by
Anaphalis
Summary: Fate has nasty ways of making you do what it wants. Alternate Reality (Canon Universe). Angst. Horror.One Shot. IY Fic Challenge Entry. Challenge - Fate/Destiny. Kagome POV
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Disclaimer: Inuyasha belongs to Rumiko Takahashi and Shonen Jump. Brushes on this page courtesy of Pure Anodyne.
When she was fifteen her brother had pulled Buyo out of the wellhouse, making them late for school. It wasn't a memory to hold and puzzle over, but there had been something, some sense of loss, when she had turned from the wellhouse, dragging her brother away. The dreams had started that night.
She was twenty-three and she woke up every morning with claws ripping through her chest. She'd have liked to say that the first time was the worst, but the truth was, she never got used to the feel of fleshboneblood fraying and snapping under the force of the attack. She'd have liked to say that the first time was the worst, but the Other only got stronger as time went on, the Other who had actually felt the force of those claws and replayed the images over and over in her trapped and fraying mind. She didn't like the Other much.
When she was six, she had tried to catch the goldfish for the festival. A little boy sat beside her and he was always a little stronger, a little faster than her. At the end, holding his bags, he'd stared at her empty hands. When he'd reached over, the squishy slickness of the bag and his sticky fingers had burned themselves into her mind. "Here- you can have him second." She never knew then why her mind had screamed in pain.
She was twenty-three and every aspect of her life was on-loan from a ghost. The Other was not evil, but took a strange delight in forcing her to acknowledge that even the core of who she was had passed through someone else's mind first. She never thought of herself as the Other- largely because the Other didn't think of them as being the same person. It helped though when she learned archery, when she actually practiced some of her shrine duties, when the curious powers she occasionally felt in her body were exercised and controlled. By giving the Other small pieces of familiarity, she earned some of her own peace. By giving the Other a sense of familiarity, she didn't have to acknowledge the Other as equal, flawed and human.
When she was eighteen she cut her hair so close to her head that it looked like a second skin when she slicked it with gel. The Other screamed in her mind, but for the first time, she felt some measure of control in the sick joke that was her life. It went like that- a piercing, a tattoo, small measures of control, of difference. She wanted to brand her skin �See?I'm not the sameI'mnot!- the way she couldn't brand her mind. And in the dark places in her dreams the Other laughed.
She was twenty-three and some days she felt every one of those five hundred years she'd never lived. She sometimes wondered if there had been lives before or after the Other, briefly thanking whoever handled these things that she didn't have to deal with them too. It hurt to have everything in her mind seen as if through a double image, to have memories of life, duty, love that weren't hers, but that made her heart ache. It hurt to have to make excuses to not visit the shrine because the ache was so much stronger there that she wasn't sure if she could control her own mind. It hurt to have to live alone in a tiny apartment, avoiding crowded spaces, avoiding situations that required concentration, because she never knew when other images would bombard her mind and she'd be forced into pain and panic. Some days she felt every one of those five hundred years and wished they'd hurry up and tell her what it was she was missing so that she could finally curl up and die.
She was twenty-three and she was tired of running. More truthfully, she no longer had the strength to run. When she got back to the shrine, she climbed the stairs with the calm of acceptance. She followed the calls of the very, very old Buyo to the wellhouse with a strange sense of completion. When the strange woman rose from the well and grabbed her, it was the first time she didn't see death when she closed her eyes.
When she was twenty-three she lost the Other from her head. After that final battle in Feudal Japan, part of her wished that she could see her again, if only for a sense of familiarity. She wanted to tell her that she understood- more than she had ever thought possible. She wanted to tell her that claws hurt much more in dreams than they do in reality. She wanted to tell her that having something second doesn't mean that it is worth any less. She wanted to tell her that the burden of years not lived isn't a burden but a gift. But she didn't really worry about it because she knew that she would be able to tell her soon enough. She was twenty-three and she'd be dead for five hundred years before she was born.
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