InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Shinibasho ❯ Shinibasho ( Chapter 1 )

A/N: This was just something inspired by episode 87, which I was watching this weekend. It struck this melancholy chord with me, I suppose, and I felt like this little plot bunny needed to come out. Hopefully it's not too bad, ne?

 

Disclaimer: I do not own, nor claim to own, Inuyasha-tachi.

 

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Some things in life you never expect. Some things that you take for granted, that you know will always be around.

 

Kagome was one of those things.

 

I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that I never had nightmares about her leaving, or running into a youkai when I wasn't able to protect her, but I never really thought they would happen. And even if they did, she'd always heal or come back, I'd yell at her for being too sensitive or too stupid, she'd yell an 'osuwari' my way, and thing's would be all right again. Never, ever in the darkest depths of my mind did I think she would die. I would always be there to save her just in time, right?

 

What I didn't count on was the fact that I couldn't save her from some things.

 

I remember the first time I smelled the sickness on her. I had just come to her time to bring her back after three days of schoolwork. She was asleep on her bed, looking utterly exhausted. This alone surprised me; it was barely noon, and I knew she was supposed to be in school for hours yet.

 

I was mad at first. She was lying to me about school, I decided, and was about to shake her awake when I smelled it. It was barely intelligible beneath her soft scent, but it was there, and it smelled dark and evil. I sneezed, trying to get it out of my nose. She wasn't supposed to smell like that.

 

The first thing that came to mind when I sensed the blackness was my mother. I remembered how she had started sleeping more when I first smelled it, and she had gradually spent more time in bed until she just didn't get up anymore. At that point, she smelled so unlike herself that I couldn't go near her.

 

However, Kagome had woken up before my thoughts could go farther down that road. We fought and then she came back with me through the well. I forgot about the blackness for the time being.

 

Kagome, however, was quickly fading. I didn't want to see it at first, but it became increasingly and disturbingly obvious.

 

It started with the tiredness. She would sleep twelve, thirteen hours a night, and fall asleep over lunch and whenever we took breaks. Then, in the six total hours she managed to be conscious, she began to hallucinate. It wasn't anything serious at first; mostly she would see a rabbit or a mouse when there was none, or maybe a Shikon shard in a youkai without one, but it was enough to shake me up. Soon, she saw whole towns before us and would stop to converse with people none of us could see. That was when Shippo started refusing to get near her. He, Sango, and Miroku spent more and more time on Kirara's back, "scouting" ahead. I couldn't blame them.

 

Eventually, it became so Kagome couldn't even leave the village. She was awake barely four hours a day, and during that time, her delusions were getting frightening for her. Mostly, she could do little more than cling to me and sob until she fell asleep again. I stayed by her side night and day as the smell of illness grew worse. Kaede gave her potions every half hour and had me bathe her in blessed water strewn with herbs. Nothing helped.

 

Two weeks later, Kagome stopped recognizing me. I became part of her delirium, just another phantasm her sickened mind was feeding her, and it hurt. She would often try to purify me with energy she didn't have. I could feel the life draining away from her.

Kagome was doomed to die five hundred years before she was even born.

 

Exactly one month after I first smelled the sickness on her, Kagome woke from her dreaming. She looked up at me and smiled faintly.

 

"Inuyasha," she breathed. I could barely hear her. "I think I'm about to die."

 

I blinked. It had been four days since she'd last said my name.

 

"Can we go outside?" she asked. "I don't want to die in some hut."

 

I snapped back to reality. She wanted me to take her outside?

 

I helped her sit up and wrapped her in my haori. It hung looser on her skin-and-bones frame than ever before. She was almost gone now.

 

"To the Goshinboku?" I asked, and when she nodded, I took her up in my arms and we left that place that reeked of illness.

 

As we neared the ancient tree, Kagome asked me what the day was.

 

"The ninth day of the sixth month," I replied, glancing at the "wristwatch" she had given me a year before. "But it's five minutes before midnight."

 

"The tenth of June..." she whispered. "It's nearly my birthday." She laughed: the most heartbreakingly beautiful sound I'd ever heard. "I'm going to die exactly three years after I first saw you."

 

I opened my mouth to deny it, but no words came. "Yes," I finally answered. "I guess you will."

 

"How ironic..." Kagome murmured as I leapt into the tree. "And here we are, where we met." She smiled genuinely. "I like it. This is a nice place to die."

 

I settled onto my favorite branch with my back to the trunk, holding the young girl to my chest. "I like to think so," I agreed, placing a chaste kiss to her temple. Her old smell was back. It reminded me of a song my mother used to sing. It had no words, but I always liked it. I imagine that if something could ever smell like music, then Kagome smelled like this song.

 

We were silent for ten minutes. I looked at the watch again.

 

"You're eighteen now," I told Kagome quietly.

 

"Hnn," she replied. "I always thought eighteen was too young..."

 

"Too young for what?" I prompted.

 

"For love," she finished. "I guess I was...wrong..."

 

She stopped breathing then, and it was right there in the Gods' Tree that my heart broke.

I sat with her there until morning, when Kaede came running to look for us, yelling about Kagome's medicines. I dropped out of the tree, with the dead girl in my arms, and walked right past the old woman. I had important things on my mind: namely, where I should lay Kagome's body to rest. Her shinibasho wasn't something I could just randomly choose. I knew that, and I knew that it might take a long time to find just the right spot, but somehow I didn't care. Everything about her in life was special, so why shouldn't her resting place be, too?

 

At first, I had wanted to bury her beneath the Goshinboku, but that didn't seem right. It was the location of our first and last moments together; that was enough. Then I thought about the well, but I soon passed that one off, too. The pretty meadow didn't exist in her world, and I couldn't bear the thought of her grave being paved over.

 

Finally, I remembered a place Kagome had shown me during one of my first over night stays in her time: a small grove of cherry trees behind her home. Her grandfather had said that it was the burial spot of an ancient miko, and the marker there was so well preserved, it was almost magical. There had been only one thing inscribed on it: Kagome.

 

"It's where my mom got the name," the girl had said.

 

To think, Kagome's own grave named her. I smiled at the irony of it all, a word I had learned from Kagome herself.

 

It took me less than an hour to locate the grotto. I buried Kagome there and built the stone marker, writing her name there as elegantly as I knew how. The next day, Miroku blessed the grave to keep it safe and preserved, as well as to send Kagome's soul to the afterlife.

 

I traveled to Kagome's time that day to deliver the news to her family. They were grief-stricken, but, oddly enough, didn't blame me. Kagome's mother asked me to show her where I buried her daughter. I showed her the grave and poor Mrs. Higurashi couldn't hold in her tears. I left her there and returned to my own time.

 

Some things in life you never expect.

 

Kagome was one of them.

 

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A/N: Short, depressing, and OOC, I know. Review?