Quickening:  Ya wanna know what I think is insulting?

 

Desiree:  Not really.  But I bet you’re gonna tell us anyway…

 

Quickening:  I think it’s insulting that there are SOME people on this site who take their readers for a complete bunch of morons.  Take a certain author-whom-shall-remain-nameless that was caught stealing an Inuyasha fanfic from an exceedingly popular author and turning it into a Sailormoon fic the other week…

 

Deedlit: Oh brother, here we go…

 

Quickening:  *Ignoring her muses, as usual*  Well, she absolutely insists by all that is holy that she didn’t steal that Inuyasha story and it was all mere coincidence that many of the scenes from all six of her chapters just happened to be worded nearly identical to the original fic, aside from the general plot being taken directly from the original fic.  She seems to think we all have the collective intelligence of an amoeba and cannot notice little details such as that.

 

Desiree:  I have to admit, that is kind of insulting…

 

Quickening:  Yeah.  Especially since she can’t lie correctly to save her life.  But she apparently doesn’t realize that there are many, many readers who aren’t stupid enough to fall for that old “I’m innocent!  Poor little me!” story and are giving her the what-for about it.  So now she’s insisting that she started her fic from a single chapter of some other fic who had ripped off the original Inuyasha fic but then stopped.  And apparently, she managed to get all six of her chapters out of that single chapter of that ripped off fic because all six of her chapters are obvious rip-offs of the original Inuyasha fic that she apparently never even read.  Only before she said she read the first two chapters of it and now again she’s insisting that she never read any such thing.

 

Desiree:  Wait…okay.  So she didn’t read it before she stole a fic, only she really did read it but now she didn’t read again and…huh?

 

Deedlit:  I’m confused.

 

Quickening:  You and me both, honey.  >_<  There are so many holes in that story it’s a wonder she doesn’t fall into them and break her neck.

 

Desiree:  Well, they do say ignorance is bliss…

 

Quickening:  Except…there’s a fine line between “ignorance” and “insanity”.

 

Deedlit:  Now, now.  Just remember, you were a kid once, too…

 

Quickening:  Don’t remind me.  I’m trying to avoid therapy.

 

Desiree:  Yeah…good luck with that…

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Chapter Ten

 

            Kagome couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so exhausted.

 

            Who would have thought it would be so hard to chase a rampaging ball of hair roughly the size of a triple-decker bus through a half-leveled forest?  Especially since it would stop every now and again to snap the top off a particularly delectable tree, stuff it into its mouth, and continue to scamper on, never mind that it was now looking slightly lopsided due to the growing bulge in its cheek pouch where all its food was being stored.  It didn’t really scamper anymore so much as lumber haphazardly along, but even so, it was pretty much impossible to catch the thing, at least not without killing it as Kagome insisted they not do.  Despite its height and obvious weight, the youkai was surprisingly fast on its feet.  It was also in a really bad mood.  Most hamsters tended to be foul-tempered to begin with, and as this one was being continually harassed by a bright red-and-white gnat who kept flitting around and poking it with a sharp, pointy stinger—obviously attempting to steer it in a direction that it did not want to go—it was beginning to feel a little miffed.

 

            The next time Inuyasha lunged at the youkai’s side, jabbing at it—“Gently!” Kagome called worriedly—the beast suddenly lunged around, quick as a snake, and sank its incisors into the hanyou’s trailing sleeve, taking out a chunk of forearm along with it.

 

            Inuyasha yelped—more in outrage than pain—and retaliated by swatting its head with the flat of Tetsusaiga’s blade.  “Leggo, ya hairball!” he snarled, and was rewarded with a squeal and a sudden toss that sent him crashing into the upper branches of yet another tree.

 

            Kagome and Miroku cringed at the sound of cracking branches and garbled curses and snarls.  “He’s gonna snap,” Kagome muttered, shaking her head.

 

            “Can you blame him?  This...”

 

            “Hamster,” Kagome supplied helpfully.

 

            “…is a rather annoying opponent, is it not?”

 

            Kagome pouted.  “It isn’t the hamster’s fault it swallowed a shard,” she sniffed.  “If it would just…finish digesting the thing or something.  I mean, it’s a rodent.  Everyone knows that rodents are just little poop-machines…”

 

            “I see nothing ‘little’ about this particular rodent.”  Miroku shot her a dry look.  “And when dealing with Shikon fragments it is best never to assume that things work…naturally.”

 

            “What, are you saying this fragment’s power is to give the youkai a bad case of constipation?” Kagome retorted.

 

            Miroku rubbed the bridge of his nose.  “I cannot believe I am even having this conversation,” he muttered.

 

            Kagome rolled her eyes.  “And this is from the guy who thinks discussing the finer details of sex makes an acceptable after-dinner conversation,” she snorted, then immediately clapped both hands over her mouth as her face once again took on the hue of an overripe tomato.  “I did not just say that…” she squeaked, glancing frantically at the tree where Inuyasha had formerly landed.  Luckily, he was too busy playing dodge-the-psychotic-hamster to pay any attention to her.

 

            Now Miroku, on the other hand...

 

“Oh, but you did,” his highly amused voice suddenly breathed into her ear, and she jerked her head around to find herself face-to-face with his laughing eyes, only an inch away from her own.  “I must admit,” he murmured, his breath ghosting hot across her suddenly-tingling lips, “that this is one conversation I’ve never actually had before, but I’d be most interested to hear your input on the matter…firsthand.  Perhaps…after dinner tonight?”

 

            Her eyes narrowed into a glare that could melt a volcano, and she pushed her palm against his face and shoved him away.  “This is all your fault!  You’ve turned me into a bloody pervert!” she yelled.

 

            He merely smiled at her.  “So…are you saying you accept?” he asked innocently.

 

            “Arrgh!”  Kagome only just managed to keep from yanking out her hair.  And his…but only because she knew he’d probably enjoy it.  Hmmph. 

 

Deciding it best to ignore the monk for the time being, she turned to fix her glare on the struggle going on not ten feet away from her.  A sweatdrop slid down the side of her head as she saw Inuyasha with his legs wrapped around the trunk of a tree, tugging with all his might on his sword, which was clenched firmly between the youkai’s teeth.  The youkai itself was pulling back with all its strength, legs scrabbling for purchase on the hard-packed earth, looking for all the world like an extremely hairy puppy playing a game of tug-of-war with its master.

 

“Oy vey…”  Kagome’s hand found its way to her forehead and she let it slide down over her face in a gesture of exasperation.  So much for Inuyasha the Wonder Dog.  Souta would be heartbroken if he could see his hero now…

 

“Inuyasha!” she bellowed.  “What the hell are you doing, making friends?!  Get up off your ass and kill the bloody thing already!  Get the friggin’ shard!  We don’t have all damned day, ya know!”

 

Both the youkai and the hanyou froze in their tracks, the latter looking at her with an expression of absolute confusion.  “B-but you said…” he began, and was immediately quelled by an all-too-familiar glare, which clearly stated that he was gonna be flattened several dozen times over if he didn’t shut his mouth and hop to it.

 

So he did.

 

“Tetsusaiga!” he bellowed, suddenly lunging forward to shove the huge Fang down the hamster’s throat.

 

The youkai shrieked and reared up as the sword ripped through its body from gullet to tail, effectively cutting it into two halves.  It fell to the ground, writhed for a few moments, and then lay still.  Kagome stomped over to the steaming remains and eyed them, muttering to herself.  “Stupid perverted bouzu.  Stupid shards.  Stupid hamster!  What the hell’s a hamster doing in Japan, anyhow?  Nasty little beasts don’t even come from here.  They aren’t even discovered ‘till the nineteen-twenties!  But does anybody follow good, old-fashioned logic in this place?  Nooooo!  Damn, I need an aspirin…”

 

Still muttering darkly, she located the shard, picked it out of the pile of remains, plopped it into her vial, and stomped away back toward the village, grabbing her bike out of Miroku’s hands on the way with a glare that could quell even Sesshoumaru.  The two men stood blinking after her in astonishment for a few moments, before Inuyasha turned a frank gaze toward the monk.  “You said something to piss her off again, didn’t you?” he asked bluntly, with a slightly smug grin on his lips.  “Keep it up and you’ll even break my record.”

 

Miroku sweatdropped.  “Er…it’s just a…girl thing…” he muttered in reply, retrieving his staff and walking away as serenely as possible.

 

~~~{~@  ~~~{~@  ~~~{~@

 

            Kagome closed her eyes as she lay sprawled out upon a relatively dry patch of grass on the bank of the river.  After the freak snowstorm had passed, it had begun to warm up again, causing everything to melt almost as quickly as it had frozen, and now there was as much mud as snow on the ground.  She was lucky enough to have found a spot with more grass than plain dirt, and after the day she’d had, all she wanted was to lay back, soak up some sunshine, and let her mind drift until the headache that pounded in her temples proceeded to fade away.

 

Of course, she preferred to do all this alone, but somebody seemed to have other ideas.

 

            She opened one eye and glared over at the quiet figure seated innocently a few feet away from her.  She didn’t know exactly when Miroku had joined her in her little trip to La-la Land, but she wasn’t about to call any undue attention to his presence, hoping that maybe if she ignored him hard enough, he’d eventually go away.  She wasn’t in any kind of mood for company; even Shippou had enough sense to stay away from her when she felt this bad, so why couldn’t he?  Aside from the headache, her stomach was cramping, which meant that Aunt Flow was about to stop by for her monthly visit, and she was out of aspirin.  Besides, she was so physically fit that she normally didn’t cramp much in the first place, but when she did, meds didn’t do anything to help anyway.  It had to be the excess anxiety from the past few days that was causing her to feel this rotten.  It always seemed to be the worst when she was under the most amount of stress.

 

            Maybe she should go home again, she thought.  Inuyasha wouldn’t be very happy, but maybe if she bribed him with extra ramen and a few bags of potato chips, he’d let her go for a few extra days?  Just until the worst of her cramps were over.  Besides…she was still aching to sink her teeth into a WacDonald’s extra-super-deluxe half-pounder cheeseburger with everything on it, a gigantic sized clover-mint milkshake, and a veritable bucket of salt-drowned French fries swimming in ketchup.

 

            The thought of all that junk food was enough to decide her right then and there to go back, and she eagerly sat up, so abruptly that she startled the half-asleep monk into falling over.  “Owwww,” she yelped, clutching her stomach when the sudden movement caused a gut-wrenching cramp to seize her lower spine and yank.

 

            “Kagome!  Are you all right?”  Miroku was suddenly at her side, hands on her shoulders as he anxiously checked her over to locate the source of her injury.

 

            “Ack!  I’m okay!  I’m okay!” Kagome yelped, swatting away his wandering hands.  “Stop that!  I said I’m…MirOku!  I said I’m fine!”  She finished off with a glare and a smack to the face when one hand “accidentally” traveled a little lower past her collarbone than she felt comfortable with.

 

            “Then why did you yelp?” he asked suspiciously, ignoring the red welt that now graced his right cheek.  “You were in pain.  What’s wrong?  Were you injured?”

 

            “No!  It’s…”  She trailed off, suddenly embarrassed, and refused to meet his eyes.  “It’s just cramps,” she mumbled, crossing her arms over her stomach protectively. 

 

            “Cramps?”  He eyed her curiously.

 

            She rolled her eyes.  “Yes.  Cramps.  You know, girl stuff.  That I told you about before, remember?”  She saw recognition dawn in his eyes and grimaced.  “They’re bad sometimes, that’s all.  Lots of stress, that kind of thing…”

 

            “Does the medicine from your world not help with this?” he asked, brow furrowing slightly.

 

            “It’s supposed to but…not always.  Not when they get this bad,” she replied, still not quite able to look at him.  She hated talking about personal stuff like this with her very best friends, and yet here she was discussing it with a renowned pervert like they were merely commenting on the weather.  Something was obviously short-circuiting in her brain here…

 

            “Is there anything else that might help?” Miroku was asking, an unusual amount of concern showing in his expression.  She eyed him curiously, wondering what in the world he was so worried about.  He seemed to read her thoughts, and gave her a sheepish grin.  “I dislike seeing you in any kind of pain,” he admitted, much to her surprise.

 

            She blinked at him, feeling flustered again as she always did whenever he acted so sweetly toward her.  “W-well…um…sometimes heat helps takes it away but…I don’t have a hot water bottle with me and…um…”  She trailed off and shrugged, not sure what else to say.

 

            He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.  “Yes.  Heat does tend to relaxes muscles,” he murmured to himself.  Then he blinked and looked down at her with a smile.  “Perhaps I can help,” he suggested.  “I know of a technique that will…”

 

            “So do I,” she interrupted hastily.  “It’s called a massage, and you’re not getting your hands anywhere near me, pal.  Besides, it isn’t my neck that needs relaxing.”

 

            He blinked at her, as though he had no idea what she was talking about.  “I meant, I know of a way to help you with your cramps.  Using heat,” he said slowly.  “I have no…hot water bottle, did you call it?  But I have something that might work just as well.  And I assure you, there is nothing perverted in my intentions.”

 

            She rolled her eyes, even as another cramp grabbed at her spine and turned it into a wince.  “And you think I’d actually believe you…why?”

 

            He sighed woefully.  “Dear Kagome, after everything we’ve been through together, you cannot accept that my help has nothing but the purest of intentions?  I am deeply wounded.”

 

            She eyed him skeptically.  “What are the chances of you actually shutting up until you get your way?” she asked snidely.  He smiled widely in response and patted his lap, and she huffed at him for a moment, before rolling her eyes and cautiously crawling closer to him, until she was settled between his bent knees with her back against his chest.  Her scowl deepened.  This position was all-too-familiar.  Obviously, the pain was making her crazy in the head, or else she never would have willingly crawled into his lap again.

 

            Feeling quite pleased with himself, Miroku pushed down on her shoulders so that she had to slump, until she was half-leaning against his chest and stretched out further on ground between his legs.  Then he clapped his hands together and rubbed them briskly to create friction, beaded cloth scrubbing over smooth flesh, while she watched his actions with all the suspicion of a deer caught in the sights of a silent hunter.  “Goodness, Kagome.  You act as though I’m about to eat you,” he admonished teasingly, and her spooked look melted into another glare while her chin jutted out stubbornly at the subtle challenge in his tone.  “Much better,” he murmured, fixing her with a sly look as he lowered his hands…and abruptly slipped the ungloved one beneath her shirt to hold it intimately against her lower belly.

 

            As expected, she yelped and immediately tried to squirm away, but he’d somehow managed to pin her without her even noticing, so that his legs were practically wrapped around her own, and other arm was around her shoulders, and of course, his hand was pressed gently to her stomach, fingers splayed against the soft flesh.  “Relax,” he murmured laughingly in her ear.  “Didn’t you say that heat sometimes helps to ease the cramps?”

 

            She just glared at him, which of course he ignored.  “Don’t you agree that my hand is very warm?” he continued conversationally.  “You told me so yourself, that night…”  He was amused to see her ears turn red at the memory…one of the many things she’d told him when her wits were too pleasure-dazed to know what she was saying at the time.  She was so cute when she was flustered…so to fluster her even further, he began a soothing caress back and forth across her belly, sliding gently from one hip to the other and back again, just below her navel.  She immediately stiffened in his arms and tried to pull away, pushing her back further into his chest in the process, which he didn’t mind one bit.  Besides…he knew she was enjoying his ministrations; he could tell by the sudden hitch in her breathing, and the way her heart was suddenly trying to beat its way through his forearm across her upper torso.  “Now, doesn’t that feel better?” he asked, resting his chin atop her soft hair as he concentrated on keeping his fingers from straying either upward or downward.  She stubbornly refused to answer, sitting like a wooden doll in his arms, but as minutes passed and Miroku’s soothing ministrations slowly began to take affect against her cramping muscles, she ever-so-slowly began to relax in his arms.

 

            He was right, she admitted grudgingly.  His hand felt as warm as any hot water bottle against her stomach, and between the heat and the slow, sensual caresses across her belly, she was starting to feel…well…pretty darned good about the whole situation.  Which was something rather dangerous to feel around him, she reminded herself sleepily, because it meant that she was once again letting down her guard and any second now he was gonna grope her and the way she was feeling at the moment she’d probably let him and…and exactly why wasn’t she moving again?

 

            And then her thoughts were interrupted when she felt his head lower a bit and his chin come to rest against her shoulder while his lips brushed gently against her neck.  Her eyes widened as he pressed a soft kiss to the skin under her jaw, and she swallowed, hard, not quite able to repress the shiver that ran down her spine at the contact.  “Have I told you today how good you smell?” he murmured, his voice deep and somewhat husky in her ear, as he nuzzled at her throat.

 

            “St-stop it.  Y-you’re doing it again,” she squeaked, frowning.

 

            “Doing what?” he questioned, sounding suspiciously innocent.  As usual.

 

            “You’re trying to s-seduce me again,” she accused.  Then, with slightly less heat than she’d hoped for, “Pervert.”

 

            A soft chuckle was her reply.  “So it seems,” came the unabashed response.  The arm around her shoulders shifted, and his glove hand came up to cup her chin and turn her face further to his own.  “Is it working?” he asked wickedly, before closing the scant distance between them to catch her lips in a soft, beguiling kiss.

 

            When he withdrew again, she was distressingly out of breath.  “Y-you promised to behave,” she muttered sulkily, trying not to meet his gaze.

 

            “Did I?”  His eyes crinkled with amusement.  At her glare, he chuckled again.  “I suppose I did promise something like that.  But I am behaving.  Have I tried to grope anything other than your stomach?”

 

            “…No,” she admitted sulkily.  “But you kissed me and I don’t recall telling you that you could.”

 

            “I don’t recall you telling me that I couldn’t,” he replied easily, looking not at all ashamed.  “But if I must ask your permission for such a simple thing…then may I please kiss you?”

 

            “You already did!” she huffed.

 

            “Yes, and I enjoyed it immensely.  So may I kiss you again?”

 

            “No!” she snapped while glaring at him, nonplussed.

 

            He sighed mournfully.  “As you wish,” he replied.          Then, with a playful wink, he added, “There.  You see then?  I can be a gentleman.”

 

            She stared at him, completely exasperated at his persistent desire to fluster her so totally.  Even now, his hand hadn’t let up on her belly, and his soft caresses, coupled with that mind-melting kiss, were causing her to feel a few things in certain areas of her body that she really didn’t want to be feeling right then.  But if she was being influenced that way, than she knew he had to be feeling the affects of their closeness, too, and in a fit of indignation, she decided that it was time to turn the tables.

 

            Before she had time to become embarrassed at what she was about to do, she snaked a hand down between their bodies until she came in contact with a warm, rigid bulge hidden beneath the monk’s clothes, which she immediately wrapped her hand around as much as she was able through the thick material of his robes.  She was straight away rewarded with a startled gasp, and the hand against her stomach jerked and clenched, fingers digging into her skin as Miroku stared at her with stunned eyes and open mouth.

 

She shot him a shrewd grin and gave his rather apparent erection a hard squeeze, which earned her a grunt and a slight bucking of his hips against her hand in return.  “Completely pure intentions, huh?” she said slyly, raising an eyebrow at him.

 

“K-Kagome…” he gasped, trying hard to control his breathing, not to mention the overwhelming urge to pounce her and strip her and let her fondle him without his robes being in the way…as long as he could return the favor, of course.  “I…that is…”

 

            She silenced his words with another squeeze that made him wince—this time with a bit of pain—then let go of him and shoved away.  “You, Sir, are no gentleman,” she sniffed haughtily, before climbing to her feet and flouncing indignantly back to the village. 

 

After all, there was an extra-super-deluxe half-pounder cheeseburger with her name on it just waiting to be scarfed.