Her heart stopped. She didn't.
Seven months had passed since she last slipped into the Bone Eater's Well.
Seven months of…
Nightmares.
Archives.
Tears.
Rage.
Seven months of heart breaking, earth shattering, silence.
Her memories of coming – being brought – back were fuzzy, white noise snippets of the swoosh of trees, the crackle of bone, muffled screams, and the feel of her skull cracking off the lip of the well.
She couldn't even remember who had carried her back. Saved her.
She remembered the feel of Naraku's hand at the base of her skull, fingers entwined in her thick raven hair tilting her head back just so. She remembered the feel of his breath against her chest, his nose nestled in the crook of her neck, tongue tasting the hollow of her throat.
She remembered the feel of his fingers as they broke through her chest cavity, the feel of wicked claws delving into a chamber of her heart. The slow, ragged stop of her pulse.
I don't need a soul in this body for it to be of use to me.
She had relived it every night for the last seven months.
But…
She also remembered the sickening sound of his flesh hitting the Earth, the sound of hissing through the air, and so much blood that the Earth squelched beneath their toes.
Were they all dead?
Koga. Sesshomaru. Inuyasha. Sango. Miroku. Shippo?
Surely they wouldn't have left her alone all this time if they had survived The Split.
Would they?
If they had killed Naraku, why would they come looking for her?
That's all she wanted to know. She needed to know.
She needed to know she was safe.
"Do you ever get lonely?"
"Lonely? Why would I get lonely? I have many who throw themselves at my feet."
"Yes, yes. The Great Lord Sesshomaru has legions of fans." Dismissive, flippant, "I mean lonely. The kind of lonely where you just want to curl up on the couch, and have someone hold you while you watch eighteen hours of Netflix. No questions of why you aren't getting up and feeding yourself, why aren't you showering just the feel of a body beside you."
A raised brow, "Is this about the television you keep going on about?"
A soft laugh, "Yes, I guess it is."
She could remember The Wish. She didn't think she'd ever forget that, after all she had made it. It was a selfish wish, one that caused the Shikon to splinter once more, because while she had considered the fate of humanity she hadn't – exactly – considered the fate of the demons.
She had been thinking of her future, and with a sickening realization the night before she had realized why her world existed just like it did.
With no demons.
But, what other choice had she had? She needed to keep them safe. All that blood was on her hands, and she hadn't even hesitated when the time came.
She knew Sango and Miroku were dead. If they hadn't died during The Split, five hundred years had passed and age certainly did them in.
They had supported her decision, understood why it had to be done. They accepted that fate, and were willing to clean up her mess when the Bone Eater's Well sucked her back in.
She hadn't talked to Inuyasha; she knew he would spend their last precious moments trying to change her mind. So she just enjoyed the time she had left with him, whether he liked it or not.
And Sesshomaru? Sesshomaru, with all his declarations of hate for the human race and superiority of demons, had surprised her the most.
"Have you ever killed something before," He raised a hand before she could open her mouth; "I'm not talking about an assist. I mean you are directly responsible for the stop of their heartbeat; none of this shooting an arrow, and the half-breed finishing the job."
She closed her eyes, and felt the muscle in her jaw tightening, "No. No, I don't think I have."
"Then you haven't. Taking a life is something you don't so readily forget."
He said it in such a way that made her feel like a child, with childish ideals. After she had talked to him about The Wish, he had been getting increasingly better at that.
"I'm not saying this to talk down to you, but rather to have you realize what you are attempting. You have never taken a single life, it has been almost five years, yet you are willing to possibly take millions with this wish. If you haven't yet had to have to live with the blood of a single life on your hands, how will you live when you have taken enough to drown the Earth?"
She wanted to tell him now that she was managing just fine. She hadn't been, not in the beginning. Not when she thought there wasn't a single demon left in the world, and she really had drowned the Earth with blood. She managed a little better when she realized The Wish wasn't a Cleansing but rather a Split. However, she read the archives. She hadn't lived the aftermath, but she read what she had done.
The Wish had made her a legend. At least, for those who still Believed. Not that she'd ever want to take credit for the lives she had stolen. But, in those dusty archives that were being eaten by the dampness of a cellar the shakey, spidery hand writing told of a priestess with raven hair and otherworldly clothing who had given her life so that demons were purged from this Earth in an attempt to let humanity thrive without fear.
She hadn't lived long enough to become a legend, and it made her feel very, very tired to read any more about The Split.
So she stopped.
When she had learned that The Wish had created an entirely different world, The Demon World, she had spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to get there. They had to be there, that was why they hadn't been able to get in touch with her. She had almost broken her ankle jumping down into the well over, and over.
She had tried weird medicines, incense, traditional garb, praying to hundreds of Gods and even let her grandfather in on the festivities. All it had earned her was triple digits worth of hours of stories from her grandfather's own archive of a memory.
So she stopped.
If she had to guess, at least three months had passed since she Stopped. She was driving herself insane, quite literally. She was falling behind in college, in eating, in sleeping. She had lost fifteen pounds, gained fifteen bags under her eyes. Her dreams were full of battle and blood, and the screams of the dying. She took in more caffeine than actual sustenance. She knew something had to give when she wasn't able to distinguish her dreams from reality.
She had Stopped in the pursuit of her past cold turkey.
In the three months since she had Stopped, she had instead focused on eating better, she joined a yoga and kick boxing class, she had found a club or two on campus that made her friends, and was trying hard to stay away from anything that remotely resembled Demons or the Shikon. Instead of obsessively chasing her past, she was now running away from it.
In the End, the Stop was the best thing that she had ever done.
It was around the time she had finished moving into her new apartment. Part of the New Kagome was distancing herself from a roommate, from that comfort of always having someone there so she wasn't left alone with her thoughts.
It was quite frightening, if she was honest with herself.
For the first time she didn't have a family or friend's bed to crawl into bed at night when the dreams got to be too much, or the background noise of someone else's phone, television, life to drown out her own.
The silencing was suffocating.
So three days later she got herself a puppy. An Akita puppy, to be precise, and it was about two days after Puppy that she realized that she had Started again.
The night after she Started, she was wearing brand new pajamas she had picked up that morning as a treat (because why not?), the sheets on her bed were crisp and smelled like Heaven (because a certain puppy smelled horrible still), and the night was so beautiful that she was able to leave the window open before she slid beneath the covers.
It was a perfect storm so she shouldn't have been surprised when her eyes popped open at 2 a.m. and was wide awake.
But she was.
And her heart Stopped.
She couldn't tell if she was having one of those breakdown moments where she was confusing dreams for reality or reality for a dream.
But Sesshomaru was there. In her bedroom. On the edge of her bed, and his familiar silhouette caused an ache so deep that she couldn't even cry.
She had wasted a year of her life searching for him, chasing the remnants of a past long gone and all she had to do was Stop?
He didn't say a word when she pushed the covers back, or when she ran a trembling hand down the length of his arm.
He didn't speak when the tears – finally – started, or when gasping sobs shook her so badly he had to gather her in his arms to try and steady her.
All she wanted him to do as speak, and keep silent. The moment felt so unreal that she was afraid if he did speak she would wake up, and she would be the same basket case spending twenty hours in a dusty archive.
With trembling fingers she touched his forehead, down his temple, past his naked cheekbones, and a small sob escaped her lips, as her free hand tangled itself in his designer shirt.
This was real.
He was real.
And if there was any doubt it was erased when he closed the distance and she felt those same wind burned lips on her own, just like they felt five hundred years prior.
"Sesshomaru."
She Started again.
A/N: I'm not really sure where I was going with this. Or if it makes much sense to anyone else. However, with the lack of demons in present day Japan, I guess I imagine the possibility that a wish was made to put a barrier between the demons and the humans, rather than thinking they all had just gone extinct.