Disclaimer: I do not own anything in or from Inuyasha in any way...please don't file a lawsuit, pretty please?
Author's Note: This story is my latest, it's told first-person POV (point of view) from Mrs. Higurashi from some ten or twelve years after the story we all know. She talks about life after having lost Kagome to the Feudal Era...but the BIG part of this is the story that took place those ten or twelve years BEFORE, when Kagome passed through the well for the last time.That story is told third POV.How would she and the others take it? How would she survive? Can she even survive? And, more eerie still, how do you live out your days 500 years in the past without changing something? This is the paradox about time: If you go back into the past and kill your grandfather, wouldn't you cease to exist? So, if you don't exist, how did you go back and kill your grandfather? How can Kagome be stuck on the wrong side of time and still exist? All right, that's enough of that talk. This starts off a little dark, but I intend for it to get gradually lighter as realization and the truth set in (Yes! there IS a truth and realization and stuff to come!) The new rating system kinda freaks me out...I think I would've named this one as an R before, so what is that now, an M? (shrugs) I hope I get it right...Also I have borrowed an Idea that several other fictions have used, but which I won't tell you about yet. Let me say this much: (blah, bla, blahb!) are Kagome's thoughts sometimes.Last note: Aijou means dearest daughter I think in Japanese...Ashi means "Paw" and Kiba means "Fang." There, make sure if you review to write in and tell me what you think! Laters!
Isolation
The house was dark and cold, though that shouldn't have surprised me. It's been that way for years and years now, but sometimes, on a few rare occasions—coming home from shopping, from seeing the dentist, or from running a small errand—arriving into the midst of the thick, heavy silence doesn't bother me. For a moment I am in my own small world, and I am all that I need. But it is always a short occurrence, and most days when I step inside that emptiness still hits me like a wall…and it's all I can do to hold back my tears and stay strong.
But not anymore. There's no reason to hold on any longer.
It wasn't so long ago—about twelve years I think—that this house flourished, it lived. There were no huge, heavy empty places in my heart then, well, save one, but that wound is an even older one within me, close to two decades in age. I understand quite well the effect of time on pain—physically, mentally and emotionally too. And yet although time can cure many pains, there comes a certain point at which a person—a woman, a daughter, a wife, a mother like me—realizes that the pains will only end with the coming of death.
I shall bear mine with me to the grave, but what human being doesn't? There are always regrets to be considered, and remembered. They are apart of what makes us all human. Some of us just have a few more regrets than the others…
The house keys jangled in my fingers, startling me. My mind has a tendency, especially in the silence of the looming house that I once called a home, to wander. I stepped beyond the doorway, closing the front door. I didn't bother locking it, yet the keys continued to rattle and jingle in my hands, as if mocking my silent tears and the cold, utter emptiness of the house. The sounds were swallowed whole, gobbled up.
My tears fell at that thought; the silence is so unnerving. If it weren't for that silence it might be easier for me to forget the pain inside.
Frustrated, bitter, I tossed the keys onto the kitchen table, taking slight comfort from their loud clattering protestations as they met with the solid wood. In the kitchen I switched on the first light I saw, illuminating the small space. I paused in front of the refrigerator, stove and the cabinets, swiping at the remaining tears that were skiing down my cheeks. A mirror on the side of the refrigerator, there for who knows how long and for reasons no one knows, threw my image back at me. The woman that stared me down in that little slice of reflection wasn't the woman I dreamed of becoming as a girl. She wasn't even the woman I dreamed of becoming as a younger woman! No, I'd always envisioned happiness and family, hugs, smiles, kisses and laughter. I'd never dreamed, not in my most frightening nightmares, that I'd end up widowed and for the most part abandoned…
I frowned at the reflection, at her tired, weary and mourning brown eyes. I didn't want to be reminded of how I'd failed my own dreams; my own happiness…and I didn't want to fall into self-pity. In truth not everyone had abandoned me, in fact no one did anything so cruel as that. My mother and husband and father all died, it's hardly as if they wanted to…and my daughter? Yes, she's dead too, has to be. My son didn't vanish or leave me behind—he just headed off to college. It's his right of course, and it made me so proud to see him graduate…but at once it saddened me so, because you see, I should've seen another of my children graduate by then, but she was stolen from me…
The sound of a cat's insistent crying startled me and I blinked, looking to the floor. Ashi, my Siamese, rubbed past my legs, demanding attention—or more likely tuna. Grateful for the distraction, I reached for the cabinets and pulled them open, chuckling to myself as Ashi's soft, delicate fur brushed by my ankles again, his meow almost more of a growl. He's always been a very insistent little beast. I should've named him Kiba or something of the like, rather than Ashi. I would've liked another mixed breed like the last cat we had—named Buyo—but this Siamese's blue eyes haunted me when I first saw him as a kitten in the pound…blue colored like the human eyes of a half dog demon that I once knew.
I pushed the tears that were threatening to fall away, blinking as if one of Ashi's abundant hairs had dripped into my eye. Stop this, stop torturing yourself…but I was beyond listening. Like a zombie—that was some little idea that my son was obsessed with as a boy, even though I always hated it—I opened the can of tuna from the cabinet, snatched a small plate and fork, and a second later I was scooping the stringy, pungently smelling meat from the tiny can. Ashi didn't wait for me to finish, he leapt up onto the kitchen counters, mewing sweetly, as if his cuteness would negate the fact that he was breaking a house law by being on the counters…but I could hardly blame him—I'd been gone all day and he hadn't been fed at all!
I gave him a tough smile, petting him once as he began to ravenously evacuate the meat from the plate into his stomach. And couldn't help but think about his eyes again, about the past, about when this house wasn't empty and cold and lifeless…
Before I knew really what had happened I was crying. The tears flew like raindrops in the spring. Still stroking Ashi I kept crying, not wild sobs, but quiet mourning whispers of grief.
The house was always lonely after a day of silent horrors like the one I'd just lived…
It was just as good as abandoned when I arrived home from the hospital, that day so many years ago, with the deaths of my mother and my husband riding on my soul. In those days my two children and my father lived here as well—but when I came home that night they were all away from the house, away at the shrine praying for the safe recovery of our loved ones. It was in vain. They had died in that hospital emergency trauma room even before I'd been ushered in as the family representative. I stayed waiting for hours, thinking about how easily it could've happened to someone else in the family—all they'd done was drive to the city for some groceries—when a police officer finally came and escorted me to a back room. That was where the final horror of that day was waiting. I had to identify their bodies, to assure the authorities that these were, in fact the real victims.
I can still remember the blue of my mother's lips, the terrible bruising on her shoulder where the seat belt had been. I remember the way my husband's eyes were cold and lifeless, the way his neck had lolled—despite the medical professional's best attempts—to greet me with an impossible angle. I was told that the car accident had killed my husband on contact, whiplash broke his neck, cutting the mind from the body. My mother hadn't been given as brief and painless a death as my husband. When the moment of the impact came my mother's seat belt had chewed its way into her body, breaking her hips, and crushing her collarbone. Something hit just right—or is it more accurate to say just wrong enough—that the bones turned inward and pierced her lungs and her heart, severing a major blood vessel. Doctors had been unable to save her.
It took us years to recover from such a blow to the family. Those first years are a blur to me, a smudge of pain. My father was strong and guided us through without ever flinching. The children grew and life went on, amazingly so. I hoped to never come back to this house with such terrible burdens, and memories, living within my heart like a parasite—but my hopes were in vain…
It'd been that tragedy that had so ripped me apart, had so shattered me inside. You have heard the saying; of course, that the worst thing parents can live through is burying their own children. I didn't bury both of my children, it's true, and technically I didn't even bury one of them, but that's trivial information because whether I saw my daughter's body or not doesn't matter. She's dead anyway, I know she is…
And it was that loss that made this house a silent place, a place of mourning, grief and loneliness without cease. Without my daughter's laughter the life left, the soul. My father tried to keep us strong again—but there are only so many losses even a strong man like my father can take. He began to suffer his own illnesses. Heart trouble, arthritis, and finally cancer. It was that cancer that stole him in the end.
It was from his funeral that I'd just arrived home to feed Ashi in this old, terrible, lonely house.
Death is a clear thing. Whether we see it coming or not in the form of illness doesn't matter. I knew my father was going to die, I knew that he was ready. His time of suffering while his body turned against him—his own cells destroying him—had come to an end, and that was how he'd wanted it. He had died in happiness, or at least as close to it as one can get.
But sometimes death comes unfairly. Seeing my mother and husband ripped so cruelly away from us is something I will never lose, something I am unable to forget. I don't want to forget their smiles, their laughs, the sounds of their voices, or the way their faces looked. But I don't want to remember that they were taken so unfairly, with such horror.
And my daughter's demise…it was even worse because I never got to say goodbye at all. There was never a spot of closure. No body, no sickness, no wounds. Just one day she said her quick goodbyes, leapt through the ancient well on our property, and vanished into time. Of course such a thing was normal for her—it was her destiny my father always said, but that time, that trip, she never returned. Never again did she rap on the screen door; never again did she come into the house looking for food that on her return trip she could give to her friends living in the Feudal Era. We just never saw her again…
Close to ten years have passed since that day she disappeared, and now, with my father's death and my son's graduation from high school, I am completely alone, entirely without human company.
I stopped petting the cat, blinking the cloudiness of my tears away. It was time to face something that I hadn't had the courage to deal with in a long, long time…
I started toward the stairs. Step by step I walked over them, over and up. They creaked, years of use making them loud whiners. At the top of the stairs I paused, as I always do, at the closed doorway that was once my daughter's room. When she'd not returned for a year we'd begun to realize the worst, and to keep us from seeing it each time we walked up the stairs, my father had installed a lock on the outside, closed the door, and locked it. It hadn't been opened since…but just in case she should suddenly reappear, I knew where my father had stored the key.
I walked into his old room, and was suddenly choking back tears. The memories of the funeral were still fresh in my mind, but not as fresh as his last words to me, "Smile more…aijou." My father had, underneath his gruff and comical exterior, been a very caring man. I don't think my children ever really understood that, but my mother and I did, and we never forgot it. And my father never really changed, not from my first memories of him to my very last at his death…after his last words he'd drifted off into sleep, and the next day he'd been in a coma. Little more than a week later he'd passed away silently.
Smile more, aijou.
Yes, I knew he was right to tell me something like that, but there was so much grief, so much loneliness, that I couldn't.
I stopped just inside his room, my insides quaking. I couldn't do this. My father had closed her door for a reason, and I couldn't open two doors of grief at once. With my father's death hanging so soon, and still so heavily on my soul I knew I wouldn't be able to survive if I opened that door—my daughter's door. Whatever had possessed me to think that I could, to imagine, even for a moment, that it'd been the right thing?
I backed away from the room and—once more like one of my son's favorite monsters, the zombies—walked to my own room. From the bookshelf I snatched a large album, a scrapbook, and I sat on my bed with it in my lap. I stayed that way for a long time, simply contemplating the images, the memories, and the pain that I would inflict on myself the moment I opened the book.
Ashi appeared at the door, mewing his arrival. A moment later he leapt to lay half in half out of my lap, purring contentedly. He smelled like tuna.
I laughed and stroked him, his friendliness filling me with new strength. God bless him, if I didn't have this cat…but the thought wasn't worth finishing. I was going to survive. If I didn't that would be a failure to my father. And besides that I knew there would be more happiness to come. As soon as my son found the right woman—which shouldn't be hard or very long in coming considering how good looking he is—he'd likely do as tradition had always dictated and move in with me to keep the shrine up and running. It was the Higurashi family responsibility, just as it had been for who knew how many years…
With a sigh I flipped open the scrapbook and faced my family of years ago—a family that I missed so much, but who I couldn't join for a long time still…we were separated in more ways than time now…
We were also separated by death.
(One decade and five hundred years ago…)
"Why is it you're always so slow, bitch?" Inuyasha raged at her, ears flicking in what she took to be aggravation or irritation, but in reality it was excitement and nervousness.
"Why do you insist on calling me names? Maybe if you treated me a little better, Inuyasha," she challenged him with her eyes, "I would be quicker. After all, why would anyone want to come back to this era with you acting like such a jackass?"
She was holding her backpack, full of the goodies and trinkets her world possessed. Inuyasha was just as fond of cho-co-lit and can-dee as Shippo was—and not to mention the lovely fragrance of Ramen never failed to make his stomach churn with anticipatory glee—but it wasn't the food he was so eager to secure.
It was Kagome.
And at the moment he knew she was upset with him, which didn't surprise him considering that their fight before she'd left had been pretty substantial and had led to her spending three whole days away. But unlike on other occasions when she might've simply ignored him or stormed off, now he knew, or rather he sensed that this time she would go right back to her own world…
He growled at her, "You should hurry—bitch—you know how close we are! And instead of do the right thing you just flap your jaws at me and take a vacation."
Tensions in their group of Shard-hunters had been very high lately. The entire Sacred Jewel was almost complete. Kagome kept it, on a strong-silvered chain about her neck. Since they'd collected Naraku's half they estimated only four or five shards were left to go before the entire jewel was finished. Their quest would be over—well, except for the fact that Naraku was still alive and pursuing the jewel piece that he'd lost. Yet, without the power of the jewel helping him Naraku wasn't nearly the threat he'd been when they were younger and still new to the quest. In due time, as long as they were careful, the quest's two goals would be complete.
But although Inuyasha thirsted for that completion he also dreaded it. Kagome had turned 17 recently, he knew, and had entered some of her last and most serious years of schooling in her world. She was drawn away from them more and more. The demands of her society in the future remained compelling. Soon, Inuyasha had realized, she would be nothing more than a memory to him and the others. She would stop traveling through time, relinquish her hold on the Shikon jewel and become an ordinary woman of her own era.
The realization made the hanyou sick to his stomach. He couldn't deny it, and he didn't really blame her. His era was dangerous and wild. Hers was loud, polluted and otherwise on the whole very safe. It was also comfortable. No hard floors, no sleeping outside with the rocks drilling into your spine.
There were also no strange half-demons in her world that couldn't bring themselves to accept their feelings for her…there were only pure blooded mortals vying for her attention, openly and simply. He knew that Kagome was beginning to feel annoyed with his lack of intimacy with her, his immaturity. The humans in her world, and the demons in his own, were starting to look more promising, certainly easier to get along with…
"Inuyasha!" she screamed, shaking with anger and frustration, "Don't call me that!"
They'd known each other more than three years and there'd never been more than a few instances of closeness. A time when she kissed him to save him from his inner demon, a time when they'd hugged to comfort each other, a time when they held hands in silent kinship. But there had never been official words, never a formality to assure her of his feelings; nothing was ever out in the open.
He'd always wanted to change that, but never had the courage…until the jewel had become so nearly complete…
"But, damn it woman," his ears folded backward, "That's what you are!"
It was as if the nearly complete jewel that hung on her neck had done something to enhance everything about her that drove him crazy. Her scent was so strong that when he lingered by the well while she was gone, he could scent her 500 years into the future if she was anywhere nearby. Before he'd had an acute sense of what her feelings were by analyzing both her scent and her body language. Now he didn't need to be looking at her at all—scent alone could tell him everything he needed to know with few exceptions. And sometimes, just sometimes, he was able to hear her thoughts whisper in his head. At first he'd thought he was going insane—and sometimes he still thought that was the case because the voices weren't always Kagome's, often it was something else, a thing that he thought might've been his own instincts talking to him. At other times he knew that these voices were Kagome's thoughts.
And at this moment he knew that the latter was indeed true—the things that he heard whispered in his head were Kagome's thoughts. And he forced himself to remain stoically silent as he heard them pass through, even though, deep within his ribcage he felt his heart constrict, his lungs tighten with a black terror…
(Why do I even try anymore? All we're ever going to do is fight. He never shows me his soft side, even though we both know he has it. Why do I kid myself? I should just go home now, leave Sango with the jewel or something. I mean, once it's finished anyway I'm just going to have to leave anyway…Inuyasha isn't right for me. I don't know why I ever thought he was…)Aloud to him she sneered with sudden ferocity, "Well then, I suppose I should call you what you are then huh? If that's the way it's going to be I'll just call you jerk from now on!"
The hanyou snarled at her silently, but he said nothing, not even "Feh." Instead he crossed the short distance between himself and the wooden well that held the girl currently in its mouth. With one clawed, deadly hand, he grabbed her backpack and tossed it across the meadow.
She stared as it soared through the air and cringed when it landedheavily, painfully almost. She was about to turn back to the half-demon that she called "friend," and yell at him, maybe even say her most favorite word, when she felt sharp claws prick her skin through her skimpy school uniform, right around her waist. She screamed when he lifted her high into the air, certain that she was about to join her backpack some fifty feet away, embedded into the ground like a fossil. She opened her mouth and was about to scream it, her favorite word, when she felt her stomach slam into his hard, strong shoulder.
The impact was rougher than he'd meant it to be and she choked, the air forced from her lungs in a terrible whoosh. She gasped and choked, inhaling deeply to take back what she'd lost. "You jerk!" she screamed when she had the air to do it, "Put me DOWN!"
"Nope, sorry bitch. I'm not going to let you go back to your own time, not now. You're staying with me."
She screamed behind him, her mouth right at his ear, and he sensed that she was about to restrain him with her subduing word…hurriedly he pulled her down from his shoulder and carried her bridal style instead. "There, bitch." He chuckled sarcastically, ears dancing and twisting on top of his head nervously, "Now if you sit me you'll be trapped right along with me!"
She made a growl that was distinctly inhuman. He'd certainly made her mad this time! She struggled, continuing to voice her emotions with animal-like growls and snarls. Against his will Inuyasha found himself wishing that she had sat him so he could innocently have pinned her below him, because with the sounds—which spoke to his own animal side fluently and commandingly—she was making he wanted to pin her anyway…but his human side made him cautious, made him hesitate. Such an advance had to be done in the right mood…
Of course he'd already taken to one clearly inuyoukai mating tradition—the use of the word bitch. A male inuyoukai often called a female relative or companion "wench." Early in his knowing Kagome he'd called her this, signifying her non-romantic involvement with him. She was not a mate, but she was someone that he had to protect and watch over, and she was, strangely enough, slightly more than the others in his eyes. The others understood this—Sango was familiar with many demon habits, as her career required her to be, Miroku knew less in some instances, but being male he could easily sense when he was going too far within another male's territory, whether the male was hanyou, human, demon or whatever.
Recently though, he'd caught himself calling her not wench, or girl, or Kagome, but bitch. When the term was used by an inuyoukai male it signaled his interest in her romantically as a mate. It announced to others that he considered her his, and that unless she didn't accept him for some reason, they would be bound together as mates. He was using it as if it were a synonym for mate, or love. In his inuhanyou male's world it was a synonym for those things…but to Kagome's people and to inuyoukai females who referred to other females that they disliked, the term was an insult, and Inuyasha knew this. That was why he kept using it without embarrassment…
Suddenly he was drawn away from his own musings just as he had reached the edge of the forest, Kagome still in his arms struggling…she'd apparently regained the use of her linguistic skills, recovered from her rage, and was going to sit him no matter the consequences to herself…he felt her tense in his arms, could smell her abrupt anticipation. She was stealing herself for the impact and his huge weight on her. As she struggled one of her feet slipped away from his arms and the change in balance made Inuyasha stumble…her other leg fell free as well, but the hanyou clutched one shoulder and her waist to hold her where she was, just as—
"SIT!" Kagome screamed triumphantly while at the same time trying to push away from him to avoid—she was too late.
Inuyasha's body crashed downward, pushing her below him. They hit the ground; Kagome's body squarely below the hanyou's, his hand still on her shoulder and waist. The wind pressed from both of their lungs, compressed from the impact. In the wake of it both gasped—like lovers after a very intense honeymoon—desperately replenishing their lungs of the lost oxygen.
Inuyasha recovered first, his dizziness making the world swirl crazily for a moment. Then he blinked, took in a second deep breath, and felt himself shiver involuntarily at it. Her scent…the air he needed to breathe was saturated with everything that was Kagome, and Inuyasha both loved and feared the feeling of warmth that it spread through him.
Kagome was still recovering, but he could already sense her anger at the situation and her—wait…he sniffed again, deeply, slowly, hoping she didn't notice…her excitement?
One of her thoughts fizzled through his mind, loud and shivering.
(Oh my—! He's on top of me! If he just…if I just…this is ridiculous! Inuyasha would never be attracted to me or think anything of this position at all—he thinks Kikyo's the one for having sex with…icky! Icky! Dead women…what the hell is wrong with him!)
Somehow her thoughts—filled with repulsion and disgust—echoed what his own mind and body felt at the same thought. While she'd been alive Inuyasha had been attracted to the priestess it was true—but never as much as he had been for Kagome. Kagome was twice as alive as Kikyo had ever been!
And she isn't from your era, and she doesn't want you anymore—you idiot! You waited too long…
Indeed, he could smell the mixed messages her scent was giving him and that same dark terror bloomed in his gut again. Was it true? Had he waited too long? But it couldn't be true! He needed her, wanted her at his side…wanted her as his mate…
He drew in a deep, slow breath, analyzing her scent carefully, and realized, with something of a shock, that the spell had worn off enough for him to get off her. When he looked toward her face he saw her deep, dark eyes—so beautiful!—and in them he saw something shining, a part of her soul perhaps. In it he saw hope. It sparkled like the stars at night, like light reflecting from pools of water.
Her scent surrounded him, enchanted him, and seemed to keep him immobile, as if he'd been chained to the ground. Inuyahsa could smell something new in her scent that was swiftly overpowering most of the other things within her natural perfume—and it made him dizzy all over again.
It was desire.
And although he could scarcely believe the situation, Inuyasha felt his own body responding to the warmth and the softness of hers below him. Before he could stop it he felt heat erupt all over him—but in particular it was on his face, burning like a fire. Her thoughts tickled his again, startling him into blinking.
(Is that a blush? It is! Why would he blush…it can't be that…he isn't thinking of…no this can't be happening!)
But her thoughts—and her scent—told him that she wanted it too, she wasn't protesting, she reciprocated. If only he had the courage to ask her to stay with him. When the Jewel was complete, when Naraku was dead, when the quest was over and the danger passed…immediately his heart squeezed with emotional pain. He had to fight the urge his muscles had to quiver with it.
It'll never be safe here like it is in her world…I could never ask her to do such a thing. I love her too much…
Even as he struggled to hide his sudden distress and to force himself away from her, despite her rich, alluring scent that permeated even his very soul, the situation grew even worse. The schoolgirl below him, driven by her sudden, frenzied hope, reached for him, her hands cupping his cheeks. For a split second Inuyasha gawked at her, golden eyes wide and stupefied, and then his thoughts were wiped away by sensation as she pulled his face close to hers and their lips met.
She tasted even better than she smelled. With this type of contact he could taste her emotions, read her like a book. Instinct and sensation overwhelmed him, and the desire burning inside him doubled, tripled in the time it took any mortal to blink. He shifted his position, taking his weight off her slightly, and brought the hand that was on her waist tickling up her arm. When her lips against his became more heated, and her scent as well as her taste became thick with arousal, Inuyasha had no doubt: it wasn't too late, Kagome wouldn't reject him as her mate, she wanted him just as much as he wanted her…
But it wasn't right! He couldn't endanger her by asking such a thing!
Kagome's arms were around his neck, her hands playing on the muscles of his back and shoulders. As much as he knew he wanted to stay within those arms, as much as he loved the taste of her, the feel of her lips working against his own, and the scent of her desire overrunning everything else within her—Inuyasha pulled away from her. He hovered over her, face-to-face, so close that he could feel her breath whispering on his face, on his lips. He searched her eyes, feeling sadness and regret replace the tension and intimacy of the moment. Her eyes were wide and shining, perplexed. He knew that she was wondering why he'd pulled away, what was wrong…
"Oh…I'm sorry…"
The voice sent both Inuyasha and Kagome straight to their feet, and a good ten feet away from one another. They pretended their faces weren't burning up with a feverish blush at having been caught in such an intimate position, but it was easy enough to see. Neither dared make an open glance at the other, instead they looked as benignly as possible to their intruder.
That intruder, or rather, the intruders, were nothing less than Miroku, Sango, Shippo and Kilala. The monk was openly smirking at them both while Sango was sharing a knowing look with Kagome. The voice that had disturbed them was Miroku's.
Shippo crossed his arms over his small chest and made a sighing noise, "It about time, you two!"
Inuyasha immediately stomped forward, growling and Shippo screeched and jumped to Sango's shoulder where he cringed, praying that Inuyasha wouldn't risk hitting Sango to smack him. His bet was right and the hanyou growled in frustration, walking past the kitsune, the nekoyoukai, the demon slayer, and the still smirking monk, scowling heavily.
"Nothing happened!" he snarled without turning, "The bitch just sat me on top of her!"
"Yea, right onto your lips Inuyasha." Miroku snorted, unimpressed with the hanyou's reluctance to admit to what had really happened.
"She did that, not me!" Inuyasha growled, pointing when he whirled to face five accusing glares, Kagome's included. Seeing the outrage in her eyes beginning to bloom he hated himself for the next words that sprung out, "Bitch must be in heat or something!"
Kagome's face looked abruptly stricken and Inuyasha felt his ears droop, but he kept the scowl on his face and turned away. If he had to look at Kagome's face much longer he was sure he'd blurt out the truth. I just don't want you to get hurt because I love you…
"Whatever, you asshole!" Kagome shouted behind him, and Inuyasha cringed when he sensed the next part coming immediately afterward, "Sit, sit, Sit, SIT!"
Before anyone could stop her Kagome turned and raced back to the well, trying to bite back her tears. She heard the others calling her but blocked them out. I don't want to be here anymore… she reached the well and gripped the side, briefly squeezing with her silent rage before she flung herself up and over the wooden edge and into the dark…
She landed on the solid dirt of the dried out well, and looked up. Immediately she felt fear and alarm shoot through her.
The sky, I can see the sky still…there's no well house!She hadn't gone anywhere…or rather, more accurately, any time…
Endnote: Here's where I thank reviewers and answer questions...this is the only time I get to just yak to myself here...feels weird...well, tell me what you think so far! I have to update "Somebody's Waiting For Me" too so I can't linger here long (and lazily I just trusted my typing in WORD to be accurate rather than rereading...I'm sorry! Yes I should be skewered alive and barbequed!) If anyone hates it write in and tell me and I'll stop (whimpers) next chapter is darker and angrier. Kagome is tweaking (as I expect she would, i know I would!) out about the well and she takes it out on Inuyasha, and he doesn't help any with his incessantname calling...anyway...gotta go, all comments are welcome!
