Take Me All the Way
Chapter One
When I was ten years old, we moved from Southern California to Oakland, New Jersey. We meant Mom and me, and my baby brother Inuyasha that was four going on forty for all the infant wisdom he pretended to possess. Nobody bothered to tell me why we were moving two thousand miles from the home I'd grown up in, the friends I had grown up with. Every time I asked Mom, she found ways of distracting me; it helped that I had a short attention span anyway. For instance:
"Mom—" I began.
She drove without looking at me, as she hadn't been looking at me for the past two weeks. "Find something on the radio, Maru," she said. There was a tink-tink noise as she turned on the left blinker and smoothly switched lanes.
I didn't say that I had been "finding something on the radio" for the past hour and a half during this three hour-long drive, or mention that the last time I'd started playing with the dial she snapped at me to turn it off. By now I'd probably forgotten all that anyway. Playing with the radio amused me for maybe another ten minutes, not listening to any song for any longer than thirty seconds. At some point I pressed a button that made the FM radio become AM. A low, droning voice came over the airwaves; a man's voice. It took me ten seconds to realize he was talking about President Clinton and someone named Monica Lewinski. Lately it seemed a popular topic, even Jay Leno was making jokes about it. Mom hates Jay Leno, but I was his faithful midnight-every night friend.
"Your name is Monica, Mama," I pointed out unnecessarily. But I was proud I knew this, having only recently realized mothers had real names at all.
"Yes it is," said Mom, indulging me. "Our last name is Youkai though, Sweetheart. You know they're not talking about me, right?"
"Mm-hm," I said. I listened for another couple of seconds to the droning voice but quickly lost interest when I realized he wasn't making jokes. He seemed very concerned over Clinton and Lewinski's affair, whatever an affair is. Turning the dial, I listened to two men talk about hunting, a woman talk about what might have been knitting, and finally reached a comedy station. A woman was telling jokes. I love jokes! "Who is this, Mom?" I asked, more out of idle curiosity than really wanting to know.
"I don't know, Sesshoumaru," my mother said, sounding suddenly annoyed. Maybe it was all questions that disgusted her so much. "Why don't you change the—"
"Dad would know," I muttered.
A long silence passed, broken only by the canned laughter and jokes coming in over the radio, and Inuyasha snoring in the Bronco's backseat. It was that tense type of silence, where you know you've upset someone and meant to so you have nothing else to do or say but wait for a rebuttal. I pretended not to notice, and maybe I didn't—I was only ten.
Mom didn't say anything for a half hour, maybe hoping I would forget about Dad. On some subconscious level I think I knew that we fled California because of him. Whenever Mom referred to Dad, she referred to him as the Demon. But I was sullen anyway because all my friends were back there. The only other time we'd moved had been from a house in San Diego to a two-bedroom, one-bathroom complex in downtown Los Angeles. Even then I got to visit Dad on weekends. Inuyasha didn't, of course; we have different dads, but my brother never gets to see his, probably because Mom doesn't know who Inuyasha's father is.
Thinking of my little brother, I looked at him in the passenger side-mirror. He was in one of those almost-car seats, the type that kids as old as nine will use if their parents insist. I got out of those car seats by the time I was seven, having argued my way out of it; even as young as then I was comprehending the power a child wields. Though it was against the national law, I got to sit in the front passenger's seat, too, but that was mostly because so many boxes and the like were piled up in back, leaving only a place for Inuyasha's car seat and the baby himself. We look nothing alike; I look like my mom and I guess Inuyasha must look like his dad, since he looks nothing like Mom. Inuyasha has the soft and wavy black hair, olive skin, and big dark eyes of a Spaniard. I, on the other hand, am an Asian-American. My eyes are wide almonds, tilted, and a brown that's so light it almost seems yellow; my hair white-blond, like Mom's, and very straight to my shoulders, though I have it tied back in a loose ponytail for the day; and my skin is pale golden.
Today has Inuyasha dressed up in another of his ridiculous outfits that Mom keeps calling cute but isn't. Since Inuyasha learned to talk, to argue, he's been allowed to dress himself. He's still learning how to match, and today he's failed miserably. In those pink polka-dotted green rubber goulashes, beige shorts, a Mickey Mouse tee shirt and the plastic yellow overcoat, and a red cap that's too big for his head because it's mine, Inuyasha looks like an alien from outer-space that's trying to disguise himself as a fireman. His black hair is mussed up from his last tantrum, because Inuyasha has a habit of pulling at his hair when he's upset. Considering that he gets upset a lot, I'm really surprised Inuyasha has any hair to pull at.
Finally I said, "Mom?"
"What, Sesshoumaru?"
She was deeply annoyed. I decided not to push it and looked out my window. "Nothin," I said. Then was passed a Dairy Queen and I forgot about keeping my tongue. "Mom! Can we get ice cream, Mom?"
"Shh. You'll wake up—" But Mom was interrupted by a little voice that said excitedly from the backseat, "Ice keem!"
"Ice keem!" I imitated my little brother, dropping my r's and rolling my e's. "Ice keem - ice keem - ice keem!"
"Hush you two! I can't drive with all this racket you're making!" Inuyasha let out an injured wail. I hid my triumphant smile by turning my head to look out the window. "Its okay, Sweetie," crooned Mom, glancing at Inuyasha in the mirror. "Shh, shh. Okay, we'll get ice cream. Okay? Shh, shh, hush now, Yasha. Shh…"
Abruptly a hot jealousy bubbled up in me and I didn't want ice cream anymore. Why did she always baby Inuyasha? Mom had never babied me. She was young for a mother, and I had been here first, so I guess it made me a little more difficult to handle at times because having a baby at nineteen was a trial by itself. But that didn't give her any right to mollycoddle Inuyasha just because he was easier to take care of, because Mom was a little more prepared the second time around.
I noticed then that the Bronco was drifting into the other lane. "Mom—" I started, about to tell her this.
"Quiet, Maru. Shh, shh, Yasha. Want ice cream? What flavor do you want, Sweetie?"
I closed up my mouth real tight and looked out my window. Fine, my thoughts growled. I hope we flip. That'll teach her. Though I wanted to, I didn't mention that we had already missed the turn-in for Dairy Queen. That would teach her, too.
Then I saw the semi.
"Mom!"
She shot me with her most piercing glare. I would learn to master that glare before I grew up. "Maru! I'm trying to calm down your little brother that you riled up. Be quiet for a minute, will you?" And she returned her attention to the screaming infant in the backseat, who I knew would not shut up 'til the actual ice cream was in his hands and allover his face. She went on cooing. She did not take any notice whatsoever that the Bronco continued to drift toward the edge of the road, and as it did a sixteen-wheeler barreled down the old country road, headed right for us. I began to wonder whether we would flip over the side first or be hit by the semi. I was hoping to flip.
"Mom," I tried again, afraid now. Cold fear overcame the hot jealousy. Liquid ice replaced my blood, but at the same time I realized I was sweating. "Mom, look! Look at the road! Both eyes on the road!" I hollered, quoting a movie I had seen a while ago. "Mom!"
"What, Sesshou—" And that's when she saw it. The semi, the edge of the road. Mom gasped and jerked the wheel a hard right. For once, Inuyasha shut up without being told. The fact we had wandered into grave danger finally dawned on him, amazingly penetrating that thick skull of his, and he somehow had sensed that silence was needed. The Bronco fishtailed and for a moment we went broadside as Mom struggled to keep the truck from going into a spin.
And the semi struck, horns blaring.
After that I blacked out. Authorities would say later that the air bags and a buckled seatbelt, and my mother's soft body were all that saved me. The last thing I remembered was canned laughter on the radio, and as I heard my mother screaming, I swore never to laugh again.
When I woke up it was quiet and very hot. I was hanging upside down, suspended by my seatbelt. To my left there was a bloody mass of flesh and lots of twisted metal, broken glass everywhere. A place on my head stung and when I lifted a hand lazily to touch the spot, my fingers came away drenched in crimson liquid. Quickly the daze wore off, though, and I remembered the heat. There was a crackling sound that I could identify with the noise bonfires at the beach made, but there was no sound of waves. I looked directly ahead of me and absently noticed there was no windshield, but more than that I was concentrated on the definite smell of gasoline, of fire.
"Inuyasha," I remembered, and my voice was a croak.
In a daze, I unbuckled my seatbelt. Subconsciously I must have comprehended there was a time limit, for I moved faster than my aching body should have allowed. Unbuckling my seatbelt might have been a mistake—I fell hard on my back and felt the skin pierced by glass and more twisted metal. I didn't pay any attention to the pain as I rolled onto my hands and knees and checked through the open space between the two front seats for any sign of my little brother. There was nothing human where he had been, just piles upon piles of my family's old belongings, now ruined. My heart hurt as my subconscious realized that I was alone, completely alone.
Then I heard a muffled sound from beneath the boxes and other junk piled atop Inuyasha's corpse.
Alive! He's alive! I'm not alone!
I dove between the seats and made ribbons of my flesh as I tore at the pile of crap covering my little brother. The longer it took the hotter it got and the rapider my heart beat. Smoke choked me, but I hardly noticed. Later the doctors would tell the social workers that I was in a deeply traumatized trance, though the more common name for it was shock. Yet the deeper I dug the louder Inuyasha's cries became, until I touched warm damp skin that was his face.
There must have been a pocket of air under there, a pocket of space, for his little hands immediately found mine and Inuyasha's screeches came louder. I took my hand back. With new fervor I ripped at anything that came under my sore fingers. Vaguely I had the knowledge I was bleeding, ripping new injuries the wilder my actions became, causing myself even more pain, but somehow even at ten I was able to shove that knowledge away, ignore it. I could indulge it later, maybe even wallow. Maybe in the hospital I would die from all the blood loss and I wouldn't have to worry about the pain that would come later. At least that's what I began to hope for as Inuyasha's cries quieted.
By the time I saw him, enough of him to grab and extract from the car-seat, Inuyasha was unconscious. The smoke had got to him, choked him. Doctors would know after interviewing me a dozen times that it was his own cries that did Inuyasha in; apparently babies breathed a lot more when they were crying than any other time, and Inuyasha had suffocated himself on the smoke. If he had just stayed quiet, he would have been fine.
I dug him out of the car-seat, found the buckle and unsnapped it, grabbed Inuyasha's little body and held it close to me. He was still warm, still breathing very softly, and I could dully feel his heart beating against mine. I crouch-crawled toward the window, struggling to keep Inuyasha's little body with me. The hole of broken glass in the backseat side-window was just big enough for the both of us to fit through, but it still scraped my legs and arms and back as I squeezed me and Inuyasha through. Once outside the wrecked Bronco, I stood and walked away from the crash, bruised, scraped and bleeding, but alive. I shifted Inuyasha in my arms so that his legs went around my middle and his head rested against my shoulder, and I carried him up the side of the ditch. On the roadside I saw the semi up ahead, the front of it smashed up pretty good but otherwise untouched, and the driver's door was open. Who must be the driver stood with his back to me and seemed to be talking on a mobile phone, for he was talking loud and hysterically and making wild yet incoherent gestures with one arm, holding the opposite hand to his right ear.
Not knowing exactly what to do, I walked over him. He pivoted this way and that but never turned to see my approach. Then I was behind him. He was overweight and wore a green-mesh trucker's hat, along with denim pants and a white tee shirt that had words on the front and back that my mind refused to process. I reached up with one hand, holding my baby brother to me feebly with all my strength of my other arm, and tugged on the incoherent tee shirt.
He turned about and looked down at me and his mouth open and closed, but the loud words stopped. In his right hand, pressed to his right ear, was a bulky black mobile phone that I heard a vaguely womanly voice emit from.
"My brother's hurt," I told the truck driver unnecessarily. "Would you please call an ambulance?"
I promptly fainted after that. A voice in the back of mind echoed into the blackness that enveloped me:
Please don't leave me. I don't want to be alone.
Alone, alone, alone… completely alone.
-
A/N: MUA HA! I'M ALIVE! Enough angst for you? Did I mention this is Alternative Universe? Could you tell? lol. This was actually going to be another of my FictionPress stories, but I got writer's block directly in the middle of this chapter and it just sat here on the computer's word-processor for months on end. Then I learned of and read through some fanfics, watched some Inuyasha®, and came up with this idea. I know this chapter ends sort of roughly and Sesshoumaru is a tad out of character right now, but don't let that discourage you. He'll be back to his cold self soon enough. Oh, and just a hint of how the rest of this story would go if I decide to continue it: Inuyasha didn't die. Anyway, how did I do?