One: The Return
"I don't even know why the fuck we're bothering," Inuyasha grumbled as the private jet took off.
"To save the shitty local economy," Kōga replied in a similar tone.
"Can you pour us some scotch, darling?" Miroku said to the flight attendant.
The woman blushed at the endearment and scurried off. A petite brunette, she had been approved by all three of them, satisfying a requirement they tried to never speak of aloud. Miroku watched her ass until the cabin doors closed behind her, sighing at the view.
"No mile high club for you," Inuyasha said. "Sango would kill us all."
"Ah, are my best days truly behind me?" Miroku looked genuinely pained for a second before briefly shaking his head. "Don't get in a bad mood before we even arrive. It's been ten years. They'll be worshiping us. Everyone who gave us shit back in high school will fall down at our feet, just like we always dreamed of when we started Tairokumi."
"Maybe you're right," Kōga said, perking up a little. "Gods know we were the only ones who made anything of ourselves and got out of that shithole."
"I don't care," Inuyasha said, grumpier now that his negativity was no longer shared. "I got out of that backwoods hell and I don't want to go back."
"We owe a debt to the place that made us, Inuyasha," Miroku said before the half-demon could go any further. "Plus, revitalizing a dying community will look good to just about everyone. And we could really use the boost after someone got into a fist fight with a teen idol over a fucking cocktail waitress, of all things."
"It wasn't about the waitress! I just hate that stupid little fuck's face," Inuyasha said, hands balling into fists as he recalled the event in question. "Shippo was loud and intercepted the waitress and drank five fuckin' bottles of champagne I had already paid for. That was over 3k! Of course I punched that fuckin' twerp. Went down like a bitch, too."
Kōga rolled his eyes at the triumphant smile on his business partner's face. "Was it worth it? Because it's been three months and everyone's still talking about it. People are even boycotting us because of your stupid violent impulse control problem."
"Keh, it's just a bunch of dumbass teenage girls on the internet."
"In case you haven't realized it by now," Miroku said, accepting the glass of scotch from the flight attendant, "teen girls drive the market. It's why Shippo is famous in the first place."
Inuyasha said nothing, swirling his scotch as he watched the flight attendant bend over to set down the final tumbler of liquor. Maybe Miroku wouldn't be getting any on this trip, but that didn't mean he had to be celibate as well. And the flight attendant did look an awful lot like her… Sure, the eyes were dark and the hair was shorter and the skin was more tan and the smell was all off, but he could deal with that.
He'd been dealing with that subtle wrongness of other partners for the past ten years, after all.
The plane landed six hours later. Kōga spent the time watching a movie, Miroku typed away on his laptop, and Inuyasha distracted the flight attendant, whose name he forgot almost as soon as she told him, for a good hour and a half before going back to his seat and taking a nice long nap. Before he drifted off, he heard Kōga get up and smirked, knowing the wolf demon was going to enjoy his leftovers yet again.
Even though their plane was safely on the ground in a private airport, they still had a way's to travel. Their hometown was so far from anything of any significance that they would have to go the rest of the way by car. Thankfully, Miroku had reserved a limo for transportation. This part of the country had subpar everything and the finer things were no exception. Inuyasha wrinkled his nose at the smell of stale cigarette smoke inside the vehicle. Was that a crushed soda can on the floor? Disgusting.
"The first thing we're doing after we seal this deal is building our own damn airport," Kōga announced.
Inuyasha nodded. "Told ya we shoulda gotten a helicopter."
"We've only been rich for three years and already the two of you are insufferable." Miroku's point was offset by him picking at his genuine gold and ivory cufflinks.
Gold eyes tracked the movements with distaste. "A bespoke suit and silk tie are a little excessive for a man of Buddha, aren't they?"
He shrugged. "I have an image to uphold."
That was true enough.
Miroku was the face of Tairokumi (a combination of Taisho, Miroku, and Ookami). In addition to that, he also oversaw most of the financial big picture for the company. Kōga was great when it came to meeting with other company officials as well as ideas. Inuyasha was even better at bringing those ideas to reality, perfecting and developing them.
"I think I remember an email about a class reunion coming up." Kōga whistled low. "Ten years. It feels like so much longer. Can't believe we're only twenty-eight."
"I hope you're right. A reunion would be great for us. We show up, get plenty of pictures out to the press, and tell everyone we're still just regular guys who are never going to forget where they came from."
"I'm not going to that shit."
Miroku's eyes turned sly. "So there's no one there you want to see?"
Inuyasha crossed his arms and didn't even bother with a response, just glaring out the window instead, jaw clenched tight.
"You sure about that? Not even K－"
"Shut up! And no." Inuyasha immediately regretted saying anything when he saw the look of immense amusement on Miroku's face. "I'm not a mathlete virgin nerd that quivers in the hallways whenever her name so much as comes up. Not anymore."
Kōga laughed. "Wow, you really did never forget where you come from."
Miroku turned his attention on the wolf demon. "You have no room to laugh, my other canine friend. It's awfully suspicious you'd remember a ten year reunion for a high school you hated so much you almost succeeded in burning it down in chemistry."
Kōga's face turned as red as it could get. "Fuck, no, I just, I, uh… I thought it would be a good opportunity, just like you said." Some of his confidence returned. "I fuck models now. Why would I want some fucking townie?"
"So she still lives in town?" Inuyasha asked, literally on the edge of his seat. "I couldn't find her on social media and I wasn't sure－"
"You two are never going to change," Miroku laughed. "If you really want, I can get someone to look into it."
"No!" the demons chorused.
"I'm engaged to the richest wolf demoness in the world. That girl doesn't interest me anymore."
"Yeah, and I can and do get anyone I want now." Inuyasha leaned back in his seat, consciously attempting to slow his heart rate which had increased at the thought of seeing her again. "She probably has like seventeen kids now and gained two-hundred pounds. I hope we never see her again."
"That's probably for the best," Miroku replied. "That way, she can stay a perky cheerleader in your head while someone else is riding you."
Inuyasha began to nod before he realized what he would be admitting to. "Fuck off."
"I don't blame you two," Miroku said, a dreamy look coming into his eyes. "She was a hot piece of ass. If I had never met Sango, I would probably still be pining over her just like you."
"Will you just shut up?" Inuyasha was so done with this conversation. Bringing out his specially made headphones, of course one of the latest products from Tairokumi, he took out his phone and played some music.
They arrived at the rundown (what Miroku insisted on calling "historic") hotel. Inuyasha left the limo reluctantly, already smelling the rats before he even opened the door. The car sped off almost immediately after they retrieved their briefcases and carry-ons. He didn't exactly blame the chauffeur. The parking lot was entirely abandoned and they lugged their bags inside. No one was there to help them. Inuyasha had planned on tipping the first bellboy a hundred, but it looked like the place was too shabby to even have that which he now considered to be a basic element of hotels.
At first glance, the front desk was abandoned, but what he had thought was a tan leather sofa started to snore. With a start, he recognized the demon taking a nap though it was hardly noon. Manten had once been a fit jock with a full head of hair, but it seemed like the decade since high school had not been kind to him. The yellowed undershirt he wore was tight-fitting and revealed a roll and a half of his stomach. His bald head gleamed under the shuddering fluorescent lights. All in all, not exactly a pleasant look.
Inuyasha rang the bell on the desk and took some pleasure in watching the demon snort and jerk awake.
"Welcome to Sunset Inn, how can I－wait, don't I know you three?"
"Yes," Miroku said, obviously delighted at having been recognized so soon. "You might recognize us from the cover of this month's Forbes. We're the founders of Tairokumi."
Manten shrugged, meaty shoulders barely moving enough to tell what the action was meant to be. "Never heard of it. Didn't y'all used to live 'round here?"
He nodded and opened his mouth to continue selling them, but was interrupted by loud laughter from Jabba Jr.
"Buttboy! You're fucking Buttboy!"
Miroku turned completely red. "I-I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, sir. Let me assure you that we－"
"Buttboy!" Manten yelled again. Inuyasha and Kōga were desperately trying not to laugh. "Hell, you usedta draw asses in that gay little notebook of yours all dang day and try to get a peek at the girls and the guys in the pool. Didn'tcha even try and grope that wrinkly old bitch librarian Urasue until she beat you so hard you didn't come to school for a week?" Miroku's demon partners could no longer control themselves and began to openly laugh at this point. "Hey, Buttboy, lemme ASS you something. What you doin' BACK in town? You leave somethin' BEHIND? Gonna try n' take a CRACK at－"
"We are here to meet with the owner and buy this rundown monstrosity and I can promise you that I am going to do whatever it takes to get it. Once I do, the first action I'm going to take will be to fire you and make sure no one who has ever heard the name Tairokumi will ever hire you again." Miroku's dark blue eyes were almost black and his face was stern.
Manten's face went blank before he performed his attempt at a shrug again. "Here's your card, sir. Your room is on the eighth floor. I'm afraid there's no staff available but myself to help with the luggage and I have a bad back problem. Also, the elevator is out of service."
"You can't possibly expect me to carry my luggage up eight fucking flights of stairs! That's ludicrous! I could barely make it through the door."
The front desk clerk simply shook his head. "All them other rooms is taken," he announced, reverting back to his local code.
"In this deserted hotel!?"
"Next!" Manten shouted, casually dismissing the pissed off human who had packed three times as much as his two business partners combined.
"Eighth floor for you, psycho," Manten said, handing Kōga his card. The wolf demon was wise enough to take it without comment. "You too, halfie."
Had it been high school, he would have run outside and punched a tree hard enough to put a hole through it. Had this been out in the real world, he would have probably put him in the hospital like he had that brat Shippo. But this was Sunset Falls and Inuyasha had a lot more to lose now.
The two demons ended up carrying the entirety of the trio's luggage, everything but Miroku's stupid murse that only he thought made him look suave and continental rather than the reality, which was goofy as fuck.
"I can't believe that inbred fat bastard," Miroku huffed, as red in the face as though he were the one carrying all the bags. "Really? There's no one else here! This town doesn't even need a damn hotel! Everyone's cousins so they can just stay with family if they have need of temporary housing."
"Nice going, Buttboy," Inuyasha grumbled, too pissed off to pay attention to the human. "We haven't even been back ten fucking minutes and you already set a townie against us."
"Can you believe Manten hasn't heard of us, though?" Kōga interjected before a fight could begin. "Well, he remembered us, but not for anything we've done outside of high school. I thought we'd get at least a little recognition. I can't even walk down the fucking street anywhere else, yet our own hometown is completely unfazed."
"It's still just the first day," Miroku said somewhere around the sixth floor. "And that was just one guy. Manten was a footballer, remember? He probably had a few too many concussions. We can't judge everyone based off of our one interaction with him."
"You're right," Inuyasha admitted. "We'll meet with the hotel owner tomorrow, negotiate, have a nice celebratory dinner, and figure out the rest of the details the day after. We'll barely even be here. Immediately after the reunion on Friday, we'll leave."
Miroku smirked and after a few false starts with the key card opened the door to his room. "Unless you see a certain someone again."
Inuyasha snorted and abruptly dropped all the luggage on the floor helter skelter. "Yeah fucking right. I bet everyone here is addicted to opiates and I'm gonna have to fly some bitches in from the city to get my rocks off tonight."
Kōga grunted in agreement as he, ever more considerate, tossed the bags on Miroku's bed. "Or maybe the women will be so fucking disgusting they'll turn us gay."
The only full human in the room rolled his eyes in disgust. "You two are the worst idiots I've ever met. Kōga, if seeing an ugly woman would 'turn you gay', then you have been gay from birth, my friend. We've all seen your mother. Good gods, this room is horrific." His eyes widened as he took it all in. "These are shag carpets. Shag－fucking－carpets! Like from the seventies! I bet it's been here since then. Filthy with dust and dried cum and…"
Inuyasha left the room for his own, uninterested in listening to the prissy man's rant any further. Unzipping his own bag, he brought out the two bottles of whiskey he'd be drinking tonight as he worked. He poured a full glass－none of that "three fingers" bullshit, no fucking ice, either－and dug in his bag for the coke he'd brought along. Just a few lines, just a little every day to get him through the week. He snorted them quickly and without pleasure.
Opening his laptop, he looked over the quarterly reports, scanning passages and graphs in an attempt to locate and minimize waste and loss. This was something he should have delegated a while ago to his employees, but he just didn't trust anyone to do work that matched the kind of quality he expected. No one was capable of it but him. Not even Miroku and Kōga would be able to do things to his satisfaction. Inuyasha worked all through the night before he considered himself close to done. Blinking at the rising sun, he glanced at the clock and realized he had time for a forty-five minute nap before the pre-meeting meeting with his partners.
Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe it was the coke. Maybe it was the constant lack of sleep. But rather than the black nothingness he had come to expect and crave, he dreamed. It was brief but it felt real. Too real for comfort. It was her. Her. Crawling over his paralyzed body on the hotel bed, her gray eyes consuming him and making him tremble. He wanted to reach out, wanted to touch her, wanted to beg her to touch him. He wanted to tell her, tell her everything.
"Inuyasha," she whispered in that voice that made him break out in goosebumps and brought his cock standing straight up. "You came back."
His lips parted. She knew his name? His heart beat faster and faster until he feared something was dreadfully wrong with him. All he could manage to do was say her name－
The blaring of his alarm woke him and he was jarringly brought back to the real world. Squinting at the ceiling, he wanted to throw his phone down and smash it to bits. Forcing his tense muscles to relax, he turned over on his side and shut off the obnoxious noise that had taken him from her.
Her. It had always been her. Always would be her.
Though the shower was filthy, it at least had hot water. His cock was still hard and he leaned against the tile wall, jerking himself off with quick and rough punishing strokes. Inuyasha concentrated on not thinking about the dream. Not the dream and definitely not that night that changed him forever. Instead, he thought of the cocktail waitress. The one he had punched Shippo over. Skin like honey and cream and roses, long black hair… Despite his best efforts, she burst in his head anyway, eclipsing the whore waitress instantly. Fresh beauty, clean beauty, pure beauty, all of it wrapped together to conceal a sharp, cruel mind.
For the thousandth time, he came all over himself to the thought of her. The damned bitch was too addictive. He never should have gone to that fucking party. The things she did, and fuck, the things she'd made him do…
"You're late," Miroku said when he got to the conference center downstairs.
The half-demon sneered at the tiny room that looked more like a cubicle with a kitchen table in it than what one would meet in for an important business negotiation. Sitting on the edge of one uneven folding chair, he crossed his arms and glared.
"Like it fucking matters."
Kōga sniffed the air and grinned. "Looks like someone was enjoying himself."
Immediately catching on, Miroku snickered. "I take it being back here brought some particular memories to mind."
They could tell he immediately regretted it after he said it. The three of them had a wordless pact to never mention that night ever again for the sake of their friendship and business partnership.
Clearing his throat, Inuyasha decided to be the professional one and opened his laptop. "So we're going to lowball him, right? Maybe fifty grand for the whole property?"
He shook his head. "We can't do that. We're here to save them, remember? It's not going to be our usual cutthroat process. They have to actually like us for this to work."
"A hundred grand for the real estate if he knocks the hotel down himself." Kōga was looking around the room with the same disdain Inuyasha had shown upon entering it. "There's no way we can renovate this place to a point of acceptability."
"But building it up from the bottom seems a little extreme," Inuyasha broke in. "We could hire local, or semi-local, decorators and renovators and make it a community event to choose designs and stuff. We're going to concentrate on hiring locals too, so this way we can get them involved before we even open up."
"That's a good idea." The two other men nodded.
"And we can get the locals to landscape, pitch us redesign ideas and have a contest, all sorts of things. We'd save a shit ton that way and show we respect the town and its history. Let's just act like we love this place. It's only for this week, right? And then we can take turns with one of us coming back to check on the place every year."
"Sounds good," Miroku said. "Now let's get to work on some vague design samples. I'll look up the initial pieces and you can photoshop them into the photos I took of the rooms last night. Kōga, you work on editing the pitch."
The three of them worked steadily for hours. Those working under them had done most of the preliminary work, but they remained the type of men who preferred to do things themselves their own way. When it was finally done, they briefly combined their separate work together and were not at all surprised when it all blended perfectly. The three men smiled at each other in congratulations, already confident that they were going to come out on top. They just worked that well together.
"Ten minutes 'til go time," Kōga said, leaning back in his chair a little farther than what was safe. "Did you ever get the name of the owner, Miroku?"
He shrugged. "My assistant told me the name and I forgot."
"It must be in the paperwork somewhere. At the very least in the correspondence…" Inuyasha searched and searched before giving up and letting out a groan. "It all just refers to him as 'the client' or 'the property owner'. Fuck it all, we finally get everything fuckin' perfect and we forget the client's motherfucking name."
"Hojo. Akitoki Hojo."
The three of them started at the sudden interruption. Miroku was the first to recover and get to his feet.
"Hojo!" he said, smile broad and hand outstretched. "Good to see you again, buddy! It's been a while."
Tall and tan and dressed inappropriately casually in a polo and worn khakis, Hojo just stared at the hand. "Do I know you?"
"Miroku. Miroku Houshi. We were in school together." At the continued blank look on his face, he continued, "From kindergarten to senior year."
"Oh," Hojo said slowly. "Oh yeah, I remember."
It was obvious to everyone in the room that he didn't.
"Would you like some coffee?" Kōga offered courteously, grabbing the pot from across the room.
"Nah," he said as he took a seat. "The staff never washes those things."
The three business partners glanced at one another, all stifling the urge to vomit.
"So," Inuyasha began, "as you know, Tairokumi has been－"
"I'm going to be honest with you guys," Hojo interrupted, completely oblivious to the half-demon's twitching left eye and clenched fist. "As I repeatedly told your representatives, I'm not interested in selling. You three aren't from here. You aren't going to care about this place the way I do. Plus, this hotel is my family's legacy. I may be the mayor now, but the business is still very close to my heart. Hojos founded this town, and I believe we still know what's best for it."
"We are from here," Inuyasha said, successfully having unclenched his jaw, "as our emails and letters repeatedly mentioned. Miroku was born and raised here, Kōga came here in elementary school, and my mom was from here and brought me here the summer before high school. We go way back with this place."
Hojo shrugged. "I just let my secretary, who is also my wife, read those. She's good at boiling them down to the bare minimum." He smiled. "She always was a smart cookie."
Everything else about the meeting, about their excuse for being here, was forgotten.
"Wife?" Inuyasha croaked. "You're married?"
"Yup. Been together since high school."
The two of demonic descent in the room exchanged a look of depressed resignation. One part of the mystery of whatever happened to their high school obsession had been revealed, successfully ruining their hopes and the living memory that still burned in their hearts. Of course, they were both well aware that she had dated Hojo all throughout high school. It was impossible not to know who they were, that perfect small town cliche. Quarterback and head cheerleader. The it couple. In hindsight, they should have expected just such a development.
Still, he had hoped. Hoped that she had somehow escaped this quicksand pit of a town like he had. Hoped the world had recognized how special she was. Hoped that they would meet again having both fulfilled their potentials and beyond and that somehow he would finally be worthy enough, be man enough, to approach her.
"Hojo, we are an international company. To put it frankly, we've done extremely well for ourselves. Each of us is valued at over a billion dollars. What we would like to do here is bring some of the luck we were fortunate enough to have stumbled upon back to the place that made us."
Inuyasha rolled his eyes at what his human friend was spewing. Luck? Fuck that. It was a lifetime of suffering, a lifetime of hard work.
"Right now, Sunset Falls is like any other small town," Miroku continued. "The youth are leaving for the cities. The ones who aren't are either addicted to drugs or suffering in extreme poverty that most of the rest of the people in the country are not even aware of."
"We take care of our own just fine!" Hojo cut in, officially riled. "In case you haven't noticed, I never left, and I'm doing pretty darn well for myself. Maybe I'm not some fancy silicon valley executive, but I'm well off."
"You've surely driven through downtown, Hojo," Kōga said with a brow raised in disbelief. "You know not everyone lives in a place like the Hojo estate. We didn't all have great-great-grandpas who invented the world's number one adhesive bandage."
"I don't think our community would appreciate the influx of outsiders you would bring here," Hojo said decisively. "The last thing Sunset Falls needs is gentrification on top of everything else."
"We completely understand, but if you—"
"'Gentrification'?" Inuyasha barked. "Is there enough left of this corpse of a town to fucking gentrify?"
Miroku widened his eyes. "Inuyasha, please."
Kōga smirked, silently egging him on.
"The mill shutting down put our grandparents out of work. The factory shutting down put our parents out of work. There's nothing left here for our generation and beyond other than the fast food restaurants and the fucking Walmart. You have to drive an hour just to get anywhere that isn't exactly like this place but everyone is just so fucking depressed from the pollution and the neglect that they don't even bother." He felt himself get heated, felt his eyes glow with the light of anger (and yeah, maybe a little jealousy) at the stupid human man. "Everyone forgot about this place but us and we want to make it into the town you never could, not even with your resources, and you know that and you resent that. Face it, you want to be the only one to save this place and you'd rather it become a ghost town than have anyone else come in and make things right." He got right in the stupid fuck's face. "You'd rather it be your dumpster fire than someone else's paradise."
And with that, he was done.
Silence rang in the room. Hojo was markedly paler than when he had first arrived and he knew his points had struck home. Resentfully, he remembered that the little fuck did indeed have a rather sizeable white knight complex. That was just how he had acted about her, too.
"Get out of my office!" Hojo shouted. "Out of my hotel! I can't force you to leave town, but you should know that you are no longer welcome."
Then he left, red-faced in anger.
Kōga laughed, clapping the half-demon on the back. "That was awesome! I wish I could have done that, but I never have the right words at the right time."
"Fuck!" Miroku yelled, throwing his laptop across the room, not caring whether he damaged the expensive model or not. "You just fucked this up for all of us. How am I going to find a place that would give us a price this good plus all that good PR?" he mourned.
Inuyasha shrugged, unbothered by Miroku's theatrics. "Okay, sorry. I admit I went a little overboard, but can you blame me? That fucker is even worse than he was in high school."
"Hojo was fine, you moron. You're just mad that he married the one you want."
"Fuck off," Inuyasha growled.
The others knew not to pursue that thread of conversation any further.
"It's not like this is completely over," Kōga said. "We don't even really need the hotel. Sure, the central location would be ideal, and it is steeped in the history of the town, but it would be easier for us to just purchase a piece of property and build on it."
"Fuck that, I'm done with this place," Inuyasha grumbled. "Nothing here has changed. They don't want to be helped. They want to drown in their misery and blame everyone but themselves."
"That's a little much," Miroku interrupted, not wanting to chance his friend going into one of his moods. "Remember the regular people. The kids. There have got to be some worth saving."
"Keh."
Inuyasha left the poor excuse for a conference room wondering if anyone would notice a change in the decor should he punch a wall on his way back to his room. Ultimately deciding he would only be helping them by getting a headstart on the inevitable demolition of the place, Inuyasha took his sweet time going back up to the eighth floor.
It wasn't fair.
She wasn't supposed to end up with some humdrum local nobody like Hojo, history or not. The half-demon hated himself for the part that wished he had stayed behind after graduation. Everyone knew that there was no way he would have survived in a place like this, not after the whole thing with his mother. Even if he had stayed behind, that didn't mean the one he wanted would have chosen him, he told himself, even though he really felt like that brief connection they had shared was real.
After all, there was no way a one-sided love could possibly last this long, right?
Digging the key card out of his pocket, he swiped it a few times before he heard the telltale beep. Blinking in the dim room, it took him a couple seconds before he figured out what was wrong with the place.
"Where the fuck is my shit!?"
"Dude, what are you yelling about?" Kōga asked, coming in behind him. "Let's just go－oh fuck."
A very unmanly shriek from a few doors down let them know that their human friend had been hit as well. Just to make sure, even though he already knew, the wolf demon checked his own room as well, returning to Inuyasha's with a grave expression.
"Guess Hojo wasn't fucking around."
Miroku stomped in the room. "You guys too!?" He threw his hands up and looked like he wanted to stab someone. "Just fucking great! Now what are we going to do!?"
"We're going to just leave." Inuyasha was already making for the door. "Never shoulda come back to this hellhole."
"We are not leaving," Miroku said, marching up to him. "Not until I get my stuff back."
"Calm down, primadonna. We'll get you new shit once we're back home."
"Not everything I had with me can be replaced! I'm not leaving until I get at least the most important thing back."
"...And that is?"
Miroku crossed his arms and refused to elaborate. Sighing, the demons made their way downstairs, their human friend huffing angrily behind them. There was no one at the front desk this time, but a quick look around revealed a door that led outside propped open by a crumbling brick that was taken straight from one of the hotel's decaying walls.
In a couple of plastic lawn chairs sat the Thunder brothers themselves. Hiten passed a joint to Manten, the two of them giggling uncontrollably. Inuyasha groaned internally. Not these fucking idiots.
"Hey!" Miroku yelled, stomping over to the two of them. "Give me my things back before I come down on you like a fucking hurricane!"
The two of them openly laughed at the man and the half-demon cringed. Hell, but why did Miroku have to be so lame?
"What's wrong, Buttboy? Didn't like the turndown service?"
Miroku slammed Hiten against the wall by his neck fast enough and hard enough to take even the strong demon by surprise.
"What the fuck did you do with my stuff, asshole!?"
Hiten grinned at him. "Dunno what you're talkin' about."
"I'm getting this all on film!" Manten announced. "We're gonna be rich as kings once this is put online. What's the name of that fancy lawyer over in Shikon Hills?"
Inuyasha snatched the phone away and deleted the file, making sure to delete the copy of it in the cloud as well. "If you don't give us our shit back, I will personally decapitate the both of you, and I guarantee that no one will ever find your bodies or even care to look."
Hiten glared at him and pushed Miroku away. "I don't think things would turn out well for you all if people get wind of what you're doing right now. Weren't you just in trouble for fighting, half-breed?" At the surprised looks on the trio's faces, he rolled his eyes. "Yeah, we get internet all the way out here in the boonies same as you city folk."
"Point is," Manten broke in, "anyone finds out about what you did just now, then your stock is going down even more, and it's already looking pretty dang bad. So you might as well call a loss a loss and get the hell out. Not like you rich fucks can't replace it all anyway."
"Not everything can be bought, you fucking trash!"
Hiten stalked up to Miroku, expression dark. "Ain't no human-blooded son of a whore calling my brother trash!"
Inuyasha gladly threw himself in front of Miroku. Not to protect the idiot, since he agreed they should have just left and said good riddance to the place, but because a fight with a demon of Hiten's caliber was just what he needed right now. Throwing the first punch, he lost himself in the action, in the movement, in the energy. The anger. The hatred. He hated this place. Hated Hojo, hated Hiten, hated Manten, hated her…
Too soon, he was pulled away from the fight by a concerned Kōga.
"We gotta run, dude. I just checked my phone. We're getting calls nonstop, and that's just from the Shippo thing."
The three partners took off running while Manten tended to his severely bruised and beaten and bloodied brother. Just down the road was a diner, a small and practically empty place. It was better for his nose than a fast food joint, so he led them inside. They squeezed into a corner booth and he wished he could have gotten just one more punch in.
"How bad is it?" Miroku asked the wolf demon, once again entirely professional.
"Pretty bad. The kid left his beach house for the first time since it happened. He was wearing a fucking neck brace. Everyone's losing their fucking minds. They're talking with the lawyers again."
"That lying little shit!" Inuyasha cursed. "I barely touched him!"
"What can I get for you boys?" an elderly waitress with unnaturally bright red hair asked. Inuyasha wasn't sure if her voice was scratchy from smoking or from the town's pollution, because all the old-timers tended to sound like that whether they partook or not.
"Some pie, please, Angela," Miroku said with a smile, having read her crooked nametag.
"What kind?"
"What would you recommend?"
The waitress just looked at him like he was wasting her time. "Apple."
"Then three slices of that and some coffee."
"I don't want pie," Inuyasha sulked as soon as the waitress left. "I want to go home."
"We're sitting here so we should at least have something before we leave."
His stomach growled and he realized he hadn't eaten anything since he was on the plane the day before. A sudden longing for the appetite-suppressing cocaine in his briefcase overtook him and he almost got to his feet to go kick Hiten's ass some more.
"After this, we'll leave," Kōga said firmly, the look he leveled at Miroku just short of a glare. "We're not going to waste any more time here."
Miroku sighed and rested his chin on his hand. "I guess. I'm done. I'm just done. I so badly wanted to make this place nice, like it used to be when our grandparents were young. Just come back here, buy a big house in a nice neighborhood with friendly neighbors, raise my kids here. It has potential. It could still be the perfect smalltown dreamland…"
Inuyasha and Kōga both tuned him out at once. Not because his monologue was boring, though it was, but because they had both honed in on the same scent. The same musical laugh. The same beautiful woman.
It was her.
She saw them almost at the same time, like she could feel the demonic gazes zeroing in on her, staring at her like she was a goddess come to earth. She turned to face them even though she had been in the middle of a conversation, making eye contact with both of them. Her eyes went wide, her full lips parted in shock. She went entirely still, her grip loosening on the pot of coffee she held until it fell to the floor.
Kagome Higurashi remembered them.
Note: Yayyy new storyyy! I'm trying something a little different here that will become more apparent in the next chapter and beyond. Let me know what you guys think!