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Writing on the Wall

Chapter 22: Off the Handle

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'You're angry.'

Inuyasha doesn't even know when she wrote it—the clicking of the chalk must have been drowned out by the blood pounding in his ears—but it had to have been sometime between slamming the front door and swearing at the (ruined) bucket of thin-set waiting for him in the bathroom.

It's not a question, so he doesn't treat it like one. "No shit," he snaps. He's pissed off all right, but if she thinks he's going to sit down and talk about it she has another thing coming. He scrapes out the dried, crumbling thin-set from the bottom the bucket and dumps it in the trash. What a fucking waste of yen.

When he looks up, Kagome's chalk has (wisely) remained silent.

The only sound in the room is the metal hiss of his trowel against the plastic sides of the bucket as he scoops and the heavy thud as it hits to the bottom of the trash bin. Scrape. Toss. Scrape. Toss. Scrape. The repetition should cool his temper, but it really fucking doesn't. His blood his boiling, and by the time he finishes he can't hold himself back.

"You couldn't just let me handle it, could you?" he growls, noisily dropping the trowel into the (now empty) bucket. He doesn't even know if she's still in the room, but that damned cat is watching him—tail flicking—from the bottom step of the staircase, and the stupid thing has a tendency to stick close to Kagome. "What the hell were you thinking?"

The chalk is swift, flying across the wall in a flurry of strokes. 'He called me a demon!'

"Who the fuck cares?!"

'I do!'

She's fucking lucky she's already dead, because right now he's pretty sure his look could kill. "Don't you get it?! He's not going to fucking let this go! Every time I talk to him, he's going to bring this up, and we're going to argue about it until one of us rolls over and dies!" he snarls, upper lip curling in a sneer. "So I hope you're fucking happy!"

The chalk floats, hovering uncertainly, but Inuyasha doesn't wait to see what she'll right. He snatches his bucket up from the floor and leaves—making sure to slam the front door behind him. He dumps the bucket by the coiled up hose before stalking over to grab the half empty bag of thin-set. When he dumps it in the bucket he gets a face full of cement dust in his face, and he curses around a cough.

The anger sticks with him, as stubborn as the dust in his hair and nose, but by the time he's slapping mud on the floor the hold it has on him begins to weaken. Kagome hasn't tried to get his attention. While he lays the first two tiles he tells himself he's glad she's leaving him the hell alone. Space is good. He likes space. Except, when he lays the last tile, Inuyasha finds himself irrationally irritated when he should just be glad to be fucking done.

Grumbling under his breath, he picks up his supplies and stalks out of the bathroom. He has every intention of just washing the bucket out, locking up, and getting the hell out of there, but he makes the mistake of glancing at the chalkboard wall on the way out, and stills.

'I'm sorry.'

Fucking hell.

Inuyasha sighs, running a hand over his face, as the rest of his anger sours into something that feels suspiciously like guilt. "Yeah," he mutters. "Me too."


AN: As always, thank you to all who have taken a moment out of their day to review! And thank you to whomever nominated me for Best Serial in the 2020 Inuyasha Fandom Awards! Please continue to stay safe and healthy, dear readers!

Word Count: 596