In which the author admits to being an abject failure.
The more years pass without me updating DLDL, the less it seems like it's going to happen. I've got bits and pieces written, and I may post them someday, but until then, I might as well spoil the rest of the fic, publishing a rough outline of how it was going to go so anyone who was still wondering can learn where it was headed.
1. The thing with Kagome and wolves:
The Higurashi family has two shrines, one is the home of Goshinboku and the other is on an ancestral land deep in the mountains. The mountain shrine is presided over by the family matriarch while the patriarch is in charge of Goshinboku. The mountain shrine is said by legend to be the home of the Wolf King, a deity taller than the trees, with steel fangs and silver claws, black fur made of storm clouds and eyes lit from within like the hottest blue lightning. The Wolf King is more or less considered myth, but it's indisputable that a pack of wolves will shadow the Shrinekeeper whenever she or a female member of her family walks through those isolated woods. They keep just barely out of sight except for the very edges of one's vision.
Kagome's grandmother is the mountain shrine's matriarch, and baby!Kagome stays with her some weeks every summer. One year she has a health crisis while she and toddler-Kagome are deep in the woods, no sign of human civilization around for tens of miles. The Wolf King appears to them, and a friendly semi-supernatural pack of shadow wolves spawned from the Wolf King carry little-Kagome to a police box on the outskirts of the nearest civilization. Her survival is considered an unexplained miracle by the rest of the family. Kagome vaguely remembers the stormy Wolf King and the pack that brought her back to civilization, but she doesn't dwell on it. This is why she has no fear of wolves.
…
2. The thing with daiyoukai and hanyou:
Daiyoukai tend to be pretty full of themselves, and want to reproduce only with someone of a similar stature, which leads to Bad Things when different kinds of 'pure' demon are mixed. The resulting offspring are mentally or physically unstable. Sesshomaru is as powerful as any demon can get and remain stable. (He's a Dog/Death hybrid.)
Kouga has a bit of Storm Demon in him (in fact, he's distantly related to the Thunder Brothers, though he considers them worthless punks.) This explains his tendency to create whirlwinds and his immunity to lightning (which shows up once when he uses that otherwise useless sword to draw away an electric attack from hitting Kagome.) This is also how he survives Kagura's wind attacks without getting as shredded as the other Yourouzoku.
(Kagome doesn't make any connection between him and her childhood encounter with the Wolf King because she's kind of dense like that.)
This brings us to hanyou. If crossing two kinds of youkai is tricky, and more than that is Always Bad, how do you think crossing youkai and human will go?
There are two types of hanyou, and both are cursed. One type are cursed on the outside – are hideous malformed creatures that can never be allowed in such a beauty-obsessed society as Japan. The other type are cursed on the inside – they are as beautiful as any full-demon, but as soon as they reach a certain age (approximately puberty), they go berserk and start killing everything around them until they are killed or they eventually destroy themselves. THIS is the reason hanyou are so ostracized, rather than simple pure bigotry. Before Tessaiga breaks, Inuyasha seems to be singularly lucky to somehow miraculously escape that fate. (Miroku had some angst early in their journey, traveling with them at first because he thought he would have to use the wind tunnel on Inuyasha Very Soon. He is both relieved and confused when he learns Inuyasha's age and apparent immunity to the Hanyou's Curse.)
After Tessaiga breaks it becomes clear that instead of Inuyasha being exempt, the the Inu no Taisho had created Tessaiga to safeguard his and Izayoi's child from the Hanyou's Curse. This leads to the ONE AND ONLY Tessaiga Upgrade arc.
…
3. Naraku and the Shikon Jewel:
Kagome's influence spurs Kouga to retrieve the Goraishi far earlier than in canon. Kouga with Goraishi and Inuyasha with Tessaiga dispatch Naraku after an epic!battle, and the various groups bring the rest of the Jewel Shards together. Kikyou gives her (un)life to save Kohaku in a similar situation to canon, and the Jewel is finally complete. Kagome tries to wish the jewel away, but it doesn't work because she WANTS the jewel gone so it's not a pure unselfish wish. She similarly can't revive the people killed by Naraku and the other deaths over the Shikon Shards, because that would make her friends and a lot of other people happy and therefore make her happy vicariously, so it wouldn't be an unselfish wish either.
Eventually they figure out that the unselfish wish is to bring back all the souls that Kikyou and her shinidamachuu had consumed and destroyed fueling her second unlife, sending those souls on to their next reincarnation. This puts right a grievous wrong without any possible selfish benefit, and the jewel vanishes when the wish is made.
…
4. Goshinboku and Ash:
After the wish is made, Kagome discovers to her horror that the magic well doesn't work anymore. She is trapped in the past. She does her best to cope with this… but then she gets sick.
I hadn't decided whether she specifically gets tuberculosis or if I would leave it as some generic coughing-and-wasting illness that was slowly killing her. There may or may not have been some kind of subplot about magic ceasing to work as soon as the scientific explanation is known to humans, so her explaining germ theory to Miroku or Kaede meant that magical methods couldn't help her (or anyone else) anymore.
Kagome makes her peace with dying, but the others aren't so complacent. Inuyasha discovers the symbolic meaning of the scar on Goshinboku's bark under where his body was for the last 50 years. It turns out Goshinboku had 'accepted' Inuyasha as a part of itself during those fifty years, and still considered Inuyasha to be part of it. Through some complicated means, if Inuyasha "fused" with the tree, and permanently rejoined it, he could open the well for Kagome one last time. He and Kouga decide to do this, not informing her about it of course since she would obviously tell Inuyasha to preserve his own independent life and consciousness instead of sending her back to the future when she'd already made her peace with dying.
Inuyasha fuses with the tree, and the scar on the bark vanishes, Kouga grabs Kagome and jumps into the well at the critical moment, sending her back to her own time. But the well's power isn't enough for him to go with her. Back in the present, she is unspeakably distraught and pissed off and sick and dying at the bottom of the well. Her family finds her before anything too bad can happen, and they get her to a hospital where she recovers.
When she comes back from the hospital, Kagome finds puppy!Ash in the roots of Goshinboku. Ash's real nature is kind of complicated to describe, but one way to say is that he's a 'placeholder' for Inuyasha. He represents the part of Inuyasha that wasn't completely subsumed into the tree. Ash has Inuyasha's eyes and a reflection of his mind and personality, but in many other ways he is a real dog.
…
5. The girls stuck in a hole:
The friends have been secretly rolling their eyes for a while now, since Kagome hasn't remotely stuck to her "magical mirror" invention for her explanation of traveling to the past, and they're realizing that the craziness she just told them was what had actually happened those years ago. They finally reconcile, and then ta-da! Ash is back, and behind him is a black wolf, taller even than the trees, with fur made of black storm clouds and electric blue eyes!
Kouga transforms back into humanoid form and helps the girls out of the pit. He explains that he can't get too close to civilization and can't even maintain his human form for very long. It's taxing him even to leave the shrine's sacred grounds. He leaves after a brief smooch and the girls head back to civilization.
…
6. Okami and The Spirit Gate
The final part of the fic is a crossover with the game Okami. (If you haven't played it, you really should. That game is pure beauty.) This will all make more sense you've played through it a time or three XD. (Alternatively… read a walkthrough? Or a youtube vid of someone else playing the relevant parts?)
Goshinboku turns out to be one of the Konohana Tree offshoots. Kagome travels with Ash to modern!Kamiki village, where Sakuya opens the portal in the mother tree's roots, and they enter a 'river of the heavens' area much like the one in the game. Instead of Nagi, the statue at the end of the path is of Inuyasha. Ash does something similar to what Inuyasha did with Goshinboku, and touches the statue to 'fuse' with it, and in a flash of light, Inuyasha's normal form is laid out on the ground in front of Kagome.
But all is not well. He is unconscious and obviously having trouble, like the very air itself is trying to harm him. In an act of desperation, Kagome drags him over to the river of stardust and submerges him to try and keep him from the air. Luckily, this is exactly what he needed, as the stardust replaces his demon heritage with the blood of divinity, so instead of a hanyou he's a sort of demigod, which the air of the modern world is somewhat less hostile to. He's awake and not in immediate danger at any rate.
Long story short – they go find Kouga, and the three of them decide to leave this world, for one that isn't actively hostile to the existence of 2/3 of them. After Kagome says goodbye to her family, the three of them find and enter Yoshpet Forest, pick up Myoga in Ponc'tan (of course he's a Poncle!), and Myoga opens the Spirit Gate (which he had long ago sent Sesshomaru through) and the four of them pass through it and enter a new world.
The end!