This
was his dream—dream meaning not a sleeping dream, but a wish, a daydream,
an aspiration. A fantasy.
They
were in his father's Stronghold, in the apartment he had shared with his
mother—Inuyasha, and Kagome, and their children, who were laughing and beautiful.
They had brought Kagome's family to this side, and they lived there as well,
her mother and grandfather and little brother, who played happily with their
children and with Shippou.
Miroku
and Sango were delighted with their rooms elsewhere in the palace. Miroku's
hand had healed and their children had been born without the curse. Every
day their little ones gathered together with the other children to play.
Kirara bounded cheerfully among them, and all of them were looked over by
Sango's brother Kohaku, who was alive and well, free of Naraku and the Shikon
shard. Hachiemon, Miroku's tanuki friend, came and went as he chose, as
did Myouga.
They
had sent word north and found Inuyasha's nurse and her husband. Youkai
that they were, they were still young after 60 years. The couple had built
a fine house on Hokkaido, but were delighted to return to the beautiful
castle on the island off Kyushu. Some of their grown children stayed in
the north, but the youngest came southwest with them to join the throng
of laughing little ones. All of them were nurtured by Kaede, honorary grandmother
of everyone in the Stronghold.
They
had found Inuyasha's mother's grave and moved it there, away from the humans
who had treated her ill. He knew it pleased her spirit, seeing them all
so very happy.
Sesshoumaru lived in his old quarters, attended by Jaken. Never mind that
those were supposed to be the best rooms. Inuyasha liked the suite where
he and his mother had once lived, and it was easy to be generous. He had
decided to allow Sesshoumaru to handle the task of actually running the
domain. His brother enjoyed that sort of thing, and he was good at it, so
it seemed to make sense—as long as it was understood that the Great Lord
Inuyasha held the true power in the Stronghold.
From
Allison, Maud Lucy [née Garden], Lord Inuyasha of the Shikon no Tama:
A Legend of Japan. Chapter 27: The Breaking of Tetsusaiga and Unleashing
of the Monster. London: Currer and Bell, 1898.
Then the Lady Kagome spoke to Inuyasha, and said, My Lord, is it still your
desire to become fully daemon? For in truth, when thy sword was broken by
the daemon Goshinki, and thou didst become fully daemon, I was sore afraid.
And then my
Lord Inuyasha did wax wroth, and sayeth, Thou foolish and timorous woman,
how then may you say such a thing? For indeed, had I not taken on that fearsome
visage, would not all of us have been devoured by that beast Goshinki?
Nay, milord,
sayeth the Lady Kagome, I speak not of thy visage, dreadful though it may
have been. But I did perceive that Lord Inuyasha's heart had been taken
to a place far away. And it was a matter of the most dreadful fear to me,
that in such form Lord Inuyasha had forgotten me.
Then spake
Lord Inuyasha and said, Nay, milady, for happen what may, I am he who you
see before you, and never could I forget about Kagome.
And the Lady
Kagome was silent, but her heart was sorely troubled.
From
S. McNeal-Sugihara, A. Remon, and I. Houjou (2009): Miroku's The
Quest of the Jewel of Four Souls: An English Translation with Annotations.
San Francisco and London: The Hollingswood Organization.
After a long night of studying Kagome had packed for the trip back through
the well and then treated herself to one last long, hot bath. That was her
undoing: the afternoon was warm and her bed was irresistible. She unplugged
the hair dryer and spread the towel across her pillow; her hair could finish
drying while she closed her eyes for a few minutes. If Inuyasha was waiting
for her, he could wait a bit longer, or haul his butt through the well and
come get her. Not that he would do that: she'd seen him like this before
and knew he'd play it cool, pretending he didn't care whether she came back.
Kikyou opened her eyes and murmured, "Why…are you here?"
"That," said Inuyasha, "is what I was going to say. Why are
you…"
"When that youkai started chasing me I ran, and before I realized
it, I had come to the village where I was born, and lived, and met you…and
you were here, too, Inuyasha," she whispered. "Inuyasha,"
she begged, "carry my body to that place…"
When Kagome awoke it was nearly midnight. Shocked to discover she had slept
through the day and into the night, she started madly packing her bag, complaining
loudly as she did so. The noise attracted the attention of her brother and
grandfather. Annoyed at herself and at her audience, Kagome complained,
"Why didn't anybody wake me up?" Her brother stared at her stupidly.
"Were you asleep?" he asked.
As Inuyasha gently set her down, Kikyou looked up at the tree—Kagome would
have called it goshinboku, the god-tree, but on that day, the day
Kikyou lay there in Inuyasha's arms, it was just a tree in the forest. "Fifty
years ago," said Kikyou, staring up at the little patch of broken bark,
the little patch that Kagome loved so well, "Fifty years ago in this
place, I shot an arrow through your chest, and then I died, as well,"
she whispered.
"Yeah,"
he said, uneasily. This whole thing bothered him for some reason. He wondered
what she was getting at. Her soul catchers, the youkai that stole
the souls of virgin girls and fetched them to her, were circling around
the tree, the incandescent souls forming pools of lights. They were like
lanterns, the clearing like a little festival there in the forest.
"Inuyasha,"
Kikyou was saying, "why do you think Naraku caught us in a trap and
made us hate each other?"
He knew the answer
to that one. He had heard it from Naraku's own mouth. "To corrupt the
Shikon no Tama," he told her. "To taint your heart, which
kept the jewel purified, with hatred for me."
She let out a
laugh, and suddenly he felt stupid. "That's just an excuse," she
told him. "Even if he hadn't tainted my heart, if Naraku had so much
as touched the Shikon no Tama, he would have corrupted it."
She looked into his eyes, and her face was as sad as it was beautiful. "The
remnant of Onigumo's heart within Naraku wanted to drive us apart,"
she said. Her soul catchers slithered around them, the glowing souls soaking
into her body like rain into dry earth.
Inuyasha thought
of Onigumo, the dying, paralyzed thief hidden in a cave outside her village.
Inuyasha had known nothing of Onigumo's existence. How had the wild-thief
come to hate him? Had Kikyou spoken to Onigumo about him, taunting him with
her love for another? But Kaede had said that her sister would hear no ill
about poor Onigumo. Perhaps it was little Kaede: You'd better watch yourself.
My sister's boyfriend is half youkai, and he's really strong. If you try
anything, you'll be sorry…
Kikyou's lovely
eyes were serious, her delicate face pale and beautiful as porcelain—even
though she was a village girl, she had always had the whitest of skin, like
a noblewoman. Inuyasha was naïve in many ways; it never occurred to
him that Kikyou had her little vanities, that a village lass, even one with
the purest of hearts, might perhaps dab on a bit of rice powder or chalk,
just to look a bit less like a country girl and more like an elegant lady.
Somewhere in
the back of his mind lurked the understanding that her current pallor was
in fact the pallor of death, just as he knew but tried to forget that the
sweetness of her scent was the sweetness of death and decay, the smell of
bones and gravesoil. Somewhere even further in the back of his mind was
the understanding that these things excited him, that the very carnality
of decay called to him in a way her purity had never done, that the loss
of the innocent souls as they were sucked into her false body was both appalling
and mesmerizing.
"The wild
thief wanted me for his woman," Kikyou murmured.
The boy who had
once prowled the forest, both wild and a thief, blinked at that.
"It was
the jealousy in the wild-thief Onigumo's heart that made him deliberately
provoke me into killing you with my own hands," she said. With her
own hands. He imagined her hands on his body, imagined himself at the
base of this tree, with her not across the clearing, as she had been that
dreadful day, but right here with him, her hands—doing what? circling his
throat, pinning him, holding him helpless…
"Jealousy?"
he said. "What a stupid reason…"
"Yes, it's
stupid," she replied, "and also…very human." The word human
seemed to hang in the air between them. Coming from her lips, human
was a term of approval. He thought of their enemy, Naraku, and his human
heart. "Then what you're saying is that Naraku's feelings for you…"
"He probably
doesn't want to admit it," Kikyou said, "but it seems he still
has those feelings for me. And in order to get rid of them, he tried to
kill me." Her face was sad, as though she were broken-hearted at the
thought of her would-be lover turning against her. Inuyasha felt his soul
filling up with anger and hatred.
Kikyou sat up,
pulling away from him. "Enough, Inuyasha," she said. "My
body has filled with dead souls."
He grabbed her
arm. "Kikyou!" he cried. "You think you can destroy Naraku
by yourself, don't you? You can't do that!"
Suddenly her
face was cold. "I am a miko," she said. "With the
power I command, I can obliterate him." But he heard her unspoken words:
"Do you dare suggest," she did not say, "that this power
I wield is no longer the power of a miko? No longer the power of
purity and innocence?"
"That's
not what I meant," he said, backing down before her level gaze. He
looked away. "The thought of someone like Naraku loving you makes me
sick," he said. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by anger, by regret, by
the love that bound them. He grabbed her shoulders, holding her close as
he spoke to her face. "Kikyou," he cried, "you said that
my life was yours. In that case, your life is mine!"
Suddenly her
expression softened, and he saw the girl he had loved, the girl who had
teased him and laughed at him and longed for him all those years ago. "Inuyasha,"
she said, and he completed their incantation: "Kikyou," he replied.
He pulled her into his arms, clutching her in a fierce embrace. "I
will not let Naraku have you," he said. And once again she murmured
his name.
As they embraced, the child Kagome, fifteen but getting older every second,
climbed out of the well, concerned by the lateness of the hour but hoping
Inuyasha's temper had cooled down. She saw the lights, the little festival
lanterns made of innocent lost souls about to be devoured, and a moment
later saw the lovers in each others' arms.
She wondered
why. She wondered what had happened, how they had come to be there together,
clinging to one another there in the place that Kagome had until that moment
believed meant as much to Inuyasha as it meant to her. She stood perfectly
still, and listened. They were talking about Naraku, their enemy, and it
occurred to Kagome that she herself had no quarrel with Naraku, nor he with
her. The others—not just these two but Miroku and Sango as well—were warriors
pursuing revenge. She was nothing but the inept schoolgirl who had shattered
the jewel, giving him access to its power.
The Inuyasha
who spoke to Kikyou was a stranger: grownup and serious, nothing at all
like the boy with whom she incessantly bickered. There was an intensity
to him she had seldom seen, for all the months they had traveled, and a
maturity and a passion she had barely glimpsed.
She realized
sadly that he had not even noticed her scent.
The conversation
seemed to rise and fall, from gentle to fervent. Suddenly Inuyasha exclaimed,
"I can't stand it any longer! I can't bear the thought of that worthless
Naraku even seeing you, or hearing your voice! And the thought of just handing
you over to him, to your death…"
Kikyou smiled
gently at him. "Don't worry, Inuyasha. I won't suffer that way again,"
she said. "Anyway, Naraku won't be able to kill me. Not as long as
he has Onigumo's heart, the heart that lusts after me." Understanding
washed over Kagome. Inuyasha was by nature incredibly jealous, even of Kagome.
Even of Kagome.
Kikyou was taking
her leave. "It's about time," she was saying, "for you to
go back to your friends." That was Kagome: one of his friends.
Kikyou paused
and turned, smiling gently at Inuyasha. "When the dead souls had been
pulled from my body and my power was exhausted I wondered if I was going
to die there alone. But you were there for me, Inuyasha," she said.
"I'm glad."
Suddenly he ran
forward and took her hand, pulling her toward himself as he had once pulled
Kagome into his arms. "If something bad happens, call for me!"
Kikyou smiled
blissfully as he held her close. "Don't worry, Inuyasha," she
said. "I won't let any man but you touch so much as a hair on my head."
It was like watching
a movie, a very sad movie that broke her heart. And did something else,
too: as she looked on at the lovers clinging to one another, the air around
them glowing and writhing with magic, she felt the stirrings of a physical
longing. Kagome was fifteen and a virgin; only a couple of years later she
would have known herself to be aroused by what she was seeing and understood
that the two figures fairly crackled with sexuality. Now she only knew that
she felt like an idiot, that she was a clumsy, stupid, incompetent child
trespassing on the grown-ups' territory. All she wanted was to get away.
And yet some
part of her was a woman, the woman who had shattered the jewel in a desperate
attempt to save the world, the woman who had believed herself worthy of
the heart of Inuyasha. The woman watched Kikyou disappear into the air,
and then silently stepped out from under the trees. She saw him catch her
scent at last, and watched him turn to face her.
Neither of them
spoke, or even moved. They both understood what had taken place:
He had forgotten
her. Forgotten about her entirely.
Inuyasha stood
silent in the place that had been their place, and he thought about his
dream, which he understood would never come to be, and he thought about
Kagome's brave and loving heart, which he had broken. He thought about all
the things he had wanted, and all the things he had meant to do, and he
realized he would never have them and they would never be done. He saw Kagome's
future and he saw his own, and he realized they were not the same.
It was at that
moment, in fact, that he understood he was going to die in search of the
Shikon no Tama, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do
about it.
Kagome went home.
She dropped off some medical supplies with the other companions and jumped
into the well and went back to her schoolgirl bedroom and cried herself
to sleep.
It would no doubt
have been the ideal time for Houjou-kun to show up, for surely he would
have won her aching heart. But Houjou-kun was occupied with preventing a
plane from crashing, a Qantas Boeing 747 that was circling over Sydney.
He was accomplishing this by pulling up as hard as he could on the armrests
of his seat while squeezing his eyes tightly shut. Actually, he had hardly
opened his eyes in the more than nine hours since they'd left Tokyo. A flight
attendant had stopped by several times to ask politely if the young man
was all right, and his mother, accustomed to flying with him, had replied
that the young man would be just fine as soon as he was on the ground and
out of the airplane—as indeed he was, although it was only a long weekend
and with the return flight hanging over his head he never quite calmed down,
remaining uncharacteristically surly for duration of their stay in Sydney.
Years later,
in the year 2009, a man acquitted, on the basis of a technicality, of a
particularly brutal murder would be found dead in a Sydney alleyway, his
body sliced with hundreds of wounds. Matthew Hanlon in Chicago would make
note of the death and send an email to his half-brother Auley De Dannan,
who for unknown reasons was still in Japan. But days before it came to Matt's
attention, the Australian homicide would already have caught the attention
of Ogura Tamami, an officer of the Tokyo Police, who as she had been instructed
immediately brought word to Detective Lieutenant Inuyasha Tetsuo, who remembered
to thank her before he started muttering obscenities.
A nasty, evil
guy had been killed, another guy who deserved to die, another guy justice
had missed. And meanwhile Inuyasha Tetsuo's favorite cousin Koinu, the son
of the lieutenant's crusading aunt, the kid (Lieutenant Inuyasha still thought
of Koinu as a kid) who never did anything bad, the kid who remembered
being a legendary hero, the kid who'd been kicked out of kendo for overenthusiasm,
was walking around Tokyo hauling a magic sword that could kill a bad guy
in exactly the way this bad guy had died. Lieutenant Inuyasha spat and swore
and dialed his aunt's office to find out if her only son had ever traveled
to Sydney, but he already knew what the answer would be.
But that wouldn't
happen for years. In the meantime, on the day of our story, the Lady Kagome
realized she had carried her paltry collection of Shikon shards back
through the well, and that she'd have to return them and face Inuyasha.
She stood in the courtyard of the Higurashi shrine and stared at goshinboku,
at the place she had thought of as his and hers but that she now suspected
was probably just a place, and she tried to understand how her life had
come to be what it was. She wept as she realized she loved Inuyasha, and
she accepted that she would go back, and face the humiliation, and finish
the quest, trying desperately (but, it would turn out, fruitlessly) to keep
him alive.
By the time Houjou-kun
returned to Japan she was back in the past. She hadn't missed him while
he was gone. In fact, the thought of him had never even crossed her mind.
This was his
dream: "Inuyasha!" Gasp. Whizz. Thunk. "K-Kikyou…Bitch, how
dare you…"
