Birthday Prediction
by Lalieth
Kagome underwent an enormous effort to celebrate her twentieth birthday with her family. She had to persuade Inuyasha to travel back to Edo in time and to wait for her for a couple of days. It took a lot of convincing. Years had passed and still the unrelenting cycles of Naraku's maliciousness went unabated. That aside, however, Kagome felt she still owed her family something. She had disappointed them in so many ways that she felt an oppressive burden of compunction whenever she was in their company.
The celebration was marked with a merry vitality, though Kagome could not free herself from the notion that it was all affected and unnatural. Her family seemed pleased that she had made an effort to be dutiful, but in the end it was her own frustrated party, because her conscience remained uneased.
She also indulged in a brief celebration with her old friends from school, from her old life. They also tried to recreate the picture of normalcy, to follow the median of people their age, in their stage of life. But Kagome was not really any of these things and they all knew it, even as they spooned down frozen yogurt in a nimbus of silence. At least, Kagome thought they all knew it.
They had decided to go the fair, which just so happened to be to the south of Tokyo this time of year. They rode rides, ate horrible food, lost money playing ridiculous games, and petted the languid livestock. For a few moments, Kagome thought she had succeeded in shaking off the shell of that otherness business, like a beetle emerging from the old skeleton. But then Yuka suddenly pulled her into a garishly decorated tent with furs on the floor and beads hanging from the ceiling like seeds on strings.
An old woman sat in front of a cheap, folding table. She was the archetype of fortune-tellers, having obviously chosen each artifact of her farcical appearance very carefully.
"Come on," Yuka pushed her into a chair, "it'll be fun."
Before she knew what was going on, the woman grabbed her right hand and held it for only a few seconds. Then she began laying cards upon the table in some inscrutable pattern with an air of cool competence. She examined the finished product however for at least five minutes before she would look up. She regarded the young, normal looking woman in front of her with an enigmatic air of regret.
"You will not be happy," she said with conviction, "so long as your feet remain pointed backwards."
Kagome shuddered to hear the prison sentence so decisively announced. It only served to increase her feeling of unease that she was truly unsure whose fate she was hearing. Was it really hers? Was it that of her friends? It could even belong to Kikyou.
Her friends later laughed about the prediction, saying that it was conveniently vague and that the old woman was such a pathetic and obvious hoax. A counterfeit, they said, and Kagome shuddered again. She said nothing, but she knew that the old woman's magic was real; at least her faculty for prophecy was real, though she could not imagine how she had come by it. The frustrated party had rendered a vicious gift, a revelation that Kagome felt was dragging her toward her ultimate end. She saw with a clarity of surrender that it did not really matter which way her feet were pointed. It did not matter if she was in the Sengoku jidai or in the modern era. It did not matter because the magic of her own soul—so heavy, pure, and tainted all at once, was always with her. So she was always the same Kagome, imprisoned in her own ineluctable fate.