Mayu has been deposited someplace pitch black, wondering where she is now. She sees a line of light in front of her and reaches out to it, pushing open a door. A gust of fiery air rushes into her small dark space and she balks at the flames quickly surrounding her.
Meanwhile, Inuyasha and Kagome land where they saw the Tatari-Mokke disappear, and Kagome recognizes it as the burned out former home of Mayu's family while she runs toward it.
In order to send this message, Inuyasha swings his Tessaiga down on where the Tatari-Mokke disappears, and it comes down on a burned carpet devoid of flames, ghost or otherwise. The Tessaiga hasn't even transformed, still in its junk-state while Inuyasha faces the empty apartment with bewilderment. He mutters that Kagome's gone with wide eyes and sweat at his temple.
Back at the hospital, it appears that someone has found Satoru's mom and patched up the lump on her head with a bandage. She sits in the hospital hallway, looking nervously contemplative. She's sure her vision of Mayu looking the way she did before she died wasn't an illusion. Suddenly, a nurse bursts from a nearby door to announce something about Satoru and his mom jumps to her feet. She runs into the room to see Satoru on a gurney, awake and recognizing her.
Satoru's mom tearfully holds her hands up to her mouth in shock. While she kneels down to put a hand on her son's chest, the nurse informs him that he's been asleep for half a year already. Satoru puts his hand over his moms and haltingly mutters to her.
Suddenly, she hears someone call out her name. She stands, thinking it might be her mother, but she looks out of the closet to see that it's Kagome shouting for her to answer. Kagome looks around and sees Mayu peeking from around the doorway and runs toward her kneeling in the closet in front of the little girl sitting again to back away from her. Kagome urges Mayu to take her hand so they can get out of there and go home, but Mayu asks if she's some kind of moron. She shouts that she's already dead and has nowhere to go home to.
Kagome observes something happening behind Mayu.
The chains around Mayu's arms tighten and Kagome lunges forward to grab her, calling out her name. She just grasps her hand before Mayu is pulled out of her reach, but this only means that Mayu is a tug-of-war rope between Kagome and the chains of Hell. She looks fearfully down into the depths where the chains disappear, then back up as the Tatari-Mokke's eye appears above Kagome, insisting that she go to Hell.
The pull is even stronger, yanking Kagome down to her armpit as she struggles to hold on, Mayu looking up at her with despair. It looks like she's already resigned to her fate, but Kagome yells at her to come back because Mayu can't possibly let it end like this. Kagome begs Mayu to come home with her and make up with her mother. Mayu's eyes widen, like she didn't even think of making-up as an option.
Mayu hangs her head and mumbles something about "won't be" which Kagome doesn't quite understand. Mayu asks more clearly if her mother won't be angry. It's Kagome's turn to widen her eyes. She tells Mayu that she thinks her mother really loved her and she asks if Mayu wants to see her again. GREAT deflection, Kagome! Mayu doesn't even care that she didn't get an actual answer, because all that matters is she's not willing to never see her mother again after this crappy night.
Mayu tells her mother that she's going now, confusing her.
Kagome just looks kind of wistful when she says that she thinks that what she did was the right thing after all. Inuyasha is looking down at her in amazement as he thinks that she REALLY managed to calm a fucking ghost. He puts on an exasperated face when he criticizes her actions as risky considering she could have been dragged to Hell too if she failed. He uses the word poltergeist to describe Mayu, but Kagome considers the word as though it doesn't quite fit.
Later, Souta is telling Kagome as he visits her room with a summer Popsicle that Satoru is finally getting out of the hospital next week. Kagome says that's nice, before Souta passes along Satoru's mom's regards, though he doesn't quite understand why. Kagome says she sees, again looking a little melancholy. He leaves and Kagome gazes at the ceiling as she sits at her desk and sighs, thinking that it's all over.
Someone whispers at Kagome from the window, though, and it can't be Inuyasha because he's too loud for that shit.
Mayu flies away back toward the no-longer-threatening Tatari-Mokke, waving at Kagome and thanking her. Kagome smiles up at her and thinks that Mayu was just a little girl who really loved her mom.
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? I think I pretty well expressed myself to an embarrassing capacity above. Don't for one second think that I'm exaggerating when I say that all of those gifs were absolutely representative of how I felt, and always feel, reading this chapter. This little arc always hits me SO hard with all of the emotions; the pain, the loss, the relationships between all the members of the family. RT makes Mayu, her brother, and her mother so REAL; they are such distinct people established in their very understandable personalities and struggles that it's hard to believe that they're just characters in the manga. This paired with the serious subject matter and the beauty of how it was treated is amazing to me. This chapter and its arc are works of incandescence.
That's not to say it's without its flaw, though. Much like the Tessaiga arc, I'm wondering how Kagome and Mayu got OUT of the illusion of the day Mayu died and back into the real world. They just end up back in the real world again, with no explanation. Unlike that arc, though, there are at least HINTS that the Tatari-Mokke may have let them out of the illusion. It alerted Kagome to the fact that there was a problem with Mayu, dragged her into the illusion with Mayu which allowed her to directly help, and the chains DID break on Mayu when she finally admitted that she wanted to see her mother. It seemed like the Tatari-Mokke put Kagome in with Mayu in order to give Mayu a chance, and once that chance was taken, it could let both of them go.
It's those hints that allow me to give this one chapter a pass on how Kagome and Mayu made it out of there, because even though it wasn't explicit, there are reasons to believe that their escape was dependent on Tatari-Mokke just dissolving the illusion around them.
All in all, I'm ALWAYS awed by this chapter in how much it can make me feel all throughout it. I don't think there will ever come a time when I'm not moved to tears by it.
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