I Was Invincible: Chapter 5
Sengoku Jidai, location unknown...
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Kagome woke to the blinding spill of early sunlight across her face. She winced at the sudden intrusion while the transition from darkness to light took place. The miko was filled with apprehension when she was finally aware that she wasn't in any place she had been before. Her waist began to bend, and despite the stiffness to her joints, she attempted to snap upright.
"Kagome-chan, you mustn't." A hand when to her shoulder, lightly pushing her back down. She knew that voice. Soft, feminine... Sango?
"S-Sango?" Her voice caught up with her mind a second or two later.
"Yes."
"What... what happened? Where am I?" Through half-cracked lids, Kagome attempted to glean any information about her location through her faulty vision, but all she could see was the overpowering outline of Sango's figure bathed in light. She seemed a holy apparition, unreal yet there all the same. Contrite too, because although her expression was hard to make out, Kagome was aware that she looked downtrodden and abused. Her hair was in disarray, and her ponytail hung dejectedly to a right angle. The kimono she wore was torn in spots, and hung from her frame with limply - almost as if the demon exterminator had been wearing the cloth for months and hadn't once removed it.
There was the unmistakable sound of water nearby. Kagome wondered why she was suddenly so aware of it.
"Kagome-chan..." Sango started, but then dipped her head to her chest and held it.
"Sango...? Where's everyone else? Miroku, Shippo, Kaede, Kirara..." She swallowed, and forced the last name from between her lips. "...Inuyasha...?"
"Miroku is among the other villagers, helping with the damages. I stayed with you."
'The others... tell me about the others...' she begged inwardly. It was like the dive off a chasm. She could hold her breath, tense for the jump, but she didn't want to look down. If she did, it would be a black, gaping maw. Nothing past it, nothing more than its indescribable darkness.
Void.
Sango slowly raised strange eyes up to Kagome's. The young schoolgirl had by now sat up inch by inch as she leaned toward Sango expectantly, and the other girl hadn't stopped her this time.
The sister of Kohaku was young, not much older than Kagome. Something was different this time, for a certain transformation had occurred on Sango's face in the time it had taken Kagome's eyes to adjust to the light since waking. She looked so old. There were no real permanent lines on Sango's skin, but now there were shadows in her eyes that nothing would erase, not even the brilliance of the sunrise over the water to their left. Those brackish penumbras in Sango's eyes brimmed with tears, but no liquid escaped their murky depths to steal down her cheeks. She kept herself in check.
"Kaede is dead, Kagome."
The fact hit her like a cold splash of water to the face. Kagome averted her eyes to her left, and took a detached notice that they were adjacent to a pond, not a river. "Kaede..." It was a croak. Unexpectedly, she wildly twisted at the waist and took a fistful of Sango's dirty garment. "Inuyasha! Tell me of Inuyasha...!" Her voice was high and nearly keening, full of desperation.
"I don't... we don't know where he and Shippo are. Even Kirara is gone. The raid caught us all by surprise, and we were separated... the village burned..."
Kagome's mind spun. 'Raid?'
She thought back to the woman in the field. It was impossible not to do so, but there she was. The bloodied kimono, the trail of crimson fluid through the grass, the men on horseback... and the shrill shrieks. She had left her there, to die to the tune of those filthy men's grunts of pleasure as they took her again and again, tearing her open. She had failed...
Kagome jerked her head away from Sango, and the tears that her friend wouldn't release came unbidden to the miko. They coursed down her cheeks in watery ribbons, sparkling like glints of gold in the maiden morning.
Sobbing, her hands rose to her face, and suddenly Sango was hugging her from behind. "Kagome-chan! It's... it'll be alright. We'll find the others, I promise. We haven't lost everything."
'But others had. Did Kaede experience the same fate as that... woman or did she burn alive in her hut, waiting for help that never came?' Kagome couldn't help but to think it. It only made her weeping worse, and the violent onslaught of a mental picture struck her like a blade to her gut. Kaede was aflame, her wizened old face drawn tightly into a mask of sheer agony as her hair burned first; the grayed ends crisping and growing black before the skin melted and shed from her skull like melted rubber.
Kagome moaned, and Sango began to rock her back and forth. "Shh-shh...."
They stayed like that for a long time. Kagome hunched over, knees drawn up to her chest as she clutched them for dear life in a vice-like hug. Sango had her arms around Kagome's neck, and was embracing her from behind. They grieved together, and even Sango let an errant tear fall now and again. Just beyond their bubble of mutual suffering, the lake shimmered and went from amber to cerulean as the steady sun rose higher in the sky, announcing noon. All around them, nocturnal wildlife slept and the animals that stirred during the day spoke to one another in the tongues of beasts as they quarreled for food and territory.
The world moved on, but Sango and Kagome stayed still.
It was Miroku who eventually came upon them. He had left the main grouping of villagers, who were beyond the bluff that eased down near the shoreline. After Kagome fainted on the opposite bank of the river, Sango and Miroku had spared no time in retrieving her, even when the men who had saved the young woman offered to do it. She was their friend, they had insisted. It was their duty.
So now they were here, miles from the charred spot that had been the village. It seemed like an amiable place to stop and rest, and with so many injuries amongst their small group, who could deny anyone some time to mend? Several people took turns carrying Kagome, and the mood had been so somber that Sango had noticed the lecherous priest had not once coped a feel when his turn to carry Kagome had come. When Miroku passed up easy opportunities like that, one had to know it was bad.
"Sango?" As the priest approached, the one he called for raised her head from the bend of Kagome's back.
"Houshi?" Sango smiled, albeit weakly. It was the false smile of someone catering to another's comfort, but Miroku wasn't mislead.
"You need to go rest. You look..."
"...horrible. I know." Releasing her arms from around Kagome's neck, she looked on to the miko with clear anxiety. "Kagome?" she said softly.
Kagome heard her name, and responded to it by weakly turning her head to acknowledge Miroku with some small amount of relief. Before she was acutely aware of it, the monk was by her side and looking expectantly into her tormented face. "Are you alright, Kagome-sama?"
"As well as anyone could be," she answered honestly. The dark-haired girl from the future had stopped crying some time ago, and now she just felt hollow and numb. As Kagome studied Miroku's face from mere inches away, she found something appallingly out of place. "Miroku... you... you... you don't have..."
"An ear?" he finished flatly for her.
It was true. One of the monk's ears was missing, and in its place was nothing but a slight stump and inward depression of the ear canal. It was difficult to discern anything, given the caked clots that had misshapenly formed as a warped substitute for where his ear should have been.
"Miroku...!" Kagome cried. She put such an emphasis on his name not solely for the strange disappearance of his ear, but rather for everything. Kaede's death (of which method that claimed the grandmotherly old woman, she had yet to know), the unimaginable demise of the woman in the meadow, the burning of the village, the drowning at the river, Shippo, Kirara and... oh, Kami... Inuyasha's disappearance. It was all too much, and beyond the sum of every vexation Inuyasha stood out the most.
'They don't know where he is... oh, Inuyasha...' She loved him. She was missing her other half, and it hurt with the glaring burn of an open, physical wound.
Just as Miroku was missing a part of himself, so was she.
Bringing herself back to the present, she raggedly inquired of his missing ear. "How.. how did it happen, Miroku-sama?"
"Those bastards cut it off. I was trying to help some young girls escape out of their hut as it burned."
Kagome startled everyone by laughing. It was a dead laugh, bitter and short. Sango and Miroku exchanged startled looks.
So the ladies' man had been true to his nature, even under duress. It was too soon to release new tears, and the revelation was so ironic that it had caused her to laugh.
"Kagome-chan... are you alright?" Sango eyed her friend as if she had absolutely lost it.
"Sorry, Sango. I didn't... that is, that came out wrong." Kagome wiped viciously at the corners of her eyes, trying desperately to rid herself of the dried bits of tears that lingered there. Looking to Miroku, her blank visage settled into one of grim resolve. "Tell me everything, both of you. I need to know."
Once again, the demon exterminator and perverted monk both found themselves at a loss and looking to one another for answers neither could supply.
"I just.. I need to know what happened before I came through the well. We need to know where to go from here." Kagome was surprised by the deadpan calm to her own voice. It was as if she were over the tears, over the mourning, and already moving on. Deep down, this was not so. She was merely putting up a front, overwhelmed by the severity of the situation and extremely concentrated on righting the wrongs. If she could find a solution, one that would bring back Inuyasha, Shippo and Kirara... then perhaps the rest of the horrors would go away as well. Kaede would be alive again, sitting in her whole hut, surrounded by similar ones in a whole village, with whole people...
...But this was not so. Kagome knew it, but she couldn't admit to it just yet.
She had to try for the impossible. The entire ordeal seemed like a cheap thriller that a late night viewer would find on a local cable station subscribing to the supernatural. This was the low point in the plot; but their luck would quickly change, the tempo would pick up and before you knew it, they would all be back as they were once more. In all her dealings with the youkai, over all the corpses she had seen since she had started looking for the Shikon shards with Inuyasha, none of it had hit on such a personal level as this. What she had seen was not the effect of some magical being's petty whim to inflict harm upon a person, but rather a concentrated effort from a miscreant side of humanity to another, more nobler one. It was humanity at it's worst, and now certain irreplaceable things were missing because of it.
Yes, she could never remember witnessing things as she had now.
As Miroku and Sango tentatively began to explain the proceedings before her arrival into the past, she was touched by a thought that made her shudder.
'Inuyasha said this was a war among youkai. Is this just a taste of what's to come?'
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A/N: Yeah... so... chapter five. More to come soon! :) As always, R&R and let me know what you think! Sucks? Good? Doesn't matter, anything goes!