Old Wounds
emeralddarkness
Summary: Kagome always did look so much like Kikyou
Rating: PG/K+
Author's Notes: Post-series - Kagome has chosen to live in the past, and her and Inuyasha are married.
Sometimes when Inuyasha dreamed, he dreamed of Kikyou.
And Kagome knew.
She could usually tell what nights they were, restless ones, nightmares of blood and death and failing to protect her, or dreams of happiness fifty years ago, with little cottages and children (all human, not three quarter parts as theirs would be - sometimes she wondered how that would work, genetically), or old memories that his subconscious was reusing. Sometimes it was easy to tell, and sometimes it became easy when he woke up and she looked into his eyes.
Look at me, she would silently beg sometimes. Look at me. And frequently he did. But there were still moments - most frequently when they had just woken up, curled together on their little bed - when she would see him look over at her, and for a moment his eyes would be confused. Then they would go through an old, familiar cycle - remembrance, then pain, then sorrow, which would take the longest to fade, and usually hadn't by the time he looked away.
It was an old pain by now, one that had faded dramatically from those old days when she was a 15 year old school girl with her head full of fairytales and romance novels, and she had learned to live with it. It wasn't, after all, as though she was simply Kikyou's replacement. Inuyasha knew that they were different, and loved her as well as Kikyou. And they had a good life. She was, however, second place. The second born, the second choice - and that was something that she lived with.
Sometimes she thought it was a curse, to love with the man who had loved her previous incarnation.
Although they don't always look radically similar in-series, Kagome and Kikyo are clearly very very similar in appearance, going by her first appearance in the past. Like, everyone who knew Kikyo and sees Kagome seems to comment on their striking physical similarities as soon as they meet Kagome.
And since it's faaairly obvious from any number of plotlines before and after she dies that Inuyasha loved Kikyo more, or that she was his first choice before she died (again again again), I find it hard to believe that something like this wouldn't have happened at one point or another.
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