A/N: Soooo sorry about the delay! Things got all discombobulated, and this is why it is being posted on Friday, instead of the Mondays I promised... Thank you all for the alerts! It is a refresher to know that people are reading this, and with an abundance, is more meaningful than a review at times! Ily all!

Anyways, keeping Kelly Clarkson in mind (who is, hands-down, my favourite female singer), onwards to chapter four!

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Human Like Me

Mr. Know-It-All

Light filtered through the kitchen window, illuminating a statuesque form that stood vigil for the Higurashi household. His face was drawn in fatigue and his shoulders were hunched over, but he fought off the dizziness that overwhelmed him whenever he so much as stood and worked out his stiffening muscles. It was no later than two hours after sunrise, and already the house was beginning to stir with activity.

He acknowledged briefly Kagome's younger brother when he entered the kitchen area and began to prepare himself breakfast, and acknowledged even briefer Kagome's grandfather. The old coot eyed the taiyoukai in warning before rummaging around and fixing himself a bowl of cereal. When Mrs. Higurashi entered the kitchen and began to prepare meals for her children's lunches, all that was missing was Kagome.

Curiously, Sesshoumaru deigned to check upon her. She didn't strike him at first to be the time to sleep past midday, but he didn't know anything about this woman, let alone what her sleeping habits were.

He drew himself up to her bedroom on padded feet and peered cautiously inside, noticing that she was curled up in a tight little ball on her bed and was softly snoring. Little did he know it was the same action Inuyasha had taken when he found Kagome in a similar position on a school day, who had mumbled 'sit' even in her sleep, so when he crossed the short distance from the door to the bedroom Kagome could almost imagine that it was Inuyasha that was checking up on her.

Of course the fantasy image faded when she smelled Sesshoumaru. "What?" she grumbled, sinking deeper into her nest.

"You must rise." He ordered, hovering over her. She thought it was to intimidate her, but she was too tired to be frightened. A yawn split her pretty lips open fleetingly, which caught his eye unintentionally.

"I don't wanna go to school," she moaned, hand waving in a 'go-away' gesture, promptly ignoring the way he was about to snatch the covers from her face.

"You are privileged to have an education?" He arched a brow at this.

"Well, yeah," she replied tersely.

"But you are not from a noble family, how could you possibly go to school?" This idea entirely perplexed him; he only knew of noble women and scholars that were privileged to have an education, not lowly mikos, or, in her case, annoying little reincarnated mikos who pranced about thieving taiyoukai powers. He bristled when Kagome merely batted her hand at him, as if he were nothing but a flea.

Kagome huffed impatiently. Men could be so clueless. "In my era, everyone is entitled to an education. Even the women."

Sesshoumaru ruminated this for a bit, but found it utterly impractical. "I do not believe you," he said. He felt like articulating his thoughts further upon the subject, but the miko would not allow him to insert his opinion.

"Oh no?" Kagome slung herself out of the bed—he practically ripped away his gaze when a portion of her chest became immodest as she wrestled out of the sheets—and went to her desk, pulling out textbook after textbook of math, astrology, human sciences, and geography. She gestured for him to take a look, emotions in a tizzy. "This is what I'm learning right now."

Sesshoumaru approached the texts with an eye of interest. He thumbed the pages of the geography book, staring intently on the map of Japan. It brought about a memory so old that he could imagine blowing the detritus from it, one of when his father's current scholar began to tutour the lordling of his father's vast, expansive land and the kingdoms that ruled beneath him. After another cursory glance he deemed that these maps were, indeed, not the ones he had been taught.

"This is incorrect," he stated, pointing to parts of the continent that had been pulled together to form cities, land marks that weren't supposed to be, villages created that did not exist.

"Not anymore. Five hundred years changes a lot of things, you know." The bitter smell of distaste graced her sensitive nose.

Sesshoumaru merely glowered at her. "What of five hundred years? It is but a small amount of time in a youkai's life."

"Maybe," she opined, "but right now we are five hundred years into the present. This is where I was born, and this is where we are now."

His incredulous face was apparent for a second before he disregarded her statement entirely.

"It's true!" In a flash, Kagome gestured to pictures, showed him the items in his room, her expression set into a grim line. "Have you ever seen any of this in your life? What about the cars on the streets? The gun I was shot with? The houses people live in?"

"I merely observed that these people were living separately from us. My kingdom has many of these great houses and interior embellishments. As for the 'gun,' I believe it was simply an extension of that youkai's power."

Stupid youkai, and you're stupid, stupid know-it-all attitude! she seethed internally, aware that her anger was beginning to slowly manifest itself in the form of poisonous claws.

"But have you seen any youkai since coming here?"

This was enough to have shock register on his face; he quickly banished it and looked away from her. "I am a mortal now, as you have pointed out numerously." He said flatly. "I am just not in tune to the youkai as I once was. I am positive that they are here."

"There isn't any." Kagome tried to convince. "I've lived here my whole life, and I've never seen one here. Even after I became a miko, or a youkai, I sensed nothing. That's because in my time there are no youkai."

"I refuse the existence of youkai within Japan has been eviscerated within only five centuries." His burnished brown eyes tore away from hers as he folded his arms, disinclined to continue the matter further. A small, almost billowy puff of his scent secreted from him, and it left a bland taste in her mouth.

"Look," she began, smoothing a tuft of her hair meticulously as the words aligned themselves into her mouth. "I know it's a bit hard to swallow, but it is true, Sesshoumaru."

"Youkai are clearly more adept, versatile, and stronger than any ningen. It is a frivolous endeavor to believe that youkai have been permanently removed from this earth." Brown eyes slanted her way calculatingly. Kagome felt her chest cave in on itself. He just couldn't grasp this, could he?

Her hands created gestures in front of her as the basis of a theory pushed out from her thoughts to her lips. "It's like when you have a large colony of something that the bigger something gets pushed away—no, that's not right." The words tumbled out of her mouth in a messy string barely coherent. "What I mean is; when you have something small, and it's challenged by something large, the larger one normally wins. But when a bunch of small somethings band together, that one large something is outnumbered and backs off. Is this making any sense?"

The taiyoukai's lips were quirking spasmodically; it was a few seconds, but eventually Kagome was given the impression he was trying not to mock her fumbled analogy. Didn't she hold a point though, no matter how much it wrenched her bruised heart to know that she would never meet friends like the kitsune she had adopted, or the hanyou she had befriended and fallen for, or the taiyoukai she relied on... ?

She felt for him then, truly did. What was it like to know that one day your kind would soon be extinct, a legend, and a fact of fiction? She hoped she never had to find out. Supposing he lived for another five hundred years into the future, it would be a useful tidbit to remember when he entered a world so apart from his own. Kagome could only hope that by then he would come to believe in her.

Sympathy for the taiyoukai swept over and through her in a chilled, brutal wave. When she stepped closer to him, and she noticed the slight tension in his body that she probably would have missed if she was still human. "I'm sorry," she lamented, "but it's true. I have no basis for lying, and you know it."

Sesshoumaru left from the room, pivoting smartly on his heel and his hair slightly airborne by his graceful retreat. The urge to chase after him blossomed behind her breast, but knew it wouldn't do well to push him. He wasn't his brother, who could be soothed with words and promises and optimism. This demon required cold hard facts, and even then it had to be tested by him to be worth his time. So she would allow him to come to terms on his own time. She certainly hoped it would be soon.

Kagome dressed and meticulously applied makeup to her face within her small bathroom, certain that the markings on her face would be hidden from her peers for another day. Her breathing slogged as the sharp sting of chemicals filtered through her nostrils as she raised the makeup sponge to her eyes, ridding them temporarily of the rosy colour that smoothed over her eyelids.

Well aware that Sesshoumaru was eying her intently while she prepared to go out into the world looking like a human, he scoffed when she began taking care of the markings on her wrist. "What?" she asked moodily.

"I find it derogatory that you think it embarrassing to bare the markings of a great lord," he clipped. Irritation radiated from him.

Kagome noted the way he relied on the wall to support him, but thought nothing of it in the end as she retorted, "Well, my friends don't think that demons exist, so I have to keep it that way." They'll keep thinking they're found in fairytales and horror-stories, Kagome thought, finding that the notion made her slightly pensive. What if they did find out, somehow?

A horrifying vision filled her thoughts; images of her alienated appearance appearing on full display within the gymnasium projector screen, burning crosses, nuns hitting her over the head with bibles and splashing holy water in fervour, all resulted in Kagome becoming extremely nauseated. Her face would be printed on billboards nation wide, alerting the public that she was a demon hell-bent on stalking their children at night to rip out their throats and taking the women's men to bed. A shudder started at the base of Kagome's spine and ended at the nape of her unusually warm neck.

She decided she'd never let them get that chance.

"Then your friends are fools." Sesshoumaru bared his blunt teeth out of instinct. "You are a youkai now yourself. Will they not take notice? I do not think my presence would pass unknown by any." As an afterthought, the taiyoukai plunged on, "The very thought that you would conceal my nobility sickens me. You should be honoured." The emphasis on 'honoured' ended in an indignant hiss.

"If I hide the evidence they won't notice at all," she assured. "And no one's been trained to look for your kind anymore, so they have no reason to suspect anything. Why won't my hair dye black, though? It'd make everything so much easier... " she murmured to herself more than anyone, plaiting a piece of her silvery hair between her fingers thoughtfully. My eyes are yellow and I have his powers, so why don't I still get the pretty hair? Morosely, her eyes locked on to the feathery light hair that belonged to the sardonic taiyoukai. She felt a twinge of jealousy.

"My attributes are not to be concealed in any way; the matter that you have managed to remove the markings from your profile is, indeed, surprising. But most of my traits are harder to remove."

"It's just make-up," she said primly, triple-checking the foundation. "It'll come off when I wash it away,"

"Hn." Sesshoumaru felt no need to articulate his loss of the word 'make-up.'

She ignored his presence and toyed with her silver tresses, frowning; there were little ones that found it hysterical to defy her wishes by not remaining in her tight knot. What to cover them with? Remembering that her mother owned a shawl, she quickly skittered to her mother's room and rummaged through her dresser, coming upon the expensive material with relief. She stepped into the bathroom, staring into the place where her mirror used to be. It took a measure of control not to look at the person responsible for this dilemma.

"Drats,"

Kagome went back into her room and found the little hand mirror on her shelf, bringing it with her to the bathroom. Sitting upon the plastic toilet cover, she angled it just so on the sink, unscrewed her hair from the ponytail, and began knotting it into a tight bun, wrapping the shawl around her hair in such a way and tucking the stray strands of silver hair from view. She had to secure it in place with several bobby pins, but she was quite pleased with the results. She heard Sesshoumaru enter her room and snort softly. "What?" she growled.

"It is nothing," he said.

She turned in her seat, giving him a baleful look. "Obviously there's something."

Sesshoumaru inclined his head slightly. "I find it pointless to be hiding my identity from others." He reiterated, almost casually.

"You're the one who doesn't have elf ears, old-lady hair, and strange tattoos anymore, Sesshoumaru-sama." She retorted haughtily, adjusting the shawl one last time before deeming it appropriate. "You don't have as much to worry about as I do."

The scent of coals and fire reached her sensitive nose and left a scorching pain behind. It was wafting from Sesshoumaru in tiny trickles, but on the outside he looked to her bored and aloof. There was never a moment in which Kagome thought that his exterior persona ever collaborated with his inner self, and this was one of those moments. She scented the air once more, confirming her suspicions. Is he angry?

"Sesshoumaru-sama?" she watched as he eyed her almost blandly, but she couldn't deny the scent of his emotions that contrasted against his appearance. "Did I anger you?"

"Do not be foolish," he muttered without hesitation.

"But you smell like fire and smoke," she pursued.

"How would you know what that smell associates with?"

She shrugged. "I don't," she admitted freely. "But I have a strong hunch."

"You mean to say a guess?"

"Yes."

"Well, this Sesshoumaru was not angered."

He watched as her nose delicately twitched. "Now you smell sour. What does that mean?"

He refused to answer her, and when he said nothing at all and Kagome grew bored of interrogating him, he took it as a sign to evacuate, though found his feet cemented to the floor. Black wings fluttered across his vision fleetingly, almost rendering him teetering to the side. Gnashing his jaws together he managed to regain his composure, just before the priestess took notice of his thought to be hidden ennui.

With mild amusement Sesshoumaru watched as she fiddled with trying to come up with a solution to her enlarged incisor teeth. The little mirror propped steadily in Kagome's tiny hands, her tiny pink tongue lolled around the sharp edges cautiously, scraping the bottom teeth and the roof of her mouth as well. He found his eyes following the movements of her tongue as it darted in and out of her mouth, wetting her lips absently that caused a brief stir within his stomach.

"Will you file those down as well?"

Curious gold eyes met his once more when she attempted to scrutinize his mood from the little hand-mirror.

"My teeth?" She gave them another once over. Then it dawned on her that he was teasing. "Ha, funny." She commented humourlessly, resuming her tedious ministrations.

Sesshoumaru took in the way she angled her body towards his, her eyes fixated on him from the little mirror, and couldn't deny that she was curious about something. True, he did feel a touch irate when she complained about her problems outweighing his, but he thought he had squashed that emotion when it slipped. Apparently, she had just caught it too soon.

"Why do humans bother you?"

Her innocent question stoked some sort of burnt out fire within his gut; had he been a youkai still, there would be no doubt that some part of him would have responded negatively to his emotion. Sesshoumaru wished not for the first time to have his tapered fingers armed with razor sharp claws, just so he could impale himself in the leg to keep the emotion from his face.

There was a bout of reasons as to why her question irked him; on one hand, it was completely repulsive that such filthy, hazardous beings were even allowed to remain on this planet when they had no business to do so. On the other hand, it also meant that her ancestors had annihilated a better portion of his kind, and this did not sit easily with the fastidious taiyoukai. On the other other hand, a human gave birth to Inuyasha.

No, it did not appease him at all.

He settled for giving her the short answer. "Humans are filthy and too brief; it is merely staggering that your kind has managed to live up until now. Clearly, higher beings such as youkai should be populating this earth."

Kagome harrumphed. She'd heard enough. "I want to know something," she declared haughtily.

Sesshoumaru merely met her 'declaration' with an arched brow.

"If you youkai are so superior to us," she felt the worlds roll of her tongue slickly; she was on a roll now, building momentum as the worlds aligned themselves clearly within her mind, "why is it sought by youkai to become human in appearance? If you are so mighty, why strive to blend in with us? Isn't imitation a form of flattery?"

Her hands settled on her thin hips as she checked piss-obnoxious-youkai-before-school off of her mental to-do list. She watched with fascination as his tongue flopped around his mouth as he struggled to make a retort. A shoe-in to win, Kagome leaned languorously against her bathroom sink, enjoying the state with which she rendered him.

How Kagome had known about youkai who strived to be powerful enough to appear human almost took away from his attention to formulate a suitable rebuke. It had been his infallible father that had taught the young Sesshoumaru to shift into a human by appearance, to squelch his massive power into a tinier, more anthropomorphic form, when he was but a century old, a toddler in human years, a month-old pup in appearance.

"Da?" Tiny Sesshoumaru asked innocently in a low whine, gazing upon his 'Da' with unusual calculating eyes. His glossy fur was ruffled, and his paws filthy from the mud he had found out in his mother's garden, and he had been licking them clean with his rough tongue when his human father sought him out.

"Come, Sesshoumaru," his father invited, and the little pup scampered after his father's retreating form giddily. Clawed paws clicked upon the wooden floor, his breath coming out into little tiny pants as he followed after his father who brought them to the door of his study.

He felt his little heart gallop as his legs bunched for flight, swooping four feet into the air and landing almost nose-first into his father's leg.

Clucking his tongue, the Inu no Taishou patted his fist on his thigh, and obediently Sesshoumaru sat upon his haunches, gazing up at his father with an expectant expression only a pup could manage. He opened the door, and Sesshoumaru scampered inside, taking in the scents of his father's study that was filled with old, crispy papers, the abandoned stove, and fur rug.

"Sit."

Sesshoumaru sat.

Inu no Taishou moved to sit in front of his young son, his hand rubbing Sesshoumaru's head softly. "You're a little young, but this will just be between you and me. all right?" his face donned a rare, genuine smile that he reserved only for his son.

Sesshoumaru barked happily, his tail furiously wagging.

"You're going to learn how to become human, Sesshoumaru." At the sound of the low keen, his father admonished his choice of words. "No, not an actual human; you shall learn how to be human in appearance, and walk on two legs." As if sharing a very well-kept secret, the Lord of the Western Lands brought his lips close to Sesshoumaru's fluffy ears. "Only the most powerful of youkai can achieve this."

"But why?" Sesshoumaru asked that came out as a keen to others who could not decipher inuyoukai language.

His father smiled then, not full of reproach, or of disappointed; Sesshoumaru remembered it to be of happiness. "Because," he said, stroking Sesshoumaru's fur, "if we can accomplish to become the one thing people think that we are not, then we are the winners, not they."

It wasn't a secret that youkai were born in their true forms, and that the mother's reverted back to their true forms as well for labour, but since the question as to why they all sought to achieve this alien appearance had not crossed his mind. Sesshoumaru was not enjoying being confused, and was becoming tired of Kagome's haughty expression.

"Hn." He strode out of the room without much else to say. He would have to make sure to keep his emotions more guarded now that she was actually using her nose to discern him. The Lord of the West would not be penalized by a woman of lower status than he, even if she did attain his epic power.

xXx

Shout out for madin456 for doing another amazing job being my beta!

Please review on your way out! I appreciate them!