Author's Note: I own nothing, not the characters or anime or show or anything to go with it.
My name is Kagome Higurashi. Three days ago I celebrated my eighteenth birthday at home with my mother, grandfather, younger brother, and the normal human friends whom I've rarely seen in three years. More than a celebration, it was a commemoration of my life the past three years, three years of leapfrogging through time to defeat an evil hidden beneath a smirk. Three years of lying to the friends I've had for years and living a double life that could kill me at any moment. Three years of longing for a man who set my heart racing with a glance of his golden eyes, a man who had once been a boy with soft triangular dog ears that twitched in feigned irritation when I rubbed them. It was a celebration because my life didn't truly begin until the three years prior when I first fell through the ancient well.
Two days ago I went to see the doctor for test results. For months I had been weak and fatigued, and when it turned to sharp pains I knew it was something rest and a first-aid kit couldn't fix. All I remember is hearing my mother cry while snippets of the doctor's conversation filtered through my hazy mind. Degenerative. Progressive. Incurable. Having gone so many months before it was detected, the heart defect had worn me out and there was nothing they could do without a transplant. Without one, my heart would give out, simply stop.
One day ago with wicked glee, Naraku destroyed the well upon my return. I came to say goodbye, and instead I have returned to the Sengoku Jidai to a place where there will be no transplant, no doctors, no equipment and sterile white room. I watched silently as my family was stolen from me, as the friends who stood by me despite my absence disappeared from my grasp, yet I didn't cry. No one understood why I didn't cry.
My name is Kagome Higurashi. And I'm going to die today.
Of course, there is no definitive time. At exactly 7:15 pm I will not drop dead. But every day could easily be my last…the doctors expected it. Who is to say what event will be the one, the moment when my heart, the heart people always tell me gives too much, finally gives out? I remember hearing those stories of teenagers who had seemed perfectly healthy and who suddenly died during a basketball game when their heart stopped. The doctor said I was lucky, they had caught it before it reached that stage and unlike others I had a chance to live if the transplant took. But now there would be no transplant, no chance to live a long life. After three years of Grandfather making up ailments to excuse my absence, now he had a real one.
Grandfather…. It all seems unreal. Three years of being attacked and being surrounded by death and yet my own mortality has never really occurred to me. It still hasn't. As I glance up I see Inuyasha sitting silently in the corner of Kaede's hut, staring intently into the fire. The flicker of his golden eyes says everything to me. He hasn't so much as glance in my direction since the well was destroyed this afternoon. His guilt at being unable to prevent it is coupled by his own grief, though his stubborn pride would never admit it. Despite his protests every time I returned home, he also looked forward to our time there. There he had a family who loved him regardless, who never saw him as an "abomination" to their kind. There he was a brother, a son, and a grandson—even if the grandfather occasionally tried to purify him "just in case."
Golden eyes flickered once more to me, uncertain. He wondered why I wasn't crying, if I was angry and blamed him for his weakness. At the moment I still felt nothing. But the pain he tried to conceal behind his eyes had me slowly crawling the few feet to him. Silently I laid down, my head in his lap as I stared into the flickering flames of the fire, his red haori soft against my cheek. I forgave him, it wasn't his fault. Like always any physical touch, particularly from me, made him uncomfortable. He didn't know what to do, and I felt his hesitation. Stiffly his body moved and he laid his hand upon my long, straight mane of ebony hair. After a moment he slowly began to thread his claws through the soft mass as he relaxed and leaned back to rest against the wall of the hut. At the comforting pressure my eyes slid shut, and I drifted into a deep and dreamless sleep.