Chapter 1: Death is Just the Beginning

Authors Note: This story has a character driven plot. This is my take on what happens at the end of the manga and how Kagome will deal with the cards that fate has laid out for her. There are mild spoilers, but no major ones and only ones from the beginning of the manga.

Summary: Naraku is defeated, the jewel has been completed, and the well has permanently sealed Inuyasha in the past and Kagome in present. How does Kagome deal with her separation from Inuyasha? How does this separation affect the course that her life takes in modern Japan?

Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha, the well, or even my own heart. Inuyasha and the well are products of Rumiko Takahashi's fertile imagination. My heart belongs to my spouse.

Dedication: I am dedicating this story to Resmiranda, whose story, Tales From the House of the Moon, has enriched my life with her brilliant depictions of Kagome and Sesshomaru and their struggles as they deal with their bereavement.

Sigmund Freud on Grief: "We find a place for what we lose. Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else." E.L. Freud Letters of Sigmund Freud

Present day – 13 years after she first fell into the well

One day, there was a miko who fell through a well into an enchanted land. In the enchanted land she met a prince and fell in love. But the love was ill-fated, for no sooner than the words of love had passed the prince's mouth, the miko was banished from the enchanted land and returned to her home alone, never to see the prince again.

'Damn,' Kagome thought as she read Dr. Miyo Sato's Collection of Rare Fairy-Tales of the Sengoku Jidai, 'I am not going to cry in the middle of the library. I've cried three times already today, and I refuse to cry again.' But seeing both the happiest and saddest moments of her life reduced to a trite fairy-tale of no more than three sentences angered her. The casual reader might feel a slight pang of sadness upon reading this, but they would feel nothing of the rapturous joy that his confession of love had brought her or the numbing confusion and despair that accompanied her abrupt and unexpected separation from him.

Kagome was currently indulging in her weekly ritual of torture. At the end of the work week, after finishing her shift at Toyko Hospital as a pediatrician, she allowed herself the dubious pleasure of digging through mountains of information at the public library about the Sengoku Jidai period, looking for any mention of Sango, Miroku, Shippo, herself or him, especially him. She almost always thought of Inuyasha as him now. Just the mention of his name still had the power to bring tears to eyes. The abrupt manner of their parting ten years ago in her life and 500 year ago in the past had left a gaping hole in her heart, and she had given up trying to fill it. Or at least that's what she told herself. The truth was that she hadn't really given up, only she was trying to fill the hole with him, little pieces of him left behind in fairy-tales and folk-lore of Sengoku Jidai period. Maybe if she found enough pieces, she might, almost, maybe, possibly feel whole again. And maybe she would sprout wings and fly. She knew that it wouldn't really work, in fact couldn't work, but it was all that she had left of him. Every reference, every story was like drops of water on her parched heart, not enough to revive it from its withered state, but enough to tease and make her thirsty for more.

And she fully intended to continue her search for those golden drops of him that were like manna to her heart, as long as her mother and Souta didn't find out. If they knew what she was doing, they would worry, and she had worried them both enough to last several lifetimes. She had seen the lines of worry and stress etched into mother's face, and her brother Souta had been forced to leave his childhood behind too early – and it was all her fault. When she was still able to travel through the well, she had tried to play down the dangers she had faced to keep her mother from worrying, but she knew her mother had worried anyway. Her mom had been aware of the dangers, though by silent agreement neither broached the subject when she would return home for her exams or to get more supplies. It wasn't until the long after the well had closed that she became fully aware of the effect her time travel had had on her mother. But that stress was nothing compared to the worry and anxiety the family had faced the first year after her sudden and permanent return to the modern world.

10 years ago – Modern era

The first month after the well had closed, Kagome had remained optimistic. After all, she loved Inuyasha, and he had finally admitted that he loved her. That meant they were supposed to be together. Brought together across time to meet, fall in love, and save the world. Surely, they had earned their happily-ever-after ending. Surely the fates were not so cruel. Surely she deserved to be with the hanyou she loved more than life itself, and any other possible outcome had been completely unthinkable. She would try the well two or three times each day, once on the way to school, once when she arrived home before studying. Sometimes, late at night when she could not sleep, she would creep through the darkness to try the well again. She was always thinking, Just one more time and the well will work. Each time, she would use her miko powers to try to make the well respond, force the magic catch and carry her back to the arms of her hanyou. But it never worked. Sometimes she thought if she just wished hard enough or dug deep enough into the moist soil of the well, it would answer the sincerity of her desire and open up for her. But the strength of her need and the strength of her powers proved useless against the seal of the well. The well had remained silent and closed.

By the second month, panic had started to edge its way into her consciousness. She tried to remain optimistic, but more often than not, it was despair and tears that greeted her at night than hope for the new day. She begged her family, and they brought priests and mikos from across Japan to examine the well. The well had been chanted over so often that the combined voices of their chants seemed to echo hollowly from its depth long after the priests had left. Sutras covered the aged wood, making the well resemble more of an origami experiment gone bad than a portal to another time and another life. But none of the chants, the sutras or her tears – of course, "crying never accomplished anything" - had worked. The well had remained stubbornly closed.

Up to this point, she had harbored the hope that Inuyasha might be able to come for her, if not from the well, then through the passage of time. But his failure to make an appearance convinced her of two things that struck horror and pain into the deepest part of her heart. First, he could no longer reach through the well and was stuck in his time just as she was stuck in hers. Second, he was no longer alive in modern Tokyo. Somewhere, sometime in the last 500 years, he had died. No other force on this earth could have kept him from her. This second revelation she had long suspected was true even before the well was closed. After all, he could not exist in two places in this era each time he came through the well to drag her back to fulfill her duty as his shard-detector and, more importantly, as his companion. For that same reason, she knew there was no reincarnation of him in modern Tokyo or modern anywhere. His soul could not exist in two places any more than his body could.

By the third month, desperation led her to raid her grandfather's collection of ancient texts. She stopped going to school and spent all of her waking hours searching for how to reopen the well. She refused to stop even for meals and would only eat if food were brought to her. After exhausting her grandfather's collection, she went from shrine to shrine, searching for her answer. Finally, she found herself searching through the public libraries. At this point, she knew it was all but hopeless. If the shrines did not contain the information she sought, the chances were far less that the library would. But that slight, almost impossible possibility kept her searching. For, if she were ever to see Inuyasha again, she had to reopen the portal in the well. And the thought of never seeing him, never touching him, never sitting him again was unbearable. It was far worse than spending hours of every day bent over obscure, dusty tombs. Far worse than hunger or fatigue or the ache of her own body. Far worse than even the thought of her own death. Because life without Inuyasha was death.

A month and a half into her frantic research, her family confronted her. In no uncertain terms, they had told her that she could not continue as she had been. She was hurting her health and, as she looked into the careworn faces of her family, she realized she was hurting them too. Suddenly, she was awash in shame. She had been so focused on returning to Inuyasha that she had forgotten her family was suffering along with her. Inuyasha would not have wanted them to suffer, any more than he would have wanted her to make herself sick by exhausting herself each day as she searched for a way back to him. Nevermind that concerns over his own health would never have stopped him from doing the same. She could hear his chastisement echoing in her mind already. But even as she inwardly cringed at the thought of his rebuke, she desperately wished he had been here to deliver it in person. What she would not give to hear him call her 'wench' just one more time. At this point, she would even be glad to hear him mistakenly call her 'Kikyo'.

So, Kagome reluctantly agreed to return to school, with the provision that she would be allowed to continue her search for a way back to the hanyou to whom she had given her heart. She found it entirely ironic and painful that the heart she left 500 years in the past still insisted on beating in her chest.

So with a heart that insisted on beating, Kagome returned to school to find that her mind insisted on learning even if the information did not bring her any closer to opening the well. So with her mind stuffed with useless information – at least from her point of view – she would return the library every evening to continue her search. Sometimes she felt like her brain was overflowing, and that if she tried to cram any more information into it, all of it would begin to pour over the edge of her skull and be lost. But mostly, she felt like she was in between – in between hope and despair, in between trying her best and giving up, in between intellectually knowing that she could not return and accepting it. And so she continued her search. And slowly, the knowledge that she had been avoiding crept into her mind, gathered on the fringes, and waited for a weak moment to enter.

That moment came on the six month anniversary of the portal closing. She had read that people who lost loved ones could open portals through time with their heart's blood. Less than an hour later, she found herself at the bottom of the well, her ankle sprained, and blood slowly seeping out from a slash she had given herself across one of her wrist. All she could think was that the passage she had read had sounded so promising, she could not fathom why it had not worked. And then she had burst into tears.

That was how Souta had found her thirty minutes later. He had crawled down the ladder to carry her back up the well. As he reached down to pick her up, he noticed the slash across her wrist. He hadn't said anything, just pressed a handkerchief across her wound to stop the bleeding and pressed his lips together to stop the words. Kagome knew Souta was thinking she was suicidal, but she was so miserable at the moment that she couldn't bring herself to correct him.

So she had clung tightly to his shoulders as he lifted her onto his back to carry her out of the well. All the way up the well, through the courtyard and into the house, she continued to sob onto his shoulder. Her mother had taken one look at Kagome before telling Souta to carry her upstairs to the bathroom. Mrs. Higurashi had bathed her and bandaged her wounds before tucking her into bed. Silently, her mother had stroked her hair and back until she fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning Kagome could not find the will to get up. On the heels of that revelation came the knowledge that she had lost her appetite as well. Food tasted like chalk to her, and she could barely stand to eat. Thoughts of her worried family forced a few bites of each meal down her throat before she would send them away, almost, but not quite untouched. She could tell that they were all afraid she was suicidal. They thought now that her apparent attempt to bleed to death at the bottom of the well had failed, she was trying to starve to death instead. But nothing could be further than the truth. She wanted to live, because as long as she was alive now, part of Inuyasha was too. Only, she could not quite find the strength to get up yet. She knew that one day she would, but that day was not the today. And that day was not the next day, or the next day, or the many days that followed, slowly flowing into months. Because she knew that the day she got up and faced the world again, would be the day she would have to face a world without Inuyasha in it. And she just couldn't do that yet.

Ironically, it was for Inuyasha that she finally left bed one morning, went downstairs, and calmly told her mother that she was ready to start living again. And her first task in this new world of the living was to eat a healthy breakfast, followed by a week of slowly recovering her strength before returning to school.

The next week she returned to school with a new determination – she never wanted anyone else to suffer the excruciating pain of an untimely separation that she and Inuyasha had. If she could save others from that pain, then maybe her own pain would not seem so meaningless simply because others were able to benefit from it. And so she studied, and ate right, and slept well – all so that she could graduate, get into college and eventually follow a career in medicine. Because in this era, it wasn't warriors who held back death, but doctors.

Present Day Tokyo, at the library

Kagome closed the book and surreptitiously wiped her eyes. She knew the librarians already thought she was eccentric in her reading habits. She didn't want them to think she was mentally unhinged as well, crying over children's fairy-tales and stories from ancient folk-lore.

Wearily, she returned the book to the stacks and headed home. Tonight's visit had been worth it. She had found a passage about him – and even better, it was about the two of them together. It was one more piece of him she could use to fill the hole in her heart that his presence used to occupy. But like any heart operation, it hurt as it healed.