InuYasha Fan Fiction / Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction ❯ The Blue Anshan ❯ Everything Changes 7 - Convincing ( Chapter 44 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

The Blue Anshan

By Alesyira

Disclaimer: Inuyasha and Yu Yu Hakusho are not mine. I made a few OCs to fill in my gaps.

Summary: The theory goes like this...

Chapter Rating: T, language

Arc 5 - Everything Changes 7 - Convincing

Shippo turned to Kagome, and they stared across the short distance at one another. He took a careful step toward her, hesitating at the hurt and wariness in her expression. He tried to remember that she'd just been through something undeniably awful and that she was probably not thinking terrible things about his recent absence in her life, but it still worried him.

Another step closer, and her lower lip trembled.

One more step and she threw herself forward with a sob. He met her halfway, arms extended to catch her in a hug. The others had stepped away to give the two some semblance of privacy, so they missed the interesting new development.

The vines were in the way, so he improvised with an arm around her waist and a hand at the back of her neck. The moment his hand touched her skin, his magic welled up inside him, overwhelming and sudden. Surprised and concerned about whatever the heck had just happened, he broke off their embrace and immediately pulled back from her. She looked up at him and seemed just as shocked.

"That didn't happen by Goshinboku."

She shook her head. "No, something changed."

His gaze fell to her hip, where he knew the jewel had been tucked away so long ago. Curiosity and longing pushed through his wariness, and he placed his hand atop her head. Nothing. He slid his fingers down her hair and brushed a thumb over one of the tearstreaks down her cheek. His magic welled again. Skin contact.

He sighed and pulled her closer, keeping his hands away from anything that might trigger it again and hugged her tightly. She sighed in relief and wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed hard.

"I'm so sorry," he said, his voice the soft rustle of leaves in a gentle breeze. "I should have been here sooner. The timing has just been shit…" He pressed his face into her hair and breathed deeply as she rubbed her face against his chest, more tears leaking from her eyes as she held him to her. He'd seen her cry more times than he could count. A few more tears would be nothing.

She pulled back a little to look up into his face. He'd grown older and taller since she'd last seen him, and he smiled down at her with an affectionate grin. "You've changed," she whispered.

"No one can stop time," he replied with a warm smile. He rubbed his hand playfully in the mess of her hair. "How long have you been stumbling around in this place?" he chuckled. "You look like you haven't had a bath in a week."

She shuddered. "Please don't remind me." Not only did she have grime and her own blood all over her, but now she had the remains of others to contend with. She might never emerge from the next spring or river they could find.

He gave her a serious look. "We will have time to properly catch up later, but first… where's the bracelet?"

She tilted her head in confusion at the abrupt change in subject. She searched her memory for where it had been put away, then realized she was missing her backpack, again. Pulling away from him further, she peered around his shoulder at the others standing nearby. "It's in the backpack Kuwabara is carrying." Small miracles. (She wondered if someone had grabbed her bow. Chagrined, she noticed it was missing.)

Hiei tossed it over to Shippo before either had a chance to ask for it.

She'd forgotten he could read minds or hear thoughts; she wasn't sure exactly what it was he could do. Tentatively, and unsure he'd even hear her, she thought, 'Thank you.' Not just for the backpack, but for risking his life to bring her back her magic. There had been a very real chance she'd have done something worse before anyone would have been able to stop her. If anyone would have been able to stop her. He met her gaze and nodded slightly.

She was glad he'd heard her; she'd already begun to formulate ways she could thank him properly, and he didn't seem the sort to want that kind of attention. She noticed him frown in irritation, and she wasn't sure if it was in reaction to whatever his companions were speaking about or if it was her thoughts about being so thankful that she would dare to inconvenience him with further signs of her appreciation.

Either way, she turned away from them to hide her smile and knelt to rummage through her pack. She quickly found the silver trinket and pulled it out to hand to Shippo.

He crouched before her and waved his hand against taking it. "No, no, put it on." He gave her a shrewd look.

"Here? But..." she peeked over her shoulder at the others.

"I bet it doesn't do what you think it'll do anymore." His expression looked like a weird cross between grim and hopeful.

She slid the metal band over her wrist and shuddered as the magic crept over her features, changing her as she'd expected. She glanced down at her filthy hands and blinked in confusion. She still had claws? He stared at her features just a little too intently and she started to feel unnerved. "What?" Had the spell on the bracelet broken? She pulled some of her wayward hair into view. Still red. What the heck?

He grinned suddenly, excited about this new discovery. "Don't you see?" he asked. She shook her head, thoroughly confused. He continued, speaking his train of thought aloud, "This explains why you kept getting sick - you'd taken something that doesn't belong to you. Every time I've tried to take magic from others, your magic rebels and it makes me wanna puke. I'm only able to receive gifts! I bet that's the same way for you - any one of us could gift you freaky magic all day long and you'd be just fine, but as soon as you try to take it on your own that's when you get tweaked."

She stared at him like he'd grown a second head. Where had all this random information come from? "But…" she thought back to the previous day. "I don't know how to take magic. And I got sick yesterday when he gifted..." she paused, thinking back to what had happened. True, Kurama had been giving the plant some energy and she thought it had trickled on to her, but what was that weird... hunger... ? Had she been stealing it without meaning to?

She had a hard time believing him. "That doesn't make any sense. I shouldn't be able to take energy like that. It goes against my nature!" She froze, remembering when Kurama had pushed his ki to her during their kiss. That hadn't been stolen by any stretch; it had been practically shoved down her throat, and it had felt very nice.

"Exactly. But you still don't really believe me, nor do you understand what I'm trying to say..."

She had to admit that with as many years as he'd been kicking around, he probably understood quite a bit more now than when he'd been the short-stuff cute kit traveling with them to recover jewel shards. But she couldn't bring herself to accept the weirdness of her illnesses as being the result of her own actions, whether intentional or not.

Kagome shrugged, looking down at her clawed fingertips. She grimaced as she tried to nudge loose some of the drying material still stuck under the tips. "Is that what you have to deal with all the time, then?"

He nodded. "I learned to live with it, because I wanted to keep it as a part of me. But you... you shouldn't have to live with it. Kagome, I think you're supposed to just be the miko. This youkai thing," he waved his hands at her, "was always a mistake, an aberration not meant to last. And these reactions prove it." His eyes narrowed in consideration. "Is she awake?"

Kagome's eyes widened. "She?" How much did he know? Who was she?

"The possession. Don't play dumb, Kagome, I know she's in there. Is she aware right now?"

"I…" Kagome searched her thoughts and feelings. "I don't think so… she hid herself away after she caused all that… that…" She shuddered and turned her face away.

"Hmm…" he put his hand on his chin as he looked over over.

"Shippo, I don't understand, who is she? What are you not telling me?"

He shook his head, thinking. "With the others that are here, I think we can get you back in order."

Her eyebrows arched in interest. Getting the possession out of her would be a great thing.

He started nodding slowly as he looked her over. "Completely back in order, like no more bracelet, no more vine, normal life again."

She didn't dare to hope that it could all go back to how it should have been.

"Kurama is holding a body back there. When you see who it looks like, do not be alarmed." He held up a leaf and winked at her. "You trust me."

Kagome couldn't imagine what might alarm her. 'That's not ominous at all.' But the leaf… he used to use leaves as a medium for his illusions.

He smirked a little bit. "I have an idea, but she must be aware for all these pieces to fall into place. You'll understand. Are you ready?"

Kagome frowned at him suspiciously. "I already don't like this idea."

He winked at her, then held up a fingertip that glowed with a visible trace of his magic. He tapped her on the forehead and his magic rippled through her, sliding down her neck and sparking through her nerves. She took a deep breath as it soaked in, feeling more relaxed and awake than she had in days. "Mother?" He called quietly.

She gasped, feeling suddenly uncomfortable with newly conflicting emotions. 'Mother?' She really hoped he didn't mean what she thought he did.

Kagome blinked as the other consciousness curled from its hiding place to rise within her, lethargic and sad. As it woke, she felt as though part of her body had been forgotten and half-asleep, drifting in a state of rest until this moment. "Mm? Shippo?" The other spoke, the accent feeling out of place in her mouth. She felt a foreign confusion curling through her, then she scented the air and Kagome experienced the overwhelming sensation of how heavily a canine youkai relies on their sense of smell to identify others.

Her brain buzzed, flooded with the nuances of scent that triggered a strong nostalgia, like someone had just pulled out old memories from her childhood and shook off the dust. Her eyes widened as she stared into his face, confused for a wholly different reason than this spirit seemed to be.

"You have grown," She said, reaching out to touch her fingers to his face in wonder. "I think I was... dreaming." She paused, looking down at her filthy hands, her attention sliding over the lingering remnants of violence as though it didn't exist to focus on the familiar bracelet around her wrist. "Where are we? This place does not feel right."

Kagome's mind reeled. 'Oh kami, he… she—?' How the heck had she picked up the spirit of Shippo's long lost —and she'd assumed dead— mother?

"Mother, do you remember how to take energy from others?" She felt her head tilt to the side as flickers of memories flashed by like light reflecting off a hummingbird's wings. Kagome's eyes unfocused as she tried to follow along, but trying to make sense of an old kitsune's mind was dizzying.

"Yes."

"Can you take some from me?"

She frowned at her son, grown up now, and felt a wave of sadness at how much she had missed. "I should not take from you. I have more than I could ever use."

Kagome flinched. She was thankful that their new condition was mysterious to most everyone around them. She hoped the others were not eavesdropping.

"I need to demonstrate something that I'm trying to explain. Just a little should work."

Kagome's hand lifted of its own accord, reached out, and brushed Shippo's arm.

She was expecting to maybe feel discomfort and nausea based on what she remembered happening the day before, but a few details had been overlooked.

First, the old soul inhabiting her body knew exactly how to use her innate abilities with startling precision, and second, Shippo had not considered what the jewel's power might do to boost a 'small sampling' of an ability.

Shippo gasped at the sudden massive drain. Kagome choked and shuddered at the influx of magic as it rushed through her body in a sparkling maelstrom of giddy warmth, but then it corrupted into a poisonous stabbing pain that ripped and tore through her. A strangled sound escaped her throat as she promptly tipped forward and ejected the entire contents of her stomach between the two of them.

Shippo barely flipped out of the way as it splashed in a huge, noxious puddle.

(The team of four had indeed been eavesdropping, and their reactions ranged from ouch to lmao.)

Kagome hiccupped on her hands and knees over the mess on the forest floor. "Ugh, Shippo - that ... was a terrible idea. Kami, I believe you now."

"What is this? Am I ill?" The kitsune spirit had definitely been unaware during the earlier conversation.

"I'm sorry, Mother. Yes, you are very unwell. I think I know what we will need to do to make you better."

He pulled free a wide length of material that had been looped around his waist and handed it to her with a pat on the shoulder. "Sorry about that…" he apologized with the kind of smile that Kagome recognized as not really sorry and about to lead to some trouble-making. "I'll be back in a minute."

She wiped the edge of her mouth. 'Ugh.' As he skipped over to confer with the others, Kagome found herself speaking with her other self.

"My son... he has grown so much." She stared down at her arm and rubbed some of the splatters of gross from her skin. The drying blood flaked free, and she shuddered as she tried to dislodge the gore from beneath a claw.

Kagome nodded, glad to have something else to focus on as she remembered the years they'd spent traveling with Shippo as a young kit. "It really seemed to happen overnight. One day he was little, and the next he was taller than me." The kitsune spirit seemed so calm, almost lethargic. Where was her misery from hurting people? Had she blocked out everything she'd done in her madness?

"His energy feels wrong. Is he sick, as I am?" She felt herself shift uncomfortably.

Kagome paused, staring at the tiny patches of visible dirt as she dug her claws into the trampled grasses. "I'm not sure. He might be. I hope he isn't… not like this." She grimaced, thinking of him wanting to throw up every time he used his natural abilities. If he knew of a way to help undo this madness, would there be a way to fix whatever was wrong with him, too?

Her face tilted up to look through broken branches of the few remaining trees nearby. "This place... it is not as I remember. Why is the sky so strange?"

Kagome shrugged. "I've only been here for a few days myself. It's all weird to me, too."

"I wish to touch the trees and flowers, to know them once more. But this…sickness? I fear I may cause further damage."

"Let's just move over to a clean spot and look for now. Maybe they'll have an idea about what can be done."

The other hesitated, then nodded. "Yes, something must be done. Your burn is most unpleasant." So she did remember some of what had happened earlier, but not all. Disappointing. Remembering the worst of one's past was sometimes the only way to avoid repeating similar mistakes in the future.

Kagome agreed with her, though. The fires of her purity turned against her had been the most unpleasant thing she'd ever gone through. The spirit's unbridled, violent rage was pretty unpleasant, too, and she hoped she never experienced either, ever again.

The team was understandably wary when Shippo literally skipped over to have a word with them and immediately launched into his pitch. "So you all understand she's supposed to be holy, right? Someone like her hasn't been around in a long while. You don't have to trust me on this, but I've looked. You saw what she did at the Goshinboku." He paused and they all nodded.

"She's got two problems. First, she's been cursed. That youkai spirit that's possessed her? That's my mom." He hesitated for a moment, searching for the words he wanted to use. "A spell went bad a while ago." Youko immediately realized something with this story was wrong as Shippo frowned and stared off into the distance, his expression darkening as old memories surfaced.

He directed his next sentence to Kurama. "This is common knowledge to us, but kitsune that don't know any better," he nodded back at the girl behind him, "especially young ones, will take energy from their surroundings, people or whatever else has it available."

Kurama nodded, glancing over Shippo's shoulder at the strange human/avatar they'd been escorting. She faced away from them, talking out loud with the spirit sharing her body.

~This curse happened a while ago? For a kitsune his age, that description seems strange. She unintentionally admitted it herself: she's only 19. And you learned how to not accidentally take from others before you could walk. Surely 'a while ago' is plenty of time to learn control.~

'The avatar theory is looking less likely with each new piece of information.'

"I've had a long time to think about the circumstances around this. If she steals magic from something else, and usually she does it on accident, her natural magic—the holy stuff— gets nasty about it. To make matters worse, the more she takes, the worse the reaction, like everyone just saw."

Yusuke snickered loudly before Kuwabara punched him in the arm and hissed, "Be nice!"

Shippo ignored the interruption. "This leads us to her second problem, that plant, which was like a band-aid to help her with the curse. When her curse activated, it stole my mother's youki to use as its base. We didn't know what was wrong with her at first, but this old lady led us to a plant that could feed on the stolen magic as it regenerated."

Here, Shippo's expression became hopeful and excited, but he lowered his voice to be sure the girl behind him wouldn't overhear. "I think if we can get the spirit of my mother out of her, the curse will break, and then we can do something about that damned vine."

~This timing is completely wrong. The vine has been extinct for one hundred years until it showed up on her. I looked. She hasn't been cursed for 100 years.~

'She lived in an entirely different city. It's possible that wherever they got this variety you just didn't happen to come across it? We couldn't possibly have our nose in every place on earth.' Kurama felt Youko frown, but begrudgingly agreed with the assessment.

~One day, we'll figure out how to get our nose in every place on earth.~

Hiei surprised everyone by asking the first question. "What makes you think we can break the curse?"

"That bracelet has a spell on it to reveal the wearer's true self. Before the crap at the tree, when she wore the bracelet, she looked mostly the same, just more human. Black hair, blue eyes, no tail, like this illusion," he motioned at the body held by Kurama. "Now, when she wears the bracelet, she looks…" He trailed off, glancing behind him. "Hey, Kagome?"

The girl that turned around to look at the team had a completely different face than she had before, looking mostly like the soulless female that Shippo had been carrying when he'd caught up to the group before he'd applied an illusion to her appearance. "Yes?"

"Feeling any better?" When she nodded in response, he gave her a cheerful thumbs up and turned back to the others and whispered the rest, "…she looks like my mother." He leaned forward and added on in a lower tone but far more urgent, "and I can't hit on my mother. That's fucked up."

This declaration was met by more than one frown.

"Again," Hiei asked, his impatience making itself clear, "how do you expect we can break the curse?"

"When that spell went bad, it brought over part of my mother's magic. I think because all of it is back together again with Mother's spirit, she won't part from it willingly. If we can get her spirit back into her body, I bet it'll all go at once. And if it doesn't, well, we have at least one person here who has spent a long time playing with other people's energies."

Kurama nodded thoughtfully. "If the two souls are still completely separate entities and the original body is intact, this might work. We might need the help of the Reikai, though."

Shippo was the first to turn down that suggestion, but Youko didn't miss Hiei's change in expression. ~You have a problem with Reikai helping?~

*And you don't? Those idiots cause just as many problems as they fix.*

"You've got telepathy stuff, right?" Shippo waved his fingers at Hiei's forehead. "Can you do a mental barrier?" Hiei barely moved, but it looked kind of like a shrug to Shippo, so he nodded. "Good. I've heard you're damned scary at that kind of stuff so I hope there's some substance to those rumors." Shippo eyed the short hybrid. The youkai had a reputation of being evil and ruthless. He'd met evil more times than he'd care to admit, and this guy didn't seem to fit that same profile. The idea that this stranger had risked his life for his favorite person won him a few points of regard.

*I do not need or want your regard.*

Shippo blinked. 'Okay.'

*You know more a lot more about this than you're telling us.*

"We need a place to put the plant once it's safe to extract it from her." Shippo went on to say. 'If you're such a great mind reader, then you'd know why I'm not saying more.'

*I risked my life when she showed me what was at stake. This possession threatens more than just one cursed girl.*

Kurama rubbed his chin thoughtfully and shifted his attention to the woods surrounding them. "I can think of a few choice locations, but that god tree could use some extra protections. We should head back in that direction so I can see if I can help the tree, and we will determine if it's a good enough place to transplant."

Shippo had turned to look back in the direction of the god tree, but glanced at Hiei. 'Do the others know?'

*I doubt it. Kuwabara says he can see something bright, but I could not detect a difference outwardly. None of us have noticed a draw as she indicated the jewel and its shards have been capable of before.*

Shippo nodded in relief, and spoke his response to both Kurama's suggestion and Hiei's observations. "Yes, that's good. That will work."

Yusuke wedged himself between his friends and the stranger making plans and held up his hands. "Wait, wait, you guys are wanting to run off to do that, now? Can't it wait until this other trouble is over?"

"Normally I'd agree, but I don't think he is gonna wait too much longer before returning for her. I think he's been keeping her around for centuries, and we need to be ready for his return as soon as possible. I heard a story once about the last time he lost his temper, and it ended with a new volcano in the middle of some lord's stronghold. We might only have around four to eight hours, so long as there isn't an active fault directly beneath this region."

"And if there is?" Yusuke did not like where this was going.

Shippo glanced at the sky and pursed his lips. "Fifteen minutes?"

Yusuke cursed. "All this fucking trouble because of a tree." He grimaced and nodded in agreement. "Okay, you guys go ahead to get set up for this … whatever it is you're gonna do. Kuwabara, you and I can stick around here for a few minutes to get these people situated with the help coming from Reikai. We'll follow shortly."

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