Forged Dreams by Aimee Blue

A Nostalgic Future

Disclaimer: I don’t own Inuyasha.

With a mouthful of clothes pegs pressed between her lips, Kagome rolled her eyes at the insistent dinging of the shops bell. Apparently someone was attempting to garner her attention. People in this day and age were far too impatient, she reflected as she finished hanging the futons out on the line and picked up her basket. Stepping back into the house, she carefully picked up the random items of clothing destined for the washing machine, her sleeves tied back so that movement wasn’t hindered, her hair tied out of her eyes. The more the impatient customer insisted on dinging the infernal bell and creating a racket, the longer Kagome wished to delay them.

Finally, when the dinging got so frequent she began to worry about the poor bell, she loaded the washing machine quickly and hurried on through to the store front.

A thin pointy man with a spiteful glint to his spectacles and rather sharp elbows stood in the store, jabbing the bell repeatedly with his bony finger, his other hand holding his phone to his ear.

He talked in a drone, words so fast that Kagome could catch only spiteful words every now and then.

He continued to press the bell belligerently as she approached the desk and she pointedly covered it with her hand.

“Irasshaimase, How can I help you, Okyaku-san?” she asked politely.

He hung up with  pointed snap of his phone and a perilous quiver of his bottom lip. “I am here to collect Ito-sama’s order,” he sniffed, looking down his rather long nose at Kagome.

Kagome nodded with a respect that this rude person certainly didn’t deserve. “Just a moment,” she murmured, ducking back through the flap and into the storage space of the shop where Totosai liked to keep the orders that were ready for pick up.

“Ito... Ito,” she murmured as she perused the shelves, “Ah! So that’s where you were hiding!”

Taking the wrapped katana carefully from its resting place with dutiful care; Totosai would have a fit if he caught her swinging one of his precious weapons around like it was a stick. Heaven forbid.

“Here you are,” she hummed, laying the katana on the counter and removing the little name pin from the fabric used to wrap it.

Sniffing like she’d just told him his suit was a knock-off, he whisked it from the counter and flounced from the little store without so much as another word.

“Good riddance,” she mumbled under her breath, idly wondering whether she should brew herself some of the new jasmine tea she’d purchased at the convenience store.

Heralded by the tinkling of the shop bell, the gust of wind that accompanied her visitor swept her loose hair around her face and strew the freshly swept porch with cherry blossoms.

“Irasshaimase,” she greeted dutifully as she extricated her hair from her eyes. But when she met the gaze of her latest customer, she felt obliged to attempt to part her hair again, because surely her eyes were deceiving her.

“No way,” she gasped, knuckles turning white as she gripped the counter with enough force that the wood was in danger of splintering.

The stranger peered at her over his expensive looking spectacles, his eyebrows had initially furrowed as if in surprise, but his expression smoothed over so fast she was unsure that she’d even seen it.

“Hn,” he murmured, clearing away any doubt as to whether this person in the expensive suit, silky braid and designer spectacles was Sesshoumaru. Unlike the cherry blossoms that had heralded his arrival, it appeared that Sesshoumaru’s beauty was not fleeting; he was as beautiful now as he had been when he’d attempted to melt her. Though now there was an absence of killing intent for which she was incredibly grateful.

Though his hair had once been spun silver it was now an ordinary brown, though his markings had once rode proud on his forehead and cheeks they were now notably absent and though golden eyes were unheard of, his remained the golden that they had always been. It seemed Sesshoumaru believed in hiding his true nature up until a certain point, strange that he would refuse to glamour his eyes, but maybe a different colour would make his glare less effective?

“We’ve swapped places,” she twittered nervously, gesturing anxiously between the two of them, “once upon a time I wore modern clothes and you traditional.”

Sesshoumaru’s eyes tightened around the corners, as if fighting an impulse to laugh… or maybe she was hallucinating and he just had an itchy nose. Shaking her head fiercely as her mind threatened to wander off on another tangent, she sought to fill the silence.

“So, why are you showing up here out of the blue?” she asked, fingers twisting together and then untwisting nervously.

Blinking blandly, he spoke calmly, unhurried, quite the contrast to the bumbling Kagome, “I sent a letter.”

It was her turn to blink in mute astonishment, not because she doubted Sesshoumaru’s word, but because if it was very hard to fit the ruthless lord she had once known into the shoes of a twenty-first century businessman, it was even harder to imagine him sitting down to right her a letter.

“We didn’t receive any letter,” she murmured nervously.

Golden eyes flitted to the rickety pile of unopened mail teetering precariously on the edge of the counter.

“Or maybe we did,” she reconsidered anxiously, crossing the floor so the pile of mail that had been attempting to climb to the ceiling in Totosai’s absence. Finding Sesshoumaru’s letter was easy; it was the only letter with a wax seal in the shape of a crescent moon.

Yet, as she went to break the seal, a de-clawed hand – attached to a non-striped wrist – closed around her wrist and she found the letter had been whisked from between her fingers.

“Sesshoumaru-sama?” she inquired bemusedly.

Releasing her wrist in a motion that was almost gentle, he slipped the letter into the breast pocket of his suit under the confused stare from her blue eyes.

“It is for Totosai alone,” he expounded minutely, his left eyebrow raising a fraction of an inch in inquiry, “where is he?”

Kagome peered over Sesshoumaru’s shoulder, as if expecting the old sword smith to appear as if conjured by Sesshoumaru's presence alone. It became apparent that he wasn’t there fairly quickly and feeling slightly silly she met Sesshoumaru’s gaze, ignoring the quirked eyebrow that seemed to call into question her sanity.

“In the mountains somewhere,” she hedged loosely, an airy wave of one of her arms as a vague accompaniment.

Sesshoumaru blinked blandly and she froze onto the spot in confusion as he lifted the counter top to one side and walked right on through as if he owned the place. Once he was on the same side as her, he dropped the counter top with a snap that made Kagome jump just a little and she settled into the unnerving feeling that her only security blanket had gone. At least, up until that point she’d had the counter as a – rather flimsy – barrier between them it had helped calm her somewhat as simple minded as that was. But now she felt rather on edge.

Probing with a rather unsettling intensity, his golden eyes perused her light blue kimono, taking in the careful knot of her darker blue obi with a practised eye. Randomly, she wondered if this was what been put under a microscope felt like, and as he lifted a tendril of her loose hair to his nose and inhaled, she lost her grip on reality.

Sesshoumaru is sniffing my hair…

In a suit no less!

So, she’d obviously fallen into a parallel universe where instead of melting mikos, Taiyokai sniffed mikos. Of course.

Snapping out of her stupor, she refocused her eyes only to discover he was disorientating on the opposite side of the counter again. Either she was having hallucinations or he was deliberately messing with her mind.

It turned out that it wasn’t the latter; he’d merely taken a short break from sniffing a bemused Miko to collect the laptop case he'd brought into the store with him. However, the jury was still out on the former argument; she could very well be having an extremely vivid hallucination. Strangely, she was a little miffed; she’d always hoped that if she’d had a hallucination it would have been the sort that involved pink dancing elephants rather than possibly homicidal demons.

Grasping a firm reign over her vocal chords that seemed to have abandoned her moments prior, she managed to squawk, sounding frighteningly like Jaken, “What are you doing?” as he came back around to her side of the counter.

She feared the bland blink he offered would be his only answer, but apparently he was being chatty today. “I will wait.”

“For what?” she asked, tilting her head and blinking frantically in bemusement.

“Totosai’s return,” he stated, inflecting in a way that made it clear he thought her a fool for not figuring it out.

“Here?” she ventured tentatively, tucking her hair behind her ears and wringing her fingers together anxiously.

“Indeed.”

“B-but, that could be months!” she exclaimed, eyes wide at the thought of Sesshoumaru staying in their modest traditional house. Fretfully she recalled that the three spare bedrooms all had leaky roofs. She couldn’t let Sesshoumaru stay in a room with a leaky roof!

“I am immortal,” Sesshoumaru pointed out blandly. Kagome winced, of course, what was a month to an immortal? The only reason it seemed like a long time to her was because she was used to Chouko.

The cherry blossoms had lied; this beauty wasn’t fleeting, in fact he was planning on staying.

A/N: This was written for Nisou Tenshi’s Fourteen symbol challenge for the prompt cherry blossom. Hope you enjoyed it!