The Revenant by Luna

Chapter 2

I do not own Inuyasha. I never have, and never will.

Thank you everyone for your kind and encouraging words! This story will be the first time I've dipped my toes into dark waters, and I'm glad that everyone has enjoyed what I have so far!

For those of you who have been asking, this story will be updated once a week. Thanks again!

…

The Revenant

Chapter Two

By: Luna

…

Kagome moaned in her sleep, tossing back and forth as nightmares assailed her. Ghostly whispers, touches in the dark, and a face she couldn't see - following her, always following her. And a memory, so stark in her mind, so vividly tattooed in the part of her soul where she never wanted to look again; that dark whisper, his dark touch…

"You will never escape me, Kagome." He had whispered into her ear on that night. "I'll always find you. You are mine!"

She woke up screaming. Her night shirt was nearly soaked through, clinging to her damp skin. She shivered, curling up into a small ball in the middle of her futon, hugging her knees to her chest.

Why? Why was that memory coming back to haunt her after all these years? She tried to remember if she had taken her medication before bed - she didn't think she did. She had been so tired after moving all those boxes, and then unpacking almost everything that, when she found where the futons were stored, she pulled one out and collapsed on it.

It was a mistake. She should have known better than to forget to take her medicine. With a brief glance at her watch, she decided it wasn't too late to take the missed dose. She stumbled to the bathroom, shivering in cold, and slapped her hand against the wall and groped for the light switch.

Light illuminated the small bathroom, and when Kagome glanced up into the mirror she screamed.

Her body jerked back, her feet slipping on the tile and she fell on her tailbone hard. She sat there gasping, waiting, but when nothing happened she shakily rose to her feet and stared into the mirrors reflection. She stared at herself, her heart beating irregularly, and wondered if she really had gone crazy.

For those first few seconds, she could have sworn there was someone else staring back at her.

Shaking her head with sigh, she turned on the faucet and splashed her face with cool water before filling up a glass. Counting out her medicine, she swallowed them with a shudder of relief. She didn't want to dream anymore. Not tonight.

Not ever.

Walking back to her futon, she collapsed once again, pulling the blanket over her and willing herself back into a dreamless sleep.

Kagome groaned as, a few hours later, her alarm clock vibrated with a constant shrill beep, and she slapped the ground a few moments before her hand connected with it, and silence filled the room. She stayed like that for a while; her face pressed into her pillow, her hand over the clock, until she lifted her head and blearily stared at her clock.

It went off an hour early.

Kagome narrowed her eyes, sitting up with the clock held between both hands. There was no way she set the alarm early. Her life was one giant schedule; she showered, dressed, ate, and took her medications at specific times of the day, with no exceptions. She did not like to deviate from schedule; if she missed even one event, she was a wreck the rest of the day until she was able to go to sleep and start over the next day, entirely on schedule.

So how was it early? She flipped it over to stare at the back before reaching for the winder button to set it back to her original time. Perhaps something snagged on it during the move?

Shuddering, Kagome laid back down, her eyes haunted, and she stared at the face of the clock until the sun started to shine through the rice paper doors, and she watched the big hand click its way to the top of the hour, and smiled when she heard the alarm. It had been the move. It had to have been.

Quickly, she got up, leaving her futon where it was as she hurried into the shower. She only allotted herself fifteen minutes worth of shower time; she only splurged on the weekend and used the bath for thirty. After dressing, she ran a brush through her hair quickly, then she set about unpacking the rest of the boxes.

She froze when she opened up a box and a broken picture stared back up at her. The whole family; Gramps, that woman, Souta, and Kagome, were standing in formal kimono under a large cherry blossom tree, huge smiles on each of their faces.

The glass was shattered over her face.

It had happened long before that night, only back then she assumed she had merely dropped it, and had told herself she would replace the frame next allowance, but she had forgotten. She caressed the faces in the photo briefly, her lips tightening when a sliver of glass jabbed at her finger tip, and she dropped the photo back in the box and shoved it aside. She's look at that one later.

After pulling out the glass and getting a band aid, Kagome went back to her task. Another box revealed all of her childhood knickknacks. A stuffed purple unicorn, a tray of broken sea shells - the broken ones had always been her favorite. She pulled out a box of carefully wrapped blown glass, a gift Souta had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Briefly, she wondered whether it had been Souta or his mother who packed all of her things.

She looked around the room, choosing a low table to place all of her special items. The unicorn she tucked under the covers on her futon. She went through the boxes that had her old clothes, wondering why they bothered packing these; she was an adult now, and she couldn't fit into clothes she had worn as a child.

She put them to the side, reminding herself to drop the clothes off at the nearest homeless shelter. The only box remaining was the one from before; the one that held all of her pictures. She didn't want to open it, didn't want to see those memories of her past life. She knew, however, that if she didn't open that box, it would act like the white elephant in the room. She might as well sort through them, at least to take them out of the box and store them somewhere else.

Picking up the broken frame again, Kagome stared down at the photo another moment before slipping it out, placing the photo in one pile and the frame in the other. The next couple of picture frames were before the episode seven years ago; Yuka, Eri, and Ayumi linked together and beaming into the camera.

Souta at a soccer game, a picture of intense concentration on his face, with his foot swung back as he was about to kick the winning point. She was in almost all of them; with her friends, with her family, some by herself. There were a few clumsily taken landscape scenes, and she decided to keep those out; not all of the pictures were bad memories or unwanted reminders.

As she dug deeper, she noticed that she started smiling less and less. Shadows were forming under her eyes, and there was an increasing look of worry and fear in her expressions. In one of them she wasn't smiling at all, merely staring into the camera solemnly. She picked up the last frame, and her fingers quivered a moment before she steeled herself.

She was crossing her arms, hugging herself almost anxiously, looking over her shoulders into the shadows. Kagome squinted at the photo, following the direction her eyes were pointed towards. There, barely visible in the shadows, was a faint outline of a man.

She dropped the photo, watching as a corner of it landed first and broke, the glass shattering. Kagome stared, stared so hard her eyes started to burn and her lungs felt tight. Suddenly she was ripping at the frame, the photo, picking it up to run out of her room and down the hall, into the kitchen, and lit the gas stove with shaky fingers.

When a flame was lit she held the photo above it, and then dropped it into the sink to watch it burn.

When it was nothing but ash, Kagome turned on the faucet and watched as it floated down the drain. She didn't care if that was the only proof that something had been following her. She wouldn't approach any of her family members with it regardless, and she wanted nothing of that man in her house.

Perhaps she was merely seeing things. Maybe she only imagined a figure standing there because it made her feel better. She gripped the edge of the counter, bowing her head so that her bangs shadowed her eyes, and she gritted her teeth as she attempted to exert control over her emotions.

She didn't like feeling so out of control, all because one little picture made her remember what she tried so hard to forget. Her doctor had attempted to help her differentiate between reality and illusion, tried to make her be normal again. But she still believed, deep down to her core, that what happened had been real. It wasn't make believe. What kind of girl would she have been to have dreamed something like that?

Taking a deep breath, she straightened, then shut off the water with a determined flick of her wrists. It was all in her imagination. She hadn't seen anything, and she almost had a panic attack over nothing. Using breathing techniques taught at the hospital, Kagome turned and left the kitchen. Yes, she thought with a silent sigh. It had all been in her head.

Later that night - and early morning - her clock once again let off its shrill alarm. She picked it up, glaring at the time.

3:33 a.m. Kagome froze, a remembering a line from a book she recently read. The Hour of the Wolf.

"The Hour of the Wolf is the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful…"[1]

Frightened, she let it slip through her fingers, watching as it rolled a couple of inches away, before she burrowed under her blankets and hid with her head underneath the covers.

She didn't go back to sleep.

------+-------

[1] The marketing tagline for a 1968 Ingmar Bergman horror film entitled Hour of the Wolf.

It's the time between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.

So, in case you're wondering, yes, I did make up the fact that Kagome read that tagline in a book.