Thank you all yet again for all your kind reviews, and, as always, for bearing with me as I figure out what I'm doing. And of course, for your patience.
I apologize for the 'filler' feel to this chapter. I felt like they needed a break from the unrelenting melancholy...and ended up regressing back to by base genre (Humor. Forgive me.). My foundation in drabbles also shows, I think, in the fragmented way I handle things. But of course, the only cure to this is to write more long stories!
Kagome shifted about under the covers. "Gnuh," she mumbled.
Beep! Beep! said her alarm again.
Her muddled mind couldn't understand what was going on. She wriggled and made a sound of protest.
Beep! Beep!
Thoughts sloshing about in her head like a spin cycle, she instinctively reached out and pawed the air. After a minute of uncoordinated flailing she hit the snooze bar, mostly by accident, and the room filled with blessed silence.
For a while.
Beep! Beep! the clock sang again, almost cheerily. If an inanimate object could enjoy its job, this one surely did.
"Rrrnnn," Kagome replied, hitting it again.
But the clock of course sprang back to life a few minutes later, as clocks always do.
Beep! Beep!
"Mmmfhg," Kagome said, rolling over and smacking the snooze bar. Her head pounded. Why was she so tired? She cracked open her eyes and caught a bleary glimpse of the dog laying in her bedroom doorway. Something about a kitchen…?
Nguh. She was too tired to think about it. Just a few more minutes…
Beep! Beep! the clock chided shortly.
She squinted a hateful look at it and groped the air again. Her hand landed on something warm and furry. Oh good. Sesshoumaru must have decided to sleep by the bed.
Her hand finally managed to reach the clock and silence it, and with a sleepy grumble she passed out again.
Beep—crrnchhk.
When she woke again it was already midday, sunlight pouring through the blinds. Disoriented, she blinked against the glare. How had she overslept so late? Had she forgotten to set the alarm? She could've sworn she remembered it going off once or twice. Weird.
Groaning, she rolled out of bed, stumbled towards the bathroom, and walked straight into a homicide.
"You…you killed my alarm clock!"
Sesshoumaru looked up at her, a wire sticking out of his mouth. Then he bent down and resumed gnawing his mechanical kill. The air rang with the crunchy squeal of metal.
Kagome gaped, aghast.
My poor clock! She'd always hated the thing, but now that it was dead, she felt an irrational surge of sympathy for it. Along with a very rational surge of ire for the dog.
Twisting another spring loose, Sesshoumaru reveled internally at the satisfying twang it made. After the infernal racket had gone on for an hour and forty-five minutes, something had to die, and it was going to be the clock or Kagome.
Sesshoumaru felt he had been quite merciful.
He watched with interest as the miko pointed at him, mouth opening and closing several times before she found some words to fill it with. "I thought we agreed there would be no more breaking things!"
Sesshoumaru paused mid-crunch. Had that been part of their agreement?
Hm.
"Bad dog," she said, shaking the finger. "Very bad."
Sesshoumaru wondered what she would do if he bit the finger. Not enough to hurt her, of course, just enough to make her yelp a bit.
He paused in his thoughts, suddenly contemplative. When was the last time he'd had a childish urge like that? How...odd. After last night's incident, he shouldn't be thinking about such things so lightly. She still bore the marks of his madness on her hand.
Kagome watched as the dog's red eyes turned somber, and immediately felt bad. She was never a good disciplinarian. Her technique was to praise her pets when they were good, and…praise them less when they weren't. Okay, so she'd never had a pet who was quite this destructive, but she still didn't like telling him he was bad. No pet should have to feel they were bad.
"Aw, I didn't mean it," she said, crumbling completely. "You're a good boy, Sesshoumaru. But that was still a very wrong thing you did."
She would swear the dog gave her a look of disappointment.
The miko, Sesshoumaru decided, would make a terrible warlord. As a former warlord himself, it was almost painful to watch. Amusing, but painful.
"Well, what's done is done, I suppose," she sighed, giving the remains of her clock a last mournful look. Kagome knew she wasn't a graceful riser, but seriously…she didn't deserve this, did she?
Kagome sighed again as she staggered into the kitchen. "Did you have to destroy the coffee machine?"
The dog's eyes followed her line of sight to the demolished kitchenware. Then they lifted back up to hers with a look that was almost defiantly unrepentant.
Kagome pinched the bridge of her nose.
Eventually, after several fumbling starts and singed fingers, she managed to make her coffee the normal way, with a teapot. Her silent audience only served to make her more self-conscious. He tracked everything she did with his eyes, and the extra attention seemed to amplify her innate clumsiness. He was just so focused.
Ah well, she thought as she took the first soothing sip, if you can't be a clutz in front of your dog, who can you be clutzy with? It was actually kind of nice, in a way, now that she thought about it. It didn't feel like her actions were being judged, just…observed.
"Well!" she said, smiling, her demeanor suddenly bright. She raised her mug in the air. "A toast, then." She dipped it down and clinked it against the side of his doggie bowl, grinning at him. "To new beginnings. Today is a fresh new start for both of us. Lets make it a good one."
And indeed, daylight seemed to have let them shed their specters. The weight of the past was still there, but for the moment, he wasn't carrying it.
Things went smoothly until she realized she had yet to take her new dog for a walk. At which point she realized that convincing an animal bigger than you to do what you want was an exercise in hair-pulling frustration.
Kagome had been sort of hoping that after their breakthrough last night he had gotten over his aversion to touch, but apparently, that had been a one-time deal.
Getting the leash on him was a nightmare.
She had coaxed, and cursed, and pleaded, and prayed. She had tried sneak attacks, tried bodily tackles, tried hiding the leash up her sleeve so he wouldn't know it was coming. Twice she had ended up tangled up in the leash on the floor; once she had somehow gotten the collar on herself; and never, of course, had the leash ended up on him.
After an hour she gave up and started laying down newspapers, at which point he picked up the leash himself, sat in front of the door, and waited to go out.
Ooooh! The dog was yanking her chain!
He had then looked her dead in the eye as she fastened it, sending a brief chill through her. She had the uncanny, unsettling feeling that she was being allowed to leash him—and he wanted her to know it. The moment it was secured he pulled away again, moving to the end of the length of the leash, and it stayed that way as she led them outside.
Sesshoumaru's first few steps into the snow were heavy with dread as he looked up at the buildings and breathed in the thick scent of humanity. The metal towers were dizzyingly, searingly bright, so bright they made him feel dim. And the cars droned, and droned...
"C'mon Sesshoumaru, lets go to the park!" Kagome said, tugging on his leash.
Diverted, he looked up at her and she grinned and tugged again.
Sesshoumaru looked around at the buildings again. The snow was clean and crisp and crunched under his paws. Shaking himself, he padded after her.
The miko beamed and skipped ahead of him, her steps sending up little flurries of snow, and Sesshoumaru found, as the fear of losing himself receded, that her light mood was catching. In fact, he was still feeling uncommonly pleased with himself from the clock incident that morning.
Damn, mauling things felt good.
Messing with the miko felt good.
He'd mauled lots of things during his years as a stray dog, and even more as a youkai lord, but never had he taken the time stop and enjoy it, and never had he had an audience to (un)appreciate his work.
It really made all the difference. After all, every artist wants recognition for their craft, and there was a definite art to dismembering things.
And there was an added pleasure to destroying clocks, he'd found: it felt like destroying time. Time had eviscerated him. Getting to bite it back, even just symbolically, was viscerally cathartic. It made him want to tear apart every clock in the world until he stopped time entirely.
His eyes drifted back to the human girl. Had the little miko stopped time for herself? Is that how she had survived it? She smelt so human though. Granted, with his youki dormant he probably smelt mortal too, and even felt mortal to others—her inner eye obviously couldn't sense him. But he found it highly doubtful that she was a sealed up youkai.
"Oh look! Those kids are making a snowman! We should make one too!"
Highly doubtful indeed.
They stopped in a white field framed in snow-capped trees. Behind them the tops of buildings rose, and there were benches and other humans with other dogs, taking away any illusion that this was a forest like the ones he had grown up in. Something almost wistful crossed the miko's face for a moment, like she was remembering old forests as well.
But the field was an isolated island in the middle of a concrete sea, and it was all he was going to get. He hadn't known there were any trees in this part of Tokyo at all.
Kagome closed her eyes and breathed the cold air deeply.
"See? Isn't this nice?" she said.
He silently agreed.
"Don't you wish now that you'd just been a good boy and behaved in the first place?"
Hn.
Kagome yelped as the leash jerked out of her hand. She quickly grabbed for it, but the dog danced out of reach.
"Oh, shit!" she cried in dismay as he surged forward, all liquid muscle, and tore off across the park. "Um, um…SIT!"
She'd shouted the word entirely on reflex, and the tiny spark of hope that it would work was also mostly reflex, built up from years of having that one little word solve so very many problems.
But, no. Sesshoumaru had no subduing collar, and also, apparently, no obedience training.
The spark fizzled out.
Doing the only thing she could do, she took off after him.
"Kagome?" Her elderly neighbor frowned. "Are you all right? You look exhausted."
Kagome paused in the middle of putting the key in the door.
"What? Me? No, I'm fine."
He raised a bushy eyebrow at her.
"You're all wet."
"Am I?" she said absently, fumbling with the lock. A piece of icy snow dislodged itself from her hair.
"And muddy."
She glanced down at her slush-caked boots. "So I am."
"Are you sure you're okay, dear?"
"Oh, it's nothing," she said with a wave. She struggled harder with the stuck lock. "I was just out for a run with my new dog, that's all."
He lowered the first eyebrow and raised the other one.
"But the dog is dry."
Kagome glanced down at Sesshoumaru. "Yes. So he is." Giving an internal sigh, she started trying to dry her wet key on her wet sweater. "Actually, he slipped his leash and I had a little trouble catching him," she admitted.
Her neighbor looked dubiously down at the dog. The dog looked back, perfectly calm and well-behaved.
"He only has three legs," he pointed out.
"…They're three really, really good legs," she said lamely. The bolt turned with a heavy click. "Oh! It's working! Well, I'll see you later, Mr. Muraki." Before he could open his mouth again she'd shoved herself and the dog through the door and slammed it shut. Pressing her back to it, she heaved a sigh of relief. Mr. Muraki was nice, but he was a very…observant man, and even she had enough dignity left to feel embarrassed about being left in the dust by a three-legged dog.
But apparently, not enough dignity to avoid such a situation in the first place.
Pushing off from the door, Kagome squished and sloshed her way into the apartment. With as much grace as she could muster she wrung her hair out on the doormat, shucked off her boots and socks, and made her soggy, frazzled way towards the bathroom.
Before she could get there Sesshoumaru was beside her, the end of his leash in his jaws.
"Oh, now you want me to hold the leash?" Kagome drawled, kneeling so she could unlatch it from his collar. He sat still until the moment it was undone and then he was out of reach again, watching her from a safe distance. "Ungrateful," she muttered, even as an unwanted hint of amusement stole across her face.
Kagome started to get up but slipped in her own growing puddle and landed back on her butt. She growled so loudly it startled the dog.
"This is all your fault," she grumbled, successfully regaining her feet on the second try. "My new dog is a sadist."
She would almost swear his tail gave a slight wag.
When her shower was done she threw on fresh clothes and threw herself down on the bed in an achy, boneless heap. "Ow," she said aloud. "That's going to be sore in the morning. And by that, I mean my entire body." She groaned and closed her eyes. "On the plus side, I don't think I've had this much exercise since the feudal era."
There was the soft clicking of nails on wood, then silence. She turned her head to find Sesshoumaru with his muzzle on the edge of the bed, staring at her. Again.
"You're so weird," she told him.
Sesshoumaru blinked at her.
"Just what is it about me that's so interesting?"
The dog gave a whuff and disappeared from view.
"Ouch," she muttered again.
At that point she must have dozed off for a bit, because when she opened her eyes again her hair was dry and the sunlight coming through the window was beginning to dim. She glanced over at her clock—oh, wait, she didn't have one any more.
"Oh crud, I need to go shopping," she mumbled, reminded that there were several direly important household items that needed replacement (the coffee machine, and…and the coffee machine!). She rolled over—
And was face-to-face with Sesshoumaru again.
With her bow in his mouth.
Kagome blinked. The sight of her bow in his jaws was strange and misplaced, like an oversized fetch stick. How'd he get her bow anyway?
"Did I leave that out in the hall last night?" she said, remembering that she had taken it out. Hadn't she put it away again? Apparently not. She reached out and took hold of it, and the dog relinquished it without a fight. Thank goodness—she didn't know what she'd do if it broke. It was, after all, technically an antique…they didn't make them any more like they did five hundred years ago…
Her stomach gave a small lurch as she turned it over in her hands, the familiar feel of the supple wood making something inside her ache.
"Back in the closet with you," she murmured, getting up and setting it reverently in place beside her quiver and her hope chest. Even if it was a useless weapon this day and age, she felt safer having it there.
She carefully shut the closet door, putting the past out of sight again. "The bow is not a toy," she told Sesshoumaru firmly.
Sesshoumaru canted his head to the side, regarding her with his dark eyes.
"You're just lucky you didn't leave teeth-marks," she scolded. "You know, the way you did in everything else I own." Slipping into an old pair of sneakers, she grabbed her wallet and keys. "I've got to go get some things. Be good while I'm out."
The dog sat there, his face blank, looking perfectly innocent like he'd never torn apart an appliance in his life. The piece of clock at his feet ruined the effect.
She pointed at him. "Be good."
As she left the building, she passed by the trashcan where the remains of half her kitchen set had been laid to rest.
Kagome crossed her fingers and sent up a little silent prayer. Please, please be good.
Kagome halfway expected her building to be on fire when she returned, but was pleasantly surprised to find herself not homeless, and also not short any more appliances.
She was unpleasantly surprised to find Sesshoumaru's leash missing.
Sesshoumaru watched with mild amusement as the miko sputtered and huffed, repeating the words "I said be good!" over and over, as if by protesting enough, the leash would reappear. Sesshoumaru almost wished he could talk so that he could patiently explain that, considering he used to make people mysteriously disappear (though it was perhaps never that mysterious, and they didn't disappear so much as dissolve), this was very good by his standards.
He was going to have to find a better way to get rid of things nowadays though. His stomach was starting to hurt.
The miko finally wore herself out. "Fine," she sighed, "I'll improvise."
She started rummaging through her closet, and to his horror, withdrew a long bathrobe tie.
"Sorry, buddy, but there's leash laws around here."
Now his stomach really hurt.
"But what to use for a collar…" she murmured, noticing that was gone too. "Ah!" Pulling open a drawer, she withdrew a…a sparkly glittery thing. It appeared to be masquerading as a belt, but Sesshoumaru knew it couldn't possibly be a belt because belts were simple practical things, and this was anything but.
It couldn't be a belt. It couldn't.
Kagome wrinkled her nose at it. "At least I'll finally have a use for Yuka's present." She held it up and turned back to Sesshoumaru. The dog looked at it like it was a snake.
Kagome looked back and forth between the dog—the big, beautiful, shaggy white dog—and The Belt. The…very pink belt. With red rhinestones. Arranged in heart shapes.
"No," she said finally, sagging. "…I think this might be animal cruelty."
Sesshoumaru relaxed, relieved. He might have no dignity, but the memory of his old, prideful self was still echoing around in his skull. The thought of being deliberately mocked made the echoes get louder, made something inside him…tense…and he didn't know what that something was going to do if it was pushed too hard.
He sort of wished she'd push it.
Then to his amazement, the miko undid her own belt—her own plain, brown belt—and attached the bathrobe tie to it.
"I hope you appreciate this," she muttered, buckling the pink one on herself. She grimaced. "I'd like to say I'm being entirely selfless, but I'm convinced your namesake would rise from the grave and kill me if I let anything this pink touch something with his name on it."
She had no idea how right she was.
And in appreciation, he didn't shred the new jerry-rigged leash to pieces like he'd planned to.
Not today, at least, he thought as he let her lead him out the door.
When they got back, Kagome forced herself to sit at her desk and do work. Tomorrow was a full day of classes and she couldn't afford to fall behind. Biting her pen, she struggled to concentrate on the words on the page.
She was starting to worry if maybe she'd bitten off more than she could chew (and more to the point, if what she'd bitten was going to start biting back). She'd never thought owning a dog would be so exhausting, so…demanding. She'd only had it for one day and it was dominating her life! Was it supposed to be like this?
Her eyes slid to the side, landing on the dog that spread across her couch like a lounging white lion. Its half-lidded eyes were already focused on her. She was struck by what a regal creature it was, even with its missing leg. The way he was draped over it made her ratty old couch look like a throne.
Guess that was another thing he had in common with his namesake. The youkai could have made anything look like a palace just by gracing with his presence. Of course, he'd have probably taken one look at her couch and melted it into fabric goop. Even so, it was funny to imagine him sitting imperiously upon her cushions and glaring at her.
With a start Kagome realized that the pen had fallen from her fingers some time ago and she was sitting there, chin in her hands, doing nothing but staring at the dog. How long had she been wasting time not working?
With a groan she realized she wasn't going to be getting anything done.
"This dog'll be the death of me," she muttered, face in her hands. Then again, they had survived their first day together—that had to mean something! And there was a lot less attempted homicide than on the first day she'd met his namesake. If that dog hadn't been the death of her, there's no way she couldn't handle this one.
"Alright," she said, snapping her book shut. "I'm going to bed. Tomorrow I'll be totally productive." And if I tell myself that enough times, maybe it'll be true, she thought morosely.
The dog didn't make a move as she got up, but by the time she was done brushing her teeth, it had settled itself in her bedroom doorway again, just like last night.
Kagome glared down at him, hands on her hips. "What's it going to take to get a little snuggling around here?"
Sesshoumaru didn't budge.
Great, she sighed internally. Yet again, no snuggles for Kagome. Story of my life. Her fingers itched to run themselves through his ivory fur, but she had a feeling (a feeling she liked to call survival instinct) that wouldn't be a very good idea at this point.
After setting her new alarm, she turned back to Sesshoumaru again, folding her arms. "Okay, you," she said, crouching down in front of him. "Here's the deal. I have a class first thing in the morning. I need to get up on time. So I'll get up at the first ring, if you leave my clock alone from now on. Okay? No more clock assassination. No." She shook her finger at him on the last word.
He didn't look impressed.
Well, hell.
Too tired to fight about it more (and well aware that it was useless to debate against her dog), she quit while she was ahead (or was he ahead?) and went to bed.
"Good night, Sesshoumaru," she said. And then, even though she was exhausted and achy and cross, she found herself smiling in the dark anyway.
It hadn't been a bad day at all.
Brrrrinnng! Brrrrinnng!
"Mmnngh," Kagome said, stirring. Pushing herself halfway upright, she wavered, squinting blearily at the…noise-making thingy. It was different than the noisy thingy that was usually there. Kagome found this confusing.
Brrrrrriinnnnng…! it continued to sing, ringing in the dawn.
Knowing there was something she was supposed to do, she sluggishly reached out and engaged in slow-motion flailing. The noise stopped and she slumped back down.
But then the noise began again (Brrrrrriiinnnng…!). Scrunching her eyes, she flailed harder. Her clumsy movements knocked the clock from the bed-stand. Still ringing, it clanked to the ground, then bounced and went silent as the button was finally hit. Satisfied, Kagome rolled over, reveling in the sound of perfect quiet, and was soon asleep.
In the background, a faint crunching began.