"They'll just have to live with me, right?" Inuyasha retorted with a good-natured eyeroll.

Kagome's family was quite interesting to him. He had no real views of what a family should be, no idea what it would be like to have a sibling that loved you and a grandfather who was a little more than halfway crazy and a mother that was constantly trying to understand you while you were going through your teenage years and usually just ended up confusing yourself. No, he'd had Sesshoumaru, who wanted to kill him, Myoga the Flea, who was little help in anything, and his mother had died before she'd had the chance to see him fully grow. Sad, really, but he'd stopped thinking about it after all this time.

The hanyou allowed himself to be led to the well, slipping an arm around the miko's waist before resting a foot on the lip of the well. "Ready?"

Here goes nothing...cursed scrolls and steak. Lovely.

She couldn't imagine not having a family to torture her, to care too much or too little at the wrong times. If her only true companionship was a flea, a brother who wished him dead and a mother who'd been dead for far too long – it wasn't really feasible to begin with.

They would always /be/ there. A boulder in front of a very interesting door...it wasn't so interesting that you were about to push the boulder over, but it would be nice to see what was lurking within.

Kagome didn't bother to reply as they jumped through the well, a flash of blue light greeting them, along with a very aggravated cat that paced around the rim of the well overhead. Someone had opened the door and hadn't closed it behind them – probably she, all things considered.

She could just claim there'd been a random bout of rain in Sengoku Jidai – not that some psychotic grade school demon that had nearly possessed her once before had pushed the half-demon she was in love with into a pond, of course sending her to go drag him out. That would be asking a little much of her slightly forgiving parental unit.

The moment the blue light faded, the hanyou's nose was flooded with the scent of cat, old inscense, and the last traces of a sugary ice cream cone Souta had dropped in the shrine about a week ago.

For Inuyasha, his family was more like a paper weight on top of a paper you needed. It was quickly discarded in favor of what you wanted to read. Nice to look at, but not something you wanted in your way.

He easily scaled the lip of the well, reaching down to scratch Buyo's ear while he waited for Kagome. Something was off here....

"Hey Kagome?" He sniffed the air, just to make sure. No there was something wrong. The scent of her family was old, not like it should have been with them going in and out of the house everyday. They'd been here not to long ago, but they weren't /here/. Just Buyo.

"Your mother didn't say anything about not being here, did she? Or your grandfather? I can't smell them."

Kagome shrugged as she pushed herself out of the well, feet making damp imprints on the thin sheet of dust over the weather-beaten planks. It was a wonder they hadn't buckled over so much weight for so many years.

"Nope."

Why would they have left? They hadn't said anything, hadn't hinted, hadn't even made the slightest indication. That was either terribly inadvertent, or very deliberate.

"She didn't mention anything about being gone ... but if they /are/, I guess they expected me to come back late enough that it would've seemed like nothing had ever happened..."

It was only a mild irritation that buzzed through her throat as she realized that they didn't want her to come along -- or that they didn't want to trouble her with their own little escapade. Clearly Kagome was just so /terribly/ involved with her own problems. Hopefully it wasn't that important ... it couldn't be that important ...

...it probably wasn't that important.

/Hopefully/.

Kagome smiled at him faintly as she walked towards the exit of the chibi shrine.

"--I bet they left a note or something. Even so, we can still get dried off."

"Dry sounds nice," he said in all obviousness, grimacing as he pulled a twig out of his hair. "Clean sounds nice too...."

The hanyou hoped they really /had/ left a note, really /were/ okay. He may not have been best friends with her family, but he didn't want them hurt or in trouble, either. They meant something to Kagome, so they meant something to him, too. Even if that something was just to keep her from worrying.

They wouldn't just up and leave without leaving anything, would they? No, they were more responsible than that. Weren't they? Walking out of the chibi shrine with Kagome, he tried opening the door, only to find that he couldn't.

Well, if something terrible had happened, they'd obviously found the time to lock the door.

"Kagome, do you have a key or something? They locked it."

"Uh...I think Okaa-san hides one around here in case I forget..."

Her eyes scanned the familiar surroundings until she finally walked over to an overly conspicuous stature of Buddha in the middle of a small shrubbery. Lifting it up, a very dusty key was produced from within its hollow depths. Giving a slight shrug, she turned the lock. A rush of stale air hit her in the face, no whirring of fans audible. Just dead silence.

It had been so long since she'd walked into the house to find it entirely empty. Souta always had left on one of his game consoles...or Grandpa had left on a random CD of monks chanting. Pulling tangles out of her matted hair with a wince, Kagome stepped into the living room and unconsciously flipped on the light.

Bulbs flickering into existence, and the blades whirring dismally, it felt a little better to be in such an empty house. No note was visible as of yet, and so her nervous reflex restarted and she began to chew her lip. It was just like her family to get abducted by bloodthirsty youkai, holding them for ransom.

"Anybody home?" She called for good measure.