InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ A Parallel Dimensional Fairytale ❯ Of being too kind and too kissed ( Chapter 6 )

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

 

 

''bout time.'

Inuyasha sighed as the petty emotional turmoil he had created inside himself when he'd shared some memories with that girl settled and emptiness seized his mind again. That emptiness was, after all, the whole reason he kept on pouring every drop of alcohol containing liquid he came across down his throat. He probably really was an alcoholic, he hadn't spent that much time reflecting his behaviour during the last years of his life, but looking back now he realised that by general standards a man who spent less than half of each day sober might be considered just that. But he also knew that general standards didn't apply to him. No one blamed a dying cancer patient for the amounts of morphine he took, right?

He had to admit though, that today being sober had not been as hard as it had been when he'd still been alive. Today he had experienced something entirely new: The feeling he was doing something useful, something really useful, not being a bouncer for a strip bar or some underpaid building worker and whatever job options you had as a impersonated Japanese myth living illegally in a country.

No, there had been several occasions today when he'd felt he was doing something that counted... somehow, in a way his slightly, ok, more than slightly fogged brain could not really grasp, for example fighting had felt like a somewhat right thing to do. Not the optimal thing, ensuring his very own survival, but the justifiable, maybe even honourable thing to do, and he couldn't even recall the last time he had felt like that during a fight... no that was not true... he did remember... though today he was not that sure that his feelings hadn't led him on back then... too many different motivations, emotions had driven him to fight that fight, it was hard to say whether they had been honourable... right now it seemed to him that he had never fought a fight that was as justifiable as the one today. Weird, because he didn't really know why he thought so. No that wasn't true either. He had a faint suspicion that it might have been something to do with the fact that he now was, even though not voluntarily, responsible for someone else besides himself.

Fighting to preserve his own worthless existence did not feel as right as fighting to protect the life of someone as young and naive and whatever as Kagome.

Kagome.

He strained his hearing and managed to catch her slight snoring. What was up with that girl anyway? One moment she was cheerful, almost childish, getting excited over the fact that she wasn't out of breath after running, and the next moment she slumped down and started crying like a helpless child that lost it's mother... well duh! She had lost her mother... and everything else. Maybe she'd been crying about that? Just because he was almost delighted that he was dead now probably didn't mean that her life had been as screwed up as his. Alright, so she had a reason to cry, but still, crying women... or girls, he could absolutely not, not, not stand it. And he, too, had a reason to feel that way - Keh! Inuyasha shook his head wildly to erase those thoughts.

No way was he going to let them take that very direction, not when he had just regained this comfortable alcohol induced apathy. Some things were just meant to be forgotten.

In a way of distracting himself Inuyasha lifted his head to look how Kagome was doing sleeping on a tree for the first time.
Quite well it seemed, she had figured the only way it worked out on her own, apparently, lying on her stomach with her legs dangling from the branch and her arms cushioning her head. The table cloth he had brought to use as a blanket was tucked only around her torso but she didn't seem to be cold.

Now, with her face relaxed, she did, despite the short, dark hair framing it, appear more feminine again, more like the way she really did. Taking advantage of the fact that she was fast asleep Inuyasha allowed himself to study her a little closer in the meagre moonlight and decided that her counterpart of this dimension even held a vague resemblance to her real form. They had the same lips and slightly similar noses, and the curve of their eyebrows was matching, although the overall shape of their faces was different. He all but stared at her for quite a while until he realized what he was doing and turned away, blushing although no one was around to witness his lapse.

“Stupid girl.” He accused, unsure what he was actually accusing her of.

Giving that a little thought he forced himself to consider that he maybe kind of liked that stupid girl... who was not all that stupid but just annoyingly curious... or maybe even not that. It had been a long, long time since he'd last felt something like affection towards another person... which might have been something to do with the fact that he had hardly gone out since he'd moved from the USA to Germany and that when he did he had usually been way too drunk to even decide of which gender the colourful blurs around him were... but anyway, the point was, that this specific part of having social contact had much like the rest, grown too unfamiliar for him to even remember how to deal with it. So she was stupid for making him feel anything when he had hoped he'd left that behind him already. Or drowned it somewhere inside him.

It seemed as though everything he thought about tonight was going to lead out of the emptiness that promised sleep. So he just dropped forwards, lying down on the branch the same way Kagome did and started calculating until his eyes drifted close.

Strangely he was, although he had never attained school, quite the geek when it came to mathematics. One of his friends back in the USA used to still go to high school and Inuyasha had, late one night, in the aftermath of one out of the incessant amounts of parties that used to reign his life back then, sneaked a look into his book to find that what everyone he knew always groaned and bitched about was actually pleasantly relaxing because it was so painstakingly logical. Inuyasha had always liked things that made perfect sense on the very first glance and did not involve subliminal messages that needed to be interpreted. Words were awful, someone could say one thing and mean the opposite (well, he knew he was sarcastic and ironic all of the time, but that didn't mean he liked it in other people.). And words hurt, or gave power to people who shouldn't be given it... well and they betrayed him most of the time.

But two times two was four, nothing could influence that outcome, just as the integral from 1 to e of ln(x) was 1. And numbers themselves hurt no one.

So he had taken on the habit of... borrowing his acquaintances books. It wasn't like they needed them, most of them had dropped out of high school or college that summer anyway. And it wasn't long until he found that when he was drunk, to him doing complicated calculations in his head was like counting sheep to other people. It calmed him into sleep. So what to do today? Perhaps just some simple cubic equations?

In the morning Inuyasha woke with a slight headache and a horribly dry mouth, but he was more than used to that. Groggily he reached for the backpack he'd hung on a branch and retrieved a canister of orange juice. He emptied it hastily and stuffed the bottle back.

As he yawned and stretched a little he glanced up to Kagome and saw her stir in her sleep, her eyes opening slowly. He quickly moved to stand on the branch just in time to catch her when her eyes took in the long distance to the ground and she bolted up, loosing her balance in the process.

“Sleeping on trees is easy, waking up is the problem, I tell you that.” He said cheerily, as she pressed her hand to her chest to recover from that early morning shock. She glared.

“You couldn't have possibly told me that before I fell asleep on one, now, could you?”

Inuyasha was in a uncharacteristically good mood that morning, he had slept better that he had in a few years, and so he just shrugged and politely offered her a hand.

“Nope. Now come on down we need to find that girl.”

She stared at his hand for a moment and then swatted it away to climb down on her own.

“Uh-oh, someone's cranky this morning.” Inuyasha observed as he followed her.

“Hell yeah, I slept horribly. I dreamt of falling the whole night. I even fell down the Eiffel tower and I haven't even ever been to France.” Kagome kept on chattering while she climbed down the tree.

“And then I was climbing up a rope, hunted by some scissor monkey who always cut the rope right beneath me, but the rope went on and on and I just kept on climbing and climbing until suddenly another monkey appeared above me and cut the rope. And then I fell again. “

Inuyasha couldn't help but snicker a little. That girl's dreams where just as weird as she was. But at least she didn't seem to be sad anymore. That meant no more crying and no more forcing him to distract her with something. Something that was personal and not actually meant for her to know, but when you have no imagination, what else is there to tell?

“But strangely you were suddenly there and caught me, just like just now.”

Inuyasha glanced down to her surprisedly, to find her already on the wall, waiting for him. He jumped to land beside her.

“Can't have been that much of a nightmare if I had an appearance in it, huh?” Inuyasha joked, still not believing how cheerful he felt today. He had dreamt of interestingly shaped graphs, a very comforting dream for once. In addition to that the graphs had smelled oddly pleasant, of fruit and sun, freshly washed cloth, skin and female sweat...

Kagome rolled her eyes but her cheeks grew a tad pinkisher.

“Yeah right.” She dropped to her knees and began crawling onto the branch that reached over the pavement. While she struggled to slide around it Inuyasha just went to sit on the wall and dropped to the ground from there, lessening the force of his fall by going into a crouch.

Kagome managed to reach the ground safely, but she took her time and somehow managed to make her skirt ride up all the way to her hips while sliding back and forth on the branch for reasons unknown to Inuyasha, who decided to keep any comment to himself to avoid being declared a hentai again. Besides that, the view of Kagome's counterpart's legs aroused nothing but envy in him, when comparing those rippling bundles of pure power wrapped in fair, smooth skin with the bones and tendons wrapped in overly hairy skin of his counterpart's sprinter body.

Why was it that he, who had been drawn into the whole affair for the sole purpose of keeping that girl safe, got such inadequate equipment whereas said girl got this killing machine of a body and didn't even know how to use it? Hadn't he known that the mysterious woman who claimed to be the creator of all this claimed to keep out of her creation he would have suspected that she'd done it on purpose, just to make things harder for him.

Maybe she'd just been plain lying and she did interfere and really didn't like him (he had no trouble imagining that someone didn't like him, he himself had never brought up the patience necessary to feel sympathy for himself). That was a very pleasant explanation for the overall screwed-up-ness of his life. What made it so pleasant was the fact that it did, in comparison to all his previous theories, declare someone else guilty and not himself alone. Very nice, he liked that. Now if only there was a way to make himself believe it, that would probably mark a first step out of the circles of self-hatred, drug abuse and general anti-sociality he had been moving inside for god knew how long. Oh well...

Kagome ripped him out of his conspiracy theories and self pity, but he had still managed to subdue his previously good mood a good deal.

“It's ten minutes to seven, if we're lucky she hasn't left to school yet.” She declared, looking at her wristwatch.

“Only one way to find out.” Inuyasha stepped past her to peer through the iron bars of the gate to the enormous garden.

“And that would be?” Kagome asked, sticking her head between two bars.

“Waiting for her right here.” Wonderful. More waiting and sitting around.

“Aww, really, will all of this mission consist of getting beaten up or being chased around on the one hand and spending ours just sitting around with nothing to do on the other?” So she thought about it the same way.

“No. At least about the getting beaten up part. That won't happen again. You should know by now that you best leave that to me.”

“Yadda yadda, can one sound any more chauvinist?” She moved closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. “Don't worry, honey, I'll take on all the bad guys for you. Just stay back and powder your nose, or better yet, cook me steak.” She said, obviously trying to sound like some western hero or something. Inuyasha just watched her bewilderedly, unsure whether he should be laughing or feel insulted. How did that girl keep up with her moods if they swung like that? Hadn't she been mad at him or something a few minutes ago? And now she was joking around?

In the end he just peeled her hand from his shoulder and shoved it back at her. Her face dropped but she did not look angry, guilty more like.

“Oh. I'm sorry.”

“What for?” Well the joke had been stupid, but-

“For forgetting that you hate to be touched. I'm sorry, didn't do it to offend you or anything I just really forgot.”

And so had he, obviously. He hadn't even expected her to remember it, it was true, yeah, but he didn't hate her touch in particular that much, for what ever reasons. Talk about being over considerate. He did not actually expect people to consider what he wanted or felt. At least few people had ever done that, and no-one after knowing him for only a day or so. What a strange girl she was, indeed.

“Whatever.” Glancing back into the garden he suddenly saw a figure moving towards the gate. There came his direly needed excuse to ignore the urge to explain himself to Kagome to wipe the guilty expression off her face.

“Hey, look. The shard bitch is coming.”

 

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Cornering the wench and taking the shard had been a child's play, she wasn't half as confident alone as she was with her group of humble slaves, at first she did try to threaten him though, with some kind of social outcasting, said she was gonna make sure that he'd be thrown out of his sprinting team and such. Well he couldn't care less about what happened to this body after he left it. She didn't say anything to Kagome, probably thought she was outcast enough just being what she was, and in the end all Inuyasha had to do was snatch the shard and rip it off her neck, she didn't even fight back. They ran away and didn't stop until they found a little park where they sat down on a bench to rest a little.

No.

Getting the shard was no trouble at all, that infuriatingly considerate Kagome was.

All the while they ran she had been awkwardly quiet and now she sat on the bench frowning, and thus not all too far from crying again for all he knew. Just what he fucking needed.

“Stop that!”

She snapped out of whatever was bothering her to shoot him a puzzled look.

“Stop what?”

“What ever you are thinking of, I can hear the wheels in your head turning. Annoys me.”

“You know, I was just thinking - “

“I figured that much.”

“Will you stop playing impolite and listen?”

What does she mean playing impolite?

“So you were thinking...?”

“Why are you saying that like you doubt I am capa- oh, don't answer that. Just listen.” She fidgeted with the hem of her skirt, not facing him as she spoke. “I don't think it's right to just take over these poor people's body's, wrecking havoc with them and then just leaving their real inhabitants to deal with the consequences. Maybe we can try to right at least some of the wrong that has occurred because of us.”

Talk about being over considerate, indeed.

“And just what do you have in mind? How can we possibly make that crazy bitch not hate us, for example, or keep her from doing whatever she plans to to socially stigmatize my counterpart?”

Now she did look up to face him, almost defiantly.

“Well, we could apologize and give her something to replace the necklace we took. And I could try making up with my supposed 'girlfriend' just as you can do that with your counterpart's friend you scared off so rudely.”

Inuyasha felt his jaw drop. That girl was incredible. Just what did she think people were like? Forgiving? Understanding? Even the slightest bit willing and able to identify with another person? Good lord! It would have been almost cute, that attitude, hadn't he known how badly she would be disappointed as soon as she found out what things were really like. And why did she give a shit about those fuckers anyway?

But she was determined now, standing up and continuing to argue with her hands on her hips.

“I know you'll say that you don't care, but I do. And as far as I know they won't get us out of this dimension until I linked my self with the jewel so they can extract it with us. I just won't do that until we at least tried to sort things out.”

Oh the nerve of that brat. But she'd said 'try to sort things out', he'd just hold her to that. And it wasn't like he had much of a choice. He couldn't possibly let her go alone, who knew what kind of trouble she'd get herself into. No protecting the bitch, no reward. It was as simple as that. But he could at least play a little hard to get before he agreed.

“As far as I remember you were the one who's been bitching about the whole running around. And now you're willingly getting yourself into even more of it?”

“Yes I am. -”

Realising she was about to say something like 'and I'll be going now, with you or without you' he hastily stood.

“Ok, ok. But no more bitching or anything.”

Because, really, he had never, even when he was like just now, just contradicting someone for the hell of it, been able to agree anymore as soon as someone had said something like that. Inuyasha had always prided himself with his scratches of self respect that occurred every once in a seldom while, especially in situations where they just got in the way. Hell, everyone needed something to be proud of, right?

No more bitching for her did of course not mean no more bitching for him.

“Well then oh little Mother Therese in spe, what do you suggest we do?”

“Who is 'Mother Therese in spe'?”

Ah yes, she probably wasn't that famous in Japan.

“Doesn't matter. Let's get going!”

And off they went.

 

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