Kagome was near tears by the time she managed to get her apology out – never had she left all of her manners behind in such a way; although she had definitely lost her temper during school before. She cussed plenty, and only when she used her language incredibly creatively did she become embarrassed with her lack of composure to he point of flushing. It had just never happened near her family or pack (that she was aware of – Sesshōmaru had happened to witness her outbursts on more than one occasion when picking her up from shrines), and she was so utterly ashamed – but simultaneously she did not regret a single word because she refused to let anyone aside from Toga claim her or dominate her in any way whatsoever! "P-please forgive this Kagome for completely abandoning her manners and using such foul language, Toga-sama…"
Not for the first time, Toga pulled her into his lap and rested his chin atop her head, growling comfortingly to her, "Drop the suffix, Kagome. There is no need to apologise, little one. That boy had no right to claim you and order you to obey him, koishi, and while your reaction might have been overboard – how many people have I ever asked you to submit yourself to, little one?"
She sniffled softly, burying her face in his kimono – beyond glad that he could touch and hold her, even though he was still semi-transparent and only half solid, and even though she was the only one to benefit from such touch (cut that thought out, it hurts to know that). "N-nobody but yourself, Toga… B-but still, you taught this Kagome better than to use crude language like that, and better to lash out like that, too! And she has to admit that it has happened before now, just never around pack or family…"
"As to your second comment, it really doesn't matter so long as you have the ability to keep your composure when necessary, and in the past you have many times proven you do. As to your protest of your behaviour, this Toga taught you better than that, but that only matters for when you are confronted with any situation that is even somewhat reasonable. Since when is a thirteen year old boy ordering you to marry him, telling you you have no choice in the matter, and telling you to "deal with it" because he always gets what he wants, a reasonable situation?"
Her voice was tentative when she answered, despite knowing the answer damn well. "W-well… never?"
"Especially when he didn't even think to ask if you were already betrothed or promised to someone else, or if your family actually needed his family's money enough to simply follow his whims?"
"Oh, it isn't just that; he was threatening to take our home from us. His father does that to people who cross him."
Toga wrinkled his nose; that was beyond despicable. He would have Sesshōmaru take care of that little situation, whilst he took care of the foolish boy via a well-worded letter. "Kagome, I promise you; I am not angry, I am proud of you for standing up for yourself so strongly, even with the language you used – and I must admit, your final little declaration pleased me immensely, considering that on your next birthday I was going to ask you if the tentative betrothal that had been arranged between us was something you would be willing to go through with."
Cerulean eyes widened and the young miko gasped, pulling back to searchingly stare into her alpha's face, looking for any sign of deception. Scent was strongly accurate, but anybody developed enough could find ways to cheat that fact – not to mention that as he had no physical form, Toga had no scent.
All she found was immense, intense, unfathomably deep love, and she immediately clung to him, sobbing happily. "Y-you really w-want me!"
He murmured nonsense into her ears until the tears stopped – aided by comforting, love-filled growls, his clawed fingers stroking through her hair. "You are my soul mate, koishi – my perfect match, just as I am yours. The entire story is convoluted, and you will learn it when you are older, but I came into your life for the sole purpose of making you my mate once you were old enough – assuming, of course, you were willing, for I will only have you if you want me. And not until after I have a physical body again – and you are grown a bit more. You are definitely mature beyond your years, especially because I am not using your ningen years, I am judging your readiness by how old you are mentally as a yōkai, but you still have some growing to do, both physically and mentally – growth that I am immensely looking forward to."
Kagome smiled happily at the person she loved more than anything, and nodded to him, "I want to wait too, for the same reasons. I love you, but I know that at least a small part of it is still just a child's love for her alpha – I want to be able to love you completely and wholly as a woman when you mate me. I know that when you were raised I would be a woman already, but I don't feel like one yet – I think I'll be more than ready by the time I meet you through the well, though."
He licked and kissed the tears away from her cheeks and nodded, "Even when I was raised, I thought anything younger than fourteen was a bit young for marriage. If you weren't so emotionally and mentally mature I would insist on waiting until you were sixteen or seventeen, nearer to the end of your puberty; but I honestly don't believe either of us could wait that long. Besides, like I said – I'm not going by your ningen age; I'm going by your yōkai maturity, and if you were a yōkai you would already be almost out of your teens."
She giggled at that and stuck her tongue out at him playfully, "That is entirely your fault, and you know it; damn well, too. You're the one who raised me, after all. And – hey, didn't Sesshōmaru-kun raise Rin-chan, too? Is this some weird yōkai fetish, marrying your daughters?"
Kagome was fully and definitely joking, but Toga still choked, before laughing helplessly. "Rin was the first and only person to ever love Sesshōmaru unconditionally for who he was and disregarding his power and position and wealth. As for me… I knew you, as a teenager and into adulthood, almost five centuries before you were born. I fell in love with you first then – twice, in fact. The Kami wanted your fate to change and I happened to be the one who could change it; and believe you me, I resisted at first – I loved you as I grew to know you, I didn't want to change what I loved about you… But the Kami informed me, and correctly, that helping raise you would only magnify the things I loved about you, and give you even more things for me to love. It is weird, though – one minute thinking of you as not-blood-pack and then suddenly you're all grown up and that innocent love is romantic instead."
Kagome hummed and nodded, then stood up, grabbing Toga's hand, "Let's go find the others so that I can properly threaten Ryuu Ken'ichi this time, because I know Sesshōmaru-kun enough to know that he wouldn't dare take that joy away from me."
The group hadn't gone too far, and they were all completely silent – every head turning towards Toga and Kagome as they entered the clearing, chattering happily about commonplaces. Ryuu Ken'ichi was a spoilt brat, who always got what he wanted – and he was, very falsely, assuming that it would happen again this time – so Kagome would be a Lady now, and show him how wrong he was, without once raising her voice or cussing.
Which meant that when he walked up to her and made to grab her, she slapped him, only pulling in her strength that had, by now, been permanently enhanced to daiyōkai standards, by about half.
It looked like she had barely touched him, but her hand-print was red as day, and darkening to an ugly purple. "You, Ryuu Ken'ichi, are a spoilt little boy, who always gets what he wants from his daddy, and so assumes that this trend will continue. Let me inform you of some things, Ryuu. First off, you are no longer allowed to call me Kagome – every time you do, I will slap you, and believe me, what I just gave you was nothing compared to what I can do. I was holding back. Along with that, as you can clearly tell, no longer will I be calling you by your first name, or with any suffixes. You have clearly proven undeserving of anything else to me this day, what with your presumptuous and demanding attitude, as well as your complete disrespect of my person.
"Secondly, that man over there, to whom I served tea less than an hour ago? You don't seem to be able to recognise his face, but maybe you will recognise his name – he is my very dear friend Taishō Sesshōmaru. Not only is he a personal friend, but he owns the land on which I have lived for the majority of my life, meaning you can not threaten my family into selling me to you as if I were some object by stealing our shrine from us. As well, I have been betrothed since I was three to Taishō Toga, my best friend, alpha, and soul-mate. I am very much looking forwards to reading the letter he is going to be writing your father about your conduct towards me today.
"I do not expect you will be in this class for much longer, so enjoy it while you can, and, if you know what is best for you, do stay away from me. I wouldn't want you to antagonise me into hurting you again, after all – and I am more than certain that everyone here will agree that you absolutely deserved that slap, for attempting to manhandle me, despite having told you that I already belonged to someone else. You know what, actually, for attempting to grab hold of me, full stop – people are not objects to be possessed, something which you sorely need to learn."
As soon as he heard Sesshōmaru's full name, the boy who had attempted to assault her person – and who had so rudely laid a claim on her without her permission – blanched, turning so pale that it looked as if he had blood loss. As Kagome continued to speak, her voice even, level, and deathly soft, as well as impeccably polite, formal, and well-mannered – an enormous difference from the tantrum she had thrown earlier – she showed her true breeding, and the boy began to turn red, until he resembled a rather ugly tomato; for all that he wasn't truly bad looking, normally. His personality, apparently, was rather horrid and lacking in any depth, though.
Despite that, even he could realise that Kagome was beyond out of his league, after her speech.
After he skulked off, nursing his cheek, one of the girls she was – kind of – friends with (okay, they were her friends, truly, but it was all shallow friendships as they had very little in common) asked her softly, "Why do you keep calling Toga-sama your alpha? Isn't that an ōkami thing?"
Kagome smiled at her and sat on the ground, her legs crossed and leaning against her betrothed's calf. No need to mention it was also an inu "thing", but she could tell the outwards reasons why. "Because Toga is the only person that I will ever submit to unquestioningly. Not even my family has ever had the sort of power over me that he has, and they all know it. He never asks anything of me that is either not for my personal gain or benefit, or for my protection. He knows that he can order me around and I will obey him without fail, but he never does so, unless it is a truly serious or life-threatening situation. Our situation is a little bit weird, because as his betrothed, I had to know specific sorts of things.
"Toga has, and has always had, full control of every aspect of my education outside of school – it's wonderful having a fiancée who not only allows, but actively encourages, me to fight and defend myself; simultaneously along with teaching me the soft things, like the beauty of a flute, or the relaxation of a tea ceremony. Despite controlling my education, though, Toga encouraged me to be myself and develop into who I was meant to be – he doesn't want some perfect little court bloom who will say pretty things and never mean a word she says; air-headed and empty of true, honest love. I have loved Toga for my entire life, even though it is only in the last year that that love changed into something romantic – we are both looking forward to watching it grow even more before we wed."
They wouldn't really be wedding, they would be mating, but nobody here needed to know that.
Nor did anybody in her class need to know that Toga, instead of being in his mid-twenties like he looked, was over two millennia old – Kagome wasn't sure exactly how old he was, and was not going to ask. Seriously, Sesshōmaru-kun, his own son, looked older than he did! At least right now, anyway; Toga told her that when she first met him in the past he looked – and acted – only a few years older than her, although that rapidly changed, and since she was mentally way more than a few years older than she was physically… Well, she suspected she'd end up mothering the stoic yōkai, much to the amusement and/or annoyance of everyone present at the time.
That… Was going to be so fun – especially once they reached the year that she stopped coming through the well in this universe and Sesshōmaru-kun gained his memories back.
Being surrogate mother, student, and surrogate niece/good friend all at once was bound to be hilarious. Hopefully, by then, though, the "good friend" would be what was in place, with a strong hint of mothering but not constantly present mothering. That was what Kagome wanted for her beloved Sesshōmaru-kun, who taught her and bought her things, and was so kind to her. He was family – and he was pack.
Oh, and now Kagome knew why Sesshōmaru-kun had not had any problem being a less favourite pack member than Kagome was, all those years ago when she had questioned her mother's comment. That was probably a Very Good Thing.
Plus, Toga had told her so many stories of what the Sengoku Jidai was like. Lush green pastures. yōkai everywhere in all their full glory with no hiding, war, famine, disease, shiros that were completely magnificent. Being a Lord meaning that you only spent a small time at your shiro – if you were a good Lord, you patrolled your lands, looking for trouble, killing and/or fixing it, living totally in the wilds except for when you wanted to pamper yourself and stayed in a village, using onsen, waterfalls, streams, lakes, and cold springs for bathing constantly.
Kagome didn't mind showers, or baths, truly she didn't...
But they had an onsen in a cave in the mountain, and Kagome had to admit that she would rather live in the cave than she did her house – and use that onsen constantly… Especially when Toga had gotten Sesshōmaru-kun to buy her yōkai-made soaps and shampoos that left no residue in the water – they were infused with yōki and special magic that made them completely diffuse so that the water wasn't ruined like modern-day soaps and shampoos did. And that he knew how to make onsen.
Kagome really couldn't wait until she hit fifteen. Especially because it meant she would finally be living where she belonged. Kagome had completely literally been raised as if she were living in the Sengoku Jidai – home-schooled in shrines, living on a shrine, right next to a massive forest that she regularly stayed out in, explored, and slept in, being taught traditional self-defence, and almost never going to the city – as well as almost never wearing modern clothes, either. Her nights were spent in the place where Toga used to rule, his magnificent old shiro, and he taught her about politics, how to be a good ruler, how to address people, different ceremonies, how to welcome guests, and so many other Important Things that it was rather dizzying – or rather it should have been but since Kagome was raised learning these things it just felt natural.
She would come visit, because otherwise she would miss her mama, grandpa, and little brother… but the day she turned fifteen she was going home for the first time in her life.
Translation:
Koishi – beloved
Ōkami – wolf/wolves
Shiro – castle
Onsen – hot springs