0o0o0o0o i likes that!

that was disturbing..  but not in the way that one might think.. it was more disturbing that one so full of life would feel so unwanted, unneeded, and lonely that she would willing lay her life down to be something for someone, in such a sense.  why wouldn't she just choose to travel with him, while still living?  that's what i don't understand...  

very well written by the way :)

I suppose I am being asked a question. 

Or several.

"Do you need to be loved?"

I do. 

"Do you need to love?"

I do; I cannot take someone's love and give them an empty basket to amuse themselves with.

"Are you capable of loving?"

Now...that I'm not so certain of. I have always found it very hard to feel real, marrow-deep love for anyone. Not even my family. Affection comes easy to me, love...is a toss up that I'm waiting for.

"If you were capable of loving, would you be able to understand? That someone's need for love may be yours to fulfil?"

I don't think so. I truly doubt I have that sort of perceptiveness.

"If you were given to understand the above...would you do it? Woud you love them no matter what sort of love they needed?"

And this...is where I flee the conversation, because I do not even know what I am being asked. 


So this chapter came to me as a complete surprise. Not in the content - but in the lengths to which someone can go to attain, and provide love. How, to some people, love is truly the greatest reason for anything they do, anything they live for, everything they choose to die for.

I don't think I could die for love. Especially because I have not experienced such love, not on the giver's end nor on the receiver's. So to die for love - not a a sacrifice or out of grief or something dramatic along those lines, but to simply choose to die because that is the only way you can show you love...it's incomprehendible to me. I can't understand the motivation behind it - because i have the feeling it might break something in me f I tried to delve into how much onw would want to love and be loved, to reach such a state where it is the ony thing they are.

The very idea is terrifying. Terrifying, how much loneliness and emptiness and hollowness and brittle, fragile pain must be handled with every breath, waking and sleeping, to reach here. To do this. To love this. To just...love.

Thank you for showing me...someday I might grow the fortitude to actually understand it on a purely empathic leve instead of a cursory perceptive one. 

I think you have just cemented yourself as my favorite fanfiction author. Only you could write this and not gross me out.

WTH HAT! o_________________________o i have no idea what to say to that. sweet? O_o

DUUUUDE! I didn't even think of cannabilism. I was more like awwww he carries her in him...I think I just found out something disturbing about myself. -shrugs- Oh well. Beautifully written, lovely.

Til next time

OH.MY.GOD. WOW. That's all I can say, really, besides the fact that you did an amazing job with the whole cannabilism part because I was totally entranced with the romance of it. xD

Oh, and because I'm stupid - I forgot to tell you that this was really well written and I really, really liked it. I liked it better than the previous one, to be honest! With Sess you expect darkness, but Kagome-in-despair is a fun thing to read cuz she's always so freaking annoyingly optimistic otherwise. >_>

Aaaaaaaaaaaand I just realised that my review was almost as long as your chappie. XD Sorry about all the essay-writing for something you already knew. XDD Cuz..you...wrote it. XD

Again.

You know, I'm suspecting that this isn't so much about angst as it is a rather cynically realistic version of the future of Inuyasha canon. 

Facts in hand - a 15 year old teenager, who speaks, walks, acts, thinks and boasts an attitude like a typica teenager is thrown into a nightmare borne from her own body and her own past. Forget the stress of dealing with being at the centre of a war for nuclear grade destructive power, the events of Inuyasha must have left her unsure of her very identity.

"Who am I? Am I Kikyo? Am I the heroine here? Am I just a punching bag? Am I the new goldfish when everyone would just rather have the original one? Am I better? Can I be better? Can I at least pretend to be better? Can I just give it 200 per cent and hope that the effort counts for something, even it doesn't make me better? Am I here to stay? Am I wanted? Am I needed? If Kikyo's back, should I return to my own era where I at least know what I'm going about? What if I can't stay here? WIll I be able to survive the modern era? What will I do if I stay here at the end? Will I be a priestess for real? What will I do if I can't? Will I even be able to get into college and get a job with the way my education's going? Will I ever find love? Should I just date Hojou? Is it okay to go on loving Inuyasha? Is it okay to be second place? Is it okay to be known simply for trying, trying, trying and never really getting anything done?"

And I'm sure that that's just a part of what would have gone through a normal teenager's head. A teenager who must know, somewhere, hat they're in over their head and trying their brains out to just...try. Try to do something or be something, is all they can ever really accomplish. 

If they had any self respect, they would do just that. They would give everything the best they had to give, knowing all the time time that their best was near useless, but hoping that the law of averages would give them a break somewhere. 

In a reasonable utopia, it might.

In the real world, that's a dream best left in the sandbox. It's the age of be-or-nothing. One of those is enough to handle for any given person. Kagome found herself dealing with TWO such worlds. And so she perhaps found her 200 per cent mutating to 400 per cent. Half for one world and half for the other, and found herself burnt out. 

Perhaps she was so busy just trying her bestest best that she never really bothered to think whether it was worth it, whether she was doing it the right way or whether it was even needed. She wanted to be an achiever, but put in the effort of an overachiever without once pausing to think that her completely innefectual averageness had doomed her from the start. 

In a reasonabe world, she would have found herself in the psychiatrist's office, getting help. Getting somewhere at last. 

In the real world, she found herself being asked to give one last shot of everything - this time for herself and no one else. Naturally, she finally discovers that she doesn't even exist, and why would anyone give anything for a ghost who never really was? 

And I am thoroughly awed that you managed to put all that together without being prompted. Takes a special kind of guts to see it, much less to show it. 

Hmm.

I read. I understand.

Except one thing, and it's a question I'd want to ask personally.

Why didn't he stop it?

And why do I feel that if he had retained his cold heartlessness, his apathy and disdain of emotions, he would have gone inside that restaurant and told her exactly what she needed to know?

Perhaps he was right. Emotions do make a person weaker.

It's disturbingly  beautiful, almost poetic.

This, Hattery. This.

Just this.

How often do we centre our stories around the jewel? How often do we speak of what's inside the jewel? How often do we manipulate and analyse and deconstruct and flanderise the jewel?

Times enough, I suppose.

But how often has anyone bothered - or dared - to remember that the jewel is an entity on its own, to peek into its mind and express everything, every last bit of unreason and unlogic and power and hate and viciousness there is inside that thing?

You catalogued everything that has happened to the jewel - the circumstances of its creation, the usage of it as a tool to ruin people, the shattering of it in a million pieces and finally the repairing of it, only to feed it into destruction, complete destruction right after.

And you correctly deemed that such a life cycle would turn anything insane. The more powerful, the more insane.

I can't see this story as being about Kagome at all - she isn't important. Excep that she's very important. She was supposed to be the jewel's final refuge. Her own body cushioned and sheltered it, her powers cloaking its presence. And then, she was careless enough to let it be ripped from her, compounding her error by breaking the thing into a million pieces. To the jewel, it must seem like betrayal of the highest order, which is why it's turned its fury onto her, not doubt. She wouldn't let it live peacefully inside her body, so now it will destroy her mind while preserving that selfsame body. Much like ruining a family because you loved the house too much.

I am going to admit to one thing that may shock you. I am glad. Glad, glad, glad that Kagome will kill Sesshoumaru's child. He deserves it. The child does not, but he will deserve every last inch of that agony. Because after knowing what will happen to Kagome, knowing that all she wanted, all she has left in her destroyed life and self and all that she will repeatedly torture herself for - all that she wants, pleads from him is to put her out of her misery. A bit like a lame horse that cannot walk or run or stand any more, to the point that keeping it alive would be sheer cruelty of the most horrible kind. And Sesshoumaru makes it worse, because unlike an animal, Kagome CAN plead for an end. And he refused to give it to her, prolonging her suffering and multiplying it through the centuries.

No one deserves that sort of stretching destruction, and she had to take it because one arrogant, disdainful youkai had no mercy. No, not that he hadn't mercy. It was that he was disgusted and punished her for his disgust and couldn't be bothered to see beyond it and find a scrap of humane reasoning within himself. A fine end he gave, to someone who had once been his ally, his distant family and a powerful, blameless girl who didn't wish this on herself.

So...I'm glad she kills his child. Bastard deserves it. And what is more, in my headcanon for this story, after he dies himself and comes to the afterlife, he will find a message waiting for him. A message telling him why his child died, and that one small act of mercy by him could have prevented it. In my headcanon, he knows, eventually, that he brought it on himself, and destroyed a young life just as surely as he had destroyed an older, far more pitiable and anguished one.

And I see Kagome laughing as she tells him that, and walking away with the spirit of his child - his child who rejects him because the child now knows the reason behind its death. And strangely enough, agrees with its killer.

Damn, where are all these great ideas coming from? Lol. Wait! I don't really care for the answer to that question, instead, just keep it coming! Haha. :)

D: So sadddd. I can't imagine Kagome going through all that D: Waahhhh, BT, now I'm emo!

-MissKatt

Wow, I loved this, and it was just so amazing. I could practically feel her pain and the anger and accomplishment of the jewel. :)

Oh but I forgot to add that the last line is totally evil though! And cool even though it spells out doom for Kagome

See I kept figuring out whose perspective that was being written under and for some reason I though it might be Sesshoumaru that cursed her... I don't know why but then when you posted at the end that it was the jewel it all made sense! So although it was angsty I didn't find it as much... more relieved at the end that it wasn't Sesshoumaru that had cursed her...can you tell how much of a mushy mood I'm in... Awesome chapter though I don't think I've ever read anything from the perspective of the jewel... it was interesting and angsty. :)