InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ The Great Mom Detective ❯ Chapter 2 ( Chapter 2 )
[ A - All Readers ]
By: LadyStina 
Mrs. Higurashi begins to examine some odd happenings that started 5 months ago with an analytical eye.
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Romance | Type: Fanfiction Sequel | Uploaded On: 09.24.2012 | Updated On: 11.21.2012 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.5K | Visits: 812 | Status: Completed
Mrs. Higurashi begins to examine some odd happenings that started 5 months ago with an analytical eye.
Anime/Manga: InuYasha Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Drama / Romance | Type: Fanfiction Sequel | Uploaded On: 09.24.2012 | Updated On: 11.21.2012 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.5K | Visits: 812 | Status: Completed
Blanket Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha or any of the characters listed below. They all are the property of Rumiko Takahashi. I am in no way affiliated with Takahashi, or VIZ Productions.
Chapter 2
Tonight Akina Higurashi decided to try to figure out what was going on once and for all. She sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and began jotting notes.
***FLASHBACK to 5 Months Ago***
It was mid-afternoon when Akina arrived back at their shrine after going on a shrine tour of Kyoto and Osaka with her father. He was staying in Osaka for another couple days to work on ‘shrine business.’ It was nice getting out of Tokyo, but not something that they could do very often. As they approached the front door of their house, Akina saw that the front door was boarded up. Fearing the worst, she started running towards the back door.
‘Did someone break in while we were gone? Who boarded up the door? Was Kagome home when it happened? Is she-‘ her thoughts broke off in mid-worry as she heard a familiar voice yelling from her kitchen.
“Oi, Wench! Hurry up! The humans are waiting on us!”
“I am hurrying! And I’m human too, you know!” replied another familiar, but faint voice that was yelling in another part of the house.
“Feh! Could have fooled me the way you… Oi, your family is back!” Inuyasha finished just as Akina entered the house.
“Inuyasha, dear, are you alright? What happened here?” Akina started asking her daughter’s dog-eared suitor right before he blushed fiercely that seemed to hide a mark on his cheeks. She filed that tidbit of information away because Kagome suddenly entered the room then and gave her a quick hug.
“Hi, Mama! I thought we were going to miss you entirely. We were just about to head out again,” Kagome pulled away and started edging towards the back door.
“Oh, no you don’t young lady,” Akina replied firmly. “You’re going to sit right here and tell me what happened to my front door.” Her tone brightened then, “And then I imagine it will be close to supper, and I insist that you two stay for that. I can’t in good conscience send my daughter and her…,” she glanced over to the still-blushing young man, “…friend into battle without making sure they have at least one decent meal in them.”
Kagome sighed and crept towards a chair to sit down. Just as she settled herself, Akina heard Inuyasha also sigh.
“I did it,” he said softly. Akina looked over at him and saw that his head was down and his ears were very low on his head. His posture was slumped and he looked defeated. She blinked at him. Right now he looked like a beaten dog expecting yet another beating.
Kagome must have noticed the same thing because she suddenly blurted, “But it was my fault! I can explain!”
Akina smiled on the inside. It was so cute watching them stand up for one another. She could care less if one of them broke the door as long as everything was ok. As part of a shrine family, she wasn’t worried about material things. They still had one working door after all, and eventually they could fix the other one.
“Kagome, don’t…” Inuyasha started before he was interrupted.
“Mama, we had gotten into one of our arguments, a bad one. We were yelling at each other as we walked to the house. When I got inside, I slammed the door on him and then yelled, ‘osuwari.’”
“GAH!” Inuyasha yelled as his subjugation beads lit up and slammed him to the floor. Akina had only heard that this would happen and was the first time she had seen it. Her hands flew up to her mouth as she gasped in alarm.
“Kagome, why?...” Inuyasha whined as he was stuck to the floor.
“Oh, Inuyasha! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” Kagome jumped out of her chair and ran to his side.
“Kagome!” Akina exclaimed. “That is a terrible thing to do to the boy you… you’re friends with! You need to take those things off of him!”
By this time the spell had released him and Inuyasha was standing up, “Keh. Don’t worry about it,” he muttered.
Kagome stood beside him slightly teary-eyed and grasped the rosary, “Mama’s right. That’s no way for me to treat my ma-ahhh….. friend. I should have removed them a long time ago.”
Inuyasha grasped her hand, “Feh, leave them alone, Wench. They’ve come in handy a couple times.”
“But…”
“We’ll talk about it after we kill Naraku.”
“If you’re sure… sorry…” Kagome replied softly.
Akina clapped, startling the other two. “Well, now that that’s straightened out, how does steak sound for dinner? And Kagome, you will stop using that rosary, right?”
“Yes, Mama…”
“Ok, dears, run along. I’ll let you know when supper is ready.” The two ‘just friends’ nodded then headed up to Kagome’s room. Akina just smiled after them. One day soon they would get their act together and admit that they love one another.
‘How can two intelligent people like that not see that they are both head over heels for each other?’ Just as she finished the thought, she remembered her own courtship with her late husband with a fond smile. They were just as stubborn and hot-headed as those two upstairs. Kagome had no idea how much history was repeating itself.
Akina reached into the ‘Cash for Kagome’ cookie jar to grab some extra yen to buy the steaks. Her hand encountered a lot more resistance than it should have. Puzzled, Akina removed her hand and looked inside. To her immense surprise, the jar was stuffed with yen. She never put that much in there, usually because she never had that much on hand. She pulled out enough to cover the steaks, then went upstairs.
As she neared Kagome’s room, she saw that the door to her daughter’s room was also broken. Akina sighed as she stood in Kagome’s empty doorway.
“So, another argument? Or was it the same one?” she asked as she pointedly looked at the door. Inuyasha was sitting in a chair with his arms crossed and tucked in his sleeves looking a little uncomfortable and Kagome was leaning over and lightly touching his face. Inuyasha flushed and looked away while Kagome quickly straightened and brought an arm behind her back and laughed nervously.
“Umm, it was the same one, Mama… I’m surprised that more things weren’t broken…” Kagome said nervously. Akina knew her daughter was hiding something. About the doors and it wasn’t at all natural to stand with an arm behind your back. Akina tried the Mother’s-Patented-I-Know-You’re-Hiding-Something-Look for a good minute. She was impressed. Her daughter shifted her weight from foot to foot and looked away, but never cracked.
‘One of the signs of growing up is that the Mom-looks don’t work anymore.’ She gave a mental shrug and continued with what she originally came upstairs for.
“Kagome, did you get all the supplies you needed? I’m about to run to the store.”
Kagome breathed a sigh of relief, “We still have plenty and didn’t have to buy anything else. There was enough in the supplies you keep for me in the pantry.”
“Ok dear, I’ll be back in a little while,” Akina replied as she turned to leave. Apparently Kagome never checked the cookie jar to notice the excess yen. Where did it all come from then?...
As she left she heard agitated mumbling and her daughter snap, “Keep still!”
“It smells!” was snapped back.
“Tough! And stop squirming!” Ahh…young love….
************
Dinner was a success the previous night. Inuyasha and even Kagome had a second steak. Akina had finally managed to convince the two ‘just friends’ to stay the night and leave in the morning. She was moving through her room getting ready before going downstairs to cook breakfast for the pair when she heard a commotion at the end of the hall. She poked her head out of her bedroom just as a door slammed. She saw Inuyasha standing outside of the bathroom door.
“Kagome, you ok?” she heard him ask softly. She couldn’t hear the response, but he continued to stand there looking worried. Akina frowned and headed out into the hallway.
“Inuyasha, what’s wrong?” she asked as she approached him.
He opened his mouth to answer, then the door slid open and Kagome stepped out and said, “I’m fine! My stomach was just a little upset, but nothing happened. I think I just ate too much last night.”
“Are you sure, dear? You could stay if you’re getting sick.”
“Nope! I’m fine! Come on, Inuyasha, let’s get ready to go back.”
It seemed that there was a whirlwind of activity that morning and the two ‘just friends’ were off through the well within an hour. Akina started cleaning the dishes from breakfast when the phone rang. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was past time when Kagome should have been at school.
Suspecting who was on the other end, she answered the phone, “Moshi, moshi. Higurashi Shrine.”
“Mrs. Higurashi?”
“Yes, this is her.”
“I’m calling to let you know that your daughter, Kagome, is not in school today.”
“Oh yes, I was going to call, but the time got away from me. It looks like Kagome caught a stomach bug and I kept her home. The poor dear has a terrible immune system, you know. We just never know when she’s going to be down and out.”
“Yes, I will say her fainting spell a few days ago gave us all a scare.”
“Fainting spell?” Akina asked, shocked. Kagome hadn’t told her about that, and since Kagome was in reality a healthy girl, that was really surprising.
“Umm…yes. It looks like your brother-in-law picked her up after we spoke to your sister on the phone. A Sango and Miroku Konnaninu,” the voice on the phone continued. As an only child, this was another surprise to Akina.
“Oh…uh…yes,” Akina ad-libbed. She never was good going off-script when she was lying. That was also why her father usually answered these calls. “They…um…must not have wanted to worry me. Oh hold on,” she covered the receiver with one hand and said, “yes dear?” then waited a moment. She got back on the phone, “I need to go now, my daughter needs some medicine. Thanks for calling.” She hung up without giving them time to say anything else.
‘Sango and Miroku…those are the names of Kagome’s friends… But they can’t be alive still, they’re humans, right? And Konnaninu? Difficult dog? What a strange name…’
******END FLASHBACK******
Akina jotted down on her notepad:
1)Spoke kind words to Inuyasha – same day received a thank you card from “I” for kind words.
2)Kagome and Inuyasha broke doors in the house – enough yen stuffed in “secret” cookie jar for repairs
3)Kagome gets sick in school – picked up by “sister” Sango & Miroku (uncommon names of Kagome’s friends in the past) Konnaninu (Difficult Dog). Both names added by someone else to Kagome’s pick-up list.
She examined what she wrote down. Number one could just be a coincidence. Could have been for another “Mrs. Higurashi,” and the sender got the address wrong. Or it was from someone she spoke to in passing at the shrine. Akina was a kind woman, so she gave out kind words all the time. Maybe someone was just thanking a stranger.
As for the yen in the cookie jar, she had never asked her father about it, so that was still a possibility. Or Souta could have taken up selling his school supplies in an effort to help out his sister and his hero. He did go through an awful lot of pencils… She would need more facts to officially count this one.
The last point was the most interesting. It was interesting enough that she remembered the names five months later, anyway. Out of curiosity, she grabbed the Tokyo phonebook and attempted to find the surname ‘Konnaninu.’ And just as she expected, it wasn’t there. It was possible that if the name was real that they had an unlisted number, but the name sounded odd. Someone in the past would have had to have chosen to call their clan ‘difficult dog,’ and she couldn’t imagine that.
And then Sango and Miroku, names of Kagome’s friends in the past… Kagome’s human friends… But her other friends aren’t human. Akina’s future son-in-law is part-youkai and youkai are long-lived. How long is long, though? Could Inuyasha still be alive? After 500 years? But he would be too proud to come up with ‘Difficult Dog.’ He would have come up with ‘fierce,’ or ‘dangerous,’ or something else slightly threatening… ‘Difficult’ was a teasing name. One that he wouldn’t normally put up with…
Akina shook her head. There was not near enough evidence to support the slightly wild theory she just came up with. She bent down to her pad of paper and began to recall the next odd incident.
-tbc-
Chapter 2
Tonight Akina Higurashi decided to try to figure out what was going on once and for all. She sat down at the kitchen table with a pad of paper and began jotting notes.
***FLASHBACK to 5 Months Ago***
It was mid-afternoon when Akina arrived back at their shrine after going on a shrine tour of Kyoto and Osaka with her father. He was staying in Osaka for another couple days to work on ‘shrine business.’ It was nice getting out of Tokyo, but not something that they could do very often. As they approached the front door of their house, Akina saw that the front door was boarded up. Fearing the worst, she started running towards the back door.
‘Did someone break in while we were gone? Who boarded up the door? Was Kagome home when it happened? Is she-‘ her thoughts broke off in mid-worry as she heard a familiar voice yelling from her kitchen.
“Oi, Wench! Hurry up! The humans are waiting on us!”
“I am hurrying! And I’m human too, you know!” replied another familiar, but faint voice that was yelling in another part of the house.
“Feh! Could have fooled me the way you… Oi, your family is back!” Inuyasha finished just as Akina entered the house.
“Inuyasha, dear, are you alright? What happened here?” Akina started asking her daughter’s dog-eared suitor right before he blushed fiercely that seemed to hide a mark on his cheeks. She filed that tidbit of information away because Kagome suddenly entered the room then and gave her a quick hug.
“Hi, Mama! I thought we were going to miss you entirely. We were just about to head out again,” Kagome pulled away and started edging towards the back door.
“Oh, no you don’t young lady,” Akina replied firmly. “You’re going to sit right here and tell me what happened to my front door.” Her tone brightened then, “And then I imagine it will be close to supper, and I insist that you two stay for that. I can’t in good conscience send my daughter and her…,” she glanced over to the still-blushing young man, “…friend into battle without making sure they have at least one decent meal in them.”
Kagome sighed and crept towards a chair to sit down. Just as she settled herself, Akina heard Inuyasha also sigh.
“I did it,” he said softly. Akina looked over at him and saw that his head was down and his ears were very low on his head. His posture was slumped and he looked defeated. She blinked at him. Right now he looked like a beaten dog expecting yet another beating.
Kagome must have noticed the same thing because she suddenly blurted, “But it was my fault! I can explain!”
Akina smiled on the inside. It was so cute watching them stand up for one another. She could care less if one of them broke the door as long as everything was ok. As part of a shrine family, she wasn’t worried about material things. They still had one working door after all, and eventually they could fix the other one.
“Kagome, don’t…” Inuyasha started before he was interrupted.
“Mama, we had gotten into one of our arguments, a bad one. We were yelling at each other as we walked to the house. When I got inside, I slammed the door on him and then yelled, ‘osuwari.’”
“GAH!” Inuyasha yelled as his subjugation beads lit up and slammed him to the floor. Akina had only heard that this would happen and was the first time she had seen it. Her hands flew up to her mouth as she gasped in alarm.
“Kagome, why?...” Inuyasha whined as he was stuck to the floor.
“Oh, Inuyasha! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!” Kagome jumped out of her chair and ran to his side.
“Kagome!” Akina exclaimed. “That is a terrible thing to do to the boy you… you’re friends with! You need to take those things off of him!”
By this time the spell had released him and Inuyasha was standing up, “Keh. Don’t worry about it,” he muttered.
Kagome stood beside him slightly teary-eyed and grasped the rosary, “Mama’s right. That’s no way for me to treat my ma-ahhh….. friend. I should have removed them a long time ago.”
Inuyasha grasped her hand, “Feh, leave them alone, Wench. They’ve come in handy a couple times.”
“But…”
“We’ll talk about it after we kill Naraku.”
“If you’re sure… sorry…” Kagome replied softly.
Akina clapped, startling the other two. “Well, now that that’s straightened out, how does steak sound for dinner? And Kagome, you will stop using that rosary, right?”
“Yes, Mama…”
“Ok, dears, run along. I’ll let you know when supper is ready.” The two ‘just friends’ nodded then headed up to Kagome’s room. Akina just smiled after them. One day soon they would get their act together and admit that they love one another.
‘How can two intelligent people like that not see that they are both head over heels for each other?’ Just as she finished the thought, she remembered her own courtship with her late husband with a fond smile. They were just as stubborn and hot-headed as those two upstairs. Kagome had no idea how much history was repeating itself.
Akina reached into the ‘Cash for Kagome’ cookie jar to grab some extra yen to buy the steaks. Her hand encountered a lot more resistance than it should have. Puzzled, Akina removed her hand and looked inside. To her immense surprise, the jar was stuffed with yen. She never put that much in there, usually because she never had that much on hand. She pulled out enough to cover the steaks, then went upstairs.
As she neared Kagome’s room, she saw that the door to her daughter’s room was also broken. Akina sighed as she stood in Kagome’s empty doorway.
“So, another argument? Or was it the same one?” she asked as she pointedly looked at the door. Inuyasha was sitting in a chair with his arms crossed and tucked in his sleeves looking a little uncomfortable and Kagome was leaning over and lightly touching his face. Inuyasha flushed and looked away while Kagome quickly straightened and brought an arm behind her back and laughed nervously.
“Umm, it was the same one, Mama… I’m surprised that more things weren’t broken…” Kagome said nervously. Akina knew her daughter was hiding something. About the doors and it wasn’t at all natural to stand with an arm behind your back. Akina tried the Mother’s-Patented-I-Know-You’re-Hiding-Something-Look for a good minute. She was impressed. Her daughter shifted her weight from foot to foot and looked away, but never cracked.
‘One of the signs of growing up is that the Mom-looks don’t work anymore.’ She gave a mental shrug and continued with what she originally came upstairs for.
“Kagome, did you get all the supplies you needed? I’m about to run to the store.”
Kagome breathed a sigh of relief, “We still have plenty and didn’t have to buy anything else. There was enough in the supplies you keep for me in the pantry.”
“Ok dear, I’ll be back in a little while,” Akina replied as she turned to leave. Apparently Kagome never checked the cookie jar to notice the excess yen. Where did it all come from then?...
As she left she heard agitated mumbling and her daughter snap, “Keep still!”
“It smells!” was snapped back.
“Tough! And stop squirming!” Ahh…young love….
************
Dinner was a success the previous night. Inuyasha and even Kagome had a second steak. Akina had finally managed to convince the two ‘just friends’ to stay the night and leave in the morning. She was moving through her room getting ready before going downstairs to cook breakfast for the pair when she heard a commotion at the end of the hall. She poked her head out of her bedroom just as a door slammed. She saw Inuyasha standing outside of the bathroom door.
“Kagome, you ok?” she heard him ask softly. She couldn’t hear the response, but he continued to stand there looking worried. Akina frowned and headed out into the hallway.
“Inuyasha, what’s wrong?” she asked as she approached him.
He opened his mouth to answer, then the door slid open and Kagome stepped out and said, “I’m fine! My stomach was just a little upset, but nothing happened. I think I just ate too much last night.”
“Are you sure, dear? You could stay if you’re getting sick.”
“Nope! I’m fine! Come on, Inuyasha, let’s get ready to go back.”
It seemed that there was a whirlwind of activity that morning and the two ‘just friends’ were off through the well within an hour. Akina started cleaning the dishes from breakfast when the phone rang. She glanced at the clock and saw that it was past time when Kagome should have been at school.
Suspecting who was on the other end, she answered the phone, “Moshi, moshi. Higurashi Shrine.”
“Mrs. Higurashi?”
“Yes, this is her.”
“I’m calling to let you know that your daughter, Kagome, is not in school today.”
“Oh yes, I was going to call, but the time got away from me. It looks like Kagome caught a stomach bug and I kept her home. The poor dear has a terrible immune system, you know. We just never know when she’s going to be down and out.”
“Yes, I will say her fainting spell a few days ago gave us all a scare.”
“Fainting spell?” Akina asked, shocked. Kagome hadn’t told her about that, and since Kagome was in reality a healthy girl, that was really surprising.
“Umm…yes. It looks like your brother-in-law picked her up after we spoke to your sister on the phone. A Sango and Miroku Konnaninu,” the voice on the phone continued. As an only child, this was another surprise to Akina.
“Oh…uh…yes,” Akina ad-libbed. She never was good going off-script when she was lying. That was also why her father usually answered these calls. “They…um…must not have wanted to worry me. Oh hold on,” she covered the receiver with one hand and said, “yes dear?” then waited a moment. She got back on the phone, “I need to go now, my daughter needs some medicine. Thanks for calling.” She hung up without giving them time to say anything else.
‘Sango and Miroku…those are the names of Kagome’s friends… But they can’t be alive still, they’re humans, right? And Konnaninu? Difficult dog? What a strange name…’
******END FLASHBACK******
Akina jotted down on her notepad:
1)Spoke kind words to Inuyasha – same day received a thank you card from “I” for kind words.
2)Kagome and Inuyasha broke doors in the house – enough yen stuffed in “secret” cookie jar for repairs
3)Kagome gets sick in school – picked up by “sister” Sango & Miroku (uncommon names of Kagome’s friends in the past) Konnaninu (Difficult Dog). Both names added by someone else to Kagome’s pick-up list.
She examined what she wrote down. Number one could just be a coincidence. Could have been for another “Mrs. Higurashi,” and the sender got the address wrong. Or it was from someone she spoke to in passing at the shrine. Akina was a kind woman, so she gave out kind words all the time. Maybe someone was just thanking a stranger.
As for the yen in the cookie jar, she had never asked her father about it, so that was still a possibility. Or Souta could have taken up selling his school supplies in an effort to help out his sister and his hero. He did go through an awful lot of pencils… She would need more facts to officially count this one.
The last point was the most interesting. It was interesting enough that she remembered the names five months later, anyway. Out of curiosity, she grabbed the Tokyo phonebook and attempted to find the surname ‘Konnaninu.’ And just as she expected, it wasn’t there. It was possible that if the name was real that they had an unlisted number, but the name sounded odd. Someone in the past would have had to have chosen to call their clan ‘difficult dog,’ and she couldn’t imagine that.
And then Sango and Miroku, names of Kagome’s friends in the past… Kagome’s human friends… But her other friends aren’t human. Akina’s future son-in-law is part-youkai and youkai are long-lived. How long is long, though? Could Inuyasha still be alive? After 500 years? But he would be too proud to come up with ‘Difficult Dog.’ He would have come up with ‘fierce,’ or ‘dangerous,’ or something else slightly threatening… ‘Difficult’ was a teasing name. One that he wouldn’t normally put up with…
Akina shook her head. There was not near enough evidence to support the slightly wild theory she just came up with. She bent down to her pad of paper and began to recall the next odd incident.
-tbc-