Disclaimer: He's not mine. Inuyasha does not, in whole or in part, in sickness or in health, 'til death do we part, belong to me. Takahashi-san has not yet responded to my raving fanmails asking for joint ownership and property rights...

English Lessons

Kagome groaned in exasperation, glaring across the papers strewn across her desktop at her English textbook—a most detestable and unintelligible collection of the most useless pages on the face of the planet, in her open- minded opinion. She tapped her pencil against the smooth surface, struggling to overcome her frustration and apply herself to her studies. That test tomorrow wasn't going to take itself, and if she didn't really crack down and hit the books immediately, she wasn't going to pass eighth grade.

"Oi, Kagome!"

Inuyasha's gruff greeting from the open window startled her, and Kagome fell out of her chair with an ungainly thump and a frightened screech. He scowled, rubbing his sensitive ears and leaping easily over to her bed. "You didn't have to attempt to remove my sense of hearing," he muttered, crossing his legs and settling Tetsusaiga over his right shoulder. "You didn't come back today."

Sighing—she'd long since given up attempting to remind him that she always said three days and he always came on the second day—Kagome merely shrugged. "I have a test tomorrow, so I have to stay at least one more day."

He snorted, typical, and folded his arms over his chest. "English test?"

Kagome blinked and smoothed her skirt over her thighs as she settled back in her chair, swiveling to face him. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

Inuyasha averted those gorgeous golden eyes and shrugged slightly, but she could tell he was embarrassed. "You were talking in your sleep last night, and I happened to overhear you mention something about English."

That sounded simple enough, but Kagome narrowed her eyes at him thoughtfully. There was a long silence in the room, only the sounds of traffic moving past on the street below coming in through the window Kagome had left open to allow the slight, cool breeze to enter the room and chase away the lingering daytime heat. It was late autumn now, and summer was almost finished with its final attempt to clutch Japan in its hot, humid, sweaty grasp.

Guiltily, Inuyasha lifted his eyes to Kagome's, wondering if she was only silent because she was mad at him for listening in on her conversations. He was all ready with a retort—it wasn't his fault she talked during her sleep!—when he caught sight of her expression. She was watching him, narrow-eyed, yes, but she didn't seem angry...instead, she looked vaguely thoughtful.

"Ne," she murmured, and he cringed, expecting the worst. But Kagome only smiled slightly and twisted her fingers in her lap. This had been worrying her for some time now, but she still couldn't find the right words to form her thoughts, even after all her practicing. "Do I...shout in my sleep?"

He blinked. He hadn't been expecting that. "Wha? No."

Kagome stifled a relieved sigh; she'd been afraid she was yelling or screaming or something equally humiliating and disruptive. But Inuyasha's answer made her frown as her second question bubbled to the surface without thought. "Then how can you hear what I'm saying?"

Was he blushing? Kagome stared, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as Inuyasha's face turned a uniquely appealing shade of faint pink, and he ducked his head so she couldn't see his eyes. "Uh..." His voice squeaked, and he cleared his throat rather roughly. "I...um...Don't think I'm the same as Miroku," he stammered uneasily.

Tilting her head in interest, Kagome let a small smile play across her lips, safely out of Inuyasha's view. This was truly amusing...Inuyasha the fearless, Inuyasha the brave, Inuyasha the unconquerable, was absolutely mortified by whatever answer he was trying to offer her. "Go on," she urged, with not just a hint of mischievous delight in her voice.

"When you sleep...I, uh, I sometimes...sit nearby. You know, just to watch you sleep. Because you look sort of, um, peaceful. And it makes me feel, uh, relaxed. Yeah." He swallowed hard, his throat dry, his palms clammy as he clenched them together in his lap to still their faint quivers as nerves danced through his belly. "And, um, you just sort of whisper. In your sleep."

Kagome watched as his face—what she could see of his face—turned a darker shade of red at the revelation, and she giggled. The innocent, girlish sound seemed to reassure him, and Inuyasha peeked up at her through his bangs. A bright smile spread across Kagome's face as she caught his hesitant glance, and she said, "I'm not mad, if that what you're worried about."

He heaved a loud sigh of relief, and then it was Kagome's turn to be bashful. She dipped her head and drew a figure eight on her bare knee with her finger. "I didn't know you liked to watch me sleep." It was sort of comforting and intimidating all at the same time. What if she drooled?

"Keh," he snorted, thoroughly embarrassed with the entire direction of their conversation. "I never said I liked to." He hoped to divert her attention from the truth. "Now get back to studying. If you're always screwing around like this, you'll never pass your dumb test, and then I'll have to listen to you whine all the way back. Hurry up and study!"

She hid another giggle as she turned around and stared at the despised pages. They were filled with incomprehensible squiggles and figures, letters of the English alphabet that, when isolated, she could understand perfectly, but when strung together, formed words that didn't sound like words and didn't even behave like proper words. Irritated with her insurmountable inability to learn the stupid language, Kagome drilled her pencil tip into a loose sheet of binder paper, hoping to wear down her pencil into inexistence before she dug a hole through her desk.

"What are you doing?" Inuyasha demanded, and Kagome nearly screeched at his proximity as he leaned over her left shoulder and peered near-sightedly at her worksheets. "It doesn't look much like studying." Not that he knew what studying looked like, but Kagome had been diligently grinding her pencil tip to a dull little stub. If he could do that—which he could—it couldn't possibly be considered studying.

Her heart was still pounding unevenly at the shock, combined with the undeniable little bump in her pulse that wasn't at all unwanted as he stepped close to her, his body radiating warmth as he reached around her to grab her textbook. "Don't do that!" she scolded; unable to respond to either his question or her own response to his closeness, Kagome fell back on what she did know. And that was insulting him somehow to recreate the distance that she so needed to feel emotionally safe around him.

"What if you'd made me fall again?"

Inuyasha smirked at her, his face close, his beautiful eyes burning into hers. "You would've hit the ground. Ka-thump." Then he shifted his attention to the book, staring in horror at the little marks covering the paper. "What the hell is all this crap?"

"That's English, remember? I'm studying for my test tomorrow. My English test." Kagome explained slowly, and Inuyasha curled his lip in derision.

"Keh." He carelessly tossed the book back onto her desk. "Looks like nonsense to me."

Kagome could finally feel useless tears of frustration in her eyes. It had only been a matter of time until it happened, really. She always cried when she couldn't understand the material, and it infuriated her. And crying in front of Inuyasha always humiliated her, because she knew it made him think she was weak, and that she couldn't stand.

"It is utter nonsense!" She wailed, scrubbing furiously at her dripping eyes and sniffling viciously. "I don't understand a single thing! None of it makes sense! I bet you could get a better score than I will on tomorrow's test!"

He snorted, unnerved by her tears and the furious way she was going about dealing with them. Usually she stormed off or told him to go away when she cried, or at the very least they argued explosively. Now she seemed to be reaching out to him, and all he wanted to do was back away—far, far away.

"Don't lie," he told her rudely. "I don't even understand what that says." And he pointed to a random passage in the textbook.

"No," Kagome agreed miserably, "you don't..."

And then an idea struck her like lightening. It was amazing it didn't fell her like a tree.

"Inuyasha!" She leapt to her feet and could have grabbed him into a tight hug had he not backed up in utter fear for his life. "I'll teach you!"

Now his eyes were wide, and Inuyasha found himself stepping backwards, away from her, slowly until he was sitting on the bed with nowhere else to go. "Uh..." His gaze jittered around the room as if in search of an escape—any escape. There was something akin to burning fanaticism in her gaze as she tossed her textbook, pencils, and paper onto the mattress beside him before climbing up onto the foot of her bed.

"Sensei is always saying that the best way to learn something is to teach it," she was chattering excitedly, her tears forgotten as she settled herself comfortably at his side and handed him a pad of lined paper and a pencil decorated with...were those cats? Inuyasha threw the pencil down in disgust and glared at it until Kagome, understanding, moved to her desk to offer him another one—this one with a turtle thing hanging off the end.

"All right!" Kagome clapped her hands in front of her, arms extended as if preparing to dive into water. "We'll start at the beginning, okay? This—" she pointed at some blob on the paper, "is a noun. A noun is, well, it's a 'person, place, or thing', all right?" She waited for some sort of confirmation before plunging forward with a desperation borne of reckless need to achieve understanding. "Then there are things called pronouns, and those are..."

She droned on for hours, maybe; Inuyasha was never good at 'telling time', even after she'd spent so much effort on trying to teach him how to read the clock. He just couldn't get over the fact that they didn't look like 'hands' to him. They looked like lines. Thick, short, moving lines that pointed at random squiggles.

And why did he care about English? He didn't even know how to read Japanese, and that, as far as Inuyasha was concerned, was the only language that mattered. Youkai never bothered with reading and writing.

"...and that's a compound, complex sentence," she uttered triumphantly, stabbing her pencil onto a 'period'—that dot thing that ended periodic blurbs of her babbling in that foreign language known as English—that broke her lead. Yawning, Kagome stretched luxuriously, either unaware or uncaring as Inuyasha's gaze swept swiftly over her body, lingering on that tantalizing strip of flesh just under the hem of her shirt as it lifted over her tummy.

"Yatta!" She cheered quietly, glancing bleary-eyed at the clock and yawning again. She grinned fuzzily at Inuyasha, her eyes drooping. Exhilaration at understanding faded quickly, leaving her drained and suddenly unable to keep her eyes open. "I'm...finished..." Her voice trailed off, and Inuyasha stared in amazement at how quickly she slipped into a deep sleep, slumping forward onto her bed and crumpling papers beneath her face.

Grumbling quietly—affectionately—Inuyasha dumped her textbook, her pencils, and the stack of used paper onto the floor and stretched her out under the covers. She shifted, murmuring quietly as she twined her arms around his neck, nearly dragging him onto her. Shocked, Inuyasha froze and gently—if somewhat hurriedly—removed her arms from him.

He drew the blankets over her small body, marveling at how vulnerable and little she seemed under the covers. Standing awkwardly a moment longer, Inuyasha yawned hugely and blinked down at her through soft, amber-edged eyes. He bent down, wincing as stiff joints creaked at the sudden abuse, and tenderly touched his lips to her forehead.

The English words sounded strange to his ears, felt funny on his tongue, as he labored over the pronunciation of nouns, verbs, and objects upon which the verb was acting. It was a relatively simple sentence; it had no indirect 'you's, no transition verbs, no adjectives or adverbs or conjunctions.

But it was the most important sentence he'd uttered in his life.

"I...l...love...you."

Maybe, Inuyasha thought with a quick grin as he crouched in the open window, glancing over his shoulder at her slumbering form, maybe studying wasn't such a bad thing after all.