A/N: New story! Yay! Well, I must say that I got this idea from my "Cosmic Concepts" class, but any otherlikenessto my professor, class,and college, etc. are purely coincidence. Nothing else. I must also say, that I am pretty damn proud of this one and I am going to take my time on it. One day, I may publish a novelalong the same basis. (With different characters obviously because I don't own Inuyasha. Yay! A disclaimer!)

Just so the "Dreams" fans know, I will be working on that more intensely than this. "Dreams" is my priority now because it is closer to being done and because I started it first. I have put off posting a few stories so that I could keep my sights on that one, but I feel this one needed posted now. It will probably be better written (considering I had a general plan for how it would end before I started it), unlike "Dreams" which originally was intended to be a one-shot.

Anyway, those of you who liked "Dreams" will probably like this one too, and those of you who didn't like "Dreams" may like this one anyway. It is a different food group.

Thanks for the continued support! Don't forget to review and criticize. ;)

She lifted her head from where it rested on her wrist. A red print was left on her cheek from her snooze and her eyes were bleary. Hair mussed, and skin pale, Kagome blinked at her professor and watched his hand arch across the chalkboard, leaving white streaks which vaguely reminded her of words. She was sure she had seen these characters before, but she couldn't seem to recall what they meant. Nothing clicked over in her mind to help her recognize the strange writings, so she gave up reading it and dropped her forehead back onto her lab table in exhaustion. It didn't really matter anyway; her scholarship would never hold up for next semester with her current grades, and she had no motivation to even try to salvage them. She should care. She should have a reason to get an education now. She certainly had the time for it now. No more journeys, no more missions into the feudal era. She needed an education to get anywhere in her time, unlike when she was on the other side of the well. She was a priestess there, a miko. There would have been no worries if she didn't go to college, she could just work with Kaede and Miroku then come home to visit. She had never really planned that when she was younger, but it made sense. Perfect sense. That way she would be able to continue both lives, on both sides of the well.

But the well no longer worked. That had been over and done with for nearly two years and she had gone to college and she was flunking out miserably. The work really wasn't hard. Not really. It was the getting out of bed in the mornings to get to class, which was the problem. It had become worse within the past year, and she had really gone downhill in just this semester. She thought she was supposed to be getting over the grieving stage, not falling deeper into it. She had always been a stronger person; even in her darkest nights she had been able to find a reason to go on. When her father died, she survived. When she was lost in the cave with Kikyo she never gave up, even when Kikyo did. No matter how many blows she had taken from Inuyasha's insults, she had always come back for more. No matter how many times she saw him run off to look for Kikyo, always she would return. She was simply a person who would not go down easily.

But there was nothing for her. She hadn't found any reason, any hope to struggle through this, and she had searched. For a while, the hopes of the well suddenly working again kept her bright-eyed and alert. Then, she took this class in a last attempt to at least prove to her that it would never open. She wanted to know exactly why it had worked, and why she should stop dreaming that it ever would again. At least if she flunked out, she might find some reason to try again, or more likely a reason to forget. At the age of twenty, Kagome could see no place for her in this world. She had been touched, by something more that she had gambled for while in the other dimension of time. Something that would never let her fit in with any crowd in her world again. Before when she had her friends, she was able to live with that, enjoy it even. She was unique and special. Not anymore. No longer.

Just stain, that's all she was now. There was nothing unique about her. She had given up her miko studies when she had no one to learn from, and though she probably could have continued on her own, the passion wasn't there. Without the passion there was no power. Her power came directly from her emotions. Her determination, stubbornness, strength, compassion, kindness, and love…love…all fueled her abilities and her desire to practice them.

The class was a science class—a physics class—a subject she had never been interested in before. The class was a "no math" physics class, which was the first attribute that called her attention. It was called "Cosmic Concepts," and she heard through the grapevine that the professor was brilliant but insane. The later interested her more. Hell, her whole life from the age of fifteen until that well closed off was insane. Maybe a lunatic would have the answers.

Professor Gawa-guchi was the name of the man who taught the class. He was in his mid-to-late forties and wore his graying hair in a low tight ponytail. A small pair of rimless spectacles sat high on his nose to aid him when he read the textbook. Other than that, they sat perched atop his head, forgotten. Kagome found slight interest in this man. His name meant "river mouth" and she found that he was indeed a river mouth. The man loved to talk about everything; he seemed to be well learned in almost any field. His face was carved and his eyes were always open wide, so he looked more like a foreigner, like a Native American, rather than like his Japanese heritage. His nose was much larger, and more curved downward than anyone else she had ever met. In his youth, Kagome's old school friend Yuka would have called him handsome, in an intense way that is. He never wore a tie, but always kept his dress-shirt tucked cleanly into a pair of dark gray jeans. He wore an old brown suit jacket only to staff meetings and outside to protect against the elements. Black hiking boots constantly adorned his feet, and Kagome wondered if he ever heard complaints from his department chair about his casual wardrobe. She assumed so, but also assumed that he probably did not care too much.

In her first class with the odd man, he went over the syllabus and class conduct. Before he went over the attendance policy and the test schedule, he calmly stood on his desk. A wave of whispers swept over the students and Kagome saw that the tall professor towering over her nearly had to duck to avoid the ceiling. He loomed over his class and waited for everyone's attention to quiet and stay on him.

"Can anyone tell me what I am doing?" He had a deep penetrating voice that reaching to the back of the classroom easily and resounded off the walls to echo in Kagome's ears.

A young man in the front raised his hand. He was the one who had brought every book to class and had already highlighted and made notes on the first two chapters of each. He wore a white dress shirt, and a navy sweeter-vest with khaki dress pants. His career ambition was to move to America after college and win The Nobel Prize. That was it, no particular job, just to win The Prize.

Gawa-guchi nodded to the boy and the young student sat up straighter in his desk. "Well," he began with a squeak and a blush, "you're standing on your desk." He looked very satisfied with himself.

The professor nodded again and rubbed his chin as he asked, "Yes, but why am I standing on my desk?"

The boy looked utterly puzzled. "Because…" he swallowed, "you are trying to prove a point?"

Gawa-guchi glanced around the room. "Can anyone please tell me why I am standing on my desk? What is my point?"

The class grew silent. Small snickers that had been evident before, cut off. Kagome pushed back her recently cut short hair and dared to move.

He saw her small, pale hand rise up from the back of the room. "Yes?"

"You're trying to prove that we don't know what you are doing. Because we can't just look at you and analyze your intentions through what we see and think as fact." Kagome felt her mind say duh!

The professor jumped off the desk and landed evenly on his feet, without taking his eyes off her. "This young lady," he gestured to where Kagome sat, "is absolutely correct."

Whispers were heard throughout the room again, and the boy in the sweater-vest blushed deeply.

"Math is a wonderful tool for finding out what things are doing and how they are doing it," he walked over to the chalkboard. "This," he scratched a formula in chalk, "is the formula for the velocity of the revolution of the Earth around the Sun. This tells you exactly how fast we are moving through space. But, why are we?"

"Because of gravity," a girl called out from beside Kagome.

"That is the how and the what, not the why." The class looked perplexed. "Math can show us what we are doing and how we are doing it. You could have come up with the angle I was standing in compared to the desk. You could have measured my mass and the desk's mass to prove that it was possible for me to stand on it without it breaking. But you couldn't pull a calculator out and tell me why I was doing it." He sat on his desk. "This class is about the why, the big picture. Mathematicians have a tendency to look too close at a problem, and never see why it is there, or how it affects things around it." He shifted his weight and ran his palm over his forehead. "In this class, I want you to stop zooming in on the little details; I want you to see the big picture. You can't measure and calculate the big picture. And without knowing the big picture, there is no reason to find the small details. Unless, you like making formulas in your spare time." He glanced at the boy in the sweater-vest. "I was standing on the desk because it made you all think. That is why I did it and why it affected you."

Kagome knew she would like the class from the first day. Well, that is she would normally be intrigued by the discussions, but she felt very little interest in anything anymore. She was sleeping in the most interesting class she had ever been involved with, and didn't care. Well, its not like I sleep in the dorm anyway. She pondered her roommate who was constantly coming and going at all hours of the night. She had been stuck with a freshman who was very interested in two things: sorority parties and her lacrosse-playing boyfriend. In fact, Kagome had trouble sleeping often at night because her roommate's boyfriend liked to pay late night visits. Noisy late night visits.

Kagome would move out, but she had no energy to get a job to pay for rent unless she absolutely had to, and she couldn't go home. She only attended college about an hour away from her old home, but couldn't stay very long at the Sunset Shrine. She walked by the broken well too often. Sota needed her guidance less and less each year, preferring to talk in confidence with his buddies on his soccer team or with his numerous female admirers. He had nearly forgotten what the white-haired boy from the past had meant to him…had nearly forgotten the strong bond he once shared with his older sister. Her mother worried about her—a great deal in fact—and Kagome could no longer raise her head to look in her mother's eyes. She preferred to e-mail and have the phone call every two weeks, rather than speaking and visiting with her in person. It was much easier to hide behind the Internet and phone lines. Her mother knew this and allowed her the space she needed, hoping it would do better for her than pressuring her to come home. Her grandfather, as usual, was oblivious to the situation. He simply thought she was one busy girl, and assumed that Buyo's avoidance of Kagome when she came home was simply because she smelled too much like dorm room smells. Kagome knew better. The old friendly cat avoided her because she was no longer the girl he treasured as a child and teenager. That girl was gone, and fading fast.

Besides the fact that she hated to feel her heart weep (and more recently just ice-over with numbness), Kagome always felt like she was being pulled to the well. Like little hands were always gently tugging on her heartstrings. This used to disturb her and make her break down into sobs. But, then one day when she walked by it, she didn't feel anything. She stopped, expecting the tugging sensation to occur, but felt nothing. She turned her head in the direction of the well house and felt utterly nothing. This feeling, this loss of connection, was ultimately what killed her hopes. That was when she finally felt her soul crumble and lay in pieces at the bottom of her bowels. She had gone home once since then, and did not walk past the well house and did not walk past the God Tree. She walked around the entire shrine grounds, avoiding them.

As far as her thoughts of her friends and Inuyasha went, she just didn't engage in that area of her mind if possible. It sat there, all her memories in a box with a dust covering in the back of her mind labeled "Lost." She didn't peek into that box anymore, and if anything happened to fall out of it when she went through the general shuffle of her thoughts, she picked the memory up and shoved it back in without looking at it. But, there were still times when she couldn't help but notice something that reminded her of her friends. A jingle from a young man twirling his set of car keys around his index finger always made her stop short, and search the parking lot for a young monk dressed in dark purples. Anytime she saw a boomerang or pink eye shadow she missed Sango's comforting words. She had joined the dance club at her school to stay fit (in case the well opened back up, of course), but couldn't take seeing the longhaired women in the black full-body leotards they were required to wear. Every time she saw a foreign student studying abroad, especially with red curly hair, she could almost hear Shippo's voice crying for her to come back. When she went to see a play that the drama department was performing, she nearly leapt onto the stage crying when a young man came out with a long white wig and red haori. Pushing her back and shoulders against the backrest of her seat, she had to grip the armrests and pin her feet under the seat in front of her so she could control herself until intermission, when she ran back to her dorm. There was even an old priestess at the shrine on campus that wore the traditional miko garb.

So what had she been searching for by adding her name to the roster of this class? Closure? Was that what her problem was? Was that what she needed to continue living?

"…and everything has its own gravitational pull." Kagome lifted her head back up to study her professor. He sat casually on the edge of his desk as usual, and glanced across the room. His eyes stopped on Kagome, seemingly surprised that she had returned to the crowd of the living. He liked her; Kagome knew that. He found her interesting and very bright, but he also saw that she was slowly shriveling up. He hated to see such an insightful young person give up on life so soon. Kagome knew all of this, and for some reason, he had been the only person who had kept her afloat…for a while.

Kagome blinked the sleep out of her eyes. She tucked her grown-out bangs behind her ears and adjusted her wrinkled blouse. Everything has its own gravitational pull. Kagome stiffened, hand frozen on her stomach where she had been fighting the folds of fabric. What?

Gawa-guchi saw her stand up straight in her seat from the back of the classroom. As long as he had known her, her eyes were always foggy. He new she wasn't into drugs, but that didn't mean what he saw there was any less real. He saw her stand and her eyes suddenly snap into focus, becoming sharp and glossy. Although still low and tired in their relationship to the rest of her face, her eyes had changed her whole appearance. She was much more vibrant and young as she stood before him, though her external features still held the old worn look. And he had never seen her stand so tall.

"What?" Kagome's voice cracked as it left her throat. She had been silent in this class after the first day and she felt the entire body of students occupying the room turn in their seats to see the strange, normally quiet girl behind them. "What did you say?"

Gawa-guchi stared at her for a moment, then snapped himself back like an actor who just realized he had been given his cue line. "Ah," he shifted. "Everything has its own gravity. I do, you do. Mount Everest does. You are being pulled by my gravity, and I am being pulled by yours."

Kagome leaned forward, supporting her weight with her right hand on the desk. "Everything?"

He looked perplexed that she seemed so lost in this concept. "Yes, things with more mass have a greater pull. That is why the Earth holds us to itself. And, the closer two objects are together, the stronger the force of the pull."

Kagome was getting breathy and her cheeks were gaining color. She began to gasp for air. "Everything?" she asked again between two harsh breaths.

Her professor searched her face out of worry. "Yes, everything…" He got up and began to walk down the aisle to her desk. "Are you okay, Kagome?"

Kagome didn't even hear his question. "Does mass have to be physical? I mean…" she gasp between words, "…could it be emotion that takes up mass? Or someone's soul?"

Gawa-guchi was with her, patting her gently on the back. "I…I don't think I understand," he chanted distractedly.

"Can you have a mass of emotion that would make an object that isn't very big have a strong pull on you?" She stared into his eyes, waiting for an answer.

"Kagome," he was worried and put his arm around her to support her slumping figure. "Let me get you to the infirmary."

Kagome closed her eyes, shook her head, and ground her teeth. "Damn it, just tell me!"

Gawa-guchi began to lift her into his arms, to carry her to the nurse. "I don't know," he added, frantic to calm her before she fainted. "No one knows what matter is made up of. We know that neutrons and protons make up atoms, that is as small as our knowledge gets." He walked her out of the classroom, as a girl opened the door for him and another larger boy followed to help, if needed. "We don't know what those are made up of. I supposed it is possible for them to be formed out of emotions."

Kagome felt herself fading, but she had gotten what she needed out of Gawa-guchi for now. That pull, she thought. No wonder it was so strong! We must still be connected. She drifted into the fainting spell Gawa-guchi had been worried about, and dreamed about a large thread tugging on her heart, pulling her back into the working well. Her dream only lost its splendor, when she remembered that she hadn't felt that familiar tug on her heartstrings that guided her to the well for nearly a year.