We made it back to Mr. Walden's classroom. I don't know how, but we did it,
the statue's head hurtling after us the whole way, the velocity with which
it was traveling causing it to whistle eerily, as if the Buddha were
screaming. The head collided with all the force of a cannonball against the
heavy wooden door, just as we slammed it closed behind us.
"Holy Shit," Inuyasha sputtered, as we leaned, panting, with out backs pressed up against the door as if with our sheer weight, we could keep her out- Ayame, who could walk through walls if she wanted to. "'I can take care of myself,' you said. 'I'll just have to get rid of her first,' you told me. Right!"
I was trying to catch my breath, and think what to do. I had never seen anything like that. Never. "Shut up," I said.
"Cadaver breath." Inuyasha turned his head to look down at me. His chest was rising and falling. "Do you realize that's what you called me? That hurt, you know, aisuru. It really hurt."
"I told you..." something heavy was buffeting against the door. I could feel it knocking against my spine. It didn't take a genius to guess it was the founder of a certain statue's head. "...Not to call me that."
"Well, I would appreciate if you didn't make disparaging remarks about my..."
"Look," I said. "This door isn't going to hold up forever."
"No," he agreed, just as the metal head managed to smash its way partly through a spot it had weakened in the wood. "May I make a suggestion?"
I was staring, horrified, down at the head, which had turned, halfway in and halfway out of the door, to look up at me with cold, bronze eyes. It's crazy, but I could have sworn it was smiling at me. "Sure," I said.
"Run."
I wasted no time in taking his advice. I ran for the windowsill, and, heedless of the shards of broken glass, swung myself up onto it. It only took a few seconds to open the window again but that was long enough for Inuyasha, still pushing against what had begun to sound like a hurricane with all the banging and wailing, to say, "Uh, hurry please?"
I jumped down into the parking lot. It was kind of funny how, outside the thick adobe walls of the school, you couldn't tell at all that there was a severe paranormal disturbance going on inside. The parking lot was still empty, and still quiet, except for the gentle, rhythmic sound of ocean waves. It's just amazing what can be going on beneath people's noses, and they have no idea... no idea at all.
"Inuyasha!" I hissed, through the window. "Come on!" I had no idea if Ayame might decide to take out her rage with me on an innocent party- or, if she did, whether Inuyasha had any cool tricks, like the one she pulled with the statue's head, of his own. All I knew was that the sooner the both of us got out of her range, the better.
Okay, let me state right now that I am not a coward. I'm really not. But I'm not a fool, either. I think if you recognize that you are up against a force greater than your own, it is perfectly okay to run.
It's not okay to leave others behind, though.
"Inuyasha!" I screamed, through the window.
"I thought I told you," said a very irritated voice from behind me, "to run."
I gasped and spun around. Inuyasha stood there on the asphalt of the parking lot, the moon at his back, casting his face into shadow.
"Oh my god." My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to explode. I had never been so scared in all my life. Never.
Maybe that's why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Inuyasha's shirt in both my hands. "Oh my god," I said, again. "Inuyasha, are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right." He sounded surprised I'd even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Ayame do to Inuyasha, after all? She couldn't exactly kill him. "Are YOU all right?"
"Me? I'm fine." I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr. Walden's classroom. "Do you think she's.... done?"
"For now," Inuyasha said.
"How do you know?" I was shocked to find that I was shaking- really shaking- all over. "How do you know she won't come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?"
Inuyasha shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Kouga's. "She won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because she won't. She doesn't know she can. She's too new at all this, Kagome. She doesn't know yet all that she can do."
If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn't work. The fact that he admitted she COULD uproot trees and start hurling them at me- she was that powerful- and only hadn't due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn't think Ayame could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Inuyasha had followed me down to school. But the thing of it was, Inuyasha knew he could. He'd been a dead partial demon a lot longer than Ayame. She was only just beginning to explore her new powers.
That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this... and already that powerful.
I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.
"We've got to do something," I said. "We've got to warn Mother Kaede- and Kouga. My god, we've got to warn Kouga not to come to school tomorrow. She'll kill him. She'll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus..."
"Kagome," Inuyasha said.
"I guess we could call him. It's one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him- I don't know what we could tell him. We could tell him there's been a death threat on him, or something. That might work. Or- we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that's what we could do we could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like, 'Don't come to school tomorrow, or you'll die.' Maybe he'd listen."
"Kagome," Inuyasha said again.
"Or we could had Mother Kaede do it! We could have Mother Kaede call Kouga and tell him not to come to school, that there's been some kind of accident or something. Something..."
"Kagome," Inuyasha stepped in front of me just as I turned around to retread the same five feet I'd been pacing for the past few minutes. I came up short, startled by his sudden proximity, my nose practically banging into place where his shirt collar was open. Inuyasha seized both my arms quickly, to steady me.
This was no a good thing. I mean, I know a minute ago I had grabbed him- well, not really him, but his shirt. But I don't like being touched under normal circumstances, and I especially don't like being touched by demons. And I ESPECIALLY don't like being touched by a demon who has hands as big and as tendony and strong-looking at Inuyasha's.
"Kagome," he said again, before I could tell him to get his big tendony hands off me. "It's all right. It's not your fault. There was nothing you could do."
I sort of forgot about being mad about his hands. "Nothing I could do? Are you kidding me? I should have kicked that girl back into her grave!"
"No." Inuyasha shook his head. "She'd have killed you."
"Bull! I totally could have taken her. If she hadn't done that thing with that head..."
"Kagome."
"I mean it, Inuyasha, I could totally have handled her if she had gotten so mad. I bet if I just wait a little while until she's calmed down and go back in there, I can talk her into..."
"No." He let go of my arms, but only so he could wrap one of his own around my shoulders and start steering me away from the school and toward the dumpster where I'd parked my bike. "Come on. Let's go home."
"But what about..."
The grip on my shoulders tightened. "No."
"Inuyasha, you don't understand. This is my job. I have to..."
"It's Mother Kaede's job too, no? Let him take it from here. There's no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself."
"Well, yes, there is. I'm the one who screwed up."
"You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?"
"Of course not. But I'm the one who got her so mad. Mother Kaede didn't. I can't ask Mother Kaede to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair."
"What is totally unfair," Inuyasha explained- patiently, I guess, for him, "is for anyone to expect a young HUMAN girl like you to do battle with a demon from hell like..."
"She isn't a demon from hell." I said, although technically she was. "She's just mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a..."
"Kagome." Inuyasha stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn't lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.
For a minute- just a minute- I really thought... well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I'd never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: you know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing- oh, yeah, and we'd both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed off demon.
Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, who happened to be part demon, but hey, beggars cant be choosers, and let me tell you something, Inuyasha was way cuter than any live human guy I'd met lately. I'd never seen such a nice-looking guy. He couldn't, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It's usually hard to tell with demons, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn't look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around the park ten years ago.
I could only assume Inuyasha had died at someone else's hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he'd been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Nobunaga to frame it for posterity's sake.
And now this extremely nice-looking hanyou looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?
So I sort of leaned my head back and looked at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that's when I noticed his attention wasn't focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest either, which would have been an okay second.
"You're bleeding," he said.
Well that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that particular remark.
"I am not," I said automatically since I didn't feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn't tell what color they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Inuyasha's shirt.
But they were definitely coming from me I checked myself out, and found that I'd managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my writs. I'd peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I'd been talking to Ayame, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I'd forgotten to put them back on. I'd probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the windowsill in Mr. Walden's classroom when I'd vaulted up onto it during my escape. Which had just proved my theory that it's always on the way out that you get stuck.
"Oh," I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn't think of anything else to say but, "what a mess. I'm sorry about your shirt."
"It's nothing." Inuyasha reached into one of the pockets of his dark wide- fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped around my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn't say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a demon had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.
There," he said when he was finished. "Does that hurt?"
No," I said, since it didn't. It wouldn't start hurting, I knew from experience, for a few hours. I cleared my throat. "Thanks."
"It's nothing." He said.
"No," I said. Suddenly, ridiculously, I felt like crying. Really. And I never cry. "I mean it. Thanks. Thanks for coming out here to help me. You shouldn't have done it. I mean, I'm glad you did. And... well, thanks. That's all."
He looked embarrassed. Well, I suppose that was natural, me going all mushy on him the way I had just then. But I couldn't help it. I mean, I still couldn't really believe it. No demon had ever been so nice to me. Oh, my dad tried, I guess. But he wasn't exactly what you'd call reliable about it. I could never really count on him, especially in a crisis.
But Inuyasha... Inuyasha had come through for me. And I hadn't even asked him to. In fact, I'd been pretty unpleasant to him, overall.
"Never mind," was all he said though. And then he added, "let's go home."
A/N:
Aww... fluffness... how sweet....
Anyways, I changed the spacing, so hopefully it'll be easier to read. If it's not, just tell me.
REVIEW!!!
"Holy Shit," Inuyasha sputtered, as we leaned, panting, with out backs pressed up against the door as if with our sheer weight, we could keep her out- Ayame, who could walk through walls if she wanted to. "'I can take care of myself,' you said. 'I'll just have to get rid of her first,' you told me. Right!"
I was trying to catch my breath, and think what to do. I had never seen anything like that. Never. "Shut up," I said.
"Cadaver breath." Inuyasha turned his head to look down at me. His chest was rising and falling. "Do you realize that's what you called me? That hurt, you know, aisuru. It really hurt."
"I told you..." something heavy was buffeting against the door. I could feel it knocking against my spine. It didn't take a genius to guess it was the founder of a certain statue's head. "...Not to call me that."
"Well, I would appreciate if you didn't make disparaging remarks about my..."
"Look," I said. "This door isn't going to hold up forever."
"No," he agreed, just as the metal head managed to smash its way partly through a spot it had weakened in the wood. "May I make a suggestion?"
I was staring, horrified, down at the head, which had turned, halfway in and halfway out of the door, to look up at me with cold, bronze eyes. It's crazy, but I could have sworn it was smiling at me. "Sure," I said.
"Run."
I wasted no time in taking his advice. I ran for the windowsill, and, heedless of the shards of broken glass, swung myself up onto it. It only took a few seconds to open the window again but that was long enough for Inuyasha, still pushing against what had begun to sound like a hurricane with all the banging and wailing, to say, "Uh, hurry please?"
I jumped down into the parking lot. It was kind of funny how, outside the thick adobe walls of the school, you couldn't tell at all that there was a severe paranormal disturbance going on inside. The parking lot was still empty, and still quiet, except for the gentle, rhythmic sound of ocean waves. It's just amazing what can be going on beneath people's noses, and they have no idea... no idea at all.
"Inuyasha!" I hissed, through the window. "Come on!" I had no idea if Ayame might decide to take out her rage with me on an innocent party- or, if she did, whether Inuyasha had any cool tricks, like the one she pulled with the statue's head, of his own. All I knew was that the sooner the both of us got out of her range, the better.
Okay, let me state right now that I am not a coward. I'm really not. But I'm not a fool, either. I think if you recognize that you are up against a force greater than your own, it is perfectly okay to run.
It's not okay to leave others behind, though.
"Inuyasha!" I screamed, through the window.
"I thought I told you," said a very irritated voice from behind me, "to run."
I gasped and spun around. Inuyasha stood there on the asphalt of the parking lot, the moon at his back, casting his face into shadow.
"Oh my god." My heart was beating so fast, I thought it was going to explode. I had never been so scared in all my life. Never.
Maybe that's why I did what I did next, which was reach out and grab the front of Inuyasha's shirt in both my hands. "Oh my god," I said, again. "Inuyasha, are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right." He sounded surprised I'd even bother to ask. And I guess it was stupid. What could Ayame do to Inuyasha, after all? She couldn't exactly kill him. "Are YOU all right?"
"Me? I'm fine." I turned my head to search the darkened windows of Mr. Walden's classroom. "Do you think she's.... done?"
"For now," Inuyasha said.
"How do you know?" I was shocked to find that I was shaking- really shaking- all over. "How do you know she won't come bursting through that wall there and start uprooting all those trees and hurling them at us?"
Inuyasha shook his head, and I could see that he was smiling. You know, for a guy who died before they invented orthodontia, he had pretty nice teeth. Almost as nice as Kouga's. "She won't."
"How do you know?"
"Because she won't. She doesn't know she can. She's too new at all this, Kagome. She doesn't know yet all that she can do."
If that was supposed to make me feel better, it didn't work. The fact that he admitted she COULD uproot trees and start hurling them at me- she was that powerful- and only hadn't due to lack of experience, was enough to stop my shaking cold, and drop the handfuls of shirt I held. Not that I didn't think Ayame could have followed me if she wanted to. She could, the same way Inuyasha had followed me down to school. But the thing of it was, Inuyasha knew he could. He'd been a dead partial demon a lot longer than Ayame. She was only just beginning to explore her new powers.
That was the scariest part. She was so new at all of this... and already that powerful.
I started pacing around the parking lot like a crazy woman.
"We've got to do something," I said. "We've got to warn Mother Kaede- and Kouga. My god, we've got to warn Kouga not to come to school tomorrow. She'll kill him. She'll kill him the minute he sets foot on campus..."
"Kagome," Inuyasha said.
"I guess we could call him. It's one in the morning, but we could call him, and tell him- I don't know what we could tell him. We could tell him there's been a death threat on him, or something. That might work. Or- we could leave a death threat. Yeah, that's what we could do we could call his house and I could disguise my voice, and I could be like, 'Don't come to school tomorrow, or you'll die.' Maybe he'd listen."
"Kagome," Inuyasha said again.
"Or we could had Mother Kaede do it! We could have Mother Kaede call Kouga and tell him not to come to school, that there's been some kind of accident or something. Something..."
"Kagome," Inuyasha stepped in front of me just as I turned around to retread the same five feet I'd been pacing for the past few minutes. I came up short, startled by his sudden proximity, my nose practically banging into place where his shirt collar was open. Inuyasha seized both my arms quickly, to steady me.
This was no a good thing. I mean, I know a minute ago I had grabbed him- well, not really him, but his shirt. But I don't like being touched under normal circumstances, and I especially don't like being touched by demons. And I ESPECIALLY don't like being touched by a demon who has hands as big and as tendony and strong-looking at Inuyasha's.
"Kagome," he said again, before I could tell him to get his big tendony hands off me. "It's all right. It's not your fault. There was nothing you could do."
I sort of forgot about being mad about his hands. "Nothing I could do? Are you kidding me? I should have kicked that girl back into her grave!"
"No." Inuyasha shook his head. "She'd have killed you."
"Bull! I totally could have taken her. If she hadn't done that thing with that head..."
"Kagome."
"I mean it, Inuyasha, I could totally have handled her if she had gotten so mad. I bet if I just wait a little while until she's calmed down and go back in there, I can talk her into..."
"No." He let go of my arms, but only so he could wrap one of his own around my shoulders and start steering me away from the school and toward the dumpster where I'd parked my bike. "Come on. Let's go home."
"But what about..."
The grip on my shoulders tightened. "No."
"Inuyasha, you don't understand. This is my job. I have to..."
"It's Mother Kaede's job too, no? Let him take it from here. There's no reason why you have to be burdened with all the responsibility yourself."
"Well, yes, there is. I'm the one who screwed up."
"You put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger?"
"Of course not. But I'm the one who got her so mad. Mother Kaede didn't. I can't ask Mother Kaede to clean up my messes. That is totally unfair."
"What is totally unfair," Inuyasha explained- patiently, I guess, for him, "is for anyone to expect a young HUMAN girl like you to do battle with a demon from hell like..."
"She isn't a demon from hell." I said, although technically she was. "She's just mad because the one guy she thought she could trust turned out to be a..."
"Kagome." Inuyasha stopped walking suddenly. The only reason I didn't lurch forward and fall flat on my face was that he still kept hold of my shoulder.
For a minute- just a minute- I really thought... well, I thought he was going to kiss me. I'd never been kissed before, but it seemed as if all the necessities for a kiss to happen were there: you know, his arm was around me, there was moonlight, our hearts were racing- oh, yeah, and we'd both just narrowly escaped being killed by a really pissed off demon.
Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, who happened to be part demon, but hey, beggars cant be choosers, and let me tell you something, Inuyasha was way cuter than any live human guy I'd met lately. I'd never seen such a nice-looking guy. He couldn't, I thought, have been more than twenty when he died. I wondered what had killed him. It's usually hard to tell with demons, since their spirits tend to take on the shape their body was in just before they stopped functioning. My dad, for instance, doesn't look any different when he appears to me now than he did the day before he went out for that fatal jog around the park ten years ago.
I could only assume Inuyasha had died at someone else's hands since he looked pretty damned healthy to me. Chances were he'd been a victim of one of those bullet holes downstairs. Nice of Nobunaga to frame it for posterity's sake.
And now this extremely nice-looking hanyou looked as if he were going to kiss me. Well, who was I to stop him?
So I sort of leaned my head back and looked at him from underneath my eyelids, and sort of let my mouth get all relaxed, you know? And that's when I noticed his attention wasn't focused anywhere near my lips, but way below them. And not my chest either, which would have been an okay second.
"You're bleeding," he said.
Well that pretty much spoiled the moment. My eyes popped wide open at that particular remark.
"I am not," I said automatically since I didn't feel any pain. Then I looked down. There were smallish stains flowering on the pavement below my feet. You couldn't tell what color they were because it was so dark. In the moonlight, they looked black. There were similar stains, I saw with horror, on the front of Inuyasha's shirt.
But they were definitely coming from me I checked myself out, and found that I'd managed to open what was probably one of the smaller, but still fairly important, veins in my writs. I'd peeled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pockets while I'd been talking to Ayame, and in my haste to escape during her fit of rage, I'd forgotten to put them back on. I'd probably sliced myself on the broken glass still littering the windowsill in Mr. Walden's classroom when I'd vaulted up onto it during my escape. Which had just proved my theory that it's always on the way out that you get stuck.
"Oh," I said, watching the blood ooze out. I couldn't think of anything else to say but, "what a mess. I'm sorry about your shirt."
"It's nothing." Inuyasha reached into one of the pockets of his dark wide- fitting trousers and pulled out something white and soft that he wrapped around my wrist a few times, then tied into place like a tourniquet, only not as tight. He didn't say anything as he did this, concentrating on what he was doing. I have to say this was the first time a demon had ever performed first aid on me. Not quite as interesting as a kiss would have been, but not entirely boring, either.
There," he said when he was finished. "Does that hurt?"
No," I said, since it didn't. It wouldn't start hurting, I knew from experience, for a few hours. I cleared my throat. "Thanks."
"It's nothing." He said.
"No," I said. Suddenly, ridiculously, I felt like crying. Really. And I never cry. "I mean it. Thanks. Thanks for coming out here to help me. You shouldn't have done it. I mean, I'm glad you did. And... well, thanks. That's all."
He looked embarrassed. Well, I suppose that was natural, me going all mushy on him the way I had just then. But I couldn't help it. I mean, I still couldn't really believe it. No demon had ever been so nice to me. Oh, my dad tried, I guess. But he wasn't exactly what you'd call reliable about it. I could never really count on him, especially in a crisis.
But Inuyasha... Inuyasha had come through for me. And I hadn't even asked him to. In fact, I'd been pretty unpleasant to him, overall.
"Never mind," was all he said though. And then he added, "let's go home."
A/N:
Aww... fluffness... how sweet....
Anyways, I changed the spacing, so hopefully it'll be easier to read. If it's not, just tell me.
REVIEW!!!