Yu Yu Hakusho Fan Fiction / InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Her Spirit ❯ Oddities ( Chapter 8 )

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Yusuke groaned in melancholy as he walked down the street, not even bothering to smirk at the amusing sight of people whispering and trying to discreetly avoid his path. It had been days since he had seen his team mates, and his nerves were wearing thin with the desire to go to the shrine and just- relax.

He groaned again at the thought of doing such, he had a very tiring few days, and his friends had all been busy. Keiko had been on his case again, yammering about the fight he hadn't instigated against some green punks- no matter what she thought. It would seem that she wouldn't believe him even when he vehemently denied starting that fight- `Stupid punks'.

He longed to maybe just sit and bask in the feel of that shrine. To feel the soothing energies that he knew were a direct result of the family that occupied and took care of that holy property. He knew Keiko would be surprised to hear him say that, and he knew she would change her mind from content shock to jealous fury when he told her that he would like to visit the shrine's priestess as well- `Jealous chit'.

Yusuke growled out at his thoughts, effectively scaring away some of those passing by that had been a little too close for their comfort. Which drew him to thoughts of pride about the reputation he had established…then his scowl found its way onto his calmly masked face. He had wanted to be viewed as the tough guy who could hold his own in a fight, but now people always blamed him for starting the fights. And all this thinking was getting him nowhere. His scowl deepened even as he reflected on some things he should be grateful for. It was summer time after all…

That meant that Keiko couldn't get mad at him for missing any of his `precious' schooling. His scowl only deepened even more at the reminder of her nagging, and he kicked at a stray pebble on the sidewalk as he slouched even further into his gait.

`Too bad they can't have a school for-' His thoughts were abruptly cut off.

“Yusuke!” A happy shout of his name had him looking up startled, and when his gaze met Souta he was almost too pleased for the pleasant interruption to his clouding thoughts. The cheerful child was grinning from his position near a street lamp and was waving his arm energetically as he beckoned him over.

“Yo Souta, what's up?”

He grinned up at him as he neared, and Yusuke noticed the small height that seemed to be inherent in their family, and it got him wondering how such a small family could feel so intimidating…

“I'm here with my sister. We had a little episode with some of her older - errr - belongings and we had to go out and buy some new stuff.”

Yusuke was confused for only a moment, until the sister in question came out of a store with a beaming smile on her face and a `thank you' being given over her shoulder to whatever worker in the store had helped her. She held herself differently, and Yusuke took note of the way the obviously new, crisp clothes seemed to suit her so much more than the clothes he had seen her in at her house.

She seemed to walk with a more predatory gait and the loose fitting and conservative outfit gave her an aura of someone who knew exactly how to brandish her weapon of choice. Yet as he watched her in this element that seemed to be hers he was struck by how ancient she looked. He cringed at the thought even as he admitted it to be true.

An age seemed to cling to her as she walked like the warriors he had encountered. She was proud and confident; she walked with the predatory grace of the animals he had seen on those stupid shows Keiko watched all the time.

He scowled as his thoughts drifted to Keiko. If she found out he thought someone ancient she would box his ears in for being rude.

“Yusuke?” The quiet inquiry drew him out of his thoughts and he smiled sheepishly with a chuckle as he rubbed the back of his neck. Kagome smiled in reply and placed her bags by her feet as she pulled her brother under her arm.

“You know I was just thinking about visiting your shrine.”

Souta stiffened up but Yusuke caught the way Kagome's arm tightened around her brother and her other hand soothed down the hair on his head and back of neck. “You wished to pay your respects to the gods? Or did you just wish to visit with my family.”

Yusuke ginned at her, taking in the way she seemed to calm her brother down even as she paid no noticeable attention to him. “I actually enjoy your shrine as much as I enjoy the company.”

She looked straight up at him then, and got a thoughtful look on her face as she looked around the street area they were in. “We are almost done here, if you seek our peace so much then I am sure we can make the time for you to enjoy our shrine.” She turned an inviting smile to him and pulled her brother playfully along with her as she started walking to another store. “Join us, I won't take long, I swear.” She laughed gently as she led them down the street.

It was only one shop that Kagome went to and Yusuke found himself enjoying the silent companionship the siblings exuded even away from their home shrine. Despite all the misgivings of Hiei and Kuwabara, Yusuke saw no reason to stay away from this family. Not when they welcomed him like this, so unexpectedly. `Even with their own misgivings they invited me to join them,' Yusuke thought as he remembered Souta's reaction to his mentioning of visiting the shrine.

Kagome was still hard to read, but Yusuke ignored that in favor of enjoying the day he spent with them. Souta waited outside the shop with him, they watched people, Kagome laughed with them, and he had a generally good time. He even had a good laugh at Kagome's expense, when she met up with some people that quickly established themselves as her old friends.

He frowned slightly- laughter that had turned stale when he realized these friends had turned out to be old and sour and apathetic. His laughter stopped as the friends - three females and one male - created a terse silence among the previously happy group, and Yusuke felt himself tensing up in indignation.

Kagome said nothing, gazing out at her friends with an amiable serene look on her face and Yusuke raised an eyebrow and held back Souta with a firm hand on his arm. “It is so nice to see you guys, how long has it been?” The veiled sarcasm seemed to pass over the group before them, and Yusuke watched them shift nervously in the face of the question.

“Higurashi-san we weren't aware that you had been released from the hospital.”

Yusuke felt her brother tense irately under his hand and heard the muttered and dark whisper. “Not like you knew she was in the hospital until jii-chan told you…idiot…bitches….” Momentarily shocked at the foul word he heard from the usually polite child Yusuke missed a snatch of the conversation, only coming back to reality when Souta angrily wrenched his arm away and stood in between his sister and the four new arrivals.

“Yes, excuse us, we are expected home you see. Mother will get worried if we spend too much time away.”

They started to walk away from the naïve group and Yusuke watched the siblings tense up as the four called out their farewells. “We hope you are better Higurashi-san.” The boy called out, but the calls of the girls were falsely familiar, and irritating as well as insulting. “Yeah! Make sure that you have no more of those odd spells okay!” A short haired female stated as the wavy haired girl nodded shyly in agreement.

Yusuke found himself bristling at the looks Kagome was getting, and even more so when she just tilted her chin ever so slightly higher and gave a regal nod before turning to them and blinking only once as they walked away.

Footsteps faded from the auditory senses…

Voices faded from mind and memory…

And Yusuke watched as Souta growled and reached for his sister's hand. She clutched his fingers to hers, curling the longer and more feminine hand around the much smaller and innocent hand of her brother. And she drew strength from her brother.

Yusuke walked quietly beside them on the way back to their shrine, wondering at the contact and fuming at the looks. He saw no need for those people to treat Kagome like a pariah. Or look at her like she was a leper. He seethed and clenched his hands into fists, out of the siblings view, and tilted his head down to hide his angry expression.

The angry muttering of Souta reached his ears, and he couldn't help but catch some phrases that…cleared a few things up for him. “Stupid infidel…odd spells…HAH...” The mumbled words rolled together into a growl, and Yusuke had to wonder about these…odd spells.

But they arrived at the shrine with nary another mishap or awkward meeting, and Yusuke found himself once gain entering through onto the shrine grounds and felt the ever present feeling of being watched and judged and weighed against some set standard. Satisfied with him he felt the mood shift and morph into the acceptance and lazy haze that he now associated with this shrine.

Ms. Higurashi and the old man glanced up at them as they entered the home to place their packages away so their hands would be free to show him the shrine grounds. Kagome's steps seemed to quicken, and her eyes seemed to start a fire as they approached the main touring area of the shrine, the one more accessible to the public, and she spun a little excited scan of the grounds - her home - before she breathed deeply with a satisfied look on her face and turned to smile at him and her brother.

Souta grinned.

“How do you like history Yusuke?”

Her brother grinned even more as he too turned to Yusuke with a happy glance at his sister. Yusuke didn't respond for a minute and Souta turned pleading and exhilarated eyes up to him. “Just tell her to talk; you'll be in for a treat.” Kagome laughed and Yusuke found himself nodding in genial agreement to the boy's pleading eyes and Kagome's anticipation.

So the young woman laughed and spun to gesture to the sacred tree, protected by the symbolic paper chain, and she began her dance of words. Yusuke found himself hanging on to every utterance of her mouth, and to his astonishment he found himself living the history she talked about as if it were just yesterday. The shrines origins, the original holy line, the allies throughout history, the rumored demon involvement with her predecessors…

The strange light never left her eyes, and her enthusiasm only seemed to heighten as he listened to her weave a tale not so much of imagination but of fact- one that she took pride in as her birthright. So he smiled and walked with the siblings, enjoying the simple aura of contentment they radiated just being in each other's presence and on their home lands.

Their walk came to a much greener patch of grass, newer than the surrounding greenery and much more…different. Kagome's smile faded as she ran her hands through the rough patch of new seedlings and dirt patches. “So much history was right here.” Her mournful tone made him shift his gaze around in unease, and he noticed the signs of decayed wood from an ancient structure, and his gaze snapped back to the siblings. “This used to be the bone eaters well, where the miko and warriors who protected the village,” her hand waved absentmindedly to the city around her, “from demons attacks and bandits would throw the remains of their opponents as a sacrifice and thanks to the gods that protected them.”

Souta flinched slightly and gazed away for a moment before he too kneeled by his sister. Yusuke only took a moment to realize that they were paying respects to the ancients- the gods the ancestors praised and their predecessors themselves.

They both raised their heads simultaneously in the direction of the numerous shrine steps and Yusuke followed their gaze to spot two of his team members crossing the zenith of the immense steps. He felt a brief feeling of disappointment and irritation that he wouldn't get to finish his tour of the family shrine grounds, but the looks on his cohorts' faces caused a different emotion to replace those- fear and worry.

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The hybrid of fire and ice - one that should never have existed due to all practical and logical sense - scowled darkly as he watched Yusuke note their presence, along with the two siblings. He didn't like it when people could sense him, even more so when he understood mostly nothing about said people. He had long ago gotten used to Yusuke being strong enough to detect him sometimes, oftentimes causing Hiei some form of pride that his teammates were so strong.

But he scowled even more when he realized that Koenma once again had messed something up. Voices were still ringing in his ears from the Reikai offices, where he had been to meet with his teammates, but they had been unable to reach Yusuke, and had finally been forced to use his Jagan eye and some trackers to place him at the shrine. Curiously enough, the communicator and scans of Reikai couldn't reach onto the shrine grounds, and Koenma had been even more annoyed.

As a result the fox and he had been sent to retrieve their wayward teammate and leader, for Kuwabara would have caused unnecessary delays if he started a fight with the toushin about the importance of being punctual and such.

Hiei growled even more, he had only gone to fetch the leader because if they had to get their asses reamed by their ever so paranoid `boss' he wouldn't be one to suffer alone- not over something as petty as approaching the Higurashi and their shrine when not directly ordered to do so.

So he half-heartedly listened when Kurama explained - politely and as diplomatically as ever - why Yusuke was needed in the Reikai offices and why they needed to go as soon as possible. Instead he found his attention drawn to the kneeling siblings, and he almost shifted under the combined force of their gazes. Once again the woman was sizing him up, for something he knew not of, and the young boy was once more looking at him with that inscrutable glare.

Hiei didn't really want to be there. Not under the scrutiny of whatever and whoever lived and resided in the shrine grounds or to see the two siblings in their natural habitat and walking around with all the ease of a strong and trusting relationship. Not now.

He didn't want to be under their scrutiny and wonder if that was just simple chariness or actual hate in the young boy's eyes, and he didn't want to try to understand why the female was looking at him with that unreadable expression in her eyes- no, it wasn't unreadable, it was just such a myriad of emotions that Hiei couldn't find the will to decipher them all.

As long as this family stayed an enigma, he could hold true to his morals.

Family was not something you interfered with, and if you did may the denizens of hell take pity on your soul.

So he gave the family a curt nod as Yusuke grumbled and acquiesced to Kurama's suggestion to accompany them, and he turned his back on them swiftly so he wouldn't be distressed once more with the presence of such close siblings.

They left the shrine without incident, and Hiei almost growled low in relief when they reached the intimidating stairs to leave the shrine to grounds that Reikai could monitor.

Then he felt it.

A violent snap of energy and power rushed along him.

Hiei stumbled catching himself just before he fell into the ground and whipping around to stare at the shrine they knew so well. His Jagan was searching out the energies, and to his rising horror he understood what was going on. “It's an unauthorized portal!”

His friends looked at him like he was crazy, never having understood that a portal was actually creating a rip in the energies that separated space or time, and unauthorized would have no protective shield around it to prevent physical affects like the tremors they could still feel coursing along the ground.

His eyes were almost distracted from watching the energy when the family emerged from their house; the broken and unfamiliar family came towards the break in energy as if they had never been apart, and the strangely unified formation shocked him only for a moment before he was once again focused on the portal.

As much as the now united family shocked him - coming from the previously and obviously divided and strained family they had been leaving at the shrine - the conflicting energy of the portal grasped more of his attention.

The energy snapped together into one solid swirling mass of grey and red, and Hiei felt his muscles tense even more as he expected something …anything to come out and greet the Higure shrine. The power paused and fluxed seeming to test out the energy of the shrine and react to the presence the reikai tantei had felt watching them.

Kurama startled slightly out of the corner of his eye, yet his gaze remained true to a rather shady corner of the lot, reaching into the woods he could tell stretched far beyond the city into the rural forests. The energy and the color of the energy circled and swerved over that one area. Continuing its dance and upsetting the natural soothing energy of the shrine and its inhabitants, and it kept on swirling, and dancing, and moving.

Then the energy paused, the seemingly unstoppable force not daring to move; frozen in one vibrant display of power in the brash and unruly strokes of color. Hiei shifted his eyes around uneasily; afraid with each passing moment that whatever wanted that portal…had already come through.

The tense and strategically positioned family seemed to pause in their energy as well, expecting something….

Then something shady and dark and foreboding fell through, and the portal snapped closed with a considerable snap along the higher senses most here possessed. The family was still tense, and Kagome moved forward to inspect the bundle. The closer she got, the more sure her steps became, and the more her face relaxed. Her family, growing more confused, relaxed with the females lowering defenses, and when she lowered herself to break off the arrow shaft imbedded in the bodies heart, the steady and sharp snap resounded through the silent air.

Nothing could possibly harm the family and those present, for all that had come through was the slightly decaying and dilapidated body of some male. Hiei found he was sneering in disgust at the scent that started to waft through the air and turned his head to the side. But he couldn't.

The ease with which the human woman seated herself beside the grossly disfigured form and the experience belied when she expertly broke the arrow shaft spoke to his warriors training, and his eyes would not be drawn away from capturing any detail. The small but relaxed smile that graced her mouth was oddly juxtaposed by the blood under her hands, and the body turned to ash.

Still holding the shaft of the arrow, Kagome Higurashi stood swiftly with only the sound of her clothes making a crisp swish and the clip of her traditional shrine sandals as she took a step back from the pile of ash that got carried away on the wind. He could only watch in some confusion, carefully concealed, as the serene expression on her face only seemed to become more so, and the ease with which she walked fall into a more relaxed lope.

The surprisingly plain arrow in her hands stayed as nondescript as it was, the blood seeming to fade off of it with the twining of her power as she stepped calmly to her brother. The arrow shaft should have crumbled under the onna's power, as it wasn't made for such things- but the plain weapon remained.

`Kurama?' He sent out the thought trail to his partner, damming Koenma for his timing and inadequacy, and maybe his paranoia- as rational as it is, it clouded his judgment and made him incompetent. The fox sent him a wave of acknowledgment along the link he had opened up, and Hiei latched onto it. `The arrow…it is not of any world or making I know of.'

Kurama startled and turned his gaze away from the family, `I am afraid I wasn't looking, the family just…' Hiei shifted his eyes to him to encourage his close comrade to continue, `they were so strained before.'

Kurama needn't say anymore to the hybrid, for he too had noticed the way the family pulled together to watch each other's backs even though the turmoil of change and time had wrought a chasm between them.

Time had wrought many things upon this family- these things that made them so different from any ningen family that he had previously encountered, and somewhat different from any demons he had met as well. Time would continue to change this family and warp their mysteries and character, and Hiei could only guess what they would discover with so much prolonged contact with the mysterious Higurashi.

And like all truly ironic truths of life; only time could tell.

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