Sunday, April 16, 2006

Chapter 65: Most Dreaded Words...
Miroku watched Inuyasha twist to look in the direction of the river for what had to be the hundredth time and rolled his eyes, “Inuyasha, Kagome-sama is well within range, and if something were wrong she would have called for us. You agreed to let her bathe alone, so stop fidgeting.”

Inuyasha scowled at him in irritation for pointing that out, stuffing his hands up into his sleeves and growling as he shifted to brace his back against the nearest tree, “You would hover worse than I do, if it was your own fucking mate, bouzu.”

When Shippou nodded sagely from his perch on Inuyasha’s shoulder, both monk and exterminator shared a suspicious look before moving to stand directly in front of the lounging pair of youkai. Sango frowned disapprovingly, folding her arms over her chest, and clearing her throat to get their attention, “What have you done?”

Shippou squeaked, and darted under Inuyasha’s hair to avoid the dark looks aimed their way, but Inuyasha’s own expression was bland as he looked up at them, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You have both been behaving strangely since you returned, Inuyasha,” Miroku pointed at them with his staff, his own look disturbingly similar to Sango’s. “What has occurred with Kagome-sama that you are not telling us?”

Inuyasha arched an eyebrow and looked completely unconcerned with their posturing. “This has nothing to do with the fact that she still can hear the voices, Naraku’s alive and obsessed with her, and she’s still not quite comfortable with handling youkai emotions. I mated her, for fuck’s sake, doesn’t that give me some right to behave ‘strangely,’ bouzu?”

Sango frowned at him, shaking her head and folding her arms over her chest, “You and Shippou never get along.”

“Maybe he’s practicing,” Shippou poked his head out from under the thick curtain of Inuyasha’s hair, and puffed up defensively.

“Practicing?” It may have been a more believable excuse if Inuyasha wasn’t wearing the exact same expression of confusion as the two humans.

The little kitsune folded his arms over his chest and tried his hardest to look completely confident with his explanation, “Well, Okaa-san and Inuyasha are probably going to want kits of their own-“

“Pups,” Inuyasha cut in, his cheeks faintly pink when both Sango and Miroku shot him startled looks.

“Whatever,” Shippou waved that off, really getting into his idea as he bounced to his feet and gestured enthusiastically, “so you know they’re going to have pups someday, but Okaa-san’s never going to agree if he can’t behave himself-“

“Shippou,” Inuyasha growled warningly.

“Well it’s true!” he defended, reaching up to grab Inuyasha’s ear and yank his head down. “She’s never going to agree if all she sees is you beating up on me, you know.”

Inuyasha scowled, twisting his head out of Shippou’s little hand, “She’s seen me with her little brother, dammit, it’s not like I ever did anything to him! That fucking brat practically idolizes me.”

Sango knew she probably looked just as dumbfounded at the monk at her side, her mind trying to process that not only had Shippou just openly accused the hanyou of trying to show Kagome that he could be a good father, but the hanyou was actually supporting that accusation with his defense, “I-Inuyasha?”

The youkai were a bit too engrossed in their mini-argument to give the shaky whisper any real notice, Shippou turning his nose up arrogantly to taunt, “I hope she washes your mouth out with soap every time you say bad words after you have pups.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?!” Inuyasha demanded, wondering where the kitsune had heard such a ridiculous thing. Why would Kagome try to wash his mouth if he cursed?

“I ask about things like that,” he stuck out his tongue. “It’s interesting to hear how they do things there, but you never act curious. She said the first time she swore when she was little, her mother washed her mouth out.” Shippou wrinkled his nose in distaste, “That stuff does not taste good.”

His brows lowered, “You tasted her soap?”

“I was curious!” he insisted, his own cheeks bright with embarrassment. “She was a pup herself when it happened, and she said it was really, really gross. So she didn’t think twice about listening to her mother about watching her mouth after that.”

Inuyasha looked thoughtful, settling back against the tree, “I’ll have to remember that one then.”

“You say worse!” Shippou pointed accusingly, feeling a sudden sense of foreboding at the smug look on Inuyasha’s face.

“I’m an adult.”

“That is so debatable,” the kitsune’s tail flicked rapidly in agitation.

“I guess you like the taste of that soap more than you admit,” Inuyasha heaved a sigh of mock disappointment as he made a grab for the baby youkai.

Shippou let out a shriek and darted away from him, shouting over his shoulder, “It’s for cursing, dammit!”

Inuyasha chuckled, cracking his knuckles as Shippou clapped his hands over his mouth, in wide-eyed realization of the mistake he’d made. “You were saying?”

Shippou let out a wail and started running in circles around the grove. Inuyasha was darting after him, but rather than the usual frustrated dashing, this time he seemed to actually be enjoying himself. The hanyou was obviously trying to hold his usual scowl, but his lips twitched every time he took a half-hearted swing at the boy, eyes glowing and much more gentle than the two engrossed humans had ever seen.

Miroku followed their progress with his confusion clear on his face, “This… is quite strange, Sango.”

Sango stepped back to sit down heavily in the grass before she ended up embarrassing herself, and falling on her face with just how deep her confusion and surprise were running, “Do you think it’s true, houshi-sama?”

He sighed and looked down at the exterminator, “You mean that Inuyasha is being kind to Shippou because he’s trying to impress Kagome-sama, and convince her he’d be a responsible parent?”

She nodded, watching the hanyou chase Shippou up a tree, and simply smirk up at the little kitsune hissing down at him from a low branch. “It’s… just so difficult to believe. Inuyasha wanting children… His behavior has always suggested that it was the last thing he would consider.”

“Perhaps we underestimated his desires,” Miroku crossed his legs and dropped easily to a cross-legged position beside her. “He has changed, drastically, since Kagome-sama was enchanted. This side he’s showing us now seems to be everything he really is.”

“How can something so little change so much though?” she raked a hand through her hair and murmured distractedly. “And so quickly!”

He frowned, trailing his fingers along his staff as he tried to think of the best way to vocalize his own theories concerning the mess they were slowly sorting out, “I believe the… idea of being with each other was far from new in their heads, but both believed it to be unobtainable. Suddenly everything they thought was in their way has been removed,” he closed his eyes to take up his most common meditative pose. “It stands to reason that neither of them wanted to waste any more time, when they knew they belonged together.”

Sango turned to look at him in amazement, vaguely aware of Inuyasha in the background calling up to Shippou, “Oi! You realize you’re just making your punishment worse than it has to be by running away, don’t you, runt?”

“You’ll get bored and forget to punish me if I stay out of the way long enough!” Shippou called back petulantly, digging his little claws into the branch under his feet.

“I’m feeling patient today,” Inuyasha’s lips quirked.

Sango looked back at Inuyasha, reaching out to stroke Kirara when the little cat hopped up into her lap. “Kagome-chan’s right… it is disturbing to see him so calm after getting use to him being so temperamental, and blowing up at the slightest provocation.”

Miroku didn’t bother to open his eyes, “I imagine that has a great deal to do with Kagome-sama herself.”

“Pervert,” she muttered dryly, rolling her eyes as her fingers slid down to scratch under Kirara’s chin.

“Sango! I can’t believe you would accuse me of such a thing!” he gave her his most perfected look of affront, pressing his hand flat over his heart to add to the over-all “innocence” of the expression. “My words were spoken in the purest sense!”

She slanted him a look out of the corner of her eyes, “You’re jealous that Inuyasha’s closer to having a pup than you are to having an heir, aren’t you?”

For a moment, his expression reflected his alarm at Sango’s observation before he schooled it back to casual blandness, “The thought has never once crossed my mind, Sango. I have nothing but their happiness in mind.”

Sango muttered something that was definitely disparaging under her breath, propping her elbow on her knee to rest her chin on her palm, “Shippou lies better than you do sometimes, houshi-sama.”

“I can do this all day, Shippou,” Inuyasha was sitting on the ground beneath the branch, with a perfectly bored expression on his face.

“Why don’t you just chase me and get it over with!” Shippou demanded impatiently.

Inuyasha rolled his eyes and muttered before he had a chance to think through his knee-jerk response, “You’re starting to sound just like your mother, brat.”

Shippou blinked, the anger suddenly rushing out of him as his chest puffed out so far with pride that his ribs were in danger of breaking, “Really?”

“That’s not a good thing at the moment,” Inuyasha smacked himself in the head, groaning at the delight in Shippou’s voice. ‘What in the hell got into me to say something like that to Shippou? He was… just acting so much like Kagome, but do I really think of him like he’s ours already?’

The kitsune turned his nose up arrogantly, “You’re just bitchy because now you have to admit you like me.”

Inuyasha’s eyebrow twitched at that little perception, “You’re pushing it, Shippou.”

Shippou now looked completely unconcerned, plopping down lazily on the branch and fluffing his tail with special precision while he tried to keep the snicker out of his voice, “Pushing it would have been saying you have to admit you love me, ‘Oyaji.’”

Sango blinked when they took off again, Shippou laughing hysterically while Inuyasha swore and gave chase before observing with growing amusement, “I don’t think that it’s healthy for Inuyasha to be that red-”

She broke off abruptly when she felt the oh-so familiar palm rubbing over the curve of her backside, followed immediately by the firm squeeze of strong fingers.

Miroku heard the outraged shout at the same moment the equally familiar weight of the Hiraikotsu cracked down on top of his head, wondering in a rather disjointed way if Sango was aware that her face, at that moment, was just as dark as Inuyasha’s.

~

Kagome folded her arms on the rocks that created the natural pool close to the bank in the wide river, sighing heavily as she let her thoughts wander aimlessly with the breeze. This was part of the reason she wanted to bathe alone, she wanted to think without any distractions from her friends, well meaning or not. This was a conversation with herself that was long overdue.

You know we can’t stay there.

She closed her eyes as Inuyasha’s words drifted back through her mind, pushing away from the rocks and ducking down in the cool water. ‘Why aren’t I more upset at knowing that I have to leave my time behind? Have I really spent so much time here, fighting and searching for the shards, that this feels more like home to me? Do I even know how to live in the future anymore?’

That was really the thought that was confusing her, but who could she possibly talk to about her internal tug-of-war? Inuyasha had been the only one who really said it out loud, but Kagome knew he wasn’t the only one who thought she was running away whenever she went back to her time.

Kagome wrinkled her nose, “If I think I could get an unbiased opinion from the same hanyou who once thought smashing the well with a boulder was the perfect solution to helping me decide where I should stay, then I really have lost it.”

Or could she?

He seemed so much more… peaceful now, like he was actually taking the time to think things through instead of just letting his temper decide his reactions. He’d told her without hesitation that he’d take her to see her mother, even though he’d added that they couldn’t stay, but he was just being honest. He knew just as well as she did that she was just as out of place in the future as he was, the only difference was he was willing to vocalize it. But what would his response be if she finally admitted that she agreed with him?

She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts as she lifted her hands to rub her temples, ‘I don’t think I can talk to him about this… But I have to talk to someone… maybe hearing it loud will help it make sense.’

Sango and Miroku were more understanding and polite about her desire to go back and forth between times, but there was a look in their eyes every now and then… Like they felt abandoned, or hurt when she placed so much priority on her tests instead of in Sengoku Jidai with them, and with their quest.

She sighed miserably, shaking her head, “I can’t talk to them either. It seems so childish to even worry about things like this with everything they’ve gone through.”

More and more lately, even before this mess with tattoos and spells, Kagome had started to wonder how her life in the future must look to her friends. In this era there were lives at stake, deaths caused by hesitation, nightmarish dangers and the uncertainty that came from the day-to-day fighting it took just to survive.

She left it behind regularly for exams.

Pieces of paper where a low score didn’t get anyone killed, but she still acted at times, as though the world was coming to an end if she had to retake them?

Shippou’s parents had been murdered, Sango’s family and entire village had been utterly decimated, and Miroku had a void in his hand that would kill him if they didn’t kill Naraku. Not to mention everything that had happened to Inuyasha.

Kagome was suddenly feeling a bit ill.

‘Am I really that selfish?’ she looked up at the clear sky, brow furrowed with the darkness of her thoughts. ‘Inuyasha’s the only one who complained whenever I left for school, but how must they have felt when I went on about how important those tests were? Compared to what we go through here, my life in the future is like a fucking vacation…’

Kagome swallowed hard, trying to subdue the odd rise of guilt that swamped her, paddling to the riverbank and slowly climbing out. She reached for the simple kimono Kaede-baachan had borrowed for her, her lips twisting in a faint smile of self-deprecation, ‘And now I’m wearing kimonos. Was it some weird subconscious thing that I was just trying to use to keep thinking of myself as separate from everything here before? Is that why I only wore my own clothes?’

She chewed on her lower lip as she slipped her arms through the sleeves, ‘Was I trying to not fit in?’

As much as she didn’t want to think of that, she didn’t really have any other explanation. Jeans or any other kind of pants were at least functional, and not too strange after some of the outfits they’d seen youkai wearing, but she had always insisted on her uniform. It was easier to deny that her place was in the past, when every stare or not-so-quiet whisper about her appearance helped her feel out of place.

Kagome blinked and frowned at that thought, ‘When did I start to feel so awkward about being in the future? If I was even feeling the need to remind myself that I came from there.’

Every time she went back, she always found herself watching her friends talking, thinking they were including her, when she felt detached from the entire thing. It had just seemed… seemed so petty, gossiping about boys and school, movies and shopping. Her thoughts would always wander to the past, thinking about Inuyasha and what he was doing without her. Or worrying if Shippou was getting into trouble, or even how many times she missed seeing Sango whack Miroku over the head, and try to pretend she didn’t have feelings for the lecherous monk.

“Kagome, you’re an idiot,” she shook her head, barely noticing how easy it was to fold and tie the kimono before she reached for the obi. She made a face and sat down on the bank, ignoring the water soaking the cloth from her hair and skin, “And you are in serious need of something to stop these damn mood swings.”

That thought had distracted her from her guilt momentarily, but in the peaceful silence of the warm afternoon, it wasn’t long before the guilt returned with a vengeance. Bracing her elbows on her knees, she propped her chin in her palms, and watched the sunlight chase over the smooth water in front of her.

In her head, she still had that nagging voice telling her that she was born five hundred years in the future, and nothing that happened could change that. That part of her insisted she finish the quest, give Inuyasha the jewel, and go back home, back to her own time. The guilt came from the feeling in her heart and soul, that feeling that she already was home.

Kagome closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, shivering slightly when the wind changed direction. She growled quietly at the sudden ping that hit the back of her awareness, making her already aching head start to pound, and forced the annoying twinge aside in favor of continuing her attempts to straighten herself out.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t helping her headache any. Especially since her head was starting to sound less and less convinced about where she belonged, and even now the protests only seemed like a token argument.

She wasn’t human anymore, and even before then, her powers were hardly something considered an everyday occurrence in the future. She’d mated Inuyasha, and even if by some strange moment of muddled thinking she actually wanted to leave, she knew letting her go, when all this ended, had never crossed his mind. Now that she thought back on their conversation about the fictional offer of disconnection, she could recall how he’d told her their mating bond would be weakened, and the miserable look on his face when he had. She’d have to be a total idiot not to see how possessive he was, even ignoring how badly they argued when she tried to go through the well.

No, Inuyasha would not let her go, and she did not want him to. Her home was wherever he was, and if she felt out of place in her own time, there was no way in hell the hanyou would want to live on that side of the well either.

But how was she going to tell her family about her indecision?

Or rather, her decision that would leave her locked in the past five hundred years away from them.

‘Maybe I should talk to Inuyasha after all,’ Kagome’s shoulders slumped slightly at the realization that, more than anyone else, she wanted him to reassure her that she was making the right choice. She wanted to talk to him about how to explain everything to her mother, and more than anything, she wanted him to just hold her, and tell her everything was going to work out and be okay.

“I’m absolutely hopeless,” she barely suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. It was hard not to feel ridiculous when the undeniable tightness in her throat that normally preceded a bout of tears rose up inside her. Between the chaotic mess of emotions, not to mention the recent events, her instincts had tangled with her desires. Now they seemed to have collided into one big mess, no matter how many different ways she tried to untangle them in her head.

Maybe that was her clue to let this go for now.

Kagome stood briskly, rubbing her hands down the kimono to smooth it. She turned to go back to where she knew they were waiting for her, ‘This has been the weirdest month in my life,’ only to nearly fall over in shock when she turned, barely suppressing a startled scream when she found she wasn’t alone, “How did-?!”

“What the fuck did that damn inukkoro do to you?” Kouga demanded, arms folded across his chest as his own pale eyes confused, but hard as they darted over her face, and paying special attention to her eyes, cheeks, and ears.

“How didn’t I sense you?” Kagome demanded, her voice choked as she pressed a hand flat over her racing heart. ‘How the fuck could I have been so distracted that I didn’t feel his shards?! Or smell him?’

She took a sniff and nearly smacked herself in frustration, “The wind changed. Fuck-!”

Kouga stepped closer, obviously trying to take in her scent with the water muddling it, “You smell different. You-“ he broke off, eyes widening in confused alarm, “you smell youkai!”

Kagome took a quick step back, biting her lip and groaning when she saw his eyes drop to the little point of her fang peeking out, “Kouga-kun, this really isn’t-“

“Why do you smell like a youkai?” he shook his head, cutting her off again as he followed her backwards progress. “Hell, Kagome, why do you look like a youkai?” he added with a slight grunt of impatient bemusement.

She swore when she nearly went tumbling back into the water, saved by Kouga’s hands snapping out and catching her by the shoulders. “It’s a long story. Kouga-kun, Inuyasha’s close and he’s not going to be happy to see you here alone with me.”

Kagome was thinking more along the lines of vital organs being ripped from the wolf youkai, if Inuyasha caught his scent here, with her, before she could get to him and calm him down.

Kouga, however, wasn’t listening. His eyes had dropped down lower when his hands pulled her kimono taut over her breasts, brows lowering and a deep growl starting in his throat.

Kagome’s thoughts all came to a screeching halt when the wolf youkai’s hands left her shoulders and closed over her breasts, squeezing firmly and then cupping the weight, “They’re bigger...”

Her cheeks flamed, a curl of anger making her eyes glow vibrantly as her own warning growl started, “What the hell-?”

Kouga lifted one hand to swipe her hair aside, ducking to get right next to her skin and inhale deeply as his other hand dropped to her belly, splaying his fingers and pushed hard. His eyes widened sharply, and he straightened, eyebrows nearly vanishing under his bangs as he hissed out, “The fuck?!”

“If you don’t tell me what the fuck you think you’re doing, I’m going to-!” Kagome’s eyes turned scarlet, one hand snapping to his throat and the other gripping his wrist bruisingly tight, but Kouga’s snarl cut her off yet again.

“You’re pregnant!?”


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