There are certain things in life that you never forget. Some are mundane, some are uncontrollable. For Kagome, she would never forget the smell of her father's collogne, the bristle of his morning stubble when she'd rub her hands against his cheeks, or the smudge she'd wiped off of his gleaming toffee colored work shoes after dancing on his feet before he went to work the day that he died.
Her wedding was another such thing.
It was only the five of them that day. Her morther had led her and the demon lord shrine, where Souta and her grandfather were already waiting. Long after, it would be remarkable to her how, after so many years of his strange and farcical demonstrations, Ji-chan had looked more like a priest than anyone who she had ever seen as he initiated the shubatsu and prayed the Norito-sojo. The kagura dance, which she had practiced countless times in the shade of the shrine on muggy summer afternoons, was absent from her own wedding - the shrine maiden was indisposed.
She would never forget the cool texture of the cups she raised to her lips - once, twice, thrice - the billow of Sesshoumaru's sleeves as he did the same - the burn of the sake she imagined as the youki already resonating from somewhere deep within her.
The reverence with which her grandfather handed the Western Lord the sakaki branch was not lost on her, nor the reverence with which the daiyoukai accepted it. Perhaps strangest of all in her memory would be the natural austerity with which her husband had observed the rites, had bowed and clapped beside her. In all their time together, through all their challenges, they had never spoken of the gods or their place in the world - it had never occurred to her that Sesshoumaru would accept any god other than his own will.
It didn't matter that the friends she'd had were gone now, that she wore her mother's make up, or that there were no rings - she had learned the truth of more precious bobbles, one she hadn't known as a starry-eyed youth, one of several giggling faces pressed against twinkling display windows and dreaming of "love." She'd remember these things - the fine pins in her mother's hair, her brother's hakama, too short since his recent groth spurt - at every wedding she would attend henceforth. And the acrid taste of the joyful shinzoku-hai would linger bitter-sweet between her teeth as it did the last day she fell though the well.