I… thought I uploaded this months ago. It's been up on AO3 for months… Whoops.
Disclaimer: No own. No money made. Also sometimes characters say somewhat rude things, I do not always agree with them.
Ayumi Plays the Biwa
by: WolfishMoon
If you'd asked 15 year old Ayumi what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have fixed you with a dazzle-eyed stare. "I'll be what I've always been! A music teacher!" Ayumi loved music, and she was good at it. Good enough to teach others about it, at least. She knew the history and she knew the theory and she knew the instruments and she knew Eastern styles and Western styles and everything in between. She loved it, and she was excellent at transmitting that love.
If you'd asked 16 year old Ayumi the same question, her eyes would stray to her friend Kagome, who'd gone still and silent and angry in ways that Ayumi never would have ascribed to her. "Music," she would say quietly. "I want to be a music teacher."
When she was seventeen, Ayumi decided she wanted to play the biwa and learn to write for it. She practiced. She researched a good story to put to music. Deep in a book of legends, she found one about a priestess and a dog demon, about their friends, and a jewel that destroyed their lives and put them back together again.
Ayumi always loved stories about love and loss, so she wrote out carefully chosen notes, pained over the score, and wrote and wrote and wrote until finally, she decided it was good enough to share with her friends.
She didn't get a chance to finish her performance, because there was Kagome with her grayish eyes filling with tears. For an hour, after Ayumi chased Eri and Yuka from the room, she held Kagome as she cried and cried and cried.
Kagome never explained, but if you asked eighteen year old Ayumi what major she'd applied for college under, she'd flip her wavy hair over her shoulder, smile slightly, and say, "History." It could move an audience just as surely as music could, she'd learned, and she wanted to learn every ounce of it she could.
Though Kagome remained still and silent and angry, she seemed to relax a little around Ayumi after the biwa incident. She gave no details, but sometimes she let Ayumi see sadness and fear that seemed overwhelming. Ayumi learned to recognize when Kagome was especially struggling, and could slip her hand in hers and squeeze. It wasn't much, but Ayumi liked to think it helped a little.
After high school graduation but before Ayumi had settled into her college apartment, she and the girls got fast food together for old times' sake. Kagome walked into the burger joint smiling broadly. Smiling! Without a trace of the pain Ayumi had grown accustomed to. At first, she could hardly believe her eyes.
From their first day of high school to graduation day, Kagome was cloaked in melancholy. She clearly tried to hide it, and Eri and Yuka seemed to think Ayumi didn't notice. Ayumi's friends were always trying to protect her, more than even her parents. But Ayumi noticed. She always noticed. Kagome's distress had been palpable, and Ayumi could hear it coming from Kagome's chest like a song.
"Eri? Yuka, Ayumi?" Kagome, eighteen years old and bouncing, sat down across from them in the Yankee burger joint, glowing with that bright and unexpected happiness. "I'm moving to America," she said. "I'll miss you, and I'll try to visit as often as I can."
Never once in their friendship had Kagome ever expressed a desire to move to America. Ayumi blinked at her, dumbfounded.
"America!" Eri said "Where did this come from?"
"With all that awful food over there, you'll get fat in a minute!" said Yuka, looking genuinely alarmed.
"I'm getting married," Kagome said with the sort of vigor that Ayumi hadn't seen from her since they were fifteen.
"Married!" said Eri. "To whom?"
"It had better not be some sort of delinquent! Kagome, you're only eighteen!" Yuka was standing in her seat now, her earlier alarm having escalated to full scale panic.
Kagome hesitated, and Ayumi furrowed her brow in question. But Kagome seemed to come to terms with something, because she nodded firmly. "Do you all remember Inuyasha? From our last year of junior high?"
Ayumi nearly melted. She'd always liked Inuyasha for Kagome. "Oh, Kagome, that's wonderful!"
"Inuyasha? You mean that cosplaying two-timer?" Yuka's voice squeaked somewhere into the range of high G. Ayumi winced. "You're not! Where has he even been the last three years?"
Kagome sighed, and slid into the seat next to Ayumi, who was the only one of the three of them not to say anything disparaging. Ayumi called that fair. "It's complicated," she said. "His family moved him all the way to northern Hokkaido. And with that kind of separation? Well, we were too young to do long distance."
"So how did you get back together?" Eri asked. "Is he less of a jerk now?"
"He was never a jerk," Kagome said. "And he was never a two-timer. We were only friends, technically, when all that stuff with his ex went down. And if Inuyasha had a weird relationship with Kikyo, well, I wasn't exactly innocent, either, if we're gonna be strict."
"Are you kidding? "
"Hojo?" Kagome said. "Remember him? Inuyasha would get so jealous. And Hojo wasn't even the worst of it! One of the people we ran into a lot, named Kouga, hit on me constantly! And sometimes, I didn't exactly discourage him."
"Why didn't you tell us any of this?" Eri said. Ayumi wasn't sure that Kagome had ever so much as mentioned a Kouga.
"Well, I was out of school so much…" Kagome shook her head. "Look. Whenever I saw you guys I was mad at him and venting. I swear he's a much better guy than I made him sound. Nothing I said was exactly false , but you guys never got to hear the context or the good things about him. Anyway, we got back in contact the day of graduation and-"
Yuka cut her off. "Kagome, we graduated last week."
Kagome smiled and nodded. "I know it seems sudden, but I think this was inevitable from the moment I met him."
"Kagome, you were terrible in English class!"
Ayumi just gave Kagome an encouraging shoulder nudge, and Kagome blinked at her gratefully. "Listen," Kagome finally said. "I appreciate that you're worried. But I'll be fine. If you want me to, I'll send you reports through my mother."
"Can we meet him again before you leave?" Eri looked like the world was ending, and Kagome nodded.
"Of course," she said. "But be aware, Hokkaido's made him a little weird. People aren't meant to live that far north, I swear."
And with that, Kagome disappeared from Ayumi's life, mostly. Ayumi was sure that during the biwa incident of their second year of high school, Kagome had sobbed something about being certain Inuyasha was dead. Still, he stood proudly at the gates to the Higurashi shrine that day Ayumi went to meet him again as newly minted adults. It was definitely him, make no mistake about it.
She wanted to ask, but let it go, because she could tell from the start that Kagome's mind was made. Some contact was better than none at all, and she did not want to chase her friend away.
Ayumi went into college studying Japanese feudal history with a concentration in archeological methods and minors in music and music history. She did her best not to worry about her friend way across the ocean. It was easier said than done, but she did it.
If you asked a twenty-two year old Ayumi what her plans were, she'd grin and tell you about her digsite along a remaining fragment of the Tokaido road. "I'm looking for traveler artifacts," she would say. "Remnants of old fires, maybe some crockery. Just the sort of debris that might have been left along the road by travelers in the Edo period."
Yuka tickled under Ayumi's chin. "Awww you're such a good student Ayumi, so excited about your grad school prospects."
"Just make sure it stays healthy," Eri said. "Eat three square meals a day. Don't overdo it on the caffeine. And for the love of all that is holy, get enough sleep! Living with you during finals week was always hell."
Eri did middling-ly well in college and had no grad school ambitions, but she did always get eight hours of sleep a night when she wasn't partying. Ayumi respected that priority.
Ayumi didn't know if she'd be getting that eight hours anytime soon, but she hefted her work bag on one shoulder and her biwa's case on the other. There were so many historical songs she could learn and write and sing about the Tokaido, and this sort of research fueled her creativity like nothing else.
"I just want to feel the spirit of the road," she said. "And I'll stay up 72 hours in a row to do it."
"And if you turn into a stress zombie, we'll be there to pick up the pieces and take you shopping," said Yuka. "Happy excavating."
Excavating was happy.
When Ayumi was twenty-three, she was squatting in the dirt in a bit of woodland off the Tokaido road when she found the mostly-decayed remains of a yellow backpack. "Hikers," she said to herself. "They've gotta be more careful about their things!"
There were other things in that layer, things that made sense for Edo-period travelers. Ayumi wondered what had been destroyed by the hiker that buried their backpack here. Still, she exercised all the care of her archeological training when removing the backpack from its resting spot. At the very least, she didn't want to risk interfering with artifacts that might be suspended in the soil near it.
With it placed gently out of the way, Ayumi went about the rest of her day humming softly to herself. If there were a few bizarrely aged ramen wrappers scattered around the site, well, she attributed it to the same recklessness that lost the yellow backpack. She put the ramen wrappers in a box with the yellow backpack for record's sake, and continued on.
She wasn't quite sure why, but when she retired to her tent for the night, she brought the box with the yellow backpack with her. Technically, it should have been loaded up with all the rest of the anthropogenic debris found in the digsite, even as anachronistic as it was. But it's not like anyone would miss a thoroughly modern pack she'd neglected to list in the manifest.
Ayumi wasn't sure why she'd neglected to list it.
In the privacy of her tent, she opened it. The stitching was stronger than the weave of the fabric, so the zipper had long since worked its way out of place. Opening it was as simple as separating the pockets.
Ayumi had her own pack with her, she knew the fundamentals of wilderness supply. She wasn't sure why she was so curious. But an echo of familiarity egged her on despite herself. She removed the well-aged packets of ramen, the first aid kit, the change of clothes. Removed the toothbrush and the shampoo and the bag of menstrual products. It had been a woman's pack, and Ayumi found herself surprised that she wasn't surprised.
And then Ayumi saw her ninth-grade math textbook. Her heart stuttered. Why on earth had a student at her junior high, no doubt around her age, left their math textbook in a crumbling yellow backpack along the side of the Tokaido? Oddly, she realized that she'd been looking for it. She remembered when it went missing. Remembered when Kagome had first started coming back to school regularly, looking like she'd fought a war and flinching at loud sounds. Remembered her sitting in math class, just weeks before they were due to sit their high school entrance exams and groaning. "It's in my backpack," she'd said. Conspicuously, the backpack at her feet was an electric blue. "It's -" she'd cut herself off, clearly about to let slip where she'd lost that missing yellow backpack with her math text.
Ayumi gingerly opened the front cover, finding it as fragile and messy as it would be if it had sat in that yellow backpack for hundreds of years. Surely enough, despite the nearly ruined textblock, she could see Kagome's name inscribed on the inside front cover. Inside the book, inside the backpack, and covered by a layer of debris, the ink looked to be in fairly decent condition. Why wouldn't it be? Ayumi thought to herself. Even the most light-sensitive of modern inks could survive eight years.
But the backpack wouldn't have been in this condition if it had only been eight years. Ayumi knew that as well as anyone. A hand strayed toward her cellphone, but halted. Texting Kagome directly probably wouldn't accomplish anything. Kagome still had a Japanese phone number, but had never passed along her American one, and understandably the Japanese cell phone was rarely on. And when it was on, Kagome usually messaged in to let Ayumi know she was visiting first thing, invited Ayumi and Yuka and Eri to fast food.
Their opportunities for visiting were limited. Ayumi imagined that plane tickets to America were not only prohibitively expensive for her, but also for Kagome and Inuyasha. She wondered what it said about her, that she'd never bothered to check. That she hadn't even offered to visit them in America and see their new home. That she'd been content to let her friend, who'd moved through high school in a disassociated fog, disappear into the arms of a man who'd reappeared in her life when she'd seemed so fragile.
She'd been half convinced, after Kagome sobbed into her arms during the Biwa Incident, that she'd met Inuyasha in some sort of sick-kids support group, that their story had ended in Kagome's recovery and Inuyasha's death. But that theory was proven at least incomplete with Inuyasha's reappearance. And even before that, Ayumi knew she'd been missing some crucial information. And now, in the dim glow of her camp lantern, Ayumi knew she had even less information than she thought she had.
Suddenly not able to look at this bizarrely aged junior high math textbook, Ayumi placed the backpack and each item she'd unearthed from it into their box. She unzipped the flap of her tent and stepped into the humid summer evening. With a glance towards her teammates' tents, she crept back to the digsite. For a long while, she sat on the edge of the ancient campfire. Kagome sat here , she thought. Kagome sat here five hundred years ago with an anachronistic backpack, and somehow that's true.
Ayumi resolved to ask her questions at the Higurashi shrine. Remembering the sheer number of times she'd been carefully redirected by Kagome's mother back in junior high, Ayumi was suddenly sure that Higurashi-san would have answers for her, if Ayumi refused to leave until she spilled them.
Ayumi's team was due to move sites in just another week, she'd go just after the transition, to keep the team's workflow as smooth as possible. Decided, she crawled into her sleeping bag for the night. The next morning, she made extra coffee on her little camp stove and cornered her advisor with two cups in her hand.
"Cream, no sugar," Ayumi said without preamble, "how you like it."
"Thank the spirits," said Ota-sensei, taking the cup and bringing it to her nose for a deep inhale. Now Ota-sensei wasn't the most socially aware person Ayumi had ever met, but apparently even she couldn't miss the look on Ayumi's face. Her thanks, though clearly heartfelt, was followed up with, "What do you want, Nomura-san?"
Ayumi took a sip of her own coffee before answering. "I was hoping I could depart for a few days just after we move camp."
"You're invaluable here," said Ota-sensei. "Is there a reason you can't conclude your business on a normal day off?"
"I don't know," said Ayumi, deciding to give a measure of the truth. "I've been thinking about a friend of mine lately. I know where to start, but I'm not sure how much time I'm actually going to need to track everything down. I'm willing to time my absence for a weekend, but…"
Ota-sensei looked skeptical. "This isn't about a man, is it?"
Ayumi glared at her. "As if," she said. "I'm not remotely interested in jeopardizing my career for marriage." Then Ayumi sagged. "But I need answers about a friend of mine from high school, and I have a terrible feeling those answers are going to involve her husband. So. I guess there's a man involved."
Ota-sensei's demeanor changed in an instant. "Your friend, she's safe, right?"
Ayumi thought about the box of anachronistic artifacts hidden in her tent. "I'd thought so," she said. "I always thought her husband was a good match for her, back when they first dated in junior high. But it suddenly occurs to me that I don't know nearly as much about them as I thought I did. I just don't know . Ota-sensei, I need to know."
Ota-sensei took a long drink of her coffee, sat down heavily on a large log by their own modern campfire. "We'll deal," Ota-sensei said, avoiding Ayumi's attempt at eye contact. "Go take care of your friend."
"Thank you," said Ayumi. "LIke I said before, I'll make sure we wrap things up at this site first, and then I'll be gone no more than three work days."
"Wrap things up at the site? Get out of here, Nomura-san. I said we can deal without you and I mean it. You're worried now, so go now. Your work won't be as consistent if you're preoccupied, anyway."
Ayumi could have kissed her advisor. "I'll leave my coffee pot and grounds here," she said instead. "It's a very good set-up." And yours, advisor dearest, is notoriously awful.
Steam continued to rise off the coffee mugs, dissipating quickly into the warm late-summer air. "I appreciate that," Ota-sensei finally said. Ayumi gave her a small bow and retreated.
Aside from her coffee things, Ayumi was careful to load all of her personal camp items into the bed of her small truck. She had a funny feeling that Ota-sensei would have forgiven Ayumi for rushing off and leaving it all behind, but Ayumi didn't want to make moving digsites any harder on her colleagues than it had to be. She also thought that Ota-sensei was operating under the impression that Ayumi's friend was near enough that Ayumi could do something immediate, that Ayumi had concrete suspicions of a dangerous domestic situation and was staging some sort of rescue. But Kagome was in America. And all Ayumi had was a math textbook and a terrible understanding that she'd never really known Kagome nor Inuyasha to any degree of satisfaction. Her questions didn't even necessarily point to domestic violence, and no matter what answers she found, there wasn't much she could do about them without considerable time delay anyway.
Given those circumstances, it wouldn't be fair for Ayumi to accept all the leeway Ota-sensei had extended.
Still, even being as thorough as possible, Ayumi had her campsite cleared and impeccable faster than she'd ever managed before. A pure sense of urgency had infested her limbs, and before she had time to think, Ayumi was gently placing the box of Kagome's anachronisms into the passenger seat of her two-door off-road pick-up and tearing through the woods along the Tokaido and down to the main road.
She was in Tokyo by afternoon, pulled up out front of the Higurashi shrine by early evening. Somehow, it had not changed at all. After a short struggle to find parking, Ayumi took a moment to collect herself. She'd picked up a few cups of coffee along the drive, feeling steadied by the heat of the drink and the familiar watery-bitterness of road-side swill. The most recent cup had already cooled, and Ayumi wasn't sure if they were steadying anymore either. But she wrapped her hands around the styrofoam cup like it offered both heat and stability anyway, took a wistful swig. She smiled wryly at the tremor that had set into her fingers, slid out of the car.
Kagome's things were heavier than was perhaps easy to carry in a square box, and Ayumi wasn't quite sure she wanted to open the conversation with them, anyway. Perhaps it was better to initiate a pleasant conversation, and come back for the box when the time was right? Just leaving it out here seemed impossible, though, so Ayumi rested a corner of it on her hip bone and gamely started up the stairs to the shrine house.
About half-way up the steps, Ayumi paused to take a deep breath. When she'd been in high school, the comparative space and greenery around the Higurashi Shrine had meant she savored the taste of the air here, and the familiar notes were both soothing and unsettling. After months living in campsites along Tokaido dig prospects, the air tasted hardly better than the rest of the city. I'll be back on the Tokaido when I have my answers, Ayumi thought and continued her climb.
It really was nearly twilight, Ayumi realized when she crested the top of the stairs, suddenly dwarfed by the Goshinboku. It occurred to her that perhaps she should have stopped at her parents' house for the night. They'd be willing to put her up, thrilled to see her, and only moderately annoyed by the lack of notice. And bothering the Higurashi family about their daughter abroad might go over better during normal visiting hours. But it genuinely had not occurred to her until this moment, and the box of Kagome's things was heavy on her hip.
Don't chicken out now, Ayumi , she thought to herself. She walked the path to the family home, nodding at the Goshinboku, the sacred well house, and the main shrine as she passed them, and knocked firmly on the door.
"I'll get it, mom!" said the voice of a surprisingly grown man. Souta opened the door, and Ayumi blinked. The last time she'd given him much thought at all was when she'd met Inuyasha again after high school graduation, when Souta was still a year or so off from high school himself. It was crazy that he'd probably already graduated. "Can I help you?" he said, looking a little disappointed. Absently, Ayumi wondered who he'd hoped she would be.
"Higurashi-kun," said Ayumi, careful to establish at least that much familiarity, ignoring his taken-aback expression at the suffix. "It's nice to see you again! I'm Nomura Ayumi, one of Kagome-chan's old friends. Is there any chance I could come in?"
Souta looked immediately guarded, "Nomura-chan," he said, giving the informal suffix right back. "I remember you now, it's been a long time!" He did not yield the doorway, though.
"It has," said Ayumi. "I shouldn't have let it go so long."
At last, the woman Ayumi had come to see appeared, poking her head over her son's shoulder. Souta had been shorter than Higurashi-san the last time Ayumi had seen them. Not any more. "Higurashi-san," she said.
"Ayumi-chan!" said Kagome's mother, gently moving her son out of the way. "What brings you here? It's been so long."
Ayumi let herself be shepherded through the doorway and genkan, slipping off her shoes while hardly breaking pace. When her socked feet touched the wooden floors of the hallway, she hefted the box on her hip. "I have some of Kagome's things," she said. "I thought you guys might like to see them."
Higurashi-san exchanged a look with Souta before urging Ayumi forward across the hall into the living room. "How thoughtful!" she said, "why don't we take a seat and look at them together!" She took the box right from Ayumi's arms, placed it on the low table, and slid into a perfect seiza on the tatami. Higurashi-san patted the open space next to her and Ayumi took the hint, but took the opportunity to shift the box closest to her on the table. She had not missed Higurashi-san's attempt at exerting spatial control, and she would only let some of that fly.
Abruptly, she noticed that Grandpa Higurashi was missing. She looked from Higurashi-san to Souta, who'd sat cross-legged across the table from them. "Might I ask after Higurashi-jii-san?"
"He overworked himself this morning," said Souta, with an exasperated frown. "He went to bed early."
"If he stops overworking," said Higurashi-san wryly, "I expect he'll outlive us all."
Ayumi felt a wave of palpable relief, both that Grandpa Higurashi was alright and that he probably wouldn't be interrupting this conversation. He was quite possibly the biggest busybody Ayumi had ever met, and her nerves were frayed. It occurred to her that she had essentially not stopped since she'd unearthed the yellow backpack. She shook herself. "I'm glad to hear he's doing well," she said.
"So," said Souta, eyeing the box warily. "What'd ya bring us?"
Ayumi placed her hands on the lid of the box, pressing down on it protectively. Maybe she should just spit it out. She directed her attention from Souta to Higurashi-san, directly meeting her eyes, "What was going on in our last year of junior high?"
Higurashi-san blanched, politely broke eye contact. "Well," she said. "Kagome was struggling a lot with her health that year."
"Did she meet Inuyasha in a sick kids group?"
"Yes!" said Higurashi-san, too visibly relieved to take the explanation to be genuine. "They were great comforts to each other."
Souta, though, was not to be deterred. "What's in the box, Nomura-chan?"
When Ayumi looked at him, it was Souta that initiated the rude eye contact. Ayumi didn't break it. She ran her palms across the lid of her artifact box, lifted it. "Her personal effects from a nearly five-hundred year old campsite along the Tokaido road."
Souta did not look surprised at all. "I remember hearing you went into archeology," he said.
Higurashi-san raised herself to her knees, peered over the lid of the box. "The Tokaido!" she said.
"I couldn't be sure without further testing, but my colleagues and I are pretty sure the campsite predates the Tokaido itself. But I suppose formalized roads were born out of routes that were already occasionally traveled."
"That sounds right," said Higurashi-san with a sigh. "Kagome didn't share much with us, but."
"Mama," said Souta, voice a warning. "It's Nee-chan's secret to tell."
"Of course," said Higurashi-san. "Ayumi-chan, can you accept that Kagome went through a lot that year? That she had good and important reasons for missing school?"
"And what about the next three years? Did she have a good and important reason for being depressed and dissociated all through high school? I tried so hard to help her, and she just stayed beyond my reach! And then she moved to America right out of high school, and made the separation physical as well!"
It occurred to Ayumi that she'd been carrying that weight on her chest for a while.
"Would you believe us if we said she's really fine, now?" said Souta.
"She said she was fine all through high school," said Ayumi. "And she clearly was not."
Souta looked like he was about to argue, but Higurashi-san sent him a quelling look. "She'll never be who she was at fourteen," she said. "Not ever again."
That answer was a cop-out and Ayumi knew it. Souta actually snorted, said, "I'm not the same as I was at fourteen," he said. "Nobody is."
"Exactly," said Higurashi-san. "And sometimes life makes that change more dramatic than others."
"I could accept that," said Ayumi. "Back when I thought this all came from medical trauma. But if it's not medical trauma, can either of you tell me why I played a song I wrote for the biwa and Kagome spent the next hour sobbing in my arms and wondering if Inuyasha was dead? What were they doing that made that a reasonable fear?"
Both HIgurashi-san and Souta looked deeply uncomfortable. A silence descended, and Ayumi wondered how productive this was going to be. She carefully lifted the empty yellow backpack from the top of the box. "I'm sitting on top of something impossible," Ayumi said, placing it on the table. "And I've already compromised my professional integrity. I didn't log any of this stuff."
The tension was so thick, that for a moment Ayumi didn't register the sound of the front door opening. She didn't process the sound until Kagome marched into the living room, dressed in the clothes of a shrine maiden with Inuyasha at her shoulder. "I'm home!"
Ayumi jumped near out of her skin, and she wasn't the only one. "Nee-chan!" Souta shouted, vaulting to his feet and swinging Kagome around in a wild hug. The two of them were laughing, and Mrs. Higurashi was unfolding from her seiza to join them. Inuyasha stepped around Kagome and Souta to greet his mother-in-law. Ayumi sat there frozen.
Who in the hell flies to Japan from America without telling their family first? Because clearly this had been a surprise. A good one, she could tell, but a surprise none-the-less. She wondered if she'd been overly hasty about assuming Kagome and Inuyasha's financial status. Maybe they could afford those kinds of plane tickets on a whim.
But they didn't look like they'd just gotten off a plane from the US. They were bright-eyed, energetic, and wearing kimono of all things. And not modern, machine-sewn, brightly-dyed festival kimono, either. While historical fashion had never been Ayumi's research focus, she could still see at a glance that they'd been made not only to look historical, they were almost definitely made with historical methods.
Ayumi could not quite help but stare at Kagome's vivid red hakama and white kosode. Ayumi had never even seen Kagome wearing the clothes of a miko before. She knew Grandpa Higurashi had been hoping Kagome would become more involved with the shrine when she entered high school, and to her credit, Kagome had. But Ayumi remembered the clothes being a hard line. She just wouldn't wear them and never gave an explanation where Ayumi could hear. Even more unbelievable, she was fairly certain that Inuyasha was wearing the same clothes he'd worn when she first met him in junior high.
It was him who noticed Ayumi first, first sniffing the air (to Ayumi's horrified surprise) and then pinning her with a very direct stare over Higurashi-san's head. He shuffled around Higurashi-san, said "Hey. You! You're one of Kagome's old human friends, right?"
Ayumi did not appreciate being called teme, of all things, and she was about to tell him so, when Kagome stepped between them, feet sliding with a shhhh across the tatami. "Ayumi-chan!" she said. "What are you doing here?"
"Um," said Ayumi, then wordlessly gestured at the box on the table.
"That's your old backpack, isn't it?" said Inuyasha to Kagome, with a nostalgic look on his face, before looking back at Ayumi. "Where'dya find it?"
"At a nearly five-hundred year old archeological site along the Tokaido," said Ayumi. "Also found our ninth grade math textbook and a whole lotta ramen wrappers. I came here because I was wondering how that was possible."
Kagome, now directly at Ayumi's side slid wordlessly into seiza. Her clothes were definitely carefully handmade from a loose-woven coarse linen. Crazy. Without looking at Ayumi, she placed a careful hand on one of the front pockets of her backpack, said, "It all started on my fifteenth birthday, when Souta had me go looking for the cat."
"That's when you disappeared for three days, right? I remember even the police got involved."
"Yeah," said Kagome.
"After your health took a nose-dive, I wondered if it all started with the stress of whatever happened that week," said Ayumi, carefully extending her own hand to place over Kagome's. "But there was never a health crisis, was there?"
"The sacred well," said Kagome, voice timid and reluctant, "is a mostly-functional time portal. It closed right before we graduated junior high."
Ayumi let out a breath she didn't know she was holding, whirled around to look at Higurashi-san, who was still standing. "You let your fifteen year old daughter sabotage her education to go gallivanting in the feudal era without you?"
Higurashi-san had the grace to look abashed.
"It wasn't like that," said Kagome. "In my first three days, I made a huge mistake. The rest was just trying to fix it." She reached for Inuyasha, who sat so quickly beside her, his figure seemed to blur. She grabbed his hand. "And by the time we were done, I'd found a family there. A sister, a son. Inuyasha. So much more."
Ayumi had always thought that she, Eri, Yuka, and Kagome had been a family of sorts. Apparently not. "And you never told us?"
"Look," said Kagome, finally tearing her eyes from the yellow backpack and actually looking at Ayumi. "I loved you. All three of you. But I desperately wanted something normal, wanted people to look at me like I was just a normal girl. Not the incompetent, undertrained, second-rate reincarnation of the shikon miko, not a savior or a surrogate mother or a star-crossed lover. I hated that the three of you looked at me like I was fragile, but it was still a break. And by the time I'd adjusted to my new role, and might have shared it, it had gone on so long I didn't know how."
Ayumi heard the last part of Kagome's tirade, but she stopped processing after reincarnation of the shikon miko. Her inner ear could quite clearly hear her own voice accompanied by the biwa, singing the song of the shikon no tama. She looked at Inuyasha; realized he wasn't wearing a baseball cap or bandana like he always used to. Nestled in his snow-white hair were pointed and furry dog ears that looked more natural than the most advanced cosplay prosthetics Ayumi had ever seen.
"When I played my song on the biwa," said Ayumi, cutting off whatever else Kagome was rambling about now and taking both of her hands. "When we were seventeen."
"The well had been shut for almost two years then," said Kagome. "It threw me back here right when I purified the jewel for good and ever, then shut. And I'd done that purification in the middle of battle. I had no idea what had happened to anyone."
"And that's why you said you were sure Inuyasha was dead."
"Even if he hadn't died in the battle, the fact that his future-self never came to find me made me think he'd definitely died in the intervening half-millenium."
"Think," said Ayumi, marveling at the possibility of a man living half a millenium. She turned again to Inuyasha and let go of Kagome's hands. "You're the dog demon. The hanyou who loved the priestess."
He looked thoroughly awkward to be described that way, shrugged helplessly. "I guess."
"You guess," said Kagome, a playful scowl in her voice.
"So what happened?" said Ayumi. "How did you find each other again? You said that you reconnected on the day of our high school graduation."
"The well re-opened," said Kagome, looking at Inuyasha with the fiercest love Ayumi had ever seen on her face. "I jumped right through, and there was Inuyasha, who'd sensed it too. He was already waiting for me, having permanently settled with our friends in the closest town."
The part of Ayumi that was still fifteen years old and head over heels for how cute Kagome and Inuyasha seemed together squealed. The part of Ayumi that was twenty-three and worried wasn't quite assuaged. She looked between her friend and her husband for a moment, trying to reconcile the parts of herself into something cohesive. A hand landed on her shoulder. Higurashi-san, looking suddenly very old.
"It scared me so much, Ayumi-chan," she said. "My baby was fifteen years old and in so much danger. But nothing I'd have said would have stopped a Higurashi shrine maiden from doing what she needed to do."
Ayumi hated that answer.
And then the obvious occurred to her. "So the two of you live just on the other side of a well? Not America?"
Kagome looked momentarily taken aback, then laughed. "No, Ayumi-chan. Not America."
"Still not entirely sure what the fuck America is," said Inuyasha, scratching the back of his head. "Kagome tried to explain it while we were making our cover story, but..."
That's about when the archeologist in Ayumi started screaming. The man was a living relic. The memory of the past that Ayumi was trying to excavate from generations of dirt and detritus was alive and happening on just the other side of a goddamn well.
"Can I go?" said Ayumi.
"To America?" said Inuyasha.
Ayumi glared at him, said, "To your home! I'll admit that a lot of it is professional curiosity, but I also really want to see the life the two of you have built there. Meet your friends."
Kagome and Inuyasha glanced at each other, telling a whole story that Ayumi just couldn't quite interpret. "You can try," said Kagome, finally. "But the well's not exactly predictable in who it sends through. Inuyasha and I are the only ones that can get through it consistently, and we've learned not to take that as a guarantee."
Ayumi wondered if there were other times that they'd been stuck on one side of the well or another, or if that one isolated stretch of three years was enough to break their trust in it forever.
"And even if you did get through," said Inuyasha, "it ain't like what you're expecting."
"I have no expectations," said Ayumi, because she'd set that as a professional requirement for herself years ago.
"It's not especially safe, either," said Kagome.
That was a breaking point. "You think I don't know that?" said Ayumi, whirling on her old friend. "You were in such fantastic shape back in middle school that the illness excuse would never have been believable if it weren't for the injuries!"
"What injuries?" said Kagome. "I had a few close calls, but I was lucky for the most part."
Maybe injuries had been the wrong word. "The hemophilia claim was believable because you were always covered in bruises," said Ayumi.
"That's not - "
"And you moved like you'd overworked yourself five days in a row."
"How is that an injury?"
"And remember when you'd have a twisted ankle or a sore wrist?"
"None of those even count!" said Kagome.
"Exactly," said Ayumi. "You usually had the sort of low-grade injury that would have had me, Yuka, or Eri complaining for days. And for you they were always normal. Didn't think anything of it, because that behavior might make sense in someone who's chronically ill."
"I forget how fucking soft you future people are," said Inuyasha, looking at Kagome like he'd never even considered her injuries in the realm of concerning.
"Now Inuyasha," said Higurashi-san. "I don't know that you're being especially fair."
"My injuries were nothing most of the time," said Kagome, cutting over her mother and looking at her husband with an expression that was half pain and half nostalgia. "They aren't an accurate representation of the risk."
"I know ," said Ayumi. "But I still want to see. It's not going to change how I feel about you or how I look at you, Kagome-chan. I promise."
And that hit the nail on the head. Kagome had said it, but Ayumi had been lost in the realization that her friend was the shikon miko. Now she actually understood - Kagome never would have told her or Eri or Yuka the truth about anything. She didn't want the feel of their friendship to change. Ayumi suddenly felt almost bad for forcing that change. Almost.
"You say that," said Kagome.
"Anything's better than how we looked at you when we thought you might be dying, right?"
Kagome huffed out a small laugh. "I guess," she said.
"Let me see," said Ayumi. "Please." She wasn't sure that she should be insisting like this - people were entitled to their private lives, complicated histories aside. But she pressed on all the same, trying to inject pleading sincerity into every pore.
"Alright," said Kagome. "Okay."
"You even sure it'll work?" asked Inuyasha, looking at Ayumi skeptically.
"No," Kagome said, with a one-shouldered shrug. "But we might as well give it a shot."
"Thank you," said Ayumi. "Seriously, thank you." Her arms twitched in an aborted move to hug her friend, but Ayumi was suddenly uncertain about whether this was the time. Uncertain if their friendship still held that level of intimacy.
Before Ayumi could make a decision about it, Kagome sprang onto the balls of her feet from seiza, stood with a smooth grace Ayumi would not have attributed to her. Her hands extended out and Ayumi gingerly took them, not quite understanding her hesitation. Before she was quite ready, Kagome was hauling her to her feet. "No time like the present," she said.
"Really? Now?"
"Why not?" said Kagome, turning toward her mother without letting go of Ayumi's hands. "We'll probably end up staying the night at home. We'll stop by tomorrow instead?"
"That's fine," said Higurashi-san.
"Be safe," said Souta, speaking for the first time since the conversation had started in earnest. Belatedly, Ayumi realized how intently he'd been watching proceedings. I hope he's been there , she thought to herself. He has to have been there before, right?
She wasn't sure, but let herself be dragged from the room, feet going from tatami to wood to her shoes in the genkan. She let herself be guided from the Higurashi home and walked under her own power through the darkening evening to the well-house. For the first time since junior high, Ayumi had answers. Impossible answers, but she knew in her gut that they were truer than any explanation she'd been given before. With a deep breath and one last glance out at the shrine and Tokyo at large, Ayumi felt in the dark for the rim of the sacred well and jumped.
Author's Note: I really hope y'all enjoyed this fic. It's my first time writing for Inuyasha (disregarding false-starts from my pre-teen years that never saw the light of day) and I'd love to hear critique/recommendations/etc.
