AN: I really have no idea why I started this. I have literally about ten fics I am working on throughout the various fanfiction websites. I update daily, but still...
Anyway, expect this to be updated once a week. Sorry if it's a little longer. The chapters are all going to be around five thousand words, so they will take awhile to write and then revise and edit.
If there are any mistakes, I'm sorry. If you find any please let me know! Thanks!
Anyway, I don't really like alternate universe stories that much. I almost always just pass over them because they usually annoy me. I have read probably four that I actually enjoyed, and this is my second time writing one. So I can only hope this turns out to be not so terrible. This is definitely going to be different for me.
Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, and I am not profiting from this fanficiton.
OOOOOO
School. That word can be summed up as an organization that truly represents the tragic suffering that adults feel the need to inflict upon those who are underage. Yup, that's the long and fancy way of saying that it completely sucks.
It was a Monday, the first of many to come. It had that first day metaphorical fog that seeped around your brain and ate your sanity away as you wondered why you were forced to be put through such a torture as education. It was on that day that I started my second year of upper secondary school, but to make things simple, it goes by a less complicated name, high school.
I was one of the older girls in my class at the age of seventeen. I hadn't been held back like the other seventeen year old rebels. I just had an early birthday, something that could not be helped. I liked to think that I was more wise and mature. I mean, if I had to age a year faster than the rest of the student body, then I should gain the intelligence a year early as well. Too bad that truly wasn't the case.
My day was cruddy at every angle. It was like looking through a high definition camera. Everything was so clear that it made my brain hurt. The reasons why I planned on weeping inwardly during class were numerable, but the main ones were that my boyfriend had broken up with me, I recently discovered my priestess powers, and we had a new teacher.
My boyfriend, InuYasha, broke up with me to go out with some stripper—at least that's what I thought of her. Her name was Kikyo, but I dubbed her a secret porn star. Not because she was hotter than me, but because she was...icky...Oh, who am I kidding! If I'm a seven then she's a twelve. I can't beat that scale...although it would be fun to try. Step number one to survive the school day, up self-confidence.
Now you're probably wondering why realizing I had holy powers was such a bad thing. If you don't count barely being able to control them, having to practically pass out from restraining yourself from purifying every demon around you, and having to fight to live up to Kikyo—who also happened to be the best priestess at my school—then yes, uncovering my "hidden" powers was absolutely no big deal. I, on the other hand, found it to be a complete disaster.
The last issue I listed also seemed like no problem, but I begged to differ. First off, the first thing this new teacher would see about me would be my flaring aura and my inability to use or even control my powers. The next tidbit of induced terror would be that he was InuYasha's half-brother. Oh joy. If he turned out to be even a smidgen like his sibling, I would flee from the room screaming like a banshee in one of those Disney movies gone wrong.
That's a large summary of my yet to be started journey at school, but some people were about to change that.
"KAGOME!"
I turned on my heel, looking for who had screamed my name. If only I had spotted her sooner I might have been able to avoid being trampled.
Sango tackled me to the ground, leaning over me and bruising my ribs as she breathed heavily into my face.
"Hey," I grumbled, massively tired and slightly irritated by the rough start of the school morning, "this movie is rated PG-13. No explicit sex scenes please." I didn't even filter what came out of my mouth like I usually did. I was just too tired.
Sango scoffed, but luckily took her weight off my body. Thank kami. "Whatever, and that was an odd comment. You must be in one of your weird moods. Sorry for being excited to see you."
Ignoring her almost insult, I mentally cursed her and her irresistible demon slayer pout. "It's fine. I guess I just overreacted."
She beamed at me, and I let her remark—or should I say remarks—slide, pulling my phone out and checking my karmascope. Apparently it was a new thing to predict...karma. Well, I figured it might come in handy.
Sango peered over my shoulder, her long brown hair falling into my face. "Hey!" I protested.
The slayer tossed her tresses into place at her back and lifted a slender brow. "If you lie you'll get attacked by a bird? That has got to be the worst horoscope—"
"Karmascope," I interrupted.
"Doesn't matter," she snapped. I blinked blankly, wondering at her bipolar personality.
"Look, let's just enjoy the day," she told me, her hands on her hips.
On the outside I nodded. On the inside I was running around in circles, flailing my arms and pretending that my incessant screaming was actually some new, hip rap song. Yeah, I needed to see if a shrink was in town.
"Anyway," Sango started, not saying anything further.
"Let's just get to class." It appeared that my tired, sloshy Monday morning feeling had returned. It was probably momentarily spooked from its eternal resting place in my cerebral cortex by Sango's dangerously sharp elbows, but now that the environment was safe it had come back.
We quickly walked across the sports field, named after what it was used for obviously. I only had to duck once to avoid some kind of ball, and stepped onto the other side unscathed. It was the first miracle of the day. We proceeded to walk into the atrocious building of learning and down the hallway, stopping at the lockers with our names on them. I shoved a various assortment of unneeded junk that was stashed—still stashed…like never un-stashed— in my backpack into my locker. I never got around to spring cleaning...or summer tidy up...or first week of school reorganization. It didn't matter anyway. My yellow pack swallowed up my books, clothes, and various trashes like a supermassive black hole, and my locker then ate the book bag like a greedy, starving man. It was as if they had some sort of mutual and rewarding agreement.
I pulled out my wrinkled class schedule, glaring at the piece of paper that had been mailed to me as if it was attempting to me. I would say that was exactly what it was doing. The one word on it was enough to make me go flailing and scream rapping again. My first class was gym, also known by social pricks and grammar nazis as physical education. Couldn't they just cool it and call it P.E.?
I sighed, breaking myself out of my thoughts and trudging to one of the largest rooms—the largest being the assembly hall—that the school had to offer. I shortly pondered over the name assembly hall. It wasn't a hall...but then even my amazement at how stupid people could be was ruined by me being stupid. I was pretty sure I broke my nose on the wall I ran into. I immediately brought my hand up to my bleeding schnozzola—a word I had started using for absolutely no reason—narrowing my eyes. "Wow, wall, did you just have to go and make this even more difficult for me? Could you not just give me a break and stay out of my walking bubble for a single day?"
"Higurashi, why are you talking to an inanimate object?"
I froze up. Yup, my day had definitely been made worse. I guess I had unintentionally offered life a challenge, and against my hopes and dreams it had accepted. "Yes, Coach?" I made sure not to answer her question, knowing if I did a trip to the nearest asylum would be in order.
Coach's eyes widened as I turned around, my bloody face and shirt now visible. Coach didn't want us to call her anything else other than Coach. There would be no last names or first names or even pseudonyms—other than Coach—passing from our lips to her ears anytime soon. "What happened to you?"
"Well, I would say the wall, but then I'd sound stupid." I looked up at the ceiling, not wanting to see her expression. Nothing could block out her amused giggling though.
"Come on." Coach waved me forward, smiling as she ordered me to follow politely. "I'll take you to my office."
At least I'd get patched up. "Thanks." I was right behind Coach as we stepped into her little hole of an office, the papers pinned in piles onto the wall like clumping foundation.
"No problem," she replied, actually sounding slightly nice. I wondered what was up with her. "So I heard you have holy powers." Oh, great.
"Yeah...I do."
Coach was on her tippy toes, grabbing gauze from the cabinet. "So are you going to train with the mikos now?"
Coach was officially on my knows-how-to-make-your-day-even-worse list. "I guess so." I shrugged then, not knowing what else to say.
Coach wasn't very tall for how threatening she was. Half the school was afraid of her, most severely so, and she was only a five foot, three inch human. Go figure. She was quite daunting though, her hollow black eyes and argumentative nature certainly didn't make her an all out addict for candy and sunshine with a unique love for unicorns. Nope, she was one of the most frightening people I knew.
Coach approached me then, the gauze held in her hands. I went cross-eyed as she set my nose, wrapping the white cloth around my head. I couldn't tell if what she was doing was itchy or painful, but that was most likely because of the fact that my whole face was numb from the damage I had caused by running into the wall. She clipped it when done, and when she stepped back to admire her handy dandy injury curing skills, I knew that I looked like an utter dork. "Well, looks like you're good as new. Ready for class?"
"As I'll ever be," I answered miserably. I almost wanted to scream at life and beat it with a lacrosse stick—which actually hurts a ton when it makes contact with your body, in case you didn't know—but it would probably take it as another challenge. I didn't want to risk another daily dosage of hate and pain, so I refrained from trying to murder whatever little creature represented life. For good measure, I thought life would be a skunk. The black and white of juxtapositional danger as well as the godawful fumes. What a perfect representation.
Coach led me out of her cramped and deceivingly normal—that of a workplace I would think—office, and we entered the gym. Heads snapped in our direction, a few snickers meeting my ears. If that wasn't enough to tell me I looked as silly as a lame, wingless duck, then Kikyo's full out laugh was. Whoever put her in my class was going to get an earful.
"What happened to your face, Kagome?" Kikyo taunted, her eyes full of loathing and disrespect. I didn't know why she hated me so, but it was probably because she was just used to doing it and had to keep it up if she wanted to retain her reputation at having wanted and having gained InuYasha. The hanyou stood by her side, watching me blankly. I couldn't tell what was on his mind, but he seemed almost regretful. I wondered why he acted so awkward and out of it. Was it because it was the first day of school? I doubted that, but I figured it could possibly be that he just didn't know what to do. It wouldn't be the first time.
"I met a god, and he told me if I let him break my nose I'd be gifted with a million dollars. Turns out he was the god of liars," I replied, just rambling and hoping my sarcastic answer actually made sense. By Kikyo's glare I judged that it at least didn't come out sounding as weak as I looked.
"Shut up and pay attention!" Coach screamed in her harsh voice, a few people actually flinching. Everyone kept quiet though. "Now, I want you to split up in groups of humans, demon slayers, priestesses and monks, demons, and hanyous."
Without hesitation we scrambled to get with the right people, hurrying this way and that. I met Miroku halfway. "Hey!"
He turned his black, violet tinted eyes to me, smiling widely. "Hey." He then handed me what might possibly have been the zenith of my day. A warm cup of coffee from some unknown and unimportant source.
"Thank you," I purred, the drink already at my lips as I lagged behind him, standing at the group of holy powered people opposite from Kikyo.
"No problem. I figured that we'd keep the same traditions from last year." His brief sideways glance alerted me to the fact that I was supposed to keep up my share of the deal as well.
"Okay," I responded to the tacit suggestion—more like demand—quickly. "I'll bring the breakfast tomorrow."
We stared at each other for one more tense moment before letting our eyes be drawn to Coach. Her hands were on her hips and her mouth set in a thin, firm line. She was waiting, but she kept up her intimidating manor. It was natural for her, and I guessed that she didn't even really know or understand the effect she had on people.
One girl in our gym class nervously twitched her fingers and huddled closer to the humans behind her. The girls scrunched up their faces with distaste and moved away. Yeah, our school was known to be unfriendly towards foreigners. Most were warned against transferring, but this girl hadn't gotten the message. Since she had come to our school the year prior, only two and a half months of class left, she had been set apart. This was for a number of reasons. One was the fact that she was American. For some odd reason, many people at school had an inane prejudice against citizens of the faraway country. Personally, the certain discrimination baffled me. How could they put such a large assumption on one girl's shoulders? Another reason was that she was the only naturally blonde human at our high school. I couldn't tell if the other girls were jealous or what, but they talked about it in insulting whispers. The quiet words at my school spread like a plague, passing from person to person as if it was an unknown wildfire. But the girl was also...weird.
"Today we are going to go over my class expectations!" Coach shrieked, rudely and unknowingly breaking my train of thought.
"W-wait," the blonde girl stuttered, shuffling up to Coach. She handed her a note, a bag clutched in her other hand. Coach grabbed the note and read it angrily, obviously frustrated that her lesson on P.E. courtesy had been interrupted. As Coach's eyes made their way through the paper, they widened with indignant disbelief.
She shoved it back at the girl. "Do whatever you have to."
The timid blonde let out a sound of surprise and quickly backpedaled, setting her baby-blue bag down on the bleachers. What was wrong with her? The group of humans seemed to be thinking the same thing, and when the American approached them once again, they took two steps away instead of one. The girl trembled, a miserable pout set on her face. I had to help that girl sometime. I couldn't stand to see someone that upset. Maybe I could talk to her later or something.
Miroku shoved me. "Hey, Coach is talking again."
"...and that is why we don't hit each other with the lacrosse sticks." She held up one of the sticks, explaining the various parts and demonstrating the lethal factors of the metal handle and blunt plastic head, and I suddenly remembered why in my mind I beat things with lacrosse sticks. I blamed Coach.
"I'm going to go to the nurse, alright?" I told her, staring right into her beady, haunting eyes, hoping to gain her favoritism with my confidence. Nonchalantly, I took a sip of coffee.
"Why would you do that, Higurashi?" Coach asked, staring at me incredulously. Did she think I was just skipping out? I might hate school, but I wasn't that desperate.
I frantically point at my nose. "Don't you remember? I broke my face!"
"Nonsense, you should just be more careful next time," Coach warned haughtily, her grin stuck up in that I-am-a-teacher-bow-down-to-my-authority kind of way.
"Uh, no. I am going to the nurse," I stated with absolute positivity. I was sure that if I was a demon I'd be one of fire, and flames would be bursting from me in my irritation. With that, I speed walked out of the gym, ignoring the screeching of my teacher. I needed to talk to the principal. Gym should not be a mandatory class.
I walked through the halls at a reasonable pace, but the throbbing of my almost certainly broken nose would not leave my attention. It was just my luck to run into a wall. I could say it was the wall's fault, but a wall would be hard to beat with a lacrosse stick, so I'd have to take responsibility.
The walls were painted red. I knew then and there that the person who had decided to match the scarlet walls with emerald floors had been color blind. There was no doubt in my mind. It was just such as ugly and disturbing combination of colors that it actually resembled toxic waste in a way. The doors were dark brown. They were old, the ends broken and readily giving splinters to anyone they deemed to be a slacker. Only once you had a handful of wood in your hand you tended to not do any work because your hand was too swollen. The new students were always the ones to get injured. We second and third years knew how to open the door without the splinters being lodged into our skin. We either let the freshman open it, or we flung it open by the knob and snapped it back. It was as intricate as a dancer trying to...well actually, we looked like stumbling elephants. At least we didn't have tree slivers in our skin. I needed to talk to the principal about that too.
The nurse's office was just around the corner, and I walked into it dejectedly. It was going to be humiliating if I had to tell the story to the young woman; she was a gossiper. Her nose was small, her mouth big, and she always had something to say. Her long black hair sometimes fell into her warm and excited brown eyes as she worked with a patient. She was a talker; her words usually comforted and entertained those in her office, and my story would be one for the next patient to laugh about.
The nurse, Shiiko-san, took one look at me and sighed, tsking quietly under her breath. "Aw, what happened to you, Honey?" Oh yeah, and every patient had the same name. It was not a nickname or a one-time title; it was a name she used universally. Everyone was Honey in her eyes.
"Uh..." I started, blushing profusely, "a wall."
Shiiko smiled, her lips parting slightly as she let out a silent giggle. "Let me fix you up, Honey."
"Okay." I sat at where I knew she'd pointed me. I was in that room often, my clumsiness landing me more than just a broken nose.
Shiiko laughed a little more. "You be careful of those walls, alright? I hear they're very dangerous, Honey."
I nodded. "Okay. Thanks, Shiiko-san."
Her warm umber eyes lit up once more. "It's no problem, Honey." I felt her small, warm fingers against my face as she unwrapped the gauze. I looked down and realized my bloody white shirt needing to be changed as well. In a final undoing loop, Shiiko pulled off the white and brown wrap—it was a blood stained fabric—and took one more look at me before moving to her cabinet. As she moved from my vision, I caught my reflection in the mirror at the back of the room. My whole face was slightly swollen and red, tiny scratches appeared here and there. My nose was black, blue, and purple. The mosaic making the bruises and smeared blood almost pretty in a sick kind of way. All in all, the injury looked pretty bad to me, but what would I know?
"You only ran into a wall?" Shiiko asked, glancing over her shoulder as she grabbed various things from the shelf.
"Yeah. I guess I hit it pretty hard," I replied, feeling incredibly stupid for what had to be the thirtieth time that day. It was a wall, and somehow I had turned it into a dangerous weapon...against myself.
"I guess so, Honey," Shiiko announced, stepping away from her supplies and prancing back over to me in her energetic way. "I'm going to clean you up first, okay?"
I nodded, a smile finally coming to my face. I may have been having a cruddy day, but I really enjoyed being around Shiiko's gentle cheerfulness.
She grinned reassuringly and dabbed her pretty cream cloth in antiseptic filled water, bringing the soft item to my face and wiping the blood away in firm, feather-like strokes. Sadness overwhelmed me as I saw what had become of the cream cloth at the end of the cleaning session, but before I could get more upset about it, Shiiko moved her hand to my face, staring right into my far away eyes. I snapped my attention to the nurse, wondering what she needed.
"This is going to hurt."
I nodded again, getting what she was trying to say. She was going to set my nose (more proficiently than Coach had done anyway); it really was broken. "Okay. I trust you to fix it."
And so she did, and when I walked out the office my nose was professionally wrapped and clear from any red, bodily fluid—as well as my shirt. To say the least, I was glad for the fact that even though I still looked like an idiot, I didn't look like a just-escaped-from-murder idiot. That was one step up!
It was already time for my second class, and I walked there reluctantly. I was going to be late anyway, so why not take my time? My second class was history. I couldn't remember what type, and I was too lazy to check my schedule that was buried somewhere deep in my bag. But I still knew that the teacher was InuYasha's brother, and that made me nervous. Now I didn't even have any coffee left to drink!
Eventually I knew I had to go to class, so I did. I walked into the room with my books in my hands, hair blowing around my face at the slight and direct breeze from an open window. A few demons twitched, catching the new scent as I walked into the room.
And then InuYasha's brother turned to me. His silver white hair was long, falling just above his ankles. His eyes were a bright gold, reminding me of his brothers, but this full demon's eyes were blank, not letting me know his emotions like his half-brother's did. A violet moon sat in the middle of his forehead, a shock of bangs carefully split around it. The magenta markings of his heritage were situated on his cheeks and across his eyelids. I knew immediately that this man was more powerful and much more handsome than his brother could ever be.
"Higurashi, why are you late to class?" he asked, staring at me without his expression changing. I was interested by him the moment I laid my eyes on him, but he was my teacher, and I let it go as a type of hero worship; it was hero worship in a way. Everything about him captivated me. The way he spoke without any emotional infliction, the way he stared me down, and even his arrogant pose that seemed to deem me beneath the question he asked. He decided to talk to me, the look on his face saying that I wasn't worth the time, but I couldn't keep my amazement in check; there was something off—or maybe on—about the dog demon. Too bad I had to go and ruin the moment.
"I broke my face," I murmured, moving to the only empty seat. I felt my aura flare as it tasted his youki, and I gritted my teeth, trying my hardest to keep it under control. I was able to tame it, and I prayed gratefully to whoever had helped me and understood the crappy situation I had been thrown into.
He quirked a brow, but said nothing more. I was thankful for that.
Unlike him, his class was boring for the most part. Well, it might have been exciting, but I wouldn't know because I was too busy gazing off into space and trying to ignore the pain in my nose. I took another one of the pain pills that the nurse gave me, sighing in relief as the little numbing monsters inside it killed my agony. I liked to think of medical things in a cute way. It always made me feel better.
I tried to listen to the lesson, I really did, but I found it impossible, so I decided to just do my best to keep awake. My eyes flashed to one of the oddest colors in the room. Blonde. The American girl sat next to me, and I hadn't even noticed. She popped another of her crazy looking candies into her mouth. They were mahogany with bright orange stripes. I found myself wondering what they tasted like.
She looked at me too then, and we just stared for a while. I guess you could say that a silent conversation passed between us, and she smiled. "My name's Sabra."
The name was strange, and yet not that different from what I'd heard before. "My name's Kagome." And that was all that we said to each other the entire class time. It was enough though. It seemed that we had clicked—as friends that is—without even needing many words.
The rest of the school day passed by slowly, torturing me in a way. I almost fell asleep multiple times, and the question of my nose came up so much that I stopped answering. But school was finally over, and I couldn't be any more thankful.
Miroku ran out of the school, a huge red bump on his head. "It was just a touch!"
"And that swing of my bat was just a tap!" the girl screamed, throwing the baseball bat she had used to hit him, luckily missing him by a few feet.
Miroku ran behind me, and the girl stopped, huffing but not wanting to continue if Miroku was going to be a coward and throw himself behind the protection of an innocent girl. I laughed silently as she padded away, furious. "Miroku."
He held his hands up, panic flickering across his face. "No need to get hasty here."
I sighed. There was just no stopping the extents of perverseness. And on the first day of school. "Miroku, seriously?"
"Well you got detention!" he shouted in defense.
A blush coated my cheeks, and I snapped, "Well, it was the principal's fault!"
"The principal's fault for what?" Sango asked, coming from around the corner and toward Miroku and me.
I blushed again, but didn't go into details.
"Kagome decided that helping another girl cheat on a pop quiz was a good idea," Miroku said smugly, smiling with teeth at the demon slayer at his side. "And the principal decided that it was detention worthy."
"I just wanted to help her," I whined, trying to keep them from embarrassing me further. Who gives a pop quiz on the first day of school anyway?
"You're too kind, Kagome," Sango announced.
I was pretty sure that there was so much blood in my face that my feet were turning blue and wrinkling like a piece of fruit gone rotten. That was not a pretty picture. I hated blushing to death.
Sango and Miroku beamed at each other. I left, not wanting to be a third wheel. It would be...awkward.
As I made my way into the school building's shade and away from the front doors, I thought about what Sango said. Was being too generous a bad thing, or was it just what I did?
The gardens on the side of the school were pretty. Whoever had planted them had done so very deliberately, and I thought it was to battle the hideous interior of the learning establishment. The colors were coordinating. There were blues, reds, violets, and even a few yellow flowers. I deemed the gold ones to be the bravest. There were roses and lilies and flowers I couldn't even name. I loved it, that garden. It was what really made my day.
The trip to my house was short, so I was able to walk. I headed the direction I knew my house was in, but something interrupted my travel to my warm and comfy home, and that happened to be the toy that hit my head. I rubbed my sore skull and glared at the plaything that had fallen on me. "Could my day get any—" I stopped then. I didn't want to challenge life again. I was running out of energy...and lacrosse sticks.
The toy was a cat. It was stuffed and had many plastic pieces, the cat playing with yarn and decorated with a cute red bow. The feline was a maple shade of brown with darker brown tabby markings, its front paw reaching up and pawing the air. A cheeky animalistic grin adorned its face, and I giggled. It was unrealistic yet a great representation. The toy would make an amazing gift for Shippo.
And so I continued on my way home, my day now even better. I had a new theory of life based on that one incident. You were born how you died. People changed, but the original part of them always stayed with them. You could never forget those first years of life that would shape you forever, and I would never forget that toy that started everything for me. I would never forget Sesshomaru.