InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Movie House Hanyou ❯ Aftermath: Ground Zero ( Chapter 12 )

By the time FatGirl came back with two mop buckets filled with soapy water, the prep room was devoid of employees. Not wanting to just stand there and patiently wait until Inuyasha and Kagome returned, she hurriedly and unenthusiastically went to work at sopping up the sea of saturated, highly concentrated Coke syrup that coated the middle of the prep room floor. She wasn't sure she wanted to figure out what sort of accident had happened.

Inuyasha had directed Kagome to use the janitor's closet by the set of restrooms in the middle of the back hallway, while he went for the one between the emergency exit doors and the women's restrooms in the main lobby. It took all the self control he had not to lash out at the coworkers who laughed at his disheveled and Coke-splattered appearance, Coke syrup even in his hair, as he trudged from the door by the concession stand across the lobby and toward said janitor's closet. Some random customers leaving from their movie even stopped him and asked what had happened, amused smirks on their faces and stifled giggles locked in their throats.

Of course, he merely ignored them aside from a softly uttered "Keh," keeping his eyes squinty and narrowed as he passed by them, leaving sticky Coke prints on the formerly clean lobby floor.

---

Inside the small "closet," Kagome let the door close and moved several empty mop buckets out of the way to make a path to the 2'x2' corner drainage area set into the floor and bordered by a 6" splashguard. There was a hose attached to a faucet, and she stripped down to her bare skin before going to quick work on soaking her clothes with water as burning and scalding as she could get. If she would have to wear these clothes damp for the rest of the work evening, she'd rather not freeze herself right off the bat.

Then, she took a quick, informal shower to rid her body and hair of the disgustingly sweet stickiness that lightly coated much of her skin, hosing herself down part by part.

During the entire washing and bathing process, her thoughts kept going back to the… incident that occurred earlier in the prep room.

---

Inuyasha stripped his body of his clothes and hosed them down with hot water as quickly as he could before reversing the faucet knob vehemently. While he waited for the water to turn icy, he stared down at himself grumpily.

With a sigh, he softly muttered, "Why must my mind hate what my body does crave?"

His staring object said nothing in response. Cocks don't talk. But the way it stood at attention, it seemed to be taunting him.

Inuyasha flared his nostrils and glared right back, his ears flattening against his head.

"Traitor."

---

"Vile temptation, huh?" Kagome thought with annoyance and cattiness as she scrubbed at some syrupy residue on her torso, obviously there from the unusual and unexpected embrace. He's the one who started licking the Coke off my face, not me. If anything, he's the temptation--

She abruptly stopped her train of thought.

"God, I was actually enjoying it all, wasn't I?" Her eyes widened, and she quickly washed off her hand with the hose before easing the same hand downward to feel for something. The slickness she found was better than any words she could tell herself, in addition to the still continued rush of blood and adrenaline coursing through her body.

He wants you, you want him, and there's nothing you can do about it for now, she told herself in a rationalization attempt. You could get him demoted. You could get him arrested, if anyone found out he so much as laid a suggestive finger on you.

---

"You know, I'm sick and tired of you."

No answer. Just a twitch and a slight weep. The hanyou narrowed his eyes.

"I refuse to let you act like the brain here."

It stiffened even more as if to say, I'm the boss here, no use thinking with your head.

"You want the cold water?"

Right. Like you would. You'd rather wank off than settle for shrinkage and blue balls.

---

"His… his lips, and his hands…."

A long pause, and there was only the sound of gushing hot water as it spewed onto her skin, into her hair, and then hit the walls in the corner or dripped off her body to the drainage area like she was cleansing herself of selfishness, lust, and sins with Baptismal liquid.

"I could taste the Coke that he licked off my face, taste it in his mouth."

Stop dwelling on it! Keep yourself in check, girl! She chewed on her lip and sighed. She had kissed a guy for the first time since she still lived in Chicago, and something just had to go wrong. But it had felt so right. She could have melted into his arms and stayed there forever, and those swats he delivered--

"He's right," she told herself somberly, "I'm the one who went too far back there."

Kagome's skin was flushed from the heat of the water that doused her. But strangely, she shivered.

---

"You, mushroom at me again-- I dare you…." His voice was low and gravelly, threatening, his mental crosshairs firmly aligned and the hose of gushing cold water clamped firmly in his left hand.

It called his bluff, standing at even firmer attention now, flexing and spreading, and angling up even higher than earlier.

Inuyasha's thoughts swam with images of what he could only imagine a spectator might have seen from when he had been in the prep room with her earlier. His ears twitched, as did the weeping head below his waist, and he shook his real head quickly to clear his imagination before aiming the freezing water at his torso area just above the navel.

The chill of the liquid rushing over his Coke-sticky skin would normally have made him jump and dance in an antsy manner, but he managed to keep himself under impossibly incredible restraint, merely whimpering and hissing from the temperature from time to time, his teeth clenched and his breath tightly under control.

As he went on to wash the rest of himself of the splatters that remained on his flesh, he cursed himself for the backfire of his tease and, even worse, the fact that the allure of his employee was even stronger. Kami, I don't think I could trust myself to keep my hands off her again. Not… not after that. But what can I possibly do to punish myself for losing my self control?

He mulled over his options, over whom he could go to.

It was then that he remembered an offer he had received a long time ago. An offer that could help him deal with his… problem. An offer he never would have taken under normal circumstances. But, considering the person who made the offer, it could very well serve as good enough punishment without doubling as pleasure at the same time. And that person worked tonight. At Ground Zero.

---

During the remainder of the work evening, there was an obvious tension between Inuyasha and Kagome. Just about everyone picked up on it. The two were normally easy to get along with, particularly she, but tonight, both seemed to be only half paying attention to work, obviously distracted by inner thoughts. No one dared confront the silver-haired supervisor about it, and Kagome, when asked, merely smiled apprehensively and brushed the concerned questioning off like she was perfectly fine. Even though it was obvious she was bothered by something, she refused to divulge.

Naraku was working that night, as it was Thursday and he always worked on Thursdays. After seeing what his two employees looked like in damp clothing, he dug around in the storage section of the poster room and then came back with new uniform shirts for them both. There wasn't much he could do about them wearing damp pants, but since they were behind the concession stand, it wouldn't be as noticeable.

Toward the end of the night during cleanup, the General Manager had Christonn change the posters in the cases and remove two standees for movies they no longer had, due to losing them in exchange for the likes of Finding Nemo and Wrong Turn the next day.

The usher was dragging the unwieldy cardboard constructions toward the prep room when Kagome walked up and offered to help him, as she had little else left for concession cleanup. So, together, each with one standee, they brought them through the large, heavy yellow doors and into the back toward the large grey dumpster bins.

Setting his standee upright, Christonn stopped and turned toward his coworker. "What exactly happened back here earlier? I heard about the mess from FatGirl, but--"

"Trust me, you don't wanna know," Kagome quickly answered with a sheepish grin, laughing nervously. Please, don't ask any further on that, Christonn.

Grinning back, he said, "Ah, okay, I understand," with a head nod and an eye glint. "Anyway, get Inuyasha back here. It's time for him to destroy these standees."

"Why can't we just do it?" she questioned.

"We can. But I just love watching how he destroys them. If we do it, we'd have to basically beat the crap out of this thing and then some. Trust me, once you see him in action--"

At the mention of the phrase 'in action,' Kagome suddenly felt an image of Inuyasha in bed with her flashing through her mind distract her for a mere moment, and she visibly shuddered. And not with disgust.

"--you'll know what I mean," he finished off, unaware of the waver in his coworker's attention. "Go on, go get him back here. You gotta see this!" With another laugh he playfully slapped her on the upper arm just below her shoulder.

Once back behind the stand, she found Inuyasha doing the count sheets. She quickly explained to him what Christonn wanted him for, and he sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, seemingly deep in thought or contemplating something. When his golden irises were finally once again exposed, they stared straight back at her, and his gaze appeared to be noticeably unfriendly.

But he set down his clipboard and pen on one of the shelves inside the cabinet whose contents he'd been counting, locked the cabinet doors, and stood up from his folding chair. "C'mon, let's go," his voice low and oozing with moodiness as he turned toward her for a moment and then started walking along the back counter until he reached the door that led into the prep room, making sure she followed him.

When they approached Christonn, the usher smiled and presented the upright standee that had Adam Sandler's and Jack Nicholson's faces plastered on the front to them like it was a prize to be displayed on Wheel of Fortune.

"Stand back and off to the side, both of you," Inuyasha quietly ordered to both of his employees while he chose a predatory stance about a foot and a half in front of the standee and flexed his claws, squinting at it menacingly, his lips twisted into a malicious smirk.

Kagome felt Christonn's forearm upon her shoulder and turned to see him leaning on her, his eyes happily and excitedly pinned upon their supervisor. "Watch," he said, his stark white teeth showing. "I can never get enough of seeing him slash these things up."

"He slashes them?" She sounded quite surprised, yet again. He'd given me the impression Inuyasha would use some form of martial arts on the damn thing. Hoo boy.

Underneath his breath, the figure before them muttered some incomprehensible words, modified his stance, and then… jumped forward to attack the standee using the long and pointy claw-like fingernails of his right hand in a downward diagonal swipe.

Within a split second, what had once been an Anger Management standee was now a desperately shredded mess of cardboard, brown and color-printed pieces of standee-confetti fluttering around in the air for mere moments before raining like sakura petals to the very floor FatGirl, Inuyasha, and Kagome had spent a good deal of time mopping up.

The sharp intake of breath from behind him did not go unnoticed by Lefty beneath his Akira cap, nor the smug, satisfied murmur from the other male in the prep room. As the standee confetti settled, he turned to see Kagome's reaction.

Kagome was, simply put, amazed. The shock of his ability to turn a sturdy, well assembled piece of colored cardboard into the giant pile of, well, confetti absolutely stunned her, putting her rigid with wide eyes and not too far from tongue-tied. She didn't even attempt to comment on the vision before her.

"Kagome?"

"Kagome?"

Kagome felt a shove at her shoulder, and it busted her out of her current space out. She blinked, readjusted her expression, and looked from Inuyasha to Christonn and back again, as both had saying her name, as she had just noticed, Christonn even going so far as to wave his hand in front of her face.

"Huh? Yeah?" She suddenly felt a bit ditzy, and she eyed the mess that littered the linoleum for a moment.

"Pretty cool, huh, Kagome?" Christonn commented.

Inuyasha's pressing gaze suddenly made her feel nervous. Ever since the incident, she'd felt like he was purposefully distancing himself from her. That smirk on his face as he had turned his head to look at her after he had slaughtered Adam Sandler's face was the first time she'd seen him smile all night since she had gotten back from cleansing herself of the mess he'd made on her and himself. Was he really that angry at her for having been so forward and careless? His face, now, had gone back to a blank expression.

"Kagome. Go home. We'll finish up cleaning and counting. You should clock out as soon as you can." His voice was gruff sounding now. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment before opening them again and managing to stifle a sigh of exasperation. "You ought to get home as quickly as you can. You have a legal curfew."

Unsure of how to respond, she merely nodded and turned to scuttle out of there.

---

As soon as he was able to clock out himself, Inuyasha quickly drove home for a quick change into clubbing clothes before making his way through Downtown yet again and driving all the way to the very bridge he knew Kagome walked across to get home, and continuing onward until he reached Ground Zero. He found a decent parking spot and then walked toward the entrance, his spirits slightly lifted for knowing he'd be let in for free for being on the guest list like he was every single week.

VNV Nation's "Epicentre" blasted as he walked past the bouncer swiftly. Several females decked out in the stereotypical vinyl and velvet colors of black, red, and blue approached him while he attempted to make a beeline for the stairwell that would lead him upward, to the second level.

"Nice boots," a short woman dressed mostly in vinyl and fishnets proclaimed flirtatiously, eyeing his black vinyl hot pants, knee high transmutors reminiscent of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, gas mask fishnet shirt, and black bandana, going so far as to lick her lips.

"For the last fucking time, I'm not interested," he grumpily responded with a heavily guarded gaze, arching his eyebrow and glaring at her before turning his attention away from his unwanted suitors, muttering to himself to remember to kill whoever came up with that goddamn pickup line, 'Nice boots, wanna fuck?' should he ever find him or her.

His bad mood was only slightly lifted as he made his way up the stairwell toward the area on the second level where the Cage was situated. The Cage was where the doms and dommes did private sessions for somewhat meager fees compared to what professionals usually would charge.

Of all the workers Ground Zero had for the position, only one was male. And there was no fucking way he would ever submit to a female, most especially if he had to pay for it. The particular male dom working here absolutely disgusted him, personally, and the main reason he was even on speaking terms with the freakish man was because he happened to date his friend Bankotsu.

But, Bankotsu's boyfriend had had a crush on him for years and always made comments about his "cute doggy ears." The reason Inuyasha was even here? Even after voicing his dislike toward him, Jakotsu still insisted on offering him free dom sessions. Until now, he never would have taken up the offer. There was no way he felt he could put up with submitting to him, of all people. However, what with his current situation and personal needs, it just might be what would help him.

"Inuyasha!" came a girlish squeal from his obvious object of loathing as the man dressed head to toe in black leather sitting boredly in front of the public Cage, currently in use by the fem domme working that night with him, noticed just exactly who was walking toward him.

"I still can't stand you, Jak, so just shut the fuck up and listen to my proposition, okay?"

"But of course, anything for you, my cute little dog-boy--"

"Don't call me that!" Inuyasha growled menacingly.

Jakotsu the dom brushed off the veiled threat with a smile and stood up, walking toward a small booth in the corner. "What can I do for you?"

Still somewhat hesitant about what he had decided to go through with, Inuyasha slowly followed him to the booth and sat across from him. "I need a favor," he said as plainly and simply as possible once the annoyingly perky dom sitting across from him stopped acting so giddy.

"Oh? Really… tell me about this, this favor of which you speak, hm?" Jakotsu had had his elbows on the table at first, but he quickly sat straight up to readjust the loosely primped mess of styled black hair on his head, making sure to lick his lips with a demure smirk as he glanced at the silver-haired hottie across from him.

Inuyasha rolled his eyes at the disguised flirting and began to explain his situation. "There's a woman I like, but she's underage. And I do not want a repeat of, of Seattle, okay? The thing is," he went on but paused, not wanting to divulge too much juicy information that no doubt would be spread, "uh, bottom line is, I need to suppress my desires for her. That's why I am willing to take you up on that offer you made me several years ago--"

"Oh, you'll bottom for me?" His eyes lit up like violet wand electrodes.

"Under a few conditions," Inuyasha continued, somewhat perturbed at the interruption. Kami, this freak pisses the living shit outta me. He's so irritating! "Number one, you do not touch the ears--"

"But they're so cute--" Jakotsu offered in defense.

"Stop fucking interrupting me, you cock!" Jakotsu merely kept his smile and remained quiet for a moment longer. "Okay, Number two, you only touch me with your hands or with toys. You do not remove the hot pants or even unzip them. Number three, I'm not here to enjoy myself. I'm here for punishment--"

"But they should be one and the same," the dom dared to drawl out.

"Goddamnit, Jakotsu, stop being a fuckass--"

"Fuckass? You been watching Donnie Darko a lot lately?" He smirked now.

Inuyasha snorted and glared at him and started drumming the pointed tips of his fingers on the table surface with fury. The song overhead drew to an end, and the DJ seamlessly eased in the intro of the next song, "Fit For Flogging" by Leæ ther Strip.

"How fitting."

"Interrupt me one more time, and you'll have to use a strap-on if you wanna fuck your boyfriend. Got it?"

"Fine, fine. Go on." Jakotsu never let his smirk and glassy-eyed gaze fade.

Inuyasha huffed before continuing, "I'm going to need a brutal and painful bdsm scene laced with humiliation. And I'll need it at least once a week. However, this is to in no way extend beyond a professional business thing. If I so much as feel threatened or harassed by you, if you overstep my personal limits… I will not hesitate to tell your boyfriend you were hitting on me. I make all the calls here, and I'm only doing this to ensure that I can trust myself to keep my," he paused and glanced at the tabletop, feeling a bit remorseful, "to keep my dirty hands off the jailbait."

Jakotsu slipped into a more serious mood, his smile dropping. "You're really hurting about this, aren't you?" After no response from the hanyou sitting across from him, he went on. "You know, are you sure you wouldn't be better off seeing a therapist about this?"

Refusing to look at the man in leather before him, Inuyasha merely grunted and mumbled, "This is the only therapy I need. Trust me."

The dom grew concerned. "Does she know what you are?"

Inuyasha's eyes shot up to meet Jakotsu's as he managed to grind his next few malicious words out. "No. And if I have anything to do with it, she won't, not for quite a while."

Jakotsu grimaced slightly, his lips curling back from his teeth slightly. After a moment he tried to perk back up. "How about I get you a copy of the Do's and Don't's checklist so I can draw up exactly what you need." Inuyasha nodded dejectedly but said nothing more for the time being.

---

That night, when he returned home, he was simply exhausted. His back stung from the whip marks that had turned into weeping red welts, his jaw ached from being held open for so long with that metal dental jaw clamp, and his skin still felt rosy and warm from the lashings and beatings he had undergone.

He was very glad he would not be working for the next couple days, as the new moon was closely approaching. Recovering from such physical torture in a human's body would certainly be nerve-wracking. If it weren't for the severity of the situation, he would have waited until the following Thursday.

Inuyasha took a quick shower to rinse himself of the grime, real and imaginary, that no doubt coated his skin. In order to keep his fishnet shirt clean, he had driven home shirtless. By the time he had walked in the door, the sweat and blood had dried, and once in the shower, he winced at the sensations of the warm water hitting his bruised back and washing off, almost the color of rust if he were to hallucinate enough.

I'm receiving final indication
I'm aware my time is running out
I'm the next in line to see the fountain
come to rest or enter light

I'm wading out to sea
to love the same as you
don't say I'm all surrender
even though you know it's true
the danger is the shame
with things that I can't tame
danger is the shame

any life that I have run to
could be ending blindly in a silver light
and if my lies to myself return
then I'm sure that is no surprise

"Kagome, I'll protect both of us from myself." He watched the dirty water swirl and get sucked into the drain, and he sighed.

------------

A/N: song lyrics are from "Danger is the Shame" by Iris