a great job. He felt her gentle hand on his shoulder, rubbing it reassuringly as he worked, reminding him that he deserved to get back to his family, and that she believed in him.

It was fucking stupid, creating a fake relationship with the woman on the book cover, but it helped. It helped the hollow loneliness that came with his quest. It helped him keep his guard up every time he had to see Onigumo (which was a lot). He sometimes even thought about tracking her down, just so he could see her. But he was a fucking half-demon in a world full of humans, and she had written a book about searching out and exposing demons.

Even if the woman on the cover did not plan to exploit his existence, she also would never fucking accept a half-demon like him.

He didn't belong in this world.
This was a world that would never accept what he was.
Because he wasn't supposed to exist.

Why did something inside his soul desperately want that woman to accept who he was? As if… he was meant to meet her. Meant to read her book. And now, as he used the theories in that book to build and realize its words, he wondered if she would be proud of him, a wretch from a different world who interpreted their theories and turned them into a working machine.

Well, an almost working machine.
If it was going to be an actual working machine. Inuyasha had a lot more work to do.

Thankfully the burn had receded to a sting and was now only a tingle. His hands were intact now, because of the demon half of him. If he worked through the night, he would be able to have the prototype ready for its next trial.

Hopefully he'd been able to dampen the oscillations, and insulate the wires sufficiently to avoid the power overload that happened last time, and hopefully, when he injected a spark of his yōki into the system, it wouldn't back react through him and fry him (like it had today). If he could just isolate the yōki reservoir a little better, he would not get zapped again.

Inuyasha threw the welder's mask back over his face and got back to work. It was going to be a long night.

The next day, Inuyasha stood in front of the nondescript building in East Harlem. He swallowed down the growl that always tried to escape him when he saw the slumped figure of Onigumo, waiting for him.

"No alarms. Will be simple to get in," Onigumo rasped.
(Why did Inuyasha nearly always have to stifle down a shudder when Onigumo spoke?)

"Keh. Just show me where," Inuyasha replied, following Onigumo's fingers to a barred double-door in the alleyway next to the building. "Let's get this over with."

Onigumo bared his yellowed teeth as he followed Inuyasha to the door. Inuyasha pulled out the bolt cutters, and with a loud snap, the chain fell loose. A couple quick knocks of his hand later, and the lock clicked. They were in.

"Why here?" Inuyasha couldn't hold the question in. He needed to know.

"Because," Onigumo answered, a slight edge to his voice.

"I've been busting my balls making this fucking reverse cyclotron device," Inuyasha growled. "Least you can do is tell me why the fuck we keep havin' to go do it all over the goddamned city."

"You want to get home, right, Inuyasha?" Onigumo's voice had become quiet and laced with menace.

"You fucking know I do." Inuyasha lowered his own growl to meet the challenge, but after meeting Onigumo's eyes, he softened his tone. "I just want to fucking know why here. Is all."

"Do you not trust me?" Onigumo snarled.

"I… I do," Inuyasha wavered.
He knew that he was lying to Onigumo, but what the fuck else could he do?

"Then trust me," Onigumo answered. "Make the device. And trust me to tell you where to activate it."

Inuyasha nodded. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to be around Onigumo anymore. He… he was starting to think that he never should've talked to the man.

But… he needed to return to his home. More than anything.

So… he would continue. He would activate the device. He would burn his hands again if he needed to. He would make it fucking work. And while he set it up, with the rancid breath of Onigumo assaulting his nose, he would imagine the woman on the cover of Demons Among Us! telling him to keep going, because in his daydreams she was confident that he could do it.