I'll Be There
Chapter One
Kagome skipped her last exam. She already had to retake a semester of pre-calculus, and she didn't except her English exam to be any better. She could already speak the damn language fluently, but she cared about as much about how it worked as she did logarithms; it hadn't been worth the time when she had so many more important things to do. Like saving the world as everyone knew it.
Yeah, that would fly when she had to explain to the teacher why she had skipped.
The three day weekend had been nice though. She slept for most of it, and she was feeling a lot better Monday morning. She had even managed to convince herself that the person she had seen Thursday afternoon was just a new student. Not Inuyasha. Never Inuyasha.
"How the fuck do you know my name?"
Kagome shivered. What a strange coincidence. Strange name. Not likely to have a double.
She shook the thought from her head. Whatever she had thought she heard, she only heard because she was upset. Here she was, Monday morning. She had gotten through her first two second semester classes, and she hadn't seen the boy once. It was crazy. It was stupid. Anyway, she had enough to worry about anyway, what with the missing Shikon Jewel.
After Inuyasha . . . er, the boy, had turned back, she had simply grabbed her books and run. She had forgotten all about the Shikon no Tama until she got home that afternoon. She still didn't know what she was supposed to do. Should she look for it again? There was no way it would still be in the courtyard; even if it had been somewhere around the bench, it had to have been picked up by now.
Or should she just forget about it?
Humans couldn't use it, Inuyasha had said. And these humans, the ones from her time . . . they wouldn't even know what it was. The Shikon no Tama didn't exist in her time, except in Gramps' crazy delusions. Maybe the reason it had disappeared was because it was used sometime between the feudal era and modern day Tokyo. That was a lot of space for the "right hands" to come across it and . . .
She knew that didn't make sense. She had left the feudal era with the jewel. That meant it had seen no hands but her own.
The bell rang as she slid into a seat in her third hour class. She should just forget about it. It wasn't worth the stress. After all, here she was. She had all her limbs, and she felt relatively sane despite her ordeals over the past few days. Nothing that bad could have happened.
The teacher got up from the desk in the corner and walked to the front of the room. "Welcome to Philosophy. This will probably be the hardest class you take this year."
There were a couple snickers from the back of the room.
"Some of you are laughing. Is something funny?" There was no answer. "Well," she continued, "I'm glad to see that you all have excellent senses of humor. However, I'm going to tell you right now that If you don't plan on taking this class seriously, you can leave right now." She looked down the row, right at Kagome. "Any questions?"
Kagome paled. She hadn't been laughing. The teacher was young, but she was very intimidating. She was tall with dark hair that curled into her chin, framing her long, straight face and sharp features. Kagome was about to apologize when she heard a chair scrape across the floor behind her as someone got up. She sighed in relief. The teacher hadn't been looking at her, but the person behind her.
The relief didn't last long. The young man cleared his throat, and in a horribly familiar and charmingly innocent voice, he began, "I have a question."
Kagome choked. She knew that voice.
The teacher narrowed her eyes. She looked deadly, and Kagome knew that look as well. She knew it from complete strangers, because all their faces screwed into the same expression at this voice and it's implications. No, this wasn't happening.
"Well, ma'am, this is a philosophy class, am I correct?" Kagome refused to turn around like everyone aroudn her had. She was afraid of what she would be met with.
He didn't wait for an answer. "How can you, or anyone else for that matter, tell me what is and isn't philosophy? Can you really have a 'correct' philosophical answer? Please, ma'am. I don't mean any disrespect, but couldn't I, theoretically, have a differing philosophical view from your own? Therefore, why is this class to be any more or less difficult than any of my others?"
"What's your name, young man?" the teacher demanded. She crossed her arms and stared down her nose at the boy behind Kagome.
"Uh . . . Miroku, ma'am," he said sheepishly. "Ashia Miroku. You won't . . . kick me our of your class, will you?"
Kagome put her face in her hands. She didn't want to hear anymore, but even more than that, she didn't want to see. If she saw Miroku's face, the monk, her comrade and her friend . . . she didn't know what she would do.
"Quite the contrary, Mr. Ashia," the teacher smirked. From the tone of her voice, Kagome wasn't sure Miroku would much like the alternative. "In fact, I'm going to make a lesson out of you. To the front of the room, sir. Now."
"Yes ma'am," Miroku said.
He walked past her, but Kagome didn't see. She was still covering her eyes. She didn't want to see.
"And you," the teacher said. "Young lady!" she added sharply when there was no answer. Kagome uncovered her eyes. This time the instructor was looking at her. Right at her. "That's right, you. Your name?"
"Hi-Higurashi Kagome," she stammered. Miroku was dressed in the boy's uniform instead of his monk's robes, and he wasn't carrying his staff, nor was his right hand wrapped with prayer beads, but it was him. Unmistakable.
"Come up here, Ms. Higurashi, Mr. Ashia won't bite," the teacher snapped.
Kagome got up and stumbled to the front of the room. "Now, the two of you are a Roman God and a Roman Goddess respectively "
"Excuse me," Miroku interjected, reaching across the teacher for Kagome's hand, "I'm sorry to interupt, ma'am, but I must ask." He knelt before Kagome and through the giggles from the back of the room, he asked, "Miss, would you do me the honor . . . of bearing me a son?"
Something very strange was going on, and yet it wasn't that strange at all. In fact, it was almost normal. Kagome had to smile. "No, Miroku. But I'm honored that you would ask."
Inuyasha hated new schools.
In fact, he hated school in general. What's the point? All they taught was stupid stuff he sure as hell wasn't going to need to know when he grew up. He didn't know what he wanted to do when he grew up. But he didn't need to know English to do it. He knew that for sure.
So why was he here? Sitting in a classroom while some stupid old man tried to get him to understand adverbs and pronouns in a language he never intended to learn to speak properly.
Oh, but you should be fucking grateful, he thought bitterly, remembering his brother, Sesshomaru's lawyer, Mr. Jaken's words. Oh yes, how kind of Sesshomaru to take in his weak little half-brother. "Half the blood, half the brains," Sesshomaru used to say when they were younger, before their father died, sending them each to their respective mothers. Inuyasha had been so glad to get away from his older brother, but the victory was short-lived. A mere five years with his mother before she died too, inconveniently seven months before his eighteenth birthday. He had to have a legal guardian, the child services woman had said.
And he was so grateful that his brother had stepped up to the plate. Oh, yes. Honorable Sesshomaru, a year out of graduate school with a high degree in psychology. Why couldn't Inuyasha be more like Sesshomaru, who was so gracious as to take him in?
If anyone knew anything, they would know Sesshomaru, the kind savior, had taken him in for two reasons: publicity and the extra tax money. He didn't treat Inuyasha badly or anything but it wasn't exactly a nurturing environment. And he had only been there for three weeks. He had hated his brother from the moment he was old enough to understand that he was never going to go away, and Sesshomaru had hated him longer.
So here he was, halfway across the country, in a city he didn't want to be in, in a school he equally didn't want to be in.
A school full of fucking psychos, no less.
Sesshomaru would have had a field day with the girl he met the other day. He was looking for the principal's office, so he went to ask a girl he saw at a bench in the courtyard. But instead of acting like a civilized person when he got over there, she burst into tears at his feet. No explanation, not one word, she just turned on the waterworks the second he started talking.
To top it all off, when he turned to leave, she said his name.
"Inuyasha!"
He shuddered. First of all, it was weird that she knew his name. That in itself was strange. It wasn't like it was a common name, like she had just guessed it. It was a weird name. There were times in elementary school when he hated his parents for that name. But she had said it without him ever introducing himself. He'd never seen this girl before in his life! How the hell had she known his name?
And yet there was something . . . Almost familiar about the way she said it. As stupid as it sounded, it kind've made him feel . . . well, powerful. Like someone relied on him to protect her. Like someone really cared about him. It was a warm feeling. It was a weird feeling. But it was a good one.
And that is even weirder than her knowing your name, Inuyasha thought.
Finally, the bell rang. Inuyasha sat up and gathered his things. At least he hadn't seen her since then. Maybe she had transferred out. Maybe moved halfway across the country to start at a new school in the middle of the year. Maybe that's why she was bawling her eyes out. At any rate, if he never saw her again, he would be just fine with that.
And that was the end of that. No more stupid feelings, no more weird girls. He got up, and slammed right into someone passing his desk.
"Hey, wanna watch where you're fucking going?" he grumbled, trying to keep his loose-leaf papers from spilling around his feet.
"Me?" the girl demanded. "You're the one that stood up just as I was walking by!" She had dropped her folders, and her things had flown in all directions. She knelt down to gather them from under the desks and across the aisle.
"Well, maybe next time you'll watch where you're walking!" he snorted, watching her clean up her things. He turned to go, but she grabbed the cuff of his pant-leg and jerked it.
"Help me clean up these papers, you little devil," she growled.
Inuyasha looked down. He wasn't sure if he should smirk at her or get away from her as quickly as possible. She was small, but she was wiry and she looked angry. He sighed. This wasn't worth the argument, or the tearing of his pants. Besides that, the English teacher was glaring at him. He had a feeling if he tried to take another step, he'd be verbally assaulted. He stooped down and began scooping the papers haphazardly together.
"Y'know, I'm only doing this because I feel sorry for you, you dumb wench," he growled. The papers bent and tore under his rough grasp as he shoved them at the girl.
"And I'm only sparing your life because you're new here," she growled back.
Did no one else think it was weird for strange girls to know your life story?
"What do you know," he muttered, crumpling the last paper and tossing it over her head as he stood. "Mind your own goddamned business, lady."
"My name's not 'lady,' " she spat, standing as well. "It's Sango, and maybe you should readjust your attitude." She looked him up and down. "I could turn you inside out so fast you'd be having your balls surgically removed from your tonseils before you knew what hit you."
She was gone before he could make another retort.
He jammed his free hand in his pocket. Girls. Fucking crazy.
This was too weird.
There she was, walking to lunch, like any other day in her own time . . .
. . . with Miroku.
"Yeah, I've never seen you either," he said as they headed for Kagome's locker. "Then again, I was in the foreign exchange program last year. I went to France. Maybe we saw each other in junior high."
"I kind've doubt it," Kagome murmured, stopping at C 435. 29 - 18 - 32. Normal. Except for the boy next to her that was supposed to be a monk in the Sengoku Jidai.
"Oh, I don't know. Anything's possible."
"You're telling me."
"So how about you, why'd you sign up for philosophy?" he asked.
She slammed her locker shut. "Well . . . I guess I was looking for something interesting to take. Y'know, shake things up a bit."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. The classes here are so boring. My cousin goes to the school across town, and they have a mythology class. A class dedicated to ancient gods!" He shook his head. "Things are just too slow here."
Kagome closed her eyes. He didn't even know the half of it. A few weeks before, she had watched him con a rich man in a poor village that his house was haunted and he and his assistants needed to stay a few nights to rid it of the evil spirits.
"I thought I'd warn you, sir, you house has been," he dropped his voice and looked from side to side, "infested. With evil spirits. They'll surely take over your wife and children! Kill you in your sleep! However, I can help you. I'll exorcise your home for you!"
"Oh, thank you kind sir! You're welcome to stay here as long as you like! Just please, rid us of these creatures!"
They were so gullible that they usually not only let the lot of them stay in their homes, they paid Miroku handsomely. It was almost sick to watch, except that they needed shelter to stay alive. Especially when Inuyasha was . . .
Inuyasha. Miroku. Were Sango and Shippo here too? Should she be on the lookout?
That was silly. Miroku was proving that they were quite capable of handling themselves. They thought they were high school students. They thought they were from her time.
And they are. There's no mistake about it. They know what cars and toasters and washer-dryer combos are. They're not lost like the real Miroku would be. They're acting like they've lived here all along, Kagome reminded herself.
What a joke. Somehow, she had a feeling she would have at least noticed Miroku before, and Inuyasha would no doubt be surfacing again soon.
"Hey, Miroku, I know we just met and all . . ." Kagome began tentatively, ". . . but do you mind if I ask a rather . . . personal . . . Question?"
Miroku grinned. "Ask away!"
"Have you lived here your whole life?"
Miroku looked slightly crestfallen. Sorry, pervert, she thought. She almost giggled, but she held back. "Yes," he answered just brightly, however. "My whole life."
"And do you know a girl named Sango?" Kagome continued. This was stupid. Why was she asking him questions like this. They made no sense.
To her surprise, he smiled dreamily. "Of course!" he exclaimed, practically swooning against the lockers. "Why, I've known Sango almost a whole semester now!" He turned his head to offer Kagome a serious look. "Of course, she's a bit . . . high-strung . . . . But no matter! Someday I'll win her heart! The beautiful Sango!" He sighed.
There was definitely something very strange going on in the fact that there was nothing strange going on at all.
