XXXIX

Sic Infit

It is still light when Inuyasha reaches the outskirts of Edo, and when he does he sends shouts of terror out across the village before him. Dark memories flicker at the edges of his consciousness. The last time he was in this place – the last time – betrayal. Fury. Grief. Sleep. That endless, terrible sleep; terrible because while he was in it, he ceased to exist at all – because while he was in it, his whole being was engulfed in silence.

Kikyou trails a few steps behind him, as she has the whole way. At the edge of the village, when it is first visible, she stands and stares and sways until Inuyasha almost says something, but he turns away and shrugs, scowling, and continues forward. It is several minutes later before he hears her footsteps following him again. Almost unconsciously, he slows to allow her to catch up, and then curses himself for doing so.

Habit. Habit, because she is the woman he loved and the woman who sealed him and he doesn't know what to feel. Habit, though he can smell death in her – not on her, but in her, as if the essence of decay had been sealed into her flesh.

"You knew me before," she had said. Before she died...

Inuyasha shakes his head and continues stolidly forward. He ignores the screams of the villagers and the weapons that are held in shaking hands and directed toward him. He almost – almost – snorts with laughter when the first one among them recognizes her, and speaks her name, and lets his weapons fall in utter confusion.

The man runs off to find Kaede, and Inuyasha stops then and stands in the middle of the road, arms crossed over his chest, and waits.

Kaede comes slowly, hobbling her way along from her own house. She is certain the man who summoned her is just over reacting; that Kouga and Kagome have come back, rather than Inuyasha and Kikyou. How could that even be!

In the back of her mind is the knowledge that her sister's grave has been robbed, her mortal remains stolen – that the shikon no tama is loose in the world again, in the possession of a girl who walks by the side of a demon without worry, as if the old story is to repeat itself all over again.

She shakes her head, and then looks up and stops dead in the road, staring.

"Inu – Inuyasha – Kikyou-onee-sama -"

Kikyou says nothing at first, stares at her with mild interest, her expression mostly blank, her eyes empty of the fire that Kaede remembers in her sister. And then:

"I'm sorry; your words say you're my sister, but I don't remember you."

And then it was Inuyasha's turn to stare at what had become of the little girl who had stood beside her sister as she shot him, bleeding -

"Kaede? Little Kaede? That's really – that's really you?"

She is hunchbacked and wrinkled and white-haired, but her eye – her wounded, missing eye is the same and her scent, too, carries the same core as it did then.

"Aye, it's me, Inuyasha – though I can't say I'm glad to see you. What are you doing here? Why are you with my sister – and why is she alive?"

Wordlessly, Inuyasha shakes his head, and Kaede sighs.

"Of course you don't know. Well, follow me – but I warn you, I'm not as helpless as I look."

Inuyasha made a noncommittal noise.

It was the matter of a few hours talk before Inuyasha had everything straight in his head, or as straight as could be, considering the scarcity of information. Kikyou's grave had been robbed; now Kikyou lived, though by her own admission she remembered very little of her previous lifetime. Most of what she did remember was connected to Inuyasha. Privately, Kaede considering this unsurprising; she had been too young to question things when they had happened, but in the years since she had had time to think on the past, and the story as it appeared made no sense to her.

She explained the visits she had received from Kouga – explained the presence of the girl, Kagome, who bore the shikon no tama and hints of strange power and a miko's strength. She hesitated on the edge of describing her appearance, the way she looked like Kikyou's twin, but decided that withholding information would do more harm than good.

Finally, Inuyasha asked for advice – though not politely.

"So what do I do, old woman? She's your sister, why do I have to take care of her! I've got no love for her now; you know what she did to me!"

"Because she thought you betrayed her, Inuyasha! You say you did not, and I am willing to believe you – for now – but she must have had a compelling reason to think so, or she wouldn't have acted. In the end, she paid the worse price – she died; you only slept. Now you are awake again, and she is here beside you, reborn, and you are all she remembers of what came before. If she stays beside you, she has the best chance of remembering who she was."

"I still don't -"

"Do not forget, Inuyasha! You have claimed a desire to seek the shikon no tama, scattered in fragments though it might be. You will need Kikyou or someone like her; you will need a miko to see the shards! Go out and find them, and find my sister's memory, too. Find out the truth of what happened to bring her back to life, and maybe you will find out what it was that broke the trust between you fifty years ago! That is your task; that is all the help I can give you."

Something is growing in Echigo, between Kouga, Wolf Alpha, and Kagome, a miko out of time. Hints of that something echo across the land, because the whole pack has seen them together now and because there is nothing secret about the way that Kouga feels. Many voices are now speaking about the shikon no tama, and those who have found it, and where that energy is strongest now, concentrated all in one place. Many voices are speaking, and certain ears are listening with all their might, gathering information about a treasure once thought forever lost.

Something is also growing in Edo, between Inuyasha, the Sleeper who is Awakened, and Kikyou...who is also a miko out of time, though less so. They have their own difficulties, not the least of which is the task laid upon them by Kikyou's sister. Old Kaede knows the difference between the sister who died and this new creature that is wandering the earth, but even so she cannot bring herself to condemn Kikyou when the woman barely knows her own name.

Someone has heard that the miko Kikyou has been seen to walk again, not once, but twice – the same someone who has begun to take note of the Wolf and his pack.

In the dim north beyond the Ou Mountains, the north Kouga had refused to tread because of a terrible presence and a dark miasma, that someone has made himself a home, and is waiting. He has been waiting for fifty years, and now that waiting has born fruit. He can sense the woman he wants, and the treasure she hid from him in the only place he could not reach – the afterlife.

Red eyes glow dark in the dimness of a palace obscured by foul mists, and a pale mouth smiles and then opens to let out a hiss of terrible purpose.

"Soon – soon! The waiting is almost over now."

His flesh is human shaped, but his shadow writhes on the wall like a monstrous creature barely restrained.

A/N: The title of this chapter, "Sic Infit" translates to "so it begins". I'll leave you all to guess what that means! (or not, it should be pretty obvious already!) Forward, onward, and so forth! To chapter forty!

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