Standing on that weedy pavement in the baking sun, Kagome stared at this unlikely place where her life in the Modern Era had changed forever. 

Having learned from her mother the name of the medicine she’d need to save Rin, Kagome had come here, to buy it illegally from Tachiyama-san, a pharmacist and old family friend. A man who had once put his warm damp hand on Kagome’s shoulder when she was a little girl and told her to come to him if she ‘ever needed anything. Anything at all.’

So Kagome came to him now. 

She entered into his store at night, just as he was closing shop. She went up to him at the counter where he smiled at her in slow, easy surprise. 

“Kagome-chan…you’ve grown so pretty.”

Kagome smiled back without thinking, and pleaded her case. She told him the drug she needed and how she had money to pay.

“I don’t need money, Kagome-chan,” he’d said with another easy smile. Patting her cheek, he’d turned toward his locked drug closet and opened it with a key he stuffed back deep into his coat pocket. “Just come in here, and I’ll fetch it for you while you tell me how you’ve been.”

Some intuition kept Kagome rooted to the spot. It was an intuition she dismissed when she followed Tachiyama-san into the drug closet. When after a few minutes of idle chit-chat, he returned with the dispensed drug in hand and then slammed the door locked shut behind her and forced her up against it. 

Kagome screamed when his mouth came down hard on hers. He was just a man. Just a rather short and flabby old man, but his fingers bit into her arms as he forced them back like they were nothing. As he pinned her to the door like a cat pinning a mouse.

She had fought demons toe to toe and won. Who was this guy? He was just a man. Just a man, and she stood no chance against him. He was just a man, and he was going to rape her.

His fingers shoved up under her dress, wedging between her thighs. He forced her panties aside and plunged up roughly into her.

“Oh, Kagome-chan. You’re so hot and tight…”

Kagome’s stomach roiled. She wanted to vomit. She screamed.

But no one could hear her.

No one was coming to save her, not this time. Hopeless as she felt, a steely cord tightened in her as she accepted this fact. Repulsed as she felt, she forced herself to soften in her attacker’s arms, as if she liked how he was assaulting her. He groaned into her neck. He let down his guard and slackened his grip, and the moment he did, Kagome brought her knee up hard into his unsuspecting balls.

Tachiyama let out a shrilling cry as he collapsed to his knees, clutching between them. Plastered to the door, Kagome stared down at him, paralyzed. 

Then, she remembered the key.

Loathsomely, she scrabbled for it in his pocket where he writhed, and retrieved it. She burst through the drug closet door. She raced across the store to the exit, only to find it locked as well—by some other key. In her panic, Kagome grabbed a stool at the bar counter nearby. She smashed the legs of it through the glass storefront, then hurled herself outside. With the drug to her breast, she didn’t stop running until she reached her own house door. 

It had been her mother who’d told her to stay on the run, after that. To stay in Sengoku Jidai, where she would be safe from prosecution. Her mother’s instinct had been right, of course. The prosecution had been relentless in her case. There had even been media coverage on it— ‘unhinged hypochondriac girl assaults and burglarizes local pharmacist.’ Conveniently enough, there was no saved security camera footage from within Tachiyama Pharmacy. There was only street-camera footage of Kagome bursting with stolen drugs in hand through the shattered store window and fleeing the scene.

The news reporters had even gone so far as to dig into Kagome’s murky past. They’d interviewed her school teachers and old schoolmates about her dubious long ‘absences.’ It still bothered Kagome to learn that Hojo had been among those sour former acquaintances to turn on her and fuel the infamy. He’d seemed to have cared for her so much—overly much—and yet to read his quote in the paper where he described her as ‘flaky and detached’ still stung. Maybe in part because there was some truth to it.

Kagome didn’t know where she belonged. Long before she’d ever traveled through that well.

All she knew was that she didn’t belong here, in this particular place of bad memories. And so she pushed Shin on, away from that blighted storefront, never to pass by it again.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi