Yes, this is my first posted story. So, if you are kind hearted and only wish to give me celebrating comments because of this, try not to. A person won't achieve greatness if they do not know what their faults are. Critics are allowed to demonstrate and explain their opinion. I never totally bash an opinion. I may disprove of it, but it is your belief and I shouldn't be able to take that away.
Disclaimer: No, I really do not own anything in relation to Naruto. Only this story.
Loveless
Rest in peace.
It's our solemn wish, our plea for our dead.
The idea of death as eternal sleep is an old one, but almost as old are tales of the undead, those who won't or can't lie down and do what's expected of them.
Every culture has its strategies and safeguards for seeing the dead on their way. We hire professional wailing women to lament them, sprinkle them with herbs, and lay coins on their eyelids. We fill their tombs with food and drinks, riches, servants, pets, and painted boats, even life-size clay armies. We may then refuse to speak their names, but we honor and appease with flags and flowers, bake them cakes, picnic over their sleeping bones.
Even before a body dies, we tend the "loosening" soul. A "good" death, a peaceful one, is about readiness. So a Pima tribal elder might furnish the dying with owl feathers, a Catholic priest offer last rites, a Buddhist will read aloud from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. If we don't prepare a vital, transitioning spirit, it departs unprotected. Or won't depart at all.
Whether the classic forlorn figure in white or a full scale vision from another dimension— as in Chris Wooding's "The House and the Locket"—ghosts have unfinished business. Wrenched from familiar flesh, caught between matter and absence, they hang around, cautioning and blaming and wringing their useless hands, or as in Libba Bray's "Bad Things," just reflecting the random nature of evil.
Vampires are a class of undead that feeds on the living, and in "kissing Dead Boys," Annette Curtis Klause toys with the familiar dynamic of predator and pray.
In Holly Black's "The Poison Eaters" hunger for the flesh or essence of another promises not renewal but defeat.
The living in these tales, meanwhile, conducts their own dark affairs. Marcus Sedgwick's "The Heart of Another" summons the shade of Poe while illustrating the brutal lengths to which people go to avoid giving up the ghost.
In classic literature from Shelly's "Frankenstein" to Jacob's "The Monkey's Paw" to King's Pet Sematary, worldly ambition or grief evoke a costly form of greed. Nancy Etchemendy's "Honey in the Wound" follows this tradition, while in Kelly Link's "The Wrong Grave" and Herbie Brennan's "The Necromancers" the resurrected dead blithely rebel in service of their own agendas.
Whether they are motivated by shock, sorrow, self-preservation, or more subtle ambitions—as in M.T. Anderson's richly allegorical "The gray Boy's Work"—the dead in this anthology are all restless, all awake when they shouldn't be, all conspiring to keep you up at night.
Please do inform me of what you thought of it. Even if this chapter was boring, there was great importance to it. I needed this to be the introduction toward the main event. I can't jump into something without a safety net. Once I get a little more used to this sort of thing will I risk a stories main theme. I'm not to sure about the pairing. Ever good story has one, but I don't want this to be a full blown romance fic. Mostly thinking Gaara or Pein, though that's just me thinking. If you have an idea, feel free to suggest it. The help is most defiantly needed.
Loveless