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Through The Well	By : TheKaytla Category: InuYasha > Yaoi - Male/Male > InuYasha/Sessh?maru > InuYasha/Sessh?maru Views: 25850 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 9
Disclaimer: I do not own the series Inuyasha, nor its characters.They are property of Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Yomiuri TV, Sunrise, and Viz. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-One
- 2-Two
- 3-Three
- 4-Four
- 5-Five
- 6-Six
- 7-Seven
- 8-Eight
- 9-Nine
- 10-Ten
- 11-Eleven
- 12-Twelve
- 13-Thirteen
- 14-Fourteen
- 15-Fifteen
- 16-Sixteen
- 17-Seventeen
- 4
- 5
- 6
Chapter Five

Sitting on the wooden platform on the opposite side of Kaede's cooking pit, Inuyasha shifted his shoulders tensely. For the last ten minutes, neither of them had said anything. Both waiting for the other to start, Inuyasha supposed. It wasn't easy to tell someone you'd cared about for years that they were so different, you could barely recocile them with the person you'd once known.

For all he wanted to get to the truth, he suddenly found he didn't want to be the one to start this conversation. The more time passed, the more he got the feeling he wouldn't like what he was about to hear.

But he had to find out. The dread, the not knowing, was eating away at him.

"Where to start, huh?" he finally said, breaking the silence.

Kaede looked at him with sympathy. "Ye implied there were questions ye wanted to ask."

He scratched his head absently, dragging his gaze away and watching the flickering flames instead. "Yeah... Yeah, I do. But it seems every time someone opens their mouth around me, I get a dozen more questions, and everything's so out of order and jumbled up in my head and... I guess..." He sighed heavily. "I guess... what I really want to know about most... is Kagome."

"Kagome?"

"Yeah... What happened to her. Where she is. Stuff like that."

Kaede was silent and almost unnaturally still. Inuyasha's heart started speeding up almost instantly.

"What do ye last remember about her?"

Not liking where this was going already, Inuyasha frowned. "I'd just taken her home back to her time. She was safe. Last I saw her, she was with her family."

"Ah." The old miko stoked the fire with a stick that had become blackened at one end. "It seems ye have forgotten much, Inuyasha. Perhaps it is a blessing as much as a curse, in this case." Kaede's face underwent a change and suddenly seemed even older, tired and sad. "I am sorry to say it, but she was lost to us. In some ways, it was even more tragic than my sister's passing. Kagome was so young. Too young to be entwined with the fate of the Shikon no Tama, I always thought..."

Inuyasha didn't hear anything else. The blood was suddenly pounding furiously in his ears and a cold sweat was beading on his back. His body felt numb, almost paralysed. Though he stared into the fire, he couldn't see it.

It shouldn't have been such a shock. It wasn't like he hadn't had some kind of forewarning. Yet it was a quick, hard sucker punch he hadn't been able to brace himself for, and it left him reeling.

He didn't know how long he sat there, but when he blinked and focused on Kaede's face, the old miko was silent, simply watching him. He let out a shaky breath. "How?"

Kaede echoed his exhale, soft and regretful. "It was Naraku's doing," she said. "I don't know the details; never had the heart to ask. The knowing alone was enough for me."

Naraku's doing.

How? Inuyasha wondered. He'd been dead. They'd destroyed him, once and for all. The Shikon no Tama had followed him into nothing. And then he'd personally seen Kagome back to her own time, safe and alive.

So how could this have happened? Could there have been a way for Naraku to come back? Had he somehow... been still alive? While he'd floated in the well, useless to everyone, had Naraku come back for them?

Had Kagome been there?

He wouldn't have been there with her, with any of them. He wouldn't have been able to lift a finger to help... hadn't known there had been any danger.

He forgot all his plans to learn what he could about what had changed here, maybe begin to understand why it had changed. This eclipsed everything. Hearing someone whose word he trusted confirm the worst possible truth... he knew then it wasn't about seeing if he could potentially adjust to the changes. It was about seeing if he could somehow change this future.

The well, Inuyasha thought. The well was his one chance to fix things. If it brought him here, into this horrible future, it could take him back. He'd be prepared for it now; if he knew Naraku would come after Kagome, he'd just make sure she stayed by his side at all times. And maybe, just maybe, he could stop it happening again.

He stood abruptly, startling Kaede. "I have to go," he said simply, without looking at her. This sudden parting was, he could admit, a bit callous... but when he saved Kagome, none of this would matter anymore. It would all change, and this future wouldn't exist. Something brighter... righter would take its place, and things would make sense again.

Decided, he started to leave, but the old miko catching and holding his hand made him stop, surprised. She'd never held his hand before. Never really touched him except when patching up his injuries. It made him meet her eyes again.

"There's nothing ye can do to change the past, Inuyasha," she explained gently. "Ye cannot bring Kagome back. Even the Tenseiga was unable to do that."

Inuyasha's mouth was open, ready to contradict her, to explain his plan, but that brought him up short. He couldn't deny that shocked him; despite his urgency, he found himself wanting to know more. "What d'you mean? You can't tell me Sesshomaru actually..."

"Aye, he did. But the sword failed to bring her back, to the dismay of all. Sesshomaru began to lose faith in the Tenseiga after that. It was the second time it had failed him."

Staggered again, Inuyasha could only dumbly follow the conversation's natural path while his mind whirred ineffectually, struggling to accept what he was hearing. She'd implied it, and so to some degree he'd expected it, but still...

"Second time?" he pressed.

"Ye don't remember that, either? Such gaps seem so strange..." Kaede seemed both surprised and sympathetic; she let go of his hand, finally, apparently content he would not try to leave for now. "It was Kikyo, of course. Though it was perhaps not unexpected, considering..."

Inuyasha's heart was once again pounding. Sesshomaru... had attempted to save Kikyo as well? How was that even possible? The daiyoukai had never even met her while she'd been alive. Not as far as Inuyasha knew, anyway. But even if he had... why would he have bothered? Before Rin, Sesshomaru had never given a mortal a second glance, and usually not even a first. It was only that little girl he made any effort to save... and why he did even that much, Inuyasha had never figured out.

What did all this mean? He didn't understand any of it. It was like the world had tilted just a small degree; things were still painfully familiar but alarmingly foreign at the same time. How could everything have changed so drastically just because he'd gone back in the well?

"Sesshomaru never found a reason for the failures that satisfied him," Kaede continued over the silence. "But I have my own theories."

Inuyasha slowly sat down again, still trying to absorb all this information. Despite already feeling overloaded with it, he still asked: "What theories?"

"I know not what limits Tenseiga truly has, but I believe the sword has only a short time in which it can bring a soul back from the netherworld. As for my sister, I suspect he was simply... too late."

Inuyasha had to privately agree this made sense to him. A sword that could bring any soul back from the dead would be impossible. Such powers simply didn't exist. If they did, he would have chased them to the ends of the earth to bring back his mother. In that respect, he supposed Tenseiga was something of a miracle. More special than his Tetsusaiga.

"As for Kagome, the girl's soul was not of our time. I believe when she passed, her soul returned to where it should be." Kaede paused long enought to stoke the flames once more. "Tenseiga is a powerful sword, that is without question, but it is not infallible. I assume it simply could not bring back a soul from the future."

Again, it was completely plausible. It did make sense. Perfect sense, even. But part of him rebelled at accepting it. There had been a way to save Kagome's life, yet one technicality stopped it working? It was just too cruel. Hadn't they all suffered enough?

In the silence, the hanyou once again got to his feet. "I have to go to the well."

"The well?" Kaede asked, standing with him.

"I came through it," Inuyasha explained. "I don't know how... or why things have changed, but everything had been normal before I jumped in. If I go back.. maybe things will make sense again. It's my only hope right now."

"The Bone Eater's Well has been inactive since Kagome passed away, Inuyasha. Ye hadn't even been able to take her home after, to explain to her family... It hurt us all deeply to know that they would always wonder what happened to her."

That blow, he hadn't even seen coming. It was a possibility he hadn't even considered, and just imagining their pain hurt him as well. Had any of them really been cut any slack since they got tangled up with the Shikon no Tama? They'd all made the best of it, got back up whenever they got knocked down, but it had never really been easy. They'd all taken their knocks. Some harder than others, it seemed.

"The well is still the only way," he decided. It was his only chance to change this future where Kagome had died, to set things back on the right track. "I have to go back."

He might have said more, perhaps offered messages to pass onto his friends, but at that moment, twin bursts of youki flared in the village. Inuyasha stiffened as he instantly recognised them.

Rin's head popped into the hut before he could react, her face lit up by a smile as bright as sunshine. "Lord Sesshomaru is back! And Koga, too! Inuyasha, come see them!"

---

So I got a comment yesterday about this fic. They asked very nicely for more... and, well, I guess I got inspired. Let that be a lesson to all you silent lurkers out there! It's actually the second time this has happened to me (and that's just what I can remember off the top of my head), so it proves I'm simple-minded enough to work on things just because people ask me to personally. xD

If you think Inuyasha's trains of thought about what's happening around him are inconsistent, switching from one assumption to the next... I'll tell you that's not an oversight. It's deliberate. He's being hit with a lot of strange, confusing, distressing information over and over, so it's difficult for him to keep his thoughts on one track. There will come a time, in the future, where he finally has enough information to line it up properly and fully understand what's happened.

Then new drama will start, I guess. XD

In the meantime, hopefully this has answered at least a question or two. If not... things will start becoming clearer later. ^^
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Through The Well