They met in a group meeting.

A sad little circle of plastic chairs arranged in the too white, too empty, too familiar room on the third floor of the center. She had been in too many rooms like this. Sometimes they contained a table and two chairs facing each other, so that the doctors could look into her face and she could see the look of disbelief and the crushing, pitying looks they spared her. The crazy girl.

Sometimes the rooms were for group meetings like this one.

She supposed that the doctors thought that because they had similar “delusions” or “fantasy lives” that they therefore had similar maladies. They were the same kind of crazy.

She had to admit, even after all she had seen, she was pretty sure she was the only sane person in the room. She was so sure of this, in fact, that when one of the other girls mentioned her own personal demon, a river spirit who forgot his name because his river was covered over to build an apartment building, she laughed. She laughed so hard she cried. She laughed so hard she fell out of her little plastic chair and was still laughing on the floor when the other girl lost it and lunged at her.

It took two medics and a shot of some unidentified drug to get her off of Kagome'’s throat. But it was the look in her eyes, the look of pure belief and frustration, the same look she'’d seen in her own eyes, that made Kagome a believer. They were the same kind of crazy.

So when they carried them both to a private room and strapped them down, to “talk out their differences”, Kagome began looking at the girl with new eyes. She was plain, straight brown hair, average height, average build; your typical Japanese schoolgirl. She was perhaps a few years younger than herself. But her eyes were old. Her eyes were ancient. They had seen down the rabbit hole and unfortunately for them both, come back out again in a world that no longer made sense.

When the drugs began to wear off, Kagome began talking. She apologized to the girl, which unsurprisingly had little effect. What did have an effect were the revelations she made after. Kagome told her that she believed her. Told her that she had fallen down the rabbit hole as well. She told her about giant centipede demons, flying two-tailed cats, hanyous and possessed combs. The girl didn'’t truly perk up until she started talking about him.

Though she bristled when the girl laughed at her description of a three-legged white dog, she supposed she deserved it for her earlier callousness. Because she had treated the girl like everyone else. She hadn’'t believed. She had thought she was crazy. But now she knew, they were, in fact, suffering from the same disease.

They loved and they missed and they remembered and it was slowly killing them. Double-takes when she saw a flash of silver out of the corner of her eyes. Hours spent staring out a window looking for the telltale flash of scales. Tears whenever she saw white fur. One-sided conversations with dust bunnies and fleas. They knew and it was slowly killing them.

But both of them were too stubborn to give up. Too in love. So they bore the looks. The crushing disappointment of their families. The drugs and the hospitals and the doctors and the endless cycles of disbelief and institutional grey. Because now that they had met each other, they knew, they were both the same kind of crazy.

AN: A brief little fic that popped into my head. What if after the jewel was completed Kagome's family didn't remember? What if she met someone else like her? Like Chihiro from Spirited Away?

Also, disclaimer, I own nothing, I'm just borrowing the characters ;)