Waiting
"Kagome. . . ." His touch conveyed all he couldn't find the words to say, stroking over her grayed hair and tucking loose strands behind her ear with the ease of habit, her head resting in his lap.
Thank the gods she didn't have a sharp nose; she'd smell the fear on him, the despair that clenched his gut and twisted his chest. But if she had been other than she was, maybe it wouldn't have come to this, this fading into senescence and the claims of mortality. If they'd used the jewel differently. . . . Bile filled his mouth, bitter, only to be swallowed away when her mouth twitched with what might have been a smile she was too tired to produce fully. "Not yet," she murmured, her words whispered so low that he struggled to catch them. "I'm not leaving you yet." When she fell into silence, he hunched over, pressing an ear to her chest, but her heartbeat had followed her already into the quiet and he could catch nothing.
* * *
She recognized him the first time she saw him, about her own age, yelling irately into his wrist unit with a brash disregard for all public disturbance laws as well as his own privacy. "What the hell do you mean by that, assho--" He broke off when he felt her gaze, fixing her with an annoyed glance. "Oi. Do I know you?" An unspoken 'then why the fuck are you bothering me' hung ready to pounce on her expected 'no.'
She smiled at him, her heart lifting, his expression shifting from irritation to puzzlement. "Not yet."
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AN: this ficlet arose from a conversation I was having with Merith and Saro about the various ways that all the characters in the series could die--whether poetically or harshly. The kernel of this was my idea for Kagome's poetic death (the harsh one, just for your information, was going down in battle after seeing Inuyasha killed first), and Naraku in possession of all the shards.