Kagome’s time between worlds. Drabble collection for @inukag-week 2023 ☆
Chapter 7/7 – Smile: Kagome comes home.
Tags: The One with the Chapter/Episode Retelling
Word Count: 700 (Heptadrabble)
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A/N below the cut ☆
Kagome’s fingers slipped away, and with her last leap of faith came her final wish – that she’d look like her mother when she was older.
Her heart crept up her throat while her stomach stayed behind. Time cushioned her fall, bathed her in shimmering light and slowly, gravity returned. Stone and packed earth became corporeal again, and Kagome was left standing at the bottom of the bone-eaters well, five-hundred years in the past.
She grinned and looked up. The climb was tough, that much she remembered, and she positioned her feet to pull herself up and leave the world she’d been born into behind.
One year for every day spent inside the jewel was long enough to know that while her prospects were bright, she felt enormously bleak, and her family knew, from the lack of what comes next. They’d flowed around her like a stone in a river, hoping the passage of time would dislodge her; she could be polished like her lacquer but still preferred the remnants of dirt under her nails.
There would be no right time. There was only time, and what she chose to do with it.
She’d wanted both, so asked for neither and accepted where she’d been assigned to; where fear of the unknown kept her hostage. She lathered and rinsed, but Kagome was stuck on repeat, taunted by dreams of choosing the wrong path, and she should've known where she belonged when she sought where life had taken them, and couldn’t bear to know if she wasn’t there to witness it.
The thought that Inuyasha might not be there occurred, but she crushed it as assuredly as she climbed because they were cut from the same cloth, and she knew he’d stubbornly rebuild the village Naraku had so callously destroyed. It was impossible to know what waited for her, but she raced towards it like it was the only finish line worth crossing.
Too much went unsaid, and she’d be damned if she didn’t get the chance to tell him.
He’d taught her so much. That she didn’t have to smile just to please others, to trust her intuition. That she was powerful enough to fight anything coming her way. To stand up for those who couldn’t do it for themselves. What true strength and kindness is.
That sometimes, choosing your heart – human, demon or otherwise – was the most courageous path a person could take.
Was it so selfish to want to see a man like that again?
That question, she decided, was only hers to determine, and she wasn’t afraid of the answer anymore.
Slippery vines aided and hindered her ascent, and her legs started to shake the closer she came to cerulean skies. A hand appeared in front of her face, and her eyes crossed. Calloused, claw-tipped fingers flexed, she grabbed on, and in a blink, she was hauled from its mouth to come face to face with the man she needed to see again.
"Inuyasha! I’m so sorry," she said, tears springing to her eyes, "were you waiting for me?"
"Kagome…" He looked the same, yet entirely different, and he gave her no time to admire that before he yanked and she flew forward, straight into his arms. "You idiot," he said, shrouding her in his sleeves, "what took you so long?"
She had so much to say, no idea where to start, and from the glint in his eyes, he felt the same.
How silly of her, to think destiny had been fulfilled, that she’d have to settle, be grateful, and condemn herself to a life of what-ifs.
Voices rang from afar, drawing her attention. Sango, Miroku, Shippo, and three little faces she didn’t know but would recognise anywhere appeared, and she looked back at Inuyasha, smiling as brightly as the gold staring back.
Her duty to the past had been fulfilled. She wound back the clock, brought back the jewel, destroyed it, then mended it, all so she could say she’d destroyed it again and lived to tell the tale.
Miraculously, despite all that, and in the face of it, she even managed to graduate.
But she had a different purpose now.
And his name was Inuyasha.
