InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Last Girlfriend ❯ Chapter 9 ( Chapter 9 )

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

Disclaimer:Own Inu-chan I do not.
Own Itokuzu-pi(Sesshoumaru) I do not.
Own Miroku-san and Sango-san?
.......... -.- I don't and I wish I did.

Additional Disclaimer: I don't own author Valerie Frankel's book "The Girlfriend Curse", from which this story I've made a parody of(somewhat). So nobody sue me, or accuse me of plagiarism if you've read the book. I'm just altering some stuff, but the storyline remains indifferent all the same.

X) Oh yeah. The names of the characters, locations and events are plain fictitious.

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"You've got a little mouse problem." said Toutousai Iwata, Sapporo's "One and Only Exterminator," or so it said on his truck.

He met her on the porch of the Sapporo Inn. Sango had been living there for two days. That was how long it took to get Toutousai Iwata to get out to her house and investigate the vermin scourge.

"Well, which is it?" she asked. "Do I have a little mouse problem, or a little problem with mice?"

Toutousai chuckled, and adjusted his baseball cap with the logo of an ant with X-es for eyes. His other style choices included bib overalls, filthy Nike sneakers, and long ratty-white hair in a high ponytail. His face had more wrinkles than a 50-year old book. He could have been any age from fifty to sixty, but it was impossible to tell.

"The mice are small." he said. "The problem is big. That's what happens when a house is empty for too long in the warm weather. You get uninvited guests."

"So you'll get rid of them." Sango prompted. "Use the strongest poison you've got. Go in there with napalm. Nuke them to vapor."

Toutousai shook his head, kicked a post with his sneaker and said, "I don't like to kill a mouse for no reason."

"Aren't you an exterminator?" she asked, brow raised.

"Only one in town."

"Do you exterminate pests? Or just the competition?"

Toutousai spat on the ground, and she duly ignored it. "I prefer to relocate mice. To a better place."

"To Okinawa?"

"These mice were just doing what comes naturally." he explained with an air of a sage. "It's wrong to kill them for being animals. I'm sure you don't want the murder of hundreds of mice on your record when you go to meet your maker."

"Hundreds?" Sango asked. A pause, then, "My maker???"

"Kami-sama." Toutousai whispered.

She would have laughed, had she not been dumbfounded. "Wouldn't the mice be in a better place, as you say, with their maker? Who, I assure you, is not the same one who made me."

"Can't do that." he answered. "Mice have souls, Fuyuzuki-san. So goes on the cycle of karma. We'll all be one someday. Insects don't. I'm fine with killing bugs. But I have a strict policy about mammals."

Sango didn't believe in karma. She was Christian for crying out loud! And only one of the fewest in the Japanese population. Still, she had to agree that mice did have souls. But the day she was to be reborn as one was when she evolves and develops wings!

"You've got a gun rack on your truck!" she continued to protest, pointing at his truck.

"Hunting is different." he said. "I eat what I kill. I don't eat mice. Do you, Fuyuzuki-san?"

"Not yet." she growled, getting frustrated, missing the exterminators of Tokyo with their crush, kill, destroy, scorched earth policy with vermin.

"I recommend cats."

"You eat cats?" she turned to him, exasperated and tired.

"Cats eat mice." he explained. "What they don't eat, they'll scare away, into the field. That way, you won't have mice dying in the walls. They're small, but the rotting bodies stink. The smell never quite goes away. You'll need about thirty cats. Should take a month."

"Where am I going to get thirty cats?" she asked. Another pause, then, "A month?!"

"I can rent you the cats." he told her. "For eight thousand yen a week."

"Thirty-two thousand yen." she muttered, incredulous. Toutousai obviously thought her a rich urbanite who would pay anything.

"I can go to an animal shelter and get thirty cats for free." she said impatiently.

"Sixteen thousand?"

"Four thousand." she said firmly, a "not another cent" tone in her voice.

"I can work with that. I'll bring the cats over sometime next week."

"Next week?! Do it today!" she demanded.

Toutousai shook his head. "It takes some time to rustle up thirty cats, Fuyuzuki-san."

It takes Hokkaido time, where everyone moved at the speed of tort reform. The concierge at the inn made Sango wait two hours for her room. The bartender took half an hour to mix a martini. Kaede the broker, who'd sold her the mousetrap, hadn't returned her multiple urgent phone messages for two days. Toutousai Iwata, forty-five minutes late for their appointment, apologized by saying, "Inside an hour is on time" to her, before shaking his head in beady-eyed disgust at her impatience. Tokyo to Hokkaido was like going from sixty to zero in one second flat. She felt the emotional skid marks on her soul. Despite the martinis and traditional sake(the inn's home brew, given the name Kiseirei), both of which she'd been guzzling since she checked in, nothing erased the sight of mice rampaging around her bathroom, or the sensation of their claws on her toes.

"Do it." she directed to Toutousai. "Send in the cats."

Sango reached into her purse, removed her wallet and slapped several coins into his open palm. He wrote her a receipt.

Sango glanced back at the inn. Charming, quaint, floor-to-ceiling floral. It was enough to drive a city mouse insane. Plus, her room wasn't as cheap at 4000 yen per night, and at the rate she was going, she could look forward to another 200 yen a day in bar and restaurant charges. She was flush, but Sango Fuyuzuki hadn't been raised to throw her money out the chintz-curtained window.

"Where am I going to live?" she asked herself out loud.

Toutousai arranged his cap again and smiled, showing off his countrified dentistry. "You can stay with me if you like. I've got an attic room that's comfortable. You can shower behind the barn. Clean outhouse. No charge."

Sango looked at him as if he'd sprung a second head.

She could see it now. Toutousai, the mammal lover, trapping her in the attic. Spying on her barn showers. Doing what came naturally.

"Tempting offer, Iwata-san." she replied. "But I'm partial to indoor plumbing."

"Suit yourself."

Nodding his head to her, he got in his truck and drove away. Hating the idea of going back into the inn, Sango wandered off the porch, and across the parking lot to Kinata's general store. The store's slogan, painted in big letters on the side of the building, read, "If we don't have it, you don't need it."

She'd see about that.

Sango perused the organic produce aisle, the blue cheese department, the racks of flannel wear(from panties to slacks). She picked up a hummus-and-sprouts sandwich and a Diet Coke and took them to the register. The cashier, skinny in a tank top(no bra), nodded to her, flipping her three-foot-long braid.

"Need anything else?" she asked in all the courteousness of a Hokkaidan.

"You don't have it." Sango said.

"Then you don't really need it." she chirped.

"In which aisle can I find a habitable place to live? A friend? A man who will love me unconditionally?"

The cashier blinked. "I can check our inventory."

Sango sighed. "Don't bother."

After paying, Sango left with lunch. The cashier was glad to see her go. Raw emotional vulnerability unsettled the locals(it was stock-in-trade in Tokyo). Once outside, Sango noticed the giant bulletin board on the wall of the store. By rote, her eyes scanned the colored flyers tacked on the board, selling used tractors, teams of draft horses, cords of wood, steer slaughter service. She took out her cell phone. No service.

Suddenly exhausted, Sango leaned back against the bulletin board. All her plans had gone to shit. Her farm was a disaster. She couldn't start furnishing a house with a horde of cats inside it. The huge stretches of waiting had left her free to fantasize about Kuranosuke Takeda, which only served to deepen her impatience and loneliness. She wanted to contact him. Get some sympathy, some TLC. But she had no way to contact him. Her cell was useless. Inward Bound wasn't in the Upper Valley phone book.

Sango would have to rethink her course of action. Rin would give her ideas. She'd call Tokyo on the landline in her room. Maybe she'd let Rin convince her to move back to the city. Except, how humiliating would that be? Admitting defeat after only two days? No, Sango would have to be tougher than that. She would call Rin anyway and try to get some pity. Maybe she'd feel better.

Leaning forward, her shoulders lifting off the bulletin board, Sango caught her hair on a thumbtack. Pulling the strand free, she watched a red flyer flutter to the ground at her feet. She found the tack on the ground, picked up the piece of paper and read it. TIRED OF REPEATING THE SAME MISTAKES?
HAD ENOUGH OF FAILED RELATIONSHIPS?
YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR ROMANTIC DESTINY
TAKE THE MOST IMPORTANT JOURNEY OF YOUR LIFE
GO INWARD BOUND
SPOTS IN THE JULY SESSION STILL AVAILABLE
FOR MEN AND WOMEN
JULY 5 THRU AUGUST 3
CALL 802-555-4089 INWARD BOUND, INC. SAPPORO, HOKKAIDO

Holy shit, she thought.

Coincidence? Or was this destiny?

To be thinking of Kuranosuke, frustrated no to be able to reach him, only to have the number drop from the sky(bulletin board, whatever), and land at her feet? Coincidence, she'd once read, was merely the work of synchronicity, the cosmic spheres spinning at exactly the right speed and directions at the right time. As if everything in her life--the years in Tokyo, the move, the mice, the stay at the inn, buying lunch at the general store--had been leading to this moment, this message on red paper in 14-point Geneva. As advertised, Kinata's did have exactly what she needed. And Sango, a woman in touch with her needs, was not going to ignore this gift of fate.

She raced back to the inn, and up its steep stairway to her room. As she climbed each step, an image clicked through her consciousness like a slide show: the faces of her exes, breakup scenes, at a bar, the movie theater, over dinner, in bed. A flash to freshman English at Tokyo University.

"The best laid schemes of mice and men often go wrong. And they leave us nothing but grief and pain for promised joy." she recited American Robert Burns' poem to herself as she rushed down the corridor to her room. Each word of it was suddenly packed with new meaning(especially "mice" and "men").

Sango would invent a new scheme--impulsively laid, for promised joy. It wouldn't work to just call and ask to speak to Kuranosuke. He wasn't supposed to have romantic contacts. The Inward Bound directors might not even give him the message.

No. If she was going to get close to him, she'd have to enlist. Four weeks to demouse her house. The program lasted four weeks. Logistically, it couldn't be more perfect.

She called the number on the flyer. She had a twenty-minute conversation with a woman on the other end. She gave her credit card number, took driving directions, packed her suitcase and checked out of the inn.

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A/N: :walkie-talkie squawks: Desperately in Love has left the premises. Now headed "Inward".
Keep up the good work. :) So now, we have finally left the building, the inn itself, and are now headed for Inward Bound, where our Prince Charming of a monk awaits our prima donna for their first pas de deux! But first, R&R!