Title: Cri du Chat
Author: Alleyprowler
Characters: Nanashi and Ralph Kurt
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Dark themes. Birth, death, pain.

"It won't live long."

Ralph nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard the words. He was covered in blood and filth, nearly crazy with grief and horror--he really didn't need the kid to go all gloomy on him now. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Nanashi knelt on the ground next to the squalling newborn and pulled her away from her dead mother's cooling body. "This baby isn't right. Look at its head. Look at its face. There's something wrong with it."

"Her, damn you!" Ralph cried out, but forty straight hours of trying to help the homeless woman through her labor had robbed his voice of any real strength. "Stop calling her 'it'!"

The kid ignored him. He stripped off his jacket and spread it out on the ground, then lay the baby down on the quilted lining. He took his army knife out of the side pocket of his pants, and Ralph could only watch in fascinated horror as the kid selected a blade and pried it out of the handle with his thumbnail.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"

"The cord needs to be cut," said Nanashi. He doubled the umbilical cord over the blade and sliced through it as if it had no more substance than warm butter. Ralph felt a twinge in his gut. That such a thing so strong as to sustain and nurture a new life for so many months could be severed so easily...

"Fuck, I can't believe this." Ralph sat down on the leaf mould and rubbed his temples with filthy fingers. He was close to physical and nervous collapse, and the baby's unnaturally high-pitched wail was going right through his head like a drillbit. The cries sounded like someone torturing a cat. "Can't you shut her up?"

Nanashi gave him a cool, appraising look that made him want to sink into the ground, but soon dropped it in order to focus his attention on the baby. "You did all you could, Kurt. You have nothing to be ashamed of."

Ralph looked at the pale, limp body of the young mother. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist and was still damp with amniotic fluid, sweat, and blood. So much blood. "We killed her."

Nanashi arranged the dead girl's legs into a more modest position and pulled her skirt down before forcing her eyelids closed and weighing them with small pebbles. "We destroyed her village," he said, "but she ran. It was her choice."

"Fuck." Ralph folded in on himself, pressing the heels of his hands into his aching eyesockets. It felt like his brain was trying to force its way out of his head via his temples, and he had to wonder why his head didn't simply shatter from the pressure.

The baby shrieked in uncomforted pain.

"Do something!" he exploded.

"I will. Don't worry."

The baby wailed on a flat, discordant note that wavered and diminished as Nanashi carried it away. Ralph breathed slowly, trying to ride out the pain--the horror. "What are you going to do?" he asked, but Nanashi was already out of earshot. "Oh God, kid, what are you going to do?"

There was no answer, but then Ralph had expected none. The kid had his own bizarre motives and he rarely bothered to justify them. It was best just to let him be. It was best, he decided, to simply curl up at the dead girl's feet and try not to listen to the eerie, tortured-animal sound that should have been the crying of a healthy infant but wasn't. It wasn't at all.

And then, it wasn't. The forest was as silent as a tomb.

END

(10/16/05)