"I have this dream... It's the kind of dream you keep buried within you, deep inside. In it, I'm a normal girl. It hurts to wake up, sometimes." -- Kagome

"If a man is destined to drown, he will drown even in a spoonful of water." -- Yiddish proverb

Youkai aren't quite so normal a sight as they once were. The days of being attacked when frolicking alone in the woods by hordes of Youkai have long since been over.

Doesn't mean that it was any safer to frolic.

There were still a great many youkai, nobody actually knows how many, it's been said they've gotten crafty, and that they can walk among humans without anyone turning heads.

It's pretty rare to actually see a youkai. Unless it was one of the rare domestic, docile, slave youkai, kept by one of the more prominent wealthy families of Tokyo. Even then, the youkai looked almost human, and was usually carting around shopping bags, trailing behind its master like a puppy. With dead eyes.

Even rarer than youkai, of course, were sightings of a miko. It had been almost fifteen years since Tokyo had lost the protection of its miko, fifteen years since whatever confidence the city had in its own safety disappeared just as mysteriously as she had.

Mikos were so rare that in the fifteen years (180 weeks, 65565 days) since her disappearance, no replacement miko had been found. In fact, most of the city gave up on ever finding another.

Of course, there were the obligatory checks for miko talent in every newborn girl, but most of the city had come to the conclusion that there would never be another miko.

And so, of course, the youkai began to become bolder. Be fruitful and multiply, and all that jazz. They were far from overrunning the city. But in the back of everyone's minds…

In the dark hopelessness that shrouded the city's heart, we knew.

One day, the youkai were going to slaughter us all.

It was a common sentiment heard throughout the city on any given day; "If only we had a miko.."

And every time I heard it, my heart died in my chest. Because Tokyo had a miko.

I should know. I am that miko.

Higurashi, Kagome. Reporting for duty.

Or.. Not.

Because while the human population of the city would have rejoiced in the knowledge of my existence (with much alcohol, and drunken toasts most likely..), the youkai would have been planning my messy death.

I would have disappeared at some point. Just like Kikyo. The miko before me. And she had been the most powerful miko in countless generations, almost unrivaled.

This was what my grandfather drilled into my head each and every day. No one must know. My family loved me too much to have me taken away from them.

My grandfather, a monk of no little power, although senile as all get out when the moment suits him, and somewhat… fat.. Had been able to see what I was right through the womb. He had felt my gifts, and immediately set to work making ward after ward to paste to my mother's growing belly.

He used everything he had to hide what I was. To protect me.

Because he knew what would happen if I were to become Tokyo's miko. I would be taken from my family as soon as I was outed, taken from my shrine and brought to an institution where I would develop my talents, and my family would never see me again.

I would never get to grow up to be a normal seventeen year old. If I were to grow up at all. My mother and grandfather were terrified that the youkai would find me, as they had undoubtedly found Kikyo, and kill me.

And so, I was a miko without all the talent that comes with the name. I had never even seen proof of the power running through me, although my grandfather told me he could see it through his "freaking eyelids".

And so, while I went to school like every other teenage girl my age, while I had friends, good grades, and homework, you could divide my life in half with a black magic marker.

One half being normal, school-going Kagome. The other half, the Kagome who had to run home after school every day and begin the process of being warded so no one could figure out what I was.

It felt distinctly… spy-ish. Only without the gadgets and lots of sex.

I never got to go out after school and fool around at the mall. My friends never saw me outside of a school uniform. If it rained, I didn't get to go to school. I always had an umbrella on hand.

Ooh! And thispink poncho with these cute little purple bunnies..

Because the rain could wash off my wards (pasted on with a nice thick glue). Any kind of water would dilute the spells that kept me hidden.

But it worked. No one knew what I was. Not my best friends, only family. And everyday, I had to hear on the news, or over the school announcements, that someone had been killed by a youkai. I had to lose classmates, teachers, neighbors and strangers.

I watched the news religiously, morbidly, to see if anyone had been killed. Because they were all on my conscience. I had as good as killed them.

I was their miko, and I left them to die.

Somehow I couldn't revel in day-to-day survival, or a normal life, or time with my family. Because everyday I had, someone else lost.

Life is such a bitch.