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Strangled Time

Chapter 27

The sliding door to Kagome's sleeping quarters closed with a satisfying and secure thunk of wood hitting wood, the willful warrior priestess safely deposited back inside. Relieved of his herding duties, Saburo took a step back. He closed his eyes and listened to the soft patter of her feet on the straw mats, the rattling of a pill bottle being lifted from her bag, the whisk of fabrics falling to the floor as she prepared for her bath, all muted and distant behind the wall that separated them.

He frowned before taking another step back. Then the blacksmith turned away and walked the few short strides that it took to reach his own dormitory. The doors were identical, save for the plaques that identified them as 'the room of pebbles' and 'the room of rapids.'

How fitting that he would be staying with a demon in a room named after a thing of chaos and turmoil. Water tumbling over itself again and again, powerful and destructive as it wore away banks of rivers and ripped homes from their foundations. Even the strongest of rocks eroded to sand in such currents.

Even the most willful of pebbles.

Saburo's frown fell further into a scowl as he stared at the plaque.

Already riled up from his near fight in the street, he didn't think he could handle being confined in that space so soon. Not when he knew what was waiting for him inside.

Both of his hands tightened into fists. He wanted to hit the wall, hollar, break something, start a fight in the yard! But he didn't. He couldn't. Not with Miss Kagome so near. His temper hadn't been a thing that he'd needed to battle in years. So why then did it decide to rear its ugly head?

Why did it have to be that demon?

Of all the beasts plaguing this life and the next, why Togashimaru of the West?

Refusing to enter that room with his head in such a place, Saburo ran his hands through his hair. Then he turned down the hall to see how many laps through the corridors it would take for him to be able to breathe without fire lacing his breath.

A tiny boulder blocked his path.

Stumbling back, Saburo gladly let his shock cover up the dirty stain of his more negative emotions. "Madam innkeeper!" He gasped, bring his hand to his chest to touch his rapidly beating heart. "Ya snuck right up on me."

"You look troubled, young Sir." She replied with a wily smile.

"Me?" He laughed and scrubbed at the short beard that was already coming in on his chin. He really needed to get a shaving blade in that village before they left. "Nah, I—"

"Idle hands can only cause mischief, you know." The small old woman said, cutting short his explanation. "What say you come with me? There is a task that you might be able to help me with."

Gesturing for him to follow along, she headed away from him and down the hall, turning deeper into the sanctuary of the inn. Away from Togashimaru.

With one last look at the door to their shared room, Saburo followed.

"Yes, Ma'am."

…

Kagome took a deep breath as she settled back against her weathered chaise of rocks, allowing herself to submerge deeper in the hot soothing waters of the inn's spring. The wet tickled as it rose up her neck and above the tips of her ears. The sound of the world fell away to a hollow expanse of nothing. She floated in that nothing. The sound of her own heartbeat was strong and healing. As the only part of her left to the air the tip of her nose felt like an isolated mountain radio tower—the only connection to a frigid and unrelenting world beyond.

Returning to the surface when she finally needed to breathe, the priestess opened her blue eyes and looked up to the sky. It was nearly black despite the efforts of the sun. When she released the air from her lungs it formed thick and heavy clouds of white among the steam. Above, she caught sight of the first of the snowflakes as they began to fall in thick clumps.

They melted well before coming in contact with the hot of her bath, but the dappling of white along the walkway was quick to become visible.

She wouldn't be able to stay in there for long—the heat of the water was already beginning to work against the dizzy bees in her head—but even a little soak would be more than enough to wash away the stress of the day.

For the time being they were safe, they were warm. They were well on their way to recovery,

And she had nothing to worry about.

…

"I should go look for him." Kagome said, pacing back and forth across Saburo and Togashimaru's shared room. "He should have been back by now."

"You should let him be." Togashimaru suggested. "I've found that I quite enjoy the silence without him lingering at my neck." He'd followed the volley of her movements for quite a while before turning his attention instead to the black and white checkers of the go board laid out in front of him. To keep the suffocating scent of her worry from smothering him completely, the dog demon cracked open the garden door at his back before making his move with a round black pebble.

"He could be in trouble." She made a flippantly large gesture with her arms as she turned around for the one hundredth time, which he ignored. "What if he went back to fight that guy?"

A smile pulled the corner of his lips, but his voice remained neutral when he replied. "Your human pet is no fighter."

Kagome stopped pacing. She crossed her arms and turned to stare at the screen blocking the main doorway.

"That's what I'm worried about." She said quietly.

Togashimaru looked up at the girl's back; straight and determined she stood ready and willing to fight for her companions, even while engaged with the end of her own battle with the cold. But with her wet hair pulled up high in a towel in the oddest of fashion statements, her visible neck was thin and belying of just how delicate her human body was. Physically stronger of might and endurance than Izayoi, without a doubt; Kagome was a warrior in her own right to stand beside his son in battle, but a beast skilled in hand to hand combat she was not.

What had been an amusing observation before now began to trouble the demon Lord.

With a sigh, Togashimaru set the white pebble in his hands back into its box.

"And if he has?" He asked her, drawing her attention back from the doorway. "If he truly has gone after the stranger from the street stall? Would you jump between the blades of two fighting men to stop their quarrels?"

Kagome shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe. It hasn't failed me yet, I'd figure something out."

Togashimaru's eyebrows pinched together before he forced himself to look back down at his game board. He mindlessly dug out another white pebble before saying, "Your kindness is vast, Kagome, and your heart is in a well-thought place, but you must think before acting on those instincts of yours. Brash decisions and interferences could not only bring trouble to yourself, but to others involved as well. There are perhaps times when you should allow things to reconcile themselves on their own."

The priestess spun around to face him, her hand rising to her chest in indignation. "So you just want me to wait here while my friend could be out there getting hurt!? I don't know what issues you have with Saburo, but that other guy was a total jerk and I'll be damned if I just sit back and—"

Just then the door to the hotel room slid open. Caught off guard, the both of them straightened to full alert. Quick as a viper Kagome reached down to the closest blanket she could find of the many scattered about on the floor and threw it to cover the silver hair of the demon. He coughed and, nonplussed, swam around under it in search of an air hole.

"I'm back… I got th' innkeeper lady with me." Saburo's voice said from around the frame of the screen, announcing the warning with stale timing. Kagome skipped to the edge of the tatami mat and the tall blacksmith rounded the corner carrying a large tray. His buffoonish smile faltered a bit when he saw her, and his eyes roamed to the towel wrapped up and around her head.

Togashimaru was pleased to see that he wasn't the only one to think it an oddity.

"That's quite a dinner new thing." Saburo's tongue betrayed him and his words came out in a weird jumble of a sentence. Turning red, the human man shook his head and held out the heavy tray with more purpose. "I mean this. It's dinner. We made up dinner. The lady innkeep had me helpin' out in the kitchen. Cookin' ain't as easy as my ma always made it look."

As Kagome prattled and preened about the smith's newest domestic accomplishment to cover up her relief over his safety, Togashimaru cautiously watched the petite elder innkeeper from under the low drawn blanket. Just a thin blanket between himself and discovery. She knelt down on the lowered portion of wood flooring beside where Saburo was standing and set down on the tatami mat the second, smaller tray of her own. Sleeves were readjusted before she bowed. Eye contact was brief, but eye contact was made.

The mighty dog demon general felt his heart beating in three places at once: in his chest, at his neck, and within the wound at his side. Only when the tiny woman left did he find himself able to breathe again.

Going to that village had been a bad idea. He couldn't say for certain why, but Togashimaru could feel it.

Something about that old woman simply didn't seem right. Nothing about that village seemed right. Their entire farce had been too easy. They should have been discovered ten times over since they stepped foot on the boundary between the forest and that town. Yet nothing. Not even a stir from the sight of his golden eyes—human's invariably always reacted to their ethereal color, knowing far too intimately that danger lurked among the strange and preternatural.

Even his darling Izayoi gave them pause upon their first meeting; her reflex to freeze in delicate silence as oppose to run or scream being the thing that first incited his curiosity as she read her poetry unattended in the forests, sitting against the god tree that bordered his route of patrol.

Kagome, on the other hand, did not seem to sense that anything was unusual with the village and she settled herself in to eat, comfortable and loose as she trusted her wellbeing to the walls of the inn. Togashimaru did not know whether he should be so carefree, or whether he should alert his companions to his overly sensitive sense of impending doom. His fears were ultimately without base after all, and his judgment was being solely placed on the fraction of a moment's contact between his eyes and the questionably accurate sight of a feeble old woman.

Ultimately Togashimaru decided to lay his faith with the priestess. Her power was strong and, for the most part, her judgment was fair—even in the face of an enemy who by all rights she knew to be an ally, she held firm. Her actions were always made for the betterment of his own wellbeing, if most certainly not her own, and that was worth its weight in gold to his consideration.

If there were truly something foul afoot, the injured demon trusted that Kagome would take the necessary charge.

Either way, trouble brewing or not, Togashimaru tried to take solace in the fact that the food smelled delicious. At the very least he would be well fed before his ultimate death, be it by the hands of renegade villagers or by his own festering fate.

…

After dinner was eaten and the dishes artfully stacked, Kagome had to practically fend off Saburo when she picked them up to take away; his cooking lessons had put the blacksmith in an eager mood to help, but he'd already done so much that day and the priestess wasn't about to let him clean up too. She could have just left them outside the door like they were supposed to, but she felt that was rude after the innkeeper kept going out of her way for them. And besides, Kagome's walk earlier hadn't exactly gone according to plan and she still had antsy feet. With her head feeling ten thousand times better and her cold looking like it was finally hanging by its last thin tendril and ready to fall away, Kagome figured that finding the lady innkeeper wouldn't be too difficult of a task.

And she was right. Actually, it was even easier than she'd expected, since the small old woman was in the very first place the teen looked. The innkeeper's voice floated around the corner from where the main hallway connected to the front entryway. She spoke in rhythmic tones so gentle that Kagome couldn't make out what she was saying over the evening sounds of the street beyond the curtain. The priestess smiled and shifted her load of dishes, but before she could round the corner to ask the innkeeper where she could bring them, the responding voice gave her pause.

The man's baritone was heady and rich, if a bit weathered, and the sound of it set Kagome's blood to an instant boil.

Pressing her back to the wall, Kagome held her dishes firm so they wouldn't make any noise and peeked around the corner to where the rude stranger from the street stall was speaking with her innkeeper. When he looked her way, she jerked back.

All at the same time she felt an urge to apologize to him for lashing out and an even stronger urge to yell at him until he apologized for being such a high and mighty pompous dick weasel. She was responsible for hurting his hand and she really did feel bad about that, but that didn't give him any right to be a jerk! He nearly slapped her! More than that, he scared Saburo!

Oh hell yeah he was going to get a piece of her mind!

Kagome froze just as she was setting the heavy trays on the ground, her body coursing with adrenaline and tongue primed for a lashing.

What the heck was she doing?

Squatting, Kagome leaned back against the wall again and closed her eyes. Her conversation with Toga came back right then to take over her thoughts like a cricket in her ear.

It was over. Everything was already said and done. They'd already gone their separate ways and nobody was seriously injured. So why was she going to recklessly jump into an unnecessarily dangerous situation just to start up another fight? For her pride? For Saburo's? What did she have to gain by stirring the pot now, other than a possible black eye and a revenge-seeking blacksmith who would only make things even worse?

Maybe Toga was right. Maybe she needed to take a step back and let things be instead of blindly storming in, guns blazing.

Taking a deep, steady breath, Kagome calmed the burn of adrenaline from her blood. She was nearly settled down by the time she overheard the two on the other side of the wall share a parting farewell. Curious, the priestess peeked out from her corner one more time to watch the man leave without incident, unaware of how close he'd just come to being jumped by an angry teenage girl. The innkeeper was bowing, as one does with a customer, and the man gave a curt nod after hefting his travel pack over his shoulder. He turned and walked out of the Inn, the wind from the outside catching the billowing fabrics of his haori. His left sleeve danced in the breeze, wild and empty.

Oh god.

He was missing an arm.

Kagome slumped against the wall and dragged her hands over her face. Everything happened so fast before, she hadn't even noticed. The guy was a war veteran! The scars, the attitude, they all made sense. What was she doing, thinking of picking a fight with a guy with only one arm!? She was the worst!

Suddenly reminded of Sesshoumaru, Kagome blanched even further.

Oh god.

This time period's younger Sesshoumaru still had both of his arms, but she knew the truth of his limb's fate. What she didn't know was how in the world she was going to get back to the well once their journey to Chichibu was said and done and she was ready to find a way back home. As far as she knew he was still pacing back and forth along that border, just waiting for her to pass back through. Waiting to pounce with flared markings and piercing red eyes.

Kagome sank even further.

Oh god, why had she fought Sesshoumaru!? Why didn't she just stay safe behind the barrier like Toga had asked? Why was she so… so—Argh!

"Young Madame?" Kagome didn't even hear the dainty, deer-like woman walk up on her. She jumped.

"Are you alright dear?" The innkeeper asked again.

"I'm good." Kagome lied a little too quickly. She scrambled to her feet, picked up the tray of dishes, and gestured. "I, um… who was that? You know him?" She questioned, wanting to smack her own nose as soon as the words came out of her mouth.

Smiling gently, the woman's doe-brown eyes softened and she motioned for Kagome to follow her down the halls and into the direction of the kitchen. "Ah yes, he is a wandering rounin—a warrior with no master. He passes through from time to time, ever chasing the battles of the lands. One of many who frequent this town as a way station. Did he give you a fright?"

"You could say that." The priestess mumbled.

The innkeeper hummed. "He is mostly harmless, but it is best to keep one's distance. There are scars on his heart. Not unlike your own, I would believe. It comes with the territory, so to speak. War treats us all without mercy, especially those like us and those who have seen the bloodshed firsthand."

That gave Kagome pause.

"Me?" She asked awkwardly. Kagome really hadn't wanted to be ousted as a priestess. What in the world had she done to stand out this time? She was being good! Sorta… "Why would you assume… wait. Us?" The innkeeper didn't slow when the time traveler fell out of step, and Kagome had to jog to catch back up to her. "What do you mean by 'those like us'? Are you—?"

Cutting off the younger girl with a pleasant smile, the elder came to a stop in front of an archway that had short green curtains hiding the kitchens beyond. "You can set those down here, young Madame. I will tend to them afterwards. In the meantime, if you happen to have a moment of your time to spare, there is something that I would like to give to you, if you would be so willing as to take it off my hands."

"Um." Kagome swallowed. "Maybe? What is it?"

"Come along and I will show you."

Hesitant, Kagome set down the heavy tray of dishes against the wall by the kitchen and watched the tiny old woman walk further down the hall. Cryptic. She didn't like cryptic. Not because people with secrets were necessarily bad, but because Kagome was curious to a fault and she'd gotten into her own fair share of sticky situations by blindly following the nagging of a mystery that begged to be solved.

This situation was different, she decided after a moment. The innkeeper had been nothing but sweet since they arrived, and there was absolutely no ill will coming from her. She wasn't a possessed person luring Kagome away from safety to fall into one of Naraku's traps—Naraku didn't even exist in that time period. She was just a kind old woman.

And Kagome really wanted to know what she had meant by 'us.'

So without looking back, the priestess followed her hostess down the dark corridor to the very back of the River Crossing inn.

End Chapter

(Tsarashi – I'm back and college is pretty much conquered! Just a few more ends to tie up before the committee deems me worthy of my degree. It's been a rollercoaster, and I'm so glad it's finally coming to an end. Thank you all for sticking with me through these crazy, unreliable years. I appreciate you and your reviews so much!

Speaking of reviews—normally I'm not one to respond to reviews in my notes, but this particular reviewer never responds to the PMs I send, so I thought I would explain it to everybody to clear up any confusion or misdirected ire.

In this story I've mentioned that Inuyasha is 253 years old: 200 years lived pre-Kikyou, 50 years bound to the tree, and 3-4ish years since being released by Kagome. This isn't a definitive age set in stone. Occasionally I'll reference him as being 200, as that is around his 'physical' age, not including his time spent in stasis. This goes against the official guidebook that sets his age at 200, including the time bound, stating he was 150 when he met Kikyou.

The reason I aged Inuyasha up by about 50 years is because his birth does not make sense in the timeline of Japanese history. Setting the present day around 1990, Kagome is sent approximately 500 years into the past, which puts 'the past' around 1490. (However, if we take the character Amari Nobunaga into consideration, this would put them closer to 1550-1560, since he was mistaken for Oda Nobunaga. Amari acknowledges that Oda exists during that time, but insinuates that he is young and foolish, and not yet in a place of power. Oda was born 1535 and we can assume from Amari that he would currently be a teenager. But let's not do that, since it pushes out our date even further.) So 1490. If Inuyasha was bound to the tree when he was 150 years old, as the guide book says, that would put the time of his birth at 1290, around the time of the 1293 Kamakura earthquake and nearly dead center of the warring Kamakura period (1185-1333ce).

This wouldn't be a problem, except that in the scenes of Inuyasha's childhood we see the courtyards, games, people, and dress that are all highly distinctive of the Heian period of Japanese history. The Heian era was one of the world longest eras of peace for any nation, marked by lavish garments and artistic accomplishments. Female court nobles could be seen wearing heavy and ostentatious 12 layer kimonos, as we see worn by Izayoi, and the noblemen leisurely played kickball with kemari balls as a refined and dignified sport, as we see them playing when little Inuyasha tried to join in. The Heian period lasted from 794 to 1185, putting the official date of Inuyasha's birth 100 years after this period ended. When the Heian period ended, so too did the lavish and rich lives of the court nobility, falling into an era of war, chaos, and rebellion of the lower classes. The shift was drastic, and as a wealthy Heian-styled noblewoman Izayoi would not have existed in 1290.

By pushing back the date by 50 years, making Inuyasha's date of birth around 1240 or earlier, assuming he hadn't kept perfect track of his birthday, it allows a little more leeway for the cultural transition between the Heian and Kamakura. In the true Heian era, 'samurai' such as Takemaru of Setsuna would have never met the court women, and the noblemen would not have been trained as warriors, but in this transitional time we could argue that Izayoi's family is among the last of the nobles living that lifestyle and they needed to be more directly protected by their soldiers. Still a bit of a stretch, but it helps it feel a little more probable for me.

Nothing that I do is without purpose; I enjoy making things as historically accurate as possible and adding tiny little facts and details into my stories, since Japanese culture and history is what I studied for my degree. I do a lot of research, and yes, occasionally I make mistakes, but if any of you ever have a question about something, never hesitate to ask about it! I'll be more than happy to explain even the smallest of my stories' quirks. So if ever something doesn't seem quite right, or there is something that I didn't explain very well in one of my silly teaching bits, please feel free to come to me before leaving a negative review about it. There's probably some historical background to it. I love hearing your thoughts and opinions, and if I can enhance your reading experience in any way, I'm always here to help.

Until next time!)