InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Don't Forget Me ❯ Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Inu and Co. don’t belong to me. I just take them out to play once in a while. Don’t Forget Me  

“Don’t forget me.” *  

The lone figure sat hunched in the middle of the rain-soaked battlefield, heedless of the cold rain that mixed with the blood oozing from his wounds. He stared, unseeing, at the string of beads in his clawed hands.

‘She must have known,’ he thought numbly. ‘Why else would she have removed the subduing spell before the fight with Naraku?’

He remembered last night, when the girl had come to him. He had tried to send her away, telling her that she would need to be rested for the coming battle. Not at all surprisingly, she had ignored his advice, sitting close beside him. After a long moment of silence, she turned to him, placing her hands on his shoulders. In a move almost too fast to follow, she leaned forward, brushing her lips across his cheek. As she backed away he was shocked to see that her hands gripped the prayer beads that held the spell she sometimes used to control him. It had been quite a while since she had seen fit to “sit” him, but she was not above threatening him with it from time to time.

The fight, as he had expected, had been bad. None of them had escaped uninjured, although all of their wounds would heal in time. ‘At least the physical wounds will heal,’ he thought.

In the end, it had been a combination of attacks from Sesshoumaru’s Toukijin, his own Tetsusaiga, and Kagome’s purifying arrows that had finally destroyed Naraku. Kagome, despite a deep shoulder wound, retrieved the nearly complete Shikon no Tama from the remains of their enemy. As she held it in her hands along with the two fragments she had received from Kouga and the few they had managed to collect themselves after Kikyou had stolen more than half of the jewel from Kagome, the pieces fused to form a nearly complete sphere that immediately began to change from the deep purple-black to the pale rosy pink of the purified Shikon no Tama.

That was when that damn monk interfered. If only he hadn’t given Kagome the three shards he’d been carrying….

He had watched in silence as the new fragments fused into the whole, finally completing the jewel. That was when it happened. The completed stone began to glow with a warm, rosy light that quickly became a brilliant white. The sphere of light expanded to envelope the figure kneeling on the ground, then faded away until it looked like Kagome herself was glowing.

When the strange light had finally disappeared, she continued looking down at the hands that had held the Shikon no Tama. She looked up at him in shock, and he could see that she was becoming transparent. “No,” she whispered.

As she vanished completely, her last words hung in the air as the only reminder that she had ever been there at all.

“Don’t forget me.” *  

Kagome scrambled across the battlefield, plucking the desecrated Shikon no Tama from the gently smoking remains of what had once been Naraku. As she touched the blackened stone her miko powers, untrained thought they were, began to actively purify the jewel, fusing it with the handful of shards she already possessed.

Miroku came to her then, blood dripping into his eyes from a nasty scalp cut. He dragged his right foot slightly, leaning on his staff to take some of the pressure off his broken ankle. Smiling, he extended a closed hand in her direction, saying, “Take these. I would have given them to you long before now, but it seemed wisest not to keep all of our shards in the same place--just in case.”

In spite of the deep cut across her left shoulder, she smiled as she took the fragments he offered. Even though her shoulder hurt more than she had thought possible, she was happy, at peace. Now that the Shikon no Tama had been restored and Naraku defeated, just maybe her friends could finally have the happiness they deserved.

She watched as the perfect sphere of the Shikon no Tama began to emit a soft pink glow. The radiance brightened to a pure, clear white as it expanded to completely surround her before vanishing. Looking down at her empty hands, she realized that she could see the ground through them.

Looking up with a sudden horrified realization, she saw the battered and bleeding hanyou pull himself to his feet and take a shaky step in her direction, leaning heavily on his Tetsusaiga. She could feel her grip on reality fading away. “No,” she whispered.

As the battlefield, her friends, and the man she had finally come to realize that she loved more than life itself faded from her sight, Kagome looked up, tears in her eyes, and said, “Don’t forget me.” *  

Sick and disoriented, Kagome squeezed her eyes shut, feeling the cool, hard surface on which she lay against her cheek. Opening her eyes a crack, she realized that she was lying at the top of the long flight of steps that marked the entrance to the Higurashi family’s shrine.

Sitting up, she clutched at her head as the sudden movement sent pain shooting through her skull. Blinking rapidly to clear her eyes of the tears in them, she dragged herself to her feet. Still disoriented from the sudden unexpected transition, she could think of nothing but returning to the Sengoku Jidai and the friends she had left behind.

‘They must be wondering what happened to me,’ she thought, walking slowly to the small building that housed the well that was the gateway between the two worlds. She slid open the wooden doors, walking carefully to the short flight of stairs leading to the minishrine’s lower level, where the old well stood.  

Taking a deep breath, she balanced on the edge of the well for a moment before dropping into the darkness below.

Looking up from the bottom of the well, she was shocked to see the wooden roof of the building overhead. She looked around in a panic--why hadn’t the well sent her back?

Pulling herself up the ladder that had been installed once it became clear that she would be traveling back and forth through the time portal on a more or less regular basis, Kagome wasn’t really too worried. After all, strange things had been happening to her for months, and just because she didn’t understand what was going on didn’t mean that there wasn’t a perfectly reasonable explanation.

She was, however, concerned about her friends in the past. Although all of them had been injured in the battle, none of the wounds had seemed life-threatening. Nauseous and dizzy from blood loss, Kagome made her way back to the house. Stopping in the kitchen for a moment to clear her head, she was surprised when the darkness at the edge of her vision began to grow and her knees buckled under her. *  

The insistent beeping of something electronic penetrated the thick blackness in which she found herself. Opening one eye, she realized that she was no longer in her family’s kitchen. The other eye opened to the interior of an unfamiliar room and a very familiar person sitting in the single chair nearby. “What happened?” she asked.

The woman who had been sitting there shook her head. “That’s what everybody’s waiting to ask you. I came home from the market and found you unconscious on the kitchen floor. You were cold, wet, and bleeding from a bad cut on your shoulder. When I couldn’t wake you, I called for an ambulance. They brought you here to the hospital. It’ll probably be a few minutes before the nurses realize that you’re awake, so I wanted to talk to you about it first.” She shook her head. “When the ambulance came, I had to tell them something, so I told them that you probably surprised a burglar in the house. Since I wasn’t there when it happened, it seemed as good an idea as any. You might want to stick to some variation of the same story when they ask you about it. We,” she said as the door opened to admit a nurse, “Can talk about it a little later on.”

Kagome was singularly unhelpful when questioned by both the doctors and the police. No, she never actually saw the person who gave her the injury. Yes, she had gone into the kitchen because she thought she heard someone there and thought that her mother had returned from shopping. They had struggled, then she followed the man--at least, she thought it was a man--out to the steps leading from the shrine grounds down to the street. She became dizzy at that point, and returned to the house to call for help. Apparently, she told them, she never made it that far.

The police were not particularly confident of their ability to catch the intruder, although they would speak with all of the other families in the neighborhood in an attempt to find out whether or not anyone else had seen anything. The doctors, on the other hand, were convinced that she had indeed seen her attacker, but that she was blocking the horrible memory from her conscious mind. It was, they said, possible that the memories would return in time by themselves

--any attempt to force them to the surface could cause irreparable harm to the young girl.

Although it was not common practice, her mother was permitted to remain in the hospital with her for the night. Long after the halls were darkened and the squeak of the nurses’ rubber-soled shoes had vanished from their hearing, Kagome told her mother about the final battle with Naraku. “It was terrible, Mama. All of us were hurt, but we would all recover in time. It took a combined attack from Inuyasha, his youkai brother Sesshoumaru, and my arrows to finally destroy Naraku. I recovered the large piece of the Shikon no Tama from what was left of him, and held it together with the pieces we already had. When it was finally complete, it started to glow. Then it vanished, and I started to fade away. The next thing I knew, I was lying at the top of the steps in front of the shrine. I tried to go back down the well to make sure everybody was all right, but the well didn’t work. Then I went into the house.” She shook her head. “You know the rest.”

That didn’t make any sense in terms of what she had learned of the legends surrounding the jewel. “And you didn’t make any request of the Shikon no Tama?”

“No,” she said, the tears starting to flow again, “And if I did, it certainly wouldn’t have been to come back here and not be able to return to them. Besides,” she said, “I’d already decided that the wish would be Inuyasha’s--he’s suffered so much for that damn thing, and he really deserved the very first break in his life.”

“Did he make any wish?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Besides, he didn’t have the Shikon no Tama--I did.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Is it possible that he could have done something anyway--I mean, since I had decided that he would be the one to make the wish anyway?”

The older woman shook her head in confusion. “I don’t know, and I can’t think of any way to find out--the records we have at the shrine are incomplete at best. We might ask your grandfather, but he may not know any more than we do.”

Finally the girl brought up the matter that had been bothering her ever since she had found herself at the bottom of the well in her own century. “Mama--what if the well never opens back up?” *  

Kagome sat in her room, trying to concentrate on the school assignments her friends had brought her when they learned of her injury. Though she had been released from the hospital after nearly a week, she was not permitted to leave her room for at least another week. Finally deciding that homework wasn’t going to be a priority at the moment, she dropped the algebra book on the floor and threw herself on the bed, tears coming to her eyes as the motion jarred her half-healed shoulder.

‘Why didn’t the well work any more? Was it closed from both sides? Could there be a way for the others to get a message to her letting her know what had happened?’ The questions chased themselves around her mind, leaving her with nothing but even more questions.  

Once she was finally allowed to leave her room, she discovered that she had no particular desire to do so. There didn’t seem to be much point in school, or seeing the friends who came to visit, or even going downstairs to eat with her family. She stopped talking, or eating, or doing anything but lying on her bed staring out the window near her head.

Seventeen days after being released from the hospital, Kagome lay staring out the window, eyes unfocused, when she thought she saw a flash of color near the minishrine which housed the well that had once been her link to the world of five hundred years in the past. Rising slowly, she walked unsteadily down the stairs, forcing muscles no longer used to obeying her commands to function against the inertia that had become the norm.

Dragging her feet, she forced herself to go to the well house even though she had sworn to herself never to visit the closed portal again. She stood silently at the side of the structure, staring into the darkness at the bottom. It would be, she decided, easy to just throw herself over the side and end all the pain she was feeling.

“It won’t help.”

She looked around in confusion. There was something hauntingly familiar about that soft voice. “Nani--?”

“The well won’t open, and it’s not deep enough for what you have in mind--you’d probably do no more than break a leg.”

She peered around into the darkness, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice that had seemed so familiar, almost like something out of a dream…or a nightmare. “What do you know about the well? And what makes you think you know what I’m thinking?”

She felt strong hands take her by the shoulders and turn her around. “I know about the well because I’ve tried to use it every day since the day you disappeared. I know what you’re thinking because I’ve often wished the same thing myself--especially once I realized that this was all my fault.”

“This isn’t real,” she said, staring at him with something like horror. “It can’t be--”

“Look at me,” he commanded. “Do I look like I did five hundred years ago?”

The reasoning, analytical part of her mind that had been dormant for the past few weeks seemed to wake up as she looked at the figure in front of her. He was right--he really did look different than he had the last time she had seen him. He was slightly taller now, and his hair was much longer, reaching past his hips. His features were a little more defined, although still youthful, despite looking painfully thin, almost emaciated. Though the same thick, silvery-white mass it had always been, his hair was unkempt and tangled: he had been neglecting himself for quite some time, from the look of things.

Still, some things hadn’t changed, especially the warm, golden-amber eyes that stared into her own, and the soft, furry triangular ears on the top of his head. Her hands itched to reach out and touch them, as they always had, but she remembered that he had always protested when she did that, so she resisted the temptation.

He seemed to know what she was thinking, and smiled sadly. “Go ahead. If it’ll make you finally believe that I’m real, it’s more than worth it.”

With tentative hands she reached up, lightly stroking the velvety fur on the outside surface of his ears. She was more than a little startled when he didn’t try to stop her--instead, his eyes started to close and he produced a rumbling deep in his chest that reminded her of nothing so much as the purr of an immense cat. As much as she would have liked to continue with the massage of his ears, something inside of her seemed to snap, and she was set free of the darkness in which she had been existing for weeks. “What happened?”

He shook his head. “It took a long time to figure out--years, in fact. Remember when you finally fused the last of the shards into the complete Shikon no Tama? You were hurt, and all I could remember thinking was that I wanted you to be safe, no matter what.” He looked at her sadly. “You were going to give me the jewel, weren’t you?”

“Of course I was. That was the entire point, wasn’t it?” She couldn’t imagine what he was getting at. “So what?”

“Then Myouga was right all along. The Shikon no Tama read your intention to give me the jewel as your wish. It then picked up my desire to keep you safe. The jewel is what brought you here and sealed the well.”

She shook her head. “That can’t be right. If the Shikon sealed the well, how are you here?”

He held her close, as though he couldn’t bear to see her face when he said what he had to tell her. “I remembered the last thing you said before you vanished. I never forgot you. Even though I tried every day since you disappeared, it wouldn’t let me through. I did the only thing I could do: I waited.” He stroked her hair, the slightly oily strands slipping through his fingers. “You haven’t been taking care of yourself.”

She looked up at him, lifting a strand of his own tangled mane. “Neither have you.” She suddenly realized what he had been saying. “You mean you’ve been waiting all this time for history to catch up to me?”

“Of course,” he said. “How could I do anything else?”

She shook her head in confusion. “Why didn’t you show yourself before now? How could you let this all happen?”

“Think about it, Kagome. If I showed myself to you earlier, I might have changed our history. You might never have come back through the well at all. I had to wait until after you were brought back here. But you were hurt, and in the hospital. Then, you were confined to your bed. I’ve been watching you ever since you came home form the hospital, but you were in so much pain I couldn’t stand to make it worse.”

She shook her head. “You’ve changed. You think things out more than you used to.”

He smiled, and she thought that she could see a bit of his old bravado. “Well, I like to

think that I’ve learned a little in the past five centuries.”

She shook her head in wonder. “You mean that you’ve waited all this time just to see me again? Why?”

“There’s something I never got to tell you, mostly because I had to be such an ass all the time. You see, I’ve loved you for more than five hundred years, but was too afraid of what you’d say to tell you. I went out of my way to keep you at a distance just so I wouldn’t have to face the chance that you would turn me down. I’m just a lousy hanyou, after all.” He pulled her tight against him once again. “So if you don’t want me, just say so now and I’ll never bother you again. But choose based on what you want, not on whatever it may have taken for me to find you again.”

She pulled away from him, taking his clawed hand in hers and leading him toward the house she had lived in through her entire life. “I have a confession to make. There’s something I never told you. I’ve loved you ever since I can remember. I think I started to love you even before I released you from Kikyou’s seal. After I found out that I couldn’t go back to you I didn’t want to live any more.” She turned, reaching up to stroke his cheek. “I lost you for a few weeks. I don’t ever want to lose you again.”

He shook his head. “It won’t be easy. I’m not exactly inconspicuous, you know.”

“I don’t think I care in the slightest.” She frowned slightly. “There’s one thing I don’t understand. How have you managed to survive all this time?”

He laughed softly, a sound she had heard only rarely in the past. “Believe it or not, I went into business--with Sesshoumaru. I’ve been managing the domestic side of his holdings, which are pretty extensive. I’ve been thinking of retiring from the financial world, though, and settling down. What do you think?”

She flashed a brilliant smile, and he suddenly remembered what had kept him going all these centuries. “I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time.” Still grinning broadly, she slid open the door to the house. “Mama,” she called, “We’re home!”

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