InuYasha Fan Fiction / Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ Lights Over The City ❯ Chapter 4 ( Chapter 4 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

Meg’s PoV
60 hours after Kim’s disappearance

I ran as quickly as I could, even trailing behind my friend Sarah, although she had her five year old Sam in tow, as we ran through the crowded Toronto airport. I’d received the phone call from Maxine a mere twelve hours ago, but waiting for a flight had taken what seemed like an eternity.
Kim was missing and I was currently in a freaking the fuck out state of mind.
“Did she say how long she’d been missing?” Sarah asked loudly over the crowd, momentarily stopping to pick Sam up since he was dragging his feet. I huffed and took the moment’s stop to grab her shoulder and hold her in place. I’d been running back and forth and all over the place for the past two hours, trying to find an airline with a flight that was affordable enough but would get us to James and Kim’s apartment as quickly as possible.
“Two… days…” I panted, wiping the new tears that were forming in my eyes. After Maxine had called, I’d called James to find out the details. It wasn’t just the shock of disappearance but also what James had been preventing that had caused me to collapse in tears. Something not even Kim knew, something he’d hidden to keep her calm and safe and healthy for as long as he could.

But now, it seemed, her life was in play as well.

“Will Aunty Kim be okay?” Sam asked, squirming in his mother’s arms. She set him back down and looked at me with tears brimming in her eyes now, as well. I looked at Sarah, meeting her blue-eyed gaze and replied in a shaky-voiced lie, “Y-yes, Sam. She’ll be okay. A-as a matter of fact, I’m sure she already is fine.”
“Cool, so I get to visit with the baby now, right?” he asked, referring to Leah as ‘the baby,’ as usual. I couldn’t help but smile. He’d been so fond of her from the moment Sarah and I had him help us pick clothes for her to send to Maxine when Leah really was just a baby.
She definitely wasn’t a little baby anymore though. For a three year old, she was especially witty and almost scarily perceptive.
When I’d talked to Maxine last, she’d explained something to further my thoughts on just how witty Leah was. But it still didn’t make sense… then again, I couldn’t make much sense of it anyway because Max had been shouting and crying and sort of been acting ballistic. So she’d handed the phone to her baby and Leah had explained everything: InuYasha, Kim, how she was going to ‘make all the boo-boos go away.’ Frankly, it terrified me to think a three year old, however perceptive and witty she was, could put our world back in order.
But, here we were, apparently trusting that it could happen.
Or so I prayed.




Maxine’s PoV

I was huddled in my decrepit lawn chair on my apartment balcony, chain smoking in the darkness. Leah was fast asleep in her bed and that… man, or whatever, was hovering over me in silence.
He had been for the past five or ten cigarettes, I’d lost count. But it was really starting to piss me off.
“Could you please, I don’t know, sit down or something?” I hissed at him, flicking my cigarette butt over the railing.
“Uhm, sure. Can I¬…” he started, but I snapped instantly.
“Can you WHAT?”
He took a step back, a little fearful of my hidden temper. “Just wanted to know if I could bum one of those…” he grumbled, sitting down cross-legged on the balcony floor. He even pouted.
Which, admittedly, was kind of… cute.
But I gagged at that thought--sort of, as I handed him a cigarette, lighting my own. He cleared his throat and looked at me expectantly, the unlit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Can you, y’know… light me?”
I couldn’t help smirking. His demeanor was kind of… attractive. His looks, of course, weren’t bad either. His hair was dark, raven’s black, but it glimmered in the moonlight. I supposed he had dyed it to hide the silver. His eyes were eerie and sexy, a warm amber that I could melt in. It was those ears that kind of put me off.
Because it reminded me that there was way in hell he could be real.

I leaned forward, having run out of matches, lighting his cigarette with mine. Even in the darkness, I noticed a small blush warming his cheeks; I supposed from my sudden closeness.
Then I realized that warmth was spreading across my face, too. I backed away quickly, coughing and leaning back in my chair, “So… can you explain it again? How can you know my daughter?” I asked.
“Technically, she’s mine, too,” he said quietly, “I guess, in a way. I mean, I adopted her when we…” he trailed off, taking a long drag of his cigarette.
“When we what?” I said, panicking. He wasn’t going to say what I thought he was going to say… was he?”
He sighed, took a deep breath and spilled the sentence quickly in one breath, “Iadoptedherwhenwegotmarriedlastyear.”
Apparently he was going to say what I thought he was going to say. Shit.
“Shit,” I whispered, then louder, “We can’t be married. I mean. You’re not…”
“I am real, if that’s what you’re going to say. Stop being a stubborn ass, babe,” he said, then blushed quickly as he added the endearment.
“Babe?!” I nearly screamed, “Did you call me BABE? Aren’t you supposed to be from the Feudal Era of JAPAN?”
I was laughing now as his face grew the shade of a plump ripe tomato.
“I’ve been living here, in the modern ages, for almost three years. I picked it up, sorry.”
I laughed even harder, trying to imagine someone from the Feudal Era, with a topknot, asking his ‘babe’ to marry him. Then it hit me again, even harder.
“Wait… we…I mean, you and I are married?”
“Well, some form of you. But… you’re the same as you, if you understand what I mean,” he responded, his voice soft and gruff, as he flicked his cigarette butt. I just stared, forgetting about my own lit cigarette, my mouth agape.
“Our ceremony was actually very nice. Leah was your maid of honour… well, she was the only bridesmaid. Everyone else attended, of course. We were married and had our honeymoon in San Francisco. We promised we’d move there when we could, too… Leah loved it, we traveled through wine country and went south to spend some time on the warmer beaches. She’s such a water baby…”
I let out a sudden yelp, my cigarette burning down to the filter and burning my fingers. I dropped it quickly just as he jumped up and grabbed my hand, kissing it gently without missing a beat and apparently not thinking, “Let me get some ice, my love.”

And I realized, it sounded so nice. Even from him. And I realized that there was this smidgeon inside of me that believed him and at least cared for him, too.
And that smidgeon terrified the hell out of me.

I felt so disconnected.
Shit.