When She Stands Between Two Worlds
Every time she steps into the well, there's one short moment after she's begun to leave her home and enter the Fedual Era where she feels like she's nowhere. She's had dreams about it, where she can't pass through or return and she's just there, trapped in nothing.
She doesn't tell him about it when she wakes up, her breathing rapid and irregular, even though she can feel his yellow eyes focusing on her, even though she can feel his worry as strongly as if it were her own; even though, on those nights, there's nothing she wants more than to be held tightly, to rub her face against the fabric covering his chest and just stay there until morning.
She doesn't look at him because it can't always up to him to save her, to protect her. But she wants to.
When the warm yellow of his eyes refocuses on some other sound, Kagome wishes for a moment that he could be something else – human, maybe; but she takes the thought back immediately, regretfully. She just wishes that he couldn't sense the fear from the beating of her heart or the smell of cold sweat forming on her skin or the awkward way she curls into herself in the dark hut.
In the mornings, she always wakes up a little sore, her body still unaccustomed to the hard ground beneath her after what seems a lifetime of practice. She thinks maybe it's hard to undo sixteen years of sleeping atop a warm mattress with two pillows beneath her neck and one curled in front of her (to wrap her arms around). She can tell by the mocking tone of his voice that he doesn't really understand this, that maybe he'd only be able to understand after a failed night sleep atop something warm and soft. But she knows his were a just a way to test her – his means of determining if she's really suited for life in this way, or of telling her he knows she isn't. Or maybe they're his way of trying to make her choice easier.
She wonders briefly if he can smell her ambivalence.
But later, when they're leaving and he crouches down in front of her and helps her slip her legs around him, pulls her to him harder than usual. He splays his fingers across the underside of her thighs and holds her so tightly, she knows he knows. His fingertips pass the unspoken thought through her skin: don't leave me here without you.