He couldn't keep doing this. Avoiding Kagome was on its way to becoming an Olympic sport. It had been a solid month since he had last seen her face in person and it was eating away at him. They had talked on the phone, sent texts, she had even sent him some pics of her a few times as an attempt to make him "feel better".

Physically he was feeling fine now. Kinda. In a manner of speaking. But his heart… his heart was breaking.

He could only get away with the guise of being unwell for so long, so he had to start coming up with new excuses. Work kept him busy – even though it was a remote position most of the work week – he could bide his time a little more by saying that the office had called him in to go over some reports he had completed in person. Clarify things. The trick was he had to do it so that she wouldn't suspect that something was off. Work couldn't be the excuse every time. So he said that his mother needed him to come over and fix some things around the house. Being a single mother with no other children she relied on Inuyasha to help her with small tasks. Build a bookshelf. Replace that leaky pipe under the kitchen sink. Maintain the yard each Saturday. Help with the boatload of groceries that she always seemed to buy. Tutor the ginger haired boy that lived next door to her because he was a darling and needed help with history.

It got to be so frequent that he started keeping a running list of reasons he had used next to where he kept his phone. On the next page of that notebook was a list of potential reasons that he could pull from. It was horrible and he felt horrible doing it but, he really needed to understand what was going on with him before he let Kagome in on….whatever this was.

The claws… no matter how many times he clipped or filed them down, they grew back within hours. It was maddening and if it wouldn't hurt like a bitch he had considered ripping them from the root to test the amount of time it took to regrow.

But that wasn't the only change he was dealing with. Aside from the gouges he had done to himself in his sleep a month prior, any injury to his person was healing at a rapid speed. He cut the palm of his hand slicing onions and watched as the skin stitched itself back together. His vision was sharper, hearing picked up the minute details, and his nose…he wasn't sure how to describe it, but it wasn't natural.

Wasn't human.

He could hear the sounds of the tenants two floors above his when they got explicitly loud during sex, for example. Could smell what the lady in 60B was cooking for supper and knew the moment that she added too much rosemary before he heard her cuss her luck.

His endurance… well, that was about the one thing he didn't have complaints about.

Inuyasha had always been good at sports. He worked hard, built his strength up over the years and felt pretty decent about his physical shape. But now he was able to run up the flights of stairs to his apartment without being out of breath. He didn't feel like he needed to sleep as much as he really did. And when he was… well… when he had to take matters into his own hands… to say he had been shocked when he found that he could rub out a second one so soon after the first was an understatement. It still took some effort but still.

That wasn't normal.

Which was precisely why Inuyasha sat on his couch, staring at his phone dejectedly after ending the latest call with Kagome. He couldn't tell her about this, not until he knew himself what the hell was going on. He couldn't bring that to her doorstep. Even if she didn't mind the new changes…the idea of being intimate now was terrifying to him.

He could hurt her.

You won't hurt her.

"What the fuck..?"

You won't hurt her.

Inuyasha sat up and looked around his apartment. He knew he was alone but that voice…sounded like it was…right next to him… "The hell is going on?"

You should tell her.

"Who the fuck are you?"

I am you.

"Where the fuck are you?!" His body went tense, like arms were circling his shoulders from behind, though he knew that there was no one physically in the room with him.

I am in your mind. I am you, and I am telling you that you need to tell Kagome.