A/N: So a reader made a comment about how she didn't like how she couldn't tell the flashbacks from present day dialogue. Well… I had been kind of been trying to create that effect, but I guess its just a little too frustrating, eh? So from now on, any memories or flashbacks will be put in their own individual sections, as in surrounded by those weird bar line things that I put to separate author's notes and disclaimers from actual text, and will also be italicized. As usual, present thoughts (not in flashbacks) will be put into italics, and regular dialogue in regular font. Okie dokie?

Disclaimer: No recognizable material belongs to me.

Kagome scrambled on the loose rock, headed for the valley that she knew she wasn't going to reach in time. The gravel was slipping away from beneath her feet, no matter where she stepped, as if she were running on water.

She heard herself cry out as her ankle twisted painfully the wrong way, again. She caught herself roughly, grabbing onto a root jutting out above her head. Her feet flew out from underneath her, and she let herself hang for a moment, heavy as lead, barely breathing.

Cautiously lowering herself back down, she tried to find something stable.

As she tested the ground, she tried to stop her breath and hands from shaking when she exhaled. One of these times, she was just going to run out of luck, and fall down the rest of the mountain, arms and legs flying and snapping like baby toys under the wheel of a mover truck. But no way was she getting back up again.

Her only chance was to go down.

That is, if she could even call it a 'chance'. It was more like suicide.

And, for once, Kagome wasn't trying to escape.

She was chasing down her two kidnappers, now that they'd finally left her alone. Proving to her that there was something very, very wrong with this world. But she couldn't help it.

Kagome let out another shriek as she slipped and crashed backwards, her body hitting the ground slamming the air out of her lungs before she rocketed forwards. When she hit a huge boulder planted in the slope, she felt her body splinter on impact. But she didn't care. She was alive. There was a new tear in her dress that ran all the way up to her thigh, and every square inch of her skin stung from being ripped raw against gravel. "Oh… my god." Kagome said slowly, through gasping breaths, her hair fallen into her face, she could barely see. "Why am I doing this?!?" She forced the panic and shaking into her voice and exploded it out of her tattered lungs, adrenaline still pumping through her veins until she was ready to break.

When she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye, she screamed loudly.

A man had popped out of seemingly nowhere, and was staring at her rather quizzically, as if he were some sort of curious squirrel. "I don't know." He said quite honestly, staring at her, tilting his head. "Why are you doing this?"

Kagome stuttered numbly, taking in the man's frighteningly wolf-like appearance. He had a strange hairstyle - silver and gray patched - and bright brown eyes. And what the heck was he doing here?

"Do you need help?" He asked.

Kagome just made a little sound that not even she could identify. It was like a really little high-pitched "uh" thing. And though her hands were still raw at her sides from scraping against the rock, she was too stunned to feel the pain.

The young man seemed to scrutinize her carefully and then spoke again, "You know, you'd better get off the mountain. The wolves are getting hungry. We try to keep them from eating humans now but…"

Ok. If he was trying to calm her down, he really wasn't doing such a great job. "I've been trying." she said, slight irritation irking her voice.

"Oh. Right." The man smiled and bashfully rubbed the back of his head. "I forgot that it's harder for you humans."

Kagome bit her tongue to keep herself from shouting at him. 'Oh, Ya think?!'

Immediately, another head popped out from around the corner. This one with a white mow hawk and even brighter, more wolf-like eyes. "Ginta!" He shouted.

"Ahh!" Kagome screamed again.

"Waaah!" The man screamed right back at her.

Ginta seemed startled at first, but he managed to keep his cool. "Hikkaku!" He scolded.

"Oh... It's just a human!" Hikakku said, after recovering from his scream, slightly out of breath.

Kagome herself was also breathing heavily, and refrained from the sudden urge to scream at him: "Oh it's just a bunch of physcos hiding out on a mountain and popping out of rocks!" But instead she just bit her tongue and decided to take very deep breaths.

"Listen, are you sure you're alright?" The first man, Ginta, said, pushing his companion aside. "It's gonna take you forever to try to get down like this."

Kagome stared down at the mountainside, and it was like a death sentence. No kidding.

"Do you want help?" Ginta asked again.

"Ginta!" The second man yelled. "You knowKoga won't like that!"

"Koga doesn't eat humans anymore!" Ginta defended.

Kagome felt the shiver run down her spine. 'Doesn't eat them "anymore"?' As in like… he used to?

"Yeah, but still!" Hikkaku insisted.

Kagome watched as the men began to fight and decided to nip it in the bud. "Actually," She said, "some help would be great." She smiled, moving her hair out of her face and flipping it over her shoulder.

Big mistake.

"Ah…?"

"Ah!"

"AH!"

Kagome watched in puzzlement as the men's expressions simultaneously moved to utter shock, surprise, and finally blood-chilling horror.

"GHOST!" The two men shrieked, their voices escalating to impossible, almost girly pitches as they're eyes turned to bowling balls. They grabbed onto each other, turned around, and in seconds they were gone.

Needless to say the smile had not had its desired effect.

"Wh-what?" Kagome sat, shocked, before she became offended. "HEY!" She called after them, now angry and more than a little offended. "I'm not a ghost!"

OoOoOoOoOoO

"I'm sick of this." Inuyasha said, wiping a line of blood from his cheek. "Look, Koga-"

"If you apologize to me now, you're dead."

Inuyasha laughed bitterly. "Funny." He said. "Thought I already was dead."

"Shut up." Koga grated out.

When Inuyasha crash landed into the dirt, his shoulder popped the wrong way, and when he stood again, he found himself re-locating it into its socket. It cracked loudly. "Ok." He got up raggedly and smiled grimly at the wolf prince. "That kind of hurt." He said, his expression all hard angles and shadows. "But only a little." He smirked.

Koga grit his teeth, lunged forwards, and smashed his fist into Inuyasha's face. The hanyou immediately locked his hands around Koga's forearm and sunk his teeth hard into the muscle, the taste of blood spurting into his mouth. He resisted the urge to spit.

Koga grunted in pain and ripped his arm out of the hanyou's mouth, holding it gingerly as he delivered a kick to Inuyasha's groin. The hanyou doubled over for a moment, and then charged forwards. The fight was just beginning. And he still hadn't drawn the Tetsuigia.

"Koga." Inuyasha grit out as he pinned the older man down into the dirt. "This – is – ludicrous."

"Is it?" Koga asked, his eyes narrowing as he threw Inuyasha over his shoulders and rolled up to a stand again. "Is it so 'ludicrous' that I want to protect someone I care about?"

Inuyasha's fang pierced his lip, and his glare turned to electric poison.

"You had your chance, half breed." Koga spat. "And you blew it."

"I know." Inuyasha answered, getting up and finally, and drawing his sword. Koga's eyes narrowed. "But just because I screwed it up once, it does not mean that I'm giving up!" He charged, only to have Koga dodge and he turned on his heel. "I sure as hell am not giving up!" Inuyasha pulled out the blood from a chest wound and cracked his knuckles into stiff shapes. "And if you can't deal with that, then get out of my way! Blades of Blood!"

He slashed. And the two men's blood slapped on the grass, mixed and mingled into a darker shade of red.

OoOoOoO

"Is it really her?" Hikakku asked from behind his hiding place, a short, scraggily bush.

"I'm not sure." His companion answered, crouched down next to him behind the same bush.

"I mean, it can't be her!"

"Yeah…" Ginta leaned forwards and peered through their pathetic coverage of witling leaves. "But at the same time, it has to be!"

"Could she have come back to life?" Hikkaku questioned.

"I don't know… I suppose so. It happened to that other girl, didn't it? Oh, Kiki or something?"

"Oh. Right. Kiko."

"Yeah. That one."

Still unconvinced, the two men squatted low on their heels and watched as Kagome scrambled down loose gravel. If she weren't so engrossed in keeping herself alive, she probably could have spotted them in an instant.

They still caught the off exclamations of "Jerks!", "How dare they?" and the ever offended "Do I look like a ghost?!?"

"Do you think we should help her?"

"I don't know… she seems kind of scary."

"EEK!"

"Yeah… A bit." Hikakku agreed.

"Lets give her a few minutes to calm down. Then we'll offer to help her."

"…Ok."

The two men squatted low on their heels, and continued to watch. Too bad Kagome happened to catch them out of the corner of her eye. "Hey!" She rounded on them in a second. "You two!"

The wolf-men gasped as she stepped directly onto a rock that they knew wouldn't hold. "DON'T!" They both screamed at the same time, springing up from their hiding places.

A look of brief shock crossed over Kagome's face for a moment, and then the rock broke free. She was free falling.

The two men darted out onto the gravel, darting across it effortlessly, as if it were as solid as level pavement. Pebbled cascaded down the mountains in their twin wakes, as if they were running on water.

Expertly they reached up, caught her falling figure as if they'd done it a million times, sliding downwards on the loose gravel. Kagome could only stared dumbly as the ground their heels into the mountain face and slid to an easy stop.

"Phew." The one with spikey hair, who held to her lower half, grinned at her toothily. "That was kind of close."

"No kidding." Path-guy replied, holding onto her upper body. "What made you step on that rock like that? It was a horrible move."

Kagome was still stunned.

"Hey… do you, smell that?" Ginta suddenly grew stiff, his voice quiet.

The spikey haired man grew rigid beside his partner, and, for a moment, Kagome was reminded perfectly of a pair of wolves who had caught onto the scent of something alarming. Their eyes sharpened, and she could have sworn that the hair on the spike-guy's head raised slightly.

"It's… Koga."

"And Inuyasha."

"And it smells like…"

"Blood."

That snapped Kagome out of it. "Hey," She said softly, and the two men looked down at her. "Could you take me down there?" She asked.

"What!" The first exclaimed. "Are you crazy!?"

"It's where I want to go." Kagome said firmly. "I need to get down there."

She saw the uncertainty in their eyes.

"I… I don't know."

"Please." She pleaded, fisting her hand in the man's skin. "I need to get down there. If you bring me back up to the cave I'll only try again."

They looked at her, obviously torn. Before the spikey-haired one finally sighed, defeat. The other was the one who gave her their answer.

"Fine."

When she reached them, there was blood everywhere. She nearly wretched at the smell of it, pasted onto the ground, almost as badly as it had been with the ogre. When she saw the two men she almost felt her heart shrink deeper into her ribcage, painfully. They were covered in it, smears of blood ran along their arms, legs, faces. She wished she hadn't been there to see it.

Now what?

Now that she had gotten here, what was it that she had planned on doing? Throwing herself heroically between them? Saving the day? Somehow making everything right? She was the last person who could ever be expected to do something like that…

She was the one who was the most messed up, out of all of them. What difference had she expected herself to be able to make?

Inuyasha cried out in pain and shook her to her core. She watched, detached, and tried to force herself to remember that he was the one who had betrayed her. He was the man who she couldn't … who she had to kill to…

"Stop it." She said softly. But no one replied. "STOP!" she screamed it, and they didn't even hear her… she was there wasn't she? She was… real.

She bit back tears and watched, with every movement she watched and every deadly tear that cut through their skin she felt herself grow farther and farther away from them. To Ginta and Hikakku, she appeared to be almost catatonic.

"Hey… is she okay?" Ginta whispered.

"I don't know." Was the answer. They looked at her warily, but said nothing.

Kagome's stare was ghostly detached; eyes as hollow as shells, her expression… too much like Kikyo's had been. For a moment, Kagome Higurashi might as well have been a ghost.

It was some point during the middle of the battle when Inuyasha noticed her standing there, far enough so that he could see her expression, but not close enough to be able to reach her. She stood on the shore of the river, watching. He couldn't stand for her to see something like this. "Kagome!" He reached out, and started towards her.

Koga whirled around, startled, and saw her as well. When Inuyasha started running, the wolf threw himself into the hanyou's path, knocking his rival in love to the side, and then pinning him down to the ground. "You – don't – touch – her." He threatened, snarling like a wild animal. Any energy he had lost was suddenly regained at the reminder of the girl standing on the shore.

Inuyasha glared. "Koga get off."

"No."

"GET OFF!" Inuyasha broke his left fist free of Koga's grip and smashed Koga's jaw. His knuckles stung red afterwards, but he ignored the pain. When he was halfway across the ground, Koga had him again.

"As long as I'm standing, hanyou, you don't go near her."

Inuyasha looked down at him, irritated, and then turned to Kagome. It was then that he caught her hollow eyes, the way she stared at him and seemed… empty. He felt the pain flit through his body, and it wasn't from any of the injuries Koga had wrought him. This one was Kagome's alone…

"Get off me!" He kicked back viciously and Koga went sprawling backwards, blood in his mouth.

He leapt into the air, towards her, and she watched him approach, her expression barely changing. On the ground, Koga pushed his shaking form up from the ground. "I said no!"

"Ah!"

It felt like he was being crippled. Below him, Kagome came a little bit more alive, as she watched Koga's vicious kick come slamming down into Inuyasha's spine in mid-air.

She tried to force herself to take a step forward… but… the numbness that rang through her body kept herself from moving. She hated Inuyasha. For betraying her. She needed something to end. She needed someone to go. She couldn't afford to be pulled in all these different directions anymore. If … if one of them was dead, then things would be so much easier. And yet, she was still shaking from fear of losing him.

The kick sprawled Inuyasha away from her, onto the ground, his body stung. While Koga landed gracefully, kneeling to foster his wounds, his back towards her, but being the closer of the two.

Koga stared hard Inuyasha's prone form, contempt shining in his ice blue eyes. "You never could protect her decently, could you half-breed?" Koga sneered, his voice haggard. 'I always hated you for it.' "Let's see if you still have that scar I left you the last time we fought… three years ago. On the day you let her die!"

Kagome's body suddenly stung with hurt and betrayal. Hearing it out loud, somehow, only made it worse. "No…" She felt as if her ribs were crushing, she could barely breathe. "I hate you, Inuyasha." She said. "I hate you!"

Her expression was livid with anger, cheeks flaming, skin pale, as she clenched her fists and watched. And in her heart there was only pain.

Inuyasha stood, breathing haggardly, and tried to stand, but it was clear that Koga's kick had not only hurt him, but opened the ogres wound even more. It was as if he had taken the same hit all over again, and this time he was forcing himself to stand. Blood poured down his back, but he stood. When he caught Kagome's voice, he slackened again. It was almost as if… she had just killed him.

Koga's fist was unforgiving. He ripped open Inuyasha's shirt, exposing his chest, already marred with scars. Kagome felt as if she'd bitten down on a wire of electricity when she saw the long, cruel, gash that ran over his left side, right over his heart. She almost couldn't take it.

Koga landed, and Inuyasha staggered forwards, and then tried to stand. He failed. She watched him fall to his knees, the scar imprinted in her mind.

"There it is…" one of the men said behind her.

"That's where it happened. Where Koga tried to rip out Inuyasha's heart."

"Looks like it hasn't healed very well."

"It probably never will."

His dark gold eyes looked up to meet hers, but she refused to break. She would not back down… she would not, no matter how much it hurt. It shouldn't hurt. It wasn't real. This wasn't real! And yet she couldn't look away from him, half fallen over, his heaving breaths making it hard for him to stand, chest and bloody back heaving, and she felt something. She could only describe it as torrent of rushing water that was slowly pushing its way from her feet up to the bottom of her throat, making her feel dangerously full.

And when she finally managed to open her mouth to breath, a sort of clogged, choking noise came out, and she was sure it was from the ocean that was rising inside her. "I…" she tried to finish the sentence again, but couldn't. Before her, Koga stood rigid as a board.

She clenched her fists and stared at him, and she wished that he would just fall over already. She wished that Koga would kill him after all the ways lied to her. Why wouldn't he just leave her alone? Why wouldn't he just go and –

She cut herself off in mid-thought, staring at him, and all the while the devouring currents of water rose higher and higher inside her. Had she really become this kind of person? To tell someone she hated them before they died? No… she … she couldn't. She wouldn't allow herself to become that kind of person. And the water rose even higher, choking her, moving up past her mouth and lips. But it didn't mean she had to save him. It didn't mean she could.

"You're gonna die, hanyou." Koga said quietly, watching the way Inuyasha's wavered, his face slick with pink sweat and blood stains. "And this time, I don't think you even need my help." He literally spat onto the ground as he spoke.

The river was almost up to the top of her head, and she felt as if she were falling farther and farther away from the world, being whisked away to some other place. The current inside her was so strong, and she just wanted to leave this all behind.

He finally gave up on her. She saw the painful resign in his beautiful eyes as he forced himself to look away from her, his gaze, form a moment all loneliness and pain. But it was only for an instant. Inuyasha looked at the wolf prince, and did the only thing he could think to do. He sort of gave the other man a broken half-smile and spat on the ground too, blood and all, dooming himself.

Koga's face grew livid. He started at him again, launching himself into the air, a deadly streak of ebony and brown. "Why, you-"

Kagome's breath hitched in her throat.

This was it.

Koga was going to kill Inuyasha.

He was going to kill him.

And afterwards it would be over for her. She would get away from him, and go back to Naraku. She would remember her past life, and be happy at last… if she could just get through this. She would be okay… if she just stand still a bit longer.

Kagome ran. Without thoughts, and without words. It just seemed to happen.

Koga barely had enough time to react.

The wolf-prince tore to the left, suddenly, and skid on the ground, grunting against his jostled body. Just in the nick of time.

She was holding Inuyasha so tightly that she was sure it must have hurt him, her face pressed into the very same scar that was burning into her mind, right over his heart. She could feel it beating, its rhythm irregular and fluttering. For a moment, all three of them stared, shocked at what she had done. She refused to realize it at first. 'No…' this wasn't happening again. 'No.' She tried to force it out of reality, out of her mind. She didn't want to accept it. Her arms weren't really around him. She hadn't just done that. But then, she started to cry, and knew that she had. 'I can't.'

The water in her grew deeper and deeper despite the way it drained from her eyes in tears. "I hate you…" She whispered. His arms came around her tightly. He held onto her as if she were his only anchor to life, and at this point, she probably was. He was crushing her, but the pressure almost felt good on her drained body. Her tears came pouring out, and she buried her face in his silver hair, pressing herself into him as if trying to stop herself from breathing air. Tear-stained and swollen-faced, she lifted her head off of his chest and the scar and pressed it into his neck, burying herself in an ocean of soft silver. "I hate you." She whimpered against his neck, and then said it louder. "I hate you…" Her voice was thick with someone else's tears, and cracking with heartache.

Inuyasha's arms were unyielding on her; it was as if he wasn't quite able to hang on. "I know." He said, his own voice cracked and heavy, riddled with pain. He dug one hand on the top of her head and let it pull down to the nape of her neck, continued to press her into him. "I know," he said it, again. And then, "I'm sorry." He said once her, inside his mind, he'd already said it a thousand times. 'I'm so sorry.'

From a distance, Koga watched them break. And his Kagome continued to cry…

AN: That was a bitch to write. I haven't reread it, I'm pretty sure it's crap. So… if reviewers agree I'll rewrite it. I'll come back and read it later. This story is really quite frustrating.

BJIEOWRJKDLSJIOHREIROEJDKSFLJIFOREWHOIKTEJRMDLKFSJLK:FIEROHTWEIOTSDKLJFV((UE)$JRIEFOSDKVMIOW#UREOIJDFSHFHJDKSHFJDJDJDJDJDJ! – this describes my feelings about that chapter.

Review if you'd like. I don't think I'd want to.