Typical things apply.

Edited 5/14/2020

Beautiful Moon

Puzzle Pieces

While they waited for the right subway train to roll up, Mizuki kneeled with the crumbled career sheet in her lap and a pen between her teeth, at least until Riho offered her a sheet of note paper to use instead. When her friend asked what she was doing, she simply said she wanted to write down her experiences for the day so that she wouldn't forget about them later, because they would probably be useful for their research project. The curious girl left it at that, which left Mizuki to put together the puzzle of her own erratic thoughts.

First, the pendant. Yanagawa's artifact. It existed five hundred years ago and was inherited by members of the clan with blue eyes. Blue eyes were a total mutation in a Japanese person's DNA, but this clan seemed to have it frequently enough that they could pass down this thing enough times to make it important. Mizuki normally would have written something off as a coincidence right there, except that the bindings around it went up in impossible flames while she was holding it, and she had heard that emotional white noise, or whatever it was.

That noise was mostly gone now, with the distance that was now between her and the stone, but an echo of it still nagged at her that she had been wrong to leave it there, reverberating against the phantoms of her parents' career expectations. It wasn't getting any easier to ignore.

Second would be the two teens; Kagome the shrine maiden, and Inuyasha the not-yakuza. The story about the tree gave her a wild idea about the two. The golden eyes, the inhuman ears that moved, the old clothing…it was all far too coincidental. With common sense logic tossed out the window for what it was worth, and the idea that the well could connect present time to past, it was possible to assume that Inuyasha was the half-demon in the story. She didn't know what half-demons looked like, but he seemed to fit the bill if she had to think up an image of one.

She was less certain about the girl, but still had dots she could arguably connect with enough stretching. What Kagome used to subdue Inuyasha could have been a priestess-like power. Her familiarity with the boy and the fact that she had access to the well as part of the shrine family made it possible that she might be the priestess referred to in the story. That all hinged on the well working the way she was thinking it did, anyway, but so did a lot of other things.

The well itself was the third puzzle piece. Everything led back to it and the era it was apparently connected to. It had a habit of spitting things up from the past, seemed to be able to let people from the past into the present and vice versa, and was the reason a five-hundred-year-old pendant had been in a place where a girl on a class trip could see it.

Mizuki was certain that none of this was coincidence. It was all too convenient to be.

"As doggedly as I'm pursuing this, reporter might be an optional career path."

She shook her head and abandoned that long-dead ghost of a career aspiration, since her dad disliked reporters; it wasn't really the time to be thinking about an appropriate profession, anyway. Instead, she flipped the paper over to summarize.

Inuyasha was the half-demon of legend.

Kagome was the priestess of legend.

The well was what made it possible for Kagome to be the legend, and for Inuyasha of legend to be in this time.

She had something to do with that pendant and the Yanagawa family.

She circled the last one several times, as if to punctuate in her mind that she was definitely going to find out what that was all about. One way or another, whatever it took, she was going to get answers. Assuming said answers actually existed, anyway, given that logic didn't seem to be ruling anything about this.

The train finally arrived, so Mizuki folded the paper up and tucked it into her pocket. Her thoughts weren't so convenient to hide away, and the distant echo even less so, but she tried anyway.

When they arrived back at the hotel, everyone was dismissed for dinner and evening free time. They were supposed to return by nine, but Mizuki had every intention of getting back on that train and back to the shrine, having abandoned the idea of waiting until tomorrow somewhere along the way. The further they got from the pendant, the more anxious she felt about its absence, and she was certain she wouldn't be able to sleep without doing something about it. She'd at least wait until after hanging out with her friends, when it would be easier to slip away. That it would be rather late to drop in on the family wouldn't cross her mind until much later.

"Which burger shop do you think we should get dinner from?" Riho asked as soon as they entered their room.

Mizuki just shrugged, slipping out of her dirty uniform and into a loose pair of jeans and a nondescript navy shirt.

"Not really hungry," she admitted as she tied her hair back into a low ponytail with her forgotten elastic band. Much better. She needed to start carrying more than one hair tie on her.

"You sure nothing happened when you wandered off?"

Mizuki was digging the paper out of her skirt pocket as she asked, and paused long enough to cover her surprise at her friend's intuition with a shake of her head and a grounding breath.

"I just helped catch that necklace," she eventually shrugged, transferring the paper to the pocket of her jeans.

Riho rolled her eyes because she knew her best friend much better than that.

"You've been weird since we left the shrine, and you've been looking forward to burgers since breakfast," she reminded her, making Mizuki freeze. She'd forgotten that conversation. "Something went on at that shrine. I know it's bugging you, Mizuki, but you've gotta let it go. Your horoscopes, remember?"

She had no idea how hard she was trying to simply let it go, attempting to mentally tamp down the increasingly frantic echo as they spoke. Mizuki let out a frustrated breath and returned to folding her skirt.

"A few things are running through my head," she acknowledged honestly, setting the garment aside with the rest of her uniform and checking her tone so that she didn't come across as critical of her friend's concern. "I just don't feel like talking about it right now. It's not important anyway. Just stuff about what I want to do, you know?"

Of course, it was unreasonably important stuff she wanted to do as soon as possible, not stuff she wanted to do concerning her future employment, but Riho didn't need to know that.

Her best friend frowned for a few moments before nodding, letting the matter drop for now. Later, she would probably try to pry her concerns out of her, but at least she had some time to try to figure out how she would explain things that she didn't have proper words to convey, or how to lie about it instead.

"You gonna stay in your uniform, or find something more interesting to wear around Tokyo?" Mizuki asked with a deceptive smile.

Riho laughed in blissful ignorance, and asked her to wait a moment while she figured out what to wear. Mizuki took the time to check the contents of her backpack. It was already packed with the things she had been carrying around before the shrine visit – camera, rolled up rain jacket, a flashlight, abused career sheet, and the latest Weekly Jump magazine she'd picked up from their early morning stop at the corner mart – but her water bottle and the bag of rice crackers she had been snacking on that morning would be a good addition for the train ride back to the shrine, along with an actual notebook. She figured this would cover her for the evening well enough, giving her some food and entertainment should the ride take too long.

Explaining her absence later would be as easy as saying that she had simply gotten herself turned around, distracted by one thing or another. If it was later, she would have gone to get a midnight snack or something, or a walk to clear her head because she couldn't sleep, stressed about the extra classes she would be taking when she got back. Excuses and stories shifted into place, a bad habit that had become too convenient to curb and too useful where her parents were concerned. It wouldn't be the first time she had gotten lost (purposefully or otherwise). Her wandering tendency did not come with a pristine sense of direction.

They met Kimura down in the lobby and turned in their keys before heading out. Kimura and Riho insisted on getting food first; if they were going to wander around Tokyo entertaining her, they needed sustenance, so Mizuki gave in with the caveat that they'd likely have to stop for her to eat later. There was a MOS Burger down the street, and the two figured that would be enough for them.

Her two friends finally ordered after Mizuki insisted she really was full, the weight of their Tokyo-style ramen lunch still fairly heavy in her stomach, so she picked a table and sat reading over her earlier musings until they joined her.

"What's that?" Kimura asked as they set their trays on the table, indicating the piece of paper.

"Just notes on today," Mizuki quickly supplied, tucking it back into her pocket. "We're supposed to keep track of differences between modern and ancient stuff, right? I figured I'd give myself a head start."

"What do you have down already?" Riho asked, pulling out her own notebook and pencil as if she hadn't already gotten a head start on their research assignment, her unwrapped burger quickly forgotten on its tray.

Mizuki smiled nervously because there was none of that on her piece of paper, and threw out whatever came to mind.

"Oh, you know. The building styles, the clothes they wear, weird names, the idea that demons exist, legends surrounding them. That kind of stuff."

Kimura gave her a strange look, and Mizuki realized she must have slipped.

"What names?" he asked with interest.

Yep. She blew it.

"Ah, well…" she started, realizing she wasn't getting out of this one with Kimura sticking his nose in it, and scrambled for something close to the truth. "When I wandered off, I ran into that shrine girl when I helped catch the box that necklace was in. She mentioned someone named Inuyasha, and I thought it might have been a nickname, since, you know, weird name, but then I started thinking, well, if it really was someone's name, it might be something really old?"

They seemed to think on that quietly while Riho took down some notes.

"It couldn't be a person's name," she concluded as she erased what she had written. "It would have to be written with the kanji for dog, and the other half of it has to be for the Buddhist guardian deities. I don't see any other way, and that's definitely not something anyone from this era would use as a name, not if they were serious about themselves. Maybe she was talking about a shrine guardian or something."

Riho's habit of wanting to understand excelled in areas where the various meanings of things were concerned, which was something Mizuki appreciated greatly in her friend. She could always be trusted to bring out the ideas that she couldn't think of right off hand, like the kanji that could make up the name Inuyasha. Five hundred years ago, a demon might be named Inuyasha if he were a dog demon, which accounted for the ears she saw on his head, and his weird habit of sniffing things.

"Maybe they really like dogs," Kimura supplied jokingly. They laughed, though Mizuki found herself quieting quickly. The thought of demons being real should have been laughable, but she was finding that all of these little things kept adding up, and the answer she was coming to was becoming increasingly undeniable.

That pendant was still in her head, a persistent, nagging noise more compelling than annoying, more desperate than insistent. The stories and their potential to be real didn't matter so much as the credence they gave to what she was experiencing, even if what she was feeling didn't make any sense.

It wasn't even so much the necklace itself that she was so hung up on, but the emotion she had experienced while staring at it that she was having trouble putting into words. Like…looking at herself in a mirror, except it wasn't like any part of herself that she was aware of until then, and without it, she felt empty. The overwhelming happiness she had felt when she held it had vanished and taken part of her with it when she let it go.

It was like, in that brief moment, she had seen the islands Riho insisted existed in the vast sea she was always adrift in.

All at once, it came crashing down on her how very wrong she had been, giving that stone back, because she could no longer even contemplate waiting to sneak off later. She had to get back there now. The overwhelming need to do so was terrifying, and the part of her that was still desperately holding onto everything normal in her life wished she could go back to this morning, back to before she had wandered off, so that she could undo the curse she'd placed on herself the moment she touched that package, so she could heed Riho's horoscopic advice instead of treating it like she always had, and-

"Mizuki?"

She didn't realize her friends had been calling her until Riho had placed a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped, her awareness returning to the world that didn't know her inner turmoil.

"Sorry," she said apologetically as Riho recoiled from her reaction.

"Is everything okay?" Kimura asked, his own food forgotten as he stared at her.

She frowned. No, not at all. Her entire life felt like it was suddenly being ruled by a piece of old jewelry, and she was at her limit where it came to ignoring it. She felt really bad that she was going to do this to her friends, worse that she wasn't going to be honest with them, and yet something was easing her discomfort in that by insisting that this was much, much, more important.

"Sorry," she apologized again. "I'm not feeling well. I think I'm just going to head back to the hotel and lay down for a bit."

"No wonder you weren't hungry," Riho noted with concern. "You should have just said you weren't feeling good. We can go back together."

"No, no, you two should enjoy yourselves," she insisted, pulling her tray away slightly to prevent her from trying to pack up her food. "It's not like it's far. I'll be fine."

"But, Mizuki," her best friend tried, but she raised an eyebrow at her and tried to convey what she had when she'd last left them with each other. When Riho began to blush, she knew she had accomplished her goal, because when she got flustered, she tended to lose focus on the meanings of things.

"Don't worry," Mizuki pushed with a disarming smile.

"Guess we'll see you later, then," Kimura concluded, much to her relief. "Feel better, okay? We'll bring you back something to eat later."

"The most American burger you can find, if you insist," she joked. Her friends laughed. Mizuki kept a smile on her face as they parted ways, the apologies she had for them left unsaid, buried under the mountain of longing for a feeling she couldn't explain but wanted desperately to understand.

If she had chosen a table with a better view of the outside, her friends would have known that she didn't leave in the direction of the hotel at all.

-/-/-/-

She felt like a terrible, no-good thief.

Mizuki exhaled quietly, looking over her shoulder at the home that was so close to everything in this shrine that it was almost unreasonable. Everything had been packed away, but she had managed to find the storehouse in the dark, drawn to it by the white noise consuming her senses. That feeling was partly why she wasn't knocking on their door.

Her bad sense of direction was the other part, because without it, she would have been here earlier and might have actually asked about the thing, instead of sneaking around like the type of burglar she had always been warned against becoming.

…And, no, that would not even be considered. Her occupation would be a respectable one.

It was already after nine; it'd taken her three full hours to finally find her way back to it despite the pull of the stupid stone, and by then, everyone was inside, had eaten dinner, and the house was slowly going dark. She could kill whatever had possessed her to walk in anyway, but damn it, she needed to get that screaming out of her head.

What she was doing was completely wrong. She was acutely aware of that. The problem was that the pendant was for some reason so important to some overwhelming part of her that she just didn't care about her family or laws any more than she could currently bring herself to care about her friends' feelings. She needed it, in her hands, now.

She flipped on her flashlight as soon as she had managed to get into the storehouse (carelessly left unlocked, though the somewhat heavy double doors were perhaps a good enough deterrent to most). It was spacious, cramped by more items than she could count, but apparently well organized. The stone, however small it was, was making a loud enough racket to her ears that she discovered the corner it was hidden in rather quickly. Relief flooded over her. Like before, she couldn't tell if the emotion was hers or just mixed in with the white noise.

The pendant had been sealed up again, but now the sutras weren't snapping off at her touch. It worried her for a moment that maybe the old man had something more powerful around it now, but she found that they simply peeled right off of each other.

Defective, apparently.

When she finally held the stone in her hands again, relief flooded through her enough to make her cry. Leaving was a high priority, but for a few minutes, she simply sat clutching the artifact to her chest, letting the emotion course through her until it settled into a comfortable, quiet hum in the back of her mind. She took a deep, shuttering breath, dried her tears, and stood.

…Then she crouched back down again, the weight of what she was doing suddenly a lot clearer than it had been all day.

She was never going to be able to explain this to herself, let alone to anyone else, and every excuse she'd categorized earlier scattered like so many mice. This entire day was going to her grave with her. Most of her wished it had never happened at all, and yet, as she stared at the apparently five-hundred-year-old piece of jewelry, she was overcome with the sense that she wouldn't be able to regret having it with her, regardless of the consequences.

She never thought she'd find herself having an existential crisis over a polished rock. Then again, magic was suddenly real, so why not add life-altering necklaces to the mix.

Deciding to put off allowing herself to fall apart until she wasn't trespassing anymore, Mizuki switched off her flashlight and left the store house just as she had found it, minus the pendant now wrapped securely around her wrist. She meant to head back to the streets, satisfied enough with the feeling that the artifact was where it belonged and eager to get back and forget the whole ordeal, except that there was a change to the hum in her ears. Louder suddenly, urgent as though it was trying to catch her attention, she looked down at the necklace to find it glowing faintly in an attempt to add another impossibility to her list.

There was an echo from somewhere slightly behind her.

Mizuki turned to find the wellhouse right there, answering back in white noise of a different note, and she decided to investigate. Ignoring the part of the sign that reminded people to keep out, she slid the door open as quietly as possible, and as soon as she had enough room to slip in, pushed it right back where it had been. Pausing at the top of the steps for a moment let her take in the darkness that engulfed the shack. She flicked her flashlight back on, illuminating the well at the bottom of the small staircase.

It was open, like it was welcoming her to try it. She swallowed, slightly apprehensive, before walking down to the well and leaning against its lip. She shone the flashlight into it, but really didn't need to when it started to glow faintly. It looked like there was about eight or nine feet to the bottom.

The light tug she felt on her wrist was the last thing she expected, and she barely held in a yelp of surprise as her focus was pulled away from the well before she could contemplate the magical glow further. She looked to find the stone pulling toward the well, as if it were eager to enter it.

Mizuki swallowed the lump in her throat.

"Does it need to go there?" she wondered silently before thinking more cautiously, "…Do I?"

When it pulled again, Mizuki was at a loss for words for several moments. A strange thought came to her. Not a logical one, but logic had left to join the phantoms of her other failed career prospects, so what the heck.

"Stop," she whispered, and it did.

Mizuki dropped her flashlight in the well.

She cursed silently at the noise it made, hoping it hadn't caught the Higurashi family's attention. The necklace tugged again though, more forcefully this time, and she knew, somehow, that it was trying to pull her along with it. It had been trying to pull her right from the beginning.

"Alright, I get it. I get it," she insisted, and tried not to think too hard about everything.

It stopped once again, and Mizuki took a deep breath. Okay. Great. Fantastic. The stone being sentient to some degree was just one more thing to add to the list of things impossible until today. She would add more to her long list of mistakes later, when she allowed logic a comfortable place to haunt her from again.

"I am so going to freak out about this later," she mumbled. Not now, because right now she was strangely resolute in her decision. Hell, she had come this far already. If the stone wanted her that badly, it had to be for something. Something five hundred years in the past? Sure. Answers, maybe. Answers to this whole puzzle would be nice.

Answers.

She nodded sharply after another moment, feeling strongly about that singular word and the promise it held for making sense of the past day, and then swung her legs over the side of the well. She could be there and gone and back and apologizing soon. Just…after this. It could make explaining herself easier.

"…For answers."

She jumped in.

Beautiful Moon's poorly written summary would be: A girl steals a magic rock and follows it down a magic well 500 years in the past, without thinking too hard about the consequences (because there are always consequences).

I think this is one of my favorite chapters, despite its short length and that it's still taking place largely outside of the main setting of Inuyasha, because I really get to set things up for Mizuki while I write her a list of things impossible until today, and don't leave her much room to analyze it. Getting in touch with her character while she's unraveling a bit is fun.

Between this chapter and the last, I get to introduce a plethora of little things that play into the story to varying degrees, like Mizuki's birthday, for example. One of the things I neglected so badly in the first iteration of this story was exposition, and I had no grasp on the concept show but don't tell, which muted a lot of anticipation and put too heavy a reliance on cliffhangers. I missed out on all of the opportunities to plant seeds by trying to rush through to meeting and knowing the main cast and the meaty bits of the action. This is now my favorite playground (though I'm no less excited to get to the rest of the story).

If you have suggestions for improvements on the sense of urgency Mizuki experiences in this chapter, or anything else, I would love to hear them.

Thanks!