Omoide no Mori
Forest of Memories
chapter fourteen:
*Found but Fallen*
The sun had set completely.
Kagome noted it absently as they made their way through the forest. She was really worried now...Inuyasha would have lost all of his demon powers by this time.
She barely felt the chill of the night air around her; she was much too preoccupied with everything else on her mind to even notice it. She was silently berating herself for telling Sango not to worry so much, since she was having such a hard time following her own advice. But she really couldn't help it...Inuyasha had always had a way of taking a dangerous situation and making it a hundred times worse.
She hated it when he did that...
And she had a feeling he was probably doing that right now...
She made a mental note to "sit!" him one good when they found him.
Kagome grit her teeth.
Ooooh, Inuyasha, she grumbled in thought, a vein popping out of her forehead. How dare you worry me this way!
Sango didn't even seem to have noticed the younger girl's distress with their current situation. Her eyes were straight forward, her body rigid, searching for any sign of the two young men who had departed not so long ago.
...
Well...okay, so Inuyasha was only half man...but she knew what she was looking for, regardless.
They were nearing the Northern corner of the forest, drawing close to the impressive precipice of the mountain, atop which stood the Great Camphor. The taijiya had thought that, perhaps, as they drew closer to their destination, the tension she felt would ease up a little...but, so far, it had been just the opposite effect.
Rather than abating, the sick dread that was chilling her blood to ice had begun to course stronger through her veins, blanketing her entire body with an eerie feeling of cold that made her want to shiver uncontrollably.
It was like being submerged in a frozen lake, she found herself thinking.
Did fear always feel this way?
But she supposed she'd never felt a fear quite like this one...Sango had never really cared for other people the way she cared for Kagome, Inuyasha, and the others... She'd cared for and worried, about her family, granted...and, since the death of her chichi-ue and the loss of her brother, Kohaku, she wouldn't have given up her dear friends for the world... They had become her family, and she would have done anything for them...
vBut, ofttimes, she found herself slammed against the wall with emotions she had never experienced in her life.
It was confusing... She had always figured that love was the same, regardless of the incidences...but she had grown to learn, and quite quickly, that the love felt for a friend was entirely different than the love felt for one's family.
Like this...for instance...Sango was quite certain that this weird sensation in the pit of her stomach was a new one... She felt as though something was gnawing away at her insides...consuming her from the inside out.
Slowly, methodically, this worry was eating her alive.
She glanced up at the moonless sky, wondering if there wasn't some peculiar alignment of the stars tonight.
It certainly would have explained why everything that day had been so strange...
She had never seen Miroku so serious about things, never heard Inuyasha speak with such wisdom in his words...
Sango supposed this whole thing was surely some great big cosmic joke, and someone up there was certainly having a good laugh on their behalf.
She scowled.
Somehow, it didn't strike her as being amusing at all...
What was more, she was quite assured that something was succeeding at eating away the lining of her stomach, because her abdomen was starting to tighten, and she had a sour, acrid taste on the surface of her tongue...an unpleasant lump in her windpipe, making it difficult to breathe without a forced effort. She scowled again.
Dammit, Houshi-sama, she thought ruefully, how dare you make me worry like this!
"It's just up ahead," Kagome said, breaking into the taijiya's thoughts.
"The ledge will be too narrow for Kirara to walk on, she'll have to fly us up," Sango told her.
"You think that's safe?" Kagome wanted to know.
"Ee," Sango said rather distractedly.
She was still working on trying to swallow that bitter lump in the back of her throat. She glanced over her shoulder at Kagome.
"It'll be faster to the top that way, anyway," she added after a moment.
Kirara seemed to understand what was being suggested, and tensed her body in preparation to fly--
"Matte--!"
The great cat halted abruptly in her stride, standing perfectly still as silence fell all around them.
What in the--??
Something had snapped in the back of Sango's brain.
It felt like someone had slammed something blunt into the base of her skull...
No...wait, not quite...for there was no pain, only a blinding flash of white that flickered before her eyes, and a sudden dizzying second of lightheadedness.
She raised her right hand to her head.
"Sango-chan?" Kagome asked as the taijiya leapt lightly to the ground, running her hand along Kirara's side as if to tell the demon to remain there. The girl leaned over the huge cat's shoulder. "Sango-chan, doushita no?"
"Something's wrong."
Sango was suddenly starting to wish she'd taken the extra minute or so to change into her armor...she wished she hadn't been so rash as to leave Hiraikotsu back at Kaede's hut... Something had her very worried all of a sudden, and it wasn't just for the safety of the hanyou and the houshi they had come looking for.
Cursing herself, she straightened her back and listened to the silence all around them.
The night was utterly quiet and completely still. The night wind had all but died down entirely, and the birds that flew by the moon's silver light had remained in their nests, as though the eve itself were cursed. No crickets chirped in the darkness, no nocturnal predators stalked through the obscurity of the underbrush that night.
Sango closed her eyes and cupped her hands near her ears, listening...
...but she heard absolutely nothing...the night was totally hushed...
...and it was seriously freaking her out.
Leaving her backpack in the capable paws of Kirara, Kagome jumped down from the fire-cat's back and walked slowly up behind Sango, her hands clasped near her chest.
"What is it, Sango-chan?" she asked timidly, trying rather fruitlessly to keep the fear out of her voice.
Sango shook her head.
"I'm...not sure," she said. "I feel strange...something's close by."
"Youkai?" Kagome gasped, and Sango shook her head again.
"I don't think so."
"What, then?"
Sango's large brown eyes flicked over their surroundings, searching for the...whatever it was that she was sensing.
It was a very odd feeling...something was nearby, but she felt no danger...not really. The sensation was very different than what she felt when she was hunting demons. This didn't feel threatening at all. In fact, it was barely even there, now.
Now that the initial start had faded, Sango was having difficulty even sensing it anymore.
Wherever...or whatever it was, it was either very small...or very weak.
Injured, perhaps, she reasoned, but...where was it? She couldn't see much of anything...
Without the aid of the moonlight, the edge of the wood was extremely dark and shadowy. She scanned the ground, her eyes moving over the jagged silhouettes of the rocks at the base of the cliff, from the forest edge to the rounded, irregular forms of the blackened trees beyond them, all the way out to the base of the steep mountainside itself, but it was simply too dark to see. She glanced up the cliffside, where it soared more than two hundred feet above them into the inky heavens, but still saw nothing.
What was going on? She knew she had felt the presence of...of something...! So where was it coming from?
Then her eyes fell on something near the base of the mountain--an unusually organic-looking shape among the sharp, crisp edges of the craggy rocks. She took a step forward, and her gut twisted within her, the uncomfortable dizzy feeling creeping back into her brain as her chest tightened...not out of fear for herself...
...it was for a completely different reason this time.
She darted to where the form lay among the rocks, and pitched to her knees as if she had been hit hard in the small of her back.
Don't be what I think you are, she begged of the figure; please...be something--anything--else than what I think you are...!
She fell forward on her hands, nearly collapsing in a heap beside the fallen shape, and her eyes opened wide in horror.
"Houshi-sama?!"
Kagome gasped.
"Miroku-sama?" she cried, and hurried over to Sango, dropping quickly to her knees beside the taijiya.
It was, indeed, the houshi in question, Sango was quite dismayed to see.
He was on his back, his body curled slightly to the right, his posture alarmingly casual, as if he had simply dozed off while surveying the night sky. His arms rested beside him, and his head was angled just barely to one side. Kagome suddenly wished she had remembered to bring a flashlight, since they had no moon to illuminate the darkness.
The two girls leaned in a little closer to the fallen monk's form.
His skin was a little ashen, but there didn't appear to be any blood. It looked almost as if he was simply asleep.
Kagome inhaled sharply.
This surely was a set-up, right? It couldn't have truly been happening...it was like something she had seen on TV, on live rescue shows and such...and she had never known just quite how to react when someone got hurt for real...
Though she felt she didn't have much excuse for that...it certainly happened enough, back in this Sengoku Jidai... Kagome was quite certain she had more stamina than any other ninth grader...both physically and mentally. She was sure that none of her classmates had been through anything close to what she'd been through...
She remembered the time Inuyasha had been terribly wounded in a fight with Sesshoumaru.
She had been scared that time...really scared...but there was always something about Inuyasha's wounds that assured her he would be okay...and that was the fact that she could see them, she could touch them. They had been tangible wounds, terrible as they were...
She knew that Inuyasha healed much faster than any of them...being that he was half demon left him with regenerative strength that none of them could match... Kagome had always been confident that, even though Inuyasha often walked away with a bad injury, he would recover, because she knew that such flesh wounds were nothing to the hanyou in the long run.
It had frightened her...the though that Inuyasha might not make it through next time had crossed her mind once or twice, but there had always been something about him--his stubborn nature, his obstinate personality, the indignant look in his eye and his irrational abhorrence of pity--that assured her he would be all right after a few days' time.
This, however, was scary in a completely different way.
Miroku, unlike Inuyasha, had no demonic powers...
He was simply a human being...and, what was more, no matter how she looked him over, Kagome could find no injury upon the houshi. Not a single scratch, not one cut...not a twisted limb or even a scraped elbow. Certainly Miroku was no less stubborn than Inuyasha...but sometimes that simply wasn't enough... And, what was more...this time, she had absolutely no idea what was wrong...
She leaned forward.
Sango's mind was positively spinning inside her head.
What had happened?
Why was he here?
Had he fallen?
Had he been attacked?
Had someone done this to him?
Was he breathing?
Was he--?
"He's alive," Kagome said quickly, as if reading the taijiya's desperate thoughts.
Sango turned to see the girl leaned over Miroku's chest, two fingers pressed against his neck.
"He's got a pulse..." Kagome told her. "It's a little fast, and his breathing is a little irregular, but I think he's okay..."
You...think...?
Sango relaxed, but only a little.
Kagome was having a little bit of a hard time with this herself.
This was highly unexpected, she had never thought to find Miroku like this... Inuyasha, perhaps, but never Miroku. He was usually the one to keep Inuyasha in line...the houshi had always been more or less the voice of reason...
Sure, sometimes it was less rather than more...but for the most part, Miroku had his head on straight...
...unless a pretty girl was involved...
...but Kagome didn't know too many princesses who threw young monks from cliffs...
It just didn't make any sense...
She tried to recall the notes she had taken in health class. If he had truly fallen from the cliff, it was quite possible he had a neck or spinal injury...and that could be fatal even if the fall wasn't. She felt her breath catch in her throat.
Oh, man! she thought a little frantically. He could have broken his back!!
Of course, she certainly wasn't going to make that point to Sango. The taijiya already wasn't having much luck concealing the fact that she was about ready to have a nervous breakdown at any time.
"We...we should probably not move him," Kagome said lightly, and Sango glanced at her. "We don't know what happened...if he's injured his neck, movement could make it worse..."
"Will he wake up?" Sango asked, as though Kagome might have had some insight on such things, and Kagome winced. She sounded like a frightened child.
With a frown, the girl merely shrugged.
"I...I dunno," she admitted with a slight shake of her head. "I hope so..." Then she looked seriously at the taijiya. "Try," she urged.
Sango hesitated, then decided her pride would just have to suffer this time.
She gripped Miroku's hand in hers and leaned over him.
She gasped inaudibly.
His hands were startlingly cold and clammy to the touch, and she had a sudden urge to rub them vehemently between hers, to do anything to get the warmth back in them.
She clenched her jaw.
This was all wrong...it was so wrong! This should never have happened... She clamped his left hand in hers and reached out to tap his cheek with her right.
"Houshi-sama, shikkari," she said, her voice urgent. "Open your eyes! Houshi-sama!"
He didn't respond.
He didn't stir, didn't make a sound. The slow and mildly erratic rise and fall of his chest as he breathed did not falter. His eyelids didn't even twitch.
It was terrifying...! As much as the priest may have annoyed her at times...she had never once wished anything like this upon him, not even in a rage. She had never wanted anything to happen to him...
The taijiya frowned worriedly at his hand clenched between her fingers.
It was so cold.
His hands were never that cold.
She should know...for all the times he had rubbed her bottom or tried to feel her chest, for every time she had slapped his hands away from her, she had never once felt them so frigid.
His touch, while frequently inappropriate in nature, had always been warm.
Once or twice, she hadn't even flinched away from his hand when it fell softly upon her shoulder, simply because it had been such a tender, if not uncharacteristically harmless, warm and gentle brush of his fingers upon her arm. She found it a trifle vexing how he could be so equivocal...how could the same man be so terribly irritating one moment, and so wonderful the next? She didn't know how many times he had told her exactly what she had needed to hear, how often he had known just what words to say to snap her from her stupor and remind her that things really weren't as bad as she thought.
Sango's heart jerked in her chest at the thought that he might never say such things to her again.
C'mon, c'mon, she thought. Please...
"Houshi-sama!" she cried, gripping his hand a little tighter, and Kagome felt her insides wrench at the desperate sound of the taijiya's voice.
She'd suspected, for a while now, that Sango felt much more for the priest than she was willing to admit, but this...this was more than even Kagome could bear to watch.
This was enough to make Kagome cringe, enough to make her heart twist violently, painfully, within her breast.
Come on, Miroku-sama, Kagome pleaded silently. Wake up! Open your eyes!
She wanted to shake him, to take his shoulders and just jerk him out of this comatose state.
She just couldn't stand it...she couldn't stand the terrified undertone in Sango's voice, the eerie stillness of the night, the frighteningly ashy color of Miroku's skin...the whole situation made her want to scream. She was starting to wish this whole day had been nothing but a nightmare...that she hadn't really been startled awake this morning, and was still sleeping...
She was worried about Inuyasha, too...
If someone had caught Miroku with his guard down like this, could they not have also hit the hanyou unawares?
She suddenly wanted to leap to her feet and just run...run until she found Inuyasha, and throw her arms around him, hold on to him, make sure he was really real and alive and okay...
But her eyes fell on Sango, and she knew she couldn't... Not now...
Not yet...
Not in this situation...
As much as she longed to go and find Inuyasha, she knew they would have to help Miroku. They couldn't leave him like this... Even though it seemed as though he was uninjured, Kagome knew that what one could not see could potentially kill them.
Just because he didn't appear to have been hurt didn't mean he was okay, and she utterly refused to let Sango handle this alone.
After all, Miroku was her friend, too...
Her heart yearned to search for Inuyasha...but it also pleaded to remain here. She felt so very torn between the two...
As much as she feared for the hanyou, she knew what it would do to Sango if anything happened to Miroku...
She also knew what it would do to her...
Miroku may have been a lecher...he may not have taken everything seriously, and did have a way of sounding like he knew everything about everything...
...but...
Kagome looked at him, at the slack look on his kind face, and suddenly felt like crying.
...but he was really such a good person underneath all the yammer! she found herself thinking.
So what if he had groped her bottom once or twice? Kagome was totally confident that Miroku would have come to her rescue at any cost... He would have been there, right alongside Inuyasha, willing to lay his life down to save any of them, she knew that, they all did... Each and every one of them would have done the same... In the short time they had all been together, a completely unbreakable bond had formed between the five.
Inuyasha...
Sango...
Shippou...
Miroku...
and herself...
They would have done anything for each other, and Miroku had never been an exception to that.
Kagome paused a moment in thought.
No...never an exception... A walking contradiction, perhaps...but never an exception.
He did seem to have discovered a way to walk both paths at the same time...
For every time the houshi had said something annoying, he had said something consoling... For each stupid comment or lewd remark, he'd had a pearl of wisdom or a solution to something they had otherwise thought impossible...
For every time he had angered them, he had comforted them twice over...for each time he'd gotten them into trouble, he'd rescued them.
And when he wasn't confident he would be able to rescue them should a situation come up, he had gone about it alone.
That was, perhaps, what Kagome had found most irksome about the monk...the fact that he tried to take everything upon his own shoulders.
She suddenly thought back to the fight with Sesshoumaru, and she realized that she hadn't just been scared for Inuyasha...
When Miroku had sucked the Saimyoushou into his Kazaana, the poison of the venomous wasps had taken effect almost immediately, bringing the young priest to his knees, quite near death himself. She hadn't completely trusted the houshi at the time, but there had been something about his eyes that told her he was a friend to hold onto, no matter what appearances might have suggested.
Though they had only known him for a few days, she had feared for Miroku, as well.
Kagome took a deep breath.
As much as she wanted to run to Inuyasha, she absolutely didn't want Miroku to die...
Sango, meanwhile, felt like her entire body had gone numb.
She couldn't believe it! Was this really happening?
She had never really thought to herself what it might be like to lose one of the gang...it had always scared her too much to even ponder such a horrible event, hypothetically or not. She had lost her father, lost her brother, lost her village...
Sango feared that, if she were to lose anyone else her heart might shatter completely...
And...especially if it was...
She gripped his fingers until her knuckles whitened and his fingernails turned slightly purple from the constriction.
"Houshi-sama...please..." she implored almost inaudibly.
She kept waiting for him to reach around and try to feel her bottom, opening one dark eye, with that stupid grin on his face as if to say 'Psyche! Gotcha!'
But...he didn't move.
Sango thought to herself that she would even forgive him for groping her just this once if he would simply open his eyes.
But he didn't move at all.
Sango could almost feel her heart crack and start to crumble away like a dry piece of earth, and she shook her head quickly.
Yada! Don't you dare! she thought angrily. Don't you dare die, Houshi-sama, I'll never ever forgive you if you do!
She clutched at his hand with both of hers, and brought it close to her face, brushing her forehead with his fingers.
"Houshi-sama..."
She suddenly dropped her grip when he made a sort of moaning sound and scrunched up his face like he had swallowed something terribly bitter.
"Miroku-sama?" Kagome gasped, her brown eyes wide. "Shikkari shite, Miroku-sama!"
He didn't open his eyes, but he jerked his head slightly, as if to cough.
Kagome thought it almost looked like he was trying to hone in on something, before falling still and silent again.
It was like something had suddenly struck him, and he had tried desperately to react to it, but hadn't the strength to do so.
Kagome looked at Sango, and the taijiya nodded crisply.
That was enough for them.
"I don't think there's any sort of spinal injury," Kagome said quickly, and gave Sango a severe stare. "Let's get him back to the village."
Sango didn't need to be told that.
"Kirara!"
Just hang in there, Houshi-sama, Sango thought as the cat beast sprinted back toward the village, now with three passengers. She cradled the monk's head in her lap, his shakujou tucked beneath her arm as Kirara bounded through the forest.
Protectively, she gripped the fabric of his robes until her hands ached.
Hang in there...I'll find whoever did this to you...
Her expression hardened.
I refuse to let this go unpunished... For all the times you've rescued me, Houshi-sama...I'll find out who hurt you...and I'll make them pay for this...
* * *
Ano hi, futari de
Hoshizora wo miagete, naita,
Kimi wo kizutukeru
Subete kara mamoritai yo...
On that night, as the two of us
Gazed into the starry skies, weeping,
I was longing to protect you
From everything that hurts you...
~Aran Tomoko
* * *
Author Notes:
And the promised Sango/Miroku fluff only draws nearer... ^ . ^ I know, I know...I haven't given you any resolution as to what's happened to our poor poor houshi, but worry not, Dear Readers...the best is yet to come, I guarantee it. ^_^
*Glossary of Terms*
I am assuming we all know the Inuyasha basics, like youkai, hanyou, Shikon no Tama, etcetera, so those will not be translated here. Also, I'm only gonna put translations once, so as the story goes on, the glossary will dwindle. I'm hoping your memories will serve you, because otherwise the glossary will be absolutely enormous! Some chapters probably won't even need one, so I hope you guys can keep track of words already translated. Let me know if it gets too tough.
Chichi-ue: A very formal term for one's father.
"Matte!": I'm sure I did this one... But it means "Wait!", if I didn't... O_o
Wow, is that all there was for this chapter? ^_^ Have we all been following all right? Send me an email!
~~hikari