Woopie! I'm on, like... a roll or something! I AM SO ON THE BALL!
So, without further ado... ONWARD.
Falls On Me
Chapter Three: Ascending the Dark
The tunnel is so dark I doubt I could have even seen a foot in front of me with a flashlight. The walls are too grimy to use as a guide, and something decidedly crunchy was underfoot.
It's a good thing, however, that we don't need light. The tunnel's straight all the way to the end, so all you have to do is make sure you don't walk back-ass-wards.
"'Gome, gimme some hardtack, will you?"
"You just had some."
I sensed a vague annoyance from where Miroku's voice was emanating from. "I know that. I'm hungry."
"It won't last us the trip if you keep scarfing it," I mutter, matching his annoyance. I trip over something and stumble, then fall. When I'm on the floor, even I'm horrified to discover that the crunching things were rat bones. I may be a tough guy, but even I have limits. These limits include rat carcasses. A ribcage pushes into my palm as I push myself off of the floor, grimacing. "Ugh...."
Miroku's footsteps stop somewhere ahead of me. "Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I'm fine, I just fell. There's rat bones down here." It gets better! Yay!
There's a shocked silence, and a small crunch. "Gross!" he squeals, his voice fluctuating madly. Miroku has a slight phobia of rodents.
I roll my eyes, only to realize he can't see them anyway. "Don't be such a girl, Miroku!"
"I'll be whatever I want!" he snaps at me, his voice laced with paranoia. I can almost see him looking around wildly, panicked.
Our camp is in the tunnel, in a self-made clearing amidst the rotting rat corpses. A fire blazes in the center, and Miroku is dangerously close to burning his eyebrows off.
"I don't think the dead rats are going to eat you," I say amusedly, a small smirk playing at the corner of my mouth as he shoots me a dirty look.
"Shu'up, 'Gome. I hate rodents. Hate them," he repeats to himself, looking at the circle of bones.
The pot of water starts to bubble, and I dump some disgusting hardtack into it to make into an equally disgusting mushy substance, not bothering to start a debate with Miroku's subconscious away-message self on the subject of rats.
"Hate them," he mumbles to himself. As if he needs reminding.
"Look, forget about the rats and eat your mush."
His face lights up in a sarcastic grin. "Oh, wondrous, something I can look forward to! I think I can add this to my big, long list of super duper things that have happened to me today!" With that remark, his face immediately descends into a sulky expression as he spoons his mush into his mouth, glaring at a rat skull suspiciously and using the plastic bowl as the brunt of his unhappiness.
Tossing my dirty disposable dish over my shoulder into the darkness of the tunnel, I rub my forehead as I roll out my sleeping bag. "Look, are you going to mumble at your dead rats all night or what?"
This earns me a bowl in the face. It bounces off of my nose and onto my bag. "'Gome! I don't think you realize how serious of a phobia this is! I think I might start hyperventilating any second now!"
My nose wrinkles involuntarily as I bat the dish off of my bag and crawl into it. "Oh, yes, I know exactly how serious it is. Now, go to sleep or the Bogeyman will eat your toes," I tell him in a motherly fashion.
He attempts to smother me with his sleeping bag, forcing me to fend him off with the mush-covered wooden spoon. I manage to get some on his face before he lets off me.
"Hey, hey! If you kill me, who's gonna get the info from the great, big, scary youkai, hm?"
Miroku comments dryly, "Oh, how will we ever live without you."
"I can't help it if I'm charismatic."
He shoves the bag onto my face again, and I swing wildly about with the wooden spoon. He releases me and pokes me in the nose. "If I wasn't so scared of facing ghost-rats alone, you'd be so incredibly gone right now."
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. "Whatever you say, Twinkle Toes."
"Grah! Ghost-rats actually look good next to you!" he panicked, waving his arms about and whimpering as he realizes he got just a little to close to the edge.
I feign hurt, making my lower lip wobble and everything. I'm a very good actor, especially when I put my mind to it. "How can you say that to me?" For a little extra oomph, I make as if I'm wiping away tears.
Scoffing, he turns to look at his sleeping spot critically, toeing a rat arm away from it with an air of disgust. "Trust me, it's easier than it may seem at first."
I chuckle and turn towards the fire on my side, hiding my grin in my sleeping bag. "Alright, alright. We need to get some shut-eye. I'm setting my watch alarm to 4 AM, 'kay?"
He unrolls his sleeping bag and shoves himself into it. He's the kind of guy who would put on gloves and fumble so much it would look like he had twelve fingers. This lack of grace extends to the fashion in which he puts on his sleeping bag. "Right-ee-o, lovey!"
I stare into the dark outside of the fire until I blink a bit longer than I intended.
I'm jolted to awareness by a beeping. Grumbling to myself, I shake my head to wake myself up and focus on figuring out where the noise is coming from. Oh. Right. Watch. Fuck. I slap at it until it shuts up, then force myself awake enough to kick Miroku and stoke the fire so we can get camp packed up.
He mumbles something about feminine body parts and rolls over. I kick him harder.
"OW! Oh my Kami, Stephanie! Not so rou-- what the hell?" His dark head pokes out of the sleeping bag as he takes me in with what seems like a little too much disappointment.
"Sorry, no Stephanie here. Wake up."
"'Gome? What--? ... Oh. Fuck."
"Yes, I know," I reassure him soothingly as I stoke the fire a bit more.
Stretching he yanks himself out of his sleeping bag without anything even remotely resembling elegance. He yawns widely and scratches his stomach as he looks at the camp with half-lidded eyes.
"Hey, think you can actually help or something?" I ask irritably. I mean, jeesh. I'm here, doing all this work, and the best he can muster is to scratch his stomach? "Not that I don't appreciate all the moral support I bet you're sending at me."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I need wake-up time. Got any coffee?"
I roll my eyes exaggeratedly and start rolling up my sleeping bag, unrolling it halfway once so I can roll it up again tighter.
"Guess that's a 'no.'"
I keep ignoring him as I pointedly start packing up the pots. He raises his hands in surrender and finally goes about rolling up his sleeping bag, although he's a lot slower than he should be. He pauses every twenty seconds to yawn, comment on the time, and lament at me about coffee.
After we get camp packed up, we scuff dirt onto the fire to put it out. We leave the site, ashes in a circle of bones. Looks like a Pagan ritual thing.
"So, when do we get out of the tunnel?" he asks, yawning in the midst of "tunnel."
I check the time quickly and fidget with the shoulder straps of my pack irritably. "Early afternoon."
"Shit."
Can't say I don't agree.
Time passes in the outside world, leaving the tunnel of darkness untouched. Dust settles in our footsteps, the breath of dead rat whispers through our hair.
I forget what breathing is.
Miroku suddenly stops dead. "Dear God! I can see light! It's the light at the end of the fucking tunnel!" He releases a howl of joy and runs straight towards the speck off in the distance, waving his arms around frantically as if to keep the light from leaving or something.
God, damn it. I run, too, to keep up. "Will you hold your horses? The opening's not going anywhere!"
After an hour of jogging, we get close enough to the sunlight to see vague silhouettes of each other. Unable to restrain myself, I grin at him. It's as if, after being cooped up in the tunnel for so long, we're emerging from the depths of Hell to the beauties of Earth, short only of Paradise itself. Miroku returns the grin ecstatically. He feels it too, he's just not articulate enough to put it into words like I can.
As we get closer to the daylight, the corpses start becoming sparse. Eventually, we're just walking on rocks again. The perverted spy hooks his elbow around mine and starts skipping, singing loudly in the worst British accent I'd ever heard. Dragged along, I feel my spirits lift as my feet start skipping despite my clear-cut orders not to.
"I know you're happy to get out of here, but do you think you could tone your unrestrained joy a little bit and pay attention?" a crisp voice asks from the opening, scathing.
I stop dead where I am and reach for my dagger, which, consequently, is no longer there. Miroku half-skips a few steps without me before skidding to a stop, pulling a switchblade from his pocket.
The stranger puts his hands above his head so we can see from his silhouette that he's not armed. "Relax, O Joyous People of the Sewers, I'm here as an ally. Shippou couldn't make it, so I'm the in-between, got it?"
I stride forward and in a few steps am near enough to the opening to discern his face. He's smirking, and his golden eyes are topped with eyebrows in a mocking expression. His white hair grazes his waist easily, if not longer. "And you are?" I ask coldly, bitingly.
"InuYasha, tone down, bitch," he growls warningly at me.
"What did you say?" my voice rises without my consent, and I'm shocked. I can feel Miroku's shock as well at my behavior. Suddenly, something in my mind clicks. "Aren't you supposed to be meeting Sango and her team?"
He drops his sneer and looks thoughtful, if that's even possible. "The assassin? I'm heading over there tomorrow. Right now I'm bringing you to the brat." InuYasha holds his hand out to Miroku. "InuYasha. You seem like a relatively sane-looking person; could you tell your bitch to keep her voice down?"
Miroku coughs with embarrassment, and gives me an apologetic look. "Ah, she's not my, ah... woman. She's the spy, Kagome. I'm Miroku."
Incredulous looks from the most gorgeous golden eyes I've ever seen. "You're the spy? Good Kami, you're going to blow this one, aren't you?"
I breathe deeply to regain my composure, closing my eyes momentarily. "You are making us late. Let's go."
"You're the queen," he responds with a bow, and I resist the urge to kick him in the balls. "C'mon, follow me." He turns about on his heel abruptly, and I am sad to admit that I am reduced to making faces at his red kimono. Miroku wags a finger at me for a few moments before joining in.
The tunnel looms behind us like a mouth. An eater of rats, it spits us out like diseased vermin. I am glad, for once, to be indigestible.
A/N
SORRY SORRY SORRY that's so short! The next chappy will be MUCH longer! I promise! ... Hum, the words just weren't FLOWING... I'm sure the next chapter will be better. ;;; R&R!! Happy Reading!
So, without further ado... ONWARD.
Falls On Me
Chapter Three: Ascending the Dark
The tunnel is so dark I doubt I could have even seen a foot in front of me with a flashlight. The walls are too grimy to use as a guide, and something decidedly crunchy was underfoot.
It's a good thing, however, that we don't need light. The tunnel's straight all the way to the end, so all you have to do is make sure you don't walk back-ass-wards.
"'Gome, gimme some hardtack, will you?"
"You just had some."
I sensed a vague annoyance from where Miroku's voice was emanating from. "I know that. I'm hungry."
"It won't last us the trip if you keep scarfing it," I mutter, matching his annoyance. I trip over something and stumble, then fall. When I'm on the floor, even I'm horrified to discover that the crunching things were rat bones. I may be a tough guy, but even I have limits. These limits include rat carcasses. A ribcage pushes into my palm as I push myself off of the floor, grimacing. "Ugh...."
Miroku's footsteps stop somewhere ahead of me. "Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I'm fine, I just fell. There's rat bones down here." It gets better! Yay!
There's a shocked silence, and a small crunch. "Gross!" he squeals, his voice fluctuating madly. Miroku has a slight phobia of rodents.
I roll my eyes, only to realize he can't see them anyway. "Don't be such a girl, Miroku!"
"I'll be whatever I want!" he snaps at me, his voice laced with paranoia. I can almost see him looking around wildly, panicked.
Our camp is in the tunnel, in a self-made clearing amidst the rotting rat corpses. A fire blazes in the center, and Miroku is dangerously close to burning his eyebrows off.
"I don't think the dead rats are going to eat you," I say amusedly, a small smirk playing at the corner of my mouth as he shoots me a dirty look.
"Shu'up, 'Gome. I hate rodents. Hate them," he repeats to himself, looking at the circle of bones.
The pot of water starts to bubble, and I dump some disgusting hardtack into it to make into an equally disgusting mushy substance, not bothering to start a debate with Miroku's subconscious away-message self on the subject of rats.
"Hate them," he mumbles to himself. As if he needs reminding.
"Look, forget about the rats and eat your mush."
His face lights up in a sarcastic grin. "Oh, wondrous, something I can look forward to! I think I can add this to my big, long list of super duper things that have happened to me today!" With that remark, his face immediately descends into a sulky expression as he spoons his mush into his mouth, glaring at a rat skull suspiciously and using the plastic bowl as the brunt of his unhappiness.
Tossing my dirty disposable dish over my shoulder into the darkness of the tunnel, I rub my forehead as I roll out my sleeping bag. "Look, are you going to mumble at your dead rats all night or what?"
This earns me a bowl in the face. It bounces off of my nose and onto my bag. "'Gome! I don't think you realize how serious of a phobia this is! I think I might start hyperventilating any second now!"
My nose wrinkles involuntarily as I bat the dish off of my bag and crawl into it. "Oh, yes, I know exactly how serious it is. Now, go to sleep or the Bogeyman will eat your toes," I tell him in a motherly fashion.
He attempts to smother me with his sleeping bag, forcing me to fend him off with the mush-covered wooden spoon. I manage to get some on his face before he lets off me.
"Hey, hey! If you kill me, who's gonna get the info from the great, big, scary youkai, hm?"
Miroku comments dryly, "Oh, how will we ever live without you."
"I can't help it if I'm charismatic."
He shoves the bag onto my face again, and I swing wildly about with the wooden spoon. He releases me and pokes me in the nose. "If I wasn't so scared of facing ghost-rats alone, you'd be so incredibly gone right now."
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. "Whatever you say, Twinkle Toes."
"Grah! Ghost-rats actually look good next to you!" he panicked, waving his arms about and whimpering as he realizes he got just a little to close to the edge.
I feign hurt, making my lower lip wobble and everything. I'm a very good actor, especially when I put my mind to it. "How can you say that to me?" For a little extra oomph, I make as if I'm wiping away tears.
Scoffing, he turns to look at his sleeping spot critically, toeing a rat arm away from it with an air of disgust. "Trust me, it's easier than it may seem at first."
I chuckle and turn towards the fire on my side, hiding my grin in my sleeping bag. "Alright, alright. We need to get some shut-eye. I'm setting my watch alarm to 4 AM, 'kay?"
He unrolls his sleeping bag and shoves himself into it. He's the kind of guy who would put on gloves and fumble so much it would look like he had twelve fingers. This lack of grace extends to the fashion in which he puts on his sleeping bag. "Right-ee-o, lovey!"
I stare into the dark outside of the fire until I blink a bit longer than I intended.
I'm jolted to awareness by a beeping. Grumbling to myself, I shake my head to wake myself up and focus on figuring out where the noise is coming from. Oh. Right. Watch. Fuck. I slap at it until it shuts up, then force myself awake enough to kick Miroku and stoke the fire so we can get camp packed up.
He mumbles something about feminine body parts and rolls over. I kick him harder.
"OW! Oh my Kami, Stephanie! Not so rou-- what the hell?" His dark head pokes out of the sleeping bag as he takes me in with what seems like a little too much disappointment.
"Sorry, no Stephanie here. Wake up."
"'Gome? What--? ... Oh. Fuck."
"Yes, I know," I reassure him soothingly as I stoke the fire a bit more.
Stretching he yanks himself out of his sleeping bag without anything even remotely resembling elegance. He yawns widely and scratches his stomach as he looks at the camp with half-lidded eyes.
"Hey, think you can actually help or something?" I ask irritably. I mean, jeesh. I'm here, doing all this work, and the best he can muster is to scratch his stomach? "Not that I don't appreciate all the moral support I bet you're sending at me."
"Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I need wake-up time. Got any coffee?"
I roll my eyes exaggeratedly and start rolling up my sleeping bag, unrolling it halfway once so I can roll it up again tighter.
"Guess that's a 'no.'"
I keep ignoring him as I pointedly start packing up the pots. He raises his hands in surrender and finally goes about rolling up his sleeping bag, although he's a lot slower than he should be. He pauses every twenty seconds to yawn, comment on the time, and lament at me about coffee.
After we get camp packed up, we scuff dirt onto the fire to put it out. We leave the site, ashes in a circle of bones. Looks like a Pagan ritual thing.
"So, when do we get out of the tunnel?" he asks, yawning in the midst of "tunnel."
I check the time quickly and fidget with the shoulder straps of my pack irritably. "Early afternoon."
"Shit."
Can't say I don't agree.
Time passes in the outside world, leaving the tunnel of darkness untouched. Dust settles in our footsteps, the breath of dead rat whispers through our hair.
I forget what breathing is.
Miroku suddenly stops dead. "Dear God! I can see light! It's the light at the end of the fucking tunnel!" He releases a howl of joy and runs straight towards the speck off in the distance, waving his arms around frantically as if to keep the light from leaving or something.
God, damn it. I run, too, to keep up. "Will you hold your horses? The opening's not going anywhere!"
After an hour of jogging, we get close enough to the sunlight to see vague silhouettes of each other. Unable to restrain myself, I grin at him. It's as if, after being cooped up in the tunnel for so long, we're emerging from the depths of Hell to the beauties of Earth, short only of Paradise itself. Miroku returns the grin ecstatically. He feels it too, he's just not articulate enough to put it into words like I can.
As we get closer to the daylight, the corpses start becoming sparse. Eventually, we're just walking on rocks again. The perverted spy hooks his elbow around mine and starts skipping, singing loudly in the worst British accent I'd ever heard. Dragged along, I feel my spirits lift as my feet start skipping despite my clear-cut orders not to.
"I know you're happy to get out of here, but do you think you could tone your unrestrained joy a little bit and pay attention?" a crisp voice asks from the opening, scathing.
I stop dead where I am and reach for my dagger, which, consequently, is no longer there. Miroku half-skips a few steps without me before skidding to a stop, pulling a switchblade from his pocket.
The stranger puts his hands above his head so we can see from his silhouette that he's not armed. "Relax, O Joyous People of the Sewers, I'm here as an ally. Shippou couldn't make it, so I'm the in-between, got it?"
I stride forward and in a few steps am near enough to the opening to discern his face. He's smirking, and his golden eyes are topped with eyebrows in a mocking expression. His white hair grazes his waist easily, if not longer. "And you are?" I ask coldly, bitingly.
"InuYasha, tone down, bitch," he growls warningly at me.
"What did you say?" my voice rises without my consent, and I'm shocked. I can feel Miroku's shock as well at my behavior. Suddenly, something in my mind clicks. "Aren't you supposed to be meeting Sango and her team?"
He drops his sneer and looks thoughtful, if that's even possible. "The assassin? I'm heading over there tomorrow. Right now I'm bringing you to the brat." InuYasha holds his hand out to Miroku. "InuYasha. You seem like a relatively sane-looking person; could you tell your bitch to keep her voice down?"
Miroku coughs with embarrassment, and gives me an apologetic look. "Ah, she's not my, ah... woman. She's the spy, Kagome. I'm Miroku."
Incredulous looks from the most gorgeous golden eyes I've ever seen. "You're the spy? Good Kami, you're going to blow this one, aren't you?"
I breathe deeply to regain my composure, closing my eyes momentarily. "You are making us late. Let's go."
"You're the queen," he responds with a bow, and I resist the urge to kick him in the balls. "C'mon, follow me." He turns about on his heel abruptly, and I am sad to admit that I am reduced to making faces at his red kimono. Miroku wags a finger at me for a few moments before joining in.
The tunnel looms behind us like a mouth. An eater of rats, it spits us out like diseased vermin. I am glad, for once, to be indigestible.
A/N
SORRY SORRY SORRY that's so short! The next chappy will be MUCH longer! I promise! ... Hum, the words just weren't FLOWING... I'm sure the next chapter will be better. ;;; R&R!! Happy Reading!