Day 14: "Clock"
To Kagome, the clock above the classroom blackboard represented many things, metaphor owing mainly to its numerous moving parts.
The incessant ticking of the second hand, for instance, represented a countdown to the end of class. It ticked, and a second went by, and Kagome (whose class was learning fractions, which she already knew both backward and fore) was one moment closer to lunch. She drummed her pencil on her desk in time with that ticking hand until a dirty look from her teacher silenced her. Kagome stuck her tongue out when his back was turned and was pleased to note she'd wiled away an entire five seconds of unchallenging math lesson.
The fourth grade, to someone who had already lived through it, was tedious indeed.
The movement of the minute hand, more sedate than the second hand, represented the countdown to the end of the school day. She kept an eye on that hand as she ate her rice balls and drank a thermos of soup, listening with only half a year to her classmates voice their woes about a suspected pop quiz in English after their break ended. Kagome wasn't scared of a pop quiz. She'd much rather watch the clock and daydream about her favorite Japanese soap opera, which was airing that evening, as well as her aikido lesson after dark. Minato (whom she'd soon persuade to allow himself to be called 'Rabbit,' she was sure) and Eeyore would both be there, and they were much more interesting than any English quiz.
English quizzes, to someone who already speaks English, aren't the most engaging of pastimes.
Another boring, reluctant pastime was the rest of the school day, passed in tandem with the ponderous crawl of the hour hand. This hand inched laboriously around the clock's unfeeling face, movement so slow Kagome almost couldn't see it. "A watched pot never boils," her (previous) aunt would have told her, but Kagome couldn't keep her eyes off of its steady (if not infinitesimal) progress. She wished it would move faster. She had places to go and people to see. She scribbled down the answers to the pop quiz when it made its dreaded appearance, and as soon as the hour and minute hands signaled 4 PM, she bolted from her chair and out the door. She even beat the dismissal bell, a fact her teacher yelled after her as she pelted down the hall.
But teachers aren't intimidating to someone who was once a teacher, too, in another distant life.
Kagome caught the train to Sarayashiki and changed into her aikido garb in a train station bathroom, eyes flickering to the moving hands on her wristwatch every now and again. It would do to be late. She enjoyed aikido, and that night she sparred with Minato and Kagome at Hideki-sensei's instruction. She whooped and hollered and took joy in her speed, grinning even as punches flew, and when the lesson ended, she ate frozen yogurt with her friends and talked late into the evening.
It was the most fun she'd have all week.
It was the most fun she'd have every week for the next five years, probably, but she tried not to dwell on that.
Eventually they had to part. They always did. It never ceased to make her sad, but to cope, she restarted her weekly countdown in her head, and checked her watch for the passing of pointless minutes. When she got home, she watched her soap opera and did her easy, childish homework, and when that was done, she lay in bed with a smile on her face, pillow curled to her chest, knees tucked against her stomach. The clock on her bedside table didn't have hands, but it marked the passage of time the same way the clock in her classroom did. Red numbers burned at her in the night, inching through the seconds, the minutes, the hours while Kagome watched, sleepy but alert as the numbers marched closer to the day's reluctant end.
11:57.
11:58.
11:59…
Midnight.
Day turned to another day, passage of time marching ever onward, carrying her forward toward the inevitable.
Kagome sighed into her pillow.
Kagome shut her eyes.
Kagome—ordinary as she was, for now—tried to sleep, but it was difficult.
One more day had passed.
She still had many more to go.
Not-Quite-Kagome would watch the clock (that ticking symbol of her steady stride toward destiny) again tomorrow. She would watch as second turned to minute, minute to hour, hour to day, day to month, and month to year, eager and observant, just as she'd been watching the clock since being reborn as Higurashi Kagome. She would do this, she reckoned, for the next five years—until that day when she would cease to be ordinary, and would start the adventure the real Kagome was fated for at the bottom of a dry, old well.
Time was all that stood between her and that fateful day.
Time, indifferent as it was, and the ticking of an unfeeling clock.
NOTES
(840 words)
Figured I ought to give the time travelling switcheroo character her time in the spotlight.