InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Letting Go ❯ Letting Go ( Chapter 1 )

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Title: Letting Go
Genre: Drama
Character: Kagome
Rating: G
Disclaimer: I don't own Inuyasha.

She'd been dreading this moment since the very beginning. No matter how many times she tried to justify a different outcome in her head, every path led back to the same terrible conclusion.

Once the jewel was completed, she'd have no concrete reason to keep traveling through time, and she'd be sent back to the present. Alone.

Over the few months she had spent in the past she'd shown her share of bravery; holding her own in a world that up until her fifteenth birthday she could only have dreamed about. She'd faced countless demons, and stood up to evil more times than she cared to remember.

But this was far more difficult to face than any enemy she'd ever encountered. To leave behind a life that had taught her more than any stupid class in her modern-day school ever could. To leave behind people she had grown to love with all her heart.

Hands shaking, she quietly gathered her meager belongings, and collected a small object from each of her friends. She paused for a moment before one of them, lifted a necklace over her head, and laid the completed jewel in the lap of the sleeping hanyou. Taking one last heartbreaking look at her sleeping companions, she began the lonely trek to the well.

She walked quickly, for fear that one of her companions would wake and find her missing, cursing herself for lacking the courage to say goodbye.

As she fell through the well for the last time, and landed without incident at the bottom in her own time she let out a breath that she hadn't even realized she'd been holding.

`It's over,' she thought incredulously, for the moment lacking the strength of will to pull herself out of the well, `It's really over.'

The years went by, and somehow, she continued to live. At first she had thought of her former companions constantly, finding herself feeling guilty for the times her mind wandered away from the Senkou Jidai, but as time passed she thought of them less and less. The present became more important than the regrets of the past.

But still, from time to time she would pull a battered old yellow backpack out of the back of her closet, and run her fingers over the things she had taken to remember her companions by.

A small wooden top, a poison mask, a string of prayer beads, and a rosary of purple beads.

She would hold each object close to her heart, and then put it back into the backpack and stow it back in the closet with a sigh.

She would never forget them, but somehow she had finally found the courage to let them go.