Things have turned a deeper shade of blue
And images that might be real
May be illusion
I'm so free
No black and white in the blue
Everything is clearer now
Life is just a dream you know
That's never ending
I'm ascending....
-'Blue' from Cowboy Bebop
Chapter 9- A Mirror of the Heart
White. A pure, clean color.
A young woman sat in the kitchen of her home,
quietly humming to herself as she moved about, preparing food for dinner.
The sun would set soon, and soft red light glanced through the bamboo screens
over the door. She had lifted it that afternoon, helping circulate air
through the house. Turning to the side, she moved to the small fire glowing
at the hearth, kneeling beside it and setting down bowls. Two, precisely.
A smile flickered to her lips for a moment, vanishing a moment later as
she thought. Six months. Six months, married. Six months...happy. The smile
flitted across her face again, then spread when she glanced to the pillow
her husband usually sat on while they ate.
A small, white butterfly had settled itself
there, wings unfolding and folding, iridescent in the warmth of a sunset
glow.
"Butterfly?" she asked, contemplating the
insect momentarily. "Who's coming to the door?" It answered her by spreading
its wings and taking to the air, fluttering around the room and disappearing
through an open window. There was a magicality to the appearance of a butterfly.
An premonition given that someone was about to arrive. She smiled, tucking
a loose strand of dark hair behind an ear and standing. Pots clanked as
she pulled them out of their drawers, placing them on the table. The sack
of rice was heavy, but her hands were callused differently now, used to
lifting and daily work, not shooting arrows. She looked at her hands, the
webbing between thumb and index finger, the traceries and patterns across
her palms. Separating them, she looked into a bucket of water, seeing her
reflection there. Dark hair, falling around her shoulders, clouding around
her face. She still felt unaccustomed to her new clothing. A kimono, far
less notable than what she was used to. Deep blue shades, but light as
the summer sky around her neck, little white flowers embroidered on the
hemline.
Unfortunately, the water she peered in was
shallow. "He forgot to fill it again," she sighed, picking it up by the
handle and turning around, just as the slatted screen door was flung aside,
admitting the one who had forgotten to fill the bucket.
"Oy," he said as he stepped inside, removing
a red outer kimono and tossing it into a corner. She arched an eyebrow.
"You have such a nice way of greeting people."
He grinned a little at her as she walked towards
him with the bucket. "Where you headed?"
"The river, baka," she replied, angling herself
away as he tried to prevent her from leaving by grabbing her waist and
leaning in. She brought the empty bucket up between them, pushing him back
a bit. "You're in a good mood. Trouble today?"
"Hell yeah," he smiled, cracking his knuckles
and releasing her. "Youkai have been avoiding this place since I moved
in permanently. Found some centipede thing swarming around in the forest."
"And you blew it apart."
He leaned in again, a grin plastered across
his face.
"Water, food, dinner," she moved away, pushing
aside the bamboo curtain. "Dessert."
He laughed. It was good to hear him laugh.
She remembered other days, when he would have just growled at her. She
slipped outside and headed down the footpath to the river. It was worn
from many footsteps, narrow and winding down to the water's edge.
Cicada noisily greeted the oncoming evening
as she dipped the bucket into the water. Unusually content, she slipped
her sandals off and stepped into the water. Colored pebbles under the water
rolled away where she stepped. She smiled as she wriggled her toes in the
silt, the hem of her skirt dampening as it contacted the water. It made
her feel childlike, standing there in the water, barefoot and watching
the sunset. Why shouldn't she be happy? She was at peace. She had a good
husband, if he was somewhat of a pottymouthed baka at times. And he was
happy with her. They were happy. It brought a smile to her lips, thinking
of him. They were married.
Together, they would live this life. It was
a new life, not like the one before. The one before the Shikon no Tama
that brought them together. Strange, how something so corrupted could bring
people together as well. A new life, together, with Inuyasha. Perhaps it
wasn't so true, that nothing good ever came of the Shikon no Tama. She
closed her eyes, lashes resting on her cheeks. Did she miss her old life?
Not so long as she had him. He found satisfaction in guarding the village
with her. She let the bucket slip from her fingers, and heard it splash
into the water, drifting a bit before it was caught on a rock. She drank
in the sunlight, the fading rays warming her face. "A new life...."
It felt so real. It was real. This place was
real. She wasn't who she was before, not now. Not here. "I am...my name
is..." she opened her eyes, hands held loosely at her sides. "My name is...Kikyou."
The word tasted strangely on her lips, and
she opened her eyes, wondering at it. Why should her name sound strange
to her? She had known no other. Kaede-chan called her onee-sama. Big sister,
and that was what she was. To others, she was the village miko, its guardian.
To Inuyasha, she was Kikyou. The only one who saw her as a woman, not as
some magical being, separate and inhuman. Perhaps it was because for so
long, he had been inhuman himself. He, neither human nor youkai. She, neither
human nor kami.
It tasted of metal, the name, tasted of lead.
"My name is...Kikyou," she tried again, searching for the comfortable familiarity
there was in one's own name. "Kikyou. Kik...K...." It grew harder, difficult
as she struggled to discover why her name sounded alien to her own ears.
She heard it daily. What was in a name? It was ascribed to her, it was
who she was. What other name could she have? She pressed her hand to her
throat as she repeated it, feeling the vibration of her speech.
"Daijobu ka, Kagome?"
She turned, puzzled at the voice. A young
woman sat on the stones behind her, on the riverbank, dressed in the dull
grey robes of a Buddhist nun. She began to bow politely, but noticed that
the woman's face was turned upward, faced directly into the blinding sun.
And indeed, the woman was blind, her eyes pale, white, and sightless.
"Gomen nasai," she apologized politely. "I
believe you have made a mistake...my name is...my name is..." her voice
faltered, faded into uncertainty. "My name is not Kagome."
Kagome. A familiar sound in her ears. A sweet
taste, like something she was accustomed to. Kagome. My name is Kagome.
Ka-go-me. Kagome is my name. I am Kagome. Kagome.
She shook her head to clear it, long hair
falling around her shoulders. No, that wasn't right.
"Ah, I see," the young woman replied, eyes
roaming back and forth across the horizon for a moment. "So sorry, to have
mistaken you. But the one who bears the Shikon no Tama is called Kagome,
ne?"
Shikon no Tama. That was a thing gone now,
dissolved away, purified. Vanished. For a blind woman, a woman with powers
like herself, to bring up the jewel now was unsettling. Now, the moment
she was truly beginning to feel free. "The Shikon no Tama is gone, and
it has been for some time now." She moved out of the water brusquely, splashing
a trail onto the sand and leaving footprints. "Gomen."
"Oh, is that the truth?" the other woman tilted
her head to the side, pearl colored eyes unfocused, yet trained on her.
"Then what rests around your neck?"
A heartbeat. A heartbeat throbbed in her ears
for a moment, like a drum, pounding hard. She had not been a miko for six
months. Six months of happiness. Six months of being simply Kikyou. But
being a miko was ingrained into a soul, the power there, always there,
dormant, perhaps, but always there. No aura surrounded this blind woman.
No magical sense, positive or negative. Only emptiness.
She reached to her neck, and drew out a thin
chain. Her hands were shaking when she looked down, eyes finding that in
her fingers, an oblong chunk of the tama rested, uneven and broken, chipped
away in fragments. It glittered in her hand.
Kagome. I am Kagome.
The other woman was standing, weaving her
way upward from the rock and stepping forward awkwardly in her permanent
darkness. "Yare, yare. What did you do to the Shikon no Tama?"
"I...I broke it."
"Ara, so then you are Kagome," the other
woman pressed, slowly moving towards her.
"No...I am...my name is...."
"Which one are you?"
Her head lifted as she was approached. The
woman's face was blank, eyes blinking at her in an unsettling way, both
seeing and blind at once. Something strange about her blindness, something
strange about her aura of nothingness. Her hair was shorn, as it should
be, slanting off at her cheekbones, dark and contrasting to how pale she
was.
This was not right. Something here was not
right, and as a miko, she searched for the wrongness of this place. Some
sense of evil, some sense of trickery.
She backed away a step, heel striking the lapping water behind
her. Startled, she glanced down and saw her reflection in the ripples of
the water, shifting and flowing away from her on the surface of the waves.
Blue kimono, deep sapphire color, with white flowers on the collar. Blue,
the color of the sky, great and wide and free. Her reflection was not her
own. A hand reached up and touched her face, exploring the younger vision
of herself.
"Shikon no Tama formed from the heart of a
miko named Midoriko, who lived very long ago," she was told. The other
woman's voice was very soft, elegiac and sad, though cold. "The heart is
where the soul resides, the emotions of a person. Not like the head, just
for thoughts. If there is hatred in the heart of the one who holds the
Tama, it grows corrupted and turns dark. It reflects, as a mirror reflects,
absorbing and feeding off the hatred of others. The tama is a heart. It
is your heart."
It glowed in the hands of Kikyou, whispering
to her wordlessly of another way things had happened. Trickery, deception.
She shot Inuyasha. To be betrayed by one she loved hurt more deeply than
any other kind betrayal, and in her pain, she lashed out thoughtlessly.
She had shot him, and pinned him to a tree.
And five hundred years later, she had freed
him again.
But then, she was not Kikyou anymore.
A thin hand reached out, and twined fingers
around the chain of the shards of the Shikon no Tama, snatching it away.
It snapped easily from Kagome's neck, free.
"Such an important relic. You should find
a better way of keeping it with you," the woman told her, stepping away
as Kagome turned. "You'll lose it that way."
She started forward, frowning. Regardless
of caution, this stranger should not hold the shards of the tama.
"Give it back to me," Kagome ordered her,
stepping forward with a hand outstretched. But something held her back,
warning her from moving forward. The sun set behind her, light streaming
past and striking the other woman on the riverside. It struck the other
one strangely, glowing against her short hair and reflecting redly against
her white eyes, casting her in stark, cruel shades.
"A pure heart. Kokoro. My dream was
to live above the clouds, in the capitol. To serve the Imperial court so
long ago. That was a pure wish. But something happened to take that away
from me. And so now I wraith around my old home, trapped, haunting the
place I can never leave. I will get stronger. I will escape my fate. I
will be free."
White, sightless eyes lowered to the large
fragment of the jewel.
She pressed it to her lips.
And as Kagome moved forward, she swallowed
it.
"Kagome! Kagome!"
The name reverberated through the mansion,
screamed and shouted, over and over. First by one voice, then by many.
Footsteps pounded at the floorboards, booming through the empty place.
Inuyasha flew from room to room, thoughts edging sharply on panic. Horrible
thoughts can come when in a panic, flowing with silent lucidity through
a mind. The downpour erased her scent, and the still puddles steamed. The
rain had slowed, drizzling then stopping, rainwater dripping from the sloping
roofs.
Through his panicked lucidity, a thought pushed
its way forward. The ghostly image of a yurei, stepping off a shelf of
rock in the rain, tumbling quietly into a flooding river. Inuyasha froze
at the steps of the verandah, then turned, a sick feeling welling up in
his stomach as he bolted in the opposite direction of the others. The river.
The river they walked by, the river Ukifune drowned in.
The river that steamed like a living thing,
the bellow of a dragon roaring in the forming rapids, swelling and frothing
black and white.
"Kagome!"
He sniffed the wind, trying to orientate himself
along the river, searching for Kagome, searching for the place he had seen
in his dream, painted onto a lighted screen. The roar was all he could
hear, the river charging along its course, carving out a new one.
A light struck his eyes, colors of pink shifting
into lavender and purple, a radiating mandalora of light, blossoming beside
the river. On the ground beneath the glowing light, a crumpled figure lay,
a hand under her cheek, brows drawn as though in pain, though she slept
soundly, oblivious to the thundering of the sky above, and the roar of
the rising river beside her. Dark hair spilled over her face, over her
shoulders, clothed in deep blue, color of a midnight sky. A
tree splintered upstream, cracking loudly and crashing into the river,
torn down by the harsh wind. Its breaking accompanied a darkness in the
center of the light, streams of ash grey robes flowing around it, shorn
hair flying upward, swirling as white eyes turned black and wide, stretching.
He drew Tetsusiaga, and the decrepit blade
grew as he ran forward. Kagome lay just under that darkening light, and
he intended on either getting her away from it, or putting that light out
altogether.
Her head turned sharply. She saw his charge.
Around the dark figure, the ground convulsed,
buckling and shifting, as wind swarmed upward from the grass, and a dark,
silent wall formed, a dome surrounding her.
Tetsusiaga struck the barrier, sending shockwaves
through the translucent blackness, sending it swirling and writhing as
the blade was rejected.
She floated in the air, hovering inside it,
fluxes of lavender light arching around her, silently flowing upward. A
look formed on her face, slowly, an expression replacing the emptiness.
It was one of displeasure. Not anger, or rage. The person outside her wall
was nothing more than an annoyance.
A hand rose, pointed at him. Under Inuyasha's
feet, the ground began to rumble and sway, water from the river seeping
into the cracks forming geysers and shooting up around him as purple light
erupted underneath, sending him flying upwards.
"Inuyasha!"
The shout was accompanied by Sango's hiraikotsu,
bouncing off the barrier and spinning backwards towards her. She grabbed
it, staggering at the force of the return. Miroku fell into step alongside
her as she ran forward again, Kirara already in the air, catching Inuyasha
as he came down again from the blast below.
"Houshi-sama, can you try your-"
"No, it's almost like a miasma. I don't think
the kazaana will work in this instance."
Inuyasha was on a knee, looking fairly pissed
off as he leaned on Tetsusiaga. Shippou had taken that moment to run out
into the fray, and was asking Inuyasha, "Daijobu ka? Inuyasha?"
"I can't use the Kaze no Kizu...not with that
thing in the way...I won't know where to hit, not with Kagome inside...."
Sango and Miroku arrived in time to hear that
statement, as Inuyasha stood up. One by one, they looked inside the darkening
dome, and the glowing figure inside it. Energy was gathering around the
yurei's body, and it flickered between solidarity and ghostliness, forming
into a body of soil and rock and water, in the shape of the spirit within.
Miroku struck the outer wall with his staff.
Arches of lightning fluctuated up it, and he staggered back at the shock,
grimacing at his hand as his fingers burned on heated metal. Sango started
to approach, but he waved her off, shaking his head and backing away from
his dropped staff.
"I...Inuyasha..." Shippou began a bit uncertainly,
stepping forward as the figure began to coalesce. It was familiar. Different,
but familiar. "Is that Ukifune?"
"That kind of depends on how you look at it.
But yeah," Inuyasha replied, testing out Tetsusaiga's weight and letting
his eyes roam around the circle marking the wall's edge. There had to be
a way in. There was always a way inside. There had to be. Kagome was inside.
He had to get inside.
"So we just sit and watch?" Shippou shouted
up at him. "You've got to save them!"
"Them?" Inuyasha roared back. "Your little
girlfriend is trying to kill Kagome!"
"Ukifune is not my girlfriend! And she's not
bad! She's not trying to kill anybody! It's that one! Kill that one!"
"That is Ukifune, baka!"
"It is not! You're lying!"
"Shippou, shut up and listen to me." Inuyasha
glared down at the little kitsune, who had screwed up his face to look
as furious as he could. "Your friend the ghost girl is having problems
with the shikon no kakera inside her. I think I saw it in her hands. Two
of them, one in each."
Shippou remembered the how she had run away
before.
She clapped her hands together, holding
them before her and squeezing her eyes shut as though pained. Her
eyes flew open again as a brilliant light emanated from her clasped hands,
blinding Shippou in a dazzling glow of lavender.
He squeezed his eyes shut at the memory. "She
wouldn't hurt anybody! Not on purpose!"
"Shippou-chan," Sango began softly, kneeling
down to his level and putting a hand on his shoulder as the kitsune adamantly
refused to stop glaring at Inuyasha, who had turned his back.
"I'm going to try to break through, without
using the full force of the Kaze no Kizu," he said over his shoulder as
he backed away. The form inside was growing solid, pulsations of light
fluxing around her.
Inside the dome, Kagome opened her eyes to
a bleary world of darkness, shifting darkness that blotted out the stars.
Energy floated around her, crackling and filling the world inside. She
lifted her head, and dizziness sent her mind spiraling downwards, hedging
on the darkness. She fought it back, and lifted her head again, watching
through shifting colors as Inuyasha stepped along the border of the wall,
backing away and readying the Tetsusiaga.
"He's going to force his way in...."
She turned her head and watched as the figure
in the light absorbed the energy inside, filling her and increasing exponentially
as she formed.
"No Inuyasha...she'll absorb it...."
Just beyond her, the grey robes of yurei floated.
Kagome pulled herself forward, wincing as she placed her arm down on a
sharp rock and felt it through her yukata and skin. The face of the woman
above her was contorted, black eyes glittering as she folded her arms around
herself defensively. But through the oncoming unconsciousness, Kagome's
vision narrowed, searching. Though her arms were wrapped protectively around
her chest, something glowed there, brightly, like a star. This same woman
had said, in a dream; 'The tama is a heart. It is your heart.'
It was her heart. She was using it as a heart.
Somewhere to contain her drifting soul. And to it, the rest would be summoned.
And the with the tama corrupted, it corrupted her.
Kagome didn't know what she was doing. She
was not trained to exorcise ghosts, but she did know why this one was attempting
to reform her body. Free. She wanted to be free. So Kagome reached out,
and grabbed a fistful of the woman's robe.
And caused her to scream.
A convulsion wracked the yurei, the scream
pitched and ripping through the air. The force rising up and reaching out
made the world around Kagome dance into blackness, and as she fell back,
she watched a light form beyond her, a second figure, an illuminated shadow
in long, flowing robes of lavender, dark hair drifting out behind her as
she reached forward, the two points of light in her hands glowing divine.
Then all Kagome saw was the blackness of a
night without stars.
The scream cracked through the transparent
wall as Inuyasha lifted Tetsusiaga overhead, searching for the scent that
would show him where to strike. This was not a youkai he faced, but a yurei,
a ghost. But she had a scent. Chrysanthemums and rain, whorling outward
and towards him, an aura of lavender light, with the brilliant brightness
of a star of destruction. And as he found it, the wall rose by itself,
revealing a battle of wills inside.
Ukifune floated behind the copy of herself,
her transparent arms reaching around the one before her, reaching through.
Her hands glowed, power spilling out and washing over the ground, lighting
it as she reached for the Shikon no Tama, the heart of the second figure.
She clung to it, refusing to let go as black ribbons slashed backward,
trying to force her off.
Her eyes glowed, and they shifted from the
figure she held to the one on the ground, then to the one rushing forward,
towards her.
Inuyasha!
It was not a spoken order, but one told through
thought and expression, and one he understood.
She released her hold, floating backward as
he moved forward, finding the swirling clouds of scent that marked the
place of the cutting wind.
"Kaze no Kizu!"
And the world sunk into silence.
*****************************************
Oy, oy, that's just about the end...epilogue
to go, to clear things up...because that's not really and ending.
Kokoro- heart, spirit, soul.
To start at the beginning, the day before
I started in on this chapter, I was browsing through a book of Japanese
myths. (Arigatou, Melete-chan! :D) In it, I found a small story about butterflies,
and how they represented the souls of the living. (Living, in contrast
to fireflies representing the souls of the dead.) When one appeared around
you, it meant someone you knew was coming. So I decided to use it in this
chapter's opening scene. Like it?
And yes, Kikyou. I hope you're not mad at
me about that dream...I was deliberately vague with descriptions of 'Kagome'
and Inuyasha in that scene, though 'Kagome' is wearing the kimono that
Yanagi gave her. "A kimono, far less notable than what she was used
to," could refer to either Kagome's modern day school uniform, or to
Kikyou's miko clothes.
It seems fairly apparent that Kagome would
be mad/afraid if Inuyasha left her for Kikyou. So I compounded the problem
by giving Kagome a dream in which her role in the past never occured: ie,
the entire Inuyasha storyline. She always seems to be running away from
being an incarnation of Kikyou...two sides of a personality, I suppose.
Besides, we don't really know for certain what Kikyou was like while she
was alive...it's open to too much interpertation. (At this point, anyway...it's
possible more will be explained in later chapters of the manga, but as
of right now....) The ressurected Kikyou-golem is possibly not the same
as the real, living Kikyou from before the story began.
So. Onto the epilogue.