Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha. Just love it.
"Kagome?" Souta eyed his sister warily from behind her partially opened door. The last time he had interrupted her before an exam, she'd thrown a particularly heavy art history textbook at his head.
"What do you want, Souta?" That was her tired voice, the one that always made him think of rain on a cold day. She didn't look at him.
"I, well, Grandpa and I, we found something in the shrine where the well used to be."
"Oh?" She still didn't look.
"You should see it," he urged her.
"Later, Souta. I have to study." The weariness left her tone, leaving an aching hollowness behind. Almost seven years had passed since the destruction of the well, but sometimes it seemed as if she would never leave those days lived in the past behind her. Souta could never know Naraku's evil first hand, but if the pain he had had caused Kagome was any indication, the bastard deserved to rot in the deepest pits of hell. On the verge of defeat, near death, Naraku's last act had been to destroy the link between the reincarnation of a woman he had desired and the half-demon he had hated by obliterating the Bone Well. Inuyasha had had the foresight to push Kagome through the passage before it was utterly destroyed, but was unable to follow her. So Naraku had accomplished his final evil.
Determined not to be put off, Souta took a deep breath and pushed her door a bit wider. "It's a message from the monk and the demon-hunter you used to travel with, sis. You should see it." She sat very still for a few moments. Finally, she rose and walked slowly past him, making her way to the shrine. He followed her, watching when she gathered up the scrolls, when she carried them to the house, and when she shut herself in her room with them. She didn't emerge again that evening.
The next morning, everyone stepped carefully around her, avoiding speech as much as was possible, and avoiding speaking to her directly at all. When they sat down to breakfast, the table was silent until she herself broke the stillness.
"They got married, you know. Sango and Miroku. When they wrote these for me, they had three kids. After they defeated Naraku, they went to the demon-hunter village and began to train a new generation of demon-hunters. They found a lot of shunned hanyou children who were willing to be trained. I actually knew some of the children they found. Evidently they were very successful, and lived very happy lives. I'm glad for them." Her voice broke a little, but she continued.
"Inuyasha didn't do so well. He… he was… Sango said she didn't think he was happy without… me… and…." She cleared her throat and looked down at her plate rather than at her family.
"He asked them to seal him away someplace where I could find him and break the seal in this era." She paused, still not looking at them. "Finals are next week. After that, I'm going to go away for awhile. I'm not sure when I'll be back."
Kagome spent the next few days in her room, studying for her tests, presumably. She left only to eat and to bathe and to sit her exams, and when she had taken her last final of the semester, she cancelled her registration for the following term. By dawn the day after that last test, her big yellow bag sat stuffed to the brim by the front door, and she was ready to go.
Souta never could remember why the image of his sister in the doorway stuck in his mind so, but it did. She was dressed in faded jeans and red sweater that was several sizes too big for her. She'd cut her hair not long after the well was destroyed, but it had grown out again, and it seemed to Souta that his big sister wasn't really any older than she had been back then. Their mother handed her a credit card and told her to use whatever she needed, they all hugged her and urged her to call home often, and then she was gone.
