They're in the grocery store, Sota bundled in soft yellow blankets and nestled in his mother's arms. Six-year-old Kagome trails after them, one hand fisted in her mother's shirt and the other clutching a bag of snap peas. Mother sighs and tries to check her watch without disturbing Sota. "We came too late, the store will close soon. There's not enough time to get all the ingredients – I'm sorry Kagome. No oden tonight. How about curry? You like curry-"

"We have seven minutes fifty-eight seconds," Kagome blurts out. She lets go of her mother's shirt and half-skips down the vegetable aisle to the tofu and picks the first thing that resembles aburaage. "Daikon!" she shouts over her shoulder, before running to the meat section and hunting down the bacon package with the cheapest price. Dropping them back in her mother's basket, she turns decisively and announces, "Mixed bag fishcake!"

"Kagome-"

"Five minutes thirty-nine seconds. Frozen aisle!"

She all but drags her mother to the aisle, wasting forty-six seconds when Sota threatens to wake up and cry. While Mama shushes, Kagome hunts down any bag with more than one fishcake on it. "This one?" She asks, pointing. Mama looks. "Expensive."

"This one?"

"More expensive."

"Um, umm. Um." Thirty-six seconds have already passed. "Uhh. This. This one!"

They end up grabbing the bag – it's only twenty yen cheaper than the first choice, but Mama humors her – and as they run to the checkout, Kagome rattles off all the ingredients in the basket. "Daikon, fishcake, spinach, green onion, eggs-"

They're the last customers, and the store technically stays open a minute and twenty-six seconds longer to finish checking them out – Mama had to count out coins one handed while rocking Sota – but they're out the door and at the train fast enough. Kagome bounces on her heels. "Train arrives in four minutes three seconds," she grins. Mama glances at her. There's a moment of silence – fifteen and a half seconds – long enough for Kagome to get a bad feeling.

"Kagome," Mama begins. "You're going to a new school next week."

"Eight days, twelve hours, seven minutes, thirty-two seconds from now-"

"-and you don't want the kids to be mean like they were in the last school, right?"

Kagome falls silent.

"The counting, the time thing, it's very – it's very neat, don't get me wrong – but the teachers and other students might not think the same way. They might not like it. So maybe think it instead of saying it out loud? Do you think you can do that?"

Two minutes forty seconds. The train will be here soon. Kagome bites her lips.

Her mother's hand on her shoulder is warm and kind. "There's nothing wrong with you," she murmurs, "but sometimes other kids are mean for silly things. So maybe don't say things that will make them mean?"

Two minutes twenty-five seconds. She thinks about the previous year.

Being pushed into mud and fingers sore from being stepped on. A teacher calling her creepy, overhead while walking past the staff room. Yui declaring Kagome weird and the whole class gradually agreeing with her. A lonely playground.

One minute thirty seconds. "Okay," she mumbles.

The train arrives sixteen seconds earlier.

Kagome gets her birthday oden.

It's so frustrating. The entrance exams are tomorrow, and she needs to pass with at least an 80% to be able to compete for a position in the ridiculously difficult middle school she wants to get in, and normally that would be fine, but as it turns out her prep math textbook was written for somebody apparently way smarter than her and no matter how hard she stares at the equations they don't make sense, and there's something ugly and scared shaking its way into existence in her heart and she's going to cry.

She settles for throwing the eraser across the room as hard as she can.

For a moment, for a second – 600 milliseconds, a fraction of a heart beat – everything is normal. Time proceeds forward at its usual, unchanging pace, and her eyes are already wandering over to her scribble-filled notebook, resignation warring with refusal-

-and then there's a twist in her chest, like somebody yanking on a string, and the eraser stops. The clock stops. Time stops.

There's a pause between breaths.

Numbers – no, moments – are flooding through her head. Do you want here? Here? When do you want to be? A beat in her chest that's not her heart, that's too uneven, unsyncopated and painful. A pendulum is swinging in her mind's eye, weighed by something heavier than her soul, dragging with it a series of locations across the timeline. She doesn't know what it means. She exhales.

Time resumes.

The eraser is lying near the door where she threw it. She reaches a shaking hand up to her eyes. She feels . . . lonely?

She returns to her math notebook. Studying takes priority.

He died holding onto the rust-edged brass pocketwatch he'd always carried, breathing past the crushed ribs and punctured lungs he'd gotten from the van's impact, trying to say what he'd been murmuring ever since their first child had been born. "She has time. Let her have her time. Until fifteen – but let her...don't let her...you have to... you must let her..."

He's gone now. She knew he'd be gone. Knew when he'd leave, when he'd disappear, leaving her alone with only memories and her own resolve. Had been preparing for it ever since he'd told her sixteen years ago, coiled under the covers of their wedding bed, his everpresent watch tick-ticking his life away. She had mourned him long before the accident, and by the time the funeral had to be held, she was spent and resigned to watching and waiting, observing as her eldest grew, bloomed, lived, and learned to hear the world progress in the same manner her father had.

It's been four years since Kagome mentioned a time-stamp aloud, and the girl now has friends at school. She no longer tracks the duration of time in front of otherse, and makes a show of checking the clock or her wristwatch before announcing that she's running late.

Her birthday is tomorrow.

Until fifteen.

She bought the oden ingredients more as a send-off than a birthday meal.

Terror.

There are arms and teeth, claws tearing at her clothes, a fanged jaw dislocating and clamping down to rip at her flesh. She's stumbling and hitting, but she's only got two arms to fight with, and this thing has at least six, and they're all massive and fast and supernaturally strong. It's screaming and she's crying, and then they're both falling falling falling down this all-consuming blackness. Panic makes her heart throb to the point of pain, her fear weaponizing itself, and then her breath hitches and she stops breathing and pause, focus, rewind, locate, where?

Grass, wind, wood, roughened by rain and seasons, vines, foliage, forest. A pendulum swinging out of control, gouging the fabric of time. Her own hands molding seconds into something sharp. There. I'm needed there.

When she exhales, there's warmth on her face. Sunlight pours down the rim of the well. She shakes and shakes.

She climbs out into 1543 and walks past a boy that makes the ticking in her head quiet, as if the world for him is permanently frozen in place. An arrow juts out from his chest, pinning him to the tree behind him. The shaft thrums with the pent-up flow of his time, and she can just imagine the arrowhead piercing through his heart to the life-clock of his soul, paralyzing it and desynchronizing it from the surrounding universe's measured march into the future.

Later, when she's being crushed by the centipede woman against the same tree, she reaches up and reaches in at the same time, yanking on the arrow and tugging on the erratic timepiece in her chest, the tick-tick-ticking that's always let her know what time it is and how long things take, and she stops breathing in order to guide the pendulum and unwind the spell and break the arrow and drag this frozen boy back into the timestream, and she succeeds, and even though it's 1543, when he snarls and claws away the vines and arms of the centipede monster, she thinks it's very much the present.

The Shikon no Tama shatters across the sky like the prettiest, worst, most foreboding display of fireworks she's ever seen. The boy stares up with the sort of frozen horror a person might show upon witnessing a murder. "What the fuck," he starts, eyes fixed on the spectacle exploding above him, "did you just do. What. What the fuck was. What."

He's opening and closing his mouth, shifting on his feet like he wants to maybe run and start a fistfight, or a war, but doesn't have any handy shmucks to beat on. Finally, after clenching his hands a few times – squeezing imaginary necks, most likely – he turns to her, voice rising in volume and pitch. "You stupid shit, what the fuck did you do."

Kagome isn't listening. She's staring at the bow and arrow in her hands, a sense of realization trickling down the back of her thoughts like clear water. For a second when she was shooting the crow, she could see the point in space where now and then separated into individual strings, different threads that were usually woven so tightly as to seem continuous, but for one moment unraveled long enough for her to aim. A tapestry of time with countless nows and thens, and a potential target between each one. When do you want to be?

She pulls back the string, arrow notched into place. The clock in her chest winds accordingly, coiling like a spring. When do I want to be . . . home? She thinks of home. Seven o'clock, Mama in the living room, Sota and jiichan around the kotatsu. The arrow in her hand tips back back and around over to post meridiem in the imaginary clock she has in her head. The apex of the bow points down to seven. The bow a dial, the arrow the clock hands, and she's set the time.

She pulls the string back farther another hundred, two hundred years. The pendulum is slowing, time is freezing, each jewel shard braking to a halt in their journey across the sky as Kagome holds her breath and forces the universe itself to pause. She just needs long enough to aim her arrow, reset her clock, and go home.

"Quit fucking ignoring me and fix this shit!"

The voice jolts her out her trance and the pendulum swings again, the shards zip across the sky, her heart beats and lungs breathe. She's suddenly not sure what she had been about to do, but she suspects, and he interrupted her, and she's mad. Still, he's not trying to actively decapitate her, so technically she can't use the subjugation spell, which is all in all terribly frustrating.

"—shooting at the ground, dumb, but hey, probably the only realistic goal you have, can't shoot for shit unless you're about to ruin something, like you know the sacred fucking jewel shard-"

She's not that good. "Osuwari." Fuck you too, and shut up.

When they're back in Kaede's hut and he's stomping up a storm over the idea of teaming up with her, she muses idly on why he didn't slow down and freeze along with everything else. She thinks back to the arrow he'd had in his chest when she'd first seen him, how it had pierced his soul-clock and dislodged it from the timestream. She wonders.