Disclaimer: I do not own InuYasha, so don't sue!

SANGO'S WEDDING

Ch.2-Yes We Are, We're Lost.

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There was silence in the car as we smoothly drove down a secluded road. It was so quiet that the loud shrill of my cell phone woke me up from the sleep I was unknowingly falling into.

"Hello?"

"Kagome, good to know you are still alive. How's the trip so far?"

I frowned, not liking Sango's cheerful voice. There was something she was trying to hide.

"It's good. And don't think I don't know you are up to something, I can tell by the sound of your voice."

Sango started chuckling nervously, making me frown deeper.

"So are you close to arriving?"

"Ugh, I don't think so. In fact, I think we are lost, so that plus the hour we spent trying to exit Tokyo will make us a good couple of hours behind schedule."

"We're not lost." InuYasha said as he continued staring forward, not risking me telling him to keep his eyes on the road.

"Yes we are." I said in response to him.

"Kagome? You are what?"

"Nothing, I was talking to InuYasha."

"Oh, so you're actually talking to him? Has Mr. Big Bad Hanyou not pissed you off yet?"

"Keh. Tell her that I can hear everything she is saying."

"Sango, InuYasha said that you should know he's eavesdropping into our conversation."

There was a voice in the background as Sango presumably held the phone away from her as she talked to someone. Meanwhile, InuYasha and I argued on how listening into other people's conversations was considered eavesdropping.

"Kagome? You there? I have to go now. I'll call your mom for you and tell her you'll be getting home late. Gosh, how many times did I say that when we were younger? Anyways, bye."

I flipped my cell phone close and put it away, brushing off Sango's comment. I turned to InuYasha, saying, "We're lost."

"No we're not."

"InuYasha, cut the male pride and admit that we're lost."

"I said that we're not, this is just a shortcut."

"InuYasha, you only have a fourth of a gas tank left, and the last gasoline station we saw was an hour ago."

"Exactly, that means there should be another gas station close."

"InuYasha…we're driving through a forest."

"You think? What made you think that? It wasn't the trees, or was it?"

I reached out and punched InuYasha in a joking manner but also out of frustration.

"Hey! What the hell?"

"How could we get lost? I thought your 'super hanyou' powers gave excellent skills with directions."

InuYasha scrunched his nose, not bothering to look at me. "I never actually drove to Tokyo myself, or the way back. I always had someone driving for me, since I was 'too young'…and as we already established, I'm a workaholic, with no holidays. I've spent everyday since college in Tokyo."

"A-ha. That's why you were asking me if I had ever driven home. You don't know how to get there, so now we're lost."

"You already said that."

"I know. But you just said that we are lost."

"Kagome, I never said we were lost. This is just—hey! A gasoline station! Didn't I tell you there was going to be another one close by?"

I ignored InuYasha's comment as I grabbed on to the latch on the side of the door, taking out my wallet and placing my purse on the dashboard. Once the car had fully stopped moving, I exited, telling InuYasha I was going to buy a map.

"We don't need a map!"

"InuYasha, seriously, we need a map."

I walked into the shabby building, first asking were the restrooms were. After answering nature's call, I bought a map, shaking my head as I exited the building. If only we had both paid more attention doing Geography we wouldn't be in this mess. Or if we had a GPS.

When I walked to the car, I could see InuYasha leaning towards my seat from the outside. When I opened the door he visibly jumped as if he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't have.

"What are you doing?"

"Keh. I was looking for some gum but I couldn't find any."

I gave InuYasha a weird look as I sat down and closed the door, moving my purse out of the seat so that I wouldn't sit on it.

"Did you ask were we are?

"Um, yeah. The man said we're at…um, Utsunumiya."

"Utsunumiya? InuYasha! That's in the other direction of Matsue!"

"I know that, I just didn't know that the exit was the one on the right and not at the left."

I opened the map I had just bought, noticing how far away we were form our destination. Even farther than we were when we started.

"Okay, from what I can tell, we can directly take a road to Gifu, and so on until we reach Matsue. That'll save us from entering any main cities, and avoid any traffic."

InuYasha leaned from his seat over to mine, pointing out what our drive would be like. His shoulder touched mine and slightly pushed me as he reached out to point something in the map.

"It says this map is from the year 1999. I just hope some of those roads still exist."

I nodded, yet I wasn't paying attention to what InuYasha was saying, I just noticed how the proximity between us became even less, if that was even possible.

InuYasha moved back to his seat, turning on the car and pulling out of the gas station. Before we fully exited, he turned to look at me.

"Okay, ready to-Kagome? Did you put something on your face?"

"What?"

"You're all red. Don't tell me your sick or something. Not that I care, but if you throw up in here, Kagura's going to kill me…painfully and slowly."

"Uh…no. It's just that's it's kinda hot."

I reached out and turned the temperature lower, sure that in a few minutes me teeth would be chattering.

"Whatever you say."

InuYasha resumed exiting the parking lot, turning back to travel back in the forest we had just exited.

"Well, there go two hours of our life, wasted on a wrong exit."

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"No, I don't have or want a girlfriend. Women are incarnations of evil."

Somehow, our conversation had changed from a movie to InuYasha's romantic life. I thought it would be uncomfortable to talk about it, but I guess it must've been the effects of boredom during a long ride and the darkness that had fallen around us that made me not care.

"Well then, I guess we both agree that members of the opposite sex are no good as partners."

"Keh. Having marriage problems?"

"Marriage problems?"

I stared incredulously at InuYasha, not understanding what he meant. When he nodded his head to my hand that rested on my lap, I looked down and noticed I still wore the fake marriage band on my ring finger.

"Oh!" I said as I held up my hand. "I'm not married! This is just the ring I use to ward off men at work."

"So what then? Are you trying to ward me off too? I noticed you were wearing it, so I figured you were married."

"I just forgot to take it off after yesterday, that's all. I had to deal with this really pushy guy once, so I decided to try this to see if it would work. Plus it makes women more comfortable when they think I've gone through the whole marriage ordeal. They believe I know how to make a dress look perfect for the moment."

"So were you trying to ward me off?"

I looked at InuYasha and gave him the darkest glare I could muster. "I think that was established a long time ago, or did you forget already?"

"I didn't," InuYasha said as he turned to look at me for a moment, "but I might want to change that."

"Listen, InuYasha," I said as I began getting mad, "the only reason why I'm here with you in Kagura's car is because I had to change all of my plans when I found out my boyfriend was gay. If I had any other choice, I would take it, but guess what? I'm not filthy rich like you, so I have to work to get money and that prevents me from taking time off to see a stupid therapist to get over my stupid phobia!"

InuYasha did not look at me, but I could tell he was listening. If the car wasn't passing so fast by the vehicles around us, I was sure they would be able to hear me arguing…mostly to myself.

"Or did you forget that I have a phobia caused by the freak accident my father died it? Just like you forgot to be there when we lowered his casket into the ground because you were too busy with some whore?"

"Kagome-" InuYasha looked at me briefly before he looked back at the dark road.

"Shut up, I don't want to put up with your bogus story of how 'it was all a misunderstanding'. Or how it was okay to let Kagome be put down by the whole school."

The scenery on the outside was completely hidden by the darkness of the night. Suddenly, the barely visible trees came to a stop as InuYasha pulled to the side of the road. A couple of meters ahead I could see a lit up sign that signaled that our hometown was an exit away.

"Kagome-"

InuYasha twisted in his seat to look directly at me. I looked away as his strong golden gaze bore into my eyes.

"I said I don't want to-"

InuYasha's hand reached out to cover my mouth, keeping me from telling him to be quiet again. I instinctively tried to remove it, but my puny strength was not enough to overpower his. He managed to keep his hand fully covering my mouth, without letting me take it off but not hurting me in the process.

"When I finish telling you what really happened, you are probably going to think I'm bullshitting you. If I tell the truth, you'll think I'm lying. So either way, you'll think I'm lying."

I crossed my arms over my chest, not willing to agree that what he said was right. Since it was impossible for me to talk, he kept going.

"Kagome, the day that your father was buried was a significant date for me too. You know both of my parents died, right? Well…my dad was the first one to go. Sesshomaru and I were both little, but even at that age Sesshomaru acted too old for a child and seemed relatively unfazed. Mother tried not to show it for our sake, but it hurt her greatly."

My eyes widened as InuYasha spoke of both of his parents. In all the years I had known him, he rarely spoke of either one of his parents, much less his father.

"As for me, I was too small to really comprehend what happened. I would hear mother crying at nights, so all I could think to do was crawl into bed with her and try to comfort her as best as a 6-year-old could."

InuYasha stopped, and the hand at my mouth slackened. Instead of taking advantage of that, I removed his hand with ease and held it in my own as I put it down, forgetting that I was supposed to be mad at him. InuYasha didn't seem to notice as he looked straight at me and resumed talking.

"After my father died, my mom took full responsibility of both Sesshomaru and me. She gave Sesshomaru as much care as me despite the fact that he was just her step-son. Within a year of father's death, we moved out of Yokohama and ended up living in that white house at the end of your street. Mom was too overprotective of us at the time, so our only outings were to the private school she enrolled us at and the yearly trip to dad's gravesite."

InuYasha took a deep sigh as willed the words to keep going.

"Mom tried hard, she really did, but everybody could see that she couldn't live without dad. So one day when I went into her room to wake her up, she was clothed in the old Kimono dad had given her, clutching at an old picture of him. She never woke up."

As InuYasha talked, any bit of anger that I had felt was slowly disappearing, but a tiny bit of it remained as I remembered what he'd done.

"We buried mom in the same place as dad, so every year Sesshomaru and I would go to their tomb and spend the day there, on both days. It was a tradition mom started, and it's one we still keep to this day. My mom, she died on March the eighteen. Does that date remind you of anything?"

I stayed quiet, thinking back to so many years ago when I was seventeen. My dad was driving me to a nearby city to buy some supplies I needed for a new project I was about to start. We had left right after breakfast, so by the time we were returning, we were both hungry as we skipped lunch.

During one of our stops we had bought packaged riceballs, and as I ate one my dad asked for one. The mountainous road was wet from the March showers, so as my dad drove with only one hand with the riceball in the other, he didn't have time enough to regain control of the wheel as it went crazy on him.

We drove off the road and rolled down the side of the mountain. The accident should have killed us both, but somehow I survived with only a broken arm and small lesions. My dad wasn't so lucky. He was encased in the folded metal of the car, with his organs being squished together until it was too much.

My father died on March the fifteen, and he was buried on the eighteenth of the same month. Family and friends gathered on the somber graveyard, some crying and others quiet. Try as I might, I couldn't cry. I could not shed a single tear for my loving father, the fact that he was dead never sinking in.

"The day your father was buried was the day Sesshomaru and I would go to visit my mother. Sesshomaru would go out of his way to pick me up, and we would both travel from there. He always held a greater love for my mother instead of his own. After our dad died, his mother didn't fight for custody, although she always threatened dad she was going to take him."

The hand that was not being held by my own reached out to gentry caress my cheek as I took time to let everything sink in.

"I really wanted to be there for you, but I had a promise to keep for my mom. I know what it feels like to lose a parent, and I know that having people by your side makes easier to endure."

InuYasha gently pried his hand from my own and turned on the car, going back into the road and driving the small distance to our destination.

The rest of the ride to our houses was quiet as we turned into the street we both lived in our early life. When we reached my house, he parked by the majestic steps and helped me unload my things.

"I can go up by myself."

InuYasha stood outside the car as I started making my way up the steps. The added weight of my entire luggage made my trip up the steps slower, so I was not even half way up when InuYasha called me.

"Kagome! Do you remember what I told you years ago when you turned seventeen?"

I stopped, thinking back to that day. I'd had spend the day with my family and a few of my friends. After all my friends left, I went to sleep but before I could fully fall asleep, InuYasha had climbed up to my window.

"Kagome! Psst…let me in."

I sluggishly got out from my bed and opened my bedroom window. InuYasha entered, jumping to the floor.

"God, woman. I thought I was going to spend the whole night there. What took you so long to open?"

I sat on the floor with InuYasha as he dug through his jean pockets for something.

"Happy Birthday."

InuYasha opened his hand, revealing a ring. It was a silver band with small rubies, I presumed, arranged in a pattern all around it.

"InuYasha! It's so beautiful…but I can't accept this!"

InuYasha looked taken back as I closed his hand around the ring.

"Why the hell not?"

"It's too much…a simple birthday card would have been okay. You didn't have to spend so much money!"

"I didn't spend any money on it, this used to be my mother's ring, which was supposed to be passed down from mother to daughter. After my mom figured she wasn't going to have any more children, she gave it to me. And now I'm giving it to you."

I gasped, looking back at the ring that InuYasha was now placing on my finger.

"Consider it a promise ring."

InuYasha grabbed my hand, bringing up to his mouth and placing a soft kiss on my knuckles.

"My mom would have been honored have you own this, so don't worry about it."

"No," I said, bringing my hands to either side of InuYasha's face, "I'm honored to be bestowed with it."

InuYasha leaned down, capturing me in a sweet but passionate kiss.

"We'll always be together, I promise."

"Always."

"I-I do."

"Look inside your purse. I plan to keep my promise."

Before I could open the latch on my purse, InuYasha went into the little red Audi and drove away. Putting my things down, I sat in one of the steps and looked inside my purse, stopping when my fingers felt the similar pattern of the ring that had occupied my ring finger for almost a year.

Not taking it out, I brought my legs closer to me, resting my head in them and releasing the tears I had not had time to let out for the death of my father.

For the pain I had felt when Kikyo tricked me into believing InuYasha had cheated on me with her, on the day of my dad's burial.

And for the empty void that InuYasha had left in me ever since he left from my life.

Next Chapter: We're Like Disposable Chopsticks

A/N: I know, I know. I'm using the InuYasha-betrayed-Kagome-when-they-were-young-and-now-tries-to-get-her-back plot. But hey, I needed a plot for my 'road trip failure' story…so that'll suffice.