Author's Note: It's been done before, but I wanted to try it out for myself...
-Dilution-
No one thought that Kagome would die,
But once she did, no one thought that Inuyasha wouldn't.
And once they were gone who was left. Miroku? Not for long. Sango knew. Sango knew that Naraku had won. Shippou knew too, he'd disappeared into the woods. Sango never saw him again.
The night after they buried Kagome, returned her to her own side of the well, and as Inuyasha mourned burying Kikyo for the second time, it left Sango and Miroku to talk. They did more than talk. When Kagome had been there, it wasn't war. It was an adventure. Something they planned to tell their grandchildren. There was never a doubt that Naraku would fall. It was a dangerous optimism, a dangerous lie. And now it was gone. There was no more Kagome, no more ramen and card games around the campfire, no more bright smiles and encouragement, no more heartfelt oaths and childish love. There was only Naraku, and Youkai, and miasma. And a swiftly encroaching darkness.
And a void in the right hand of a monk.
So when Miroku departed, taking with him all the earth within ten paces, Sango only cried a little. Because Sango was always the strongest. Sango had dug herself out of her own grave, for fuck's sake.
Sango had killed her brother.
So when Hachi and Mushin erected the simple stone monument, like that of his father, Sango just cradled her stomach. Because as much as she wished she had faced the void with him, she knew what she had to live for. She had to live because Miroku had to live on. And he would, for ever and ever. He was already inside of her,
Half of him.
And when the son was born and raised and grown and married, Sango made her way to his monument and cried and cried and dug herself a grave. One that she would not climb out of.
She was sorry that she couldn't save him, she was sorry that she couldn't save his son. She was sorry that the hiraikotsu had long been too heavy to lift, but she swallowed her regrets and set off for the void, leaving behind her half of Miroku named for the brother she had lost.
And then one-quarter Miroku, seven years old, was left to wonder at the vast hole in the ground that was once his beloved father, and at the ominous pain in his right palm.
And so it went, on and on, for five hundred years.
Until one day, a normal girl named Kagome entered a normal high school in a very normal part of Tokyo. And there was a man there, a not-quite normal man who was one impossibly small fraction of Miroku, of Sango, one sliver of blood that Kagome wouldn't save from being shed. He was always, always there, waiting. Waiting for her. Because something in his gut told him he knew her.
Some ominous prickling in his hand told him she'd save him.
His name was Houjo.