Disclaimer: I do not own Inuyasha.

Replaced Bride – Part X
Balcony Scene (Take One!)

They stared at the letter as though it were written in...

Well, orange juice, or something.

"So we're banned from the main house?" Inuyasha asked slowly – as though confirming the little message would make it any easier to swallow.

All the question did was earn him a sharp glare, something really close to a scowl except without any movements of any facial muscles whatsoever, and a (very human-like) utterance of "damn those women!"

- - -

"Kagome-sama?"

She glanced up from her magazine almost guiltily, as though the maid could see the gossip column from half the room away. "Er, yeah? I mean, yes?"

She tilted her head slightly. "...Yes...?"

"Th-th-th—" The maid met her eyes briefly, gulped, looked away. Fidgeted. Rubbed one foot up against the other.

Curiosity well and truly caught (this was the first time she had seen anyone employed by the Kirishima family who acted like a real person), Kagome softened her tone. "Was there something you needed?"

"Th-th—" Squeak. Cough. Glance around wildly. "Look below your balcony in an hour!" she hissed in a tone of dire warning, before dashing down the hall.

"Wait! Wait – what? Excuse me?"

Closing the magazine and tossing it to the side, Kagome gave her curtain-covered balcony doors a wary look. The way the maid had said the sentence sounded more like "Good God, run away now before it's too late!" mixed with "If you don't look I'm going to die!", which... didn't exactly endear her to the idea of going out there. In the cold. To look at whatever was there. At (she glanced at the clock) 3 in the morning.

And she had a nasty little feeling as to what might be there when she looked, too.

"...I think Sango could use some company," she decided brightly. "Yes, that's it! Company! The poor girl, she has had Inuyasha around the entire time... little time to herself... little time for girl time! Right, girl time. Chocolate and um, brownies. Chocolate and brownies," she repeated, practically chanting the words over and over as she half-skipped down the hall (a careless effect which was completely ruined by her glancing over her shoulder with each step).

She half-slammed open her friend's door and chirped loudly, "Chocolate and brownies! It's girltime!"

Sango arched a brow. "And the chocolate and brownies are... where? And aren't brownies chocolate in the first place?"

"Er, right." Kagome laughed weakly and tiptoed over to the little fridge, inspecting the contents gravely.

Then glanced up and beamed. "So... wine?"

"That's beer, Kagome."

- - -

"There's a monster."

She nodded vigorously.

"Under your balcony."

Another nod.

"And the doors to your balcony are...?"

"Locked," she chirped.

"And your balcony is how high up...?"

"Th...ree stories?"

"And you know it's there because...?"

"Maid tol' me." She squinted at the label on the can. "Wha'z sodi-yum?" Puzzled. Pondered. "I'ma s'posed t'know, ya?"

Beer is probably worse for her than wine, Sango concluded with a sigh – having (for once) been smart enough to abstain.

"So the little maid told you that there was a big bad monster under your locked balcony, and you decided you needed to sleep here instead of getting eaten up by the big bad monster?"

"Sounds 'bout right!"

"Uh-huh." She swirled the contents of her still-open can, and once again counted. One, two, three... five... seven... Yep, that's seven cans in the past twenty minutes. "Are you sleepy yet?"

"Not at aaaaaaall," Kagome gleefully replied, and made a (very badly executed) little pirouette in the middle of the bed. And, needless to say, she giggled hysterically when she fell over in absolute failure. Then – suddenly not laughing at all and drunkenly deadly serious – she rolled over, looked at Sango, and asked the forbidden words. "Where's In'yasha?"

Another glance at the cans.

Sango thought very, very hard.

And for some reason, she couldn't remember exactly why it would be smart to be sober instead of drunk.

It was, after all, girl time.

- - -

Kagome carried the baseball bat with (she thought) enormous and wonderful stealth across her room, eyes locked on the weaving image of the balcony doors in front of her. "Here, monsty monsty monsty," she called in a sing-song voice, finally making it to the door and unlocking it with fumbling fingers. "Come out, come out, wherever you aaaaare..."

Somehow, another four beers had taken the speech impediment out of her words – though it had done something seriously bad to her brain.

Then she glanced over her shoulder and hissed loudly, "Will you be quiet? Mr. Monster won't come out if you keep doing that!" to the invisible Sango that had followed her down the hall, while the real Sango slept off the effects of several beers in her own room.

Three very long, tiptoed and wonderfully stealthy-ninja-like strides later, Kagome peered over her balcony with all the lights blazing behind her. Not that the lights would ever give away the fact that she was standing there, of course, because she was stealthy ninja Kagome.

"Mr. Monster?" she shouted in a very sneaky sort of way.

"You're late," her (very cold and annoyed) fiancé snapped from three stories below, snapping his nearly dead cellphone closed. It was then she realized that (how odd, how odd!) her phone had been ringing.

"Are you the monster?" Kagome shouted again, with her great interrogative skills.

Sesshoumaru's eyes narrowed, and the new number one rule of his life surfaced in his mind – Don't reason with drunk women.

So, ignoring her question, he said coolly and coldly and with great amounts of Pay Attention And Do As I Say in his voice, "Get down here and get in the car, Kagome."

"Oh yeah? Where's your lair where you're gonna take me to and eat me and play poker and eat chips? Huh?" she snapped with great intellect. "You tell me that and I'll go, 'cause I'll tell the cops and they'll get you before you can eat me. And, um, chips. They will. And you won't be Mr. Monster for much longer 'cause, uh, the cops'll have you!"

Damn crazy woman. "It's over there," he replied blandly. "Will you go now?"

"No!"

I'm going to kill her. I'm going to get her to sign those papers and then I'm going to kill her. Or maybe I'll kill her and forge the damn papers. "What if I'm not the monster?" he inquired, throwing the number one rule to the winds.

"You're not?"

"Not even a little bit," he lied.

"Oh, well then." Kagome dropped the baseball bat over the balcony rails (he blinked as it fell to the ground; she hadn't even been waving it threateningly, much less made him aware of its presence) and giggled. "Then hello, Romeo!"

Romeo? That ridiculous gay guy from that ridiculous play made years ago?

No, wait, he hadn't been gay. Had he?

"Are you coming down now?"

"No," she replied coyly, resting her arms on the rails and beaming down at him with an artlessly cute smile. "That'd make me easy then, and no Juliet is easy."

Right. "But you're my fiancée," he pointed out. "Fiancées are allowed to come down from the balconies and go home with their future husbands." So get your ass down here, you troublesome wench.

Kagome pondered this for a moment, then yawned.

"I'm sleepy. Good night!" she announced, before flouncing into her room, locking the balcony doors with a snap, and – probably – falling to the floor in a drunken heap.

While Sesshoumaru was left – below her balcony, in the cold, at three in the morning – to stare where his wayward fiancée had been, and almost decide to go and get her himself before a very, very familiar voice said from the balcony four stories up, "I already told you that you aren't welcome here."

Damned drunken women and damned pouting fathers!

- - -

Comments: Uh, yeah. Just don't take anything seriously. Hello, crack, how I've missed you. Work too much, go to school too much, crack deprivation. Result? New RB chapter. Go, life!

Has it really been two years?