Disclaimer: you all know that I don't own the awesome world of Inuyasha and company but I thought I would remind you.
She had seen the changes in her daughter. She knew it wasn't exactly pleasant and safe where her daughter spent her time. The violence, raw and evil was enough to make the coldest of hearts weary but for one such as Kagome the strain was becoming unimaginable. She saw it in the way her daughter dealt with the girls of her time and age, and could hear her cry for the lost souls every night she was home. Kagome pushed it away by pretending to be cheerful and carefully hiding the pain but her mother knew. It was a mother's job to know the pain of her children. But in this rare case there was nothing she could do. Kagome couldn't get professional help, anything Kagome would tell anyone would be considered crazy and they would drug or institutionalize her. She herself would have thought Kagome crazy had it not been for actually meeting the boy, and knowing her family history. She had thought about telling her daughter the family stories and her heritage but the fear of causing immense strain among those she called friends had restrained her. She shook her head to clear her thoughts as she watched her daughter stand in front of the large temple tree just staring in thought. She had to do something; her daughter was hurting so much…
"Kagome"
"Yes, mama?"
"How are you doing?" She watched many different emotions play through her daughter's eyes as she responded to the question in typical teenage dialect.
"Okay." Kagome smiled at her mom, hoping she didn't see what she was truly feeling. The sorrow, pain, and intense fear that always settled on her when she came home for a day or so. When she was away she rarely had time to think about the things she had seen and for so many people there it was an everyday occurrence. She looked up at her mother and knew that she didn't buy it. Her mom was smart. She had studied psychology and history in college, particularly the Feudal Era. She knew what happened in that age and no lying or skirting around the subject was going to change history. It suddenly occurred to Kagome that she could probably talk to her mother about all her worries. She had never thought of it before. She couldn't talk to the girls at school, they would think she was crazy. The others had all lived with the horrible images all there life and wouldn't truly understand what she was going though. But here was her mother, the woman who had been here all the time waiting for the right time for her daughter to talk to her about the horrors she had seen and would probably see again. Her mother wouldn't judge or think her crazy but would comfort in a way that only a mother could. And in that moment she had understood everything her mother had done for her in the past.
She watched her daughter's eyes swirl with emotion, and begin to fill with unshed tears. She hugged Kagome closely to her chest as the girl of fifteen cried the tears of one who had seen too much pain and violence. And it was understood that she didn't always need to be strong, that there was a place where, no matter how much time had passed she could go to cry and be held and that was in her mother's arms.
