Title: Work-A-Holic
Author: Tsubasa Kya
Disclaimer: I believe I know what this story lacks… A plot… No wonder it was so hard to write! Time to go to the Plot Buffet!! Let us pray for the welfare of this story, and that it does not turn into the next TMtt-Freaking-F. I don't own… By the way, I'm a hypocrite and once more demanding reviews, though half of you won't read this to know it.
Chapter sixteen:
Ghosts
She felt Souta lace his fingers within hers in a form of comfort, but her heart was beating too fast to be stopped. She was sure it would burst from her chest at any moment with no notice given.
"Come on, Aiko… we can't stand here and stare at it all night. You'll have to come in sometime." Souta whispered as he took the key to the front gate from his pocket. The gate was something new, she realized. It had been built sometime after she had moved away. It was a large metal laced gate that raised ten feet into the air.
"I can't," Kagome told Souta, turning her eyes away from the sight of all those stairs. She used to run up those steps three at a time just to get to the well faster. She could still see the blood that had washed those steps—no. She couldn't bring those memories back.
"Yes, you can. I promise, nothing can happen here. Gramps put his best barriers around here. No one will find you here." His words were meant to be reassuring, but they were far from it. Didn't Souta know? Didn't he understand? Grandpa Higurashi was no priest. He had no spiritual powers to speak of. His sutras were as useless as a dead cat.
Bouyou. That fat cat… he shouldn't have gotten in the way. He might still…
"Aiko… you're scaring me." Souta said, pressing himself against the grate of the gate as if it might absorb him if he tried hard enough.
Kagome pulled herself back. She apologized quietly, "I can't, Souta. I can feel… their ghosts…" Her life was falling apart. She was falling apart. Souta didn't understand what she had to go through, and she knew he didn't mean anything by it either, but he was pushing her too hard toward something she wasn't ready to deal with.
"There's no such thing as ghosts, Aiko." Souta said. A droplet of blood dripped from his nose and she realized why he was afraid of her. She was too big for him. Her spirit, that is. It was too big, and standing here in a place of her old memories both good and bad—all repressed—was making her soul reach out. It wanted her to touch upon those memories, but she did only what she wanted to.
She turned away from the shrine to walk away, but somehow her feet were climbing the steps, one by one. She heard the whispers of voices. She heard the sounds of people long dead as she walked up, and she could see their faces turning toward her. "Kagome… why did you do it?" asked a lonely monk.
"I never thought for a minute that you would betray us…" whispered a sad woman with a boomerang on her back and a tiny kitten in her arms. The two-tailed cat mewled and the sound brought Kagome to tears. She walked up more steps. There, waiting at the top of the stairs, was a man with cold golden eyes and not a single laugh line to be seen on his features.
She stumbled on the very last step at the sight of him. He did not have the feel of the ghost standing beside him. The man and the ghost harbored similar features. The ghost was looking at the man with utter hate etched into every line and groove of his face.
The ghost turned to Kagome and whispered—unheard by the man, "You were his. I died for you!" The man did not catch Kagome as she stumbled. She fell to her knees and her pristine suit-skirt tore at the hem. "I died for you." The ghost screamed.
Kagome blinked back damp tears, and the man and ghosts were gone; Souta was helping her to her feet. "Did you see them?" she demanded of Souta. "They were here!"
Souta shook his head. "No one is here, Aiko. I think you're just tired…"
Kagome fought against Souta. "I'm not tired! I have to leave. I have to leave now. Let me go!"
Souta ground his teeth together, but he released her. He let her go hard and she fell to the ground. Souta snapped, "There's nothing here! Stop acting like that!"
Kagome sat up in bed, panting heavily as the darkness of the room descended on her and her alarm clocks blared in her ears. She sat there, attempting to calm herself for a moment from the nightmare she should not have had. Her body pouring sweat, she left the warmth of the bed for the cold air.
Her window was open, she saw. She crossed to it, still painfully aware that four clocks were screaming at her. For a moment, she peered out the window, her head spinning as she tried to focus on something other than the nightmare.
Souta was outside, sitting on the bench under the Goshinboku tree, with what looked to be a giant bowl of pudding in his hands. He ate it slowly while his eyes watched the stairs leading down from the shrine to the city. Shuichi had said a few days, but it had been two weeks already since his departure.
Kagome went and shut off her alarms and then showered in cold water. She might have hot water now, but there was no point in making herself comfortable, was there? She dressed for yet another day of job-searching. It was hard to make ends meet, but she was receiving checks from a benefactor to pay bills and only Souta had been able to convince her to use the money.
She hadn't wanted to, knowing it was from Sesshoumaru as he attempted to get on her good side. He wanted her to heal his son, and he came twice a week to demand she do so. But he never brought up the issue of money and how he gave her some and she used it. He could have, but for some reason he did not.
Once she had a steady job that would pay the bills, she could ignore the checks. "Return to sender" on every one that came. She sighed and went to make her patient's breakfast. When she got into his room, he looked at her from his wheelchair by the window.
He'd learned quickly if he made her mad she would leave him and not return until the next day. The day before, he'd made her very angry at lunch time, so she'd left him in his wheelchair rather than helping him back into the bed where he would at least be a bit comfortable.
She set his breakfast on the table in the room and stepped aside as he wheeled over with a glowering look on his features. He didn't get supper the night before, so she supposed he was smartly keeping his mouth shut. She leaned on the edge of the sturdy old table, her proximity to him close enough that he would be able to reach out and grab her if he wanted.
"Going to tell me about the Hell Dragon yet?" she asked him. He'd kept his mouth tightly closed on that issue, even though he'd said he would tell her all she wanted to know.
His hand quivered on the spoon in anger before he turned angry crimson eyes on her. "Do you enjoy torturing me, woman?" he hissed.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," she responded evenly. She moved to leave him, but he dropped the spoon and grabbed her thigh in a powerful grip, stopping her. She glanced at him, knowing more than he clearly did how that touch was dragging the ghosts in.
Twisting away from pain as he pinned her to red sheets and sliced open her body… writhing away from his touch as he attempted tenderness before he was angered and pulled her close, biting her, clawing at her even as he raped her and her body simply a mess as he left her on the red silk, red as much from dye as blood.
"You have no idea?" he sneered, his crimson eyes flickering in the light emitted by a candle—but that wasn't right… there were no candles… Was it another memory? Another ghost to haunt her? No, she thought as she looked around the room. It had changed, shifted, as if time had split and this was far back. "I think you know damn well what I'm talking about!"
She pulled away from him, falling to a heap on the floor. She wrung her hands together. "What's going on?" she thought aloud. This wasn't right. The room seemed similar, but the lights were now emitting from the glow of candles in simple wall sconces.
He turned his wheelchair to her. His anger was clear. "You're doing this… You want to know why I came looking for you? You of all people?" She did want to know. It had been at the forefront of her mind every time she looked at her patient after hearing Souta's story that the demon was looking for her and had sought him out to do it. She'd asked Hiei why—why her? Hadn't gotten an answer.
Hiei scowled. "Of course, you won't remember, because you refuse to accept anything that happened! But I came looking for you, because you told me to find you. Now, I realize this would never have happened if I hadn't come looking for you. I am paralyzed because of you."
She felt her jaw crash open, and stared up at him from her place on the floor. "And you? You won't bother to heal me, when you could as easily as I could set this place aflame…" he finished in a low voice. He turned back to his breakfast meal, but didn't eat it. He did not look at her as he spoke his next words. "You are not the woman I knew."
She looked around the room. The candles were still there. Hiei's life monitors were not. There were no light switches. The bed that had once been a western-style frame with a mattress and box spring was now a futon on the floor.
She did this? How did she do it? She didn't remember doing it.
Kagome hurried out of the room, and as she was closing the door, she saw everything was back to the way it had been before. The candles were replaced by modern electricity. The futon with a modern bed. The monitors were back. And he still refused to look at her.
She closed the door and locked it, as she always did, so he couldn't leave the room. She couldn't face the past, and he brought it upon her, so she confined him to the one room. She left him there, so she could face him only when she was ready. He could not come upon her unbidden.
I came because you told me to… The words, so innocent, she could not remember him. She could not remember telling anyone to find her. They were dead. All of them died. They died because she had a lust for power. They died because she was with Naraku. But what happened? What happened to get her away from Naraku? She could remember one minute, it was Naraku who ripped her apart by night, and flaunted her by day. Then the next minute it was Sesshoumaru and he was taking her out of the slave pens.
She didn't want to care. She wanted to believe she had no emotion for this, that it didn't matter. But how could she continue to tell herself that? The ghosts wanted to be remembered; they'd demanded they be brought back into her life with every passing moment.
And what the hell did she do to the room? Why did it suddenly feel as though she'd once more passed through the boundaries of time? Her life, was it all just a farce? Was she made simply to make a wish? Was she made to become the Shikon no Tama?
Yes… She was able to compose herself around the answer, so simple, yet so permanent. And then she saw her brother, sitting alone outside waiting for his lover to return. It wouldn't work out… life never did. It dished out unfairness like it were pasta.
She decided it was time to tell Souta. Brushing herself free of imaginary dust, she stepped out into the cool morning air. It was only five AM, but there Souta sat, eating his pudding with a lonely look on his face. She sat next to him, but he didn't see Kagome sitting there, he saw only Aiko.
It was a difference that stung for reasons on many levels. Kagome Higurashi was an object, but Aiko Soruisa was a person. Why?
She didn't even have to say anything before Souta was talking to her. "I never felt about anyone like I feel about Shuichi. He works, and he always, always has a new game for one of my game consoles for me when he comes back. He likes watching me play my games. Is that weird?"
Kagome smiled at her brother and took the spoon from him, dipping it in the extra large bowl and eating a bit of the chocolate pudding. "It's not weird, but are you sure you know what you're doing?"
Souta shook his head. "I have no clue what I'm doing. He asked me to marry him. He said he wanted me forever. I just said yes without thinking. I know I'm not doing the wrong thing, but I still don't know what I'm doing." He began dipping his finger in the bowl to eat the pudding since she had his spoon. "I have college to go to, I know, but I already decided to give that up when you came back."
"You don't need to give up anything on my expense, Souta…" Kagome whispered.
Souta laughed sadly, "You're right… I don't need to, Aiko… But you gave up everything for me… I could at least be around to help."
She opened her mouth to say she didn't give up anything, even though it would be a lie, but noise stole her attention. The glass bowl of pudding fell out of Souta's hands and shattered on the ground. Kagome looked to see what he was looking at; Shuichi was being carried up the stairs in the gray of dawn by a tall, lanky orange haired man and a slightly shorter man with greasy black hair.
Neither of the other two looked in any sort of good condition, and Kagome recognized them as the two who had been in Morissey Park. If the two men carrying Shuichi looked bad, Kagome frowned at Shuichi's form. She knew it was him. The bright red hair made it obvious, but he was covered in blood and his right side was mangled.
Souta panicked as the men carried Shuichi closer, he fainted at the sight of the blood. Kagome caught her brother, barely saving him from a painful encounter with pudding covered glass shards. She laid him on the bench carefully and then made her way to Shuichi and the two men, who stopped.
"He told us to bring him here," said the black haired man. Kagome sighed but nodded.
"Bring him inside." Who did this? She wanted to know… She glanced back at her brother, unconscious on the bench, and wanted answers to the question of who would harm her brother's life, even indirectly through his lover. She discarded the fact that she had been about to tell her brother Shuichi's secret, that he was a demon, and there was a chance that would have killed her brother's love for the man.
Once inside, Kagome led them to the kitchen where she had them lay Shuichi on the table. The kitchen lights turned on, she took a knife from the drawer and cut away Shuichi's clothes, carefully peeling it away from his wounds. His right leg may be beyond help, she found quickly, and his right arm was a mess of ground flesh and bone—also out of her current abilities to do anything about.
But his torso would heal without too much damage and probably just be scarred, if she could sew the wounds up fast enough. She cursed the fact that she was no longer employed by a hospital where she had access to equipment that would be very helpful at that moment. But he wanted her to help him, and focusing in on him and his wounds was what she needed to push the ghosts away.
Her anger was building, however. The two men sat down on the other side of the table while she worked, cleaning and sterilizing the wounds before she sewed the wounds shut using thick thread and a regular sewing needle. They too needed attention, but at present, Shuichi was her main objective.
"Who did this?" she demanded heatedly. She hadn't felt this angry in years… since before the well sealed itself. The two men glanced at each other, as if unsure whether or not they should speak about it. Kagome merely said, "Tell me, or so help me, your next enemy will be me."
They must have seen something in her that said she was talking 'business' then, because the black haired one spoke up, "A demon named Hanagi. We've been tracking him for a few weeks now." Kagome packed that name away in her mind. She had no choice now… she would have to accept history, if only to be fully prepared for the future…
She looked down at the needle with disdain. She was running out of thread, and he was running out of blood. She positioned her hands over his heart and knew she would regret this by morning. She let the ghosts come at her. They came one by one, but with their coming, she could access the powers of the Shikon no Tama—what she was.
"Inuyasha," she breathed, her body shuddering as he reached out to embrace her. This dream was different somehow, from the other nightmares. She wasn't horrified by him, like she should be. "Don't you hate me? Aren't you disgusted by what I am?"
He laughed quietly, his breath a whisper in her ear. "Disgusted? Woman, you've seen me eat… you should know nothing disgusts me." She couldn't find it in herself to smile at that. He held her for a moment longer before releasing her to brush her shoulders off. "You know what I think?" he asked her.
She shook her head. She didn't know if she wanted to know. She didn't know if she could handle it.
"I think you need to be with your family now… as Kagome. I think you need to give up this game of hiding. You need to stop thinking we hate you. We all made mistakes, and you won't even let yourself remember your own mistake properly. Stop torturing yourself."
Inuyasha faded away, but Sango came next, racing across the planes of sleep to greet Kagome in a far more cheerful manner than any other dream. There was no blood on her face this time. She smiled happily, and grabbed Kagome's hand, twining her fingers in Kagome's.
"You'll never guess what happened?" Sango beamed, pulling Kagome toward a strange grassy plane that Kagome never before had seen in her dreams. People swarmed here and there, as if it were their home. They were building homes, and had the light of hope shining in their eyes. A new beginning.
"What is this place?" Kagome asked, having a strange feeling she already knew.
Sango sighed happily as she looked around. "This is the place you made for us, Kagome. This is the world you created, with your wish, so that we could live a new life in happiness. This is the reason you became the Shikon no Tama, so to guard our lives forever."
Kagome frowned. "I'm inside the Shikon no Tama?"
Sango shrugged. "We've been waiting for a visit from you, but you've stayed away for so long we thought you would never come." A little boy tugged on Sango's kimono hem. He was rather cute, with silver hair and puppy ears like Inuyasha, but he had Sango's chocolate eyes for some reason.
Sango smiled ruefully as she picked up the boy. "Turns out, Miroku is sterile, and so…" a blush stained her cheeks, "Inuyasha donated…"
Kagome couldn't help but smile. "I would have never guessed… How did Miroku take that?"
"Actually, it was Miroku's idea to ask Inuyasha. He said he would rather it be him, if it had to be anyone. Inuyasha was skeptical, at first, and actually didn't know what he was agreeing to until after he said he would. When he found out what he would have to do, it was so funny—he fainted." Sango introduced the boy, "Kagome, meet my son, Kagome. Kagome, this is your aunt. She's the one who made our world."
The boy stared at Kagome for a long moment before beaming happily. "Hewwo auntie 'Gome! I'm 'Gome too."
Kagome hugged her shoulders. "I'm glad my wish came true…" she said quietly as Sango trotted away, down to the grassy plane that held a village filled with people. Next came Miroku, walking at his usual sedate pace.
"Hello, Lady Kagome," Miroku said as he came to stand beside her, overlooking this village. He grinned lecherously, but said nothing of the thoughts he had before she felt something squeezing her bottom. She scooted away and he sighed but didn't move to follow. "How are you?"
"Mentally unfit to be a part of society. I'm talking to dead people in my sleep. How do you think I am?" she couldn't help but laugh at his expression. "I'm better now than I have been in ten years." She amended.
"That's good," he leaned on his staff and for a few minutes they were quite, standing on the edge of what appeared to be a world Kagome made with her wish. She couldn't remember making a world, only a sense of desire for power. That was all she remembered. Miroku corrected her, however. "You wished to become the Shikon no Tama, to keep it out of Naraku's hands, Lady Kagome. Inuyasha and Shippou… they can access your dreams whereas we humans cannot, and they see your fears."
Kagome shook her head violently, willing this dream to stay a good one. It had been so very long since she'd had one of those. "It was power…" she breathed, her heart clenching tightly, "It was power that I sought, and power that I bought using my humanity as payment."
"No, Lady Kagome," Miroku chuckled, as if they were talking of the weather. "You still have your humanity… you may be endless, but you still have the power of choice. Because of your love for us, you gave up your mortality to protect this world that you made for the victims of what you are now, the victims of the Shikon no Tama, the victims of Naraku."
Kagome shook her head again. "It cannot be true!"
"You are a compassionate creature, Lady Kagome, and you have always been. You help those who are sick and in need. You guard us, here in your world, the world you created. Humans, demons, we live peacefully for the most part, but when something threatens us in our small village, none are afraid to pick up arms and fight, to protect you as much as us."
"But… this means you are alive, but I saw you die! All of you!"
"Lady Kagome," Miroku stood up straight, shrugging his shoulders, "we were dead, but now we are alive…" he pointed to a distant horizon, and she could see something that was flickering red and pink, not the sunset but more magical. "That is the barrier to the world in which you reside… This is the world you created…" he sighed. "Come visit us more often… we've waited so long for you…"
Kagome's eyes opened slowly. She was, for once, not drenched in sweat, but she lay on the kitchen floor. It felt as if a huge, heavy burden had been lifted off her shoulders. A man with cuts on his face looked down at her.
"Are you okay?" she heard the man say as he helped her to her feet. She saw that Shuichi was lying on the table, mostly undressed, but his wounds were almost gone completely.
"I think so…" she breathed before moving to examine Shuichi. His leg, though healed, probably would never be walked on straight again, but he was alive. "My brother… where's my brother?" she asked.
"I'm here, Aiko," Souta said quietly, leaving a dark corner of the kitchen. Kagome reached out and took her brother in her arms, and felt him return the embrace with fervor. "Thank you," he whispered.
Kagome frowned. 'Don't thank me yet… You may hate me in days to come… but I swear this Hanagi will pay.' She thought. Her eyes met the brown orbs of the black haired man and he nodded decisively.
"Kuwa, come on. We'll come back later." The two left, and Kagome knew there was one person she needed to talk to… very soon. It was strange, how something as simple as an evil creature like Hanagi could help her accept the ghosts, if indeed that was what she had done.
She still had to come to terms with the past if she was to be able to use her powers to their full potential though. She could feel they were barely being used. If he knew something, he could help. If he could help… maybe she could heal him like he asked. But he would have to cooperate.
This chapter has also been read and approved by Ancient-Relic. Once more, thanks is completely deserved, Anci!! And I shall indeed take your recommendation! Don't worry about taking longer to get at this; it's completely understandable. Besides... I got more reviews while waiting... hehe...
Next chapter: Hiei let his face wash with the fierce raindrops, hating himself for a past he had no control over. More than anything, he wanted to kill her for making a fool of him. He wanted to break free of the chains that tied him to a chair with wheels. And yet, when the dog visits him with a proposition, one that will free him... he finds himself at a crossroad... can he do what is asked of him, even to regain independency?