InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Dogs in Tokyo ❯ Chapter 9 ( Chapter 9 )

Inuyasha glanced up at the TV. The grayish figures of an old black and white movie swirled across the screen and parted to show a beautiful woman in antique dress tied to a cross. A fire had been set beneath her feet and the flames were now lifting in the wind. A bareheaded samurai suddenly broke though a knot of struggling men and paused for a moment, sword in hand, as the woman lifted a tormented face to him. With a despairing yell the samurai dropped his sword and leapt, clearing the flames, to land feet braced on either side of hers and body pressed against her in a tight embrace. A sudden close-up showed the pair gazing into each other's eyes with looks of love before the flames swirled up around them and obscured the screen and a frenetic commercial for the latest pop CD took over.

"Oh, that really is such a wonderful story," sighed Mrs. Higurashi's voice from where she stood in the doorway.

Inuyasha shrugged his shoulders. "Well, they're going to die the way they're goin' about It." he said.

"Oh, they do. It's a hopeless love you know. She's married to that lord in the corner."

The movie was back on again and Inuyasha studied the screen and saw a particularly fat and ugly daimyo standing on a porch of the palace.

She went on. "His army stands between them and freedom. So they die together. It's a very famous movie. Very romantic--kind of like what Kagome-Chan told me about your past." She smiled at him dreamily. "I knew as soon as I saw you that you and Kagome were predestined for each other. When you two speak to each other it's as if there is no one else in the room. So faithful."

He dropped his eyes and concentrated on rolling his pen across the table in front of him. 'Yeah, romantic,' he thought. 'Clinging to a notion of love with a girl I hardly knew I got myself pinned to a tree for fifty years and a lot of heartache.' Finally, he spoke, "Higurashi-Sama I truly love Kagome and will provide for her and you too. I will defend this family against all threats. But you are wrong about my past. My past wasn't romantic; it was fucked up. Of course, so are they--I'd be saving her, not kissing her while my feet burned off." He spun to face her his eyes lighting with a glow that Kagome would have recognized and acted on. "Do you know what happens to the human body when it's roasted without having its guts ripped out first?"

"I think dinner's burning," Mrs. Higurashi said brightly and hurried back to the kitchen.

Inuyasha smiled slightly and changed the channel to the Japanese version of Animal Planet. 'Works every time.' He thought and settled down again to copying hiragana characters. He was experimenting with using a ballpoint instead of a brush but he was not very satisfied with the results. 'No wonder everything looks so damned spiky.' he mused as the day offered its next interruption.

"Inuyasha, I want us to select more items from the cache. They will be up on consignment this time so the profit will come more slowly." Higurashi-Jijii folded his arms and looked down his nose at the seated hanyou.

Inuyasha considered diving back down the well to his forest or even moving his study materials into his house where he could expect to be left in peace. But no, things were awfully quiet anyway without Kagome to distract him. "I'll get more stuff from the cache if you answer some questions from me."

"About what? Spiritual matters? I thought you would never ask."

"Gods! No, you old wombat! I want some information on the place that Kagome and I went to last night. Yomiyucchiland or something," he shook his head impatiently. "That happy-garden place or whatever it was."

Jijii-Chan sniffed. "Yomiuriland you twit. What about it? It's just an amusement park. A place for the stupid to waste money. You would do better making money, young man. What do you want with a stupid place like that?"

"Nothing really, I just want to know why the place stinks the way it does." Inuyasha frowned, returning to rolling his pen. "It smells like something I know."

Jijii-Chan smirked, "Bad plumbing, no doubt." Inuyasha shot him a venomous look and went out to reopen the cache.

He was back shortly thereafter with a couple of plastic grocery bags full of antiquities and a bad attitude. The bags were upended without ceremony onto the low table in front of the T.V. but if he had been expecting to upset Jijii-Chan he was out of luck. Jijii-Chan merely grunted and leaned forwards from his seat on the couch to examine the goods.

"Where did you get this one from?" Jijii-Chan inquired holding up the object in question. It looked like nothing so much as a pair of misshapen pots stacked one on top of the other with an uneven glaze of red on the top and green on the bottom. There were deep cracks baked right into it, but it appeared to be watertight nonetheless.

Inuyasha looked at it in surprise. He had not realized he'd picked that one up in the collecting sweep of his house. It was one of Shippou's pottery making efforts that the pint sized kitsune had pressed on him. He must have subconsciously been trying to get rid of it. "It's nothing," he said "just toss it."

Jijii-Chan looked at it thoughtfully, and set it carefully aside. "No," he said, "We'll offer it as part of this lot. They won't be able to determine the exact age even with the best testing. It's just a little ahead of its time."

Inuyasha stared at him as if he had sprouted another head. "Fine, whatever." He shrugged his indifference and quickly bundled the selected goods into the small backpack.

~*~

Jijii-Chan was proved right about the ugly little bowl later that morning as Jukuryo-San examined the lot of goods in his office. "You see this?" He said carefully handling the peculiar little bowl. "The design--it is organic and embodies a novel sense of the beautiful. It proves the adventurous spirit of the artist in ancient times. It was surely used in the tea ceremony," he announced in a confident tone. "The shape of it as a water container in the ceremony would remind the participants of the imperfection and transience of life. Very evocative, it should bring an excellent return when offered to the correct institution."

Inuyasha couldn't keep still for this. "You've got to be kidding me," he declared flatly. "That thing was a mistake the day it was made. The bowls were ugly to begin with and too small so the maker stuck them together and fired the result anyway."

"How would you know?" Jukuryo-San challenged promptly, a glint in his eye.

Inuyasha was thrown for just an instant then recovered nicely, "Just look at it. Its got ' I am a mess' written all over it." He folded his arms and sat back scowling through his Ray Bans and remembering the day Shippou pawned it off on him as payment for eating all the shrimp chips.

[Which is why this item was included as Myomaraware in the recent exhibition of sixteenth century Japanese art at the Metropolitan museum in New York City. There it had its own pedestal and black background at the entrance to the exhibit with careful lighting to bring forward the mossiness of the green against the depth of the blood red glaze. The seemingly random notes of the biwa and flute drifting in the air completed the setting of this most important piece. Few were the serious students of art not affected by the inscrutability of the east. The fact that Shippou had been attempting to make two separate bowls and Inuyasha had briefly used it as a pisspot had no bearing on its identity whatsoever and would have been pooh-poohed by the shows administrators. After all the piece was insured for over a million; it had to have been correctly identified. Yup, the boys cleaned up on that one.]

Finally, Jukuryo-San declared himself satisfied and saké was brought.

"You'll have to excuse the informality," he explained as he poured the tiny servings. "My assistant, Ryosei, seems to have gone missing. I am most concerned for her safety as I consider myself in some way responsible for her. We must serve ourselves I'm afraid."

Inuyasha took a cautious sip, studying the old youkai. "She was alright when I saw her last night," he volunteered.

"Ah, and where did you see her?" Jukuro quickly refilled the cups all round.

"At Yakkiworld." was the prompt reply.

Jijii-Chan sighed and slapped his forehead. "Yomiuriland boy." Turning to his old friend he elaborated, "It's an amusement park all the young idiots are going to lately."

"I've heard of it." Jukuryo-San replied shortly. He seemed distressed by the news and nervously poured another round. "Did she speak to you? Did she seem well? Was she with anyone?" The blank stares of the other two brought him up short. "I know this sounds odd, Higurashi, but office assistant was not Ryosei-San's only position."

Inuyasha's jaw dropped as Jijii-Chan gave vent to a titillated "Ooh."

Dismayed, the ancient youkai shook his spotted head and flapped his clawed hands in denial. "No, no, not like that! An association of that sort at my age is too exhausting to contemplate! The shopping for presents! The irate relatives! The eventual disenchantment and the inevitable threats of suicide! Believe me, this young man here is admirable in finding his life's mate so young. Not everyone is so lucky in his or her choices. When I had my chance I decided to wait until the time was right and then it was too late."

"Unfortunate accident?" ventured Jijii-Chan.

"No, she got tired of waiting and left me flat for a--" Jukuryo-San suddenly caught up with himself and gave the saké bottle a frowning glance. It was empty. He opened another "That's neither here nor there. What I meant to say was that I have employed her and others in the past for their skill in information gathering but she is the third in a row of such employees to disappear."

"Did they all disappear at the amusement park?" Inuyasha was making connections. The underlying smells of youkai all through the amusement grounds. This lone youkai in modern times concealed in plain sight. Disappearances…Hmn. Unbeknownst to him, Inuyasha assumed what Kagome called his brown study pose number one; arms folded, face slightly frowning, stare fixed and unblinking. His companions in the room stared back at him until Jijii-Chan became impatient and waved his hand in front of Inuyasha's nose.

"Oi, kid, we're still here."

Inuyasha twitched and blinked "Well, did they?"

"Did they what?" this from a puzzled Jukuryo.

"Disappear from Yippie-Yippieland!" Inuyasha shouted in exasperation.

"Yomiuriland." the other two said in unison.

"Growlf!" Inuyasha snarled, knocking over his cup.

~*~

Inuyasha left the two old cronies to their bottle of après-breakfast saké and set off to walk the surprisingly short distance to Yomiuriland's gates. The day was fine and he felt it was a damned shame that his walk had to be on the crowded streets of this bizarre city. He could not really make up his mind as to whether he was amazed at or appalled by his surroundings. Kagome assured him that this was the same area that he had wandered all his life but the signs of the past were very hard to perceive.

He looked around and then up the steep glittering faces of the buildings. Even the sky was different. The clouds were all different, heavy and lower in the thick air. It was as if there was a low-lying fog of miasma with its own winds up beyond the net of power lines and wires that zigzagged from every building and nearly every pole.

A truck rumbled by and belched a cloud of exhaust. He covered his mouth and coughed. He couldn't say it stank worse in Kagome's time. Human settlements in his time that were large enough to have anything like a dye works or a tannery had worse air quality. And the rice fields with their black mud nourished by animal dung and collected human waste were enough to make eyes stream and noses run. It just seemed that many of the odors in Kagome's time were actually poisonous.

And yet, a man of eighteen was considered practically a child here. Kagome when he had first met her at fifteen should scarcely been away from her mother and her mother at thirty-five was considered young. Inuyasha smirked, most of the women that age in his time were pretty worn and toothless. All of which would indicate that humans enjoyed a significantly longer life span in this era. He would have to find a way of asking. He hoped that having a longer lifespan would help to soften the shock when the time came.

He brushed through a knot of people waiting at a bus stop scowling abstractedly. There were quite a number of things that he simply had not explained to her about her status as his life's mate. He stopped for a moment and shoved his hands in his pockets with a grunt. Hell, he hadn't explained anything to her. It wasn't as though he couldn't think of anything to say or failed to understand the ramifications of the given situation. It was just that if something couldn't be summed up in a positive statement or two it was hardly worth talking about and he was a lot more interested in making love to Kagome than raising unfamiliar and possibly distressing subjects.

The light was changing and he surged forward with the crowd of humans to cross the last street before the entrance to the amusement park. Gods they all seemed the same! Like so many cattle of the same breed.

But then there was Kagome, endlessly leaping to conclusions off of too little information and trying to make the best of others or improve herself. "Keh," he snorted to himself with a warm smile and caught the eye of a baby in a carrier who grinned toothlessly back.

Kagome, he mused as he stood in line for entrance at the park gates, it seemed to him there wasn't a single time he could think of that she hadn't gotten the reading of the situation and the people around her dead wrong. Everything from believing that Kouga would be happy to accept affectionate friendship with her to mistaking his own expression of frozen horror and guilt ridden sorrow whenever he saw Kikyou for wordless passion and longing. How do you explain anything to someone so given to making wrong assumptions like that?

Well, he thought as his turn came up at the ticket counter, he had better find a way to tell her the truth before she started drawing her own conclusions or there would be hell to pay. Tickets half price before noon. How nice, why not free?

He passed through into the park and all further personal considerations were lost as he again picked up the faint but all pervasive scent of youkai….

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A/N How wonderful winter is! Ice and a 45 degree driveway have landed me at home for a few weeks with my left arm in a cast up to the shoulder. Expect updates--one--letter--at--a--time.