InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Rebound ❯ Part 2 ( Chapter 2 )

The girl furrowed her smooth brow. "In the forest, if you follow the path from here, there is a glade, and in the glade an old dry well that we call the Bone Eating Well," she said. "Do you know it?"

"I know it," said Kagome, and thought, Old wooden well, long vines, woman's open-toed black patent leather pump with three-inch stiletto heel lying on the ground right next to it.

"Go past that well," the girl continued, looking to the baby for confirmation, "a little to the left and about another, oh, three hundred paces, and there is a holy tree, a very large tree."

"I know the tree," Kagome said. I know the tree like I know my own hand, like I know my own heart-no, better than I know my own heart.

The girl smiled a dimpled smile at the baby, who smiled dimples right back. "Well, then, just past the tree is a hut, and that is where you'll find Inuyasha." She bowed low, and Kagome did the same, and then quickly turned to head back to the forest, just in case there should be anybody left alive in the village who still remembered her.

The sun was up, gentle light filtered in through the trees. The day would be warm. She passed the well, passed her incongruous shoe. Beneath her feet were roots and leaves and cool clay. This is what walking had felt like to Inuyasha in his bare feet as he had carried her on his back, day after day. She had rarely been barefoot in those days; he had never worn shoes. She could see the tree a little further on. Soon she would see him again. She stopped, opened the bottle, and took yet another swig.

He was standing outside the hut chopping wood. She came up silently and stood, quiet, watching him. Once upon a time she would not have been able to creep up on him; he would have known she was there, known by her scent, caught her scent the moment she appeared in the well and run to her, trying to look gruff but face glowing with delight. He would have called out her name; she would have responded with his. Now that sense, the one on which he had relied the most, was denied him forever. Had she been an enemy, he would be lying dead now, never having known what killed him.

She stayed still for several minutes, watching him swing the ax. His body had thickened, filled out; he had been a wiry, almost skinny boy. He still wore his familiar hakama, his legs a mystery inside the ballooning red trouser legs, but the jacket was off and he had peeled down the white under-kimono to work bare-armed and bare-chested in the warm solstice morning. At least he had gotten to keep the kimono. She wondered if he still had the sword.

His torso was well-muscled and glistening with sweat, his shoulders broader than she remembered them. He had not cut his hair, not given in to the ubiquitous mage hairstyle. His hair had been raven-black when she last saw him, but now it was shot with gray, although still thick and full. How old was he? Forty? Not yet-thirty-seven, thirty-eight, two or three years older than herself, unless some of the fifty years of stasis had been piled back onto him. She considered: late thirties looked right-old perhaps to a teenager, like the girl in the village, but still young. He was one of those people who gray prematurely; by the time he was forty, forty-five, his hair would be entirely silver again.

He stood with one foot on the ground, the other, the left, on a section of log. She was surprised to see that he wore shoes-geta, the traditional wooden sandals. As she watched, he finished the job and stopped, putting his fists on his hips, and puffed his cheeks: whew, a gesture so typical of him she almost wept again. He swiveled his head, seeming to cast around himself for something, then saw it and reached for it. Kagome's eyes widened as she saw where his hand was heading. There was a wooden crutch leaning against a tree. He grabbed the crutch, swung it towards himself and under his arm. Now she realized that the left leg, the one on the log, was shorter somehow than the other. The foot was there, and whole, but seemed to be shaped oddly, and turned the wrong way. He took a step; the leg was almost useless, the foot dragging, and now she saw the reason for the geta: it protected his foot from being scored by the ground. She felt pity and regret rise up through her body and spill out over her face, and that is when he saw her.

He didn't move; just stood there, the crutch supporting his weight in place of the atrophied leg. He looked at her face, reading what was there, without reaction, without emotion. There was no question that he recognized her. Once they had stood just like this, in almost this very spot. She had watched him embrace Kikyou, realized that he would never give Kikyou up, and they had stared silently at one another as she comprehended what it was that destiny was asking of the Lady Kagome. She took a step forward, as she had on that day, but this time she spoke. "Good morning," she said, and then flushed with shame because the words seemed so banal, so inappropriate for a moment such as this.

He considered for a moment, then bowed very slightly, leaning on the crutch. "Good morning," he replied. He paused for a moment, then added, "It's been a long time, hasn't it?" She relaxed a bit; that statement was as trite as her own. What should she do? Run into his arms? She had a horrible mental picture of herself surprising him, knocking him off his foot, breaking his crutch, his arm, his good leg. Instead she stepped forward slowly, and he looked at her bare legs. "Mind," he said, "you'll have splinters in your feet," but it was a moment too late, and she howled as a long sliver of wood jabbed into the ball of her right foot. "Shit," he said.

He swung to her side surprisingly quickly. She was wobbling on her left foot, right knee bent, looking over her shoulder to try to see her injured sole. He caught her around the shoulders, supporting both of them with the crutch under his right arm. For a moment they swayed together and she thought they would both go crashing to the ground, but he found the balancing point and they remained upright. He caught his breath-again, that familiar whew-and then he said, "All right. We can do this."

"That's great," she said. "What are we doing?"

He shot her a strange look, assessing, suspicious, and then replied, as though speaking to a particularly dense child, "We're going into the house to take a look at your foot."

"Well," she said, "that makes sense."

He frowned at her again, one curious eyebrow shooting upward, but he didn't speak, only grunted, took a deep breath, and swung the crutch forward, throwing his weight on it. She tried to follow him, her sake-fuzzed brain laboriously sorting out the physics of the situation, which foot she was standing on and which was his good one and how they were balancing on the crutch. They tottered for a moment, but his arms and good leg were strong, and they held. After a moment-mostly through his efforts-they worked out a pattern of sorts, and carefully made their way into the deep shadow of his little hut.

For a moment they both stood still, disoriented by the sudden darkness. Even in the shade of the god-tree the air had been relatively bright, green and gold light filtering down from between the leaves. In here was as all such houses she'd seen, dim and smoky from the firepit on the floor. The floor was bare wood and a few tidy boxes held what little he owned. There was an air of impermanence to the place compared to, say, Kaede's house; she remembered her most recent hours in Kaede's house and thought sadly about how little permanence really amounted to. There were no chairs, of course, no easy surface to sit or lean on. She spent a moment pondering the logistics of disengaging herself from his arm and lowering herself to the floor. He understood and moved his hand from her shoulder to her arm, steadying her as she sorted out the process of shifting her center of gravity to where she could catch herself in a kneeling position. There was a cracking noise from her knees as she settled to the floor. He grunted again and sat heavily a little distance away from her, using the crutch to support himself down to the length of his arm, and pulled his white kimono up over his arms and chest. "All right, let's see it," he said, and he reached around and grabbed her ankle, sending her sprawling.

She lay on her back and gaped up at him, caught somewhere between laughter and outrage. He was squinting at the foot in his hand. Between the two of them was an enormous expanse of white leg; the little black dress had ridden up almost to her hips. He was privy to an unobstructed beaver shot, if he cared for one, but his eyes didn't stray up the leg. She didn't know whether to be grateful or offended. Suddenly he grabbed the other ankle as well, devoted a few seconds to critical comparison, and said, "Your feet are really dirty."

She jerked her feet out of his hands and pulled herself up. "You, of all people, have no business making comments about . . . about the dirtiness of other people's feet!" she cried.

He sat back with a patient sigh. When had he discovered patience? "Your first aid book says it's important to clean around the wound before you treat it," he said.

She gawked at him. "My . . . my first aid book? What do you mean, first aid book?"

"You left your first aid book here," he said. "It was one of the books in your backpack."

"You read it? You can read?" she said. And then, "You still have my backpack?"

"I brought it back home," he said. "I could read a little then. I…we…Kikyou could read really well, and she was clever with words. We looked at them a lot. She helped me. There was a dictionary, and … it was like we were working out a puzzle. She…Kikyou…it was interesting for her, the world that you live in. That I had been there, and had seen so many of the things in your books."

He sat quietly then, saddened or embarrassed or both. Kagome looked away from him. "I'm sorry," she said. "They told me in the village about Kikyou. How…long ago? How…?"

"I had her for about ten months," he said. His voice was gruff, and he looked away into the distance.

The words were like a blow to Kagome's chest. Ten months! Only ten months? About as long as they and their companions had traveled together. After all that, all that suffering and courage and blood and pain, that was all they got? She thought back. What had she been doing, ten months after she found her way home on that terrible, lonely day? Sitting at her desk in high school, or chatting with her friends at McDonald's, stealing kisses or a little more than kisses in an out-of-the-way spot in the park?

He was talking again. "There was a fever," he said. "She'd been nursing people, like she always did. And then…" he sighed and fumbled, at a loss for words, "…it took her, too." He didn't say she died, didn't mention death. "We had…we thought…it looked like there might have been a baby on the way." She closed her eyes, engulfed with pain-pain for him, pain for herself. Ten months. She had still been trying to get through to him-not every day anymore, but often, every few weeks, dropping from the rim onto the hard-packed dirt below. He had been free, unbound, and still the well had not let her through. Immediately, she was ashamed of herself. Yes, she had been disappointed-more than disappointed, heartbroken. But this man she had loved, this man who had been so close to her heart, had been hurt, was still hurting, had lost his beautiful young wife to death not once but twice, had lost his child, had sacrificed everything to gain the Shikon no Tama, and it had reached out to betray him yet again.

"Well," he said, "this isn't mending your foot." He scooted along the floor unceremoniously on his behind to the doorway. There was a dipper in a bucket of water at the door, and a piece of cloth hanging somewhere nearby, out of her line of sight. He splashed water on his hands, then dampened the rag and scooted back, once again taking up her foot. "Where is it?" he asked, but a second later got his answer as the rag brushed the tiny protruding end of the sliver and she yelped, jumping away. This time he kept hold of the ankle, sending her flat on her back. "Shit," he said again. He shot a stern glance over her toes. "Just lie there quietly," he said. "I promise I'll be gentle."

She looked up at the ceiling and laughed. "I wanted you to say that twenty years ago," she said.

His hands were motionless upon her foot. She lifted her head; he face once again had that curious, assessing expression. After a moment, he held the foot close to his face, squinting in the dim light, and then scowled. "Dammit," he said. "I can't see it. Come closer to the fire."

"Wait a minute," she said. "I have a flashlight." He gave a quick little nod; he knew about flashlights, she had supplied them from home during their travels. She reached into her pocket and handed him the bottle of sake.

He stared at it dumbly for a minute, then looked at her. "You are drunk," he said. "I thought you were drunk. What the hell are you doing, drinking like this? Is this what you do now?"

She flopped backward onto the floor. "Shit," she said, closing her eyes. "No," she said, "this is not what I do. I … this is…was…a special occasion." She sat up again and looked at him; his mouth was twisted a bit, either in anger or to suppress a laugh-but of course he never laughed, rarely even smiled. Kagome pulled herself up into as dignified a posture as she could manage lying drunk on the floor of a 16th century hut with her dress hiked up to the top of her thighs and a man she hadn't seen for more than twenty years holding her foot up in the air. "For your information," she told him, "I was at a wedding. That's why I'm dressed up like this."

He regarded her gravely, her dirty bare feet and legs, her black dress with its down of cat hair and angora fuzz, the torn pantyhose tied around her waist, the mascara streaked down her cheeks and up her arm, the slim gold watch, and the neat little string of pearls. "Ah, so." he said. "Ways are different on your side of the well. Is there actually a flashlight?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," she said. She fumbled in her other pocket and brought out the flashlight, and along with it, entangled with it, her keys. He took the light in one hand and caught the falling keys with the other, leaving her foot hanging in the air. After a moment it grew heavy, and she set it down. It dropped onto his thigh, the bad one, and he flinched. Whatever was wrong with his leg, the trouble was there, just above the knee, and it was still painful. A long time to be in pain-the muscles of the foot and ankle were shrunken, the injury old.

He was staring at the keys-looking, she realized, at the keychain, the glowing yellow Shikon no Tama. She could tell by his face that he recognized it, and she felt her own cheeks beginning to burn. She tried to think how to explain it to him, this glass-and-plastic representation of the thing that had destroyed his life, but couldn't find any words that would justify reducing his personal tragedy to a trinket. He handed it back to her without a word, then turned his attention back to her foot, clicking on the light and scowling.

Suddenly her toenails caught his attention. He folded back her toes and stared for a moment at the red polish, then released the foot to reach over and grab her hand and inspect her unpainted fingernails. This time he set the leg down carefully, resting the foot gently on his good ankle, which was tucked up into half of the cross-legged posture she remembered. His other knee remained unbent, the lower leg and foot at an awkward angle.

She wondered if it was the knee that had been injured, or the hip, or just the femur. She narrowed her eyes, mentally tracing as best she could the line of the hip, the flare of the iliac crest under the hakama, imagining the smooth insertion of the femoral head in its socket. The hip might be all right. The knee-impossible to tell through his kimono. If the femoral shaft had been broken very close to its seating against the tibia and there was no other injury, a total knee replacement-augmented, of course, by extensive physical therapy-might bring about an excellent result. A more proximal break might do well with surgical re-fracture and pinning, again assuming aggressive postoperative PT. If there was significant nerve damage, if the apparent atrophy was secondary to denervation rather than just to lack of use, the situation would be more difficult. In some of these cases, amputation was actually preferable: the patient had better use of the limb and a smoother gait with the prosthesis than with the natural musculature. Of course, that was more problematic in a case like this, where the injury seemed to be located above the knee; the prognosis was always more guarded with an above-the-knee amputation than a below-the-knee one. It also depended on how much damage he'd done to the articular surface of the femoral head by using the leg at that unnatural angle. Her eyes moved back up to assess the pelvis, trying to gauge the angle at which he was holding the thigh. . . . Inuyasha sat perfectly still, her hand still in his, watching her stare at his crotch. "It's great to see you, too," he said.

Kagome pulled back her hand and rolled herself into a ball, her knees tucked before her chest with the sweater wrapped around them, her head on top of the knees, hair hanging forward. "I'm so sorry," she mumbled into her knees. "I didn't-I wasn't-I-we-we could-could do something about that leg."

"Could we?" he asked.

She peeked up at him from below the fringe of her bangs, lifting her head just slightly. His face was curious and-amused?-one eyebrow was raised-but not angry. "I-we. Medical science. I'm a doctor now." He grunted a bit, bowed a bit in acknowledgement. "In my-realm, doctors can do a lot to fix injuries like that." She lifted her head a bit further. "Doesn't it surprise you to know I'm a doctor?"

He looked puzzled. "No, of course not. Weren't you studying? Kikyou and Kaede also-"

"Of course," she said. "Yes, I was studying, but not to be a doctor. That was just for the high school exams. Everybody does that. Medical school came much later."

"Ah," he said, and looked away. "I'm sorry. There's so much about your time I've never figured out. The books were much more difficult, once there was just me."

Kagome reached out a hand and rested it on his arm. "I'm so sorry," she said. "You lost her because she was a doctor, like me. Can you-would you like to tell me?"

He shrugged. "Fever," he said. "Took about half the village. She and Kaede cared for them. One day she took sick, like the others. Pain in the throat, inside the throat all white, tongue all red then-burning up, delirious, and red all over the skin. Just like everyone."

Kagome closed her eyes. "Scarlet fever," she murmured. Half the village dead of strep throat. She mentally rehearsed her streptococcal monologue: Here's a scrip. You're going to feel better in a couple of days, but you have to finish all the pills or it'll come back. Stay home from school till you've been on the meds for 24 hours, so I don't have to look at all your classmates. Call me if you're not feeling a lot better by the end of the week. OK? She shivered. Sixteenth century medicine. Call me if you're delirious, if you're dead, if your joints are so inflamed you can't walk, if your kidneys have failed, if your heart valves are destroyed, if you have any of the sequelae that we in the twenty-first century expect to see in third world countries, but so rarely in the former domain of Musashi that we have to write reports and send copies all over the world when an advanced symptom turns up.

She recalled Kikyou as she'd last seen her, young and sweetly prim and smiling-she would have been a high school girl, maybe an undergraduate. Kagome had seen thousands of Kikyous in her career, swabbed their raw, splotched throats, patted their hands, handed them the prescription. They smiled at her, they loved her, they had been sick and now the doctor was making them all better.

Inuyasha said quietly, "Kagome, are you all right?"

She was in the hut, her hand still resting on his arm; his face was gentle, concerned. He had spoken her name. She laughed a little and said, "I'm supposed to be comforting you." She paused, and then added: "Inuyasha." His face did not change expression. Did he notice her response to her own name? She sighed. "Is that when Kaede died, too?"

"Kaede was years later. She had a day she didn't feel well, but it wasn't terrible. She passed in her sleep." He paused, looked away again. "I-there was another girl, a village girl, a year or so after that. You probably wouldn't remember her, she would have been just one of the kids. We-I married again. I took care of Kaede, and then I married again. We had a baby, but it was born too soon and only lived a little while. And then a few days later my-Hanae-the mother died."

"Oh, Inuyasha," she said. This time the name came easily to her lips. She reached for his arm again. She didn't need to ask; she could imagine the midwife, a woman called to the childbed from milking or sweeping, catching the tiny, pathetic, doomed infant in her dirty hands, pressing on the pudendum to extract the afterbirth and colonizing the poor grieving young mother with a bouquet of microorganisms. The baby had been mature enough to live for a bit. She thought of the hospital that was her second home, the neonatal ICU with its monitors and pumps and heaters and bilirubin lights and foot-pedal-operated sink with antibiotic soap, the tiny babies in their stocking caps. I hate this place, she thought. I want to go home. "I'm sorry," she said. "I wish I'd been here-me, the person I am now. I wish I could have been here to save them."

He smiled a bit. "You're a good doctor, huh?"

She smiled back. "I am a good doctor. Is that a funny idea?"

"No," he said. "You were always a good doctor. You always took good care of us. You were such an expert with the medicines from your home. Kaede was always impressed."

Kagome snorted. "I was a kid," she said. "I was making it up as I went along. I bought myself that first aid book and I studied it so hard-I was so afraid somebody would die…" She shook her head. "I never in the world thought I would be a doctor. I was going to teach school or work in an office until I found a husband. It's just…" She looked down at her hands. "I just… missed… doing something important. At first I thought I'd be a nurse, but the doctors are the ones with the power. The doctors make the decisions. So I thought I'd be an obstetrician, a doctor who delivers babies, because that seemed like a good job for a woman. But when I was an intern I did a rotation in the emergency room, and I was hooked. People coming in, torn apart, and we jumped in and saved them. It was like being back …" She stopped, embarrassed. "This probably makes no sense whatsoever to you."

He considered. "Emergency room was in one of your books. I don't know rotation-I think you were saying you went to that place to learn, and you like to care for people who have been in battle. You were very good at that. They're smart to have you to be a doctor for them."

Kagome felt her cheeks grow warm. Praise from Inuyasha! Who would have thought it? "That's good," she said. "Everybody I knew thought I was crazy." But she thought, Not everybody. And she remembered Houjou Junsei making pots of coffee, massaging her tired feet, bragging about her to his dubious parents. Bragging about her to his bride. He had been proud of her. What had happened?

"What happened to your leg?" she asked.

"Cannonball," he said.

"Cannonball?" she repeated. "How? What? Here? Is that what happened to the house?"

He snorted. "War. I was in the army."

"In the army? You were a samurai?"

He smiled at that. The fangs were gone forever, and there was a gap in his smile. Inuyasha had not spent eighteen minutes every morning for the last twenty years flossing his teeth. "Rich bastards from fine households are samurai. I'm a guy from a small village. I was a foot soldier."

Kagome's mouth dropped open. "Inuyasha, you're a hero! You're the son of the great Inutaisho! You killed a dragon! You destroyed the Shikon no Tama! Your blood is nobler than-than all the samurai put together! How could you be just a foot soldier?"

He looked at a spot over her shoulder. "The Inutaisho is dead. The dragon is dead. The Shikon no Tama is-gone. It's a fairy tale."

Kagome shuddered, thinking of the proud and fiery Lord Inuyasha as a foot soldier, taking orders from some little man who was not fit to tell the stories of the Shikon no Tama. "So," she said. "What did you do as … as a soldier?"

He did not meet her eyes. "What soldiers do. Took orders. Killed humans. Got drunk on cheap sake. Fucked whores. All kinds of things I would never have done when I was hanyou." He turned to speak directly to her face. "I never raped anyone. I never set a village to the torch. I never looted. I would not have shamed you or Kikyou in that way."

Something about the look on his face touched her heart, and she clasped his hand in both of hers. "You were hit by a cannonball," she prompted softly.

He shook himself off, recovered somewhat. "We were in a fucking bog, a quaking bog, trying to fight, but mostly trying not to step in the wrong place and drown. Milord Fucking Idiot who was so in love with the ways of the foreigners brought out his Christian cannon and muskets. Well," he considered. "There we were with our swords, dropping like flies, so which was the idiot? I was complimenting myself on being swift and clever enough to stay alive, when there was a whistling noise, men fell all about me, and then my leg would not hold. I didn't even feel the pain at first, I was so…surprised to feel myself fall. Never thought I would fall."

Kagome's eyes narrowed. "Where did it hit?"

His eyebrows shot up in a question. "Where? My leg. My thigh."

"The knee?" she asked. "Or closer to the hip?"

"Above the knee. Middle of the thigh. Whole fucking thigh. Does it matter? The leg wouldn't work. The bone was sticking out. I fell into the bog and the others fell on top of me. They died. I lived. The enemy took no prisoners. I lay in that damn stinking bog water for three days under a pile of corpses, men I'd been drinking with a few days before." He sighed.

"Don't curse the bog water," she said. "It saved your life."

"How do you know that?" he asked.

"Bog water has a high acid content. It's antiseptic. It kept you from dying of infection."

"Huh," he said. "I hid in it, too. When the enemy came by to finish us off, I drew down beneath the surface for as long as I could. Somehow they missed me. A priest pulled me out, a good old man, not like our friend houshi. He patched me up as best he could, and we both ran off before the next wave of battle came through. I tried to report back to my unit, but there was no unit left. Finally I gave up and made my way back home."

"Our friend houshi?" she said.

He looked away again. "I don't know," he said. "We all went our own way. Myouga went back to Kyushu. Miroku and Sango went north, and the kitsune with them. Sango was angry at me for marrying Kikyou. She told me how Kikyou tried to hurt you…" he said.

"That creature wasn't Kikyou," she answered. "It's all right." She sighed. "Everyone's gone, then."

"Gimme your foot," he said, reaching out his hand.

She obeyed. He picked up the flashlight and squinted at her foot again, gently rubbing his thumb over the sole of her foot. He grazed the sliver, and she jumped. He grunted, and pressed down on the ball of her foot. She gasped and jerked her foot; he held more tightly and sent a stern look over the tops of her toes. "Do you want this out?" he asked. "Hold still." She relaxed her leg and blinked at him meekly. "Why are your toenails red?" he asked.

"For the wedding," she replied.

"Ah," he said, "the wedding. Of course you would need red toenails. But not red fingernails."

"I'm a doctor," she said. "I wash my hands dozens of times a day, and I need to be able to see that my nails are clean."

"Good," he said. "Part of you is still sensible. Was it a good wedding?"

"Was it a good wedding," she echoed.

It was a combination of things that hit her: Lack of sleep. Too much to drink. The sad story of a bold young hero turned widower and soldier. The loss of their friends. The useless leg. The pain in her own foot. The pain in her own heart. Suddenly Kagome was crying, bawling, great, horrible, whooping sobs, and she couldn't stop. Inuyasha froze, wide-eyed, then reached over and scooped her up to sit awkwardly on his good knee. His face had lost the veteran's jaded expression; he was abashed, flustered, a teenaged boy again. Kagome laughed to see him, and then cried even harder. He held her close against his shoulder and rocked her. Her friend, her dear old friend. "Kagome," he said. "I hurt you. What happened? What did I do?"

"I," she said. "I-after I-after I left here-that-day-that-last day-" and then she had to stop to cry for a few minutes. His face was the picture of panic as he alternately rocked her and patted her on one body part or another-head, shoulder, arm, back, briefly on the ear-"Ow! Not the ear," she said, and started laughing and crying again. She took a deep breath and started over, trying to keep her voice level. "After-I-left-here-that-last-day." She closed her eyes. She was only fifteen years old. She had just said goodbye to her friends, her comrades. They were staying, and she was going. For almost a year she had been the center of the group, the rallying point. Now she was the outsider. They had closed ranks and pushed her out, for the good of the cause. Sango, sad and miserable, had finally acquiesced to the plan, remaining mute because she could not agree with the others. Even teary-eyed Shippou had given up. And Inuyasha-her first and dearest friend had sent her away, chosen another and let her go, watched her drop into the well forever…I hurt you. What did I do? She took another breath and went on. "There was a boy in my school who said he loved me. I went ou-ou-out with h-him on the rebound."

Inuyasha frowned. "Ribaundo," he said, repeating the Japlish, "I don't know that word…" She considered, took a breath. "Rebound. Like a ball bouncing. I hit, I bounced, he caught me."

"Ah," he said. What was that face? Sadness? Guilt? Sorrow?

"All through high school," she said, "and university, and … and afterward."

"He was your husband," said Inuyasha. "He died?"

"No," she said, "not my husband, and no, he didn't die. We lived together, we…were together, but we never married. Never made it legal, never had a wedding, never…we always understood we didn't need to make it official. I never wanted it to be official. I needed to-I wanted my options open. And so did he, I guess. Because about a year ago he-found-another-" She was crying again.

"It was his wedding," Inuyasha guessed. "The wedding you came from was this man, the man you loved." And of course that was true. The man she loved.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I'm sorry. I couldn't help it. I couldn't help falling in love. I know I promised you-"

For a moment he knit his brows, puzzled, then he remembered. "It's OK," he said. "I didn't think about you every day, either."

Their eyes met, and she burst out laughing and sobbing at the same time. "So, you had to go to his wedding?" Inuyasha asked.

"I wanted to," she said. "It was the right thing to do. It-it wasn't an angry breakup. He really, really loves her. They belong together. I'm happy for them."

"Ah," he said. "That's why you're drunk and crying."

"I just-" she said, "Why couldn't I be the first choice? Just once?"

He looked down. Now his face really was sad. "Beautiful Kagome," he said. "Always kind, always ready to give. She saves everybody. She kills the bad guy and then walks away, leaving everyone else to be happy. Her lover betrays her and she wishes him well. She patches up sick people, rights all the wrongs, is generous and good, and all the rest of the world just goes on being selfish and stupid."

She looked at him sharply, afraid for a moment that he was mocking her, but there was no trace of irony about him. "That man is dishonorable," he said. "He's not worthy of you. To have given himself to another when he was bound to you…"

"He loved her," Kagome said softly.

Inuyasha scowled. "You had a right to his heart. He was not free to love another. There's no honor there, to use a woman in that way."

She sighed, and looked into his eyes. "You really loved Kikyou," she said.

There was a moment of silence, and then he said, "Yes."

"He really loves his new wife," she told him. "They belong together. You belonged with Kikyou. I'm sorry you lost her. I don't want him to be with me, when he's happier with someone else. I want-" She thought for a moment. "I want that kind of love for myself. It's never happened. I wish it had. I don't understand why I was sent here," she said. "I thought that meeting you was some kind of destiny. Why me? Why not have somebody else bring you back to life? Some local girl." And with a sudden thought she answered her own question. "Because you were supposed to be with Kikyou," she whispered. "Because the person who freed you had to be somebody who would go back home when the show was over. I hate destiny," she said.

"Maybe you had your own destiny," he said. "You became a doctor. You save people. Would you have done that if you'd stayed on the other side?"

"That's it?" she cried. "That's what destiny wanted with us? Kikyou gets ten months of life, you get crippled, and I get-career counseling? After all those months of-of fighting, and hurt, and …"

"Would you give them up?" he asked. "I wouldn't." His smile was gentle.

She reached out and touched his face, then pulled back her hand. "No," she said. "I wouldn't either." And then she said, "Come back with me."

He blinked and sat back a bit. "Come back with you?" he said. "Through the well? No! I can't do that! How can I? Is that what you want? Is that why you're here?"

"I don't know why I'm here," she admitted. "I just needed-something. So I decided to try the well. I wasn't even thinking. I guess I just wanted to see, to see people who had meant something to me, to get back to happier times. It didn't occur to me Kikyou wouldn't be alive. I didn't think about it at all. I guess…I thought I could go back. I thought I'd be back, and you'd all be here, and we'd all be happy, the way we were…" There had been a picture in her mind. They were all young again, they were racing through the woods, she rode piggyback grasping the shoulders of Inuyasha, his silver hair brushing her face…I like claws, she had said. And fangs. And golden eyes. And dog ears. And running through the forest on the back of Inuyasha.

They would never run through the forest again.

Even if she coaxed him back, even if they repaired the leg, they would never again be young, the leg would never again be whole, their hearts would never again be unbroken.