A/N: Ok, I decided to keep going with this thanks to the wonderful responses from my avid readers. I think this will be a fun story, so stick around! (Happy December everyone!)
Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of the characters there in, but I do own a bottle of sparkling cider and some fish crackers (food of the gods) which are assisting me in the writing process.
The Twelve Days of Christmas
Take 2
People came and went, nameless children whose eyes were alight with the very same Christmas joy and spirit that her own used to fill with at the prospect of meeting the Santa Claus. Of course, they didn't know he was fake, or that he hated Christmas. But she did, and now she had the task of infusing him with the same raw spirit that burned brightly in the eyes of the children that came to him for help with their holiday scheming.
By the end of the day, she still had no idea what she was going to say to him. She had no idea what she was going to do. This was not the way the plan was supposed to go! Oh, it was so unfair that Sango would pick something so devious as forcing her to stand more than a few rare moments in Inuyasha's company. It wasn't right!
Her father would say that it was just another one of life's challenges. He was full of philosophical shit like that, always telling her that Life never gave anything to someone who couldn't handle it. So all the burdens and all the blame and all the bad things that had been lumped upon Kagome's shoulders was just a test of Life. Well, she never did believe her father, she only listened because she loved him. And then he died.
And that was that.
Kagome shook her head free from thoughts of her father as Shippou helped her clean up for the night. Most of the shops in the mall were closing down as well, marking an end to one of the valuable shopping days left until Christmas.
"Hey Kagome?" Shippou called, carrying a half-empty box of candy canes. "Do you want me to walk you home tonight? Can't have you getting mugged or something."
Kagome smiled. "Sure, I'd like that. I'll go get changed and meet you up here."
"I'll be waiting, so don't sneak out," the teenager warned with a sparkle in his green eyes.
It was hard to believe that he could still twinkle after all he had been through in his short life. But everyone had a story, like Miroku always told her. It just happened that she had a part in his story. The same way she had a part in Miroku's. The same way she knew Sango's. In fact, Inuyasha was the only mystery to her on the entire staff.
"Alright," she said, psyching herself up. "He's just another guy. Just...use your charm." When Kagome headed for the inner set to spark a conversation, she found that the pseudo-Santa was gone. "Miroku?" she asked the man in a reindeer suit. "Have you seen Inuyasha?"
"He just went to change in the locker room, why?"
"Nothing," Kagome said with a knock-out smile. "I'll see you tomorrow?"
"If I don't die in the night from a concussion," he replied just as cheerily.
"One you deserved," Sango threw in her two cents as she carried her film bag past them, toward her car.
"You don't understand me at all Sango," Miroku pouted. "I'm a humanitarian!"
"Yeah," Kagome laughed. "He wants to get as many women pregnant as he can in order to assure the survival of our people." Sango laughed as she left, shaking her head with a grin.
"Ah, Kagome!" Miroku whined. "Why do you have to go and make me look bad in front of her?"
"Oh, sweetie," Kagome laughed, patting him on the shoulder. "You do a better job of that yourself."
Miroku narrowed his eyes at her menacingly. "You have five seconds."
Kagome laughed and took off like a shot from the set, toward the locker room. Miroku, as promised, was after her in fie seconds. They wove their way through end-of-the-day shoppers and rent-a-cops who yelled at them to stop running in the mall, and store workers heading home for the night. Although Miroku had been on the Track team in high school, Kagome always out ran him. For the life of him, he never knew how the petite girl was always, always one step ahead of him.
"Ha! I beat you to the locker room," she said in a sing-song voice, flaunting her victory.
Miroku tried to scowl, but the corners of his mouth lifted in spite of himself. There was just no way anyone could be angry or sad or unhappy around Kagome. She gave off happiness and spirit in waves. It drew people to her, and made people fall in love with her. That was just the way she was, all sugar and spice and logic.
"You two act like grader school kids," Inuyasha commented from his locker. His Santa suit was already replaced with his normal clothes, and he was shrugging on his coat, ready to leave for the night.
"It's allowed to act like a kid, it's Christmas," Kagome responded good-naturedly.
Inuyasha's expression of disgruntled disapproval never changed.
"It's like talking to a hunk of wood," Miroku whispered to her. Kagome couldn't repress her snort of agreement.
"Good night," Inuyasha sighed, rolling his eyes as he walked past them.
"Hold on a sec!" Kagome called after him, giving chase. "Let me have a moment of your time."
Miroku watched this with veiled interest. Kagome, talking to the man who hated Christmas? A startling development. Something he'd have to watch more closely. In any event, they left the locker room and he took advantage of the opportunity to change in peace.
"What do you want?" Inuyasha asked, not really caring, as he walked toward the doors.
Kagome followed at his heels, taking two strides to match every one of his so she could keep up with his pace. It was like he wanted, needed, to get out of the mall as fast as possible. "What are your plans for Friday?" she asked.
He didn't slow. "I don't know yet," was his clever response.
"Why don't you come out with us?" she offered, eagerly.
"Who's us?" he asked, still not caring.
"You know, me, Miroku, Sango, Shippou? Us, as in the North Pole staff?"
"No thanks."
"Why not? You just said you weren't doing anything," she said stubbornly.
"I said I don't know, not that I'm doing nothing," he retorted.
"Someone only says they don't know when they don't have any plans, but don't want anyone to know that," Kagome rationalized.
Inuyasha narrowed his eyes as he glanced over to her. In a quick glance, he could appraise most people, a gift he had learned when growing up in countless foster homes. Truthfully, she was easy on the eyes. Kagome was the kind of girl who was pretty without trying to be, and effortless beauty that women were always trying to achieve but few ever had. She also seemed totally unaware of the fact, which gave naiveté to her as another favor. Pure girls were always fun to mess around with. But she was just too...perfect.
No, he had made that mistake before. Perfect girls were either taken or damaged. He didn't thinks Kagome was taken, so that meant she was damaged, and he was not the baggage type--unless it was his own.
He was the do-what-you-have-to-then-broom-her-fast type. Always had been.
Nope, nothing good would come on this. "I'm waiting to see what my friends are doing," he said lamely.
"Translation: You don't want to come out with us."
"Pretty much." He was a heart-breaker, yes, but he wasn't a liar...often.
"That's too bad, you'd have fun with us," Kagome insisted.
"I'm sure I would."
If she heard the sarcasm in his voice, she chose to ignore it. "Maybe next time?"
"Maybe," was the only assurance he gave.
"I'll just have to keep reminding you then," Kagome smiled. Oh yes, she had a plan. How often had she been called annoyingly persistent in her life? At least a thousand. Her skills were refined.
"You do that," Inuyasha yawned.
Kagome felt slightly annoyed at his who-cares attitude. "Why are you so disgruntled?" she asked. "This job isn't so bad. It pays good."
"Says the girl with the curly shoes," he retorted. "Come on, this job is a poor man's charity work."
"Do you really feel that way?" she asked, taken aback.
"If I wasn't getting paid, there is no way in hell I'd ever consider doing this crap."
"So all of us, what we're doing--"
"Come off the moral high-horse Kagome," Inuyasha sighed. "You're a well-off girl. You probably split your pay check with your mother, send $10 a month to AIDS research, and be an elf every Christmas to make your life seem a little more meaningful than what it is. Just another faceless, purposeless existence that 99.9 of the human race carries out every day."
Kagome was literally speechless for around half a heart beat. How could anyone be so bitter was beyond her, but he had struck a never by assuming he knew the first thing about her.
"I donate to Cancer, actually," Kagome commented. "My paychecks go to me, toward my student loans or my living expenses, I volunteer at a soup kitchen every other Friday night, and I first got this job to avoid the mall pressing criminal charges against me."
"What?" Inuyasha actually slowed his steps as he looked over at her.
She shrugged. "Everyone has their secrets."
Inuyasha shook his head a little, as if not believing he had been taken in for a second by some kind of scam. "This is where I leave you," he commented upon coming to the door.
"Good night!" she said and watched him leave.
Eleven days. That's how long she had to get this walnut to crack...
She could work with eleven days.
----------------------------------------------------
"It's supposed to snow again tonight," Shippou said cheerfully as he and Kagome strolled along the street together. They were the only ones for the last three streets, and most of the streetlights were out on their block, the one they were coming on to.
"Really?" Kagome asked. "I hope so."
"You like snow more than I do sometimes," Shippou laughed.
"Yeah," she admitted. "And I don't even have to pray for snow days from school anymore."
"Lucky," he grumbled.
Kagome rubbed her mitten-ed hands together for warmth, then pulled her knit hat further ovre her ears. It was bitter cold out tonight, and it was dark, only making it colder. Her breath hung in the air with a silver tint, making it look less smoky and more unearthly. Still, it was her favorite time of the year.
"I lost a bet with Sango today," Kagome told him. Shippou was someone that she kept nothing from, mostly because he was too young to judge and too old to laugh.
"You never lose bets!" he denied, more than a little shocked.
"I did today," she sighed. "I have until Christmas Eve to make Inuyasha enjoy the season."
"Why the fuck would you agree to something like that!?" Shippou demanded.
"Language," Kagome corrected.
He hung his head. "Sorry."
"Sango tricked me into it. I didn't plan on her picking that. I thought it would be something stupid that would keep me occupied, you know, like buying her film everyday or something."
Shippou took his hand out from the pockets of his jacket and grabbed a handful of snow from the curb of the street. They were almost to the apartment building now. "Well, you got the short-end of the stick."
"I know," she agreed. "Do you think I can do it?"
"Truthfully?" She nodded eagerly. "There's no chance in hell." Her spirits fell.
"Oh..."
"But," he said, making her look up. Shippou flashed her a toothy grin. "If anyone can do it, it's you, Kagome."
She smiled back, a dodged just as he hurled the snowball at her. Shippou had forgotten that she had a little brother and had been through countless snowball fights, enough to make her a seasoned veteran in the tactics of little boys. She gave chase as he attempted to escape. In front of the apartment building, she tripped him into a large snow drift.
"No fair!" he sputtered, spitting out snow as she held the door open for him.
"Stop whining, cry baby, you're letting heat out!"
He grumbled as they walked in together, then up the three flights of stairs to their floor. Kagome dug in her pocket for her keys. She walked to the left side of the hall, the loft apartment. Shippou went to the right side, the smaller apartment. She unlocked; knocked.
"G'night," he called as the door opened.
"Night," Kagome called back as she flicked on her living room lights and headed in.
"Grams, I'm home!"
"Shippou, you're home early tonight!" Kagome heard the voice of her neighbor say as she closed her door.
Kagome took off her hat and her mittens, tossing them to the floor along with her scarf and her coat. She'd pick them up later. She walked to the thermostat and turned it up, warm heat billowed into the lofty two-room apartment. She kicked off her shoes and left them by the vent in the "kitchen" portion of the larger room.
"I'm home!" she said into the apartment. No one answered. No one ever did. No one lived there but her. Still, saying it out loud helped her feel a little less lonely at the end of the day.
For a minute, Kagome was tempted to call her mother, but then she's just get another round of apologies about not being able to come for Christmas. Her grandfather was going on a Bingo trip with his friends over the holiday. Souta, her younger brother, was going to a ski cabin in the mountains with three of his friends. Her mother was going away with a few of her friends to spend the holidays at the beach.
It wasn't as if she'd be totally alone of Christmas. Miroku was coming over since his family was a firm advocate of loud parties and no real holiday significance, and Miroku was a little simpler than that. Sango promised to try and come, but with all that was going on in her life, it was truly hard to make a commitment. Shippou and Kaede were coming--and bringing the ham. So she wouldn't be alone.
But it was the first year that her family hadn't felt the need to include her in their plans. Everyone was doing something else, and no one bothered to tell her until a few days earlier. And all the plans she had been making were ruined.
Kagome pulled on a fresh pair of dry, warm socks and made herself some hot chocolate. She didn't feel like watching television. There was only some many times a person could see "Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown" without wishing Snoopy would just bite the title character on the leg.
Instead, she curled up on her window sill, knees pulled into her chest, coco cradled in her hands. She looked out into the night, watching the snow begin to fall, and remembered another snowy night, over two years ago.
She had been volunteering in the homeless shelter soup kitchen only a few weeks when she first met Shippou. He was a dewy-eyed little boy of barely thirteen with a toothy grin that melted her heart. He always got seconds when she was working the food line.
He usually wore clean clothes, and he wasn't unbearably thin like the others. He looked like he had a home, and was at least sometimes taken care of, but he still came to the soup kitchen religiously, every other Friday night. Sometimes he didn't even eat, he'd only come to talk to some of the people who volunteered. Kagome was his favorite, and he was hers.
It wasn't until a months after she met him that she saw the bruises on him. Usually they were cleverly hidden beneath his clothes and his face was usually bright, but one Friday he walked in with a day-old broken lip and a black eye. That's when she realized why he came to the soup kitchen, and why he didn't want to go home.
Kagome was just nineteen, barely able to support herself, but she was determined to help him. He trusted her with his secret, the secret wrath of his father, who took out on the son the fact that his mother had left them for a stock broker and a summer house. Kagome trusted him with her secrets as well, and they forged a bond almost as strong as the one she had with her own little brother.
One winter night, much like the one she looked out upon now, Kagome followed Shippou back to his father's apartment. He had been waiting for Shippou, as the boy knew he would be. Shippou didn't know Kagome followed him until he opened the door a few minutes after his own arrival, and found her. The second his father saw Kagome, he flew off the handle, screaming at Shippou, swearing unbearable pain upon him. Kagome simply walked in, pulled Shippou behind her and faced the fire.
He noticed that his threats meant nothing and lunged at the boy. Kagome put herself between them again and intercepted a strong blow to the side of her face. Her lip bled, but she smiled.
"Please," she said calmly. "Hit me again, so I can have to arrested for assault." He didn't raise his hand again. Kagome had the upper hand, and control, and they all three knew it. "You're not going to hurt this boy again." Then Kagome and Shippou walked out the door and they never looked back. Shippou was never hit again.
Social services had Shippou taken from his father. Kagome found a suitable foster home for him, with her elderly neighbor across the hall, Kaede. Someone she had known for two years, and who she'd trust with the life of the little boy in her care. Kaede was only too willing to accept the boy into her home.
She had adopted him, officially, the Christmas before. Kagome sighed, leaning her head against the window frame. That family had a happy ending. There were far too few of those in the world.
Kagome finished her drink and headed to bed early. Tomorrow would be brighter. She'd feel less alone. She'd appreciate her family more. She'd be less miserable. Tomorrow would be better.
Empty wishes on a snowflake that melted when it hit her window pane.
A/N: Okay, this was a downer chapter, sorry! There will be seriousness to this story--because every story needs a "story" to build the humor on. There will be morefunny in thenext chapterbecause we'll have some Miroku-Sango fun, and Kagome enacting her brilliant plans with Inuyasha. Yes, it will be fun! So review and I'll update faster!