Forked by Ejunkie
Paths
AN/ this is a two-part story, (at the moment), a picture of the Inuyasha group after the dust settles on their travels, remembering one key point: sometimes life doesn't go as planned. This placed third at dokuga_contest, thank you guys. ;u; (rated MA for language! *u*)
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Rating: T (language)
Summary: When the truth is realised, it takes strength to back away, rip out that page of life and turn another. Focus on a new life, and hope with all your heart that when one door closes, another opens. A new beginning.
Paths
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Step. Step.
She had only been running a few hours, a few days.
Step. Stumble.
Hot sweat clung her clothes to close to her body, running sticky finger trails down her calves that froze instantly on contact with the frigid air. Her toes cramped within uncomfortable foreign shoes – never mind the fact she had been wearing them for the last three years – and her hastily placed dress slid down her arms every few moments to dunk her goose skin in a fresh layer of cold. She should have done something, at least to prepare, instead of just running.
Step.
Uneasy and tired, the clacking pressed up the dirty trade route, clumsily on feet clattering with unsteady balance. Tired, her muscles complaints whined an incessant tune in her inner-ear, repelling any comfortable thoughts or daydreams with the echo of her geta. Trembling, her fingers quivered as they brushed away stray bangs from her eyes, and she steered herself for another step.
Her bones, clattering and rattling within her skin, felt as if they should break at any moment. Her eyes were burning, teetering on the brink of a fiery, flushing meltdown, the shame in her cheeks swelled, turning the brisk – freezing – air into little daggers against her skin. With a shake of the head, she eyed the path before her, teeth grinding against her lip. Come on Kagome; one foot in front of the other.
Teeth gritted, she managed one more, shaky step, before her ankle gave.
“Fuck.” Fuck. She was in pain, and afraid, and, dare she even think it - lonely. Even though she had been the one to leave, who had wanted to leave – had to leave. Next time, Kagome, plan your heartbreaking departure with enough time to at least change your shoes. Her eyes felt strangely dry, her empty stomach heaving for breath in the night air. Fear, alone. This is what you wanted, remember?
Her hands trembled lightly as she raised them, brushing down her aching limbs before collapsing to the side, a slow sigh breaking the nights silence. Exhaustion tugged at her mind, and lazily, her head rolled back, gazing at the clear night, dark eyes considering. The clear expanse, dotted with stars, was beautiful, more so than the orange shroud of Tokyo. Pain twanged within her chest, right below the left of her collarbone.
“Fuck it all.”
Tired, and in sudden defiance of her emotions, she turned her head viciously way from the sight, back to the comforting, empty landscape, without hanyous and demons.
“Enough.”
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“Stay, Kagome.”
“It won’t work, Inuyasha. I’m going to find… another village, another shrine, where I’ll be the miko.”
Pain laced his strained voice in such a way that she could see without seeing him the picture it painted on his face. “You are leaving me… just like Kikyo.”
She had frozen at that, the pain in the tightly controlled voice twisting in her stomach, and with a burst of anger, her lips twisted into a grimace as she shot back: “wake up, Inuyasha.”
In a blur of red, his crouched form appeared before her, claws roughly clinging to the dirt for purchase. So different from when they were smiling, his familiar lips had drawn back into a snarl, gaze glittering strangely as they tracked her face in a rough examination, nose twitching in the air. Nostrils flaring, his eyes never left her as he tasted the scent on his tongue, and the relief was bitter-sweet with its purity. Kagome had not been lying when she had left, then; there was no one else.
The relief had a funny effect on him, hunching his shoulders and screwing up his face. He should be happy, shouldn’t he?
“I should be saying that to you, Kagome. What do you think you can do out there that you can’t do here?”
In that moment, Kagome had finally stumbled upon the simple yet brilliant truth of the situation.
“It’s not that… I don’t love you.” He would not get it, the small betrayal of her fears and stresses and pains. He wouldn’t get it; understand that – that this was too much. Her next words were more like a whisper. “It just isn’t enough.”
Coughing on the lump in the back of her throat, her steps continued forward without her willing them, taking her away, continuing up the dirt path that tracked from the red gates of the village and farther from the confusing crash site of her history.
“You’ll be ok.” Her words were silently pleading, imploring him to understand. Better without this burden of a relationship, for the both of us. Let me go, and then maybe I can go home.
“Osuwari.”
She began to run.
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She had never predicted she would start this, and even their little romance hadn’t been conventional, in any sense of the word. Kagome also could not pinpoint the moment when she fell out of love with the ‘stupid hanyou’ before she had left Tokyo. She hadn’t even noticed it herself. But she had gone on anyway, blindly following an old thought, and gotten herself stuck.
He had been the reason why she had fallen into this era, even though this ‘love of her life’ had fallen through, with all the impact of the anticlimax resounding around her heart.
Her eyes burned bitterly; stupid, idiotic damp trailing down her cheeks. She had fucked up royally this time. She had taken one final leap that she could not come back from, and once she had realised that, she couldn’t stay with him. Even if she could never, ever, regret attempting to.
The growing exhaustion that she had been ignoring for hours dragged at her limbs, weighing down her movements towards continuing on now that she had stopped, and with a small thump, she was sat on the ground, hands covering her face, as the stuffy night let back in all of what she had been trying to run away from.
Her voice was barely a whisper now as her lips, blue-tinged by the insensitive night air, shaped the word: “enough.”
Falling back against the dirt, eyelids bruised from lack of sleep fluttered, half-mast, ignoring the pinpricks of lights that punctuated the great canvas of black out of spite. Breaths deep in the fresh, grass-sweet air, she focused instead on the change to the scene – a brightening gleam that lit the sky to almost-dusk, the light growing brighter and brighter until it had all bunched up in a burning white curve – a full moon.
A smile twisted her lips, her heart lightening at the simple peace of the scene. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done this. In fact, it had been a long time since she hadn’t looked at the clean and quiet expanse of sky without only seeing what was missing: home.
Somewhere along the way, she had lost her love for life. When was it exactly, that she had forgotten the love that could be found in everything beautiful and kind and brave, the things that she had found here, and when had she begun to hate it?
A whisper of a breeze sent her hair flying into her eyes, and as a hand rose to brush it away, it fell into shadow. Startled, her heart thumped a loud beat within her chest, glance shooting upwards, catching the elegant toe of black, hand–sewn leather. She hadn't heard any footsteps, and she tempered her thoughts to keep from falling into panic as her eyes tried to focus the face of her impromptu companion. The taller shadow caught the bright outline of the false light of the full moon, the change in light forcing her eyes to readjust, blinking rapidly to speed up the process.
A low whisper, barely audible: “you are not dead, then.”
She recognised the murmored tone, she realised; the words, strangely calming, striking some long forgotten note in her memory that sent her heart skipping. However, she found it hard to care, as her vision finally failed her and her eyes slipped shut, entangled in the fatigue that dragged at her muscles to beg for sleep. With a small rustle, she felt a breath of warm air brush her face, followed by a cool touch that pressed lightly against her eyelids. "Miko."
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