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Quatre and Inu-yasha, backdated to Sept 27
An angry Inu-yasha meets his new tutor, who is possibly the only person in the entire school who could actually put up with him. Inu starts asking the important questions.
(Super backdated because Kate is made of fail, shh...)
Inu-yasha growled to himself, making his way angrily through the halls. Apparently it wasn't enough to have to go to all these stupid classes and have everyone in the whole fucking school know what an idiot he was.
No, apparently the teachers thought further humiliation was needed. They'd assigned him a freaking tutor.
About ten minutes late, he banged into the room where they were supposed to meet, all surly attitude, but then stopped and gaped at the kid waiting for him. "You?"
Quatre jumped when the door to the empty classroom had banged open, shifting all the books in his arms as he smiled when he saw his pupil walk in. "Hello, Inu-Yasha! You're a few minutes late, so I'll have to make sure to focus on the more important parts, but that's alright. Are you ready for our tutoring session?"
"Is this some kinda joke?" Inu-yasha asked, though he already knew the answer. Of course it wasn't; or if it was, it was the kind he was going to be subjected to anyways...
Quatre drooped a little at Inu-yasha's words, but he kept his smile in place and shook his head. "I'm afraid it is no joke. Do you not like the idea of me as your tutor? I assure you I am very good at teaching."
"I don't want a tutor at all," Inu-yasha griped, dropping his bag heavily on the desk. "I don't even know why they're makin' me do school." Mostly to make him look and feel like an idiot, he figured. "Gave up on this shit years ago."
"But school is important, well at least learning is. Don't you want to do something when you get older?" Quatre stacked a few of the books that he had selected on the desk he sat at, turning to look at Inu-yasha with genuine curiosity.
"The hell am I gonna do that needs school?" Inu-yasha asked petulantly, crossing his arms over his chest. This kid was so naive...
"Well, what if you want to go into a certain career of sorts? You'll need schooling for it won't you?" Quatre placed a history book in front of Inu-Yasha. "What are your plans for the future?"
"Dunno," Inu-yasha replied, sounding bored as he glared at the book, scratching absently at one triangular ear. "Never really thought about it. Not much point."
"Why not?" He asked, turning his chair so he could see Inu-Yasha better. "There isn't anything you would like to do?"
Leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head, Inu-yasha kept up the bored, aloof act. "Figured I'd either be on the street still or dead." If he didn't sound to broken up about it, he wasn't - he was either strong enough to survive, or he wasn't. It was a straightforward enough. "Even this place is just temporary."
Quatre frowned at that, not liking Inu-yasha's blatant disregard for his own life as he folded his hands in his lap. "So, you would rather be on the street or dead than trying to figure out a future where neither of those would have to happen?"
"Huh?" Inu-yasha looked at Quatre like he was from space (he might as well have been). "S'how it is, no use pretending otherwise." Those kinds of thoughts were a waste of time and energy, he'd figured that out when he was still a kid.
"Why?" Quatre asked bluntly, serious about figuring out why the boy would rather just give up instead of at least try.
"Cause I'm a demon," Inu-yasha replied with equal bluntness, eyes narrowing at the blonde boy. "I'm not like you - got no money, no family," well, none that counted, "and no home. People've hated me my whole life." He didn't even sound resentful, just generally pissed off at having to explain it all. "There's no nice, cushy life for people like me," he growled, "and reading books ain't gonna change any of that. The only reason I'm doing any of this BS is because it comes with food and a bed, and a chance to get stronger. The minute that changes, I'm outta here."
"You are not a demon,” Quatre said flatly, moving to dig through his bag for a pen and notebook. When he pulled it out he flipped through a few pages until he got to a blank page. "People who said you were obviously had no idea what they were really talking about."
He drew a line down the middle on the page. "Also, I never said cushy, but I believe you can make a life of your own that isn't on the streets or ending up in an unmarked grave."
He labeled one side of the page likes and the other dislikes.
Inu-yasha frowned, watching all this suspiciously. It was the first time he'd seen the kid look so... determined.
"Of course I'm a demon," he retorted. "It's what my name means." It wasn't even a name he'd picked himself, it was the name his mother gave him when he was born. She'd hoped it would protect him, both of them, but of course it hadn't. "Call a mutant 'dog demon' long enough, that's what you get."
"My name means four, but you don't see me striving to be a number." Quatre shot back gently, not wanting to ruffle feathers too much.
Derailed, Inu-yasha blinked stupidly at Quatre. "Huh? Why does your name mean four?"
Quatre shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not even French, but I think they looked at my mother's name and wanted something to honor that, even if it meant giving me a number for a name."
That cleared up nothing for Inu-yasha. "...your mom's name was Four?"
Quatre stared at Inu-Yasha for a moment and then pursed his lips before giving a small laugh. "No, my mother's name was not four. It was Quaterine, so you can see where they got my name from that. Now, back to the matter at hand, I'm saying that our names don't define us. What we do defines us."
Inu-yasha watched the confusing parade of emotions on Quatre’s face, not sure what to make of it. He didn't know how to read people like this. But he did know one thing, and he frowned. "I'm not stupid you know," he said, voice softer than normal, but with a hard edge to it (but no growl of aggression at least). "Of course names define us. Your name makes you rich. My mother's name got her killed. Being born Youkai made me a target the day I was born."
Quatre paused in fiddling with his pen to glance up at Inu-Yasha in surprise. "Did you say Youkai?"
"Yeah," Inu-yasha replied before wondering if he should've answered. More warily, he asked, "Why?"
Quatre frowned trying to remember everything his father had talked to him about on their one business trip to Japan, but was having a hard time remembering anything besides the name of that family. "If you are a Youkai family member...why were you on the streets?"
"Huh?" Inu-yasha blinked stupidly at Quatre. No one not-Japanese had ever known who his family was. Slowly, his face settled into something harder. Quatre wanted to know? Fine. "Half. My dad was Youkai. He fell in love with my mom even though he was already married, an’ they murdered him 'cause I was born." Inu-yasha wasn't too broken up over it - he'd never met the guy, and it was his own idiocy that had gotten him killed.
"That's horrible." Quatre whispered, only remembering that the Youkai were powerful and that his father was none to thrilled to be doing business with them. "They...they just murdered him because he had a son out of wedlock?"
"Of course," Inu-yasha replied, not sure why this was such a surprise. Wasn't Quatre's family rich? "Or his wife's family, no one knows for sure. Doesn't matter." He sighed, sounding bored again. "Now my asshole half-brother's in charge."
Quatre couldn't understand a family that functioned like that, a family who because one acted out of line, would kill them without a thought. He knew of the Youkai's young CEO, having had to read about it for his business lessons.
"You are Sessho-maru's half brother?" He asked quietly.
"You know him?" Inu-yasha was only half surprised at this point, and completely oblivious to Quatre's reactions to the conversation. Sessho-maru's takeover of the company - and family - had been a big deal years ago. Hell, it was why Inu-yasha had moved to the US. Myoga-jiji, an old servant of his father's, had been sure Sessho-maru would want him dead. "Yeah, that's him."
"I don't know him, I know of him. Read about him when he took over the company." The teenager on the paper was very good-looking, but never smiled in any photo Quatre had ever seen of him. He was starting to see where the alone feeling Inu-yasha had come from now, and shifted in his seat to look at the paper in front of him. "I'm guessing you are not looked...highly on in your family?"
He hated how that sounded, but he had no other way to put it.
“Don’t have any family,” Inu-yasha replied, explaining. He was related by blood, but the only family he’d ever had was his mother, and she was long dead. He raised an eyebrow at Quatre, seeming to notice for the first time that he seemed upset, while Inu-yasha himself was completely unbothered. “What’s it matter anyway?”
"I'm sorry." Quatre said quietly, tapping the tip of his pen against the paper and resisting the urge to make an ugly line across his clean columns in frustration. "I'm sorry that you had to go through that and your mother as well. You two didn't deserve that."
The fact that he had been in Japan, eating dinner with and smiling at the people who had treated a woman and her small child so horribly made him feel ill.
Something about that hit Inu-yasha in a weird way, and he looked at Quatre with a new edge. "Didn't matter," he replied. "She died ages ago. Just me now." Golden eyes took in the blond boy, trying to figure him out as he clarified gruffly, "What's it matter to you?"
"That's not how family works. Not real family." He stated, sighing as he made little check marks in the corner of the paper, then turned to fix Inu-yasha with a serious look. "They don't deserve you."
Inu-yasha was staring at Quatre with wide eyes, looking almost a little panicked. What was with this kid?? "The hell does that even mean?"
"It means exactly what I said. You should be able to have a happy and safe life, no matter who your parents decided to love or not." Quatre refused to break eye contact so he would get this point across. "Which means that you should strive for something other than living on the street."
Stunned into silence, Inu-yasha could only stare back at Quatre for a long moment. He didn't even have anything rude to say. No one had ever wanted something like that for him, especially not after actually talking to him. "I..."
Silence was probably the best he was going to get for right now and Quatre nodded as he turned back to the paper. "Now, I had planned to help you figure out what you would like to do, so we can work on that or we can get straight to Composition."
Missing the implied question, Inu-yasha bit back a growl of discomfort, instead making a soft sound as he looked back at the paper. He didn't like this - he felt weird, and didn't know why or what to do with it.
He waited for an answer, but when he only received silence he turned back towards the other with a questioning look. "Inu-yasha?"
Inu-yasha looked back at him, conflicted golden eyes fixing Quatre with a heavy look, face just a little too close (though he didn't realize). "I still don't get it - why do you care?"
Quatre leaned back, suprised at how close the other was suddenly and frowned. "Well, I would like to think of you as a friend and friends care about one another. Does that bother you?"
Inu-yasha wanted to say that he didn’t have friends, but that wasn’t true, Shen was his friend (sort of); he wanted to be bothered by it, but the truth was, he wasn’t.
“...I guess not,” he muttered, looking away. He still didn’t understand it, at all. But what did it matter to him if some idiot kid cared about him? Didn’t mean anything.
Quatre grinned, pleased that they finally seemed to be working towards something, and turned back to the paper. "Good. Okay. Let's at least get some work done before our time runs out."
Inu-yasha wasn’t entirely sure why that smile brought a faint blush to his cheeks, but whatever it was definitely wasn’t worth thinking about it so he ignored it and looked back at the paper too. “Okay, fine.”
(Super backdated because Kate is made of fail, shh...)
Inu-yasha growled to himself, making his way angrily through the halls. Apparently it wasn't enough to have to go to all these stupid classes and have everyone in the whole fucking school know what an idiot he was.
No, apparently the teachers thought further humiliation was needed. They'd assigned him a freaking tutor.
About ten minutes late, he banged into the room where they were supposed to meet, all surly attitude, but then stopped and gaped at the kid waiting for him. "You?"
Quatre jumped when the door to the empty classroom had banged open, shifting all the books in his arms as he smiled when he saw his pupil walk in. "Hello, Inu-Yasha! You're a few minutes late, so I'll have to make sure to focus on the more important parts, but that's alright. Are you ready for our tutoring session?"
"Is this some kinda joke?" Inu-yasha asked, though he already knew the answer. Of course it wasn't; or if it was, it was the kind he was going to be subjected to anyways...
Quatre drooped a little at Inu-yasha's words, but he kept his smile in place and shook his head. "I'm afraid it is no joke. Do you not like the idea of me as your tutor? I assure you I am very good at teaching."
"I don't want a tutor at all," Inu-yasha griped, dropping his bag heavily on the desk. "I don't even know why they're makin' me do school." Mostly to make him look and feel like an idiot, he figured. "Gave up on this shit years ago."
"But school is important, well at least learning is. Don't you want to do something when you get older?" Quatre stacked a few of the books that he had selected on the desk he sat at, turning to look at Inu-yasha with genuine curiosity.
"The hell am I gonna do that needs school?" Inu-yasha asked petulantly, crossing his arms over his chest. This kid was so naive...
"Well, what if you want to go into a certain career of sorts? You'll need schooling for it won't you?" Quatre placed a history book in front of Inu-Yasha. "What are your plans for the future?"
"Dunno," Inu-yasha replied, sounding bored as he glared at the book, scratching absently at one triangular ear. "Never really thought about it. Not much point."
"Why not?" He asked, turning his chair so he could see Inu-Yasha better. "There isn't anything you would like to do?"
Leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers behind his head, Inu-yasha kept up the bored, aloof act. "Figured I'd either be on the street still or dead." If he didn't sound to broken up about it, he wasn't - he was either strong enough to survive, or he wasn't. It was a straightforward enough. "Even this place is just temporary."
Quatre frowned at that, not liking Inu-yasha's blatant disregard for his own life as he folded his hands in his lap. "So, you would rather be on the street or dead than trying to figure out a future where neither of those would have to happen?"
"Huh?" Inu-yasha looked at Quatre like he was from space (he might as well have been). "S'how it is, no use pretending otherwise." Those kinds of thoughts were a waste of time and energy, he'd figured that out when he was still a kid.
"Why?" Quatre asked bluntly, serious about figuring out why the boy would rather just give up instead of at least try.
"Cause I'm a demon," Inu-yasha replied with equal bluntness, eyes narrowing at the blonde boy. "I'm not like you - got no money, no family," well, none that counted, "and no home. People've hated me my whole life." He didn't even sound resentful, just generally pissed off at having to explain it all. "There's no nice, cushy life for people like me," he growled, "and reading books ain't gonna change any of that. The only reason I'm doing any of this BS is because it comes with food and a bed, and a chance to get stronger. The minute that changes, I'm outta here."
"You are not a demon,” Quatre said flatly, moving to dig through his bag for a pen and notebook. When he pulled it out he flipped through a few pages until he got to a blank page. "People who said you were obviously had no idea what they were really talking about."
He drew a line down the middle on the page. "Also, I never said cushy, but I believe you can make a life of your own that isn't on the streets or ending up in an unmarked grave."
He labeled one side of the page likes and the other dislikes.
Inu-yasha frowned, watching all this suspiciously. It was the first time he'd seen the kid look so... determined.
"Of course I'm a demon," he retorted. "It's what my name means." It wasn't even a name he'd picked himself, it was the name his mother gave him when he was born. She'd hoped it would protect him, both of them, but of course it hadn't. "Call a mutant 'dog demon' long enough, that's what you get."
"My name means four, but you don't see me striving to be a number." Quatre shot back gently, not wanting to ruffle feathers too much.
Derailed, Inu-yasha blinked stupidly at Quatre. "Huh? Why does your name mean four?"
Quatre shrugged. "I don't know. I'm not even French, but I think they looked at my mother's name and wanted something to honor that, even if it meant giving me a number for a name."
That cleared up nothing for Inu-yasha. "...your mom's name was Four?"
Quatre stared at Inu-Yasha for a moment and then pursed his lips before giving a small laugh. "No, my mother's name was not four. It was Quaterine, so you can see where they got my name from that. Now, back to the matter at hand, I'm saying that our names don't define us. What we do defines us."
Inu-yasha watched the confusing parade of emotions on Quatre’s face, not sure what to make of it. He didn't know how to read people like this. But he did know one thing, and he frowned. "I'm not stupid you know," he said, voice softer than normal, but with a hard edge to it (but no growl of aggression at least). "Of course names define us. Your name makes you rich. My mother's name got her killed. Being born Youkai made me a target the day I was born."
Quatre paused in fiddling with his pen to glance up at Inu-Yasha in surprise. "Did you say Youkai?"
"Yeah," Inu-yasha replied before wondering if he should've answered. More warily, he asked, "Why?"
Quatre frowned trying to remember everything his father had talked to him about on their one business trip to Japan, but was having a hard time remembering anything besides the name of that family. "If you are a Youkai family member...why were you on the streets?"
"Huh?" Inu-yasha blinked stupidly at Quatre. No one not-Japanese had ever known who his family was. Slowly, his face settled into something harder. Quatre wanted to know? Fine. "Half. My dad was Youkai. He fell in love with my mom even though he was already married, an’ they murdered him 'cause I was born." Inu-yasha wasn't too broken up over it - he'd never met the guy, and it was his own idiocy that had gotten him killed.
"That's horrible." Quatre whispered, only remembering that the Youkai were powerful and that his father was none to thrilled to be doing business with them. "They...they just murdered him because he had a son out of wedlock?"
"Of course," Inu-yasha replied, not sure why this was such a surprise. Wasn't Quatre's family rich? "Or his wife's family, no one knows for sure. Doesn't matter." He sighed, sounding bored again. "Now my asshole half-brother's in charge."
Quatre couldn't understand a family that functioned like that, a family who because one acted out of line, would kill them without a thought. He knew of the Youkai's young CEO, having had to read about it for his business lessons.
"You are Sessho-maru's half brother?" He asked quietly.
"You know him?" Inu-yasha was only half surprised at this point, and completely oblivious to Quatre's reactions to the conversation. Sessho-maru's takeover of the company - and family - had been a big deal years ago. Hell, it was why Inu-yasha had moved to the US. Myoga-jiji, an old servant of his father's, had been sure Sessho-maru would want him dead. "Yeah, that's him."
"I don't know him, I know of him. Read about him when he took over the company." The teenager on the paper was very good-looking, but never smiled in any photo Quatre had ever seen of him. He was starting to see where the alone feeling Inu-yasha had come from now, and shifted in his seat to look at the paper in front of him. "I'm guessing you are not looked...highly on in your family?"
He hated how that sounded, but he had no other way to put it.
“Don’t have any family,” Inu-yasha replied, explaining. He was related by blood, but the only family he’d ever had was his mother, and she was long dead. He raised an eyebrow at Quatre, seeming to notice for the first time that he seemed upset, while Inu-yasha himself was completely unbothered. “What’s it matter anyway?”
"I'm sorry." Quatre said quietly, tapping the tip of his pen against the paper and resisting the urge to make an ugly line across his clean columns in frustration. "I'm sorry that you had to go through that and your mother as well. You two didn't deserve that."
The fact that he had been in Japan, eating dinner with and smiling at the people who had treated a woman and her small child so horribly made him feel ill.
Something about that hit Inu-yasha in a weird way, and he looked at Quatre with a new edge. "Didn't matter," he replied. "She died ages ago. Just me now." Golden eyes took in the blond boy, trying to figure him out as he clarified gruffly, "What's it matter to you?"
"That's not how family works. Not real family." He stated, sighing as he made little check marks in the corner of the paper, then turned to fix Inu-yasha with a serious look. "They don't deserve you."
Inu-yasha was staring at Quatre with wide eyes, looking almost a little panicked. What was with this kid?? "The hell does that even mean?"
"It means exactly what I said. You should be able to have a happy and safe life, no matter who your parents decided to love or not." Quatre refused to break eye contact so he would get this point across. "Which means that you should strive for something other than living on the street."
Stunned into silence, Inu-yasha could only stare back at Quatre for a long moment. He didn't even have anything rude to say. No one had ever wanted something like that for him, especially not after actually talking to him. "I..."
Silence was probably the best he was going to get for right now and Quatre nodded as he turned back to the paper. "Now, I had planned to help you figure out what you would like to do, so we can work on that or we can get straight to Composition."
Missing the implied question, Inu-yasha bit back a growl of discomfort, instead making a soft sound as he looked back at the paper. He didn't like this - he felt weird, and didn't know why or what to do with it.
He waited for an answer, but when he only received silence he turned back towards the other with a questioning look. "Inu-yasha?"
Inu-yasha looked back at him, conflicted golden eyes fixing Quatre with a heavy look, face just a little too close (though he didn't realize). "I still don't get it - why do you care?"
Quatre leaned back, suprised at how close the other was suddenly and frowned. "Well, I would like to think of you as a friend and friends care about one another. Does that bother you?"
Inu-yasha wanted to say that he didn’t have friends, but that wasn’t true, Shen was his friend (sort of); he wanted to be bothered by it, but the truth was, he wasn’t.
“...I guess not,” he muttered, looking away. He still didn’t understand it, at all. But what did it matter to him if some idiot kid cared about him? Didn’t mean anything.
Quatre grinned, pleased that they finally seemed to be working towards something, and turned back to the paper. "Good. Okay. Let's at least get some work done before our time runs out."
Inu-yasha wasn’t entirely sure why that smile brought a faint blush to his cheeks, but whatever it was definitely wasn’t worth thinking about it so he ignored it and looked back at the paper too. “Okay, fine.”