Between the Now and the Forever

Disclaimer: I don't own it!
Author's Note: This was written for Quirkyslayer in the May 2006 round of Flashfic on LJ.

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In one moment, the world came crashing to a halt and the future that had been so painstakingly fought for and carefully planned and had seemed to be almost within reach was snatched away, and then it was over.

In the very last moment, Kikyo bound the jewel to her own soul, brought it with her to the between, and now, she waits.

Even in death she cannot rest, she exists now in the last moments she was living, the last moments she was dying, in the moments where hope slipped through her fingers and those where regret seeped through her veins. She exists in the moment when the truth fell away and the hatred ignited.

And now she is full and she is empty, completely incomplete, and she waits in the space between the Now and the Forever.

If she were able to think on it, from somewhere where she wasn't drowning in that moment for even just a second, she might have cried over the fact that her life had come down to that one moment, one tiny glass ball, one selfish wish.

Or maybe she would have laughed to think that she would spend more than twice her lifetime living in that moment, unable to change the past or fix the future, hung up on the hatred, the betrayal, and the tiny glimmer of hope that next time, maybe next time, her soul could get it right.

And in the meantime, she waits.

The boy calls her name.

And then all at once she's back on solid ground, back from the between and back to where the moments kept unfolding while she was hanging in hers. But she is still stuck, nothing has changed, the reincarnation keeps making mistakes, throwing her sacrifice back in her face, and the boy, the boy who betrayed her, whose name is on her lips even now, who broke a promise and should have been stuck in that moment too, and he is still alive, why is he alive, and the look on his face when he sees her makes her wish that she could have lived in the if only instead of the regret, but she knows that face and she knows that it must be a lie.

The only choice to make is how to bring him with her back to the between, she knows, they don't belong in this strange space between the Then and the Next Time, she didn't spend fifty years in a moment to pick up where she left off, but when she finally has some sort of chance to finish something she hadn't had the strength to finish then she takes it, and tries to pull him back with her, fingers tingling, the hatred settling into the very foundation of her imitation body.

She falls and crawls back to the village she had once sworn to protect and finds the old woman who was once a little sister, and she learns the truth, and the truth is a name.

Naraku.

The name itself means hell, and now she knows that he is the reason that she died, that the fifty years of regret and pain and clinging to a moment she thought she knew had all been a lie. The boy was telling the truth and they had both been betrayed, and that look on his face had been the truth, but she had been hating him for decades longer than she had ever loved him, and forgot how to feel anything but the hatred, and the need. And so now all she knows is that she needs him. She can't love him anymore but he is still hers, and if she brings him back with her, if they go, they can wait until the next time, and the next time it will be better. The next time she'll be able to feel and maybe then, maybe then there can be a happily ever after.

But he has already found his next time in her next time, but she hasn't gotten there yet, this is still a twisted between and now she doesn't know why she even exists at all. All she knows is the hatred and she grasps blindly until she finds something to blame for the emptiness, and when she makes her decision it seems to be the simplest thing she's ever done, and then there is purpose. She will gather together the jewel and purify it within the body of the one who is to blame. For now, there is no next time, because next time is struggling to find her way, and she doesn't know what Kikyo knows.

So now she looks forward to the future, painstakingly fighting and carefully planning for the ultimate end, so that it almost seems that it is finally within reach, and then it dawns on her that now she is really living, and for the first time in any life, either her first life or the strange in-between life she is living now, she is free to do what she chooses. Her responsibilities have been passed on to the next one in line, and one day when she seeks out the boy, she finds that she doesn't need him anymore. She doesn't trust that he can win, nor can her reincarnation, who is far weaker than Kikyo ever was, but that isn't why she's fighting. She's living for herself, correcting old mistakes because she wants to, and not because it's her duty, there is no longer the obligation, only a desire to see things through to the end. To try to turn what was into what could have been.

So she lives, she lives for the End and for the Next Time, and looks forward to the day when she can go back to the Forever, and maybe on the way she'll find some better moment to live in, but for now, she must wait and do what she can, finally finding her place in this not-so-strange place between the Beginning and the End.