CHAPTER 1: THIS IS NOW

"Remember, remember,
This is now,
And now,
And now.
Live it, feel it, cling to it.
I want to become
Acutely aware
Of all I've taken
For granted."
(Sylvia Plath)

When the light clears from her eyes, the pinpricks of magic fading away and leaving her sight full of nothing more than wood and dirt and bones, Kagome shakes her head to gain her bearings. She pauses, waiting a few moments for Inuyasha to lean over the rim, ears twitching and help her (albeit complainingly) to the top.

But, though she waits and waits and waits, he never comes.

She pouts, but, knowing that will help nothing, starts to climb. Her bag, weighed down by heavy school boots, almost drags her over backwards more than once. She struggles and slips and slides, scrapes her knee, breaks several fingernails, but still manages to emerge, triumphant at the top of the well.

"Whew," she wipes at her brow as she catches her breath. "I don't know how Inuyasha manages. Speaking of who…" She glances around the clearing, but nothing appears amiss. No signs of a fight, no smoke visible on the horizon or sounds of shouting being carried on the breeze. It's just another beautiful, calm day in the Feudal Era. But there is still no sign of Inuyasha. And no Shippo, Sango, or Miroku, either. It's all strange, but, seeing no cause for alarm (yet) she heads out towards Kaede's village.

The walk is picturesque and tranquil, and she still seeing nothing to explain why no one, not every overprotective Inuyasha, is there to greet her. She's sure she didn't lose track of what day it was, since she only returned for the four days it took to take her mid-term exams (which she could just feel that she did terribly on, hence the bag of books) plus one extra day to pack. Five days. She was very clear she'd be coming back on the fifth day at lunch time.

So where was everyone?

"Kaede-san! I'm ba-ack!"

The aged miko peers upwards from her pot of stew and breaks into a weathered smile. "Kagome, dear! Welcome back!"

Kagome all but collapses across from the fire from her, her bag landing with a thump, her legs akimbo. "At least someone is glad to see me."

"Whatever do you mean, child?"

She gestured at the room around them, full of no one but the two of them. "Well, no one is even here to welcome me back." She pulled her legs up so she can wrap her arms around them and rests her chin on her knees. Her voice is morose. "Didn't they miss me?"

"Of course they did, you silly girl! But the world doesn't stop just because you're not here!" Kagome blinks up at her, her eyes big and wide and blue. "Demons cause havoc no matter what, and your friends feel drawn to help. Sango went to help a village rebuild after it was destroyed by some sort of rogue demon. Young Shippo went with her." Kaede frowned. "It might have been mentioned that there was a young, vixen living near there." She snorted. "And Miroku went somewhere up north hunting after a rumor of a Shikon shard."

There's a momentary silence and when Kagome fills it, her voice is soft and hesitant. "And… and Inuyasha?"

Kaede sighed. "Inuyasha… he heard another rumor… and followed that one."

Another pregnant pause. "He went after Kikyo, didn't he?"

Kaede stared at her sadly. "Aye, child, he did. But don't think – "

"That's alright!" She stands with a flurry of motion, tone forced full of brightness, smiling wide. "I'll just go help one of the others!" Kaede tries to deter her, tries to tell her that she should just wait here, that the woods are a dangerous place for such a young, pretty girl, but Kagome is oblivious. She assures her that, with her miko powers, she'll be safe. That she'll just take the northern road until she heard a rumor of a jewel shard and that she'd find Miroku no problem. Easy-peasy. She grinned, hefting her bag onto her shoulder as Kaede tried to stand and grasp her arm, to keep her here, but Kagome was already skipping out the door, waving over her shoulder as she went.

Kaede watched her go with a worried expression. "Stay safe, child." She pursed her lips as she thought about what – and who – lived so close to the border of the northern and western lands. "And don't wander too far off the path."

Kagome marches at a quick pace for miles – years of wandering through Feudal Japan making sure she is in perfect shape, even carrying her enormous bag. It's only after a few hours, when she starts to see the glow of sunset on the horizon, is it that she starts to think she maybe acting rashly and made a huge mistake.

Nothing to do about it now but carry on. Persevere and hope she doesn't get murdered in the middle of the night by bandits. Or killed by wild animals. Or kidnapped by a demon. She sighed. So many things that could go wrong in this era that it was a wonder she had survived for so long.

But then she started thinking about the reason she was still alive (Inuyasha) and she got depressed, imaging him off with Kikyo, reliving the romantic moments of times decades passed. Or whatever it was they were doing. Being dragged off to hell, probably. For a moment, she contemplates continuing to walk until she finds a village or passes out, but the darkness is reaching out with inky tendrils across the road and soon it will be dark to see. The smartest thing, the safest thing, she can do is find the best shelter she can, and hunker down for the night.

The best shelter she can find is wedged into the gnarled roots of a massive tree. It sucks, but she's hoping that nothing big enough to kill, eat, or kidnap her, can fit their big, fat hands in between the roots to grab her. Her back aches in the morning and she's scraped all the skin off of one of her elbows sometime during the night, but she wakes up. No midnight struggles of life and death. So at least her plan works.

Screw Inuyasha. Who needed him to stay safe anyway? Maybe she wouldn't even track down Miroku – she could find those jewel shards herself. She could purify the demon who had it, and make her own way back. In fact… maybe she'd take her sweet time making her way back to Kaede's village. Tracking down rogue jewel shards all over the country. Think of the look on their faces when she returned, triumphant (and alive!) with dozens and dozens of shards of the Shikon no Tama that she had collected and purified all on her own, without any help! Inuyasha would be so mad! And Sango and Miroku would be impressed with how grown-up she was – not needing any help or protection. They'd stop treating her like she was made of glass – like she was delicate and fragile and needed to be protected at all costs. She was a powerful miko, a fact that they (all of them, even Kaede) seemed to forget. This way she would show them all!

"All I need to do is get to the village with the jewel shard, purify the demon without dying or injuring anyone, and then do that like, ten more times, on my way back." She nodded decisively. "After that it'll all be perfect!"

A good plan. Not perfect, there were several glaring holes in her plan that she was about to realize soon, but a good plan nonetheless.

Nights one through four go swimmingly, if Kagome does say so herself. She hasn't been robbed or raped, kidnapped or killed. She's managed to start a fire to cook ramen on when she gets hungry and find a few wild berries that she correctly remembered weren't poisonous. Her only hiccup so far was on the third night when she was stopping to bathe in a stream and was almost stumbled over by a fisherman. The old man either thought she was demon or the ghost of a drowned woman, because, rather than leer at what was clearly visible, he screamed like a little girl, through his fishing rod and bucket at her, and ran off into the forest.

After she caught her breath and calmed her racing heart, she realized something very important –

He was probably running towards his village.

"H-hey! Wait up!" She yelled after him, trying to grab her clothes and run after him. She trips over roots and rocks as she tries to dress herself and follow at the same time. She managed to get a sock and a shoe on one foot, but lost her second sock somewhere as she ran. It felt like her skirt was on backwards, too. But she had more important things to do. She grabbed her bag as she whizzed by it, crashing through the woods and still calling out for the fleeing fisherman. "Stop! Please! I'm not a spirit or anything!" A branch raked across her face but she barely felt the sting. "Wait! I – " The next branch she pulled aside stopped her cold.

Because standing on the other side, staring at her in bewilderment that was slowly blossoming into hunger, was a great, hulking bear-demon.

It stood on two legs, like a man, but the breadth of his shoulders is inhuman. As is the shaggy, coarse, brown hair covering his body and the gleaming shine of his deadly red eyes. A grin stretches across his face, face gleaming, tongue lolling as hot, panting breaths spill out. "Hello, girly – don't you look… delicious."

She screams and scrambles back as he lunges towards her, claws outstretched. Only the fact that she trips and falls saves her, makes his reaching grasp strike a tree and tear it to splinters. It would have been her throat. She bolts.

This time she's not paying any attention to where she's going. Her only goal is to escape, to survive, to not be eaten by a fucking bear. The demon crashes through the woods behind her, his wide bulk and lumbering motion meaning he has to go around when she can dart through. Or, as she hears him do on numerous occasions, barrel through them. She yelps when there's a splintering explosion from behind her and shards of woods and dirt go flying past her, pelting her with debris.

If I only I could stop for a moment and get my bow, she thinks. She starts to take the hardest route she can, slipping in between trees that are growing tightly together, darting between brambles and thorn bushes, anything she can do to potentially slow the pursuit of the hungry beast behind her. Only when she hears a roar of frustration that rattles the leaves on the branches, does she slide to a halt. She drops her bag and, in one smooth motion, grabs the bow handle that is poking out of the side.

When the bear demon lurches past the last copse of trees between them, the only thing he sees is a miko glaring at him with a glowing arrow pointed directly at his chest.

"Take one more step towards me and I'll end you." She's incredibly proud that her voice doesn't shake at all. "I can sense that you have no jewel shards, so I have no wish to purify you, but I will if you continue to attack me."

His red-eyed gaze travels from the arrow, to linger over her in a slow, sweeping glance, before settling on that purifying light once more. He growls, upper lip curling back like a wild beast's, but seems to consider his life more important than a meal, no matter how tempting a morsel Kagome may be. With one last greedy look at the pale flesh of her legs, he turns to slink back into the forest. Kagome doesn't put the arrow down until the sounds of him lumbering through the underbrush completely fades, then waits an extra five minutes just in case he is trying to fool her, though he doesn't look that smart. Only then does she let the arrow fade and lower the bow.

The air whooshes out of her in a rush and her knees wobble before she collapses.

In and out, she breaths deeply, trying to calm her rattled nerves. When her heartbeat has returned to normal and her pulse no longer thunders in her ears, she stands, shoulders her bag, and starts trying to walk back in the direction she thought was maybe the way the fisherman had run. It was all very hard to tell, of course, since she hadn't been paying that much attention to where she was going exactly when she was fleeing for her life. But she would trust her miko powers to guide her and show her the way.

Directions was not something her priestess powers were good for. She found that out after a remarkably short amount of time. An hour into her walk, she realized this was not going to go well. The river she'd been traveling alongside for the last several days, the river that followed the road north, was nowhere to be found. And if she couldn't locate the river, she couldn't locate the road. And if she couldn't do that, then she actually had no where she was going right now. When the sun started to set, she could tell she was heading in a general North-Western direction, but, beyond that, she couldn't tell how off the path she was.

She stopped. "Well, shit."

"I beg your pardon, miss?"

Kagome screams at the quiet voice and spins to face the speaker. She confronted with a young, peasant woman, dirty and sweat-streaked, but young and pretty, though confused at Kagome's outburst and looking like she'd invited conversation with a crazy woman and regretting it. "I'm so sorry, you startled me!"

The girl breaks into a smile and Kagome can see that's she's missing one of her front teach, but she's still cute. "It's okay… Can I… can I help you with something?"

"Is there a village nearby? I… I've kind of gotten lost." She smiled sheepishly and scuffed her toe in the dirt. "I'd kind of like to get my bearings. I don't… really have any money." This would have been a good time to suddenly learn an affinity for Miroku's talent for convincing village heads that he could exercise some spirit they didn't even know about as long as he and his companions could sleep there for the night. Alas, she had no such talent for subterfuge. "But I have other things I could trade." She jiggled her bag, making her meaning clear.

A wider smile. "Then I think we might be able to help you!"