Seventeenth Chapter: The Ropes of Mistrust

A/N: here we go!

Disclaimer: Like I said before, anything I own is either dead or irrelevant now. Inuyasha does not belong to me and neither do any of the other "Inuyasha" characters. Life sux. :'(

The Ropes of Mistrust

Kagome could feel the way her chest pounded. Her heart was so loud that she could hear it in her ears. Maybe he could hear it too… maybe that was why he had stopped. She was trying so hard to breathe softly, hoping desperately that the shell of the tree trunk she was hiding in would muffle the noise. But he was a hanyou. There was no telling exactly how good his sense of smell really was. Then, suddenly, he dropped to the ground, examining the earth beneath him closely. Great… he was tracking her.

She watched through the brush that was hiding her with wide brown eyes as he started to move across the forest floor, headed in the same direction she had gone to get the brush. He was deadly focused; completely locked into his work. So much so that she wondered if he would even notice if she sprang up from the rotten wood of the tree and ran right then… knowing her luck the answer would be, "duh".

When the hanyou reached the pile of pine brush he stopped, his head coming up from the ground. She waited fearfully inside the rotting trunk; the silence was enough to make her want to scream. She could feel every muscle in her body shaking with a dull ache, her ankle throbbing painfully, head still pounding, lungs now burning… and not to mention her location wasn't really the most ideal place for comfort either. It wreaked inside the rotting tree. Slick, wet mold that grew thickly along the inside of the wood brushed up against her face, and the wood itself wet and slimy, making it disgusting to touch. Who knew what was living in there wither right now… She shuddered. The damp wood was steadily seeping through her dress and soaking into her skin, making it itch uncomfortably. But she couldn't move. Not while he was still there. She wished he would just leave. She wished he would just leave her alone…

There was a faint rustle as he stood. All she could see of her pursuer were his bare feet on the ground, the hem of his red outfit barely visible through the pine branch, the red fabric clinging to his ankles. She practically choked as he took a step towards her. Oh god, it was all over. He knew where she was. He was going to find her, and he was going to kill her. She knew it. He was …

"Feh."

Kagome jumped at the sudden sound. Soon after, the feet left, leaving the ground in an effortless leap and then disappearing. Kagome watched, numb with disbelief. She stared in shock for a while, her shaking form still clenched tightly inside the tree… and then finally, the relief washed over her. Her entire body eased as her heart started to slow inside her chest. After a while she let out a long, slow breath. Waiting until she was sure he was gone. And then finally she kicked away the pine branch and crawled out into the light.

It was so good to be in the open again, to be out of the damp, smell tree and in the fresh air. Shakily, Kagome pulled herself to a stand, using the help of a nearby tree for support. Inuyasha was gone… and she was finally safe. Now she just had to make her way back to the castle… wherever that was. But to make it back to the castle… she would have to walk. Kagome sighed, looking down at her swelling, purple ankle. It didn't look any better than it had before. In fact, it looked considerably worse.

Gingerly she tried to put some weight on it, wincing as a sharp pain shot up her entire leg, sending a dizzying slam to her head. "Ah!" Quickly she took the weight off, feeling the dull pull of pain as it started to retreat back down her ankle and fade. "Great… now what am I supposed to do?" She asked herself softly. If only she knew where Naraku was. Then maybe she would have a chance of getting back to where she belonged. Then maybe she might have a chance to be okay again.

And then something hit her. Right on the nose, and it stung. Kagome blinked, her hand instinctively coming up to touch her nose delicately with her fingers before she looked down at the forest floor at the small green acorn that had somehow managed to hit her square in the face. And on her nose no less. She picked it up, examining it carefully. It was green. Bright, aching green. Kagome frowned and quirked an eyebrow at it. Acorns didn't fall when they were green… they fell when they were brown. So this one shouldn't have fallen. Unless someone had…

"Hey."

Kagome felt the dread slowly sink into her stomach. 'Oh no…' Slowly she lifted her head and looked up at the branch directly above her, already knowing what it was that she was going to see… or rather, who it was. 'No…'

There he was, glaring silently down at her form about eight feet in the air. She could tell from the look in his hard golden eyes that he wasn't very happy with her running away from him. No indeed. He sat casually in the very same tree she was leaning on, with one leg dangling over the branch on which he was perched and the other bent up so that his right elbow could rest on it comfortably; obviously he had been there since the begging, watching her.

"You've got to be kidding me." She said weakly, unable to believe her bad luck. What was it with this guy? Didn't he ever give up? "How long have you been sitting there?" She asked, knowing that she should have been running. But it wasn't as if she could get that far anyway now that he had in fact caught up with her. She had, after all, a twisted ankle.

"Whole time." He replied dryly.

She sighed, resting the side of her face against the trunk resignedly, closing her eyes momentarily before opening them again. "Well," she said slowly, "I'm still not giving up, you know."

He dropped down beside her with a "Feh.", his feet softly hitting the damp soil beneath him. Kagome was only slightly fazed by his graceful landing from the impossible height. "I know." He said.

"I'll try again later." She said tiredly, more as if she were thinking to herself than talk to the man beside her.

"Kay." He said simply.

"Kay?" She echoed, raising her eyebrows at him.

He shrugged. "It doesn't matter what you do; when you run away, I'll be coming after you." He said seriously. "I'll always be coming after you."

If Kagome had had her memories then, she would have smiled. She maybe even would have blushed, maybe kissed him and told him "thank you, Inuyasha". But she didn't have her memories. So she didn't thank him. Instead, she just gave him a twisted look, taking what he was saying in the exact opposite way it had been intended, looking at him with obvious disgust. "You're such a sicko." She said plainly.

He smirked, kneeling down on the ground and tilting his head a certain way so that his hair spilled like liquid moonlight off his back. "Get on." He said casually, looking over his shoulder at her as if they did this everyday.

Kagome stared back at him incredulously. "Are you kidding?"

He gave her a funny look. "No."

"I'm not getting on."

"Why not?" He asked, getting annoyed.

"Because I don't trust you!" She said angrily, what was wrong with this guy? He was acting as if they weren't enemies at all.

"Yeah," He said quietly, something about his voice was bitter as he turned his head away. "I noticed…"

Kagome eyed him carefully, seeing that he still wasn't moving. "I'm not letting you carry me." She said matter-of-factly.

"How else do you plan on getting back to the village?" Inuyasha asked. "You twisted your ankle."

"Gee, thanks… I hadn't noticed that." She replied tartly, sarcasm dripping from her voice. "But I'm not going back." She replied, her tone turning icy. "I'm going home."

Inuyasha then stood, turning to her, his expression serious and slightly irritated, although underneath the surface, she suspected he was raging. "Look," he said promptly, as if to leave to room for her argument. "We've obviously got a lot to talk about. But first we've got to get a few things straight."

She blinked, taken aback by his sudden change of mood.

"For one, I didn't kidnap you." He said forcefully. "And I didn't poison you, and I'm going to try to murder you."

Kagome scoffed.

"I'm not." He said again, his voice maintaining that serious tone. "And you have to trust me if this is going to work out."

"I'll trust you if you let me go back to Naraku." She said.

"I can't let you go back to him." He said firmly, the anger in his eyes starting to pace near the surface.

"Then I can't let myself trust you." She said coldly.

That was it. Apparently she had just pushed him over the edge. "Would you stop saying that!" he shouted angrily, his temper flaring up without warning. "I know!" he shouted. "I know you don't trust me and I'm trying to deal with it! I am!" He said, slamming his fist into the trunk of the tree he had been sitting in earlier and splintering it with a loud crack to Kagome's surprise. "But it would be so much easier on the both of us if you just stopped being so fucking difficult!"

Kagome stared, opening her mouth to say something but then closing it again, flustered and frightened beneath the glare of his flashing eyes.

"I know you don't want to believe me." Inuyasha said, his eyes still angry though his tight voice was starting to lower and come back into his control. "But Naraku is lying to you. I know he is. You're name's not Sayuri, and his castle's not your home, and he isn't your master. You're name's Kagome. And Naraku's the one who's trying to kidnap, poison and murder you. You're home isn't with him. You're from inside a well, which is a portal to your era in the future. And there's the tree and the shards that make you go back and forth… magically." He said, looking rather hopefully at her. "There. Does that help you any?"

She stared blankly at him, completely silent.

"Well?"

"It just…" She gathered her words and gave him a funny look. "It just convinces me even more than before that you're absolutely insane."

For a moment she thought he was going to slam his fist into the tree again. She thought was going to lose it, and genuinely, he almost had. "Look, I know it sounds crazy." He said, closing his eyes tightly. "But it's the truth. Naraku's trying to hurt us both this way and… and I'm going to protect you from it. I won't let him ever touch you again… I swear."

Something inside of her flinched… or rather, something clicked. Something familiar. Deep in the depths of her concealed mind, something began to flutter against the surface, barely brushing against her consciousness… almost in her comprehension…. She tugged at it gently, afraid that if she tried to hard she'd lose it. And then it gradually came back into her mind.

A memory.

"Stop crying!"

"Oh and what should I do? Laugh?"

"No! You should shut up and let me protect you!"

Kagome struggled as the voices in her mind started to fade. The image that had accompanied them had been blurry, barely comprehensive at all… but the voices were clear. Desperately she tried to hold onto them, to try and make them stay and anchor them to her brain. But the more she tried the more they seemed to slip from her grasp, back through the crack in the stone wall where they had come from, somewhere in her past. But they had felt real. She knew it was familiar to her… somewhere in her core, and she was desperately trying to bring them back again. But they were gone.

"Kagome?"

She snapped out her trance, a dizzy sick feeling washing over her. It was the same feeling that came every time she tried to dig up a piece of her past. But this time it was overwhelming. When she managed to look up through the sickness, she was a little startled to see Inuyasha watching her carefully. If she didn't know any better she would have thought that he was… worried.

She stared at him, a little unnerved and more than a bit surprised. It had definitely been his voice in her memory, hadn't it? "What?" She asked him faintly; unable to remember why she had looked up at him in the first place. Her breathing was shallow now… and it was getting shallower.

He frowned, looking at her intently. "What's wrong? You look like you're about to collapse."

She took a shaky breath, exhaustion passing over her. "That's probably… because I am." She said softly, feeling herself begin to tilt backwards… "Inuyasha." She called out weakly just before she lost herself to the black out.

She never felt the way his strong, ready hands reached out to catch her, never letting her even come closet to hitting the ground. She didn't see the way he looked at her, sadly, neither did she ever feel the way he held her close to him and allowed himself to just stand there and take in the gentle scent of her soft hair against his face… just this once…or hear the way he said her name… softly, sadly.

"Kagome." He still missed her. He missed her so much it hurt him inside. And he would go on missing her, until he got her back again.

Later the next day, when the last few fleeting shards of daylight had finally been blocked out by the thick clouds of a velvet night sky, the three of the were all piled in Kaede's hut, watching over Miroku as he slept.

Sango sat still beside him, her beautiful dark brown hair falling elegantly into her deep brown eyes, which were fixed worriedly on Miroku's ashen, white face. Her hands rested readily in her lap, prepared to reach for the medicines at any sign of discomfort on the sleeping man's face. Her own pretty face was weary and tired-looking from watching over him for the entire past day and a half. But she wasn't going to move. Not until she was sure he was going to be ok.

Behind the anxious slayer, Inuyasha paced lightly back and forth, his ears flicking every so often in an irritated manner. He was also worried about Miroku, though he would rather have his stomach torn out and shredded by Sesshomaru before ever admitting that to Miroku. But still… it had been three days of waiting, and he was still unconscious. And now he had begun to wonder, silently, if maybe Miroku wouldn't ever wake up at all.

And as for Kagome? Every once and a while he allowed his eyes to betray him and slide a sideways glance at her figure in the corner. He watched her carefully from the corner of his eye, waiting for something to happen. And he had good reason for it too. It had been only yesterday morning when she had made her first attempt at running away from them before she passed out in the woods. And since then she had made seven more attempts. Three times out of which she had made it completely into the forest before they caught her, and one time in which she had taken a rather heavy iron pot to the back of his head in a fruitless effort to try and buy herself some time. As it was he still had a huge bruise, thought it was healing… slowly. She had also bitten him once, kicked him in the shins twice, and had tried to savagely twist his ears off his head several times as well. All and all she had become very annoying to deal with, even for him. And that was the reason for which Kagome now sat in the corner of the room, bound and gagged rather effectively with thick, yellow ropes.

Originally they had thought that only two ropes would be needed in order to properly restrain her, using one for binding her ankles and another for her wrists. But soon after they saw her furiously hopping away from the village they found that perhaps they needed three, in order that they also might bind her knees together as well. And then three turned into four, when they found they required yet another rope to secure her arms firmly down to her sides, so she couldn't use her tied fists as a sort of club with which to knock them over the head with. And finally four turned to five, with a final rope going around her mouth, after she had effectively untied the knot around her arms with her teeth and resorted again to the clubbing technique.

And now she sat, in all her tied up glory, glaring sharp pointy daggers at Inuyasha. Her dark brown eyes were smoldering with anger. Obviously she was not very happy with him. Not very happy at all.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" Inuyasha finally asked, trying to hide how uncomfortable the look she was giving him made him feel.

She gave some sort of muffled reply through the rope, which after a few attempts he was able to translate into "because you tied me up, you idiot."

"Well I wouldn't have had to tie you up if you didn't keep on trying to get away, damn it!" he defended himself rather testily. Sango meanwhile, did her best to try and ignore the two. She for one, couldn't understand a single word that Kagome was saying. It seemed that only Inuyasha, who had undertaken hours on end of screaming sessions with the gagged girl, could seem to understand what she was saying with a mouthful of rope.

'Unbelievable.' The slayer thought quietly to herself. 'She's gagged and has no memory of him whatsoever… and they've still found a way to argue with each other.'

As it was, Sango had had to endure the first few hours of shouting sessions with Inuyasha, in which there was a constant stream of muffled screaming from Kagome and several frustrated cries of "WHAT!" "WHAT!" From Inuyasha, as if somehow screaming at her would help him better understand what she was trying to say to him.

Now as Kagome continued to glare at him, she gave him another response, which he had a much harder time with, but after a while figured it out to be "you can't really blame me for trying to get away! You kidnapped me!"

"Damn it! I DIDN'T KIDNAP YOU!" He roared, starting at her from across the room.

Instinctively the bound girl shrunk away from him into the corner, a look of absolute fear flashing across her eyes that made the hanyou stop in his tracks. She watched him as his body slowly relaxed, his eyes softening slightly, but still keeping a small look of tired frustration. "I'm not going to hurt you." He said more quietly than he before (thank the Gods). "So don't look at me like that… it irks me."

Kagome blinked and studied him, clearly confused.

Inuyasha opened his mouth to continue when something distracted him. A groan. A rather soft groan but a groan nonetheless. Jerkily, Inuyasha turned around, watching as Sango leaned forwards and helped a groggy Miroku attempt to resume a sitting position. So the monk was finally awake.

"Miroku," Sango said worriedly as the semi-conscious form began to stir. She placed a gentle hand over his and slowly his violet eyes flitted open. He groaned as she pulled him up into a sitting position, rubbing his head wearily with his left hand.

"Damn those insects…" he muttered quietly to himself, his eyes still closed. "How long was I out for?"

"Three days." Sango answered gravely, her deep brown eyes still full of worry for him. "Maybe you should lie back down, Miroku. Maybe you're not strong enough to-"

"I'm fine, Sango." Miroku said, lifting his eyes to look lovingly at her and smile in encouragement. "I'm totally and completely…" He drifted, the smile falling from his face as his eyes connected with something behind Sango. He then stared blankly, his face expressionless, but nevertheless his gaze lingered for a long amount of time on whatever it was that had caught his attention. "Then again…" he said slowly as he turned back to Sango, his voice weary and slightly annoyed. "Do you have anymore anti-toxins?" he sighed heavily. "It appears I'm having delusions."

Sango frowned. "Delusions?" She asked, that had never happened to him before.

Miroku glanced over her shoulder and stared blankly some more before returning his gaze to the worried slayer with a sigh. "Yes. We shall need a plentiful supply of anti-toxins… strong anti-toxins." He added with one last glance over her shoulder. He shook his head and looked again, this time apparently annoyed that that delusion refused to go away. Finally Sango turned around to look over her shoulder where the monk had been looking, while Miroku lay his head back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.

"Oh." Sango said softly, suddenly understanding. "You think you see Kagome, don't you?"

Miroku opened his eyes momentarily to regard Sango with a look of mild curiosity. "How did you know?" He asked, slightly bewildered.

"Because you are seeing Kagome, you half-wit!" Inuyasha snapped impatiently, interrupting what had been until now, a relatively low-toned conversation. He had been waiting for Miroku to return to consciousness for a full three days now, and he had been growing a bit worried about him. Now his irritation showed. "For someone as wise and all-knowing as you claim yourself to be you'd think you'd be able to tell the difference between a delusion and the real thing!"

But Miroku hadn't heard him. The somewhat woozy monk was now sitting bolt upright, wide awake and rigid. His and clenched Sango's tightly as his gaze now locked on Kagome. Had his face not already been impossibly pale, it no doubt would have grown whiter. For the first time in a long time the monk was actually left speechless. "There… this… this must be some sort of dream." He said suddenly.

"She's not a dream and she' s not a friggin delusion already!" Inuyasha roared, impatient with the poor, stunned Miroku. "It's Kagome. The real, living, breathing Kagome!"

All Miroku could do was stare. Finally his gaze returned very slowly to Inuyasha. "And… she would be bound and gagged for what reasons again?"

"Miguh moldew mry ranengh rigg nout mamougmay! Mry ranengh migs raymursee!" Kagome struggled wildly, trying somehow to inch her way forwards, though she was in a position to almost make that physically impossible. "mangh mrie gohld rewuh goo mreght mrie grmow!" (A/N: Roughly translated as: "I told you my name is not Kagome! My name is Sayuri! And I told you to let me go!") At this Miroku raised an eyebrow and turned back to Inuyasha.

The hanyou regarded the girl with slight annoyance, though Miroku could have sworn he saw traces of a little bit of bitter sadness hidden deep inside the expression. "She doesn't remember anything." Inuyasha said roughly, though sounding slightly tired at the same time. "Naraku somehow erased everything. Apparently he never… killed her. But he's got her convinced that she's this girl named Sayuri. And…" Inuyasha faltered, his hands quickly turning to tightly clenched fists. "And that now she's on his side of the battle now." He gritted out angrily, his knuckles turning white.

Sango took that as her Q to take over the explanation, realizing that Inuyasha would probably start smashing the little furniture that was inside the small hut if he was forced to continue. "We saved her from the miasma when Naraku moved his castle, but we still can't convince her that she's really Kagome." Sango said tiredly.

"Never mind that! We can hardly keep her here without having her kill herself!" Inuyasha said suddenly, intense anger simmering just beneath his barely contained voice. "She's so damned confused that she doesn't who we are. All she wants to do is go back to Naraku. And what's more, she refuses to believe anything I say to her!"

Miroku stared for a long time at his distressed and frustrated friend, his expression completely blank for the longest amount of time before slowly turning into a frown. "I just can't leave you alone for a minute can I?" He asked, disapprovingly, as if somehow it was Inuyasha's own fault that things had turned into such a mess.

Inuyasha blinked, then frowned at the realized criticism. "Hey!" He shouted angrily, turning to face the monk.

But then (and with suspiciously convenient timing) Miroku abruptly passed out on the mat again, the toxins overwhelming him once more.

A/N: I know, I know, typos galore, but my spell checks currently busted. Till then, I guess I'm on my own. :P and by the way I've hit a rut. Yes I know the last two chapters were funky. Sorry. I'll get it right next time. Promise

xox

nanirain