InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ With One Eye ❯ To Never Know ( Chapter 1 )

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Disclaimer: This piece is based on 'Inuyasha', owned by Rumiko Takahashi. No copyright infringement intended or implied.

Author's Note: Hello, everyone! Thanks for being curious enough to click on this link. This is the start of a new serial, composed of pieces from LiveJournal challengers (primarily). The focus of this serial is Kaede. I've always been fond of the character Kaede, if only because I can identify with older, non-slim people. ;) She's a minor character in the story, obviously put there to provide the explanations about what happened 50 years before the story. Yet she's more important, in a behind the scenes manner, than might be implied by her initial role. Adviser, provider of stew and shelter, go-between the group and the villagers, and perhaps a defender of the group's right to return to the village. But how did she get that way? What happened to the half-blinded girl listening to her sister's last words, that she became the respected priestess who could take on a revived hanyo and a girl from the future with unflustered equanimity? Who is Kaede? Here's a few ideas...

To Never Know

"I'm sorry."

"I don't know how."

"I can't."

Kaede didn't know how often she had said those phrases that summer.

She wasn't her sister. She wasn't clever, or powerful, or even beautiful. She was only a girl.

But, she was the closest thing to a miko they had left. So she had had to try.

She had failed. And now they'd given up. She'd overhead the headman talking. A new miko was expected within days.

What would happen her? She was an orphan. The headman and his wife had been caring for her, insisting that she must spend her nights with them, rather than be alone in the hut she'd shared with Kikyo, but that was when they thought she could replace her dead sister. Now that they knew she couldn't, what would they do? Throw her out of the village, at worst? Send her back to the temple where Kikyo had trained, at best? But, even if allowed to train, who would ever want a maimed, ugly miko?

And so that morning, she grabbed the herb-gathering basket that had always been Kikyo's best excuse to get away, and hurried down a path no one else was on. Soon, she was at the former edge of the village, where the burned and broken houses from the spring's attack had been abandoned. She ignored the weed-surrounded ruins, not really thinking of where she was going, until she found herself in front of a red-garbed figure, who would have appeared to be leaning against the rough-barked tree in a pose of deep thought or sleep, where it not for the arrow through his chest.

Inuyasha.

Kaede halted, staring up at the peaceful face. She remembered the day he had rescued her from a youkai, remembered how he had sneered at the thought of using her as a hostage. She remembered how her sister had--changed--after she had spoken with the hanyo: how she had smiled sometimes, when she thought no one was looking; occasionally even blushed. She remembered how she'd come to suspect that her sister was actually falling in love with Inuyasha, though she'd never asked and Kikyo had never said. She remembered how, in her own heart, she'd pretended that he was the big brother she'd never had.

Tears blurred her vision. "Why?" she whispered. "Why!" Her hands clenched as tears flowed down her cheeks, and then pounded into the unyielding bark next to that stilled body. "Why did you attack the village? Why did you steal the jewel? Who attacked her? Did you? Why? She loved you! She loved you! She died! Why did you do it! Why?"

She slid down to the base of the tree, crying as she had never dared let herself within the village. She cried, knowing that there were no answers to her questions. That there would never be answers, for he was frozen, sealed for all eternity by her sister's spell, body and soul.

She would never know the answers.

She would never understand.

Author's Note: This was posted to the LiveJournal community IY_Themes on September 21, 2009, in response to the theme "Bark". It took first place.