Just some things I wanted to wrap up about this story.

The premise of the story- friends growing apart as they grow older, and the boy problem Kagome has- is actually based on something from my own life. Last May, my younger sister broke up with her boyfriend of two years. She had been engaged to him for nine months. Most of those two years were not spent together because he's in the military. When he got assigned to a base in Great Britain, he convinced her that they should get married as soon as she graduated and have her move with him in England.

He completely destroyed her relationships with all her friends, with all of her family, and had my sister convinced we were the ones being wrong for trying to talk her out of marrying right out of high school. I was one of the few people in the family still on speaking terms with her when she finally realized just how fast she was jumping into things, and how stupid she was for believing he would kill himself if she didn't marry him.

The twist of making the narrator be Hojo came when I was at work. I was thinking of how poorly many of the series characters are portrayed in fanfiction- reduced down to a single quirk and zero personality, so I wanted to show just how deep even a minor character can be. You can see my take on Kikyo (very often portrayed as evil bitch out to kill everyone) in Two Mikos.

I know I'm going to get some whining (and maybe flames) about making Inu-Yasha into the evil boyfriend, even going so far as to make him kill Kikyo. Should I ever get the urge to do a sequel (very unlikely), it will probably come out he was framed for that by someone- Naraku, perhaps? (Just like in the series! I'm sticking to the story, really I am. grins)

But I did need a bad character, and since Inu-Yasha has the dubious pleasure of having an evil 'kill everything' personality when he turns into a demon, so I just borrowed that half.

The real part of the story is the first four chapters, where you really don't know who the two are. The epilogue I just added in so you would know who everyone was.

I suppose my story has two messages. The important one is that you find out who your real friends are when things get their worst. The bonus one is to try and make every character in your stories seem real, even if you don't like them. Hojo's a sweet, oblivious guy, but there's more to him, more to anyone, than just that.

-- Nighthawk

14 August 2004