"Don't leave the shrine," Kagome instructed Inuyasha through a mouthful of breakfast, the second day after the well closed to them. "And try not to get in the way of any tourists or worshippers either, got it?"
"Yeah, yeah," Inuyasha muttered, bothering Buyo in his usual fashion. "I wasn't planning to, anyway. I'm gonna go check out the well again."
"Did you have any luck yesterday?" Kagome finished her toast and sat on the raised floor, putting her shoes on.
"No," Inuyasha growled, lifting the cat's front paws up to his shoulders. "I went in and out a few times, no luck. Other than that, there's nothing different about it at all. No youki, no spiritual pressure, no foreign scent."
Kagome sighed. "Yeah, I get the impression this isn't the kind of problem that'll just go away if we wait long enough. I already asked Gramps to look into the shrine records and see if there's anything that can help us." She grabbed her bag and headed out the door. "Until then, don't leave the shrine. See you later!"
Might as well make the most of a bad situation, Kagome thought as she walked to school for the fourth day in a row. She was surprised by how easily she fell back into her old routine. Her grades were improving from quizzes and homeworks alone, and she felt more prepared for upcoming tests than she had in months.
The day passed uneventfully. And as she walked home from school, Kagome couldn't help but think: This is too easy. Since she'd met Inuyasha, her life just didn't do "uneventful."
Which was why she knew the universe was punishing her for her ingratitude when, at the base of the shrine steps, she saw three screaming police cars pulling up to a crowd of people. And in the middle of it all was a boy with long white hair and a scarlet kimono.
Inuyasha…!
"Sit!"
"He's just restless," Mama Higurashi murmured in her usual peaceful manner. She rinsed a plate and held it out to Kagome to dry.
"I guess so," Kagome sighed, her voice also low. Despite the sound of the splashing dish water and Sota's TV program running in the background, she was confident that Inuyasha could still hear them, wherever he was.
"This place must be different from what he's used to," Mama went on. "He doesn't understand the laws and ways of doing things, and he has no opportunity to learn. You get upset if he leaves the shrine grounds, and he's clearly doing his best to please you, Kagome. How do you expect him to try to fit in here if you won't give him the chance to understand where he's trying to fit?"
She was right, as always. "Understanding the rules and following them are two totally different kettles of fish," Kagome grumbled. He sure didn't follow any rules but his own in the feudal era. But back then, she tended to see it as a good thing; the thought of Inuyasha meekly following the law was vaguely horrifying.
"And he's bored, Kagome. You can't cage a boy like him and expect him not to make his own entertainment."
Kagome smacked the towel down on the countertop and faced her mother with a huff. "Then what do you suggest, mother? How do we-" she lowered her voice, which had risen with her frustration. "How do we 'keep him entertained' in a way that doesn't end up with someone suing us for property damage?"
Her mother handed Kagome the last dish gave her daughter an admonishing look. She waited until she had her daughter's full attention before speaking.
"Let me worry about that, Kagome. Property can be replaced. Money isn't important. You know what is important?"
"People." Kagome gave her mother a small smile.
"That's right, people. I'm glad to see you haven't forgotten everything I've taught you while you were gallivanting around in the past." Mama Higurashi swatted her daughter playfully with one of the drying rags before starting to put the dishes back in their drawers. "And as for what he can do...well, I think that's a question best answered with Inuyasha's own input, don't you think?"
She turned to the window, opened to let in the night-scented breeze, and said in the same mild tone, "Inuyasha, would you come in please? There's something we need to discuss."
There was a shuffle and clatter from the tiled eaves above the kitchen window, and thirty seconds later Inuyasha walked through the door. He sat down at the table with his usual sulk. "Yeah? What is it?"
Mrs. Higurashi sat down at the table across from him and motioned for Kagome to sit down as well.
"Well, Inuyasha, we understand that being stuck in the shrine grounds all day must be pretty boring for you-"
"You think that's why I did it? Because I was bored?" Inuyasha interrupted indignantly. "Hell yeah I'm bored, but that's not why I did it. And I'd do it again every time."
"Seriously?!" Kagome began. "Why do you-" She stopped short when her mother put a restraining hand on her arm.
It had been a fight of some sort, from what Kagome saw when she ran up to the chaotic scene. By the time she came close, Inuyasha had already been smashed into the ground by her spell, and there was a stranger on top of him, a punkish looking, twenty-something year old man wearing a leather jacket and rings on his fingers. He straddled Inuyasha, punching him in the head.
The police rushed forward and grabbed the stranger, pulling him off of Inuyasha.
"What the hell was that for?!" Inuyasha lifted himself up from the cracked concrete, searching until he met Kagome's eyes. She pushed forward through the small crowd until she was standing next to an officer.
The police misunderstood. "Kid, you were engaged in an act of battery and public disturbance," a female officer said. "Just because you were in the mood for a fight doesn't mean you can just go start a brawl." She glanced down at the sidewalk where Inuyasha's face had just been and muttered, "and boy were you losing."
"Wh-!" Inuyasha began to protest, but the police officer cut him off.
"Listen kid, I don't know who started this fight and I don't care. But you're a minor, and it looks like you took a lot more damage than your buddy here." Kagome glanced back at the thug's face, which looked to be developing a black eye, and Inuyasha's. Inuyasha only had the redness and scraped face that usually accompanied a sit, which she knew from experience would be gone in two hours.
"He's Yoshinobu Ito," a third officer supplied, while his partner manhandled the thug in question into the cruiser. "He's the one who made that mess in holding two months ago, remember?"
"Right," growled the policewoman. She turned back to Inuyasha. "So you're probably not in as much trouble as he is. But we're going to need you to come with us."
"Wait!" Kagome quickly went to stand between Inuyasha and the police officer. "He was the one getting attacked, wasn't he?" The officers were getting out of their cars right when Kagome had activated the beads. Hopefully they only saw as much as she did. "He's not pressing charges, so why do you need to take him?"
"And who are-"
Yoshinobu Ito, bless his idiot self, chose that moment to kick violently at the screen separating the front and back of the police cruiser. The female police officer turned and scowled, then looked back to Inuyasha.
"She speaking for you?" She asked, with a jerk of the head toward Kagome.
"Uh, yeah."
"Fine. You can go for now, but if I ever catch either of you jackasses fighting again, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Are we clear?" Without waiting for a reply, the police woman spun around and returned to her car, and the three cruisers peeled out.
Kagome waited for minute until the last straggling rubberneckers had left, and then whirled around to glare at Inuyasha. "I cannot believe you!" she screeched. "I mean, I was expecting a- a broken roof, or something, but the police?! How could you start a fight with a normal human?!" She whirled around and began stomping up the steps.
"He deserved it, Kagome!" Inuyasha leaped to stand in front of Kagome on the steps. Kagome went around him. "He was trying to force that girl into his carriage, even though-"
"And it didn't occur to you to stop him peacefully?" But then, who did she think she was talking to?
"I did try!"
"Oh yeah? For how long before you started throwing punches?"
Inuyasha opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. "Listen Kagome, just because-"
"Sit boy."
Kagome walked past the pained grunt as Inuyasha's face hit the stone steps. When she got to the house, she yelled at Sota for something stupid, and spent the rest of the night in her room, feeling guilty about it until supper. Inuyasha was absent from the dinner table. Definitely off sulking somewhere, Kagome had thought venomously.
Now, though, after talking it over with her mother and cooling her head, she was feeling a little sorry for her harshness earlier.
"Would you like to explain your side of the story?" Mama Higurashi suggested to Inuyasha gently.
Inuyasha glared at Kagome. "Are you sure you're interested in listening?"
Kagome glanced away guiltily, then back to Inuyasha's eyes. "Yes, I am. I'm sorry I was so hard on you before." If he really would do it over again, as he'd said, then she knew there had to be more to the story than restless belligerence. "And I'm sorry for not trusting your judgment."
"Keh," Inuyasha looked away, mollified.
"I was on the roof of the shed, and he was at the walk up to the oratory," Inuyasha began with a shrug. "There was a girl in the oratory, drunk as a fish. I could smell the alcohol on her breath from yards away.
"She kept talking about how she needed to get home, needed to find the…" Inuyasha waved his hand in the air, searching for the word. "Some contraption from this world that takes people home."
"Taxi? Bus?" Kagome suggested. "Train?"
"The bus, that was it." Inuyasha shrugged, and went on. "He took her down the steps and kept saying he'd take her home, but I don't think he meant her home.
"So I went down and told him to get lost. He had one of those carriage contraptions sitting in the road, and he was trying to make her get into it when I got there."
Kagome listened, eyes wide, with her hands over her mouth. Fool! She told herself. Inuyasha made a mess of things by accident all the time, but he wouldn't do anything so unreasonable intentionally. She should have known.
"He threatened me and told me to fuck off," Inuyasha continued with a smirk. "I tried to get the girl away from him, so he punched me." Inuyasha chuckled, amused at the memory. "So I slashed a hole in his carriage."
Kagome and her mother both startled at that.
"Oh my…"
"You wrecked his car? Where? How?"
Inuyasha snorted. "I only wanted to teach him a lesson, so I aimed for the extra metal part, instead of the seats. The snout at the front."
Kagome dropped her head on the table. It figured that, when he was trying to limit his damage, he aimed for the engine.
"That's when he started coming at me for real," Inuyasha went on. "I hit him a few times, but he was a scrapper. Just kept coming. Then you came," here he turned to scowl at Kagome, "and subdued me into the rock. And you know the rest."
"Sorry about that," Kagome winced. "Though actually, if I hadn't, the police would probably have considered you the primary aggressor. But I saw that guy got a few hits in; are you okay?"
Inuyasha shot her a disdainful look. Right.
"I'm glad we've cleared this up," Mrs. Higurashi said. "Regardless, I still think it's important to get Inuyasha out of the house. Not that we don't love having you here, dear," she said, giving Inuyasha a reassuring pat on the arm. "But for your own sake, it's probably best for you to have something to do during the day."
"Right," he said. Kagome sat up straighter and gave Inuyasha another look. Was he...nervous? If he was, he hid it well, because any hint of the emotion she thought she might have seen was gone.
"Excellent!" Mrs. Higurashi clapped her hands together. "How about you go to Kagome's school, Inuyasha?"
She was immediately blasted with two simultaneous screams of "NO!"
"No, no, hell no-"
"Mama there is absolutely no way he can-"
"-face a pack of wolves during the new moon than sit in that-"
"-would wreak havoc! If you think the destruction here is bad-"
"-place looks like torture! No!"
"-full of hormonal teenagers!"
Mrs. Higurashi held up her hands in surrender until the two terrified, gasping teenagers quieted down. "Alright, alright," she said. "It was just a suggestion, the first of many. You have both made your opinions clear.
"The next thing I was going to suggest was that you get a job."
Kagome's immediate thought was to protest again, but she stopped herself. Hadn't she just said she would trust Inuyasha's judgment? (At least to act on his own; she still didn't want him showing up at her school.)
Inuyasha considered the idea. "What kind of job?"
"That's up to you," Mama said. "Though I suspect that, with your lack of education or citizenship, your options will be limited. But jobs that require strength would be both available and a good match for you, I think."
Inuyasha leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "Yeah, whatever. Anything's fine. It's just until the well opens up and we can get back to our real jobs."
"Not to mention, if you have your own income, you wouldn't need to come to us for things you want."
"Like instant ramen," Kagome added.
Inuyasha cracked open one eye. "Oh really? How much ramen?"
Kagome went to grab a pen and notepad from the counter behind her, grinning. He was hooked. "Let's see. If you work half-time, for nine hundred yen an hour, and a cup of ramen is sixty yen..." she scribbled out the math. "That's about three hundred cups a week."
"Are you serious?!" Inuyasha jumped from his chair and grabbed the paper with Kagome's calculations. He discarded it half a second later, because he couldn't recognize the Hindu-Arabic numerals, but the excitement was still there. "I didn't realize how rich your world is, Kagome. Three hundred cups a week! Hell yeah I'll get a job!"
Kagome laughed out loud and her mother smiled.
"Excellent, I'll call the employment agency tomorrow," she said. "In the meantime, though, you'll need to get some modern clothes. Do you think you could take him shopping this weekend, Kagome?"
Like most girls, Kagome had played with dolls when she was little. There was something about the clothing, dressing the plastic girls up and making them beautiful, that she'd always loved.
And you could say a lot of things about Inuyasha, but there was no denying he was a very beautiful doll.
It was the middle of math class, when no sane person should be smiling, but Kagome couldn't help the occasional giggle. Her friends had been giving her concerned looks for the past ten minutes.
It was such a weird mental image, Inuyasha in modern clothing. Shorts. Slacks. Button-downs and wife-beaters. Skinny jeans or baggy ones. Weird, but good. Definitely good. Kagome let out another goofy chuckle and Eri whirled around again to make worried eyebrows at her.
The bell rang, and the noise of chatter began as the students got up to stretch their legs and vocal chords.
"Alright, spill." Yuka loomed over Kagome's desk, and Eri and Ayumi approached. "You haven't been this happy since Student Oden-Appreciation Day. What's with all the happies?"
Kagome leaned back in her chair and stretched. "I'm sorry my joy makes you so angry, Yuka," she smiled cheekily.
"That's not- I'm not angry-"
"Oh, stop teasing her Kagome," Ayumi said with a laugh, sitting on Kagome's desk. "You know that if Yuka goes three days without sticking her nose into someone else's business she turns into a pumpkin."
"A tragic curse," Eri intoned theatrically, placing one hand on her brow and the other palm over her heart. Yuka hip-checked her into a passing classmate.
Ayumi continued. "So what is up?"
Kagome thought for a moment about how to tell them, in a way that satisfied their curiosity without revealing any secrets. Well, she could go with that; it was almost true, in a way...
"I've got a date."
Ayumi, Yuka, and Eri all gasped at once and started talking.
"That's my girl!" Yuka fistpumped. "Now, details! Who is it? Where? Who asked who?"
"That's so nice," gushed Ayumi. "So cute! Same guy?"
"Wait, does this mean you're still going out with the rude one?" Eri asked.
Oh shit, abort, abort! Kagome meant to just throw them off her trail, but all she'd done was bloody the waters...and in the sea of gossip, her friends were sharks.
"Oh, it's actually not that big a deal." She desperately tried to downplay it. "He's, um, in town for a while and we're just going shopping together on Saturday. Really, it's not actually a …" she was reluctant to say the word date again in case it made them more excited.
"Well, your expression during class sure seemed to say otherwise! And this is the same guy we've been hearing about for months, right? Does this mean we finally get to meet him?" Yuka asked, an enthusiastic grin on her face.
Not if I can help it. "Yeah, it's him. And, um, I don't think so. We're just buying some clothing and then he's leaving."
"Well then where-"
The bell cut Eri off as the teacher walked into the room, and students reluctantly returned to their seats. Kagome let out a sigh of relief; those girls grilled her like master chefs! She made more of an effort to rein in her expression during the next class, but she was still playing Inuyasha-dress-up in her head.
After about an eternity, the final bell rang, and Kagome prepared herself for another round of fending off questions. She saw her friends homing in on her like hunting dogs, coming closer, and-
"Higurashi, I'd like to speak with you for a moment."
Kagome turned to Hasegawa-sensei, and saw her friends do the same. "Oh! Um, yes, sir."
The teacher stared meaningfully at the trio until they got the message and left, bowing goodbye and closing the door. Hasegawa motioned Kagome closer to his desk. She approached nervously.
"I'm very glad to see you've been feeling better lately, Miss Higurashi," he began. "I've noticed you've been doing much better in class since you've...actually been coming to class."
"Thank you, sir?"
Hasegawa waved her response away, like an insect. "But five days cannot make up for weeks of missed content and barely-passing exam scores, you must realize. At the moment, there is a very real likelihood that you will fail ninth grade if you do not maintain the level of attendance you've been showing this week."
His crushing words fell on Kagome like boulders. No, no! This can't be happening. I've got to come more often, when the well opens up. She stared miserably at her shoes.
"That is why," he continued, "I'm offering you a chance for extra credit."
"I'll take it!"
The teacher cracked a smile. "Don't be so hasty, you haven't heard what it is yet.
"There is a...student, in another class, who needs some help." Hasegawa took of his glasses and rubbed the wrinkles between his eyes, a troubled expression on his face. "He often misses classes due to...misguided attentions. I would like you to tutor him, just review the contents of any classes he missed that day. I feel that you, Miss Higurashi, must understand the difficulty of keeping up in school when you don't often attend. The review will benefit you too, in the long run."
That didn't sound so difficult. "Yes, I can do that."
The teacher let out a relieved smile. "Thank you, Miss Higurashi. I'm sure a good girl like you can help turn that boy around."
"Wait, what?"
Hasegawa-sensei rose from his chair. "His name is Natsuo Morikawa, and he really is a good boy. Please don't believe the rumors about him. Besides, he wouldn't hit a girl."
"Wait, what?!"
"So, do you think you could start on Monday?"
Aw yiss, update! Finally, things are getting fun. Speaking of which, I know a lot of you were itching to see Inuyasha going to school with Kagome, but try as I might there is no possible way I can see either of them going along with that. It would go completely against his character. And hers!
But fear not, Inuyasha's job will not disappoint! (Well, me anyway.) It took me a long while to figure out what kind of job he should have, but I'm very satisfied with what I eventually came up with, and I think you will too.
Love the chapter? Hate it? Do you have reasons why Inuyasha should go to school, or suggestions for what you want to see him try on? Comments of any sort? Give a desperate author a review this holiday season, and you'll get a complimentary T-shirt with your author's face on it. (Not really.) *Arms of an Angel plays in the background*
Till next time!
-TKF