DEMONS, INC.

Chapter 10: Whatever Happened to the Shikon, Anyway?

When Kagome woke up, she was surrounded by soft white linens. She was in a warm bed and everything around her was blindingly white, from the walls to the sunlight coming in through the partly opened window. In a white plastic chair next to her bed was her mother.

"Mommy!" Kagome shouted at the top of her lungs. Her mother, who had been dozing off in the morning calm, was startled into the waking world. She smiled broadly to see her only daughter was doing better.

"Hello, sweetheart."

"Wait, you're not gonna tell me it was all a dream, are you?" Kagome asked with a wince. What if it had been? What if the demons who had become her best friends were no more than figments of her imagination? Oh well, that meant Houjou was still fair game.

"That what was all a dream?" her mother asked placidly as she took her daughter's hand. "Don't get too worked up, dear, you have a lot of recovering left to do."

Kagome blinked and looked around, realizing she was in a hospital room. After wiggling around some and testing herself out, she found that she had a brace around her leg, supporting her ankle, and had her head wrapped in bandages. The injuries matched the ones she had received in Naraku's torture chamber (except that her jaw only felt bruised), but the fact that she thought she had healed in the demon world (miraculously in a few hours) didn't lend much credit to her crazy adventure there.

"How long was I gone?" she asked, squinting at her mother. A sad look overcame the older woman's face and she glanced towards the window.

"Four and a half months," she said. "You were found yesterday evening wandering out by a train station in the middle of Tokyo, asking everyone for ice cream. You were handing out blank cheques with a signature belonging to 'Inuyasha' as well. You just disappeared one day and despite how much we looked, we couldn't find anything...almost as if you had vanished. The police were baffled, but had investigators looking for you...we had television ads..."

"You mean I've had a television ads in two different worlds and I never got to see either of them?!" she howled. "Oh, the pain is tremendous!"

"Kagome, love, please calm down." Then hesitantly, she asked, "Where have you been, darling?"

"Mama, you wouldn't believe me if I told you, so because I'm going to tell you, please don't tell anyone else about it and don't throw me in with the nutters!"

Her mother smiled. "Of course, Kagome. I'll listen to whatever you have to say."

With her whole arsenal of expressive hand gestures, Kagome told her mother the entire story (except the part where she almost kissed Inuyasha) and only fell out of bed once.

* * *

Inuyasha, Miroku, Naraku, Kikyou, Sango, Hiten, Midoriko, and Shippou were around a giant conference table in the Demons, Inc. building. There was a cup of steaming coffee on the surface of the laminated desk in front of each chair.

They were all attacking each other like wild animals with nothing to lose. The coffee had been there since they arrived, and who knew why.

"Tell me why you want the Jewel activated!" Inuyasha demanded.

"Duh!" Kikyou yelled from across the table, ducking as Shippou flung a cup of coffee at her. "I was going to change myself into a demon and take over the human world!"

"Holy crap! And why were Kagome and Midoriko brought here?" Sango shouted.

"Duh!" Hiten added gracefully. "They're descended from powerful priestesses!"

"So what?!" Kikyou barked. "I'm descended from a powerful priestess, too. Midoriko was brought here because I don't want to die in the process of activation, which I heard was required for the Jewel!"

"Kagome, to be honest, is someone we just randomly plucked out of the human world," Naraku explained, lunging powerfully at Inuyasha, who blocked him with Tessaiga. It was pure genius cornering them in here, Inuyasha thought, since Naraku couldn't use his Miasma technique lest he kill himself in the closed-in room.

"And why did you want the Shikon activated, Naraku?!" Miroku demanded as he punched Hiten in the gut.

"Duh! I am going to use its power to open a gate into the human world, in which case I will take over the human world and turn them into slaves!"

"Fuck, that's unoriginal!" Inuyasha barked. "I'm going to fucking slice your head off!"

And that's exactly what he did. Everyone stared down at the lifeless body as it bled onto the attractive blue carpet.

"Wow, that was easy," Inuyasha said, just as the police arrived to arrest them all, including Naraku, who was now wanted on multiple charges and dead or not was going to have to sit through his execution. Then they punted Midoriko back into the human world as a favor, since they didn't want to waste tax money on figuring out what to do with her. Afterward, the Shikon Jewel was appropriately activated with a switch on its side and used to close off all ties with the human world, effectively putting Miroku and Inuyasha out of a job.

No one knows why this wasn't thought of before all the trouble got started, anyway, although there was a pretty convincing rumor that Naraku---who had been boss of Demons, Inc., since it was founded hundreds of years ago---was the one who actually opened gateways to the human world to accomplish a lot of wealth: first in the form of the business, which was supported both by taxes and by private investors although became an immense cash cow by offshoots such as baseball trading cards, TV shows, and other things, and second from trafficking humans into random slaveries on the other side of the globe, where the demons weren't afraid of humans at all. This convincing rumor would be proven true two years later after an extensive investigation that mostly consisted of cleaning up after Kagome.

Then there was the problem of why the hell Naraku had been making such a big fuss about kidnapping one single human when he had been trafficking hundreds of them for years, furthermore considering he was the one who opened the gates anyway and could, as boss of Demons, Inc., cross over any time he wanted. In the end people decided it got started with an argument that Naraku had gotten into with his favorite employee Kagura when she threatened to quit working so that she could move across the border to live with her fiance and his adopted daughter. The Shikon Jewel would supposedly allow him to have more control over gates to and from the human world instead of relying on random luck to uncover new interdimensional gates. That didn't really make a whole lot of sense from Naraku's point of view, but people decided to leave it at that since Naraku was dead and anyway the tax dollar flow had been moved into paying for uncovering a scam involving a lot of broken juicers. Shippou had finally gotten a chance to sue somebody.

* * *

Kagome frowned as she caught sight of her reflection in a shop window. It was winter now, so she was wearing her very fashionable cream-colored coat as she clipped along the walkway in her brand new pumps. She'd been back for over a year. She had graduated high school (and she had made an A on that Calculus grade, after all) and moved on to university. Over time she became more and more convinced that the demon world did exist, despite the fading intensity of her memories, and the affront on logic such a belief presented. After all, how else would she have come home wearing Inuyasha's boxer shorts? Not to mention...

She opened up her purse and pulled out a tiny folded paper. It was a cheque; one of the flash cards that she had made for the other Kagome who turned out to be the woman named Midoriko. She unfolded it and read Inuyasha's name printed on the top corner again. It was silly to hold on to, but it featured Shippou's drawing on it of a cow wearing sunglasses with a shiny tooth sparkle, and furthermore it had Inuyasha's name on it. Unfortunately, she'd handed out all the ones that had his signature, but as she'd forged those anyway it wasn't too much of a problem.

At first, she thought that after her daring leap back into the human world Inuyasha would probably come after her. Now she wondered why she had ever thought that way. Of course he wouldn't...he had vehemently wanted to get her out of his hair. Which was a shame because she so loved to put things in his hair, including fruit preserves, toothpaste, bubblegum, and attractive twigs.

She sighed and moved on. She was visiting her family for the holidays and was on her way home from having dinner with her childhood friends. However, even that hadn't gotten her mind entirely off those four and a half months that had impacted her life so much. What if Naraku had managed to kill or hurt one of her friends? (And why had he been so sensitive about his dog?) She wondered if Midoriko had made it home. Wondered, wondered, wondered...if they ever thought about her...

* * *

"Hey, Inuyasha," Shippou said as he burst into the kitchen, eyes gleaming. "Guess what I've got?"

"What do you got, runt," Inuyasha answered in a monotone voice. Now that he was out of jail (he broke down the bars for himself and the others, and no one had bothered chasing after them because of the whole tax dollar flow thing), he was extremely bored. Miroku was part of the camera crew for a local news team, now that Demons, Inc. was gone, and Inuyasha had moved on to be a hunter. Despite the fact that everyone else was happy and doing well---Sango and Miroku were hanging out all the time, Shippou was making progress in math class, and Izayoi had forgiven him and cheerfully called him all the time again---he felt clouded by a constant sense of ennui.

Shippou gave an evil little chuckle, the kind that had been so prevalent when he had schemed with Kagome so long ago. He opened up his hand and dropped something small on the table in front of Inuyasha.

Inuyasha stared as a small pink gem stone rolled to a stop. He smirked down at it.

"You fucking little thief..."

* * *

Kagome paused as she returned to the grounds of her family's home. She moved to a large tree, with paper wishes wrapped around the branches. She glanced at it for a moment, then looked at the cheque in her hand. Sadly she walked past the tree until she came to the small river that moved over the property. She crouched down, keeping her knees carefully bent to avoid any skirt problems, and stared down into the icy water as it musically carried on its way.

"This is getting silly," she told herself. "So, goodbye, Inuyasha." She looked at the cheque again. Clenching her teeth she ripped it in half. As tears rolled down her face she tore the remaining pieces again and again and again and dropped them into the water. Blurry eyed, she watched them disappear with the current. She covered her face with her hands and sobbed quietly. She didn't understand why it was so important to her, but she knew that she couldn't linger anymore despite how much the demon world had been on her mind. She had to get it all out of her system. In a week she would be back at school. There were people all around her waiting to be her friends. There was a human man out there who could make her happy.

"Oh, the ironic pain is tremendous," she mumbled through her sobs. "I wanted so badly to leave! Now I wish I was still there..."

* * *

If Kagome had bothered to ever watch the television (she was so sick of infomercials that by the time she got home even the sight of a TV was enough to make her scream---much to her brother's annoyance, since he now had a portable one that he carried around with him everywhere he went, including the toilet, not that Kagome knew that part), she would have known that a very unusual thing was happening all over the world. But she went on obliviously, returning to school and diving right back into her studies. She befriended people in her classes and felt, really, that she was learning how to live in the human world again quite nicely. It was calmer than the demon world. She got to wear nice clothes again (actually, her time of being dirty and poorly dressed there had inspired her to become extremely fashionable upon her return to the human world). And, best of all, she was allowed to go out in public without smelling like the inside of someone's shoe after that shoe had gone through three different people who respectively worked on a ranch, in a zoo, and as a garbage disposer.

However, just to torture herself (she supposed that must be it), she did work in a bakery that made wedding cakes, to help pay for her education. With her own lack of romance, she grew accustomed to being happy with everyone else's. It was nice enough when it wasn't depressing.

* * *

"Alright, this has to be it," Inuyasha grumbled to himself. "Hey, old man!"

"Ehhh?" an elderly fellow replied to Inuyasha's grumping. The old man blinked multiple times at the dog ears on his head, but Inuyasha merely flattened them and growled a little.

"Where's this girl?" He shoved a driver's license under the man's nose. Kagome had left it at his apartment, along with some of her other possessions. (Including the pair of clothes she had originally arrived in, a list of nail polishes that completely baffled Inuyasha, and a candy wrapper.)

"Probably inside the house..." the old man said. It was a pleasant spring afternoon and all the university kids were out for spring break (or reading week or whatever you happen to call it in your country). "Wait. No, she will be by the river...or the well-house...hmm...that lazy girl needs more chores!"

The elderly man tottered off as Inuyasha gave him a deadpan stare. After he shook it off, he trotted around the yard and wondered if Kagome actually was here. He'd been looking for an awfully long time and creating a big stir in the process. He was a little miffed that Kagome wasn't helping out at all. The least she could do was give a call to the cell phone number he kept shouting any time a camera crew located him. (It really was becoming like a rabid game of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?)

He stopped when he saw her. Finally! After so long of searching! She was standing on the river bed. It was still a little chilly, since the spring was new, so she was wearing a light cardigan sweater over a cheerful dress. She looked unnaturally serious and maybe a bit deflated.

"Hey, bitch!" he shouted. "Get your fucking ass over here!"

Kagome's head snapped around with practically demonic speed, jaw dropping. She blinked a few times.

"What the fuck are you staring at?!" Her jaw snapped shut and her mouth took on a happy smile.

"Inuyasha!" She bolted at him until her arms had latched around his waist. "Where have you been?! I was waiting for you!"

Inuyasha tried to pry her off but there was no removing of that one. She might have been going for a world record.

"Hey you, look at me!"

Kagome did, managing a slightly scary smile. "You know what, Inuyasha?"

He narrowed his eyes. "What?"

"I missed you!" she said as she shoved him into the cold river. He went in with a huge splash as Kagome laughed manically. "Now you'll never escape me!"

And that was the truth. Inuyasha and Kagome, with the Shikon Jewel, changed the well-house into the only permanent portal between worlds, so Kagome came and went as she pleased. The rest of their lives (all the time-warping lengthened Kagome's life by several thousand years, plus she drank Shippou's Elixir of Youth as an added bonus when she mistook it for a soda, so she had no problem adjusting to a demon's very long natural life span) were spent in a merry chase around two different globes, Shippou and Kagome causing troubles while Inuyasha, Sango, and Miroku went after them to keep them in line. Inuyasha wound up in the mental hospital at least four more times because of the mortal, Kagome was kidnapped eight more times but managed to escape her captors in all instances while leaving them permanently traumatized, Inuyasha hunted them down and never gave them a chance to try to recover anyway, Sango and Miroku had a rather large wedding, Kagura and Sesshoumaru had a much smaller wedding, and Shippou became a famous mathematician for no good reason. Oh, and Kagome appeared on the news twelve more times and never got to see it. But there were still plenty more adventures to be had.

There was a brief stunt where Kagome almost married a merman, but alas it was not meant to be.

She settled for marrying Inuyasha instead.

The End

Comments: I can't believe it's over!! In closing, I'd like to thank everyone who's stuck with me over the years and actually read this monster, and a special extra thank you to those who took the time to review and e-mail me! What a boost to my already overwhelmingly big ego. ;-) I'm going to miss writing for this story! Who knows...maybe in the future I will write a one-shot or two to add on to this, detailing Kagome's other adventures...Until then, I'll leave it to your imagination as to how she cornered Inuyasha and forced him into marrying her!
Lemme know if you think I ought to write another story in this particular style!
xoxo Sissy