Authoress Notes: For clarification, Kagome in the present is 30 while Satoru is 28. In most of the flashback scenes, she'll be 29 while he's 27.

Kagome Higurashi was well on her way to her biweekly trip to Shibuya. For Kagome, part of ascending the steps to adulthood was settling into a routine. Like any other adult, a significant portion of her routine was her full-time job as a nurse. But she also made time to volunteer at her family shrine and local animal shelters every other week. Her volunteer work was done on a rotating schedule. Despite how much more time and energy she wished that she had, Kagome was stretched thin as it was. This was a given due to her balancing a full-time job with long hours, volunteer work, and keeping the citizens of Tokyo safe from curses.

It had been over a decade since she had last seen a demon and that was back when she still had access to the Feudal Era. It took Kagome years to accept that she could no longer return to the past. She lived out her high school life like an ordinary teenager. By her second year, she had stopped her attempts at testing the well by jumping in, in hopes that she'd have another purpose in the past. By the time she had graduated, Kagome had thought that she had moved on.

She thought.

She was blindsided when the well suddenly called to her and allowed her passage back to the Warring States Era. She had reunited with her friends and her beloved Inuyasha. She had gotten married—.

—then she woke up in her bedroom at Higurashi shrine.

Kagome had woken up as a denizen of modern Tokyo.

The loss of the bliss that she felt in the dream crushed her heart back then. It was only when she turned twenty that she realized that she had deluded herself. As a teenager, she thought that if she bided her time and pretended to be an ordinary human, she would eventually find her way back to the past. It was then that she decided to stop waiting to return to the past and focus on the present.

Thus, Kagome accepted her reality, her present, and herself as she was. She was a person with spiritual power who could do things that others couldn't. She dove head first into her studies and became a Registered Nurse. Despite having a profound knowledge of modern medicine and practices, Kagome was not above using her powers to alleviate both acute and chronic pain, neutralize toxins, and more. She decided to call it her own version of holistic medicine. Head nurses and hospital administration took note of how many patients made miraculous recoveries. Without evidence of missing drugs or unauthorized practices, it had been deduced that her gentle bedside manner provided many patients with a placebo-like effect.

Kagome readily accepted the explanation with a saccharine smile. Humans tended to come up with deductions like that when they were stumped. And humans being stumped by her powers was a good thing in her book.

People outside of her immediate family knowing of her abilities could become problematic. Because of this, Kagome never clued anyone in on her powers—not even Yuka, Eri, and Ayumi, whom she stayed friends with over the years. Furthermore, she discovered the existence of cursed spirits when she finally decided to move forward and truly put herself out there. It was during a neighborhood walk that she saw a tiny but grotesque creature fluttering battered wings toward her.

Startled didn't come close to describing how she felt back.

"Wool..." It groaned out pitifully, "Socks."

Despite the surge of sorrow that she felt from the creature, Kagome still instinctively knew what she had to do. With all of her powers unsealed years ago, she didn't have to raise a finger to purify the creature. "Rest now..." She whispered. Not a moment later, the creature froze in its place before being swallowed by the pink light of her will.

It was after that encounter that Kagome dove into her near-daily patrols. She would purify the most threatening creatures within the vicinity, but not without vanquishing any small rogues that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. For years, this schedule sustained her. Admittedly, she would hang out with her friends or go shopping to break up the monotony.

But by the time that Kagome turned twenty-nine, even her occasional shopping sprees and splurges were becoming a bit stale. At one point, she absently wondered if she should take some time to re-enter the dating scene. At their age, her friends could not drop what they were doing and keep her company before or after a long shift anymore.

Okay, so maybe she wasn't just bored.

It was one year ago, when Kagome was twenty-nine, that she discovered that the void that had been building in her stomach was solitude—loneliness. Despite being surrounded by loved ones and other people almost daily, there was part of her life that she couldn't share with anyone. Everyone around her was without spiritual powers, so she would never involve them with anything involving the supernatural and paranormal. There were more risks than there were rewards.

Furthermore, Kagome discovered that she struggled to maintain steady romantic relationships with ordinary men years ago. It wasn't for a lack of trying. She didn't put herself on a pedestal and look down upon the masses. Rather, her previous boyfriends had questions about her whereabouts between certain hours of the day and night. They even picked up on how she wasn't completely honest with them about her life. She was accused of being an infidel on more than one occasion because motivated men were not above confirming with her employers that she wasn't called in for an emergency or to fill in for a colleague. She didn't blame them for being suspicious, but eventually, Kagome found herself drifting out of the dating scene.

It wasn't just romantic partners.

Kagome sometimes found herself feeling displaced amongst a sea of people who couldn't cross into her world.

When she was afraid or hurt, there was no one she could turn to—no one to talk to.

But all of that changed one year ago, when she first met Satoru Gojo.