I'm back!! Happy Canada Day everyone!!!! :)
Chapter 2 - Song and Dance
"Tadaima," Kagome muttered under her breath, exhausted when she got home from her first day of classes.
"Hi hon," her mom called from the kitchen as Kagome trudged by on her way up to her room, shoulders slumped, bag dragging on the floor. "How was your first day of school?"
Using what small amount of energy she had left in her body, Kagome turned her head to level her mother with a look that said 'don't even go there,' before she continued on wordlessly to her bedroom. After trudging down the seemingly endless hallway to her bedroom, she collapsed on her bed in a mess of limbs and schoolwork and bedsheets, content not to move for at least the next twelve hours. Sadly, the universe had other plans.
"Hello Kagome."
"EEEYAH!" she shrieked in surprise, "How did you get in here?!" she demanded upon seeing the same boy from this morning standing in her bedroom.
No.
Actually she was wrong. It wasn't the boy from this morning; it was the silver-haired, doggy-eared boy from her dream, in all his smirking glory.
"What?" he asked pretending to be offended, "No hello?"
"No," she snapped tiredly, "No helloes for figments of my over- active, sleep-deprived imagination. Nope. None. So go away and let me sleep," she finished, lying back down on her bed and rolling over to face the wall.
"I'm not your imagination, Kagome."
"La la la la la," she sang under her breath plugging her ears, "not listening."
"Kagome," the boy tried again, impatience beginning to show in his voice. "Kagome, please turn around and look at me."
"My, these old houses certainly have such creaky walls," she continued on as though ignoring the boy's very existence. Apparently, the boy himself had had enough of this particular game. She thought she would never be able to breathe normally again when she suddenly felt a clawed hand comb through her hair and down her back.
"That was pretty real, now wasn't it?" he asked seriously.
Kagome finally rolled over, convinced that she had finally completely lost her mind and decided to face her new found insanity with a certain degree of acceptance. What she ended up facing were two pools of molten gold, framed by the most beautiful face she had ever seen in her entire life. She was only partially aware of the hand that was still stroking her hair as the boy himself sat perched on the edge of her bed.
"Why won't you just leave me alone?" she sighed in defeat.
With a face that was entirely serious and completely devoid of its usual smirk, he answered, "Because I can't do that. Things need to be done, and you're the one that needs to do them."
"But, why me?"
"I told you already this morning, you're open to possibility."
"Possibility for what?" she asked, her frustration beginning to mount again, "a nice padded room because I like to talk to my imaginary friend, though I must say," she continued on, eyes trailing up his head to his ears, "I never thought I had it in me to come up with something as adorable as those."
Leaning his head down so that her seeking hand could reach the precious white appendages, he answered, "The ears are entirely mine, thank you, due in no part whatsoever to your admittedly over-active imagination," he paused while his eyes rolled up in his head in pleasure from her ministrations, "though I'm glad you like them."
Reluctantly taking her hands off the very real-feeling ears, Kagome could've sworn she'd her a disappointed whimper.
"So what am I supposed to call you?" she asked, having decided to go along with it for the time being. After all, those ears had certainly felt real. So had the hand that had suddenly stopped stroking her hair as she sat up in her bed. She suddenly found that she missed its soothing motions.
Excuse me?? What was she thinking??
She hadn't even decided if she was going to believe that he was real yet, she certainly shouldn't be enjoying imaginary clawed hands running through her long hair.
"-yasha."
"Huh?" she started out of her train of thought for the second time that day.
"I said that my name is Inu Yasha," the boy, who now had a name, replied with a hint of a mischievous grin returning to his features.
"Inu Yasha, eh?" she tried out the name, "well I suppose you must be real then, because I don't think I could think up a name like that with even the highest fever," she paused, trying to put together everything that had happened to her so far today into some kind of sense. "So you are a god, and this is what you look like?"
Inu Yasha nodded.
"And this morning at school..."
"...was my alternate form. I certainly can't go around looking like this all the time. People would begin to think they were hallucinating or something," he answered with a grin.
"Heaven forbid," she rolled her eyes, "I suppose you thought you'd reserve that special honour for little 'ole me. How kind."
"I certainly try my best," his grin got bigger.
"So you wouldn't mind answering a few questions then, right?" she asked dryly.
Sighing dramatically as though she had asked him for the stars from the sky he replied, "I can't guarantee that I can answer all your questions, but ask away."
"I thought that you knew everything," she snarked.
"I don't know everything," he replied smartly, "omniscience is a human invention. I do, however, know everything that concerns you. Let me put it to you this way, there isn't a very big difference between 'can' and 'won't', it'll be up to you to decide which it is."
"Fine," she muttered in defeat. "I'll start with an easy one then. Why the hell is there so much freaking homework on the first freaking day of school!??!"
It was a few hours later as Kagome sat on her bed trying to digest all the information that Inu Yasha had told her. He'd left only a few minutes ago, simply walking out her bedroom door with a dismissive little wave as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
Hearing her brother bounding up the stairs, Kagome had rushed to the door, her mind whirling with how she was going to explain the presence of the strange boy in her hallway, only to discover that he had disappeared without a trace, leaving the poor girl to wonder if she hadn't, in fact, imagined the entire encounter. But remembering the feeling of his clawed hand running through her hair, Kagome found herself unable to discount the events of the last few hours as a hallucination.
Turning back on her heel, she decided to just dismiss it all for the time being in order to get at least some of her homework done before bed.
The next day at school found Kagome hiding out in the music room during her lunch break. In all actuality, it had been years since she had indulged herself in any type of music, be it playing, or singing. She didn't really have any particular reason for quitting, one day, she just stopped. But here she was, years later, sitting in front of the beat up old piano, plinking away at random notes as her mind wandered back, again and again to her conservation with Inu Yasha the night before.
'What did he mean?' she wondered, her index finger idly landing on F#.
'Open to possibility? How am I open to possibility?'
Her hand traveled from F to B and then to G, creating a musical pattern of harmonics and counterpoints, slowly remembering the motions.
"You should have never stopped playing."
A slurry of disharmony filled the room suddenly as Kagome jumped, having thought she was alone. 'Of course, you're not ever really alone anymore, are you?' she thought dryly.
"I really wish you would give me a little bit of warning before you would pop out of nowhere," she grumped aloud to the now dark-haired Inu Yasha.
Ignoring her reply, he repeated, "You were quite good. Even I never really understood why you suddenly abandoned it."
Feeling as though she were being reprimanded, she replied perhaps shorter than she should have, "I don't know. I just did."
She sighed, slightly regretting her harsh tone. "I don't know," she shrugged, "one day, whatever it was that pushed, or inspired me, or whatever...it just wasn't there."
A slightly concerned look crossed Inu Yasha's face and he fell silent in seeming contemplation for a time before he spoke again. "So why are you here now, then?"
"I..." she started, realizing she didn't really know that herself, "it just felt like this was where I needed to be right now."
"Play something now," he nodded at the keyboard, smiling slightly. Without hesitation, Kagome complied to his request, idly wondering at her own complicity before her fingers found the notes and the melody of her youth began to fill the air again for the first time in years. She didn't know the song, or where it came from. Musically speaking it was a simply alternance of the F# minor key, moving from F# to D to E back up to A, repeating the pattern in endless variations, but it was these variations and alternances that evoked both feelings of sorrow and joy in both the player and the audience. For some reason, today it rang more beautiful in her ears than it had ever sounded before and Kagome wondered for the first time why she had ever stopped playing.
Suddenly, the bell rang signaling the end of her lunch break. Her eyes snapping open, Kagome looked around the room finding it empty once again.
Unbeknownst to her, however, outside the door of the classroom sat a young boy of about 13 years of age with a single tear sliding down his cheek. The beauty of the melody had moved something deep inside of him. Something that he thought had died a long time ago.
Returning to his locker, the boy placed all of his books, which he had been bringing home so that his mother would not have to, back inside, and with the first small smile in months, walked to his next class thinking that, perhaps, today was not such a good day to die.
Kagome would never know that her song had returned a small amount of hope to a child who thought he had given up.
Sitting on the roof in his true form, Inu Yasha felt his heart lifted by the resurgence of hope in the heart of the boy. Kagome may never know, but he did.
Soon, however, his heart became heavy again as he thought about the reasons for Kagome's abandonment of music. Music was a part of her very soul; he had assured that at the time of her creation. Music was truth at its very purist, and truth was hope.
He didn't understand.
She had been destined to bring hope back to a world that desperately needed it. Music was hope. How was this girl supposed to propagate hope when she herself seemed to have lost it?
Sighing, Inu Yasha tilted his head back as though looking for the Universe for answers that he already knew weren't there.
End of Chapter 2 I hope I managed to give y'all a lot to think and ponder on. Sorry the chapter took so long. Summer job and all, I'm sure you all understand ( Anywho. Let me know what you think. Any suggestions would be happily accepted.