InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Kaleidoscope ❯ Prologue ( Prologue )

Title: Kaleidoscope

Author: Renouveau

Disclaimer: Inuyasha does not belong to me in any way, shape, or form. 

Also, I am cherry picking Japanese history. This is not an accurate depiction of actual events or timelines. Dunno if that needs to be said when one of the main characters is a literal canine-demon-humanoid, but I want to cover my bases.

Summary: Three years after Naraku’s defeat, Kagome remains consumed by the past. Not in an unhealthy way, mind you! And certainly not with the sort of single-minded fixation that finds her inducted into a secret organization, obsessing over feudal timelines, entrance exams be damned… you know, some people call that tenacity. [Sesshoumaru/Kagome]  

Genre: Humor, romance… some angst. For flavor.

Rating: Mature. NC-17. R. 

Notes: Listen - Inuyasha: The Final Act? Never happened. Don’t @ me.    

Setting: It’s definitely Canon–you just have to…kinda squint and tilt your head a little to the left. And ignore the parts I chopped and screwed. And the pairing. Mm, okay, canon-esque. 

Prologue

Well, this is what it look like, right before you fall

Stumblin’ around, you’ve been guessing your direction

Next step you can’t see at all

–Circles, Mac Miller

For the three years following Naraku’s defeat, the Bone Eater’s well has sat dormant. 

Trapped in the present, Kagome has – finally, miraculously – graduated high school. Sadly, her success is short-lived. After failing her university entrance exam, she lives the life of a student ronin. Day after day is spent studying at the yobiko, trying to absorb various materials and courses and exam-taking techniques that her mind has concluded will most definitely not save her life in a fight with a feral youkai, silly, and is therefore utterly useless. 

Day after day she has to wake up like she didn’t face death almost daily for years, didn’t ultimately defeat a nightmarish entity of pure evil, didn’t save the world, didn’t have to fight for her very soul mere minutes after it was finally made whole again, didn’t then IMMEDIATELY lose the only people who might’ve had an inkling how she felt only to wake up 500 years in the future plagued with a persistent sensation of wrongness. Distantly, her teachers repeat monotonous facts meant to be memorized and coughed back up, but she can’t hear them because her brain is flooding her with adrenaline, certain there is danger lurking just out of sight in this open classroom, that the enemy is NEAR and the only viable functions it can perform right now are fight or flight. She spends each class doing her best to keep her manic twitching imperceptible. She struggles to catch her breath around the heavy iron band constricting her chest, to make each inhale/exhale deep and even. She is physically exhausted but mentally running marathons. The return to present-time has turned every new hour into an anxious blur.

Higurashi Kagome has no room left inside her for the equations, formulas, and facts that make up her modern “priorities.” 

So. 

She’s decided to drop the “future medical student seeking to pass entrance exam” shtick. She begins devoting her previously-allotted yobiko time between the three public libraries readily available to her, ravenously consuming all the volumes she can find pertaining to her very own, brand new, self-imposed, completely cobbled together curriculum (that has absolutely no modern-world application and will in no way aid her in passing any sort of standardized exam). She has no goal in mind, no 5 year plan, not even a thought for the passage of time dragging her farther into the alien notion of adulthood. She isn’t even sure what she’s looking for in each book she tears through, but random events and details and vague mentions keep compelling her to write them down, keep them safe, hold them close to her racing heart.

All she knows for certain is that while reading those texts that contain fragments of a familiar ancient world…the wrongness quiets just a bit. Her breathing slows. Her mind’s frenzied pace becomes a tool she can harness and control. Eventually, even her pulse calms enough that the sound of her rushing blood becomes muted. 

A few weeks pass, and this new day to day has begun revealing shades of who Kagome once knew herself to be. 

Unbeknownst to her, the unseen regulars of her libraries – the shrouded bibliophiles – start to take notice. They observe her countless hours spent pouring over every minute detail in dusty tomes that haven’t been touched in years, making notes chaotically, rarely stopping to take a break, some part of her always tapping, twitching or bouncing. They notice as more days pass her reading selections become increasingly focused, her notes more organized, the sudden appearance of a binder and laptop now necessary tools so she can quickly reference back to previous findings. They recognize after a month that her inquiries and subject matter have quickly become far more arcane then they could’ve possibly predicted. Her own writings are no longer just bits and pieces of other books jotted down, but the beginnings of a whole new cohesive body of work. She’s already begun building a skeleton from the meager slivers found in public transcripts, they reflect. Imagine if she had access to our private collections.  

They are enthralled by this bright young woman with her whole future in front of her, a future she can’t even see, her head bent at yet another table, eyes fixed on the past.

A couple more weeks go by. The biblio enthusiasts (their preferred designation, none of that shadowy ‘phile’ association) begin comparing notes, as their community is a tight-knit one, wary of newcomers, but eager to accept the like-minded into their folds. They reach an easy conclusion.

Higurashi Kagome has passed an exam she wasn’t aware she signed up for. 

In the second week of February, on an uncharacteristically gloomy Wednesday afternoon, we find our former miko sitting at a table in a dark corner of her most favorite library, surrounded by her standard three stacks of legend and lore. This room, located on the third floor in the westernmost corner of the building, seems to be a well-kept secret. Kagome has never witnessed more than two other people in here at a time, and today is no different. When she first settles into her spot, she shoots a polite smile at the only other occupant – a nondescript man sitting on the opposite side of the room – then promptly forgets he exists as she picks up her first read. 

It has been decided by the Body of Biblio Enthusiasts (BoB-E for short) that today is the day. 

Emerging from a shadowed corner, the peer-chosen BoB-E representative approaches her. As he grows near, his hulking figure unconsciously attempts to appear smaller by making his atrocious posture even worse, his near-silent footsteps somehow becoming quieter, brilliant blue eyes trained on the ground with absolute fidelity. When he finally reaches the opposite side of the table from Higurashi, he is internally quaking. He waits, eyes now stuck to the table’s woodgrain, all too familiar with the reaction his physical appearance inevitably invokes in strangers. Several seconds pass. 

His brows furrow. He can hear this tiny woman’s pencil scratching across paper, the occasional turn of a page. Her foot is tapping one of the legs of the table with fervor. Why hadn’t she noticed him yet? 

He shifts his weight minutely, expecting that’s all it’ll take. He again waits for the first sign of her having noticed him, expecting a sharp intake of breath or an instinctual movement in the opposite direction of where he stands.  

Her foot stops tapping. 

He feels his muscles tense. 

Her eraser hits the page she’s been working on and furiously attacks the last several lines she’s written, foot resuming its frenetic tapping when she’s done. 

Now he can feel the confused expression he’s leveling at the table. This…has never really happened before. At 6’9”, weighing 290 lbs, not once has he ever flown under the radar anywhere in Tokyo. He has no idea what his next move should be in this unknown territory.

Remembering the mission, he attempts to clear his throat, but only a half-hearted wheeze escapes. His eye flick up briefly, simultaneously hoping that did the trick and that he never makes that noise in public ever again. Higurashi’s head remains bent over two – two? At the same time? That’s not a real thing – books, her incessant tapping starting to grate on his nerves. 

Determinedly, he tries again. He achieves a proper throat clearing, takes a second to feel proud, and his gaze jumps to her face once more for just a moment. 

Kagome’s forehead is propped heavily on the palm of one hand, the pencil in her other viciously whipping back and forth between her pointer and middle finger. Though he can’t see her face to gauge an expression, the tense set to her shoulders and the ferocity of her absentminded fidgeting is statement enough. Her pencil stops moving. She adjusts her grip around it so that she’s squeezing the instrument in her fist. The behemoth in front of her is surprised he’s kept his eyes trained on her this long, but he can’t seem to look away. Her knuckles turn white as she mumbles the same sentence to herself twice. Three times. Though he has no personal experience to draw on, somehow he senses her aura is radiating dangerous displeasure. His eyes widen, his extremities somehow paralyzed. She repeats the sentence once more, trailing off at the end in what he can only describe as a mix of a groan and a growl. He feels a single bead of perspiration leave his hairline and run down his right temple then through the stubble on his cheek. The pencil abruptly snaps in her fist. He flinches at the noise, eyes somehow going wider. She opens her hand and the two halves drop to the table. Besides this one movement she remains completely still, head bent, face concealed by the arm she’s leaning on.   

Today is a bad day. The council – though generally wise and apt at making well-timed decisions – have got it wrong. It is not the day. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after, but this is not the day.

Extraordinarily comfortable with that decision, he-who-was-chosen-by-his-peers makes to turn around and silently slink away. In the span of two blinks, three things go horribly, irreversibly, chaotically wrong. 

1. His right foot – unknowingly placed halfway between the legs of a chair tucked into the table in front of him – lifts as he turns, his movement dragging the chair across the hardwood floor, producing an obnoxiously loud prolonged screech that gets slower (and much worse) as he realizes his mistake and wills his body to stop moving. Which it does. Eventually. 

2. The Chair, now no longer propelled by his foot, comes to rest on only two of its legs, somehow leaning against his leg. With absolutely no thought to the physics of the situation, his foot drops to the ground. The Chair wobbles, his eyes widen in realization, and then The Chair is falling as dramatically as an inanimate object can, somehow in slow motion, until it clatters to the floor with a force he’s positive it shouldn’t have been able to generate. 

3. As The Chair finally settles on the ground, he attempts to swallow. It’s an involuntary reaction his body decides to make in response to being both alive and present at this moment in time. Instead of a relatively silent gulp, his own spit throws itself maliciously down his throat and he begins simultaneously choking and coughing. His anatomy then immediately decides that the most violent mixture it can conjure of these two reflexes will be most effective, because the action he’s forced to perform has him bending over, turning red, nearly convulsing with the effort of both breathing and coughing. And all this in the quietest room of the quietest public space one could possibly dream of having such a fit.

After what could have been a few seconds, a couple minutes, or several millennia, he’s finally stopped choking on his own spit. He’s taking deep, careful breaths, still bent over with his hands on his knees. He counts to five for no particular reason except he’s hoping maybe he’ll wake up or something. When that doesn’t happen he slowly, carefully straightens until he’s standing in his usual hunched position. Head bowed, he takes a peek in front of him, verifying that he is now, in fact, facing a wall. That puts Kagome’s table, her remaining three chairs, and Kagome herself (occupying one such chair) on his left. It is clear, even just from his peripheral line of sight, that her mouth is impressively agape, eyebrows raised all the way to her hairline. He chances a glance to his right to confirm the unremarkable man across the room is mirroring her expression. Fully confirmed, he can’t help the miniscule nod he makes to himself, which is his equivalent of saying out loud, “Yeah, that makes sense.” 

The silence stretches. It blankets the room. The quiet is so uncomfortably tangible it is essentially its own person now, sitting at its own table, mouth hanging open, eyebrows fighting to join the scalp hair permanently. The BoB-E’s chosen one nods once more to himself before bending to retrieve The Chair lying on the ground to his right. He grasps it, sets it upright in front of him, begins turning slowly towards Kagome so he can return it from whence it came, and once more realizes his mistake too late. His initial slow dragging recreates the horrible noise that started all this, causing him to panic and flail in an effort to place The Chair back under the table faster. Overcorrecting has him hitting the table leg, and one of Kagome’s stacks topple. Another overreaction and he’s smacked The Chair into its neighboring chair, briefly tangling them together somehow (later he’d swear he watched the cursed one wrap a leg around the other). Having to exert an extraordinary amount of effort to get them apart, he feels more sweat beads forming, then gradually sliding down his face. Finally, the fiends separated, he takes a full step back from the table while holding The Chair. Cautiously, he sets it down, making sure all four legs are planted and that the haunted relic has no more evil schemes to unleash. He takes a deep breath then fully steps around the current bane of his existence, seating himself atop it. Some distant, delirious part of his brain is waxing poetry about overcoming one’s troubles, vanquishing one’s demons and building a throne out of their corpses, which he chooses determinedly to tune into so that he doesn’t hear the last…weirdly triumphant squeak The Chair makes as he stands slightly and takes a couple baby steps forward to get closer to the table. 

Settled across from Kagome, he wrings his hands together in his lap, and chances a peek. They make eye contact, her face the same – if not somehow more agape – as before, his desperately trying to look indifferent and failing miserably. To his own surprise, he doesn’t look away immediately. Kagome’s mouth clicks shut after a beat and it’s clear she’s fighting her own facial muscles to lower her eyebrows. Due to her internal conflict, they’re waggling quite absurdly, almost as if she’s trying to make some overly animated sexual advance at him. He stops staring at them and once again looks into her eyes. Their gazes locked, Kagome’s eyebrows still defying her, his face stuck in a grimace befitting someone trying to relieve themselves of constipation, the silence makes itself known once more. 

Until both of them completely crack, their hysterical laughter bouncing off the walls and echoing around the room at a decidedly not library-friendly decibel. This just sends them further into uncontrollable glee, their amusement freshly amplified each time it returns to them, and then suddenly as certain as he’d been 10 minutes ago today was not the day, he’s now ten times as convinced this woman not only holds a place in the folds of BoB-E, but that someday they will become great friends.

On the other side of the room, the nondescript stranger continues to gape, forgotten entirely. 

This is Kagome’s introduction to the secret circle of the Body of Biblio Enthusiasts, a community dedicated to the accumulation and preservation of the rarest books, manuscripts, artifacts, and the like. Specifically, the society’s most pressing interests lie in the works that contain detailed accounts of mysterious powers in Japanese history and the beings that wielded them. 

After getting over their initial hysterics, her and D – the only nomer she’d managed to drag out of him – had sat in that room for hours, him offering what details he could regarding BoB-E’s studies and the etiquette under which they operated, her doing her best to not explode in a million, ecstatic pieces. 

He explained that although the nature of her book selection was what first garnered their attention, it was the way she seemed to be narrowing her studies, seeking this particular knowledge with such fervor, that ultimately decided it was time to make an introduction. 

While Kagome’s questions had seemed incessant before, flying out of her at an unhinged rate regarding BoB-E and all their organization entailed, as soon as D started asking for details in regards to what it was exactly she was looking for, she became quite withdrawn. 

The answer wasn’t an easy one, in fact it wasn't something that Kagome was even entirely sure she possessed. All she knew was that, even within the limited scope of works already available to her, she could feel something starting to take shape in her notes. It was an inkling that at times – while recording specific events that couldn’t be anything except either youkai or holy magic – brought her own miko powers to the surface and left her with the heady sensation she was taking part in something much larger than the preoccupations of a girl feeling untethered from time. 

Seemingly satisfied with the disjointed answer she gave, and then much more so with the notes she enthusiastically showed him, D invited her into the inner sanctum of BoB-E, giving her access to the myriad of personal collections kept hidden from the general public. 

With this invitation, it feels as if suddenly Kagome’s vague, patchwork curriculum has come into sharp relief. 

Her studies, once centered around the only other period she’d ever personally experienced, begin to extend further back. Now, she’s pouring over the eras that predate the Sengoku period, drawn by some invisible thread more distantly into the past than she’s ever gone before.

Of course all that only happens because, as the initial days and weeks of her admittance into BoB-E’s collections pass, she finds with increasing frustration that virtually nothing exists concerning her friends or allies following the destruction of Naraku. After hours spent in the dustiest of public archives and the resplendent one’s belonging to BoB-E, repeatedly scanning every book and parchment that could potentially hold even a trace until her vision blurs, she decides to place this unnerving realization aside and continues on.

More time drifts by while our pseudo-miko focuses on folklore, mythology, and ancient legends, until she finds herself concentrating most heavily on chronicles passed down orally. Many of these retellings are direct from the ancestors of BoB-E’s members, carefully kept for generations. Through the lineages she’s able to trace back, Kagome finds she can place many of these tales at locations she’d become familiar with during her travels.

Using this method, Kagome starts putting rough dates to most of the events, drawing on similarities from the multitude of fables (and a few eyewitness accounts) she’d heard firsthand 500 years ago. One day, after assigning the tale of an otherwise unknown monk fighting off a murder of youkai murder-crows to the Kamakura era, she takes a step back… and notices something. 

The timeline she’s constructed – yes, it’s a physical timeline taking up an entire wall in her room and yes, there are strings and flash cards and artist renditions decorating the juiciest bits, and yeah, okay, Souta has repeatedly informed her it  gives obsessed, sleep-deprived detective-building-a-conspiracy-wall vibes which is HARDLY THE POINT – is… repeating itself?

Over the span of hundreds of years and through various periods’ rise and fall, the accounts of the use of magic follows a pattern. It starts slow, with the odd tale here and there regarding an event of weaker supernatural happenings, then gradually swells to a period of some hundred-odd years where all magic is commonplace, before an immense meeting of opposing powers come to pass. From this initial record of massive energies colliding, it remains stagnant for roughly 3-5 years, until a final, tremendous conflict is known. Following that final act, mention of any youkai or holy power emergence is non-existent until the cycle repeats itself another decade later. Each sequence brings with it a new cast of characters, the names attributed to the previous revolution never mentioned again.

This of course doesn’t account for the consistent demonic presences she knows exist – beings like that of Inuyasha’s father, who lived for centuries – but still it makes sense seeing as creatures that old rarely see fit to meddle in human affairs (unless they, you know, have a human affair…but that’s the exception, not the rule).    

After months of non-stop work, dead ends, sleepless nights, and that shroud of wrongness pulling ever tighter around her, Kagome has not only collected one of the most thorough bodies of Japanese mythology to date, she’s managed to draw distinct, recurrent patterns in the rise and fall of demonic and spiritual energy. Knowing the day of the final battle with Naraku, Kagome charts the spike that was their battlefield, finding it follows the same archetype. In fact, there were three blips previously recorded that exactly mirror the one caused by Naraku’s defeat… and after each of those blips… a much larger, more powerful energy release followed… which led to the end of each of the three major feudal periods. 

Which would mean, should history be repeating itself, as it is wont to do…

…Her friends would soon be facing a seismic display of warring energies, ushering in their wake a new age. 

All of her data spread before her, the undeniable parallels across hundreds of years proving themselves again and again, Kagome feels her heart rate increase. Her fingers tremble, her mouth goes dry. 

If this- ..If this was accurate… if she was right… 

The Warring States was about to become an even bigger battleground to a set of opposing forces whose powers would eclipse Naraku’s several times over. And her friends have only until the end of the year – roughly nine months – to prepare for the first emergence. 

Kagome stares at the Bone Eater’s Well, her face a vicious mask of anger and resentment. 

How many times had she thrown herself to the bottom of this useless thing in the last three years? How many tears had she shed in its depths? How many nails had been lost trying to physically dig herself back 500 years? 

She kicks a side of the well, distantly pleased when one of the boards loosens just a bit. 

Turning, unable to help the sigh that escapes, she sits on the edge of this inactive force that so thoroughly controlled and altered her entire life just a few years ago. Her mind is a maddening swirl of emotion and so many half-formed thoughts she can’t hope to make sense of just one.  

Kagome buries her head in her hands, tears forming in frustration. 

Why have I been reading all this stuff for months for no reason? What’s the point if I’m stuck here?? What am I supposed to do now???

Behind her, a familiar glow erupts from cracks at the bottom of the well, light shining through trenches made by her own desperate hands long ago.

Oblivious, Kagome clutches harder at her scalp, Why did you even take me in the first place you evil jerk? Her foot lifts and once more kicks at the wood behind her.

The well, offended, releases a huff of inanimate rage. The cracks emitting the soft light grow, tendrils of power reach higher from the depths, until a pulse sends dust and debris falling from the well houses rafters. Kagome sits straight up, not even daring to breathe. Her own magic pulses in sync. 

Are you fu–

Tendrils wrap around her, light blazes from the bottom, a spider squeaks in alarm from a far corner. Kagome falls back and is gone.

The Bone Eater’s well sits silent and dark once more.