A/N: I've decided to compile all my InuKagWeek2016 fics into this in a series of chapters. InuKagWeek was amazing, we had so much fun. Join us on tumblr at inukagweek dot tumblr dot com, if you want to catch up on it all. (Varying ratings, there is an eventual somewhat smut on day 3, that's why I rated the whole thing 'M')

word count: 2k

Rating: T

"Growth" - InuKag Week Day 1

The nerve of this girl to shatter the jewel.

What's worse is that I've somehow been cursed to travel around with her yapping mouth to put it back together.

To top it off, she reeks, she's ugly, and above all things, ridiculously stupid.

"Mama, you won't believe this."

"Oh," her mother said with a smile, shifting her eyes back to the stew. "I don't doubt that for a second, dear."

"You know that half-demon that traveled through the well from the past, and forced me to team up with him to find a way to save Japan?"

"Inuyasha, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, that pig-headed no-good jerk." The girl plopped down onto the seat with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips. "He looked me straight in the eyes," she gestured to them angrily. "And said I looked like a-"

"Inuyasha, what do you think, two acorns or three? I feel like four might be overdoing it. Or maybe I can put two in each hand…" Shippo lifted his palms and looked from the right to the left, eyeing the space in-between each his fingers, "Yeah that might work actually…Inuyasha? Inuyasha? Are you even listening?"

He wasn't.

His nose was crinkled and his face was scrunched into a hideous frown, looking out in the distance with an unkind expression.

Inuyasha was by proxy, an observant creature.

Being cast from society and flung into the wild to fend for yourself did that to a person. So it was natural that he would come to pay attention to almost everybody, just as much as he paid attention to the changing of the seasons, the sounds of the forest, and the harsh creases in the branches over his head.

But he rarely noticed people and although there were plenty of pretty girls that passed by his vision on any given day when they traveled from village to village, he had never really looked at a girl…

At least- not like this.

At least- not in a while…

"Yoo-hoo, Inuyasha," Shippo waved a hand in front of the half-demon's face from his perch on his shoulder. "Anybody in there? What are you looking at?"

Shippo followed Inuyasha's line of sight, bewildered and indignant. "Oh. It's just Kagome…"

But it wasn't just Kagome- it was an extra-terrestrial pull of the half-demon's solar plexus, goading him to approach her like she was sun and he was the earth. Like a Goddess or a Deity or an Angel, the heavens were inviting him to worship.

His gut churned with something unknown and it bubbled up to the rosy glow on his cheeks that snuck up all the way around to the back of his neck.

Her hair was black, like a clear night sky during winter, and it was brought up into a high messy pony-tail, falling down her back in long curly loops- similar to the way waves rolled onto the shore after dusk in the twilight. She was jogging awkwardly up an incline to meet him and her smile was oxygen to his lungs.

Inuyasha was uncomfortable.

"Earth to Inuyasha!" Shippo finally yelled in an explosive confetti of acorns.

But he wasn't responding.

Because The Goddess was speaking now, walking directly towards him with a friendly wave.

"Inuyasha!" She called out to him, and it felt like she was yanking his heart out of his mouth with a string. She wiped the sweat from her brow after the small hike up the hill and stopped. Her pony-tail curled around her right shoulder and her face was pink. "I was looking for you two. There's a sweet lady down in the village- Nori- and she needs some help lifting lumber for her wall. She's a widow you see, and I think it's something you can maybe help her with and…what…what are you looking at? Is there something on my face?"

It was then that Inuyasha realized he was still staring openly and all nine planets in the solar system came crashing down.

He blinked rapidly and dug his hands into his sleeves, finding his safe place, and parted his lips in a trademark sneer.

"Keh, yeah. But I don't think you can fix it."

"What do you mean?" There was a foreboding tone to her words, and Shippo jumped away from him, already knowing what was about to follow. Inuyasha panicked and shifted his eyes around the wilderness, looking for something- anything.

"You lo-look like a damn mongoose."

He's insufferable.

He's rude, he's loud, and he has no sense of indignity. \

I had never really given much thought to what I'd want my future husband to be like, and it's now that I've met him, I'm realizing that I would one day want someone who is his complete opposite.

"Kagome?"

The girl lifted her head from the dining table and hummed her reply.

"Is everything okay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well…" Mama began slowly, wiping her hands on the flower patterned rag by her elbow. "You look a bit down…Is it Inuyasha?"

At his name, the girl visibly stiffened up in answer to the question.

"I guess."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

After a heavy sigh, Kagome turned to face her mother but wouldn't meet her in the eye. "He held my hand."

"Oh?"

"And asked me not to leave."

"You were leaving him?"

"No," Kagome said slowly while tilting her head. "But he thought I was dead and my spirit was ascending to the spirit realm."

"Ah," Her mother nodded knowingly, "I see. So what do you make of it?"

"I have no idea. He calls me names, looks at me like I'm gum on the bottom of his shoe, and then he…he risks his life repeatedly to save me, holds my hand, gives me his firerat robe when I'm cold…"

Mama smiled softly, "And how do you feel?"

"About what?"

"About him?"

Kagome's heart was beating frantically outside her chest, her ears filling with a strange buzzing sound, and she suddenly wanted to disappear.

"I don't know, Mama."

His hair glimmered in the sunlight.

This was something that Kagome realized abruptly when she was half-way to telling him that she preferred the trout over the salmon.

His muscles were clear cut and rippled under his deliciously tanned skin as he worked his hands through the current, bent over the river to fish for lunch. His hair was tangled and free and caught up in a mess of colors that played off the surface of the water. And when…when had he taken his shirt off?

It was hard paying attention to anything else, and a coil of hot fuzzy feelings settled dense in her belly.

The foreign feeling showed on her face, and creased all the way down to her toes.

It wasn't that she thought Inuyasha unattractive- it was more the sheer leveland intensity of attraction that surprised her as it corralled head first into her chest.

From the moment she had laid eyes on him, sleeping at peace underneath the streaks of sunshine in the middle of the forest, she had known he was beautiful. The type of beauty that she had never known existed, like seeing a unicorn for the first time, or a mermaid.

But he had shattered that magic the second his mouth opened to yell obscenities, and all plausible romantic possibility flew with it.

Which didn't do much to explain why she was currently standing five feet away, blushing and hanging on the precipice of a very vivid, and very real crest of emotion.

"Hey Kagome," he began, without laced roughness or impolite connotations. "What type of fish did you say you wanted?"

Fish? What fish?

Confusion prickled at her senses, and she shook her head trying to clear up the haze that had suddenly appeared in her mind like miasma. Except not like miasma. Except much more warm and gentle and not poisonous at all…

Kagome felt uncomfortable.

Inuyasha scratched the back of his head, his face dropping into such a lost concerned look that it took all of Kagome's willpower not to move forward and brush the white wet bangs from his forehead.

"Do you not want any? Don't tell me you-"

"Trout," she yipped, pointing her fingers at him with a shimmy and slowly moved backwards. "I like trout." An awkward sensation poured all over her.

He threw her a suspicious glance, a question nearing the tip of his tongue, but then he twisted to the stream again.

Later that day, as Shippo and Kagome giggled through their mouths full of food, something painful pricked at Kagome's cheek.

She yelped in discomfort and recoiled backwards. Shippo flashed her a worried expression and Inuyasha leaned forward from the shadows to inspect the problem.

Kagome hooked into her mouth and pulled out a sharp piece of fish vertebrae.

"Kagome, you gotta be careful about those things." Shippo admonished in a good-natural way, reaching up to examine the pointed object. He held it up to the firelight where Inuyasha was observing intently and then chucked it into the bushes. "If you want, I can debone the next one for ya. My father was always really good at stuff like that, and he taught me some."

"Really Shippo?" The priestess fought back the burn of embarrassment that flickered on her cheeks. She was so famished that she hadn't taken her time with the fish and now she was blinking away tears.

"Oh yeah, he was the best."

The next time Kagome extended forward for another trout, Inuyasha had reached around and taken her plate, deposited a cleanly bone-stripped body, and pushed it back to her. His hand lingered on the edge of the paper dish carefully.

"Here," he said brusquely. And nothing else.

No- "since you can't do it for yourself". No- "you idiot- always hurting yourself".

Kagome felt her mouth open to express her gratitude, and she knew she was speaking, but she didn't hear it. Time curdled to a slow stirring stop when she realized with clarity that the clawed hand that had remained on the plate was now touching hers as she moved to grab it. The calloused dry skin of his fingers brushed up against hers, and something deep within her trembled like the earth was being split apart.

And then he snapped it back quickly, and time dropped back into focus.

Kagome wasn't sure what was transpiring here, or what was happening to her insides- seeing as they had decided to start doing things they've never done before- but all she could gather from the past few events was that something was growing steadily…a feeling…for Inuyasha…

She dropped her jaw in a characteristic sign of disgust, feeling out her tongue like she had just tasted something bitter.

"You said you wanted the trout," Inuyasha glared from his root across her. "Don't blame me for the tas-"

"No the trout is great, I just…" she gave a dry laugh and waved at him. "Uh, I just thought of something really unsettling."

Kagome is kind.

And she very often puts herself in danger, and it scares me…

Thinking of losing her, spirals me into some weird state of eternal agony- a dark empty space that's hardly breathable. Suffocating.

I don't get it, and I don't want to. I just want it gone. I want her gone. But I don't.

I wish I had never met him.

But that's not even the truth, the truth is something much crueler.

I wish I had met him first.

My ribs hurts from sobbing and my cheeks are caked with salt, but it doesn't end- it feels like it will never end.

I don't understand it, although sometimes I think I might. How can these feelings that course through me so warmly when I'm with him, turn to stone and ice when I'm away? I'd almost rather not have them at all, than feel this pain.

Almost.

Three years was an awfully long time to finally hear his voice.

"Stupid," he choked, holding her so close Kagome could see the forest through the smell on his clothes. Comfortable and warm. "What have you been up to?"

A/N: This is it, a small look into their growing feelings for each other ! I think it would be funny for Inuyasha to suddenly realize he had a huge crush on Kagome and then the next thing that tumbles out of his mouth is "you look like a mongoose." And for Kagome when she realizes she's starting to like Inuyasha: YUCK. The Kagome/Mama interactions were for you to see her growth in how she thought of him over time, and also I meant for it to be kinda funny when Kagome said something crazy and outlandish about the feudal era and her mom was like "oh really? cool!"

Also, side note (side flailing): this day has been so amazing, and I love all the response across the board, and thank you to every single person who is participating and helping, and even if all you're doing is reblogging, it means the world and I know sound super stupid but it keeps the fandom healthy. We breathe life into this series that ended years ago, and I can't imagine where we'd be without you guys.