NAMED

A/N: This was written for Day 2 of InuKag Week over on Tumblr. The prompt was: Reflection.

Kagome had her soul taken twice. Once by the witch Urasue, and once again by Naraku's spawn, Kanna. Twice over her very being had been shorn from her; twice she'd felt herself fade, drained out like a cracked jug.

But her soul was returned to her three times.

You're Kagome. To me, you are only you.

How was it that such simple words, so hesitantly spoken—his back pressed to hers, his body so solid and warm—could feel like her soul being given back to her? Because it did: she knew intimately the sensation of her soul returning to her body, had twice now experienced that instant of being refilled, restored, her being made whole again.

And Inuyasha's words had felt exactly like that. "You're Kagome to me," he'd said so softly, voice weighting the air like heat.

When she doubted herself, when she felt lost, her confidence chipped away by a world that saw someone else in her face, she held those words—uttered by his voice—to her chest like a shield: You're Kagome. You are only you. They became to her like an anchor, grounding her to herself.

Or like a mirror: her truest reflection, borne by her truest love.

::

::

Before meeting her, Inuyasha had never heard his name spoken aloud so many times. There had been a lifetime of silence, and then suddenly there was her voice.

Inuyasha, she would laugh. Inuyasha, she would chide under her breath. Inuyasha, she would scream in fear. Inuyasha, she would mumble in her sleep. And years later, it was Inuyasha she would sigh into his ear, her breath hot as the fire sparking between their bodies.

Inuyasha, Inuyasha, Inuyasha. Kagome spoke his name like it was a language all its own, and she its only native speaker. It had startled him the first time she'd said it—the familiarity it had evoked, the echoes of intimacy in it, as if he was known—and it sometimes startled him even now. Inuyasha. She made it sound like a gift; like he was some kind of gift.

What a joke.

And yet, it wasn't to her.

Hell, he should've known right away how it would be. It was her voice, after all, that had woken him from the 50-year enchanted sleep; her voice that had woken him from Kikyō's spell as she tried to drag him to the underworld; her voice that had called him back from the dark ledge of his yōkai half.

No one else had ever said his name with so much frequency, or so much feeling. Yōkai, he'd been called. Half-breed. Mongrel. Monster. It. Always an object—of fear, or derision—never deemed worthy of a name.

But right away, Kagome named him. Even in the early days, when she insulted him, she did it in the same breath as his name. "Inuyasha is such a jerk! Inuyasha wouldn't know 'sensitive' if it bit him on the leg! Inuyasha is so infuriating!"

She said his name, and somehow erased every other name he'd inherited from the world. Half-breed, monster, it. All wiped away by her voice. She saw him, and so allowed him to see himself, too.

Inuyasha, Inuyasha.

She named him, and so allowed him to name himself.

Protector. Friend. Beloved.

Inuyasha.