InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Edge of Resistance ❯ Inuyasha ( Chapter 8 )

The Edge of Resistance

Book One: The Dreaming World

 

Chapter 9: Inuyasha

 

 

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” -Confucius

 

***

 

The explosion that thundered the mountains and sundered the sky sent Inuyasha flying an incredible distance, with a roar of rage splitting his throat, until his body crashed into a tree with a crunch like a box of bone tiles. He awoke some twelve hours later.

 

Before he regained full consciousness, the taste in his mouth and the smell in his head brought everything back to him in a blazing flash. With a strangled cry, he wrenched his body to fly back to the scene, without thinking, without realizing that any time had passed.

 

He was rewarded with a lance of searing pain that ran down his right arm from the shoulder. He discovered that the limb was twisted behind him and that he could not move it. He pulled again, and heard the wet tearing of flesh. When Inuyasha gasped in pain his lungs filled with a mixture of dirt, ash, and miasma. There was no way to know how long it had been raining, but the mephitic mud had become a cake on this skin and cement in his hair.

 

Inuyasha turned his head on a weak neck and peered through matted and blackened hair to see a short branch protruding from the tree, painted with blood. His right arm was impaled on it.

 

The demolished state of his body crushed Inuyasha even more in his heart. He surrendered to the indisputable evidence that Kagome was dead.

 

The physical torture eased to a dull, burning throb. The toxic rain veiled the world in gloomy gray. Inuyasha stared into the shadows and lost the will to move. Unable to fight his pain and weariness, he fell into darkness again.

 

Moonlight was shining down through a mesh of limbs and dark leaves, black against the indigo sky and swaying like waving ghosts. The air was sweet and clear. Inuyasha's body felt light, almost insubstantial, as if he would float from the moss covered forest floor at any moment and ascend to the pale, celestial globe above. Inuyasha had a vague sense that this was all impossible, but he could not remember why.

 

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of music and laughter. He turned and saw a clearing with a large house, gaily lit with colorful lanterns. The night air sparkled with chatter and people dancing to odd, ancient music. The melodies were sad and merry at the same time. He crept closer and tried to make out faces in the crowd, but everyone turned away whenever his eyes fell upon them, so that he could only catch glimpses of blurred features and swaying hair. He thought he recognized a kimono printed with large flowers encircled in wispy leaves. The woman in it had white hair that reached almost to her feet, and Inuyasha took this as a sign of old age. He believed for a moment that he had discovered his mother as she should have been. Perhaps her death was all a misunderstanding, a mistake that some absent-minded deity of destiny had finally rectified.

 

That lasted for only a second. He soon realized that the woman was not old at all and she was not his mother. She caught sight of him out of the corner of her gleaming and exotic eye, and she took the elbow of the man beside her, guiding him away. In spite of his confused disappointment, Inuyasha was about to call out to them when a cold hand glided across the back of his neck and almost made him scream.

 

“You don't have to worry about them anymore,” it was a sweet, familiar voice. “You have me now.”

 

In another instant of elation, he thought it was Kagome. A cry of relief already on his lips, he stumbled and choked on his surprise when he saw it was Kikyou instead.

 

She looked the same as she always had. She even smelled the same. Her body gave off the heat of a young and vital woman. Once again, a little voice in his head was trying to tell him that this was all impossible, but it had been reduced to a pitiful whine, like a mosquito one keeps waving away from one's ears. He mumbled something incoherent, trying to express confusion or some other unnamed and forgotten emotions, but she did not notice.

 

“So, half-breed, what do you think?”

 

When she spoke, her voice was flint, and the words faintly shocked him.

 

“Huh? About what?”

 

“About this,” she reached out to touch the cupped bulge in front of him.

 

Inuyasha's mouth went dry, but as soon as her fingers brushed his hakama he felt them like cold and hollow twigs and he smacked her hand away, horrified.

 

“I don't believe any of this!” he shouted. “It's all lies! This is a trick!”

 

Kikyou threw her head back and laughed with scorn.

 

“Fine,” she shrugged. “Have it your way.”

 

He was pulled down, down, his feet no longer beneath him, his hair pooling in front of his face, and for a moment he thought the Muonna was dragging him under water again. He shoved his hair aside to see Kagome's face staring up at him with wide and burning eyes. He felt another wave of relief, but then he could not remember why he should be relieved.

 

“Don't you remember?” she purred in his ear, working her fingers through his hair and down the back of his neck. “We did it once before.”

 

He did remember, of course, and the memory ran down his spine like a drop of icy water.

 

Before he knew what to say or what to do, logic and decisions ran away from him and ahead of him, and he found he was already inside her, and she was already clinging to him, panting and crying loving nonsense in his ear. A part of him still understood that this could not possibly be happening, but the senseless sensations were overtaking him—deep, dark, and irresistible.

 

Stop it stop it stop it stop it—

 

—ran on a loop through his head, but with every refrain he only thrust deeper.

 

He knew it wasn't Kagome underneath him. He saw the black gash in her right shoulder and he knew it was Kikyou; not as she was before Naraku and not as she was now remade, but Kikyou as she was in death. Though she stared up at him and grinned with heartless malice, he knew he was fucking her corpse. But the haze in his brain was too thick now and he only went faster, in an act loaded with rage and recrimination. He heard himself screaming at her.

 

“Where is she? I know you know! Tell me, you bitch!”

 

Then the strings in his body began to twang and vibrate. He would finish at any moment and the thought filled him with a new horror. And Kikyou just laughed. It was the most dreadful, lifeless sound he had ever heard.

 

Inuyasha awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk. His body flinched and cringed as he shook off the comatose sleep and remembered the poisonous pain. In the subdued terror of the nightmare he had come free of the limb and had fallen to the ground. It was still raining, and the dark gray made it impossible to tell how much time had passed. The vile rain had soaked his fire robe. It ran down his face and trickled into his mouth, drawing a line of fire down his raw throat. He spat some of the toxic water out and lowered his head. It was not annoying, or even uncomfortable. It did not matter if the whole world drowned in it. As far as Inuyasha cared, it could rain forever.

 

Time passed unnoticed, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Inuyasha did not lift his face again until an unfamiliar voice roused him. He did not hear the words, but he saw before him a young priestess. She had a wealth of black hair that was plastered to her face and neck and her haori, that had once been a sky blue, was now a dull gray-brown. She wore a necklace with a pendent made of two crescent moons that faced away from each other and she carried a quiver on her back as well as a short sword. She was standing in an all too familiar stance, pointing an arrow at his chest.

 

If not for the rain already burning in his throat, Inuyasha might have choked on overwhelming rancor against his fate. But he said not a word. In truth, he hoped she would shoot.

 

She did not. She moved closer with fearful caution, and then gave a startled cry.

 

“Inuyasha?” she exclaimed, dropping her weapon. “I cannot believe it!”

 

He tried to peer at her, but his eyes could not focus. He tried to think of all the priestesses who would know him, but he could only croak: “Kikyou.”

 

He glanced at the discarded bow, disappointed.

 

“No, no I'm not her.”

 

He remembered waking up on another tree.

 

Kikyou! Kikyou! Kikyou! Whoever she is, I'm not her!

 

“I'm Botan, don't you remember?”

 

 

Botan leaned over him, and she could see right away that her question was useless. Even if he was a demon, his injuries were so severe that she decided in the accepting manner of an experienced nurse that he would soon die. She had come looking for an explanation for the cataclysmic commotion in the mountains, for the source of the poisonous rain that choked the rivers with dying weeds, but all she found was a dying dog demon. Botan knew his past, or some of it anyway, and to see it all ended here in a mangled and foul mess at her feet inspired a deep sadness in her.

 

Maybe she could play a small part in this epic.

 

 

Inuyasha slept for twelve days. He opened his eyes to a world of water. He was so wet that he could not reconcile his surroundings with his last memory. It had been raining when he was last awake, so was he still outside?

 

No, he could see a roof in front of his eyes, even though water fell down through the thatch in too many places to count. He was on his back, on a bed that was raised on bricks and piles of bamboo and straw. His left hand slid off the bed and landed in water. It must have been at least a few inches. He commanded his aching body to sit up, if only because it felt like he was lying on a bed of hot coals, but his muscles would not respond.

 

“I can't believe you're awake!”

 

Botan had returned. She was standing beside him and smiling, a tight a cheerless expression.

 

Inuyasha spoke for the first time in fourteen days.

 

“I can't move. My back is burning.”

 

With painstaking care, Botan raised Inuyasha's shoulders. After only a moment, she laid him down again just as gently.

 

“I'll be right back,” she said.

 

The young priestess returned in minutes with a few other maidens in tow. With some effort, they aided Botan in raising Inuyasha to a sitting position. Botan placed a wooden bowl of a foul smelling solution on the bed. Inuyasha felt a stretching sensation on his back, and something dropped from her hands into the bowl with a thick plop. Inuyasha glanced at it and cringed.

 

“Leeches.” It was neither a question nor an exclamation.

 

“Yes, your back is paved with them.”

 

“A little lax in your care, don't you think?” Inuyasha's throat was too raw and weak to inject all the venom he wanted into his voice. It came out instead like the rustle of rice paper.

 

Botan did not notice, and did not grow angry.

 

“I'm sorry Inuyasha,” she said. “Crops are rotting, cattle and pigs are drowning, and many would be eager to trade places with you.”

 

That was when Inuyasha learned that he had slept for so long, and that in all that time the rain had not ceased. Everything was weighed down with the water, pressed and weeping into the earth. One had only to touch an object, and its walls would collapse and mix with everything else in a sickly, gray soup.

 

He did not speak again that day. Inuyasha did not use this time to contemplate the disaster that had befallen him, or the fate of his companions, or the path that had led him to this brackish hut, or the next step that he should take. In truth, in those early days of conscious rain, Inuyasha did not think of anything at all.

 

It was Botan that forced him into action. After the leeches had been removed, he had remained sitting up because no one came back to move him again. He sat deaf and dumb to everything around him, nibbling like a placid mule on the few strips of salted pork Botan brought to him. He did not even look up when Botan and some men from the village dug a canal right through the center of the hut to give the newts and salamanders a way to escape. He did not need to drink, because fish could have swum through the doors and out the windows. However, after a few weeks she gave him the choice of either moving or drowning.

 

“We are leaving for higher ground,” she said. “Anyone who could carry you must carry babes or what food is left.”

 

Despite the exhausted apathy of her tone, Inuyasha could sense the pity in her, and it angered him. Not only did he stand for the first time since the Plateau, placing his bare feet in a stream of putrid water, he also followed Botan to a pile of rice sacks and threw one over his shoulder. The sacks were swollen and loosening their seams.

 

On the swampy earth, the huts of the village wobbled like loose teeth. Inuyasha followed the priestess, and the few straggling villagers, up into the mountains. Having expended an ocean of energy into carrying and walking, he followed like a despondent pack animal, without seeing or hearing or caring.

 

When the people around him finally stopped moving, Inuyasha looked around at his surroundings for the first time.

 

They were at the mouth of a cave.

 

Inuyasha and the others stood under the gray rock that sheltered them at last from the tiny, implacable hammering of the rain. He laid down his burden and muttered to himself.

 

“It just had to be a cave.”

 

“What did you expect?” Botan was standing beside him. “A palace?”

 

Inuyasha did not answer. She could not know his history with such places and he was not at all inclined to explain it. He was silent for a few minutes and continued to look around. He saw the other villagers, people he did not even recognize, huddled against the far wall, with eyes sad and deep-set from looking at rain so much.

 

“There is no food here,” he observed distantly.

 

“We'll make due.” Botan replied, then turned away from him to tend the children, pitiful creatures with watery eyes and swollen bellies.

 

 

Twenty-one days after the Plateau, Inuyasha sat as close to the cave mouth as he could without getting wet. The twilight was early, but everyone else was already asleep because there was no real passage of time anyway, and it was better to sleep than to be hungry.

 

But in spite of everything, it was not in Inuyasha's nature to surrender to such a slow, passive death as starvation. He realized he would have to find food because Botan would never purify him or seal him as he had initially hoped, even if she were able to do so. The villagers were too frightened to even approach him. Naraku had failed to kill him, and all the incredible misfortunes of a long and cursed life had not managed to destroy him.

 

A strange idea entered his head then: that he might as well be immortal. This was not a pleasant realization. His body destroyed by poison and atrophy and his mind creaking along only by habit, Inuyasha was disgusted and outraged by the idea of immortality, as if the entire notion was conceived just to torture him.

 

For the first time in months, Inuyasha thought of his brother.

 

His insomniac heart was razed by the strongest surge of fury since before the Plateau. Sesshoumaru was strong. He could have finished Naraku. He could have prevented all of this. It was all his fault—his damnable and unforgivable arrogance, his soulless apathy.

 

It's your fault! Not mine! You're to blame! It's all your fault! It's all your fault!

 

His rage twisted inside him like a finger of hot lead. It turned inward and scalded him. Perhaps, in secret silence, he could admit that Sesshoumaru was the stronger brother; there was still no excuse for himself. At last he gave thought to his friends, sifting through his memories just so he could slash jagged valleys in his soul with the vengeance of a masochist.

 

That's just too easy.

 

Inuyasha leapt away from the cave mouth and down the mountain slope. He ran past a blur of trees and through the cutting rain, and into the night.

 

The next morning Botan found a butchered deer at the mouth of the cave. She and her people did not go hungry again. On most nights Inuyasha stole away in search of the unwary, of poor beasts that were too depressed by the deluge to flee. If anyone lying in the cave heard roars of rage and despair coming from the night hills, they never stirred. If it seemed to them that the morning carcass was mangled excessively, they never mentioned it.

 

This went on for another month. It was not long before Inuyasha hated his memories as much as himself. In a world suspended in water, he clung to the irrational idea that the rain was washing away his past life. It was for this reason that he still would not recognize Botan, nor connect her with an incident from his past. Sometimes he recalled that she knew his name without asking, but he wasted no time in suffocating the perfidious thought with the thick blanket of senselessness that always covered his mind now.

 

Botan and her flock were not the only peasants in the area. Other villages had been abandoned, their population fleeing into the hills. Popular intuition got a whiff that something was unusual (besides the ceaseless rain), and some interpreted the sprays of blood on trees and cattails as signs that the rain had loosed an evil from hibernation. These rumors would reach other ears, some that it would have been better not to.

 

Grateful though they were for the meat, Botan's people believed they would have no need of charity if not for Inuyasha himself. The fact that the rains began with his arrival was not lost on them, and they began to speak these thoughts openly. Their muttering buzzed in Botan's ears until it began to drown out the monotonous drone of the rain.

 

The priestess had reached the end of her rope. Each night she would wait until Inuyasha left, then she would sit near the mouth of the cave and weep with silent rage. It had rained now for eighty-seven days. She was ready to believe almost any theory, however unfounded or unfair, if it offered the hope of an escape from the hellish, aquatic prison.

 

She made a plan to talk to Inuyasha and at the very least ask him if he was, to his knowledge, carrying a curse. But when she found him in the darkest corner one late afternoon, she could see that he was senseless with a fever. Always before stone silent, now he was releasing a torrent of amazing, incomprehensible gibberish.

 

“On the dry and dusty road, the nights we spent apart alone, I need to get back home, to cool, cool rain, I can't sleep and I lie and I think, the nights are hot and black as ink, oh god I need a drink, or cool, cool rain, love, love, love reign over me, rain on me—

 

“Inuyasha?” Botan interrupted him with a hand on his head.

 

He ignored her.

 

“The Beloved is only a visitor. The Bearer is kept by the General. The Saved walks with the Trickster. The Cyclone will discover the Seer. The Wanderer is Reborn and I am Released and I wish that I had said it, said it just once.”

 

“Said what, Inuyasha?” Botan broke in. “For pity's sake, said what?”

 

He glanced at her, but lowered his head again and continued mumbling.

 

“No!” Botan pushed his arms aside and shook his shoulders. “No, you're gonna tell me. What is it? What didn't you say?”

 

For the first time since she found him Inuyasha snarled, and bared his teeth at her; Botan remembered that she was trammeling a wild animal. But the situation was beyond self-concern, and she would not relent.

 

“Pretend I'm her,” she settled on the back of her heels, in front of him. “Pretend I'm her, and say it now.”

 

He jerked his head up to look at her again, a wild hope lighting his eyes. His mouth parted. Her eyes were so clear and determined, the color of almonds and just as hard. He stared at them and wished. Oh to wish, to yearn.

 

“I'm sorry.”

 

It was not what she had expected, but she supposed he was apologizing for failing to save his friends.

 

“I'm sorry I was never good enough for you.”

 

Inuyasha lowered his eyes, with an expression of such resignation and despair that they turned from gold to tarnished bronze and Botan wanted to tear out her own heart.

 

“I liked things the way they were,” he went on. “I really was grateful. I was so used to it, but this…this I don't know. I don't know what to do.”

 

Botan's slender hands were still on his shoulders when he began to shake. She looked up again in alarm, fearing he was having seizures from the fever. She realized with a surprising sorrow that he was weeping. She had no choice but to weep herself. Some others stood by, watching, but they dared not intrude.

 

After some time, Botan could no longer resist.

 

“Inuyasha, do you not suppose that maybe some of them could be alive somewhere?”

 

Desperate not to further wound him, she added.

 

“You're alive, after all, aren't you?”

 

That night Inuyasha dreamed of the house in the woods again. This time, however, there were no lanterns, no music, and no dancers. The modest sized house stood in the dark with no sign of life in it at all. The house was empty and blacker than the surrounding twilight forest, as black as a cave. It was waiting for him like the gaping mouth of something unnamed from the abyss. Torn and tattered paper waved a ghostly greeting from the windows.

 

It was going to eat him. Unable to stop himself, he would enter, and never come out. He would be driven mad. The doors would snap closed behind him and snuff out his sanity like a puny flame.

 

Despite the compulsion to enter the house, his horror planted him in place. He wondered if he would be able to turn around and run, but then his terror was supplanted by confusion and curiosity.

 

This was either not the same house, or not the same time. He saw now in the dim light of the moon that the house was crumbling. Veins carved in the wooden beams were mute evidence of termites that had been pursuing their destructive work for decades. The frames of windows and doors were lined with a saffron colored moss. In corners, cloudy cobwebs billowed in the warm air. He walked closer and, above the door, he saw a small and faded crescent moon painted in gold.

 

Without reason he expected to find Kikyou, in some form, hiding inside. She would rush from some dark corner, reach for him with arms rotting in death, and finally grab his soul away for good. Or maybe it would be Kagome. Perhaps it didn't matter.

 

It doesn't matter because they're both dead.

 

Gritting his teeth and shoving that treacherous thought aside, Inuyasha clenched his teeth and entered the decaying house.

 

In the center of it he found a high bier, covered in vines, dead leaves, and indigo bellflowers. The vines were interwoven with strands of silver-white hair. For one horrific moment, he believed someone was showing this to him to mock his assumption of immortality.

 

But the one lying in the forgotten tomb was the wrong son. His face was as still as a summer afternoon, and as expressionless as it had been in life.

 

Sesshoumaru's eyes snapped open. Inuyasha was not frightened, feeling as though he had expected it. Without words he understood the instructions in his brother's eyes and, wrapped in the soft and fuzzy logic of dreams, he left Sesshoumaru's side to look through a decrepit window at a bright red star, set low on the western horizon.

 

“What did you expect? You're still alive, aren't you?”

 

He spun around to catch the source of the voice, but the room was empty—no vines, no flowers, no bier. But he heard it again in the breeze that ghosted through the broken house and there could be no denying that it was Kagome's voice.

 

“Oh, Inuyasha,” came the wistful sigh.

 

Inuyasha crawled out of the dream. Hours remained before dawn would break, and the darkness made it difficult to realize he was no longer in the scary house by the woods, but in the cave with Botan's villagers. To regain his senses, he walked out into the night, thinking the familiar site of stars would plant his feet in the waking world.

 

Of course, he had forgotten the rain. Most of the sky was clouded, almost as dark and as close as the roof of the cave had been. But as he stood transfixed by his surreal consciousness and vertigo, the rain lessened to a slight drizzle. A new break in the clouds revealed the night sky above the western horizon, and the sight filled him with elation.

 

Then he noticed the tiny red point, set low and bright.

 

It had rained for three months, one week, and two days. In that moment, it was as if someone cut off the supply in one stroke. There was no rain again for a year.

 

The next morning Inuyasha placed a deer and a brace of hares at Botan's feet. They stood on jagged slopes outside the cave, surrounded by a forest of people with their faces upturned, stunned in place by the incredible sun.

 

“Dry this out,” he said to her. “Make it last `til you can find your own food.”

 

“You're leaving, then.” It was not a question.

 

“Yeah, I'm heading back east. Keep to the hills until the water drains from the valleys. You should be okay now.”

 

“East?”

 

“When things fall apart, go back to the beginning.”

 

Inuyasha turned and gazed in that direction, already yearning to be off, to shake free three months worth of tight cobwebs around his body and in his head. He looked down at his hands, noting with satisfaction that most of the blood and grime had washed away.

 

Botan gazed at him.

 

“Do you know me now?” she asked.

 

Inuyasha looked surprised, and then relieved, like a person remembering where he had left something important.

 

“Oh, that's right. Yes, I do.”

 

“Good luck to you then,” she said. “I hope you find something. Make sure you keep moving, the world will not survive another flood.”

 

Inuyasha looked at her in surprise, but her gaze was unwavering. Then her face broke in a broad grin.

 

“Get out of here,” she laughed. “Stupid hanyou.”

 

Inuyasha dashed away, his feet only grazing the rocks. Halfway down the slop he called back.

 

“Try not to get yourself killed, sorry excuse for a priestess!”

 

Botan thought she heard a faint “Thanks!” ghosting back, but could not be sure she had not imagined it.

 

***

[End of Chapter 9]

[Next chapter: Shippou and Kagura]