Why was she always thrust into the role of the steady headed youth? You know, the classic one in B movies? She is the heroine – the nondescript one with longish shortish forgettable dark brown hair and warm intelligent roundish slantish forgettable dark brown eyes and the unblemished peach skin and the unglossed full pale-ish pink-ish lips that has such a terribly Dark past. Her parents were killed in a Very Bad Car Crash and she was haunted by their memory ever since. She had a group of friends Who Did Not Understand Her and yet her grades were always Very Immaculate. Proper nouns and all. She was the last to die. She was the first one to scream when she saw her Horrendous but Very Kawaii Boyfriend strung up on a rather nasty looking wire from a rather nasty looking tree as the Very Mean Ex- Girlfriend looked on amusedly. Of course, she was the murderer and within the last five minutes she would creep up behind Miss Heroine with one of those Classic Glints in her eyes and then that would be that. That would /always/ be that.
/This is where I say I've had enough/
/and no one should ever feel the way that I feel now./
/A walking open wound, /
/a trophy display of bruises /
/and I don't believe that I'm getting any better./
She didn't feel very stable. Everything in her life was wobbling as it always had...every single vase in the antique shop had been once glued and thrice duct taped, feigning perfection but ultimately and obviously quite broken. There was a thick layer of dust at the corner of the ceilings that she had always thought she should rub away...but the dust implied that time had passed in her little sanctuary, and that was true. Her world had always been poisoned with uncertainty that no sixteen year old should ever be able to possess in such a death grip. Scratches on her shoulders that continually ached and a head in the clouds that perpetually absorbed a headache as if her brain was a sponge and throbbing pain was soapy water...those were the unchanging bits of fluff in a world of variables. Was she forgetting someone? Oh, no, the hanyou she so secretly adored had long since lost his title of a regular. When her old self had suddenly come back to life, a la Night Before the Living Dead, he had suddenly become a wisp of smoke. So very grand to watch as it floated about in the wind until you tried your damned best to grip it and your fingers slid through like water...he was a distraction, no more, no less.
Lying, always lying. I have hypothermia, I have influenza, I have chronic bronchitis and a small case of advanced diabetes...that's why I don't talk to you anymore, that's why I don't return your phone calls or care that your dog died. I'd like to care, but I go back in time to go see that terrible boyfriend that you hate so dearly – you know, he's half dog, and I'm not sure what breed, and I don't think he loves me. But you don't need to know that, your nails need to be done and Hoyjo needs to be giggled at and pinched and teased while all along you're trying to make him be your friend in my favor because you want me to have company in place of that bloody horrible guy I talk to you every so often about and have suddenly stopped to do so. That's because I'm going to have to leave him soon even though I care about him, that's because I don't want to see him make a mess of himself because he loves the person I could never be because I don't intend to die and come back as a zombie. For once living is my curse. Or has it always been? Gomen nasai, sumimasen, didn't mean to bother you, I'll see you next week. Lying, always lying.
/Waiting here with hopes the phone will ring /
/and I'm thinking awful things /
/and I'm pretty sure that few would notice./
/And this straightened mouth/
/is starving for an argument./
/Anything at all to break the silence./
So beautiful, so dreamy. Kikyou was a lovely portrait of the classic Feudal priestess, so sweet and so very cold and all at once comforting and then all at once brittle and frightening. Had she once been a happy person? A kind person that smiled? The few smiles she'd seen had been so forced they made the valves of her heart itch as if she'd seen them so many times before. They had too much in common. They had too many THINGS in common. Except Kikyou had been somewhat too inclined to wish on every shooting star that she could be a woman and not a miko, and that the one she was so in love with could be a man and not a boy. Had she been so trusting in her love, thick like blood, strong like wine? Or had she had her doubts, like she herself always did? He liked her enough but could he love her? Ever...even if Kikyou could just go and die like she had secretly wished on her own shooting stars...would he be a step away or a mile? No hoping and no planning, no thinking about the future. Not until you find it in yourself to hand over the completed tama, Miss Heroine. It resided in her pocket, the one inside of her skirt that was used only for small trinkets.
Spare change, demonic jewels, eh.
Exactly what was she going to say? I've been hiding this from you, so here you go finally. And now I'll leave so I don't have to see you start killing people, thanks, bye, and just for future reference I've been madly in love with you since the middle of my freshman year. Sayounara, forever and always, I think I left some ramen at Kaede's hut. She ran it in her head and wondered when she had changed and become so caustic. Maybe when she grew up. Her mother said people became cruel because cruelty was a shield, but perhaps her shield was from herself as it never broke past the surface. She would never say that to him. She would smile and be pleasant unless he annoyed her; she was always smiling because the stable ones had nerves of steel, or in her case, of a rather nice kind of copper. Kagome swung her legs back and forth on the brim of the well in her own time with pollution and crazy lunatic serial killers with guns rather then crazy lunatic I Don't Really Mind S'long As They Go Screaming killers with youkai and swords and that wonderful sort of craziness truly reserved for those splendid old B movies.
/Wandering the house /
/like I've never wanted out /
/and this is about as social as I get now. /
/And I'm mentally throwing away the letters that I am writing you/
/'cause they would never do,/
/I would never do./
Kami, she loved that place so much. It smelt like flowers even in battlefields ridden with the lost...it had the air of innocence even when all was pulsing with corruption. But it was going, correct? Because she was tearing herself away, correct? She was the reincarnation of the love of her life's love of his life and it wasn't working out in the Harlequin SuperRomance sort of way that had cost her mother at least three hundred dollars in the course of her infatuation with the series that had occurred so swiftly after her father's death. A snowflake lazily dawdled in through the creakily slightly opened doors to the chibi shrine and rather pointedly landed on her nose, almost as if some malign force was trying to make her stop wallowing in her strange brand of self-pity so she could leave and get yelled at for being late for her own departure. The irony. Kagome Higurashi was sorely wishing that she had never grown up. Peter Pan was a Disney movie, not something for Miss Heroine to try and embody, but she could sure as hell hope could manage to. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
'You follow the same life'. Like a path, as if her existence was the freeway and she was in Kikyou's turned-in used Volvo. She'd been told that countless times as if it made a difference. Being in love didn't have a catch (usually)...you didn't stop just because the first person had screwed up royally. Every remake was a better model, eh, to keep in with the car analogy? The baby had been right, more right about her than anything. The darkness in her heart had come from the one that had given her this exact TYPE of heart in the first place. Kikyou was why she was bitter and tired and wanted to give up but knew that would be against every fiber of her being. She was an optimist with a foggy mind...new weather forecast and she'd be A-OK. She jumped. She wondered if the weatherman was predicting showers. Kagome landed on her knees as she always did and felt the calluses bellow in agony as they kept the eternally ripped flesh intact. She hauled herself up with her arms lined with hard muscle from using the bow ever so often as always. Her palms gripped the sun warmed stones as if she was a professional rock climber.
/So don't be a liar,/
/don't say that "everything's working"/
/when everything's broken. /
/And you smile like a saint /
/but you curse like a sailor /
/and your eyes say the joke's on me./
Hah. Sure she was. Kagome pushed herself over the wooden edge made of the same textile as Goshinboku and wondered where the infamous half-demon was. He usually would be staring at her from perhaps two feet away, glaring in that uncannily elderly way of his like a puppy awaiting a master that it entirely realized didn't much mind about its feelings and had forgotten about it entirely while writing mid-terms and fighting off annoying questions from kids who thought she had emphysema. He always managed that glare that mutated into a tangent of curses and questions and the underlying bit of rejection– mutation because evolution took too long. And she would wait and sigh and command and walk towards the village. A never ending cycle, like the changing of the moon and the passing of the tides. He was nowhere in sight, and so the living miko played a random Namie Amuro song with short, gnawed fingernails atop the framing of the Bone-Eater's well.
The jewel felt as if it were burning a hole into her skin.
Classic. Very classic. You read about things like this is stories all the time. The good side going strong, fighting with all their hearts and triumphing over the evil for the most part. The protagonists on a mission, but goofing off and laughing anyway. Returning home victorious more often than not. But somewhere, just under the happy surface, evil brewed. The darkness grew and grew, bursting out of the shadows to attack the good side once more. An epic battle, the main character, a tragic one with a black past but a great heart, rising up and striking the final blow. If only it were like that. He was no hero, not by a longshot. Everybody seemed to think so, seemed to expect great things of him. But not all was as it seemed.
He was the image of the Tragic Anti-hero. Long, silver-white hair, golden amber eyes, ivory skin, tall with a dark past. Hated by the world around him, but always, /always/ seemed to kill the demon and save someone's life. He was the kind of person people cared about despite themselves. That's not to say he didn't care about them too, though he certainly pretended not to with all his heart. His heart was a dangerous thing, leading him astray and constantly getting himself in trouble. Loving two women at once – ironically, one the reincarnation of the other – and never being able to choose. Yet everyone looked to him for the fight, the strength, expected him to hand demons defeat on a plate. It wasn't that easy, winning all the time. It hurt; had he not been hanyou, he'd have perished long ago.
/Let's talk this over/
/It's not like we're dead/
/Was it something I did?/
/Was it something you said?/
/Don't leave me hanging/
/In a city so dead/
/Held up so high/
/On such a breakable thread/
He didn't feel strong, wasn't as sure of himself as everyone else was. He didn't feel like he had immeasurable amounts of strength that would destroy any demon in his path. Sure, he could destroy. He could annihilate. It just depended on what he was fighting. But he couldn't fight his feelings, the uneasiness inside of him that kept whispering his weakness in his ear. Hanging on for dear life to a once reality that clearly wasn't to be. Once, he could say she had been his jewel detector, that he needed the miko or he'd just go on killing random youkai and never get anywhere. The thick rope that had bound him to that thought had long since worn away, leaving him with something much more fragile. His very heartbeat seemed to be telling him to give up, to drop into obscurity. He was no good now. The world didn't need him.
In the few weeks since the Shikon no Tama had been completed, the hanyou and the miko had grown apart. There was no longer a reason for her to return, no more shards to search for. There was one lingering thing that could keep her back; what to do with the Tama. Though he was sure she'd end up keeping it in her era, if only to keep it away from the youkai in Sengoku Jidai. The miko might return, was sure to return, to see Sango and Shippo and Miroku, but not necessarily him. She seemed to be avoiding him whenever she came...or had he been avoiding her? Search as he might, he couldn't find a single reason for the drift, couldn't see why they weren't talking.
If he wanted the silence to end, why didn't he just talk to her? But what was he supposed to say? "How are you, and why haven't you been talking to me?" He should ask himself why he wasn't talking to her, but then again, he couldn't find that answer. And she was surely going to ask him that. Perhaps he was avoiding fate, the fate of the jewel, other than her. Talking to her meant discussing what to do with the Shikon no Tama, which meant making a decision, which meant she could go back to her time and never come back once they were done.
/You've got your dumb friends/
/I know what they say/
/They tell you I'm difficult/
/But so are they/
/But they don't know me/
/Do they even know you?/
/All the things you hide from me/
/All the shit that you do/
He'd overheard Sango and Kagome talking once, about Kagome's era. Sango had asked about her friends, and she'd said a lot of good things. She complained, too. About how they would nag at her to leave her abusive "boyfriend" every time she came home with wounds, how some other guy kept asking her to go out with him, never backing down once he was rejected. He'd felt bad, hearing all they had to say about him, not because he cared what they said, but because of /why/ they'd said it. Being near him was painful to her, always sticking her neck out to help him.
The hanyou was sure the miko would use the Tama in a good way. Heal people, make someone rich, something helpful like that. His own dreams of using the Tama were never going to happen. Once he'd wanted to be a powerful youkai, but not any more. Far back in his mind, in the part that was still awake when he became full youkai, was tortured when he realized what he was doing. To live in constant torture was not what he wanted. Killing people was not what he wanted. He wanted to live, free of fear. Perhaps even with someone who loved him. Someone he loved, too. Like fifty-some odd years ago, when Kikyou had had her whole soul, free of Naraku's tainting. Was happiness so much to ask for.
But with the silence between himself and Kagome, he could never ask her to make /him/ happy with her single wish. No, he really couldn't.
/You were all the things I thought I knew/
/And I thought we could be/
/You were everything, everything that I wanted/
/We were meant to be, supposed to be/
/But we lost it/
/And all of the memories so close to me just fade away/
/So much for my happy ending/
All in all, no matter which way you looked at it, he was much too dangerous to be with, anyway. Once, maybe, what he'd truly wanted had been in reach. In those days when he and the miko depended on each other, needed one another to get through. Even now, he fought an inner battle every time she left. Follow her, or not to follow her? Wait or not wait? He watched her whenever she was in Sengoku Jidai, even when she thought she was alone or was talking with someone else. No doubt the hanyou was protective of Kagome, keeping an eye out as second nature. But they could never be together. His greatest fear was a very possible reality.
One day, he could turn his claws on her. One day, he could betray her against his will, and then it would be all over for everything.
So he would watch over her, watch as she went on to live life while he slowly wasted away. She would go on, living in her world and fulfilling her life there like she never could here. And he would watch her, like a shadow, or a guardian over their charge. He would protect her; even if she didn't, couldn't love him, even if he wouldn't be able to make her happy, he could at least watch her as she became happy in her own way, as she surely would. And the hanyou would slowly fade...
Golden eyes watched as the water stirred around his red pants, causing them to float around in a hypnotic fashion. The orbs held little light, little sign of life. His sleeves, big as they were, swirled as well. The pond was close to the Goshinboku, surrounded by sakura trees, each of them swelling with pink petals. A few fell into the water, rippling the image of his broken expression. The hanyou that stared back at him wasn't the one he was used to seeing; even in his own eyes, he saw pain. A few tears, too, though they hadn't fallen just yet. The water came almost to his hip, numbing his legs.
Right then and there, he realized something.
He didn't know himself anymore.
/This is where I say I've had enough/
/and no one should ever feel the way that I feel now./
/A walking open wound, /
/a trophy display of bruises /
/and I don't believe that I'm getting any better./
She didn't feel very stable. Everything in her life was wobbling as it always had...every single vase in the antique shop had been once glued and thrice duct taped, feigning perfection but ultimately and obviously quite broken. There was a thick layer of dust at the corner of the ceilings that she had always thought she should rub away...but the dust implied that time had passed in her little sanctuary, and that was true. Her world had always been poisoned with uncertainty that no sixteen year old should ever be able to possess in such a death grip. Scratches on her shoulders that continually ached and a head in the clouds that perpetually absorbed a headache as if her brain was a sponge and throbbing pain was soapy water...those were the unchanging bits of fluff in a world of variables. Was she forgetting someone? Oh, no, the hanyou she so secretly adored had long since lost his title of a regular. When her old self had suddenly come back to life, a la Night Before the Living Dead, he had suddenly become a wisp of smoke. So very grand to watch as it floated about in the wind until you tried your damned best to grip it and your fingers slid through like water...he was a distraction, no more, no less.
Lying, always lying. I have hypothermia, I have influenza, I have chronic bronchitis and a small case of advanced diabetes...that's why I don't talk to you anymore, that's why I don't return your phone calls or care that your dog died. I'd like to care, but I go back in time to go see that terrible boyfriend that you hate so dearly – you know, he's half dog, and I'm not sure what breed, and I don't think he loves me. But you don't need to know that, your nails need to be done and Hoyjo needs to be giggled at and pinched and teased while all along you're trying to make him be your friend in my favor because you want me to have company in place of that bloody horrible guy I talk to you every so often about and have suddenly stopped to do so. That's because I'm going to have to leave him soon even though I care about him, that's because I don't want to see him make a mess of himself because he loves the person I could never be because I don't intend to die and come back as a zombie. For once living is my curse. Or has it always been? Gomen nasai, sumimasen, didn't mean to bother you, I'll see you next week. Lying, always lying.
/Waiting here with hopes the phone will ring /
/and I'm thinking awful things /
/and I'm pretty sure that few would notice./
/And this straightened mouth/
/is starving for an argument./
/Anything at all to break the silence./
So beautiful, so dreamy. Kikyou was a lovely portrait of the classic Feudal priestess, so sweet and so very cold and all at once comforting and then all at once brittle and frightening. Had she once been a happy person? A kind person that smiled? The few smiles she'd seen had been so forced they made the valves of her heart itch as if she'd seen them so many times before. They had too much in common. They had too many THINGS in common. Except Kikyou had been somewhat too inclined to wish on every shooting star that she could be a woman and not a miko, and that the one she was so in love with could be a man and not a boy. Had she been so trusting in her love, thick like blood, strong like wine? Or had she had her doubts, like she herself always did? He liked her enough but could he love her? Ever...even if Kikyou could just go and die like she had secretly wished on her own shooting stars...would he be a step away or a mile? No hoping and no planning, no thinking about the future. Not until you find it in yourself to hand over the completed tama, Miss Heroine. It resided in her pocket, the one inside of her skirt that was used only for small trinkets.
Spare change, demonic jewels, eh.
Exactly what was she going to say? I've been hiding this from you, so here you go finally. And now I'll leave so I don't have to see you start killing people, thanks, bye, and just for future reference I've been madly in love with you since the middle of my freshman year. Sayounara, forever and always, I think I left some ramen at Kaede's hut. She ran it in her head and wondered when she had changed and become so caustic. Maybe when she grew up. Her mother said people became cruel because cruelty was a shield, but perhaps her shield was from herself as it never broke past the surface. She would never say that to him. She would smile and be pleasant unless he annoyed her; she was always smiling because the stable ones had nerves of steel, or in her case, of a rather nice kind of copper. Kagome swung her legs back and forth on the brim of the well in her own time with pollution and crazy lunatic serial killers with guns rather then crazy lunatic I Don't Really Mind S'long As They Go Screaming killers with youkai and swords and that wonderful sort of craziness truly reserved for those splendid old B movies.
/Wandering the house /
/like I've never wanted out /
/and this is about as social as I get now. /
/And I'm mentally throwing away the letters that I am writing you/
/'cause they would never do,/
/I would never do./
Kami, she loved that place so much. It smelt like flowers even in battlefields ridden with the lost...it had the air of innocence even when all was pulsing with corruption. But it was going, correct? Because she was tearing herself away, correct? She was the reincarnation of the love of her life's love of his life and it wasn't working out in the Harlequin SuperRomance sort of way that had cost her mother at least three hundred dollars in the course of her infatuation with the series that had occurred so swiftly after her father's death. A snowflake lazily dawdled in through the creakily slightly opened doors to the chibi shrine and rather pointedly landed on her nose, almost as if some malign force was trying to make her stop wallowing in her strange brand of self-pity so she could leave and get yelled at for being late for her own departure. The irony. Kagome Higurashi was sorely wishing that she had never grown up. Peter Pan was a Disney movie, not something for Miss Heroine to try and embody, but she could sure as hell hope could manage to. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.
'You follow the same life'. Like a path, as if her existence was the freeway and she was in Kikyou's turned-in used Volvo. She'd been told that countless times as if it made a difference. Being in love didn't have a catch (usually)...you didn't stop just because the first person had screwed up royally. Every remake was a better model, eh, to keep in with the car analogy? The baby had been right, more right about her than anything. The darkness in her heart had come from the one that had given her this exact TYPE of heart in the first place. Kikyou was why she was bitter and tired and wanted to give up but knew that would be against every fiber of her being. She was an optimist with a foggy mind...new weather forecast and she'd be A-OK. She jumped. She wondered if the weatherman was predicting showers. Kagome landed on her knees as she always did and felt the calluses bellow in agony as they kept the eternally ripped flesh intact. She hauled herself up with her arms lined with hard muscle from using the bow ever so often as always. Her palms gripped the sun warmed stones as if she was a professional rock climber.
/So don't be a liar,/
/don't say that "everything's working"/
/when everything's broken. /
/And you smile like a saint /
/but you curse like a sailor /
/and your eyes say the joke's on me./
Hah. Sure she was. Kagome pushed herself over the wooden edge made of the same textile as Goshinboku and wondered where the infamous half-demon was. He usually would be staring at her from perhaps two feet away, glaring in that uncannily elderly way of his like a puppy awaiting a master that it entirely realized didn't much mind about its feelings and had forgotten about it entirely while writing mid-terms and fighting off annoying questions from kids who thought she had emphysema. He always managed that glare that mutated into a tangent of curses and questions and the underlying bit of rejection– mutation because evolution took too long. And she would wait and sigh and command and walk towards the village. A never ending cycle, like the changing of the moon and the passing of the tides. He was nowhere in sight, and so the living miko played a random Namie Amuro song with short, gnawed fingernails atop the framing of the Bone-Eater's well.
The jewel felt as if it were burning a hole into her skin.
Classic. Very classic. You read about things like this is stories all the time. The good side going strong, fighting with all their hearts and triumphing over the evil for the most part. The protagonists on a mission, but goofing off and laughing anyway. Returning home victorious more often than not. But somewhere, just under the happy surface, evil brewed. The darkness grew and grew, bursting out of the shadows to attack the good side once more. An epic battle, the main character, a tragic one with a black past but a great heart, rising up and striking the final blow. If only it were like that. He was no hero, not by a longshot. Everybody seemed to think so, seemed to expect great things of him. But not all was as it seemed.
He was the image of the Tragic Anti-hero. Long, silver-white hair, golden amber eyes, ivory skin, tall with a dark past. Hated by the world around him, but always, /always/ seemed to kill the demon and save someone's life. He was the kind of person people cared about despite themselves. That's not to say he didn't care about them too, though he certainly pretended not to with all his heart. His heart was a dangerous thing, leading him astray and constantly getting himself in trouble. Loving two women at once – ironically, one the reincarnation of the other – and never being able to choose. Yet everyone looked to him for the fight, the strength, expected him to hand demons defeat on a plate. It wasn't that easy, winning all the time. It hurt; had he not been hanyou, he'd have perished long ago.
/Let's talk this over/
/It's not like we're dead/
/Was it something I did?/
/Was it something you said?/
/Don't leave me hanging/
/In a city so dead/
/Held up so high/
/On such a breakable thread/
He didn't feel strong, wasn't as sure of himself as everyone else was. He didn't feel like he had immeasurable amounts of strength that would destroy any demon in his path. Sure, he could destroy. He could annihilate. It just depended on what he was fighting. But he couldn't fight his feelings, the uneasiness inside of him that kept whispering his weakness in his ear. Hanging on for dear life to a once reality that clearly wasn't to be. Once, he could say she had been his jewel detector, that he needed the miko or he'd just go on killing random youkai and never get anywhere. The thick rope that had bound him to that thought had long since worn away, leaving him with something much more fragile. His very heartbeat seemed to be telling him to give up, to drop into obscurity. He was no good now. The world didn't need him.
In the few weeks since the Shikon no Tama had been completed, the hanyou and the miko had grown apart. There was no longer a reason for her to return, no more shards to search for. There was one lingering thing that could keep her back; what to do with the Tama. Though he was sure she'd end up keeping it in her era, if only to keep it away from the youkai in Sengoku Jidai. The miko might return, was sure to return, to see Sango and Shippo and Miroku, but not necessarily him. She seemed to be avoiding him whenever she came...or had he been avoiding her? Search as he might, he couldn't find a single reason for the drift, couldn't see why they weren't talking.
If he wanted the silence to end, why didn't he just talk to her? But what was he supposed to say? "How are you, and why haven't you been talking to me?" He should ask himself why he wasn't talking to her, but then again, he couldn't find that answer. And she was surely going to ask him that. Perhaps he was avoiding fate, the fate of the jewel, other than her. Talking to her meant discussing what to do with the Shikon no Tama, which meant making a decision, which meant she could go back to her time and never come back once they were done.
/You've got your dumb friends/
/I know what they say/
/They tell you I'm difficult/
/But so are they/
/But they don't know me/
/Do they even know you?/
/All the things you hide from me/
/All the shit that you do/
He'd overheard Sango and Kagome talking once, about Kagome's era. Sango had asked about her friends, and she'd said a lot of good things. She complained, too. About how they would nag at her to leave her abusive "boyfriend" every time she came home with wounds, how some other guy kept asking her to go out with him, never backing down once he was rejected. He'd felt bad, hearing all they had to say about him, not because he cared what they said, but because of /why/ they'd said it. Being near him was painful to her, always sticking her neck out to help him.
The hanyou was sure the miko would use the Tama in a good way. Heal people, make someone rich, something helpful like that. His own dreams of using the Tama were never going to happen. Once he'd wanted to be a powerful youkai, but not any more. Far back in his mind, in the part that was still awake when he became full youkai, was tortured when he realized what he was doing. To live in constant torture was not what he wanted. Killing people was not what he wanted. He wanted to live, free of fear. Perhaps even with someone who loved him. Someone he loved, too. Like fifty-some odd years ago, when Kikyou had had her whole soul, free of Naraku's tainting. Was happiness so much to ask for.
But with the silence between himself and Kagome, he could never ask her to make /him/ happy with her single wish. No, he really couldn't.
/You were all the things I thought I knew/
/And I thought we could be/
/You were everything, everything that I wanted/
/We were meant to be, supposed to be/
/But we lost it/
/And all of the memories so close to me just fade away/
/So much for my happy ending/
All in all, no matter which way you looked at it, he was much too dangerous to be with, anyway. Once, maybe, what he'd truly wanted had been in reach. In those days when he and the miko depended on each other, needed one another to get through. Even now, he fought an inner battle every time she left. Follow her, or not to follow her? Wait or not wait? He watched her whenever she was in Sengoku Jidai, even when she thought she was alone or was talking with someone else. No doubt the hanyou was protective of Kagome, keeping an eye out as second nature. But they could never be together. His greatest fear was a very possible reality.
One day, he could turn his claws on her. One day, he could betray her against his will, and then it would be all over for everything.
So he would watch over her, watch as she went on to live life while he slowly wasted away. She would go on, living in her world and fulfilling her life there like she never could here. And he would watch her, like a shadow, or a guardian over their charge. He would protect her; even if she didn't, couldn't love him, even if he wouldn't be able to make her happy, he could at least watch her as she became happy in her own way, as she surely would. And the hanyou would slowly fade...
Golden eyes watched as the water stirred around his red pants, causing them to float around in a hypnotic fashion. The orbs held little light, little sign of life. His sleeves, big as they were, swirled as well. The pond was close to the Goshinboku, surrounded by sakura trees, each of them swelling with pink petals. A few fell into the water, rippling the image of his broken expression. The hanyou that stared back at him wasn't the one he was used to seeing; even in his own eyes, he saw pain. A few tears, too, though they hadn't fallen just yet. The water came almost to his hip, numbing his legs.
Right then and there, he realized something.
He didn't know himself anymore.