Let's go home.
It had a very cozy feel to it, that "let's go home."
Except of course, that the house we shared didn't quite feel like home to me yet. How could it? I'd only lived there a few days.
And, of course, HE shouldn't have been living there at all.
Still, demon or not, he'd saved my life. There was no denying that. He'd probably only done it to get on my good side so I wouldn't kick him out of the house entirely.
But regardless of why he'd done it, it had still been pretty nice of him. Nobody had ever volunteered to help me before- mostly because, of course, nobody knew I needed help. Even Eri, who'd been there with the fortune teller, never knew why it was I would show up to school so groggy- eyed, or where it was I went when I cut class- which I did all too frequently. And I couldn't exactly explain. Not that Eri would have thought I was crazy or anything, but she'd have told someone- you cant keep something like this secret unless it's happening to you- who'd have told someone else, and eventually, somewhere along the line, I knew someone would have told my mother.
And my mother would have freaked. That is, naturally, what mothers do, and mine is no exception. She'd already stuck me in therapy where I was forced to sit and invent elaborate lies in the hopes of explaining my anti- social behavior. I did not need to spend any time in a mental institution, which was undoubtedly where I'd have ended up if my mother had ever found out the truth.
So, yeah, I was grateful to have Inuyasha along, even though he sort of made me nervous. After the debacle at the mission, he walked me home, which was gentlemanly and all. He even, in deference to my injury, insisted on pushing the bike. I suppose if anybody had looked out the window of any of the houses we were passing, they would have thought their eyes were playing tricks on them; they'd have seen me plodding along with the bike rolling effortlessly beside me- only my hands weren't touching the bike.
Good thing people on this side of the country go to bed so early.
The whole way home, I obsessed over what I'd done wrong in my dealings with Ayame. I didn't do it out loud- I figured I'd done enough of that; I didn't want to sound like a broken record or player piano, or whatever it was they had back in Inuyasha's day... that was IF they had anything in his day...
But it was all I could think about. Never, not in all my years of miko training, had I ever encountered such a violent, irrational demon. I simply did not know what to do. And I knew I had to figure it out, and quick; I only had a few hours before school started and Kouga walked straight into what was, for him, a deathtrap.
I don't know of Inuyasha figured out why I was so quiet, or if he was thinking about Ayame, too, or what. All I know was that suddenly he broke the silence we'd been walking in and went, "'Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, nor hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.'"
I looked at him. "Are you speaking from experience?"
I saw him smile a little in the moonlight. "Actually," he said, 'I am quoting William Congreve."
"Oh." I thought about that. "But you know, sometimes the woman scorned has every right to be mad."
'Are YOU speaking from experience?" he wanted to know. I snorted. "Not hardly." A guy has to like you before he can scorn you. But I didn't say that out loud. No way I would ever say something like that out loud. I mean, not that I cared what Inuyasha thought about me. Why should I care what some dead hanyou thought of me?
But I wasn't about to admit to him that I'd never had a boyfriend. You just don't go around saying things like that to totally hot guys, even if they're dead demons.
"But we don't know what went on between Ayame and Kouga- not really. I mean, she could have every right to feel resentful."
"Toward him, I suppose she does," Inuyasha said, though he sounded grudging about admitting it. "But not toward you. She had no right to try to hurt you."
He sounded so mad about it that I thought it was probably better to change the subject. I mean, I guess I should have been mad about Ayame trying to kill me, but you know, I'm sort of used to dealing with irrational people. Well, okay, not quite as irrational as Ayame, but you know what I mean. And one thing I've learned is, you can't take it personally. Yeah, she'd tried to kill me, but I wasn't really sure she knew any better. Who knew what kind of parents she had after all? Maybe they went around murdering anybody who made them mad...
Although somehow, after having seen that add-a-pearl necklace, I sort of doubted that.
Thinking about murder made me wonder what had gotten Inuyasha so hot under the collar about it. Then I realized that he'd probably been murdered. Either that or he'd killed himself. But I didn't think he was really the suicidal type. I supposed he could have died of some sort of wasting disease...
It probably wasn't very tactful of me- but then, nobody ever accused me of tact- but I went ahead and just asked him as we were climbing the long gravel driveway to the house, "hey. How'd you die, anyway?"
Inuyasha didn't say anything right away. I'd probably offended him. Demons don't really like talking about how they died, I've noticed. Sometimes they can't even remember. Car crash victims usually haven't the slightest clue what happened to them. That's why I always see them wandering around looking for other people who were in the car with them. I have to go up and explain to them what happened, and then try to figure out where the people are that they're looking for. This is a major pain, too, let me tell you. I have to go all the way to the precinct that took the accident report and pretend I'm doing a school report or whatever and record the named of the victims, and then follow up on what happened to them.
I tell you, sometimes I feel like my work never ends.
Anyway, Inuyasha was quiet for a while, and I figured he wasn't going to tell me. He was looking straight ahead, up at the house- the house where he'd died, the house he was destined to haunt until... well, until he resolved whatever it was that was holding him to this world.
The moon was still out, pretty high in the sky now, and I could see Inuyasha's face almost as if it were day. He didn't look a whole lot different than usual. His mouth, which was on the thin-but-wide side, was kind of frowning, which, as near as I could tell, was what it usually did. And underneath those glossy black eyebrows, his thickly-lashed eyes revealed about as much as a mirror- that is, I could probably have seen my reflection in them, but I could read nothing about what he might be thinking.
"Um," I said. "You know what? Never mind. If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to..."
"No," he said. "It's all right."
"I was just kinda curious, that's all," I said. "But if it's too personal..."
"It isn't too personal." We had reached the house by then. He wheeled the bike to where it was supposed to go, and leaned it up against the carport wall. He was deep in the shadows when he said, "you know this house wasn't always a family home."
I went, "oh really?" like this was the first I'd heard of it.
"Yes. It was once a hotel. Well, more like a boarding house, really, than a hotel."
I asked, brightly, "and you were staying here as a guest?"
"Yes." He came out from the shade of the carport, but he wasn't looking at me when he spoke next. He was squinting out toward the moon.
"And..." I tried to prompt him. "Something happened while you were staying here?"
"Yes." He looked at me then. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "but it's a long story, and you must be very tired. Go to bed. In the morning we will decide that to do about Ayame."
Talk about unfair!
"Wait a minute," I said. "I am not going anywhere until you finish that story."
He shook his head. "No. It's too late. I'll tell you some other time."
"Jeez!" I sounded like a little kid whose mom had told him to go to bed early, but I didn't care. I was mad. "You can't just start a story and then not finish it. You have to..."
Inuyasha was laughing at me now. "Go to bed, Kagome," he said, coming up and giving me a gentle push toward the front steps. "You have had enough scaring for one night."
"But you..."
"Some other time," he said. He had steered me in the direction of the porch, and now I stood on the lowest step, looking back at him as he laughed at me.
"Do you promise?"
I saw his fangs flash white in the moonlight. "I promise. Good night, aisuru."
"I told you," I grumbled, stomping up the steps, "not to call me that."
It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, though, and I could only summon up token indignation. I slipped into the house as quietly as I could. Fortunately, everybody except the cat, Buyo, was asleep. The cat looked up from the couch on which he was reclining and wagged his tail when he saw it was me. Some cat. Plus my mom didn't want him sleeping on her white couch. But I wasn't about to make an enemy out of him by shooing him off. If allowing him to sleep on the couch was all that was necessary to keep him from alerting the household that I'd been out, then it was well worth it.
I slogged up the stairs, wondering the whole time what I was going to do about Ayame. I guessed I was going to have to wake up early and call over to the school, and warn Mother Kaede to meet Kouga the minute he set foot on campus and send him home. Even, I decided, if we had to resort to head lice, I wouldn't object. All that mattered, in the long run, was that Ayame was kept from her goal.
Still, the thought of waking up early to do anything- even save the life of my date for Saturday night- was not very appealing. Now that the adrenaline rush was gone, I realized I was dead tired. I staggered into the bathroom to change into my pj's- hey, I was pretty sure Inuyasha wasn't spying on me, but he still hadn't told me how he'd died, so I wasn't taking any chanced. He could have been hanged, you know, for peeping Tomism, which I believed happened occasionally five hundred years ago.
It wasn't until I was changing the bandage on the cut on my wrist that I happened to take a look at the thing that he'd wrapped around it.
It was a handkerchief. Everybody carried on in the olden days because there was no such thing as a Kleenex. People were pretty fussy about them, too, sewing their initials onto them so they didn't get mixed up in the wash with other people's hankies.
Only Inuyasha's handkerchief didn't have his initials on it, I noticed after I'd rinsed it in the sink then wrung out my blood as best I could. It was a big linen square, white- well, kind of red now- with an edging all around it of this delicate white lace. Kind of fem for a guy. I might have been a little concerned about Inuyasha's sexual orientation if I hadn't noticed the initials sewn in one corner. The stitches were tiny, white thread on white material, but the letters themselves were huge, in flowery script: KDA. That was right. KDA. No I to be found.
Weird, very weird.
I hung the cloth up to dry. I didn't have to worry about someone seeing it. In the first place, nobody used the bathroom but me, and in the second place, nobody would be able to see it anymore than they could see Inuyasha. It would be there tomorrow. Maybe I wouldn't give it back to him without demanding some sort of explanation as to those letters. KDA.
It wasn't until I was falling asleep that I realized KDA must have been a girl. Why else would there have been all that lace? Ant that curlicue script? Had Inuyasha died not in a gunfight, as I'd originally assumed, but I some sort of lover's quarrel?
I don't know why the thought disturbed me so much, but it did. It kept me awake for about three whole minutes. Then I rolled over, missed my old bed very briefly, and fell asleep.
A/N:
Wow.... It has been a long time, and I'm really sorry. School's been pretty busy.
I have like a dozen reports due, memorizing a speech, going on to STATE!!!!! Plus track practice every freaking day, and track meets that last like FIVE HOURS!
Well, hopefully I'll update soon!
It had a very cozy feel to it, that "let's go home."
Except of course, that the house we shared didn't quite feel like home to me yet. How could it? I'd only lived there a few days.
And, of course, HE shouldn't have been living there at all.
Still, demon or not, he'd saved my life. There was no denying that. He'd probably only done it to get on my good side so I wouldn't kick him out of the house entirely.
But regardless of why he'd done it, it had still been pretty nice of him. Nobody had ever volunteered to help me before- mostly because, of course, nobody knew I needed help. Even Eri, who'd been there with the fortune teller, never knew why it was I would show up to school so groggy- eyed, or where it was I went when I cut class- which I did all too frequently. And I couldn't exactly explain. Not that Eri would have thought I was crazy or anything, but she'd have told someone- you cant keep something like this secret unless it's happening to you- who'd have told someone else, and eventually, somewhere along the line, I knew someone would have told my mother.
And my mother would have freaked. That is, naturally, what mothers do, and mine is no exception. She'd already stuck me in therapy where I was forced to sit and invent elaborate lies in the hopes of explaining my anti- social behavior. I did not need to spend any time in a mental institution, which was undoubtedly where I'd have ended up if my mother had ever found out the truth.
So, yeah, I was grateful to have Inuyasha along, even though he sort of made me nervous. After the debacle at the mission, he walked me home, which was gentlemanly and all. He even, in deference to my injury, insisted on pushing the bike. I suppose if anybody had looked out the window of any of the houses we were passing, they would have thought their eyes were playing tricks on them; they'd have seen me plodding along with the bike rolling effortlessly beside me- only my hands weren't touching the bike.
Good thing people on this side of the country go to bed so early.
The whole way home, I obsessed over what I'd done wrong in my dealings with Ayame. I didn't do it out loud- I figured I'd done enough of that; I didn't want to sound like a broken record or player piano, or whatever it was they had back in Inuyasha's day... that was IF they had anything in his day...
But it was all I could think about. Never, not in all my years of miko training, had I ever encountered such a violent, irrational demon. I simply did not know what to do. And I knew I had to figure it out, and quick; I only had a few hours before school started and Kouga walked straight into what was, for him, a deathtrap.
I don't know of Inuyasha figured out why I was so quiet, or if he was thinking about Ayame, too, or what. All I know was that suddenly he broke the silence we'd been walking in and went, "'Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, nor hell a fury like a woman scorn'd.'"
I looked at him. "Are you speaking from experience?"
I saw him smile a little in the moonlight. "Actually," he said, 'I am quoting William Congreve."
"Oh." I thought about that. "But you know, sometimes the woman scorned has every right to be mad."
'Are YOU speaking from experience?" he wanted to know. I snorted. "Not hardly." A guy has to like you before he can scorn you. But I didn't say that out loud. No way I would ever say something like that out loud. I mean, not that I cared what Inuyasha thought about me. Why should I care what some dead hanyou thought of me?
But I wasn't about to admit to him that I'd never had a boyfriend. You just don't go around saying things like that to totally hot guys, even if they're dead demons.
"But we don't know what went on between Ayame and Kouga- not really. I mean, she could have every right to feel resentful."
"Toward him, I suppose she does," Inuyasha said, though he sounded grudging about admitting it. "But not toward you. She had no right to try to hurt you."
He sounded so mad about it that I thought it was probably better to change the subject. I mean, I guess I should have been mad about Ayame trying to kill me, but you know, I'm sort of used to dealing with irrational people. Well, okay, not quite as irrational as Ayame, but you know what I mean. And one thing I've learned is, you can't take it personally. Yeah, she'd tried to kill me, but I wasn't really sure she knew any better. Who knew what kind of parents she had after all? Maybe they went around murdering anybody who made them mad...
Although somehow, after having seen that add-a-pearl necklace, I sort of doubted that.
Thinking about murder made me wonder what had gotten Inuyasha so hot under the collar about it. Then I realized that he'd probably been murdered. Either that or he'd killed himself. But I didn't think he was really the suicidal type. I supposed he could have died of some sort of wasting disease...
It probably wasn't very tactful of me- but then, nobody ever accused me of tact- but I went ahead and just asked him as we were climbing the long gravel driveway to the house, "hey. How'd you die, anyway?"
Inuyasha didn't say anything right away. I'd probably offended him. Demons don't really like talking about how they died, I've noticed. Sometimes they can't even remember. Car crash victims usually haven't the slightest clue what happened to them. That's why I always see them wandering around looking for other people who were in the car with them. I have to go up and explain to them what happened, and then try to figure out where the people are that they're looking for. This is a major pain, too, let me tell you. I have to go all the way to the precinct that took the accident report and pretend I'm doing a school report or whatever and record the named of the victims, and then follow up on what happened to them.
I tell you, sometimes I feel like my work never ends.
Anyway, Inuyasha was quiet for a while, and I figured he wasn't going to tell me. He was looking straight ahead, up at the house- the house where he'd died, the house he was destined to haunt until... well, until he resolved whatever it was that was holding him to this world.
The moon was still out, pretty high in the sky now, and I could see Inuyasha's face almost as if it were day. He didn't look a whole lot different than usual. His mouth, which was on the thin-but-wide side, was kind of frowning, which, as near as I could tell, was what it usually did. And underneath those glossy black eyebrows, his thickly-lashed eyes revealed about as much as a mirror- that is, I could probably have seen my reflection in them, but I could read nothing about what he might be thinking.
"Um," I said. "You know what? Never mind. If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to..."
"No," he said. "It's all right."
"I was just kinda curious, that's all," I said. "But if it's too personal..."
"It isn't too personal." We had reached the house by then. He wheeled the bike to where it was supposed to go, and leaned it up against the carport wall. He was deep in the shadows when he said, "you know this house wasn't always a family home."
I went, "oh really?" like this was the first I'd heard of it.
"Yes. It was once a hotel. Well, more like a boarding house, really, than a hotel."
I asked, brightly, "and you were staying here as a guest?"
"Yes." He came out from the shade of the carport, but he wasn't looking at me when he spoke next. He was squinting out toward the moon.
"And..." I tried to prompt him. "Something happened while you were staying here?"
"Yes." He looked at me then. He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, "but it's a long story, and you must be very tired. Go to bed. In the morning we will decide that to do about Ayame."
Talk about unfair!
"Wait a minute," I said. "I am not going anywhere until you finish that story."
He shook his head. "No. It's too late. I'll tell you some other time."
"Jeez!" I sounded like a little kid whose mom had told him to go to bed early, but I didn't care. I was mad. "You can't just start a story and then not finish it. You have to..."
Inuyasha was laughing at me now. "Go to bed, Kagome," he said, coming up and giving me a gentle push toward the front steps. "You have had enough scaring for one night."
"But you..."
"Some other time," he said. He had steered me in the direction of the porch, and now I stood on the lowest step, looking back at him as he laughed at me.
"Do you promise?"
I saw his fangs flash white in the moonlight. "I promise. Good night, aisuru."
"I told you," I grumbled, stomping up the steps, "not to call me that."
It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, though, and I could only summon up token indignation. I slipped into the house as quietly as I could. Fortunately, everybody except the cat, Buyo, was asleep. The cat looked up from the couch on which he was reclining and wagged his tail when he saw it was me. Some cat. Plus my mom didn't want him sleeping on her white couch. But I wasn't about to make an enemy out of him by shooing him off. If allowing him to sleep on the couch was all that was necessary to keep him from alerting the household that I'd been out, then it was well worth it.
I slogged up the stairs, wondering the whole time what I was going to do about Ayame. I guessed I was going to have to wake up early and call over to the school, and warn Mother Kaede to meet Kouga the minute he set foot on campus and send him home. Even, I decided, if we had to resort to head lice, I wouldn't object. All that mattered, in the long run, was that Ayame was kept from her goal.
Still, the thought of waking up early to do anything- even save the life of my date for Saturday night- was not very appealing. Now that the adrenaline rush was gone, I realized I was dead tired. I staggered into the bathroom to change into my pj's- hey, I was pretty sure Inuyasha wasn't spying on me, but he still hadn't told me how he'd died, so I wasn't taking any chanced. He could have been hanged, you know, for peeping Tomism, which I believed happened occasionally five hundred years ago.
It wasn't until I was changing the bandage on the cut on my wrist that I happened to take a look at the thing that he'd wrapped around it.
It was a handkerchief. Everybody carried on in the olden days because there was no such thing as a Kleenex. People were pretty fussy about them, too, sewing their initials onto them so they didn't get mixed up in the wash with other people's hankies.
Only Inuyasha's handkerchief didn't have his initials on it, I noticed after I'd rinsed it in the sink then wrung out my blood as best I could. It was a big linen square, white- well, kind of red now- with an edging all around it of this delicate white lace. Kind of fem for a guy. I might have been a little concerned about Inuyasha's sexual orientation if I hadn't noticed the initials sewn in one corner. The stitches were tiny, white thread on white material, but the letters themselves were huge, in flowery script: KDA. That was right. KDA. No I to be found.
Weird, very weird.
I hung the cloth up to dry. I didn't have to worry about someone seeing it. In the first place, nobody used the bathroom but me, and in the second place, nobody would be able to see it anymore than they could see Inuyasha. It would be there tomorrow. Maybe I wouldn't give it back to him without demanding some sort of explanation as to those letters. KDA.
It wasn't until I was falling asleep that I realized KDA must have been a girl. Why else would there have been all that lace? Ant that curlicue script? Had Inuyasha died not in a gunfight, as I'd originally assumed, but I some sort of lover's quarrel?
I don't know why the thought disturbed me so much, but it did. It kept me awake for about three whole minutes. Then I rolled over, missed my old bed very briefly, and fell asleep.
A/N:
Wow.... It has been a long time, and I'm really sorry. School's been pretty busy.
I have like a dozen reports due, memorizing a speech, going on to STATE!!!!! Plus track practice every freaking day, and track meets that last like FIVE HOURS!
Well, hopefully I'll update soon!