As this fic is drawing to a close in the next 3 chapters, I would just like to give a heads up. This story is told in the style of—and was inspired by—an Asian supernatural horror film. I feel the need to state this so no one rages at me over the ending (let's just say there were a few readers over on Dokuga who tried to demand that I do something to change the outcome, because apparently they'd forgotten that this is a horror story).

Chapter Five

Snapshots

"Please," Kagome whispered through the door, touching it lightly with the tips of her fingers, "I need to know what you meant."

A few agonizing days of silence and inactivity had passed before Kagome had been able to slip back into the attic to seek out her sister. Their birthday was still another day away and their mother and grandfather had spontaneously mentioned needing to run into town to make preparations for the big day. This had struck her a little strange—certainly Kagome's birthdays had always received special attention, but she didn't ever recall any real fuss being made before. And to do so abruptly like this didn't quite sit well with her, either, but then a girl did only turn eighteen once.

"I . . . I'm sorry, Kagome, but I really don't know what I meant," Kikyou murmured contritely, "not exactly."

Kagome couldn't help frowning at her sister through the thick wood as though she could see her. "O—kay . . . what does that mean?"

There was a long pause and Kagome somehow simply knew that Kikyou was fidgeting on the other side, even though she didn't hear any telltale sounds like the rustle of fabric or movement against the floorboards. "It just . . . I don't know, sometimes when I'm stuck watching your dreams . . . it feels like he's real."

If only to spare herself from having to say what do you mean for the third time, Kagome muttered, "I'm not sure I understand. Feels real compared to what?"

A heavy sigh filtered through the surface separating them, but it was not a sound of exasperation, rather a sound of someone grappling for how to explain a foreign concept. "You . . . you remember how you said that you can feel people's energy?"

"Yeah."

"I can, too, but it's different. Maybe because I'm never actually around 'people' it comes to me through dreams. Sometimes we dream about people that really exist somewhere in the world just because they're on the same sort of wavelength with us, spiritually speaking, I guess. We might not have anything in common with them, we may never meet them in the physical world, but for that moment we're linked with them."

Kagome remained quiet, but it was very much on the tip of her tongue to ask if this was why Kikyou didn't ever seem truly lonely or bitter about her situation—because she managed to understand that her dreams were windows into living a real life, with real people, if only for a few precious scraps of time here and there. She didn't dare, though. It was always too painful to openly remind her sister of her circumstances, no matter how obvious it was in every moment.

Instead she ventured, "How is it that you know about this sort of stuff?"

Kikyou responded easily in a bright tone that utterly mystified her twin. "I asked mommy to get me books on dreams, so she did."

The chipper note present in Kikyou's voice, coupled with that childlike term of endearment made Kagome's eyes well up instantly. "How can you call that woman that?"

"I don't understand what you mean," Kikyou's words tumbled out slowly, clearly trying to grasp the intent of her sister's question and failing.

Kagome rested her forehead against the door. "How can you talk about our mother so happily?"

"But," Kikyou paused, only to pick up a moment later, her voice thick with sudden tears, "mommy takes care of me . . . as best as the family will let her."

Blinking rapidly, Kagome fluttered her hands over her cheeks to wipe away any droplets that might have escaped her eyes as she pulled herself to sit up straight. "Oh, Kikyou, I'm sorry, please don't cry—please!" After all, was she really any better than their mother? She knew Kikyou was up here, she was going to be an adult soon enough—why didn't she have the courage to speak up and demand that the family release Kikyou from confinement?

That's it! Kagome thought with almost feverish conviction. After she was legally old enough to be considered an adult she was going to come up here the next time the house was empty, open this door- break it down if she had to—and take Kikyou away from this place—by force if necessary. She knew that Kikyou would not understand at first . . . and vehemently ignored the stinging pain that accompanied the realization that she might be leaving behind whatever it was that tied her to the lonely, possibly imaginary, shade, Sesshomaru.

"No, no," Kikyou murmured, sparing a moment to sniffle. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get upset. Let's talk about something else, please! I don't like being sad when we talk, Kagome."

Kagome nodded, having to force out a sniffle of her own before going on with their previous discussion. "We were talking about him. So I guess you were saying that you can tell in dreams when the people you're dreaming about are real or not?"

"Yeah. Their energy feels different than a person appearing in a dream who's just a figment of the dreamer's imagination."

Chestnut eyes narrowed in confused thought. "But you said you're not sure if he's real or not. How can that be?"

"I don't know," Kikyou said simply and Kagome could tell she was shrugging. "It's just . . . sometimes he feels real and sometimes he doesn't. I can't explain it any better than that because I don't know how anyone could be both."

Giving another helpless frown, Kagome murmured, "Neither do I. Kikyou . . . ."

"What?"

Do mommy or grandpa ever hurt you when they come up here? It was another thing that was on the tip of Kagome's tongue to ask, but even as she felt the words trying to form on her lips she found that she couldn't bring herself to say it—not when she'd nearly brought her sister to hysterics by almost speaking harshly about their mother just a few moments ago.

"Never mind," Kagome muttered simply, returning her attention to the conversation at hand. "I really wish I understood what he was. I feel like he's somehow part of us."

"I don't know, maybe he is. Maybe you're remembering a past life or something," Kikyou said with a light, musical lift to her voice, as though she found the concept dreamy—probably due to some fairy tale romance she'd read in one of her many books, Kagome reasoned. "Ya know what? Every now and again when mommy has the door open I see grandfather going through the steamer trunk that's under the window. I've always wondered what's there, 'cause he never says anything . . . he just reaches inside, then looks over at me and shakes his head, like he's sad."

With a feeling like ice water was creeping slowly across her shoulder, trickling steadily and sluggishly down her spine, Kagome turned and fixed her gaze on the very trunk of which her sister was speaking. "Hey, hey," Kikyou said suddenly, snapping her twin's attention back to the moment, "I think I hear the car coming up the drive, you have to go!"

"Okay!" Kagome shot to her feet, no time for long, weepy goodbyes now, she thought as she made the split-second decision to race over to the steamer trunk.

She sank to the floor immediately, remembering quickly enough that she might be seen thought the window if her mother or grandfather happened to glance up toward the attic. Fumbling with the lid's thick, metal clasp- more a virtue of her suddenly nervous fingers than anything else- she found it unlocked and threw the lid back, knowing she didn't have the luxury of time to ease it open.

"Wha-?" She breathed the sound so softly she barely heard it herself.

All that was staring back at her was a thick, antiquated-looking scrap book. By this time, Kikyou must've realized she'd not heard the attic door close because she was suddenly whispering loudly and urgently, "Kagome- you have to go now, please!"

Kagome snatched the book from the trunk and dropped the lid back into place—she could always tell them she'd knocked something over in her room if they heard anything from outside—and made a dash, hurriedly crawling the first few steps to be away from the window, bolting out of the attic on unsteady footsteps that sounded way too loud in the deafening silence surrounding her. She all but threw the attic door shut behind her and jumped down the stairs, a fearing she sprained something when she landed painfully hard on the balls of her sneakered feet, but kept moving, reaching the door of her bedroom just as the door of the front entryway began to swing open.

Frantically scrambling to turn the knob, she managed to open it and drop the book inside her room just in time for her mother to look up and catch her gaze.

"Kagome," Aiko's voice sounded the tiniest bit suspicious, chilling Kagome to her bones, "are you alright? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Huh?" Kagome blinked rapidly a few times, piecing together anything from the last few minutes that she could use to explain her unsettled appearance as she turned her back to her open door and gave the book on the floor a good, thrusting shove with her foot to send it sailing under the bed—it seemed only by the grace of the gods that it didn't hit the wall and make a telling thud.

"No, mom," she said slowly, shaking her head as she closed her door and stepped—with a forced limp—toward the staircase to the main floor. "I was trying to get something from the back of one of my drawers and, well, I guess I pulled the drawer out too far, 'cause it hit me in the knee. Really hard," she added for emphasis, going wide eyed and donning an expression as though she was trying not to cry as she hobbled down the stairs.

"Oh, my baby!" Aiko practically cooed, all but tossing her armful of brown paper bags at her father-in-law. "You come sit right down and we'll see if you're bruised!"

Kagome nodded, forcing an appreciative—if weak—smile as she did as her mother asked.

That night, after tossing aside the perhaps tenth ice pack her mother had forced on her, Kagome had squirreled out from hiding a night light that she'd not used since she'd been a little girl. She wasn't certain why she'd kept it, tucked away in the far recesses of her sock drawer, simply that she'd liked the crescent moon shape of the tiny, pale blue lamp.

Sneaking it into a fixture—nearly as though she were afraid one of her porcelain dolls would spring to life and run off to tattle on her—she snapped on the night light and fished the scrap book out from beneath her bed. A frown immediately tugged at the corners of her mouth. It was nothing more than snapshots of time. Copies of old paintings, aged photographs, in some cases, pictures clipped from newspaper articles or simple Polaroids.

She didn't understand at all what she was looking at. They were in chronological order, showing different branches—scattered even in those days to different countries—of the family during varied periods, but why would her grandfather be hiding this? Didn't most grandparents insist on making their descendants pour over family albums?

A gentle pressure touched her jaw, then. It stole the breath from her lungs in a quick, startled gasp, but she knew better than to fight the bizarre sensation by now, instead letting the pressure guide her, as that was what it seemed to want. When the feeling faded, Kagome found herself staring down at a corner of the image before her. Her lips pulled into a tight, grim line.

Hoisting the book up closer and leaning toward the meager light from that pale blue crescent, she peered intently at the picture. There, peeking out from around a corner—as though he was not supposed to be seen—was the face of a little boy. Kagome lightly traced the tip of a finger over the visage. His dark brows were bunched together, mouth wide in a grin that said he was doing something he knew he shouldn't. But . . . his hair . . . .

Despite the thick, dark brows, his hair was very light, appearing stark white in the black and white still, and his eyes were pale, too- large and pale and glossy, unlike the small, dark eyes of her ancestors that populated the foreground of the image. Who was he? She wondered. Where had he come from? Perhaps in a different photo there was a Westerner she'd missed?

Kagome flipped back to a previous page and felt her fingers go numb. No Westerners . . . but another child, bearing a startling resemblance to the first boy she'd noticed. But that wasn't possible—the dates were too far apart, they had to be two different children. She held in a trembling sigh as she looked to another page . . . found another pale-haired, pale-eyed child peeking out at the camera from a corner, or a window or behind a staircase banister . . . in every single picture.

In the color images from more recent decades, she could see that these children had silvery-white hair and eyes like burnished amber. All these children hidden in her family, scattered across time and lands . . . .

And somehow . . . they all looked like her Sesshomaru.

(The whole Kikyou calling their mother 'mommy' part made me a li'l teary for some reason :/. )