Chapter Text
- When Moroha is seven, she wakes up in front of the Goshinboku.
- (“waking up” isn’t quite right, though—it’s more like snapping back into yourself after zoning out, that jolt in your mind as formless thought becomes crisp, the realization of lost time)
- Immediately, she knows—that her name is Moroha, that she is seven years old, that she is not supposed to be here.
- That she is not supposed to be alone.
- Souta finds her. He is familiar, somehow. Reassuring. He is gentle with his questions and patient when she fumbles her answers.
- She is dirty, barefoot, dressed in a faded pink yukata and an oversized red cloak. She has a clamshell compact on hand that reeks of expired rouge when she opens it. There is something wrong here.
- When Souta asks about her parents, she looks at him helplessly.
- (her eyes are big and brown and painfully familiar and Souta wonders if he’s just imagining it, that striking resemblance)
- He offers to help her look, so they do. They look everywhere, circle the grounds five times, until dawn breaks.
- They find no one.
- It takes a full week of sleepless nights without repercussions for Moroha to realize she physically cannot sleep.
- She shows none of the usual symptoms of extreme sleep deprivation, and seems to be in no danger. Doctors will go on to say there is nothing wrong with her. It’s just another mystery.
- Moroha wonders if she has ever slept. If she has ever dreamed. If she is even supposed to. She doesn’t remember.
- She remembers nothing before the Goshinboku. No names, no faces, no places. No memories.
- She nearly cries from sheer frustration.
- The Higurashi family are patient with her. Maybe too patient.
- (they look at her, sometimes, when they think she doesn’t notice; she catches pieces of broken conversations, mournful murmurs, hushed tones of Kagome and Inuyasha—)
- Souta’s wife, Moe, takes to her immediately. She’s patient like the Higurashi’s, but a different kind of patient. A cheerful kind, instead of solemn.
- She tries to help Moroha fall asleep by playing the violin, or putting on recordings of classical music. Even humming softly to her as Moroha closes her eyes and waits for tiredness that never comes.
- It never helps, but Moroha appreciates the effort anyway.
- A year passes without hide or hair of her missing family. The Higurashi’s tepidly accept that, whoever they are, they probably won’t be showing up any time soon.
- (they have their suspicions, of course, but they dare not voice them, dare not burden a child with the weight of a displaced grief)
- A few forged documents later, Moroha is adopted by Souta and Moe. She moves into their apartment and is enrolled in school under the name Moroha Higurashi.
- (she tells herself that she doesn’t mind starting over)
- When Moroha is ten, and Mei is barely a month old, she discovers her spiritual power.
- Moroha knows she’s different from normal girls. Fast-growing nails and too-sharp canines. Faster, stronger, more resilient. Better healing, better senses.
- But this is different.
- One day, Great-Grampa is giving a lecture about ofuda, because goddammit, someone has to inherit the shrine once he’s gone, and Moroha is holding one when she feels something stir inside her.
- (bright and sharp, like the flint wedge of an arrow, like a spark in kindling’s belly, like pressing your fingers to an electric pulsebeat)
- She sticks it on an urn with a supposedly cursed history. The dark, foreboding feeling that clung to the clay like a thin second skin—vanishes.
- Great-Grampa is dumbfounded. Moroha is ecstatic.
- She spends months experimenting with this new power. Sticking ofuda everywhere, meditating for as long as she can stand to, discovering how to nurture this inner brightness.
- She allows Great-Grampa to instruct her on some exercises and rituals. Reluctantly at first, but enthusiastically once she realizes he isn’t just spouting nonsense like everyone thinks he is.
- He doesn’t have powers himself, but he knows Things that are written off by ordinary people that are just that, ordinary. They don’t understand when Great-Grampa talks about hand movements in exorcisms or sacred chants.
- Moroha, though, does.
- Their bond grows fast and deep. Moroha listens raptly to the history lessons that the others don’t care for. Souta hides a wince when she brings home artifacts, parrots the same old legends.
- Moe think it’s adorable. Souta doesn’t, but at the end of the day, it makes Moroha happy, and that’s what matters in the end, so he doesn’t protest.
- Moroha performs a kagura on the eve of her eleventh birthday, dressing up in miko clothes and tying her hair back. Great-Grampa tells her that it’s a rite of passage for all Higurashi women before they turn eleven. Even her mother did this, at Moroha’s age.
- “My mother?” Moroha repeats, bewildered.
- Great-Grampa goes silent, clams up and evades the topic and launches into a whole lecture about the dance steps. Moroha nods attentively, silently.
- She decides not to press the issue. It doesn’t really make a difference either way, right?
- When Moroha is twelve, she learns what “Kagome” and “Inuyasha” mean.
- It is a badly kept secret. Even without the occasional slip-ups, there’s still Grand-Mama and Souta’s yearly vigils at the Bone-Eater’s Well and the untouched room down the hall of the house on the shrine’s property.
- There is a name that goes unspoken, and Moroha lets the silence hang, if only because it is easier to ignore than to confront something that is no longer there.
- Mei is two, and likes to toddle around, get into things she shouldn’t. Moroha finds her sneaking down the hall when no one is watching. She follows her just as Mei slips into the untouched room through a crack in the door.
- Grand-Mama is sitting on the bed, pouring over a photo album.
- She freezes like she’s been caught in the middle of crime. Slowly, Moroha looks at the pages.
- There are pictures of a girl with Moroha’s eyes and Moroha’s hair and Moroha’s smile. Pictures of a boy—if he can be called that, silver-haired and amber-eyed and canine-eared—with Moroha’s nose and Moroha’s jaw and Moroha’s smirk.
- All at once, she understands.
- Mei trips and falls on the carpet with an “oof!”.
- Moroha smiles and scoops her up and bolts out of there as casually as she can. But Grand-Mama must say something to Souta, because he sits her down later that day and tells her all about his brave, beautiful, kind and scatterbrained and selfless older sister Kagome.
- He tells her about the Sengoku Period, about youkai and hanyou and miko, about faked illnesses and missing school days and the dried-up magic inside the well. About Inuyasha, and their feudal fairytale.
- At the end of it, Moroha asks if it would be alright if she can call him Uncle Souta, from now on.
- There is sadness in his smile, but he agrees.
- (she starts wearing ribbons in her hair, stiff ones with wire in them; people say the bow looks like animal ears, and when she says it’s not on purpose, they believe her)
- Moroha gets into kyudo in middle school. She tries kendo at first, but gets kicked out for accidentally breaking some practice swords, so kyudo it is.
- Kyudo is calming, slow and purposeful. Every time she draws back the bow, makes room for the arrow, she imagines she is also making room for her spiritual powers to flare. She thinks she understands why a bow is a miko’s weapon of choice.
- The teacher says she has a knack for it. Her aim is good (better eyesight helps with that) and only gets better. Every time her arrow sails into the bull’s eye, she preens.
- She spends her sleepless nights practicing until her hands are torn up and bloody, until her tsurumaki roll runs out. Nighttime leaves her restless, bristling with energy that has nowhere to go.
- Nighttime is quiet. Too quiet. Cold and dark and, dare she say, lonely.
- (it feels like the rest of the world left her behind)
- She spends her nights studying, reading, practicing, parkouring around rooftops when she thinks she can get away with it.
- Once, while she’s practicing her bow, she notices a man trying to steal a car. Without thinking, she aims and lets the arrow fly. The man screams as it whizzes past his nose. She watches him run off.
- This is when Beniyasha is born.
- She starts off wearing a big black cloak, but eventually graduates to a specific outfit that looks like a bootleg kunoichi’s and a (white) wig and (dog) kabuki mask. The name comes from her crimson tunic, lurid as a walking wound, because she likes the sound of it.
- (she tells herself she’s not paying homage to her father or anything—the names just happen to sound similar, is all)
- (sometimes, Moroha is surprised by how convincing a liar she is)
- She doesn’t shoot arrows anymore. She gets up close and personal instead, bruises her knuckles on thugs, gangsters, petty crooks. Ties them up after she’s done and disappears before the police can show.
- Sometimes, when she isn’t fast enough, the police will arrive before she’s finished and will handcuff her too.
- She’s just a kid, so they let her call her parents. Moe always wears such a stiff smile when she shows up. Souta always has a look of supreme disappointment in his eyes as he’s paying her bail.
- He never says anything, never scolds her. Just tells her how he and Moe worry about her. Politely asks her to stop.
- Moroha can never look him in the eye. She’s not sure how to explain that she can’t. No, that she doesn’t want to.
- She likes fighting. Is that really so bad?
- There’s a teacher at her school who always looks out for her, who takes her side in schoolyard scraps and excuses late assignments and offers after-school tutoring sessions. Who listens to her vent and makes her tea from the teacher’s lounge and recommends good books for her to read when she's bored.
- He’s her favorite teacher, hands down. She has him all three years of her middle school stint, and even as a homeroom teacher for her third year. He’s the only adult outside her family that she really, genuinely trusts.
- Eventually, instead of calling Souta or Moe when she gets arrested, Moroha starts calling Kirin-sensei instead.
- When Moroha is seventeen, and it has been ten years since she came to this era, the rift between times opens once more.
- Out tumbles: a girl with white fur on her shoulder, a man garbed in black and teal armor, a panther with two tails, and a monstrous, half-centipede thing.
- Moroha knows youkai are real. She’s seen illustrations, heard legends, is part youkai herself. But this is her first time seeing one in person. It is massive, six arms and three eyes and a mouthful of fangs.
- It turns to the man. He’s unconscious. It opens its mouth, drooling. And Moroha has never seen a youkai before, but she knows what hunger looks like.
- She grabs a rock and throws it. Shouts to pick on someone its own size.
- The monster turns to her.
- Oh shit.
- There is scrambling, and desperation, and a bow in the shed made from azusa-wood that seems to fit perfect in her hands. There is Mei wandering out of the house at the wrong moment, and then butterflies made of light shining through the air.
- There is the fur-wearing girl cutting off the monster’s head after it’s magically fallen asleep, her naginata blade gleaming like a bloodied fang.
- And then the man in the black and teal armor looks at her—looks at her the way you would look at the universe collapsing, the way you would look at a star crashing into the ground, with parted lips and wide eyes and a heart quivering hopefully behind guarded ribs and Moroha’s knuckles whiten around the bow as he murmurs—
- “...Moroha? Is that you?”
- And the wheel of destiny begins to turn.