Adult-FanFiction.org : Inuyasha / Yashahime

At the End of Days
By : inumom
Category: InuYasha > General
Views: 1784 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.
Chapter List
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Disclaimer: They�re not mine, damn it, but a girl can wish, can�t she?

AN: Sorry about taking so long to get this up, but it�s that time of year. Since my household celebrates two different winter holidays, things are a little weird around here right now. The next part of this thing is already begun, though, so I�m hoping that the next update will happen a little faster than this one did.

5. Sanctuary?

The members of the Higurashi family enjoying a quiet dinner together looked up in alarm as the door flew open with a crash to admit an extremely stressed-looking hanyou carrying a limp form in his arms. As he stomped up the stairs without a word, they all sat frozen in place.
Once he disappeared from view, the woman gave her son and father-in-law looks that promised dire consequences if either of them dared to so much as speak. Rising from her place at the table, she made her way to the stairs, intent only on finding out exactly what had happened to the blissfully happy couple who had vanished down the well only hours ago. She was surprised to see her future son-in-law standing outside the bedroom door, the very picture of despair, his forehead resting against the door, hands gripping the door frame so tightly that his claws left deep gouges in the wood.
Resting a tentative hand on his shoulder, her growing sense of wrongness increased at the feel of his tense muscles trembling uncontrollably. She was brought back from her endless, circling questions by a low, broken voice.
�She�s sleeping now. She was in shock, I think.� He drew a ragged, shuddering breath before continuing, �Naraku came to the village while we were here. The meadow with the well was a battlefield, the village burned to the ground. Everybody was dead--the villagers, Kaede-babaa, our friends. Then,� he said, his voice hoarse with emotions he couldn�t begin to name, �She found a piece of the youkai kit she--hell, we, really--adopted, and passed out. I took her a distance away where I made graves for our friends. I did the best I could: even though I didn�t know the words to say, I�m sure they�ll all make it to the next world okay--they were good people. Then we came back here.� He turned to face the woman, his eyes pools of amber fire. �That son of a bitch attacked as we were making for the well. He threw some kind of smoky-looking thing that hit Kagome. I didn�t try to fight. Hell, I didn�t even think--I just grabbed her and jumped down the well.�
The woman pulled him into a loose embrace, calling upon whatever small spiritual powers she herself possessed to soothe the unseen wounds in the heart of this amazing boy who not only protected her daughter but loved her with everything that was in him as well. �Try not to worry, dear,� she said. �None of this is your fault. There�s no way you could have known what was happening back in the village.� She frowned thoughtfully for a moment. �You say that he hit Kagome with something?�
He nodded slowly. �Yeah,� he said. �I don�t know what it was--it kind of shattered into a cloud of mist when it hit her.�
The elder of the Higurashi women most definitely didn�t like the sound of that. �Come with me,� she ordered, reaching past him to open the door.
After making sure that her daughter seemed to be suffering from nothing more than exhaustion and emotional shock, she gestured at the bed. �Would you carry her into the bathroom, dear? I�m afraid that mist may have been poisonous. We need to get any traces of it off her right away.� She touched the girl�s forehead lightly, frowning thoughtfully at the way her daughter flinched away from her touch.
At the silent plea in the woman�s eyes, her companion stepped forward. Glancing at her for approval, Inuyasha sat on the edge of the bed, running the back of a claw lightly down the side of the girl�s face. She quieted instantly, leaning slightly into the touch with a soft sigh. With a slow nod, the woman looked at the young man to whom her daughter had joined her life. �When you get her into the bathroom, fill the tub, then get her undressed. You need not be especially careful with her clothes--I�m going to burn them along with her bedding, just in case. I realize that it�s a lot to ask, but could you get her into the water and keep watch over her while I get her room ready?�
He nodded briskly, scooping the girl carefully up into his arms. �I won�t let anything happen to her, Higurashi-san.� By some miracle his voice didn�t betray his inner turmoil at the task he had been asked to perform.
Placing his burden on the floor with a thick folded towel to cushion her head, he began to fill the tub, adjusting the temperature to the range most like that of her favorite hot springs. As the tub filled, he wondered briefly if Higurashi-san had somehow foreseen circumstances like these when she had taught him how to work the tub.
Though she had not awakened during the brief journey, his ears swiveled to catch the faint moan of--disappointment?--when he stepped away from her side briefly to adjust the water temperature.
Sitting down on the floor, he pulled the inert form of his future mate into his lap, suddenly uncertain of his ability to perform the task that had been asked of him. Still, while he acknowledged the necessity of what had to be done, he had no doubt that the woman would be pissed in the extreme if she were to learn the exact details.
He was suddenly very glad that she had broken the subduing spell he wore around his neck.
Although he would have liked nothing more than to drink in the sight of his intended mate�s soft, creamy flesh, he kept his eyes averted as much as possible while he carefully cut the garments from her body with his deadly claws. Despite the fact that holding her naked body made him want nothing more than to claim her for himself on the spot, he forced his body to still its raging lust--he could not take her now, when she was unaware of him and unable to refuse his advances should she so desire.
Easing her limp form into the gently steaming water, he wondered briefly--for perhaps the millionth time in the past few years--exactly what he had done in his largely misspent life to have earned the complete, unwavering devotion of such an amazing creature. Startled out of his reflections by a soft sound, his head snapped up to reveal that he was being closely watched by his future mate. Her voice was somehow fragile when she spoke. �What happened?�
His attention shifted to the water, where an iridescent purple-black substance floated on the surface like an oil slick. He gestured at the material as another drop of the substance formed on the girl�s skin before breaking free to join the rest of the stuff on the surface. �Naraku attacked when we were almost at the well. He threw something at you, but it disappeared when it hit, so I didn�t get a good look.� He reached out to lightly trace the line of her jaw with a single claw. �You wouldn�t wake up, and I was starting to worry. Your mom said she thought you might have been touched by something poisonous, and that I should get you into the bath.� He eyed the inert material floating on the surface of the water suspiciously. �I guess she was right.�
Shivering in spite of the water�s heat, Kagome shook her head. �I don�t remember anything after Naraku came out of the shadows.� She trembled violently, shaking loose even more of the droplets that had been continuing to collect on her skin. �They�re all gone�.�
Flinching at the scent of the tears that threatened to spill over at any moment, he pulled a towel from the shelf, using it to carefully skim the strange substance from the water�s surface. �You don�t need to cry for them, Kagome: they wouldn�t want that. I�m sorry they�re gone, but it was their choice. They were soldiers--all of them--in a war against the greatest evil this world has ever seen. They�ll always be a part of you--just like my mother is a part of me.�
She smiled through the tears that rolled down her face to drop into the water. �I know,� she said. �It just hurts so much to know that I�ll never get to learn healing from Kaede-baachan, or see Shippou play a trick on you, or watch Sango-chan slap Miroku-sama for groping her ever again.�
He nodded slowly. Through his lifetime he had suffered losses like this before. They were part of what had made him strong. They were, he realized, also what had caused him to close off his heart for so long. He helped her to stand, noticing that the foreign material was no longer collecting on her skin, and wrapped her in a huge, fluffy towel before pulling her into a tight embrace in his lap. �Cry, then, if it makes you feel better. But there�s something my mother used to tell me when I was a little pup--she said that we�ll get to meet the people we care about again in another life, that the fates will cause us to be drawn together again.�
The weeping subsided to a series of disconnected sniffles. �Do you really believe that?�
He sighed, curling her body against his. �For a long time I didn�t. I used to think that my mother�s certainty that she would be with my father again was just a �weak human�s� way of dealing with the loss of her mate. Then,� he said, using the towel to carefully dry her skin before wrapping her snugly in his fire rat haori, �I met you. It seemed like we knew each other forever--and maybe we have. I hadn�t trusted anybody since my mother died, but I started to trust you almost from the start. Then you came back here just before that slut Yura showed up, and I came to get you and met your family. Your mother convinced me that my mother was right: she accepted me right away, and didn�t even care that I was just a lousy hanyou.� He pulled her slender body even tighter against his own. �I think that she may have been my mother in an earlier life.�
Although the concept was absolutely incestuous in an odd, metaphysical sort of way, Kagome resisted the impulse to giggle. She had, after all, seen much stranger things in recent years. She nodded thoughtfully, getting to her feet despite decidedly wobbly knees. �I think you�re right,� she said quietly. �My whining about it won�t bring them back.� She was silent for a long time. When next she spoke, her voice was stronger, and the light was beginning to return to her eyes. �I�ll never forget them--any of them--but maybe living well and being happy would honor their sacrifice more than being miserable for the rest of my life.�
As the hanyou�s dark eyebrows rose toward his hairline, she continued, �I know this all just happened--sort of--and that I�m probably still in shock, but you somehow seem to be helping me to start healing already.� She moved toward the door, never releasing his hand. �Let�s go downstairs. I don�t remember the last time I ate anything, so I�m sure you must be practically starving.�

*

They gradually settled into a routine of sorts over the next few days. Although Kagome was still given to occasional bouts of tears for no reason that anybody not living in the shrine complex could see, her old schoolmates were willing to accept the half-truth that she was trying to deal with some unexpected deaths in the family.
Gradually, she began to find a sense of purpose in the old records of the shrine. Apparently, the stories Jii-chan had always told her had rather more truth in them than she had always believed: the oldest scrolls that were still readable gave a great many details on the training of the various kinds of mikos and priests that had existed in the family over the centuries. There seemed to be an unusual emphasis on the healing and protective magicks, something that would not have been considered �normal� in the Sengoku Jidai, when the records began.
The longer she studied the fragile scrolls, the more intrigued Kagome became. With her experiences in the feudal age, she realized that some of the information in the old shrine records directly contradicted what was commonly believed back then. She had long resisted learning more about her miko powers than was absolutely necessary to keep from hurting herself or others by accident--she had always dreamed of marrying and having a family some day (and the fantasies had only gotten worse after meeting the often surly hanyou). Since she had always been told that physical purity was essential to the exercise of miko abilities, it seemed to her that the two goals were mutually exclusive.
According to the shrine records, however, not only was celibacy unnecessary, but it appeared that the very strongest mikos in the records were those who had taken mates. Just maybe it was time to begin the training in the protective techniques--and maybe the healing as well--that she had found in the scrolls.
The young hanyou was more than happy to see his intended mate throw herself into her studies with such vigor--the concentration needed to perfect her control of her formidable powers left her with little time or energy to expend on self-pity. So encouraged was he by her rapid progress that he insisted on helping the girl practice what she had learned.
Her first barriers were small, visible as a faint shimmer in the air, and easily broken by a simple swipe of his claws. Over the next week, however, they became both stronger and harder to detect as Kagome gained in confidence and learned to tap into the energy she could feel beginning to awaken within her. When she created the first barrier her future mate couldn�t break with his bare hands, he insisted on taking her back to the same restaurant at which they had celebrated her graduation and their engagement. He had, he explained, been helping around the shrine--moving things around while organizing the storage rooms, fixing a leak in the roof, that kind of thing--and could think of no better way to use his newfound wealth.
The first hint that anything at all was amiss came during the walk to the restaurant. Though still relatively early in the evening and not particularly cold, the two saw only three people on the streets. Their odd behavior--hurrying along on some crucial personal errand while each of them stayed as far away from them as possible while using the same street--was disturbing in the extreme.
Despite the earliness of the hour, several of the small businesses located between the shrine and the restaurant had already closed. Judging by the amount of dust covering the books on display in the window, one of them had been closed for a few days at the very least.
Surprisingly, the normally crowded restaurant was nearly empty. Even more unexpected was the fact that the owner/chef himself showed them to their table and took their order before retreating back to his private domain in the kitchen.
�Is it always this quiet here?�
That soft question startled Kagome. Shaking her head slowly, she answered, �No. Usually you have to wait to get a table here unless you have reservations. I can�t imagine why it�s so empty.�
�Maybe it�s got something to do with that �floo� that�s all over the place.�
She blinked in confusion. How on earth could she have missed hearing about a flu outbreak? �I don�t remember hearing anything about the flu.�
He shrugged. �I heard a couple of people at the shrine talking about it the other day, so I asked your mother and the old man.� Realizing that she was waiting for an explanation, he continued, �It started about a week ago here in the city. Within a couple of days it was all over the country. Yesterday the first cases were reported from overseas.�
Kagome shuddered. �This is bad,� she said. �It�s spreading so much faster than usual. I wonder why I haven�t heard anything about it before now.�
�Your mother said something like that. Except for a few words now and then, there�s been nothing about it on the picture box, and even less in those papers your grandfather reads every day. Your mother was saying that the leaders should have been making announcements about how to keep from getting sick or how to treat it if you do. She said it was a good thing that the schools weren�t open right now.�
She explained briefly that diseases like the flu spread by close contact with an infected person, and that the close proximity of a classroom would allow a single ill child to spread the sickness to dozens of others who would in turn infect their families and neighbors. As her companion began to understand exactly how quickly disease could spread in a modern city, the hanyou visibly shuddered.
�Those flying machines you showed me--that�s how it could spread so far in such a short time.� It wasn�t exactly a question.
She nodded to confirm his understanding of the matter. �That�s partly it,� she said, �But there�s something else involved here. You see, a disease like this can be contagious long before any symptoms appear, so you can infect a lot of people before you even know that you�re sick.�
Kagome looked at her future mate with concern. He was suddenly looking extremely stressed--his pupils had dilated and his already pale skin whitened further. If not for the flecks of crimson in his amber eyes, she would have thought that he was close to passing out from shock. She reached out to grip the clawed hand resting on the top of the table in her two much smaller ones. �What is it?� she asked, struggling to keep any hint of panic out of her voice. �What�s wrong?�
There was a long moment when he didn�t answer. He sat motionless, eyes tightly shut, as he fought to subdue his youkai side that had perceived the information he had received as a threat to his mate. Muscles trembling with the effort of forcing his two sides--which, ironically, both thought of the little miko as their mate despite the fact that they had not yet held any sort of joining ritual--to function together to keep his/their mate safe, he drew a deep, ragged breath before opening his eyes to reveal the clear golden-amber color that indicated that he was once again fully in control of himself.
He managed a rather shaky smile, hoping to put her at least a little at ease, then shook his head. �Not here,� he said quietly. �I�ll tell you all about it on the way back to the shrine.�
After dessert, the chef came to their table to tell them that there would be no charge for their meals. He would, he said, be closing the restaurant tonight for the duration of the current situation, and had no need of their money, as his family was quite wealthy. He bowed to the pair, saying that he hoped they would return one day in happier times.
As soon as they left the restaurant, Kagome grabbed Inuyasha�s hand. �I wonder what that was,� she mused.
�What?�
She looked at him in surprise. �Didn�t you notice it? There was a sort of ripple in the air around him, especially around the top of his head. I�ve been here dozens of times before, and never saw anything like that.�
The hanyou at her side shrugged. �I didn�t see anything. Maybe it�s got something to do with your miko powers getting so much stronger. But,� he said, leading her through a deserted park that would cut ten or fifteen minutes off their trip back to the shrine, �There is something I need to talk to you about.�
�What happened in the restaurant, you mean.�
He nodded slowly. �It was almost like what happened at your graduation party all over again--my youkai side decided that you were in danger and tried to take control.�
The girl frowned thoughtfully. �I didn�t think that your youkai side was capable of understanding that kind of threat. You�ve always made that part of yourself sound like some kind of mindless animal.�
He shook his head, having been thinking about that very thing. �It�s almost like my human part is making my youkai smarter, and my youkai side is making my human stronger.�
She nodded. �I�m not really all that surprised. I think that your youkai and human sides are starting to merge. For some reason, the two parts aren�t fighting each other any more.�
He smirked a little. �You�re right,� he said. �For the first time in my life, both sides have something that they can agree on completely.� He stopped moving, pulling her into an embrace that was both fiercely possessive and unfailingly gentle. �I don�t understand how, or why, but both of my sides already recognize you as my mate. I know,� he murmured, grinning at the sudden surge in the spicy, intoxicating scent coming from her. �We haven�t held any of the rituals yet, but I think that there�s more to being mates than the act of mating itself. I think it�s safe to say that we already have that part.�
He reluctantly released her while keeping a grip on her hand. �We should be getting back,� he said. �It�s not safe out here.�
They walked back to the shrine in a companionable silence. As they entered the house, the hanyou put out a hand to stop his future mate from announcing their presence. �Wait a minute,� he growled. �Your mother�s not alone.�
His ears twitched free of their hiding place in the thick mass of his silvery hair. It didn�t sound like anything dangerous, but�. His jaw dropped open in shock as he took a tentative sniff in the direction of the living room.
Kagome could just make out her mother�s voice. �--here right now, but if you�ll leave me a number I�ll have her contact you when she gets in.�
�Mama?� Stepping forward, she turned the corner into the living room. Taking a look at the group sitting around the room, her eyes rolled up and she slumped to the floor, prevented from hitting the carpet only by the inhuman reflexes of her intended mate.

AN: There it is. Any clue as to who the mysterious visitors are, and why there was such a strong reaction to their presence? For everybody who sees this, have a merry Christmas, happy Chanukah, happy Kwanzaa, and a very cool Yule. (If I left anybody out, I�m sorry--I�m working 7 days a week until Christmas, so I�m pretty dead much of the time.)
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At the End of Days	By : inumom Category: InuYasha > General Views: 1784 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, nor make money from this story.

At the End of Days