Kagome lay on her stomach on the bed, physically in top condition, but mentally exhausted. She rested her eyes a bit on her crossed arms, as Buyo curled up against her, purring contentedly. "Home, sweet home…" she sighed. "It all seems like a dream now, but it only a few hours ago I was… there."
Kagome sat up. "Then there's that Yura of the Hair girl. Wonder what that was all about," she continued her musings, "Of course, I took the Shikon Jewel back with me, so Inuyasha will want to kill me." She let out a regretful sigh. "Oh well, the well is closed now." She smacked her palms together in resolution. "I'm going to forget everything that happened!" she said in her resolve. "After all, I'm not going back there again!"
"Hey, gramps," Souta began. "Is the well ever gonna open up again?!"
"Of course not," answered the old fellow confidently.
"Oh, WOW! It's oden!"
"I sealed it with powerful scrolls," said the old priest and engineer confidently. "In all of the Heavens and Hells —and there are a lot of them— there lives no demon, ghost, or monster that can break through those shields."
"Oden! Oden! Oden! Oden!"
Turning to the marionette, Grandpa Higurashi offered comforting words to the robot-girl that had such a harrowing time in the Sengoku Jidai. "Kagome, you should trust in my mystical powers as well as my scientific prowess and…" He trailed off as he stared at her.
"I don't think she's listening…" commented Souta.
"Oden! Oden! Oden!" Kagome chanted, fawning over the clay pot of steaming deliciousness. She sighed, delicately sniffing at the enticing fumes of oden. Oden was her absolute favorite food in the world. She adored the stuff, and oden night at Higurashi shrine would be the time she would go absolutely crazy. Kagome wiped away the tears leaking out of her eyes. What a wonderful age I live in! she mused. Lifting a bowl in which she would hold her current portion of oden, and her chopsticks with which she would eat the oden, she cheerfully declared, "Itadakimasu! [Let's eat some oden!]"
But she had barely enough time to serve out her first helping and put a boiled carrot in her mouth when the sliding door flew open. Everyone froze. Kagome, the most surprised and closest to the disturbance (and the most disturbed by the disturbance), turned around to face the intruder.
Kagome pushed the rest of the carrot into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed, thus freeing her mouth for her next line. "Inu… Inuyasha?" she asked.
"You…" growled the dog-eared youth with snow-white hair and a pink kimono (Inuyasha: "I told you! It's LIGHT RED!!"). A scrap of paper with a scribble on it was stuck in his hair. He was also seething. "Who told you you could come trotting home, eh?"
Kagome continued to stare at him in surprise. "B-But how…?" she stammered, "Where… where did you…?"
"The well, fool! Where else?!" growled the dog-boy.
"The well? But—"
"You lie!" snapped the old priest. "These barrier scrolls were passed down through generation after generation in this shrine, and they—"
"—have an expiration date of about five years, you know…" Inuyasha said, plucking out the scrap of paper in his hair, which was one of Grandpa's new, super-duper, 100% guaranteed-to-work 'Monster B-Gon™' ofuda (patent pending).
Souta stared at Grandpa accusingly. Grandpa, for his part, weeped.
"C'mon! Let's go!" shouted Inuyasha, snagging Kagome by the arm and bodily dragging her with him.
Kagome checked a sudden, intense, and understandable impulse to deck him out of the house, as that would damage the walls. Instead, she planted her feet and grabbed hold of the doorframe. This brought Inuyasha up short as suddenly the limp ragdoll turned into a stone statue in the middle of a stride.
Inuyasha glared at the girl currently digging her socked heels into the door guide and her other hand gripping the door frame. Inuyasha pulled harder, and a small creak came from the door frame. For the next few minutes, Kagome and Inuyasha were engaged in a tug-of-war between them, and the door frame was losing. Kagome was about to let Inuyasha drag her outside, where she could beat him up properly. Kagome, however, wouldn't get this far.
"Hold it right there!" came the authoritative shout of Mei. She had fire in her eyes as she strode up to the two. Mama bear, it seemed, was about to do some protecting of her cub.
Inuyasha glared at the woman. "Why should I?"
"Mama, I'm alright! I'll be fine!" pleaded Kagome. She didn't want her mama hurt by this hot-headed meanie. "It's okay! Just don't do anything rash!"
Mei did indeed do something rash, just not what Kagome expected. "Your ears! Are they real?" she asked, reaching up to squeeze the two fleshy pinnae atop Inuyasha's head. Inuyasha didn't look pleased at this abuse.
"Me too! Me too!" pleaded Souta.
"MAMA!! This is no time to be feeling up his ears!" shouted Kagome, though this may be the pot calling the kettle black, 'cause she did that too. However, it was a fortuitous interruption, because she was lucky enough to spot a thin strand of something on Inuyasha's arm. "Inuyasha! You've got a strand of hair on your sleeve!" she shouted.
"What hair?"
Kagome plucked the long black strand of hair from his sleeve. "Can't you see it?" she asked. "OH!" she yelped, as the hair suddenly tightened around her hand, cutting into her pseudoflesh. "It's moving!" she shrieked, yanking it off.
"Kagome! You're bleeding!" Grandfather Higurashi said. "I just fixed your shell a few hours ago!"
"Are you okay, Kagome?" asked Mei, also seeing the blood (or rather, her artificial substitute). Kagome realized by then that she was the only one who saw the hair. And there was only one kind of hair that just about no one except herself could see, by the owner's own admission: Yura of the Hair.
Something was wrong.
The saber marionette came tearing out of the house at maximum speed…
"Kagome, wait!" Mei called out.
Kagome screeched to a halt. "What?"
Mei lifted Kagome's bowl of oden up to her, with a helpful cover to keep in the heat and reduce the mess from sloshing around. "Just bring it back, dear!"
Kagome's face threw out cheerful little sunrays. "Thank you!" she said cheerfully, and she was off again.
The saber marionette came tearing out of the house at maximum speed, and within fractions of a second reached the mini-shrine containing the Bone-Eater's Well. Kagome threw open the door, and gasped at what she found behind it. Inuyasha stopped just behind her. Kagome had found…
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(Posted Mon, 27 Dec 2004 03:35)
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