Alrighty, you lovely people, you. I have been made aware of this... paragraph-
blocking-up problem, and done my best to fix it. It really annoyed me, me
being the meticulous mechanics user I am. But ahoy.
Falls On Me
Chapter Four: A Passage of Time
"You breath too hard," the thing-I'm-forced-to-call-my-companion intoned dully in my direction. We were climbing up a hill, and we had been trekking for hours. I think I'm bloody well allowed to breath hard. Besides, Miroku was red in the face and panting his ass off, and I'm "breathing too hard?"
"Are you going to verbally attack me all day?" I bit out at him through gritted teeth.
"Probably!" Miroku answered cheerfully, earning him a lump of hardtack to the head. He paused in his panting to give me a wounded look. "So cold, Kagome-san! So cold!"
I tried to control the dull beating of the oncoming headache and focused on walking. I could feel It glaring at me from behind me, and I gritted my teeth even more. The headache increased. All throughout the past afternoon, the only nice thing he's said is, "You don't walk as funny as I thought you did." Other than that, he's been pretty much critiquing everything I've done.
I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly yelled at me, "Hey! That tendon in your leg is uglier than a banana slug eating a pile of shit!" because that's basically all the ammo he'll have left before the day's gone.
"Your ankles are dirty," he told me with mild disgust.
That was it. The straw that broke the camel's back. I whirled on my heel to face him, and he damn near ran into me. What happened to those demon reflexes of his? Ha! "Look, you, I've been walking since yesterday when I realized that because of an impromptu invasion I was going to be denied soap, and now I've got a Neanderthalian lump and perverted monk-wannabe as a couple of companions and all you can manage verbally thus far is a few comments about my ankles and my breathing habits and frankly, I'm beginning to get irritated."
He blinked at me in mild surprise for a few moments, then went on to tell me that I was in serious need of a Tic Tac or something, because "DAMN is your breath feisty."
I felt something inside me give up and let go. It rattled about in me for a few moments before lying, dead, at the base of my mind. Before I knew what I was doing, I had him tackled. "I'm going to kill you!"
I went for his throat, of course. After he recovered from his utter shock, he merely gave me one his bored looks and yawned pointedly. I increased the pressure even though I knew it would be pointless.
"Kagome-chan! Hey! 'Gome!" I heard Miroku yelling at me, trying to pry me off of our evil companion. "Nothing can be gained by hurting InuYasha-san, you know."
"Won't know until I try!" Miroku had picked me up, so I flailed uselessly at the white-haired wretch as he stood and brushed himself off. Sighing, Miroku merely flipped me over his shoulder like some sort of backpack and continued on his merry little way.
I slammed my fists down onto his back. "You realize you'll grow exhausted in a few minutes, don't you?" I pointed out, using my index finger to help.
"Yeah, Miroku, she's too fat for one person to be hauling around," InuYasha said knowledgeably, giving me a smirk. I struggled harder to get my hands around his throat again. InuYasha made a face at me, a mirror image of the one I'd been making at him earlier. Damn. He saw me.
"Miroku, can I be let down now?" I was reduced to whining. Sad, but true. Miroku hadn't tired out; he'd been holding me over his shoulder for the past forty minutes or more. Amazed, I had waited to see how long he could last before becoming uncomfortably aware that being held in such a position was painful as hell. Especially with the demon InuYasha making faces at me.
"Promise you'll be good?" he huffed cheerfully. A-ha! The weight was beginning to wear on him. Nevertheless, I felt bad for it.
"Yes, yes, I'll be an angel. You'll be frightened of my incredibly awesome behavior," I insisted in my persistent wheedling tone, tracing little bunnies on his back with my finger. "InuYasha, you make some crack about being frightened of my face and you'll regret it."
InuYasha, having opened his mouth a second before, snapped it shut sheepishly and gained a delightfully sullen look.
Miroku let me down with a sigh of relief. "I was only able to make it because you've gotten so skinny!" Squeezing his eyes shut and wiping the sweat from his face, he sat down on a log right then and there, gathering his breath.
"What...? Hey! Stupid! We need to keep moving or we'll never get there in time!" InuYasha yelled. Miroku steadfastly ignored him.
"Y'know, a sit sounds good," I mused, then sat. Mostly for the satisfaction of pissing InuYasha off, but, for my favor, I was feeling a bit tired. InuYasha turned nearly purple in rage and yelled at us for a few minutes, then stomped off up a tree to sulk.
Miroku closed his eyes and smiled as if experiencing a piece of paradise. I guess resting is rather underrated. At least for non-travelers.
Finally able to breathe in a relaxed manner, I let myself fall back on the grass, staring up at the clouds. The sky was too bright for my puny eyes to handle, however, so I turned my attention on the trees instead. Birds, calling merrily to each other, flitted back and forth from branch to branch.
My eyelids started feeling heavy, and my muscles, bit by bit, relaxed. For some reason, the absurd notion that InuYasha was there to protect us gave me just enough of a feeling of security to drift off into a sleep. The sun fell on my body and warmed me as I sank in and out of sleep-state, like the tide of dream carrying me to and fro from realities.
I was rudely awakened by the Thing. It couldn't have been twenty minutes after I initially fell asleep, but the catnap was all I needed to rejuvenate me completely. Feeling chipper despite the fact that InuYasha was glowering at me and no doubt readying a few insults for future use, I smiled brightly at him as I got up. It stunned him, I know, because his jaw fell open. I love surprising people.
Miroku was still in his catatonic state of what looked like meditation, but InuYasha had no qualms about shoving him back into reality. The demon was given a look of sheer annoyance that he obviously didn't register, because he shoved the priest again. "C'mon! We've been sitting here for half an hour; it's time to go."
Taking his sweet time, Miroku stood and stretched amiably. InuYasha's eye developed a tic as Miroku's joyful stretching went on for a good couple of minutes. When he was finally done, he grinned at me and I gave him a thumbs up back.
InuYasha, obviously put in a bad mood, walked ahead of us, leaving us to our conversations behind his back. We knew he could hear us, so I made sure to put in a few derogatory comments about him. Miroku simply smiled serenely whenever I made a stab at InuYasha's personality, looks, or behavior. Our jabs at each other evidently had little to no effect on him, except when it impeded our progress to Shavasanah City.
The trek meandered along at an ant's pace, studious and perfected. The trail seemed to go on to infinity, despite what our common sense told us. The animals were aware of our presence, and took great pains, it seemed, to avoid us at all costs.
The sun is a marker of the passage of time.
Shavasanah City was finally before us, visible and beautiful to us dirty, worn travelers. Our destination within sight and the trail infallible, InuYasha (reluctantly, it looked) bid us farewell. He took off Eastward, to Sango and her party.
"The General said to just wait on the Southern outskirts of the city, and Shippou would come to us," Miroku reminded me absently.
"I know," I told him pointedly, telling him without words that my memory certainly wasn't as bad as he seemed to think it was. "I was there."
He grimaced. "Sorry, sorry, force of habit to repeat orders every once in a while. You'll have to forgive me, Kagome-chan."
"Forgiven," I told him flippantly, nodding once. "Well, let's go. I think we'll need to be a bit closer, don't you?" With that, I started for the high brick walls of the city. A Youkai city. He followed, and I knew he was smiling.
The Youkai who greeted us was not what we were expecting. At all. A little boy of what looked to be five or six years old waited for us patiently on the outside of the wall, a few guards standing about him in a horseshoe formation. He had bright red hair and the cutest green eyes I had ever seen. His furry fox legs shook with excitement as he saw us.
"They're here!" he exclaimed, running towards us. The guards gave each other pained looks and jogged after him.
Miroku knelt down a bit. "You must be Lord Shippou."
"Just Shippou, please. And you must be Kagome!"
I coughed politely and gave an embarrassed look off to the side. Miroku gestured at me slightly. "No, that's her. I'm Miroku."
Shippou's eyes widened in dismay. "I wanted you to be my servant!" he pouted. Flattering, but... no. I don't do servitude.
"I'm terribly sorry," Miroku said apologetically. "But you'll have to do with me. She's the best spy we've got."
I smiled down at the little fox demon warmly. "I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of each other, though, won't we?" I asked him. He nodded fervently, which I took to mean that'd he'd increase his visits to Lord Sesshoumaru's household. All the better. I felt safer with allies about, for some reason.
"M'Lord," a guard cleared his throat pointedly, then nodded towards the wall of the city when Shippou glanced at him.
"Of course!" Shippou yelled (an exuberant child, to say the least). "We need to get them clothes and stuff!"
"And weapons, if you wouldn't mind," I reminded him gently. Children always brought out my mother's instinct. He beamed at me, which I took for another yes. Miroku gave me an amused look, to which I responded with a heady glare. He whistled innocently and folded his arms behind his back.
Damn straight.
The inside of the city was amazing. The outer walls were brown mud and cement, and seriously aesthetically impaired. But the inside was something resembling our old human cities way back when. Sure, it wasn't the high- tech utopias that seemed to be the norm for Youkai cities nowadays, but it was a definite improvement over the forests outside it.
The first thing I did at Shippou's residency was take a long, beautiful bath. After that, Miroku and I donned servant's clothing and accompanied Shippou to a market area. There, he got us weapons and servant's clothing to the point of excess, and when he tried to buy me a ham I simply had to object. Politely, of course.
Miroku didn't seem to be having this problem, however, and was asking for things left and right. Shippou, being without parents to guide his purchases, paid for everything. He was a generous kit, that was for sure. Too bad about his being an orphan, really.
That night, I read Shippou some bedtime stories, at his insistence. I told him many times that I was horrible at telling stories, but he wouldn't hear of it. It got to the point where the guards were giving me threatening looks for forcing them to endure Shippou's whining, so I gave in.
I didn't know any stories of my own, so Shippou gave me a book to read from. It had fairy tales in it. Very different, it being a Youkai fairy tale book, with lots of killing and harsh justice. A lot of the morals included "If you aren't subservient to your betters, your head will get chopped off," or something to that effect.
I wasn't surprised when I went to bed with nightmares, but Shippou informed me cheerily the next day that he slept like a rock.
Figures.
A/N I know, horrifically short. I should be shot. But this is mostly just an interlude to the next chapter, where she gets a place in Sesshoumaru's household, so bear with me.
Falls On Me
Chapter Four: A Passage of Time
"You breath too hard," the thing-I'm-forced-to-call-my-companion intoned dully in my direction. We were climbing up a hill, and we had been trekking for hours. I think I'm bloody well allowed to breath hard. Besides, Miroku was red in the face and panting his ass off, and I'm "breathing too hard?"
"Are you going to verbally attack me all day?" I bit out at him through gritted teeth.
"Probably!" Miroku answered cheerfully, earning him a lump of hardtack to the head. He paused in his panting to give me a wounded look. "So cold, Kagome-san! So cold!"
I tried to control the dull beating of the oncoming headache and focused on walking. I could feel It glaring at me from behind me, and I gritted my teeth even more. The headache increased. All throughout the past afternoon, the only nice thing he's said is, "You don't walk as funny as I thought you did." Other than that, he's been pretty much critiquing everything I've done.
I wouldn't be surprised if he suddenly yelled at me, "Hey! That tendon in your leg is uglier than a banana slug eating a pile of shit!" because that's basically all the ammo he'll have left before the day's gone.
"Your ankles are dirty," he told me with mild disgust.
That was it. The straw that broke the camel's back. I whirled on my heel to face him, and he damn near ran into me. What happened to those demon reflexes of his? Ha! "Look, you, I've been walking since yesterday when I realized that because of an impromptu invasion I was going to be denied soap, and now I've got a Neanderthalian lump and perverted monk-wannabe as a couple of companions and all you can manage verbally thus far is a few comments about my ankles and my breathing habits and frankly, I'm beginning to get irritated."
He blinked at me in mild surprise for a few moments, then went on to tell me that I was in serious need of a Tic Tac or something, because "DAMN is your breath feisty."
I felt something inside me give up and let go. It rattled about in me for a few moments before lying, dead, at the base of my mind. Before I knew what I was doing, I had him tackled. "I'm going to kill you!"
I went for his throat, of course. After he recovered from his utter shock, he merely gave me one his bored looks and yawned pointedly. I increased the pressure even though I knew it would be pointless.
"Kagome-chan! Hey! 'Gome!" I heard Miroku yelling at me, trying to pry me off of our evil companion. "Nothing can be gained by hurting InuYasha-san, you know."
"Won't know until I try!" Miroku had picked me up, so I flailed uselessly at the white-haired wretch as he stood and brushed himself off. Sighing, Miroku merely flipped me over his shoulder like some sort of backpack and continued on his merry little way.
I slammed my fists down onto his back. "You realize you'll grow exhausted in a few minutes, don't you?" I pointed out, using my index finger to help.
"Yeah, Miroku, she's too fat for one person to be hauling around," InuYasha said knowledgeably, giving me a smirk. I struggled harder to get my hands around his throat again. InuYasha made a face at me, a mirror image of the one I'd been making at him earlier. Damn. He saw me.
"Miroku, can I be let down now?" I was reduced to whining. Sad, but true. Miroku hadn't tired out; he'd been holding me over his shoulder for the past forty minutes or more. Amazed, I had waited to see how long he could last before becoming uncomfortably aware that being held in such a position was painful as hell. Especially with the demon InuYasha making faces at me.
"Promise you'll be good?" he huffed cheerfully. A-ha! The weight was beginning to wear on him. Nevertheless, I felt bad for it.
"Yes, yes, I'll be an angel. You'll be frightened of my incredibly awesome behavior," I insisted in my persistent wheedling tone, tracing little bunnies on his back with my finger. "InuYasha, you make some crack about being frightened of my face and you'll regret it."
InuYasha, having opened his mouth a second before, snapped it shut sheepishly and gained a delightfully sullen look.
Miroku let me down with a sigh of relief. "I was only able to make it because you've gotten so skinny!" Squeezing his eyes shut and wiping the sweat from his face, he sat down on a log right then and there, gathering his breath.
"What...? Hey! Stupid! We need to keep moving or we'll never get there in time!" InuYasha yelled. Miroku steadfastly ignored him.
"Y'know, a sit sounds good," I mused, then sat. Mostly for the satisfaction of pissing InuYasha off, but, for my favor, I was feeling a bit tired. InuYasha turned nearly purple in rage and yelled at us for a few minutes, then stomped off up a tree to sulk.
Miroku closed his eyes and smiled as if experiencing a piece of paradise. I guess resting is rather underrated. At least for non-travelers.
Finally able to breathe in a relaxed manner, I let myself fall back on the grass, staring up at the clouds. The sky was too bright for my puny eyes to handle, however, so I turned my attention on the trees instead. Birds, calling merrily to each other, flitted back and forth from branch to branch.
My eyelids started feeling heavy, and my muscles, bit by bit, relaxed. For some reason, the absurd notion that InuYasha was there to protect us gave me just enough of a feeling of security to drift off into a sleep. The sun fell on my body and warmed me as I sank in and out of sleep-state, like the tide of dream carrying me to and fro from realities.
I was rudely awakened by the Thing. It couldn't have been twenty minutes after I initially fell asleep, but the catnap was all I needed to rejuvenate me completely. Feeling chipper despite the fact that InuYasha was glowering at me and no doubt readying a few insults for future use, I smiled brightly at him as I got up. It stunned him, I know, because his jaw fell open. I love surprising people.
Miroku was still in his catatonic state of what looked like meditation, but InuYasha had no qualms about shoving him back into reality. The demon was given a look of sheer annoyance that he obviously didn't register, because he shoved the priest again. "C'mon! We've been sitting here for half an hour; it's time to go."
Taking his sweet time, Miroku stood and stretched amiably. InuYasha's eye developed a tic as Miroku's joyful stretching went on for a good couple of minutes. When he was finally done, he grinned at me and I gave him a thumbs up back.
InuYasha, obviously put in a bad mood, walked ahead of us, leaving us to our conversations behind his back. We knew he could hear us, so I made sure to put in a few derogatory comments about him. Miroku simply smiled serenely whenever I made a stab at InuYasha's personality, looks, or behavior. Our jabs at each other evidently had little to no effect on him, except when it impeded our progress to Shavasanah City.
The trek meandered along at an ant's pace, studious and perfected. The trail seemed to go on to infinity, despite what our common sense told us. The animals were aware of our presence, and took great pains, it seemed, to avoid us at all costs.
The sun is a marker of the passage of time.
Shavasanah City was finally before us, visible and beautiful to us dirty, worn travelers. Our destination within sight and the trail infallible, InuYasha (reluctantly, it looked) bid us farewell. He took off Eastward, to Sango and her party.
"The General said to just wait on the Southern outskirts of the city, and Shippou would come to us," Miroku reminded me absently.
"I know," I told him pointedly, telling him without words that my memory certainly wasn't as bad as he seemed to think it was. "I was there."
He grimaced. "Sorry, sorry, force of habit to repeat orders every once in a while. You'll have to forgive me, Kagome-chan."
"Forgiven," I told him flippantly, nodding once. "Well, let's go. I think we'll need to be a bit closer, don't you?" With that, I started for the high brick walls of the city. A Youkai city. He followed, and I knew he was smiling.
The Youkai who greeted us was not what we were expecting. At all. A little boy of what looked to be five or six years old waited for us patiently on the outside of the wall, a few guards standing about him in a horseshoe formation. He had bright red hair and the cutest green eyes I had ever seen. His furry fox legs shook with excitement as he saw us.
"They're here!" he exclaimed, running towards us. The guards gave each other pained looks and jogged after him.
Miroku knelt down a bit. "You must be Lord Shippou."
"Just Shippou, please. And you must be Kagome!"
I coughed politely and gave an embarrassed look off to the side. Miroku gestured at me slightly. "No, that's her. I'm Miroku."
Shippou's eyes widened in dismay. "I wanted you to be my servant!" he pouted. Flattering, but... no. I don't do servitude.
"I'm terribly sorry," Miroku said apologetically. "But you'll have to do with me. She's the best spy we've got."
I smiled down at the little fox demon warmly. "I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of each other, though, won't we?" I asked him. He nodded fervently, which I took to mean that'd he'd increase his visits to Lord Sesshoumaru's household. All the better. I felt safer with allies about, for some reason.
"M'Lord," a guard cleared his throat pointedly, then nodded towards the wall of the city when Shippou glanced at him.
"Of course!" Shippou yelled (an exuberant child, to say the least). "We need to get them clothes and stuff!"
"And weapons, if you wouldn't mind," I reminded him gently. Children always brought out my mother's instinct. He beamed at me, which I took for another yes. Miroku gave me an amused look, to which I responded with a heady glare. He whistled innocently and folded his arms behind his back.
Damn straight.
The inside of the city was amazing. The outer walls were brown mud and cement, and seriously aesthetically impaired. But the inside was something resembling our old human cities way back when. Sure, it wasn't the high- tech utopias that seemed to be the norm for Youkai cities nowadays, but it was a definite improvement over the forests outside it.
The first thing I did at Shippou's residency was take a long, beautiful bath. After that, Miroku and I donned servant's clothing and accompanied Shippou to a market area. There, he got us weapons and servant's clothing to the point of excess, and when he tried to buy me a ham I simply had to object. Politely, of course.
Miroku didn't seem to be having this problem, however, and was asking for things left and right. Shippou, being without parents to guide his purchases, paid for everything. He was a generous kit, that was for sure. Too bad about his being an orphan, really.
That night, I read Shippou some bedtime stories, at his insistence. I told him many times that I was horrible at telling stories, but he wouldn't hear of it. It got to the point where the guards were giving me threatening looks for forcing them to endure Shippou's whining, so I gave in.
I didn't know any stories of my own, so Shippou gave me a book to read from. It had fairy tales in it. Very different, it being a Youkai fairy tale book, with lots of killing and harsh justice. A lot of the morals included "If you aren't subservient to your betters, your head will get chopped off," or something to that effect.
I wasn't surprised when I went to bed with nightmares, but Shippou informed me cheerily the next day that he slept like a rock.
Figures.
A/N I know, horrifically short. I should be shot. But this is mostly just an interlude to the next chapter, where she gets a place in Sesshoumaru's household, so bear with me.