A/N: It occured to me that everything regarding what happens to Kagome throughout her "adventures" would have normal people like the rest of us shitting our pants. So why is every story she's in (and every story I write, lol) all about her being the super-miko and saving the world and falling in love and living happily ever after?

That's where my train of thought went, anyways, and so I decided to try and write something a little different. It's just a oneshot, drabbly fic, but I hope you like it anyhow.

Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha. I also do not own any rights to the song "Don't Wake Me Up", by the Hush Sound.

Don't Wake Me Up

By ancient-relic

Don't wake me up
I am still dreaming
the story's undone
Unravel at the seams

-::-

Nightmares haunted her. They're not uncommon, she mused. After all, here I am, traipsing through a world through of our greatest fears.

It bothered her sometimes, when she sat down and thought about it. Most of her days were filled with fun- laughter, happy memories. But her nights were always filled with the grotesque faces of the monsters she helped hunt, and the magic and the power that should have been fiction.

Fiction, yes. Horror.

She wondered often just how she managed to swallow it… because for all intense and purposes, the things that she did, the people that she saw; she talked to, interacted with, should have been impossible.

Yet she still found herself fighting these creatures, on a regular basis. They were fighting over a jewel, no bigger than a coin that could grant magical powers to its beholder. She felt like a walking nutcase. Magical powers? She felt like she was living a dream; a lie.

But if she was dreaming- it was the craziest thing she'd ever come up with. Demons; priestesses; curses; magical powers; mythical abilities; super-human abilities; transforming swords; the un-dead reanimated… the list continued on forever.

Nightmares… dreams of heartbreak, separation, injuries, blood… death. Of being ripped from the people closest to her- of being denied the chance to love. Nightmares... twisted images, horrible whispers of what was still to come. Nightmares... remembering what she was leaving behind every day as she slipped further and further from what used to be real.

Or what still was real. As she slid further and further into this dream; this nightmare, she realized that she didn't care. Not anymore.

She didn't care that she spent her days walking endlessly, or her nights under the stars. She didn't care that she was reduced to carrying her life around her on her back. She didn't care that her ragtag family was full of people with hearts heavier than words could tell. She didn't care that nightmares plagued her.

She didn't care.

Because the nightmares… they were real. Or as real as she understood reality to be- she wouldn't deny that her perspective of reality was skewed. And the nightmares- those nightmares that had her sweating, squirming, crying…

Those nightmares were her life. They are what I am, she understands. They are what I've become. There is nothing else.

The nightmares of what could be didn't bother her as much as she knew they should. It was the nightmares of what was that scared her the most. What she left behind with each step she took, each day.

But she couldn't stop dreaming now.

fin.

EDITED: 02/01/10