Time passed so slowly now. Which was utterly ridiculous considering time is a fixed, quantifiable thing. When she and Inuyasha first re-appeared with the well, things happened so fast she could barely remember the look on his face as he disappeared. The moments before she lost him were over in an instant.
In the days after that, she felt every single second. She remembered sobbing on the dirt floor of the well, and the terrified, baffled look on her mother's face. Slept in the well for days after that, praying to God she would wake up on the other side.
What followed was an intense feeling of guilt. She begged whatever God would listen to send her back, but when the grief stupor finally wore off, all she could think of was her mother, and the look on her face, pinched with worry as she desperately tried to get her inside. Her sweet mother, who had lost so much herself already. How could she have wished for a life where she would never see her again? Or Souta, or her grandfather? They waited for three days when the well disappeared, frightened that something had happened to her, that she would never come back. How could she want that for them, beg to be ripped from their lives? The guilt ate her alive, and so she sobbed some more, for herself this time. For the horrible things that she wished for, and for the people she would never get back.
She was facedown in the ancient dirt when Souta came and pleaded with her to come out. Kagome took one look at his pale face, bruised with dark circles, and she knew it was over. She had hurt her family enough.
It was final, her friends were gone.
He was gone.
She took Souta's hand, and crawled out of the well.
Inuyasha's body was shaking. The sensation was bizarre, because it stemmed from genuine fear. It had been so long since he was truly afraid.
His toes curled over the edge of the cliff, and he waited. The sky was a brilliant, soft pink, and it reminded him so much of Kagome that he lost his breath.
Behind him were the graves of Sango and Miroku's last living grandchildren, now dead of old age. The last humans on this earth to know him, even at all.
Over two hundred years had passed since the well closed. He watched as all of his human companions grew gray with age and died. He found himself surrounded by more of them than he ever imagined possible, and he knew Kagome was to blame.
He was angry with her now, though. She made him open up to his friends, and taught him how to make new ones, and all it did was give him more people to lose.
But they were all gone now, Kagome, and Sango, and Miroku.
And soon, he would be too.
As the moon crested the horizon he breathed a sigh of relief. He did not watch as his claws disappeared, instead, he stared at the moon. Somehow, after all this time, it was the same moon they sat under two centuries ago.
It was indifferent to his imprisonment on earth.
He let the moonlight bathe his face as the last traces of his demon heritage left him, and took a deep breath.
Finally.