Fragile

Chapter 2: How to Cope

It had been five years since she’d returned and Kagome was still trying to adapt to life back in her era. She’d be turning twenty-one soon. It had been hard when she had first returned. It almost seemed hopeless that she’d be able to live a normal life again.

During the final battle many of her comrades had been seriously injured but they had finally managed to defeat ‘Him.’ She hated saying His name. Souta had asked how everything ended, but she never told him. In all honesty she’d blocked out a lot of what happened that day. Kagome now only remembered little fragments and scenes of seeing her friends hurt and the sadness and anger she’d felt. She did remember, however, that once the jewel was completed she was sent back to her time and the well had been sealed to her from then on. She’d felt the power of the jewel later on and was able to tell that it was once again in her body somewhere.

Her mother had found her lying underneath the God Tree. She was unconscious for a few days before she woke up and began to panic. Despite having several bandaged wounds herself, she’d grabbed all the medical supplies she could find and ran outside to the well. But when she jumped in she’d been denied access through time’s gateway. Denial and disbelief had set in quickly and she stayed at the bottom of the well for hours trying to dig and fight her way through the dirt bottom of the old well until her mother and brother were able to physically drag her out of the dark hole.

Kagome had cried for weeks that she had to go back to the past and treat her friends. She was afraid that without proper care they would die soon. During those weeks it had been a collective effort of everyone in the family to keep her away from the well, afraid that she would jump in and hurt herself. She finally resigned herself to the fact that after a few months if her friends had died from their injuries there was nothing she could do about it now.

That’s when grief had set in. She mourned each of her friends separately for months at a time. Souta would often come home from school to find her sitting beside the God Tree or next to the well just crying. He’d bring her inside and listen to her while she bemoaned her inability to help them. She believed that it was her fault and blamed their deaths on herself for not being there to treat them after the battle. They had grown much closer as he tried to help her through the guilt and grief; telling her that it wasn’t her fault and she couldn’t help the well not working anymore.

She’d started to make some improvement during her friends mourning which had lasted the better part of two years. But it all seemed to be null as soon as she started to mourn Inuyasha. That had nearly broken her. She didn’t want to accept the fact that her first love could be dead. That was when the attempts back to the past began again. She would try to sneak out of the house to go to the well. After breaking her ankle during one attempt her mother was forced to put bars on Kagome’s window and a lock on the outside of her door so that she couldn’t sneak out at night.

Kagome seemed to draw into herself and would just sit by her barred window and think for hours while she looked at pictures she’d taken of her friends and the white-haired half-demon she’d come to love. After a few months she was able to say his name without crying, but none were allowed to talk about him unless she brought up the topic herself. And even then she had a hard time controlling her emotions for a long while.

After another year of mourning especially for her love, she started trying to adapt back to life in the present day. She’d been able to sense several demons just in her neighborhood and had panicked at first until she convinced herself that if they hadn’t made any moves for the jewel yet then they probably weren’t after it. While she gradually tried to get used to sensing the different auras around her with her ever increasing powers, Souta was her sanity. He would go on walks with her through town so that she could get used to the sights, sounds, and feelings again. On one of their longer walks she’d grabbed his hand so hard he thought it would break.

During the couple of years while she readjusted she’d taken her grandfather’s advice and started meditating to understand her power better. She still was a long way from being able to control it, but it didn’t scare her as much anymore. She understood what it was trying to tell her sometimes and was able to tell when other people were close to her—she was even able to identify a few people, like her family, by their auras.

Today she was going to the store for her mother. Kagome had finally calmed down enough to go into town alone, but she was still skittish when she was alone. From time to time she would hear or see or smell something that would bring back memories from the past and she felt a little like a war vet who would lash out from the memories. She was only a few blocks away from the store she was going to when she heard tires squeal behind her.

Turning to find the source of the sound, Kagome saw a car with an unconscious driver about to cross onto the sidewalk. She saw a small girl and felt the need to protect. Running forward, Kagome pushed the girl out of the way and looked up to see the car heading for her. She closed her eyes and never felt the car hit her but her world went black before she could find out what had happened.

Kagome woke up a few days later in a hospital bed with several men in suits she didn’t know surrounding her. “Miss Higurashi?” one of them spoke. “We are here about an incident you were involved in earlier this week. Take a look at these photographs if you would, please.”

Kagome looked down at a few pictures spread out on a table in front of her. Her mind was still fuzzy and she was trying to wrap her thoughts around what was taking place. The pictures were of a car with the front end smashed in some and the side of a building that had also been crushed in some. There were a couple of pictures that were taken from a distance and with the car, building, and sidewalk it looked like they had been crushed by a bubble or sphere appearing. “What happened?” She asked in a groggy voice.

“That is what we would like to figure out. You will be leaving with us this afternoon. You do not have a choice in the matter and there is no room for argument. Your family will be informed of your general location, but will not be permitted to see you nor vice-versa until we’ve completed our research and investigation into this matter. Do you understand what you’ve just been told?” The same man from before spoke.

“Not really…” Kagome answered as her world spun and turned black once more.

Kagome woke up later in a different room that was very plain. It had a bed, a dresser, and three doors. She found that one led to a bathroom, on led to a closet, and the last one was locked but she assumed it went to the outside. She noticed that all of her clothes were the same. She’d been supplied with white, cotton, flannel pants and white, cotton, flannel shirts. Her bathroom had unscented shampoo and conditioner and unscented soap. Where was she? The last thing she remembered was waking up in a hospital room with a bunch of men around her. She sat back down on her bed and tried to remember what had happened. She started to remember the pictures she was shown, then the accident. That man had said she wouldn’t be able to see her family again until they were finished with whatever they needed her for. “Mama…” she sniffled as she pulled her knees up to her chest and began to cry.

About that time the locked door opened and a middle-aged man with dark hair and glasses stepped in. He was wearing a lab coat and there was a young man that was dressed similarly behind him. “Hello Miss Higurashi, I’m Doctor Nakaura. This is my assistant and we’ll be running a few tests on you today.” His smile seemed a little overly friendly.

“What kind of tests?” Kagome asked.

“Oh just a few simple little things to determine how exactly you did what you did to that car and building. It’s quite an impressive feat to bend steel and crush concrete like that without machinery.” He gave her another one of his too happy smiles. “Now if you’ll just come this way please.” He finished as he stepped aside and waited for her to slowly get up from the bed and tentatively step through the doorway to the hallway.

‘If I cooperate I’ll get to see my family sooner…’ Kagome thought as she followed the doctor and his assistant down the hall.

They led her to a room that had a few men dressed in white suits with face masks. They were holding rods of some sort, but Kagome couldn’t tell what exactly they were. She heard the doctor’s voice come on through a speaker mounted near the ceiling. “Miss Higurashi, we would like to see if you could create the same type of barrier that saved you from that car. This experiment won’t be anything quite so lethal though. The rods in the hands of the men around you are able to produce electricity. They are similar to tazers but not quite as high voltage. If touched by one it would merely sting slightly, so don’t worry. All you need to do is try to protect yourself from them. Commence with Experiment Series 1-A.”

After his voice ended the men walked towards her and she could now see the blue sparks at the ends of the rods as they crackled. Kagome didn’t know how to make a barrier. If she had done it before it had been nothing but a fluke. Any other time she’d used her powers had been with a bow and arrow. She felt the first electric sting on her back. ‘Sting slightly, my foot,’ she thought, ‘that hurts!’

Kagome soon found herself curled into a ball, sitting on the floor, wondering how much longer they would continue this until they realized that she didn’t know how to give them what they wanted. ‘Stop, please stop…’ she thought. After a few more minutes of being poked and shocked she couldn’t take it anymore and threw her arm out at one of the offending poles. There was a flash of light and when she looked up the rod had landed a few feet away and was now broken and melted in places and the man that had been holding it was in the floor slouched against the wall. The other men that had been around her quickly stepped back and she heard the doctor’s voice again.

“That was good, Miss Higurashi. It took a little longer than we had anticipated, but the outcome was as we desired. Now if you’ll come to the door we have a few more rooms to visit.” And with a ‘click’ the door opened and she got up on shaky legs and walked out.

Over the next few weeks she found herself in one experiment after another. Some weren’t as bad as others while some bordered on torture. Kagome would admit that being forced to access her powers and use them almost on command was giving her the control that she’d been severely lacking, but this wasn’t the way she imagined herself taming them. Once they seemed satisfied with what they had gathered about her powers they started with the interview…and that was painful in an entirely different way.

She would be in a room with one or two other people while they attached her to a polygraph machine. They asked her questions about how and when she first noticed her powers. Once they found out how her powers arose the interviews got twice as long. Every day they would pull her out of her room and sit her in a room while they recorded her telling her amazing tale of traveling to the past, battling demons, and searching for a magical crystal. They would keep her there until she began crying from the memories and couldn’t speak anymore.

She would be sent back to her room to lie on her bed and cry out her pain from the memories that were resurfacing. They were things she didn’t want to remember, things she thought she’d never have to face again, and things she thought she’d dealt with. But she was reminded every day of painful things and the guilt she felt so long ago. She was going through the same feelings she’d gone through when she’d first returned only this time there was nobody there to hold her hand, nobody to tell her that it was going to be okay and that it wasn’t her fault.

As the days turned into weeks and she continued to tell her story, she was getting closer to the ending. A memory that had started to come back to her and she wished with all of her soul that it hadn’t. Once she remembered the final battle she began getting more nervous about continuing with her tale. She remembered Naraku’s final words to her. He’d said “I will be back, priestess, and every time you think about me or mention my name I’ll be that much closer to having you and the jewel once more.”

The day came when she knew she would have to finish the story. She sat in the room fidgeting and hoping that everything had been a dream and she was going to wake up and be back in the past with Inuyasha yelling at her to make breakfast so they could be on their way. The thought brought tears to her eyes and she shook her head. She couldn’t finish the story. She wouldn’t do it.

Dr. Nakaura asked her to continue and she merely sat there. When he asked her again she shook her head. Then they started to threaten her, but she knew that she couldn’t tell them. Not only because she didn’t want them to know what happened, but because she had yet to tell this to anyone and saying aloud would only be like admitting that everything had really ended in such a horrible way. She knew they would eventually grow frustrated and fetch her from the room to put her back in her living quarters while they tried to figure something out.

Kagome was surprised when the security guards came in with syringes filled with something and every nerve in her body went on high alert. This wasn’t what she had expected. She stood up to try and avoid the guards but was too slow and they grabbed her arms. That’s when everything went haywire. Her powers surged forth in an effort to protect her from the unknown and the guards let her go. Everyone left the room and after a few minutes she started to get a little dizzy and then passed out.

She remained unconscious but was vaguely aware of things going on around her. They eventually moved her somewhere other than her room. Her clothes were removed and a tube was placed down her throat and a few in her nose. Sticky discs were placed on her back and chest and they put her in something cold and wet…and oddly for the first time in months she felt a sense of safety. They wouldn’t hurt her anymore while she was in here. And if that meant living the remainder of her life here then she didn’t mind.

Time passed and she would be aware if someone came close enough to her new enclosure to look at her. Then one day someone came that seemed familiar. ‘Who is this?’ she thought lazily in the back of her mind. The person stepped forward and she tried to remember who it was. This power was unforgettable. Then she heard a voice. It was more a thought in her mind than a sound in her ears.

‘How are you still here, woman?’

‘That voice, I know that voice. From the past…’ It was difficult to open her eyes at first and the water stung slightly. After ‘sleeping’ for so long her vision was still blurry and the water around her distorted the image but the silver hair and gold eyes made her smile. ‘Inuyasha…no…the doggy ears are gone…Sesshoumaru?’ The thought made her smile sad, but she was glad to see someone from the past none-the-less. If Sesshoumaru was there then there was a chance that the others survived too. Now all she had to do was get out of here. She kept his gaze as she tried to reach out to him. Her arms were stiff at first and were hard to move but she managed to press her hand against the smooth, cold glass and prayed that one thought reached him. ‘Help me…’ she called out.