This is set right at the beginning of the series, right after Kagome unsealed Inuyasha from the tree. Told from Inuyasha's perspective; just some of my musings on what he might have thought of the whole situation. If it's disjointed, I apologize.
Inuyasha and all related characters are the property of Rumiko Takahashi.
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The last week—a year, fifty years, whatever—had been… strange, to say the least.
He remembered her face as she fired the arrow that had pinned him to Goshinboku. Cold, eyes narrowed—an expression he hadn't seen on her face, not ever, not even while she was fighting youkai and defending the Shikon no Tama. There was something empty and dead in that gaze, something broken. And the horrible sick feeling in his stomach kept insisting that it was somehow his fault, even as his mind told him that she had started it, after all.
It didn't matter. The arrow through his chest ensured that all thoughts stopped quickly enough.
He'd fully expected never to wake again. When he found his senses again, only to scent her returning once again, everything simply resumed, as if it had never ended. All the feelings of betrayal quickly turned to anger, a blinding white-hot rage, and had she returned at that moment, he might very well have carried through with his threat and killed her.
Yes. He liked to tell himself that.
But it wasn't her who came. It was someone else—someone so similar that he'd thought it was her at first. Some part of him still did; the way the light fell across this new girl's eyelashes, the way she tilted her head when she spoke, the ways she moved… And yet, at the same time, some things were oddly amplified. The emotions that flashed in her eyes, the hope… it was all that much stronger. There was a life to this new girl that he'd never seen before.
She was a part of the new world he'd woken into—she would learn about it as he did, and there was something oddly comforting in that. There was little comfort to be found elsewhere.
It was odd, to be sure. Everything was still so clear, so fresh—if he wasn't careful, didn't remind himself, he knew he would slip back into thinking that the time that had passed really was no more than a day or so, that the new patterns life had settled into without him were all a dream.
Except that he knew it wasn't. How could he, even in his wildest flights of fancy (which he'd never really taken to anyway), possibly conceive of such things? A girl like that, with her funny clothes, funny turns of phrase… she couldn't be a product of his imagination. But the ways in which everything familiar had been twisted were too surreal to take in all at once. The village, the same and yet different. The patterns of the youkai in and around the forest were different; things had changed.
But most of all, it was the old woman.
Even her scent had changed subtly, undermined by the decay that had taken hold of her still-living body. But there was no mistake of identity. She was the sole link to his old life, this tiny child who seemed to have grown into an old woman overnight. Her face was lined, her eyepatch had worn itself a groove into the sagging flesh of her face, and her hair was almost as silver as his own. She had taken over her elder sister's place, after…
…after her death. He'd tried his hardest not to hesitate what had happened to her, to his Kikyou, and he'd tried equally hard to keep from flinching upon hearing of her death. At the same time, some part of him was oddly relieved—did he really want to see her, see his maiden so defiled by the years as her sister had been?
He didn't think he did, and felt cheapened by this realization.