My Soul to Steal by Ai Roku

Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha!

Prompt: Obon

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Staring at the haunted eyes looking back at her from the bathroom mirror couldn’t help but ask her reflection, ‘God what is wrong with me?’

In the years since her return she had often thought of the friends she’d left behind. She’d thought of what their lives might have been like after her departure, and how their reunion would play out if she could ever find a way to return to the past.

But had never before envisioned anything so disgusting! Looking back she should have noticed that the gruesome travesty of her  Shippo had not aged. Demon or not after five hundred years there would definitely had been some serious changes to the kit’s looks if that had really been him.

In the moment however, all she had focused on was the presence, or at least what she had believed to be the presence of one of her beloved friends.

Had she really fallen so far as to succumb to hallucinations though?  ‘Why can’t I just be normal damn it,’ she sighed, but that was the problem wasn’t it, she wasn’t normal. She hadn’t been normal since she turned fifteen.

The only place she might possibly still belong was with Inuyasha, Shippo, Miroku, Sango, and Kirara, but she was unable to find a way to return to the warring states era, and most likely in her time they were all dead.

She hadn’t wanted to accept that at first, it had taken her years to acknowledge that they were really gone.

But when her quest to re-open the well had failed she’d at last had no choice. Humans simply didn’t live for five hundred years, and she had to believe that if Inuyasha, Shippo, and Koga were still alive that they would’ve come to find her by now.

Logically she understood this but her heart just couldn’t seem to reconcile the fact that the same people that she had seen, spoken to, and fought beside a mere three years ago had been dead for hundreds of years!

At the obon festival a few months ago she had lit a lantern for each of them, watching them float serenely down river away from her. Kagome had felt as though pieces of her own soul had been carried away with them.

That night she had contemplated suicide. She had tried to fit in with Eri, Yuka, and Ayumi, and with the other kids at school but something always felt off.

She was always forcing herself to be cheery, and to seem interested in the often inane chatter of her peers, but ultimately she was never comfortable.

Her family were the only ones who really understood her isolation from the modern world. After spending so much of her adolescence in the past battling against an evil supernatural megalomaniac it was a bit difficult to readjust to everyday life in the present.

But she’d noticed her mama giving her worried looks lately, as if she had read her mind and had known that her daughter had once considered joining her friends in the afterlife.

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