Standard Disclaimer: Inuyasha and all belong to Rumiko Takahashi…

A/N:  Oi, minna!  I’m so sorry about taking such a long time to post this up here, but well… LOL, long story short…  My mother had to undergo some major surgery, which means that I had to transfer campuses for my schooling.  Hazard (my dear baby sister) is leaving for college in less than a week and requires assistance.  I tore my ACL and have been in a brace and on crutches, and last but definitely not least, I found out yesterday that my little brother has a hole in his heart and two bi-cuspid valves.  (For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of gross anatomy *rolls eyes* the heart is supposed to have a tri-cuspid and a bi-cuspid.)  So… he has to have surgery as well.

Hence, here I am, 7 weeks from graduation, holding desperately to my 4.0, living in Utah, and dealing with this…  Lovely.

*pastes on a bright smile*  Ah well, Futago and Seme are doing their absolute best to keep me sane when I start randomly smacking into walls, and you guys have managed to be the bright point for more than one day, getting sweet such sweet reviews and emails.  .  Even the ones who know what’s going on and tease me about opening a paypal account after the laundry list of weirdness in my life.  LOL, you guys crack me up sometimes, you really do!  At any rate, I adore every last one of you, you’re fabulous, and thanks for sticking with me through the long un-updated period.  But enough ranting, I know you want to get on with it…  ^.~

Much loves and undying adoration to all my beautiful, fabulous reviewers from the Evil Puppy!  ^____^

Turnabout is Fair Play: Open Mouth, Closed Fist…

            Shippou could always be honest with himself in his head, and while he was being silently honest, he could admit that his bravery only extended so far under even the best circumstances.  Not that he wouldn’t fake it if the situation was drastic, or to save his pride, but there were just some moments that called for a change in tactics.

            This just happened to be one of those moments.

“It’s a term of endearment?” Shippou tried with a hopeful squeak from his upside-down position at the hanyou’s eye level, wriggling in an effort to free his tail from Inuyasha’s hand.

            “Not in that tone of voice it’s not,” Inuyasha growled in annoyance, his eyebrow twitching before he got it under control and restored his calm mask.

            The little kitsune wracked his brain frantically for anything he could say that would convince Inuyasha to focus on something besides whacking him over the head for “being disrespectful” until either he got bored, or Shippou was seeing little dancing stars. Not that he would admit that out loud, but Inuyasha was right about the tone he’d used when he’d called him oyaji, “Ah…but… but-!”

            “If Kagome isn’t getting away with that shit, what makes you think you will, hn? I get convinced to be more lenient by her big-eyed look long before I do by yours,” he intoned in a disturbingly patient voice, privately enjoying watching the kitsune squirm in his nervous expectations of being punished. “You were being disrespectful, brat, and I have to be just as strict with you as I do with Kagome or she'll ignore it when I tell her to control herself,” he managed, just barely, to keep his expression in a firm scowl.

            “Was not!” he protested hurriedly in self-defense.  “You threatened to wash my mouth out with soap!”

            He shrugged and justified that with a casual, “You swore.”

            “You hypocrite!”

            “You’re not helping yourself, runt,” Inuyasha lifted him higher, one eyebrow arched to remind him with his expression just who was the bigger, stronger youkai in this particular discussion.

            Sango sighed, shaking her head with a dazed, yet helplessly entertained look on her face as she watched the interaction stretch longer and longer.  She was more than willing to admit that she was absolutely fascinated by Inuyasha’s bizarre behavior.    Especially since it wasn’t the first time he’d been more or less posturing in front of the little kitsune after catching hold of him, not by a long shot, but it was the first time that seemed to be all he intended to do.  Inuyasha had been staring at the stammering kitsune with a bland look, all while Shippou fidgeted and tried to talk his way out of the hole he was steadily digging himself into.

            Two months ago he would have already flattened him into the ground and be off pouting, she shook her head again, sighing as she stroked her hand absently over Kirara’s fur where the fire-cat had long since curled up in her lap.  Was it really knowing that Kagome-chan wouldn’t leave him all he needed to become so calm?  So at peace?

            Her internal musing was interrupted when the faint groan sounded beside her, peripheral vision registering the monk’s telltale twitch as he roused from his latest little unconscious bout.  Just like every other time when she’d stayed around long enough for him to recover, it was only a moment before the groan turned into a muffled curse.  And then even less time still before Miroku slowly pushed himself back up to sitting position, one hand lifting to rub his aching head.

Sango tried to feel bad about the wince that briefly crossed his face as he rolled his shoulders, she really did.  Watching him unobtrusively through her hair as he turned his head from side to side with a faint pop…  Then again, another part of her couldn’t stop itself from smiling faintly in satisfaction at his discomfort.

‘Maybe if he didn’t do that to every female he saw-‘ she cut her inner voice off with a blush, shaking her head to clear away that damning thought before it could turn into something more revealing.

            “What did I miss?” Miroku shifted his weight, finding a more comfortable position in the thick grass, and focusing back on the little match still going on between Inuyasha and Shippou.

            Sango’s amused smile grew wider at the casual question, rolling her eyes at the way he stereotypically pretended the minor concussion had never occurred, “Inuyasha is still behaving strangely and Shippou-chan just called him a hypocrite.”

            Miroku nodded as though that bit of information made perfect sense, settling his staff against his shoulder with a relieved smile, “Not too much then.  It’s a shame Kagome-sama is missing this.  I think she would be highly entertained by their arguments as well for once.”

            Sango was nodding in agreement before she realized it, imagining the younger girl’s reaction and remarking dryly, “I’m not sure this would fit the ‘father image’ Shippou-chan thinks Inuyasha is trying to prove himself capable of.”

            “In his defense, Inuyasha hasn’t whacked him over the head yet, or thrown him into a tree,” Miroku shrugged and pointed out before giving Sango a sly look out of the corner of his eye.  “Unless I missed that when I was… indisposed?”

            She set her jaw, spine automatically stiffening at the veiled laughter she could sense in his voice, and refusing to rise to the bait while supplying the answer, “He hasn’t hit him yet.”

            He lifted a hand to hide the quiet chuckle at how she ground out that response, backing up farther to lean against the trunk of the tree behind him with the slightest grunt, “Perhaps he truly is trying to impress Kagome-sama into seeing him more responsibly.  This is the longest I believe he’s ever managed to resist that urge.”

            They sat in companionable silence for a moment, relaxing as they watched Shippou grow more and more nervous with each failed attempt at an excuse.  Inuyasha’s expression stayed mild and disapproving, but his eyes were bright with suppressed mirth that the little kitsune couldn’t see in his agitation.  Sango’s gaze moved up over the hanyou in a rather distracted manner, a thoughtful look crossing her face as she murmured out loud, “I wonder if they’d have his ears.”

Miroku blinked and turned to look at the exterminator in surprise before he started to laugh.  Completely unaware of the startled looks that came their way from Inuyasha and Shippou at the unexpected sound, while Sango’s cheeks turned an even darker red, he managed to choke back his amusement long enough to nod his agreement, “That would truly be a sight to see, Sango.”

“Oi!” Inuyasha called back to them, his expression changing rapidly to a scowl directed at their human companions, but still holding Shippou aloft by his tail.  “What the hell would be a ‘sight to see,’ bouzu?” he demanded, growling louder when Miroku only continued to laugh and Sango tried to mollify the hanyou by shaking her head.

“Nothing!” Sango waved her hands in a placating gesture under his darkening expression, turning to hiss at Miroku furiously.  “Houshi-sama, will you shut up?!”

Miroku made a valiant effort to reign in his amusement, but just as he successfully brought a stop the bubbling laughter, Inuyasha’s ears twitched and set him right back off.

Inuyasha’s eyebrow twitched again, starting to look even more annoyed as he glanced down at Shippou as though expecting the kitsune to have the answers for him.  When Shippou shrugged, his expression just as confused as Inuyasha felt, he swore under his breath and absently plopped the little youkai on his shoulder to free up both hands.  Holding onto his temper while Shippou got more and more creative trying to backpedal was one thing, Miroku laughing his damn head off like an idiot over something suspicious was completely different. 

Swearing blackly under his breath, he stalked over to the human pair and demanded gruffly, “Just what is so fucking funny, hn?”

Miroku tried to wave him off, gasping in a vain effort to stop his laughter while Inuyasha obliviously added to it when his ears continuously flattened back and twitched with his annoyance.  Sango’s face was flushing darker than they’d ever seen before, fervently hoping the monk wasn’t about to give her away as the instigator, while she threatened him herself.  Trying to do that, and turn away the attention of both youkai as well, however, was turning out to be more of a challenge than she could currently handle.

            “Bouzu…” Inuyasha drawled out warningly, lifting a clenched fist as he resisted the urge to just beat him over the head.  He’d lasted against Shippou, how much harder could it be to stop himself from bashing Miroku’s head against the ground?  At least until he was sure the perverted monk deserved it.

            Sango’s hand fisted in the handle of the Hiraikotsu again, silently wondering if there was some unspoken rule against cracking it against his skull twice in less than an hour.  At the same time, she was wishing that either the ground would open and swallow her up, or some act of the gods would bring the thick branch above Miroku down on his head in karmic retribution for embarrassing her so completely, “Houshi-sama… shut up!”

            Inuyasha’s temper was the first to give out, bringing his fist down on Miroku’s head, his eyebrow still twitching as he dusted off his hands in an exaggerated motion.  He stuffed both hands arrogantly into his sleeves and glared at the monk sprawled face down in front of him, “Somehow I don’t think Kagome will be too pissed at me for doing that.”

            Shippou snickered behind his hand, grinning wider when Miroku groaned and pushed himself back up, rubbing the new lump on his head, “You have the thickest skull out of any human I’ve ever seen, Miroku.”

            Miroku winced and scowled up at the kitsune, but any response he might have made died in his throat when Inuyasha fell back a step and hissed, reaching up to press his hand flat over his heart. 

Miroku sat up in quickly in concern, pain forgotten, and vaguely aware of Sango coming up on her knees beside him while Inuyasha’s teeth clenched, fangs elongating and the double crimson stripes fading in on his cheeks.

            “Inuyasha!” Sango gasped out in concern, glancing at Miroku’s tightening expression and then following the monk’s narrowed gaze when it turned down the path Kagome had taken to the river.  “Kagome-chan is-?!”

            “Is pissed the fuck off at something,” Inuyasha finished in a thick growl, shaking his head hard once to clear off the faint dizziness that came with the sudden overpowering rush of his youkai blood.  “Shit, I knew I shouldn’t have left her alone!” he spun on his heel, taking off in a flash of red while Shippou clung to his haori to get their with the hanyou, and both humans jumped to their feet to follow.

            “Why is she pissed?!” Shippou demanded frantically, his tail bushing out and flicking rapidly from side to side.  All sorts of possibilities were running through his head, building on each other until he was almost shaking with his imagination-induced fright.

            “I don’t fucking know, okay?” Inuyasha gritted out through clenched teeth, tearing through the trees without any care for the poor condition he left the foliage in behind him.  “But whatever it is, it’s enough that she yanked her blood to the surface so much that it pulled mine out too.”

            Shippou’s expression twisted even more in concern, and even a little bit of misery as he voiced his next thought, “Why didn’t she call for us if she’s in trouble?  She knows we’re close enough to hear her if she yells…”

            “I don’t know!” he repeated in frustration, snarling as he slashed through another tree blocking his direct path to the river, ignoring the splintering crash behind him as he leapt up to move more rapidly through the branches.  He broke through the last of the trees, ripping the Tetsusaiga from its hilt as he dropped to the ground, tense and searching for Kagome and her attacker. 

“Kago-“ Inuyasha started, only to come to a skidding halt, his voice failing for a moment before his eyes went wide and he finished in disbelief, “me?”

            The point of the sword clunked heavily against the ground as his grip went slack, knowing Shippou was staring at the absolutely bizarre sight in front of them with just as much shock and confusion as he was.  He lifted his free hand to scrub over his eyes, hoping it was just a hallucination, but when he opened them again, nothing had changed, and he growled out in an almost disgusted voice, “I’m not seeing this.”

            Kagome was on the ground, a low, deadly growl rumbling from deep in her throat and eyes glowing vivid scarlet with telltale anger.  Her youkai ears had reformed, laid back almost completely flat against her damp hair, but that in itself wasn’t the real cause for concern.

            It was more that her fangs were locked on Kouga’s throat, pinning the obviously stunned wolf to the ground without any real indication that she intended to let him move, or even live through the encounter.

            “Goddammit,” Inuyasha slammed the Tetsusaiga back into its sheath with a few more choice curses, folding one arm across his chest while he covered his eyes with his other hand and shook his head against the rising ache and added throbbing of unused adrenaline.  This isn’t happening to me…

            He was so distracted he didn’t hear Sango and Miroku rush out of the woods behind him, the monk swearing as he tried to check his forward momentum when he realized the hanyou in his path wasn’t moving.  Inuyasha fell forward a step with a grunt when he felt the heavy weight slam into his back, ignoring the sound of pain behind him that he assumed with Miroku when Sango came into his peripheral vision.

            Her eyes went just as wide, attention as riveted to the unanticipated scene as his own when she whispered out in disbelief, “That’s…?”

            “Kouga,” Shippou finished in a squeak.

            “Inukkoro!?” Kouga choked out at the sound of their voices, trying to swallow around the dangerous points digging into him so close to the major arteries in his neck and move without necessarily hurting the girl on top of him.  He had opened his mouth to try expounding on that when Kagome’s eyes closed, the growl kicking up its intensity as she dug fractionally deeper.

            Considering his position, the growl coming from Kouga was impressive, but completely ineffective in getting through Kagome’s own rage, and Inuyasha started to bristle the longer he stared at her small form on top of the wolf youkai, “Kagome…”

            One scarlet eye cracked open again, glowing darkly as she focused up on him without releasing her hold on Kouga in the slightest.

            “Up… now,” his brows lowered in a dark scowl when he sensed her youki balking through their connection.

            One of her eyebrows kicked up at that tone, giving him a more physical show of her desire to ignore him, but his voice worked at penetrating the blind anger in her mind and slowly working her thoughts back into coherency.  With the return of that came the memory of why she was so angry in the first place and she released Kouga in an instant.

Kagome jumped to her feet and grabbed the wolf by the throat to lift him up over her head, sending him flying in Inuyasha’s direction as hard as she could before any of them had time to do more than tense at the hasty attack.

Kouga crashed into Inuyasha, and with Miroku still trying to stand behind the hanyou turned youkai, the added backwards momentum sent both of them to the ground over the monk’s back in a snarling, cursing tangle while Shippou shrieked and scrambled over to a safer perch on Sango’s shoulder. 

Shippou’s eyes went wide in alarm as he looked back and forth from Kagome to Inuyasha and Kouga, and back again, “Oh shit.”

            “You miserable, sneaky, sonofabitch!” Kagome fumed, baring her fangs and crossing her arms over her stomach self-consciously, taking a step back to distance herself from the mildly scrabbling pair.

            Irritated at the way Kouga was just making it more difficult to stand with his struggles, Inuyasha rammed his elbow into the wolf’s jaw to stun him long enough to get to his feet and turn on his mate, “Kag-“

            “Shut up!” she barked out, cutting him off and gesturing around to everyone with quick, jerky motions.  “Did you know?  Fuck, Inuyasha, does everyone know?!  What the hell were you thinking?!”

            Inuyasha went stiff, his eyes widening and then narrowing sharply as his gaze snapped down to the rising wolf angrily, “What did you do, you asshole?!”

            Pain exploded across the side of his face as Kagome darted forward and brought the back of her fist against his cheekbone as hard as she could, knocking him on his back and looming over him like some sort of avenging god, “HE isn’t the asshole who got me pregnant, dammit!”

            Sango’s mouth fell open, her hand lifting to her mouth in reflex and gaping at the younger girl as she repeated in a disbelieving whisper, “Pregnant?”

            Miroku forgot all about the pain in his head, his back, and all the other areas his poor body had suffered at that declaration.  His own eyes went wide as he turned to look at the hanyou holding the side of his face and rising to his feet, eyes warily trained on Kagome’s face.  His voice held a note of demand for clarification as he straightened and murmured, “Inuyasha?”

            “Well, shit, you didn’t know?” Kouga cut in before the hanyou could defend himself, rubbing his abused throat as the wounds Kagome had inflicted healed over.  His voice was still rough and he coughed slightly from the prolonged constriction as he righted himself, “No wonder you got so pissed.  That fucking hanyou didn’t tell you what he was doing?”

            “Open your mouth again, Kouga, and I’ll rip out your tongue,” Inuyasha winced, lowering his hand as his own injury healed, and turning to spear the startled wolf with his altered gaze.  “This is between me and my mate.”

            Kouga’s brows lifted sharply before his eyes narrowed and he leaned in to take a sniff and see just what the hell had happened to change the worthless hanyou so completely.  Just like Kagome… he smells youkai, but how-? his mouth opened to automatically refute the claim when he felt Kagome’s hand close around the back of his neck and send him face-first to the ground with even more strength than the last time she’d had a strange reaction and fought him.

“And you!  Don’t ever touch me again, you hentai!  I don’t care how much my breasts grow!” she grabbed onto his hair and jerked his face up to meet her eyes.  “That was just fucking creepy!”

            Shippou winced when Inuyasha’s eyes went wide under the indirect explanation of just why she’d been angry enough to change in the first place, tugging on Sango to try and convince her silently to back away from the growling trio, “Oooh, now that’s not good…”

            “He what?” Inuyasha’s jaw clenched hard enough to get the muscle in his jaw jumping with strain, not even hearing Shippou over the sudden, renewed rush of aggression, his youkai side’s insistence that such a blatant challenge be answered.

            Kagome let Kouga go, standing and placing herself between the wide-eyed wolf and her furious, jealous mate as she raked a hand impatiently through her hair, “Apparently, it’s only obvious that I’m pregnant because my goddamn breasts are ‘swollen.’  If he,” she pointed a clawed finger down at the dazed wolf, not acknowledging when his gaze turned up to her again, “noticed something like that with as infrequently as we run into him, and he’s never seen me naked, then how would my paranoid bastard of a mate not notice!?”

            Inuyasha opened his mouth, closing it again when he couldn’t counter that with anything that would settle her anger.  Rather than try, he turned his focus on the wolf pushing himself up for the third time, “You’d better enjoy what’s left of your life, yaseokami, because it’s going to be over a helluva lot sooner than you think.”

            Kagome stalked forward, slapping her open palm against Inuyasha’s forehead just hard enough to get his attention back on her and knock him back a step.  He shook his head with a growl at the almost disciplinary swat, but Kagome was already expecting retaliation, and ducked out of the way when he tried to catch hold of her, “Don’t even think it, Inuyasha, I’m not out of control and you know it!  I’m pissed as hell and I have every right to be!”

            “Dammit, calm down, Kagome,” he set his fists on his hips and scowled at her.  “I ought to-!”

“I ought to rip off your ears and feed them to you,” she interrupted and pointed at him accusingly.

            Miroku tried to smother an errant laugh at that particular threat, holding up his hands quickly to stave off Kagome’s anger when her glowing eyes turned on him at the out-of-place sound, “Kagome-sama, you really must calm down.  If you’re… in such a delicate condition, you need to be more careful with your health.”

            Kagome took a deep breath, closing her eyes and trying to count to ten before she gave in and strangled the monk right there for his downright cheerful tone, “Miroku-sama…  I highly suggest you move your ass and go stand next to Sango-chan before I find out just how many times I can bash your head against a tree before your inhumanly thick skull finally cracks.”

            Miroku was already on his feet and moving to join the stunned taijiya, eager to get out of harm’s way even as he calmly nodded, “Of course, Kagome-sama, my apologies.”

            She waited impatiently until he was out of the way, folding her arms over her chest and tapping her claws against her arms until she was certain she wasn’t going to get any new distractions from that end.  Nodding crisply with a satisfied grunt, she turned back to the two male youkai watching her nervously from their respective positions.  They were both well aware that only an idiot crossed a breeding female youkai, let alone one as angry as Kagome, and neither one of them wanted to catch the brunt edge of her less than controlled temper. 

            “I don’t know which one of you I want to drown first,” her ears were still twitching, alternately flipping forward and flattening back as she tried to take in a breath and ease her rapidly fraying nerves.  “Do either of you have any idea how fucking hard this month has been for me?  Do you even care?!  I’m eighteen, for gods’ sake, I’m suddenly cursed, turned into some weird cross between a youkai and myself, actually ‘mate’ Inuyasha, Naraku makes an ass out of me with his tricks, and now I’m pregnant?!”

            “Kagome, calm down,” Inuyasha held out a hand, his gaze instinctively darting around the rather tense scene as his mind worked furiously to come up with a way out of this that didn’t involve bodily harm.

            She set her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowing sharply, “You are absolutely the last person who should be telling me that, Inuyasha.  Did you know?  Is this one of those things youkai can smell, and I just don’t know what it smells like?”

            His eyes slid guiltily away from her at that accusation, clenching and unclenching his hands as he gritted out as quietly as he could manage with everyone’s eyes on him, “Kagome, we need to talk about this… alone.”

            “Oh I think finding this out from Kouga completely erased your right to privacy,” she was back to growling, wanting nothing more than to scream, or cry, or… or… Do not laugh, Kagome, they’re going to think you’re absolutely insane if you start laughing.

            Kouga let out an impatient sound in the taut silence that followed that remark, glaring at Inuyasha before he turned a confused look on Kagome and demanded, “What the fuck is going on here?!”  He stabbed a finger at the bristling inu-youkai and then back at the ‘supposed to be’ miko, “You’re youkai…  Both of you, but you smell like- hell, Kagome you look like Inuyasha!”

            “I mated her, you bastard, of course she smells like me, and will you keep out of this?” Inuyasha snarled at him, grabbing Kouga by the hair and yanking him around face to face to vent some of his frustration with that physical display even as he ordered sharply.  “Get out of here!”

            Kagome took advantage of the mutual distraction, rushing forward again and back-handing Kouga out of Inuyasha’s hold to send him stumbling before she ducked down to slam her elbow into Inuyasha’s stomach and double her mate over, “Is it really that difficult for the two of you to stay focused on a topic for more than five minutes without starting a fight?!”

            Inuyasha straightened angrily, using that emotion to cut down his recovery time as he kicked Kouga in the side, sending the wolf crashing back into a tree, narrowly missing Miroku in the process.  Without the distraction of Kouga, he finally succeeded in grabbing Kagome’s wrist and yanking her up against him, “Dammit, Kagome, this behavior is getting old!”

            “Oh, I haven’t even started yet with this ‘behavior,’ Inuyasha,” she ground out, fisting her hands in his haori and pivoting, using her body weight the way she’d seen him do to throw him over her shoulder and back towards the others with a grunt of exertion.

            Inuyasha caught himself on his hands before he went too far, purposefully going to the ground to twist into a better position and roll back up to his feet in a fluid motion while he snapped out at her with protective anger, “Fuck, bitch, the pups!  Will you stop before you hurt yourself and the pups?!”

            Her hands went reflexively to her stomach before what he yelled really registered and had her eyes darkening in a hurry.  Her hands fisted at such unmistakable proof that her suspicion was right about his knowledge of her condition, and she swore at him violently, “That’s it!  That’s what’s been wrong with you!  Good gods, this whole time.  Since…  You did know!  That’s why you’ve been watching me like a hawk and telling me what to eat and what not to do!  When were you planning on telling me this?  When I fucking went into labor?!”

            “I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you, you stubborn bitch!” he snarled back at her, frustration and worry mingling with his anger and making him much less concerned with even trying to soften his words.  “You think it was easy?  Do you have any idea how hard it is to try and take care of you without telling you why I was being so careful?”

            Kagome let out a short laugh, glaring at him as she tried to keep herself from touching her stomach again with natural curiosity and even a little bit of awe, Pups… his pups are inside me.  Then again, that wouldn’t fit with the point she was trying to make, so she settled for focusing on her irritation at least a little longer, “How much harder could it have been to tell me?  I’m the one that’s pregnant, you ass, not you.”

            Inuyasha’s brows pulled down in a dangerous scowl at having his role in their presence downplayed like that, “They’re mine, Kagome.  You’re the one who’s carrying them, but I’m the one that put them there.”

            “Well, no shit,” she set a hand on her hip, and remarked in as flippant a voice as she could manage, giving him a sardonic look.  “Unless some other idiot hanyou snuck in on me and is still trying to figure out how to break the news to me.”

            “Don’t even fucking joke about that,” his lips pulled back in an instinctive snarl at the very thought of someone other than him touching Kagome that way.  Even worse now that he had a very real, very serious claim on her, body and soul, “No one but me is ever going to ‘sneak in on you,’ Kagome.”

            “I’m dead serious at the moment, Inuyasha,” Kagome eyes narrowed on his face, ears laying back with her growl as she slid down into a slight crouch.  All amazement at her pregnancy aside, she was still far less than pleased with his tactics, “And I’m still very, very angry with you.”

            “Kagome, I’m going to be more than angry if you start jumping around again now that you know you have my pups in you,” Inuyasha’s voice dropped down low, almost a challenge on its own, a command for her to behave.

            She snorted at that in mocking amusement, the muscles in her legs bunching in preparation as she bent deeper into the crouch, “This is my body, Inuyasha, not yours.  I know what I can handle.”

            “Don’t try it.”

            One brow kicked up in an arrogant motion that put him disturbingly in mind of his brother before her gaze slanted to find where Kouga was swearing violently, shaking off his collision with the tree.  The wolf youkai was gripping his head in one hand as he pushed himself to his feet, oblivious to the attention as Kagome looked back at Inuyasha with a speculative gleam in her eyes.

            Inuyasha was instantly growling in warning disapproval, “Oh don’t you dare…”           

            Kagome weaved slightly to one side, watching Inuyasha shift his weight to rush at her before she bolted the opposite direction, towards Kouga.  Kagome dug her feet into the dirt, sliding right up in the youkai’s face to hook her arm through his and flip him over her head, throwing Kouga at the hanyou again before the wolf had recovered from his surprise. 

            Inuyasha swore at falling for such a juvenile trick, irritated with himself for failing to think Kagome would have picked up on such sneaky tactics on her own.  Then again, if there was anything he should be telling himself, it was definitely that this spell had proven just how versatile, and adaptable Kagome really was.  He corrected his direction in time to see Kagome throwing the wolf at him again, and brought up his arm when Kouga twisted around in the air to land on his feet.  As much as he hated to assist the wolf, he didn’t want to spend even the tiny bit of extra time it would take to duck under him, instead slamming his forearm against the bottoms of Kouga’s feet to shove him up like a springboard and out of the way of his path to Kagome.

            Inuyasha sidestepped to block her next attempt at sneaking away from him, sweeping out his arm to catch her just above her stomach when she yelped and tried to jerk away from him.  He closed his arm around her, dragging her back against his chest and tightening his grip to pin her arms down at her sides when she tried to squirm free of him again, putting his mouth right next to her ear to growl out, “Stay!”

            Kagome hissed furiously when her legs went numb and effectively ruined her chance of escape, swearing rather creatively as she turned a scowl up at Inuyasha through her disheveled hair, “Real cute, Inuyasha, you’re obviously so concerned about the pups if you’re-!”

            Inuyasha gave her a squeeze to cut her off, lifting her up higher against his chest and completely off her feet.  He slid his free hand under one arm and turned her to face him, catching her beneath the other arm as well before she could slip too far in the off-balance hold.  He lifted her up just a little higher than eye level with easy strength, catching her gaze to make sure she was seeing his own frustration, “Goddamn you, Kagome, I am looking out for the pups, and you!”

            “Well you’ve got a fucked up way of showing it!” her hands came up to grip his forearms, making a futile effort to get herself free.  She finally gave up, twisting her fist in the front of his haori and yanking hard to give herself the illusion of still having control over the situation, “Put me down, Inuyasha, or as soon as I get the feeling back in my legs, I’m going to make damn sure you don’t father any more pups!”

            Inuyasha’s eyes were literally glowing with his anger at her continued stubbornness, shaking her once to stop her posturing growl before he dragged her close enough that their noses were nearly touching, “You stubborn, temperamental bitch!  I would have beaten your ass for this kind behavior a long time ago if I didn’t love you so fucking much!!”