Love and Other Mistakes, Chapter 1: Realization
Title: Love and Other Mistakes
Author: Dreaming of Everything dreams_of_all
Series: Inuyasha
Characters/Pairings: One-sided OFC/Kagome, Inuyasha/Kagome.
Rating/Warnings: K+ (PG) or T. One-sided hypothetical femslash. OMG, you guys, rating for lesbians!
Summary: Hanako is in love with Kagome who is, unfortunately for her, in love with Inuyasha. She's also straight, which really isn't helping.
I've always believed in one-true-loves. At least, I believed in my one-true-love.
Her name was Kagome. She was gorgeous: long, wavy black hair, blue-gray eyes and a great smile. That's what I remember most-she was always smiling.
It's funny, isn't it? How I talk about her as if she's dead? She isn't, of course. She's as alive as any of us, but not as easy to contact. It's a funny story, actually.
But I forget that you don't know who I am. My name, as generic as the rest of me is, is Yoshida Hanako, and I'm about the same age as Kagome, sixteen. I have straight black hair just past my shoulders and dark brown eyes, making me as ordinary as paint. Completely unextraordinairy, to look at, at least. In reality, there are two things that separate me from the rest of the thousands of Japanese schoolgirls who otherwise could, more or less, be me.
The first, the simpler one, is that I am a homosexual. A lesbian. I am a girl, but I love other girls, and not in a sisterly way. Nobody beyond my family knew, of course, it wasn't something you told people, and I had never had many close friends. I did have friends, of course, I wasn't that divorced from reality! But I wasn't a socialite, and I was never one of those people who confided my secrets in others. There was always too much potential for things to go wrong.
I'm sure several people (though never Kagome herself, thank goodness!) knew of my... Well, obsession is probably the best word for it. I was as subtle as I could be, but you can only do so much. At least they all assumed that I just respected her, looked up to her. That made sense; Kagome got good grades, had three close friends, and boys had been noticing her since she was twelve. About the age I noticed her, actually, although back then I didn't recognize my crush for what it was. I had just assumed that I wanted to be her friend. It hadn't worked, of course, or things would have happened very differently.
Even back then she was already friends with Eri, Yuka and Ayumi, and the four of them were too close for a fifth. I was a the fifth wheel, and quickly gave up. Kagome was nice, if distant, but the antagonism of Eri, Ayumi and, to a lesser extent, Yuka, was too much.
Still, the attraction didn't go away. I eventually realized I was in love. That had been startling to realize-suddenly everything that had made me stand out, feel somehow flawed, had a name. I wasn't the only one, I wasn't uniquely defective. Those moments when I thought that I was the only one, because I was the only one in the class who never talked about which boy I wanted to date, and who I thought my first kiss would be with, were some of the most frightening of my life, even now. Even with what happened.
Which brings me to the other detail that separated me from my peers. This is actually a much longer story, one best told from the beginning. Actually, you've already heard the very beginning, the prologue, if you will.
I was in love with Kagome for years before things started to change. It started with a few absences, explained as an illness or two by her grandfather. That wasn't out of the ordinary, even if it wasn't completely normal. As time passed on though, and she remained absent for a week or more, and then weeks, and the illnesses used to explain her absences got stranger and stranger-she had AIDS one week, and the next leukemia, with scurvy in-between-it became painfully obvious that she wasn't actually sick, and her grandfather (who might have been a touch on the senile side) was covering for something else. Because I loved Kagome, deeply and with all my heart, I was already interested, but this new mystery only added fuel to the fire.
Even odder was that I seemed to be the only person who noticed something off about the string of 'illnesses' that caused her absences. While it was understandable that most of the class had no interest in her beyond knowing who she was, you'd think they'd notice when the same student is diagnosed with whooping cough and then debilitating athlete's foot. I mean, I know at least one of them is planning to become a doctor. Didn't they notice anything wrong?
And then there were her friends, Eri, Ayumi and Yuka. Shallow and gossip-minded as they were (and I would be the first to tell you that) they honestly cared for Kagome, or at least I thought they did. Could they truly be that blind? It was stunning, and rather horrifying.
Hojo definitely cared about Kagome, to the point where it was unhealthy. It's actually understandable, considering it's him we're talking about, that he honestly didn't realize there was something off about the whole thing; Hojo's basically a human Irish setter, slavishly devoted to his "owner" and hanging on her every word, but not much in the brains or common-sense department, and with selective hearing and eyesight. It was fairly obvious, even to someone who didn't have a lot invested in their relationship (which I did) that she was merely giving him token affection out of a sense of duty or pity, but certainly didn't see him as a love interest.
Ayumi, Yuka and Eri, of course, all had crushes on Hojo, to a certain degree, and were intensely happy that he had asked Kagome out. They viewed him as the penultimate boyfriend: a human Irish setter. More than a bit depressing, really. I was happy that Kagome showed no signs of returning Hojo's affections.
Then things changed for the worse. She started talking about a new boyfriend, a pig-headed jerk who never listened to her and was about as sensitive to her feelings as a rock. Despite all that, she seemed more-or-less in love with him, something the always-clueless trio was either unaware of or pointedly ignoring. She'd talk with him on the few days she wasn't sick, or rather, should I say, "sick," because she was far too healthy for someone with TB, meningitis and heart palpitations who was recovering from surgery for internal reconstruction, whatever that was. During that period of time, I regularly wondered if someone in their family was a hypochondriac. It would have explained a lot.
But I'm side-tracking. It's still strange to talk about, even later, and it's still hard to tell what was important, and what wasn't, what makes so much more sense now and what I'm still not sure of; what seems important but really isn't. It's odd.
It really broke my heart when I realized she was in love, and with a boy. There was still a chance she liked my gender, at least, but the odds of her liking other girls had plummeted from since when she had shown no interest in Hojo, or any other boy, for that matter, something that had made me deliriously happy. Here she was, now, happily in love, and with a guy, a male of the species, who was a jerk of the first water as well. My heart felt like it was tearing when I saw that, beneath the anger and the impatience and the self-righteous indignation that poured out of her when she talked about him, she loved him.
She loved him. I believed in one-true-loves, and Kagome had found hers, and it wasn't me.
It took a day and a half to sink in, and when it finally did I went home early, after explaining that I was feeling the onset of the measles, and wanted to be home before it got worse. It worked for Kagome, and it worked for me; I made it home quickly and spent the next two days crying over my desk, spotting the papers littering it-the detritus of a school project on Japan's religious history-with tears. My mother, understanding, quietly left plates of food just inside my door, probably remembering her own teenage years. My father was unsure of the situation, tip-toeing around my room as if his very presence would set off a crying, teenage-girl hormone bomb. My older brother was completely clueless, even beyond what's normal, and even considering that he was nearly never at home, always off with his friends.
It was at the end of that second day that it happened. When a plate slipped from my hands, crashing against my desk, I reached over to pick up the pieces and accidentally cut myself, a long, thin shallow cut that bled dramatically, not really hurting. The blood dripped from my hands onto the tear-wet papers on my desk, falling onto an old charm, one I found going through our family files, I was using for my project. My heart ached with sorrow and a stubborn refusal to admit the truth.
Magical energy swirled around me, painful. I remember screaming, and then green.
Author: Dreaming of Everything dreams_of_all
Series: Inuyasha
Characters/Pairings: One-sided OFC/Kagome, Inuyasha/Kagome.
Rating/Warnings: K+ (PG) or T. One-sided hypothetical femslash. OMG, you guys, rating for lesbians!
Summary: Hanako is in love with Kagome who is, unfortunately for her, in love with Inuyasha. She's also straight, which really isn't helping.
I've always believed in one-true-loves. At least, I believed in my one-true-love.
Her name was Kagome. She was gorgeous: long, wavy black hair, blue-gray eyes and a great smile. That's what I remember most-she was always smiling.
It's funny, isn't it? How I talk about her as if she's dead? She isn't, of course. She's as alive as any of us, but not as easy to contact. It's a funny story, actually.
But I forget that you don't know who I am. My name, as generic as the rest of me is, is Yoshida Hanako, and I'm about the same age as Kagome, sixteen. I have straight black hair just past my shoulders and dark brown eyes, making me as ordinary as paint. Completely unextraordinairy, to look at, at least. In reality, there are two things that separate me from the rest of the thousands of Japanese schoolgirls who otherwise could, more or less, be me.
The first, the simpler one, is that I am a homosexual. A lesbian. I am a girl, but I love other girls, and not in a sisterly way. Nobody beyond my family knew, of course, it wasn't something you told people, and I had never had many close friends. I did have friends, of course, I wasn't that divorced from reality! But I wasn't a socialite, and I was never one of those people who confided my secrets in others. There was always too much potential for things to go wrong.
I'm sure several people (though never Kagome herself, thank goodness!) knew of my... Well, obsession is probably the best word for it. I was as subtle as I could be, but you can only do so much. At least they all assumed that I just respected her, looked up to her. That made sense; Kagome got good grades, had three close friends, and boys had been noticing her since she was twelve. About the age I noticed her, actually, although back then I didn't recognize my crush for what it was. I had just assumed that I wanted to be her friend. It hadn't worked, of course, or things would have happened very differently.
Even back then she was already friends with Eri, Yuka and Ayumi, and the four of them were too close for a fifth. I was a the fifth wheel, and quickly gave up. Kagome was nice, if distant, but the antagonism of Eri, Ayumi and, to a lesser extent, Yuka, was too much.
Still, the attraction didn't go away. I eventually realized I was in love. That had been startling to realize-suddenly everything that had made me stand out, feel somehow flawed, had a name. I wasn't the only one, I wasn't uniquely defective. Those moments when I thought that I was the only one, because I was the only one in the class who never talked about which boy I wanted to date, and who I thought my first kiss would be with, were some of the most frightening of my life, even now. Even with what happened.
Which brings me to the other detail that separated me from my peers. This is actually a much longer story, one best told from the beginning. Actually, you've already heard the very beginning, the prologue, if you will.
I was in love with Kagome for years before things started to change. It started with a few absences, explained as an illness or two by her grandfather. That wasn't out of the ordinary, even if it wasn't completely normal. As time passed on though, and she remained absent for a week or more, and then weeks, and the illnesses used to explain her absences got stranger and stranger-she had AIDS one week, and the next leukemia, with scurvy in-between-it became painfully obvious that she wasn't actually sick, and her grandfather (who might have been a touch on the senile side) was covering for something else. Because I loved Kagome, deeply and with all my heart, I was already interested, but this new mystery only added fuel to the fire.
Even odder was that I seemed to be the only person who noticed something off about the string of 'illnesses' that caused her absences. While it was understandable that most of the class had no interest in her beyond knowing who she was, you'd think they'd notice when the same student is diagnosed with whooping cough and then debilitating athlete's foot. I mean, I know at least one of them is planning to become a doctor. Didn't they notice anything wrong?
And then there were her friends, Eri, Ayumi and Yuka. Shallow and gossip-minded as they were (and I would be the first to tell you that) they honestly cared for Kagome, or at least I thought they did. Could they truly be that blind? It was stunning, and rather horrifying.
Hojo definitely cared about Kagome, to the point where it was unhealthy. It's actually understandable, considering it's him we're talking about, that he honestly didn't realize there was something off about the whole thing; Hojo's basically a human Irish setter, slavishly devoted to his "owner" and hanging on her every word, but not much in the brains or common-sense department, and with selective hearing and eyesight. It was fairly obvious, even to someone who didn't have a lot invested in their relationship (which I did) that she was merely giving him token affection out of a sense of duty or pity, but certainly didn't see him as a love interest.
Ayumi, Yuka and Eri, of course, all had crushes on Hojo, to a certain degree, and were intensely happy that he had asked Kagome out. They viewed him as the penultimate boyfriend: a human Irish setter. More than a bit depressing, really. I was happy that Kagome showed no signs of returning Hojo's affections.
Then things changed for the worse. She started talking about a new boyfriend, a pig-headed jerk who never listened to her and was about as sensitive to her feelings as a rock. Despite all that, she seemed more-or-less in love with him, something the always-clueless trio was either unaware of or pointedly ignoring. She'd talk with him on the few days she wasn't sick, or rather, should I say, "sick," because she was far too healthy for someone with TB, meningitis and heart palpitations who was recovering from surgery for internal reconstruction, whatever that was. During that period of time, I regularly wondered if someone in their family was a hypochondriac. It would have explained a lot.
But I'm side-tracking. It's still strange to talk about, even later, and it's still hard to tell what was important, and what wasn't, what makes so much more sense now and what I'm still not sure of; what seems important but really isn't. It's odd.
It really broke my heart when I realized she was in love, and with a boy. There was still a chance she liked my gender, at least, but the odds of her liking other girls had plummeted from since when she had shown no interest in Hojo, or any other boy, for that matter, something that had made me deliriously happy. Here she was, now, happily in love, and with a guy, a male of the species, who was a jerk of the first water as well. My heart felt like it was tearing when I saw that, beneath the anger and the impatience and the self-righteous indignation that poured out of her when she talked about him, she loved him.
She loved him. I believed in one-true-loves, and Kagome had found hers, and it wasn't me.
It took a day and a half to sink in, and when it finally did I went home early, after explaining that I was feeling the onset of the measles, and wanted to be home before it got worse. It worked for Kagome, and it worked for me; I made it home quickly and spent the next two days crying over my desk, spotting the papers littering it-the detritus of a school project on Japan's religious history-with tears. My mother, understanding, quietly left plates of food just inside my door, probably remembering her own teenage years. My father was unsure of the situation, tip-toeing around my room as if his very presence would set off a crying, teenage-girl hormone bomb. My older brother was completely clueless, even beyond what's normal, and even considering that he was nearly never at home, always off with his friends.
It was at the end of that second day that it happened. When a plate slipped from my hands, crashing against my desk, I reached over to pick up the pieces and accidentally cut myself, a long, thin shallow cut that bled dramatically, not really hurting. The blood dripped from my hands onto the tear-wet papers on my desk, falling onto an old charm, one I found going through our family files, I was using for my project. My heart ached with sorrow and a stubborn refusal to admit the truth.
Magical energy swirled around me, painful. I remember screaming, and then green.