sqweakie | Namesake - for Cliche Bingo

Title: Namesake

Author: Sqweakie

Rating: G

Genre: Gen

Prompt: Fork in the Road AU

Word Count: over 800

AN: A short exercise while I try to find my Kagome voice again. Unbeta'd.

Summary: How things may have gone if she hadn't been quite as brave.

: Namesake :

Pronunciation: \ˈnām-sāk\
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from name's sake

Definition: is named after another or for whom another is named

She always slowed whenever she walked through the courtyard of the sanctuary. She never planned to slow down, it just…happened each and every time. She always felt something was off about the shrine, some sort of dark stain hidden underneath the trees and hiding behind the afternoon shadows never chased away by prayers or the chimes of bells.

She had first noticed it on the day of her fifteenth birthday, something beyond her hearing and unseen by nervous eyes. The shadows whispered to her, calling her towards something that neither her mother nor her grandfather ever heard and it still scared her on a primal level.

Her father had said that she had the potential to do something great when she was a small child, but he also said he would come home every evening to give her a kiss goodnight. He had broken that promise when he was killed and her mother had to take over the duties that her husband, a police officer murdered too soon, had failed. She stopped believing in promises when she was seven and during junior high the lesson was hammered home again.

Some days she wondered what would have happened if she had followed her little brother across the courtyard and into one of the locked up sheds, the one with the dry well and nothing else. He had run off into the deeper parts of the shrine that morning searching for their stupid cat, Buyo. The last time she had seen her brother he had slipped into the shed her grandfather had forbidden them from entering. She had stood frozen just inside the doorway before turning and running back to the house, in a rush to get to school and figuring that he was old enough to get back to the house so he could also make the bus. The cat had shown up by suppertime but Souta never came home.

Souta, her little brother, had the ill-fated luck of being named after a legend of the shrine. He had been named after the story of a lost boy who had appeared at the shrine one summer afternoon hundreds of years ago. It was said he wandered the lands forever searching for his home but never finding it, forever lost. And like that legend, her Souta never came back and it changed everything. It made her mother so very quiet, it took her grandfather's will and he died much too soon. It also changed her and her goals and dreams and beliefs. She never would have taken over the care of the Shrine if Souta had been there with his love of the old stories and the wish that he inherit the shrine duties when he was an adult.

Kagome noticed that she had drifted towards the locked buildings and she had to physically wrench herself away and head in the opposite direction. Every walk across the courtyard brought the temptation to move to the last spot she had seen her brother, always pulling her whether it was day or night, summer or winter. This time she fled towards the Godtree. It had always fascinated her with the wooden vines curling around the impossibly large trunk and it didn't have terrible memories she could associate with it.

The tree held a similar darkness as the shed but it didn't scare her, actually the opposite. As a child she often rested, cradled within the twisted vines and she found peace resting there even as an adult. As she laid a hand against the largest bulge on the trunk she again wondered what would have changed that day if she had entered the shed. Would Souta still be here, still alive? Would her mother have kept that sparkle that the his loss had killed? Would her life be better or would she have disappeared just like Souta? Would she have fallen down the well like her grandfather claimed her brother did?

"Obachan, Obachan!" a voice called and Kagome pulled herself away from her girlish musings and scooped up her youngest grandson, his fingers intertwining in her gray hair as she left the courtyard and uneasy feelings and 'what if's behind.

“So how was school today Souta?” she asked as they headed back to the main house for a snack before she started to prepare dinner.

Yes, sometimes it was bad luck naming a child after a dead relative or an old story but she knew that her brother would have approved of his great nephew. She would never find her brother but she would make sure his namesake would hear same stories his great uncle had loved and one day she would explain why he was forbidden to go near the burned area of the courtyard where an old shed once stood and where the scorched ground refused to grow over a buried well. She may have lost her brother but she was going to make sure her grandson would always find his home and never fall down the well.