the child inside of her, an alternate universe drabble
warning: dark themes
He holds the door open to the small house open as the girl runs past him. Her hair is in a high ponytail and her cheeks are bright red from the sting of the cold outside, but she simply loves the snow and he can't tell her no. He can never tell her no.
"I'm going to get washed up for dinner," she says with a childish grin and he nods, carefully splitting the warm noodles between two bowls as she disappears into another room. He hears the gentle splashes of water as he sets chopsticks into a bowl and waits patiently for her. When she emerges, her hair is down around her shoulders, her jacket discarded and her school uniform slightly rumpled. She falls down into a seat next to her and grins at him again. "Ramen," she says happily as she picks up her chopsticks, "my favorite."
It's his favorite too.
He picks over the noodles while she slurps her up with vigor; he can hardly find an appetite, even after all of this time. He should be used to her behavior, he quietly chides, but he can only steal glances at her while she splashes warm liquid and eats her food and lets her chopsticks dangle out of the corner of her mouth. When she's done, she leans over to pick a few noodles out of his nearly full bowl with a devious grin. He mirrors her and stands up, stretching as she runs into the other room.
InuYasha frowns, standing in the room alone. It had been a whole year now that the winter had returned and how cruel it had been before. How different things were from how he imagined them to be. A year ago, he had expected to have a child. Now, he did. Kagome was like a child now, absent of responsibility and free and caring in the way that most children were. She didn't remember because she couldn't remember the horrible things that had happened to get her to this point.
A teenaged girl should have never been a mother anyway, he muses to himself. It was only the world's way of taking that from him too and giving him a newer, more apt responsibility. The world was saying, take care of her first. She is still a child.
And yet, InuYasha longed for the child that had once been inside of her.
notes: still as unclear as ever, i'm thinking of adding onto this. kagome was in a predicament that resulted in the loss of a child she was carrying and in amnesia, and inuyasha is taking care of her. kudos.