Disclaimer: Inuyasha and co. owned by Rumiko Takahashi, Shounen Sunday, Shogukukan, Viz, etc.

Author's Notes: Please note that Kikyou is hardly ever mentioned in this fic. (hears a collective cheer) In the manga series, had Kikyou not been resurrected, Kagome wouldn't be so worried about an identity crisis and her relationship with Inuyasha would be a little less –err- twisted I daresay. Also, in this fic there shall be no mention of Naraku or Onigumo because he is completely useless when it comes to this story. (hears another collective cheer, but one plaintive boo) Onigumo died a natural death some years after Kikyou and thus never transformed into a baboon pelt wearing antagonist. No Naraku also means that half of the cast doesn't even exist and some of the relationships are different because of it.

Other than that, I have nothing to say. Hope you enjoy!

Two of a Kind

Chapter One

He was beautiful.

When Kagome stood up and absentmindedly brushed the dead grass off her skirt, cursing the upturned root that had caught her foot and sent her crashing to the ground, she didn't expect to see what she saw. Of course she had been running straight at it in hopes that she could find her way home, but she certainly hadn't expected this...

Earlier that morning, she had over slept (again) and her little brother Souta had come running into her room yelling at her to get up or she'd be late. She threw a pillow at him in hopes it would shut him up, but he only caught it and started to beat her hopelessly tangled legs while shouting all the louder. When she tried to strangle him, the sheets only restricted her movements and she fell off her bed in an ungraceful –and rather painful- heap. Souta ran off, sticking his tongue out at her, and Kagome realized that she hated little brothers more than mornings.

Her obese calico, Buyo, mewed at her from his spot by her door as she stood up with a curse and she threw one of her stuffed animals at him. It just knocked the cat over on his back and there he wiggled pathetically until a fully clothed and nicely groomed Kagome took pity on him. Poor animal was as slow and as pathetic as a turtle, only a little more cuddly and flabby.

But then again, Buyo had this knack for getting into trouble whenever the opportunity presented itself...

Which is how Kagome wound up in the middle of nowhere, her house and the shrine nowhere in sight. She was confused, shocked, and a little dazed, but she was a lot better off than other people. After all, she had grown up with a nutty grandfather who had liked to explain the history of everything. The grounds that the family shrine was on –Higurashi Shrine, Donate Today and Help Save a Landmark!- seemed to be teeming with the lure of old and ancient things, a past that still hung heavy in the air. Kagome was used to it of course, but her friends always apologetically said that something about the place gave them the creeps.

The shrine itself wasn't so interesting as it could have been –Higurashi-jijii often times said himself that there was nothing special about it, only that it had been built nearly four hundred years ago by their ancestors. At that point he would have rambled off into another 'It's history begins with...' speech and anyone who knew him well enough would have either excused themselves and walked away or pretended to be paying rapt attention.

The entrance to the shrine and its front lawns were a little more interesting –there was a hokora, a mini-shrine that most of the time was locked and had hundreds of o-fuda slapped on the wooden doors and walls. (Her grandfather was o-fuda happy and sincerely convinced that he had strong spiritual powers.) He never really said anything about Bone Gobbler's Well that lay inside, telling the tourists from a "safe" distance a quick, simple tale about how in ancient times the nearby villagers would dump the corpses of demons into the Well and wonder in amazement how the bones disappeared within a matter of days. He never lingered on the grounds of which the hokora was stored, though no one could truly blame him. It gave even ignorant tourists the chills.

To Souta and Kagome, he told them to stay out of the hokora and away from the Well within it. Higurashi-jijii may have been eccentric, but he did love his grandchildren and Kagome supposed that he just didn't want one of them to fall down the Well and hurt themselves. Coincidentally, that morning the hokora had been unlocked for some reason or another and Buyo had been hanging around in the dark. The hokora was unkempt and disgusting –there was a raised dais all around the Well, which was littered with the bones of small animals, and there were cobwebs in the corners of the small building. On the dirt surrounding the Well there were even more bones. The Well was covered, but the lid was askew as though someone had recently moved it.

Kagome had been a little scared. Some of her early nightmares consisted of monsters coming out of the Well and grabbing her, but as a seventeen-year-old girl and the older, more rational one of the two, she convinced herself that it was nothing more than that. She tiptoed around, yelling once because Buyo had snuck behind Souta and scared the cowardly twelve-year-old by purring and rubbing up against the back of his legs.

That was when everything got weird.

Later on in her life it wouldn't seem so horrifying but it would be just as choppy; it wasn't a complete memory, but instead the kind that happened in quick flashes that jumbled all together. Terror and confusion was washed all over it, spread thinner in some places and thicker in others. She would remember the pale, scaly arms that wrapped around her torso, the look of alarm and terror on her brother's face, the smell of rot and something else she couldn't quite place. When whatever it was pulled her down into the Well it wasn't pitch black like it should have been –little, twinkling lights that were like stars but certainly not danced in the endless blue of the sky at day and night, dawn and dusk.

The monster that held her was something that not even the world's most morbid horror writer could come up with. It had beady black eyes in a pale face that looked like it had never seen the sun and black hair curled like dead snakes out of the top of her head. It was most certainly a she –it had a human torso, but below the waist stretched miles upon miles of green and mahogany plates. Some of its hundreds of legs in between the junctures of plates twitched in pleasure while others wriggled in anticipation, but for what Kagome hadn't known.

She screamed then, terror welling up in the pit of her stomach, and a huge light came from the hand that she tried swinging at the thing. It blasted one of that thing's arms off –one of six- and then Kagome blacked out. It was sweet, while it lasted, and when she woke up she thought it had all been a nightmare and that Souta would come to wake her up soon so that she wouldn't be late for school.

When the arm beside her twitched she thought differently.

Of course shock settled in, and she climbed out of the Bone Gobbler's Well only to find that she wasn't in Tokyo anymore. "Oh boy Toto," was one of the things she remembered whispering. The area around her was pretty, beautiful in a way that wasn't even possible. It looked like human hands hadn't touched the place at all. Birds chirped and crickets hummed while the sun beat down on her throbbing head; judging from where it was in the sky, she realized she had been out for a few hours.

That's when she spotted the Goshinboku.

When she was little, she loved to sit underneath the great tree and do absolutely nothing, which was as great of a surprise to her mother as it was a blessing. The Goshinboku had the exact opposite effect of the Well –the tree had a calming effect that brought a smile to her face and it was the place where she had cried for her father when he had passed away. She would never climb past the first few limbs (she wasn't too keen on heights) and it always gave her a perfect view of her house. Though it would have seemed like a stupid idea to another, she went ahead on with it because the Goshinboku had never let her down before.

Higurashi-jijii didn't have many legends about the Goshinboku, which was a shame because if there had been any, Kagome would have listened to them over and over again until even her grandfather got sick of telling them. To most people it was just an old, gnarled tree that happened to be growing on scared grounds, but to Kagome the Goshinboku was something else, something more precious in a way that she couldn't explain.

She nearly ran over to the Goshinboku, but she tripped and fell over onto her face. When Kagome stood up and absentmindedly brushed the dead grass off her skirt, cursing the upturned root that had caught her foot and sent her crashing to the ground, she didn't expect to see what she saw. Of course she had been running straight at it in hopes that she could find her way home, but she certainly hadn't expected this...

Oh gods, he was so beautiful...

In her time, she wouldn't describe any boy as beautiful –cute definitely, handsome maybe, but probably not beautiful. In this case she couldn't help it. Something about him had her heart turning in a thousand tight circles, her knees buckling and her hand grabbing onto the nearest tree trunk as she pretty much gave up any hope of standing. After some time she stood and took a few tentative steps forward. Kagome was surprised to see that he wasn't leaning up against the tree and resting for a moment –that's what she had thought at first glance- but that there was a fletched arrow protruding out of his chest. Or, more exactly, out of his heart.

His hair was hopelessly tangled and she noticed it right away without even having to lean forward to see. There were two jagged purple gashes on either side of his tanned cheeks; she was positive they were tattoos. They accentuated the fullness of his eyes and the high rise of his cheekbones. His chin and jaw were strong and finely chiseled, but altogether he had a boyish look that would have made any girl take a second look.

Upon closer inspection, the arrow looked old, as if it hadn't been touched in years, and the boy's red clothing was stained with time. The ears on either side of his head were pointed like he was an elf from a fairytale; she wouldn't have seen them if his head hadn't of been resting back on the wood, the thick silver hair pushed away from his face by the wind. Her hands left her sides and she stepped up to him, gently brushing her fingers down each of his violent tattoos simultaneously. She could have sworn that for a second his eyes moved behind his eyelids and that his nostrils flared as though he were testing the air, but that was impossible. After all, the arrow was sure as hell stuck in there pretty tight, and nothing could live with an arrow staked through its heart. In morbid fascination, she reached out to touch the old, worn wood of the-

"What are you doing?!"

Suddenly arrows, about a dozen of them, flew from the bushes and landed around his body. Screaming in surprise, she flung herself forward onto the boy's chest –there was no heartbeat, but he was warm, which later on would strike her as strange- and looked over her shoulder to see an old woman with wizened gray-white hair aiming yet another arrow at her. Several men copied her stance and it made Kagome swallow. If she hadn't of been in trouble before, she was definitely in trouble now.

The next few hours all passed in a blur, mostly because she kept on phasing in and out of consciousness. The men, who were dressed in knee-length hakama and haori jackets that looked like they had seen better days, eventually came to bind her hands and feet on the old woman's command. They then threw her into a small wagon and took a bumpy ride away from the sleeping boy and the Goshinboku. They asked her questions, like who she was, where she had come from, and why she was at the boy's grave. She learned that the boy who had been pinned to the Goshinboku was called Inuyasha and that the old woman was called Kaede. She didn't learn much of anything else before passing out completely.

When she was roughly shaken awake, she realized that they had arrived in a small village that looked to Kagome like it had just popped out of some feudal history book. It struck her then that somehow she had ended up in the past –if she hadn't of been so tired, she would have had a bit more of a reaction, but she just shrugged it off. Two of the men pulled her off the cart and dropped her onto the dirt road. She noticed that the whole village had stopped, and many people were whispering back and forth. The schoolgirl couldn't catch a word of what they were saying.

Kaede stepped off the wagon, waddled over to her, put her gnarled hands on Kagome's face, turned it, examining her profile, and murmuring that she looked like a person named Kikyou. It struck Kagome as odd, but Kaede declared to the worried villagers that she wasn't a demon despite her strange garb; they had formed a circle around t her and murmured about her strange garb. Some of them thought she was a spy of some sort. Finally they ended up sticking her in what Kagome assumed was Kaede's hut for "safe-keeping".

She fell asleep almost instantly.

When she woke up she found that her limbs were no longer bound together with that harsh rope, and for that she was grateful. Kaede was touching her shoulder and holding out a bowl filled with delicious smelling soup, almost like it was a peace offering of some sort. She made small talk and introduced herself formally, excusing her behavior from before. It was apparently forbidden to go anywhere near Inuyasha without express permission –there was a watch every two days that went by to see that all was well- and the villagers panicked when they saw her there. Kagome's head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, but she picked up the bowl and was about to eat when Kaede suddenly changed subjects.

"Fifty years ago, something terrible happened." The old woman, her face engraved with the lines of time, closed her eyes as though she were trying to pull memories up from the graveyard of her mind, memories that she had long ago buried. "I'm not sure how to explain it to you, but I suppose I should start with my sister, Kikyou."

"Kikyou?" Kagome repeated the name, rolling it around in her head that was just starting to clear. Her thin, black eyebrows pushed together in thought and concentration before she shyly asked, "Isn't she the one that you said I looked like?"

"Yes." Kaede opened her eyes; they were blood-shot, as though she hadn't slept in days. "Kikyou was the protector of this village, a miko with extraordinary spiritual power. Because of this, she was given the Shikon no Tama –a very powerful and dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. She was expected to purify it so that no evil could ever use it again."

Kagome bent her head uncertainty down to the bowl in her hands and saw chunks of radishes and carrots floating around in the broth. It smelled wonderful, and it was only then that Kagome realized that she hadn't eaten since early that morning. She took a sip. Her thoughts swam around in her head –hadn't her grandfather been talking about the Shikon no Tama yesterday when he had given her the kappa hand for her birthday? It hurt to think, so she decided to listen instead of think as Kaede continued instead.

"One day, perhaps a year or two after the Jewel had come into Kikyou's possession, a hanyou, a half-demon who went by the name Inuyasha arrived in the forest, trying to break the outer boundaries Kikyou had set up as precautions. Kikyou had taken care of countless demons before him, but she simply refused to kill this one. He didn't seem so special to the rest of us, but Kikyou always seemed to see what wasn't there." Kaede's voice clouded over as she recalled her very first memories of the hanyou, which were hazy and incomplete flashes of red and silver-white. The feeling of awe always followed on swift wings, and as an old woman, nostalgia was there as well.

Oh, she knew why Kikyou had spared Inuyasha. Even she, who had taken it upon herself to watch over his grave and make sure that no one ever removed the arrow –though that itself was impossible, seeing as only Kikyou or one of her blood could do it- knew that there was something about him that tugged at the heartstrings and made the soul twist into knots. From what Kaede had seen, Kagome knew that feeling all too well...

"He kept on coming back. Sometimes he would hang around the outskirts of the village, or watch us from the rooftops. He never attacked, which surprised many of us. It was like that for almost a year and everyone had grown used to him, like he was just a part of the scenery." In fact, on of Kaede's most vivid memories was one of him sitting atop her family's house with his long arms tucked into his sleeves and his head bowed in sleep. "I guess it was all part of his plan, because one summer day our hunters brought back my sister. There was a deep wound in her shoulder, which quickly became infected due to lack of instant treatment, and she died several days later in a terrible fever. Luckily she still had the Shikon no Tama."

This should have struck someone as odd, that Kikyou had the Shikon no Tama with her instead of keeping it safe in the shrine, but it wasn't to Kaede. She may have been blind in one eye, but she wasn't stupid. Kikyou and Inuyasha, somewhere along the line, had fallen in love. How the Shikon no Tama would be used, however, was not such a mystery.

Kagome swallowed the last of her broth and laid the bowl down, her eyes suddenly clouded by little tears. Her fingers shook slightly. It wasn't as though the tale so incredibly sad –it was tragic yes, heart jerking, yes, and it seemed like it could only come out of a storybook. But Kaede wouldn't lie and she had seen Inuyasha's body earlier. It was the fact that the story was real, that it had actually happened that rattled her to the core, and finding her voice was hard. "I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Don't be." Kaede said lightly, as though she was tired of receiving pity from others. "Besides, it all turned out alright in the end. Kikyou had managed to pin Inuyasha to the Goshinboku somehow and exact her revenge. We burned the Jewel with her body on her own strange request when she died. Only the gods know where it is now, lost somewhere in the other world."

The schoolgirl nodded and fisted her hands in her lap. The fabric felt strange, weird, as though her hands were covered with plastic gloves. Her wrists were slightly chaffed because of the rough rope that the villagers had bound her with. "But Kaede-san, why tell me all this? I mean, it is a sad story, but it happened fifty years ago and Inuyasha isn't going anywhere. Why tell me?"

Kaede sighed heavily, a long time bad habit of hers that she couldn't seem to get rid of. She had stopped biting her nails years ago, but it seemed that some bad habits always remained. "Kagome, I'm telling you because you simply look like Kikyou. It could be a mere coincidence, but it is also a possibility that you are my older sister's reincarnation. If this is true, then we will have to take extra measures to keep you safe, away from certain demons that could possibly recognize you for what you are, and above all else, far from Inuyasha's resting ..."

She didn't get to finish this sentence however, because outside of her one-room hut there came a loud, piercing scream that acted like a stone dropped into water –the first scream triggered another, which triggered another, a catalyst to panic, and soon the night air was filled with fearful shouts instead of the humming of crickets. Kagome started, and jumped to her feet too quickly –she had been sitting on her legs for too long and she wobbled dangerously. A scream was in the back of her throat as well, but curiosity overcame her spike of fear and she walked awkwardly towards the door.

Kaede was quicker than the younger girl, and managed to grab her bow and quiver full of arrows before darting to the door on silent, swift feet. She was used to this drill –little demons sometimes wandered into the village. As miko of the small cluster of homes it was her duty to try her best to bring those youkai down, though in truth she was no better than the farmers who shot arrows in their spare time –Kaede had weak wrists and she was blind in one eye due to a slip-up in one of her earliest exorcisms.

Pushing aside the mat of reeds, Kaede looked out into the dark. The shouting had increased, but there was no visible movement except for the dancing shadows the firelight behind the pair created. Kagome's breath hitched and the old priestess could almost feel her shaking from repeated shots of adrenaline.

"Damnit!" Kagome suddenly swore as her head snapped to one end of the village. Kaede looked as well, and there was a surging mass of limbs and wood, a loud crunch filling the air. Light from the village fires reflected off thousands upon thousands of green armor plates, the people running around in circles in their panic to get away. Kaede saw Kagome waver for a second, shifting from foot to foot as though to get the blood moving again, and then dart forward purposefully. Almost as an after thought, she stopped and turned to the old woman and said, "It's the youkai that brought me here through the Well!"

"The Bone Gobbler's Well?" Kaede said, and gripped her bow so tightly her knuckles turned white. She was sure her bow would soon snap in half, but the news was shocking –though her powers were meager, probably to the point where they were virtually nonexistent, she still was able to feel the power that emitted from the dry well. That's were the bodies of slain youkai were dumped. They disappeared in a matter of days and nobody knew where they went. Maybe they went to this place where the girl came from...? "Out in Inuyasha's Forest?"

"Yes!" Kagome shouted. The shouting increased in volume and Kaede began to feel the blood pump through her stout, old body. "It wants me, though I don't know why. I can lure it back to the Bone Gobbler's Well and get rid of it! Where is it?"

Kaede simply pointed towards a part of Inuyasha's Forest and wondered in the back of her mind how her sister's unarmed look-a-like would be able to get rid of a full-grown second class demon.

Kagome nodded once, then turned around and began to run. Not bothering to look over her shoulder, the strange girl shouted, "Towards that light? Okay! Thanks Kaede-san!" Then she turned around the corner of one of the huts and disappeared from Kaede's view. It didn't matter though, because the priestess's thoughts suddenly stopped and jumbled all together.

How was Kagome able to see that light anyway?

Kagome wouldn't have understood it either, if she had given it any thought. Then again, the past day had been so confusing and surreal that she readily would have embraced any explanation, no matter how outlandish it seemed. Hell, everything that had happened seemed impossible and bent or broke almost every law of science she had learned in school. A couple times she even wondered if she was ever going to wake up.

Stumbling down packed dirt road –school loafers were not made for running- she knew that what she was doing was stupid and dangerous. It definitely was the monster from before and the only reason she got rid of it was by... by... by what exactly? All she really remembered was falling and panicking, then a huge surge of power. The next thing she knew, she was at the bottom of the Well with a twitching, white arm beside her to confirm what had just happened hadn't been a dream.

What if she couldn't blast another one of its arms off? What if she didn't make it to the Well before it caught her? What if it really wasn't her it wanted and kept on destroying the village? There were so many questions rolling around in her head that she wanted nothing more than to sit down and puke, but she ran on. When she passed the huge centipede demon she yelled hoarsely at it, which caused it to turn and stare at her with greedy, little black eyes. So it had been looking for her, just like she thought.

Even so, that would definitely haunt her dreams for a while...

It was little easier to run on the grass when she hit it, but the ground wasn't level and occasionally a branch would reach out to slap her in the face or grab onto her clothing. Behind her she could hear the crashing as the centipede youkai wound its way behind her –in all probability, it was faster, but its long, heavy body couldn't fit that easily between the trees and dense foliage. There were sick crunching sounds and shrill hisses of pain from time to time, but sometimes there was only the rustle of leaves.

Fear made Kagome's throat tight and she ran faster than she ever had before in her life. If she hadn't of been so terrified, she probably would have laughed and wished that her gym teacher could see her. Her heart raced in her chest and her blood pounded in her ears. She thought of stupid things as she ran, like how the stress of the situation was working on her body and how incredibly tired she would be once she stopped. Things that she learned in school, and she bitterly wondered why it always had to be about school.

The light was getting brighter, stronger, pulsing almost. The Well couldn't have been too far. As Kagome was about to burst into the clearing, her foot caught on an upturned root and she fell forward, flat onto her face. The breath was forced from her lungs in a rush. Just her luck... She would have cursed if not for the long, huge body that suddenly whizzed overhead, the place where she had been just a moment before. There was another one of those blood-curdling shrieks and the centipede youkai disappeared into the forest. Kagome got to her feet and looked around, her head snapping side to side so quickly she might have gotten whiplash while trying to look for the Bone Gobbler's Well. The light was brightest here, so that must mean that the Well was a few meters aw-

"OI BITCH!"

Kagome looked to her right and saw the Goshinboku. It wasn't the Well that was creating the light after all, but the huge, sacred tree. Inuyasha was still hanging there, but he wasn't sleeping anymore. No. Far from it in fact. He was staring right at her, and even from the five-meter distance Kagome could see that he was angry -very angry. The aura around him pulsed red, the same shade as the blood running down the side of her face from a cut on her forehead.

Suddenly she didn't know what she was more afraid of: the centipede youkai who wanted to kill her or the irate inu hanyou who was glaring at her with his horrible crimson eyes...