Her old clothes are, in fact, disgusting, and are also sopping wet. Despite her best efforts at washing them without soap, the blood and several of the dirt stains are already very set, and she's not sure that waving them around in the water was really enough to free them of all of the sweat they've absorbed, either.

This had better make at least one of them comfortable. It's not gonna be her.

"Okay. Done. Is that better."

"Yeah."

"Okay. Well. Good."

Eventually the silence drags on enough that she feels like it counts as permission to change the subject.

"So. What're you gonna do after this."

"Look for the shards. What else?"

"That makes sense."

"I think I'm gonna see if I can go home."

"Huh. Well. See you."

"Mhm. - oh." She's still got the shard she picked up off the ground. She holds it out. 

"Here."

Then he snatches it.

"I'm not giving it back."

"Fine. Good hunting, or whatever. I hope you find them before someone worse does."

"And... thanks for saving my life, and stuff."

"Just don't tell anyone."

And then he would like to LEAVE THIS CONVERSATION PLEASE AND THANK YOU VIA SUPERJUMP.

Huh.

Well, if she does make it to the future - which remains highly unlikely, no matter how doomy she's feeling about staying here, although maybe it'll turn out that she walked into something you can walk back from, like a... fantasy past themed... dream? Secret hyper advanced video game simulation? Alien experiment? - anyway, if she makes it back then nobody will ever believe her anyway, even if she does tell them. Then again, she might have already destroyed the future, and be greeted by a horrible desolate wasteland. But she's not really coming out ahead here, so far, so maybe she'd better go back anyway before she makes things any worse.

She takes another second to squeeze some water out of her hair and clothes. She walks off towards the forest. Nobody stops her. She makes it all the way to the well, this time, and nobody kidnaps her even a little bit.

It's dark down there, and a long way down, but she did make it out once before. In the most likely case, where she just lands at the bottom and has to climb out again, she'll go back to the village and pretend she never tried, and nobody except Inuyasha will ever have to know about it.

She takes a deep breath, steels herself for either possibility, and jumps in.

It's dark in the well. Completely dark, actually; the square of sunlight at the top has vanished. That's - a good sign, right? A sign that something happened? She feels along the edges of the well for the overgrown vines, but they're not there anymore.

...she's stuck at the bottom of this well.

"Sota?"

No answer.

"Ayako? Grandpa?"

Nothing.

"HEY! I'M IN THE WELL! GUYS!"

It'll take quite a while of yelling, but eventually some sunlight illuminates the ceiling of the shed, and her sister's face peers over the edge of the well.

"Kagome! Are you hurt?"

Scrapes, bruising, mild ankle sprain, rope burn, and one stab wound to the gut.

"Not badly! I can climb if you get me a rope!"

Ayako can get a rope, and also get Sota and grandpa. They're all gathered at the top of the well when Kagome climbs up, covered in dirt and blood. 

"'Not badly', huh?"

"Are you okay? Did the ghost do all of that?"

"Uh - most of it. I'm not sure it was a ghost, though. I think it was a demon. It - "

It's so weird. A minute ago, she was - where? The past? A parallel universe? An illusion created by the demon? But the demon is dead...

She sort of thought it would evaporate, if she managed to get back home. Nobody would believe her, and she'd have no way to prove it. But Sota saw the demon, too, and her injuries and the stains on her clothes are still here. 

"I don't know exactly what happened. I know that something pulled me in. A giant centipede monster with the upper body of a woman. And - that it took me somewhere, after it tried to kill me. Or at least it seemed to take me somewhere. I could have hit my head, but - I don't think I could have gotten all of these injuries at the bottom of the well? I think I really ended up somewhere else. The people there said that it was the seventeenth year of Tenbun." She looks at her grandfather, uncertainly. He's the expert. "Could something like that really happen?"

Her grandfather considers.

"It's possible. The bone-devouring well is said to trap the bodies of evil spirits, and make them disappear. If the well is sending them to the past, and one of them pulled Kagome in, then Kagome could have been trapped in the past as well."

"Really?"

He nods gravely. "Had I realized the well was so dangerous, I would have sealed this place up long ago. We should be thankful that Kagome has returned to us, and must ward the well so that nothing can come through again."

There is a strange, silent moment, as if she and Sota and Ayako are all jointly deciding what reality they live in - a world of rational and sane explanations, where supernatural powers are toothless, if they exist at all, or a world where the old dry well contains monsters that try to eat people, which can only be warded off by the power of her grandfather's rituals.

Except - the decision is only important if it's ever going to happen again. If it's just a one-time thing, an isolated incident, it doesn't matter what you believe about it, how totally you think the rules that govern the world once broke. Take it or leave it. Neither is scary if neither is going to have effects. They can ward it, as they would if it the well were dangerous, and they can go on with their lives, as they would if it were nothing. It won't matter which it was. In a few years, it'll be a good story, harmless and already fading, a source of wonder and mystery that demands no further action, disconnected from anything that matters.

"Yeah," says Kagome, after a moment. "Let's seal it."

Her grandfather seals the well. Kagome changes into something less bloodstained. Ayako fusses over her injuries while Kagome draws a map of the past for Sota, going over the main events - here was the well, and here was the sacred tree, where the half-demon boy was pinned by a magic arrow. Here's about where the village was, in relation to both of them, and here's the path she took through the forest to the river that Inuyasha fell in, where a river still runs today. Here's the place where the bandits took her, and the path that she and Inuyasha took back to the village to kill the crow demon. 

It's a lot of adventure, for a day and a half. Enough adventure for anyone, surely. Ayako tells her that everyone ought to have one such youthful adventure, and she's lucky that hers did no damage to anyone. She believes her, now, though she didn't at first. The well is sealed, and no threat to their ordinary lives. They can afford to believe.

Kagome takes a walk outside, as the sun sets and Ayako cooks Kagome's birthday dinner, one day late. She spends a long time looking up through the branches of the sacred tree. Off to one side, easily missed, the very end of an arrow shaft sticks about an inch out of the tree, as if the rest was subsumed long ago, as the tree grew. Kagome remembers that one of the villagers had shot an arrow at her, the first time they saw her with Inuyasha, back when he was still asleep, and the arrow had stuck in the tree. She pulled the magic one out, but the other remained. Since long before Kagome was born, the tree has been growing around it, erasing the only other evidence of Kagome's adventure. 

In a few centuries, the tree will subsume the arrow completely, leaving it impossible to see that the tree was ever struck. Kagome's injuries will heal up in mere weeks, and there will be no evidence but her word that she was ever hurt, either. Even if it is remembered, in some form, it won't be distinguishable from legend. It won't matter whether anyone believes it; the ripples will have left the world long ago.

It's only been hours, not years, and the realness of it all is already fading, at least when she's in her living room with her family. It's different under the tree, though. Here, she feels connected to the past and to her ancestors, to a long line of Higurashis who have guarded and maintained this shrine for generations. 

Except for her.

Kagome is not strong, or knowledgeable, or brilliant, or wise. Maybe she has some special powers hiding in her, but they mostly don't seem very useful. And yet - the jewel this shrine once contained was entrusted to her. Not by Kaede, but by her very flesh and blood. She doesn't understand it, but the jewel was a part of her; she was meant to have it, and to keep it safe. And when the time came to stand up and accept the responsibility that she alone had been entrusted with, Kagome refused. She had said to let someone else do it, not knowing whether anyone else could, either.

That is what she turned her back on. Not some youthful adventure, to be dipped into and grown out of. Her ancestral obligations. Her past. Her future. Her destiny. Her very purpose.

If all the darkness that she unleashed on her ancestors has been eroded by time, does that make it any less real? If a hundred Mistress Centipedes destroyed a hundred villages, and then the world forget about them completely, is there any sense in which the forgetting means that the crime, the cowardice, the desertion of her duty was not, in fact, a betrayal of all of those people, who when they lived were as real as she is now?

She thinks about the girl she was, for a day and a half. It's easier, with four hundred years of distance, not to hate her. Maybe she screwed up, but she was the sort of person who could have grown into someone impressive. She saved the life of someone who had kidnapped her. The trick with the arrow was disastrous, but it was the kind of mistake that you could imagine a hero out of legend making, not something that an ordinary person would do. But a hero would have spent years, or decades, cleaning up a second's mistake. They wouldn't have shrugged and gone home.

"Kagome! Dinnertime!"