The group traveled as far as they could manage in one night, putting as much distance as possible between the inferno and themselves before they stopped to set up camp. Kagome was gently placed on her sleeping bag, her face deathly pale and sweaty. Grimly aware of the hanyou breathing down her neck, Sango examined her friend's wound. The rat youkai had not been aiming for her, so the attack didn't do as much damage as it could have, but the outlook was still grim. Even worse, the javelin's haft had snapped when she had hit the ground, meaning that its head was not going to come out easily.
"The best I can do is bandage the wound up and keep it disinfected, Kagome-chan," Sango said apologetically as she reached for Kagome's backpack, which had luckily made it through the fight with the youkai. Kagome bit her lip to keep herself from crying out when Sango swabbed the area around the javelin's broken haft, cleaning the wound and wiping away some of the blood that still trickled out from around the splintered haft. InuYasha growled and shifted around slightly, wishing he could do more to help Kagome than just sit and do nothing. However, it was the woman lying wounded on the ground who usually tended to his wounds, and before that...well, fifty-one years ago, InuYasha would've preferred death over letting a human care for him. All of this meant that InuYasha had about as much knowledge about medicine as a mole had about the sky.
"Okay, Kagome-chan, I'm done," Sango said as she finally pulled away. Her hands were stained with blood and the cleansing fluid, as were several of the crumpled wipes beside her. Kagome's shoulder had been bandaged to the best of Sango's ability, but the haft of the javelin still peeped out through the bandages.
"Thanks, Sango-chan," Kagome said feebly as she tried to relax into her sleeping bag. She winced when the javelin threatened to cut deeper into the muscles of her shoulder. Twinges of pain throbbed throughout her entire body as her shoulder protested the motion. "Ow," she groaned as she rolled over onto her uninjured shoulder.
InuYasha leaped up from where he was sitting and rushed over to her, unable to sit still any longer. "Dammit, Kagome, are you sure there isn't anything I can do to help?" he asked, his voice frantic and his eyes desperate.
"Yes," she moaned. "I need to take some painkillers, but I don't have any water to drink. Could you get me something?" InuYasha nodded. Just what he needed, a run in the forest to take his mind off things. Sango rummaged around in Kagome's bag and found one of her empty water bottles. She handed it to InuYasha, who took off into the depths of the forest.
Gaka, who had been recovering from the events in the city, came over to Kagome's bedside and sat down beside her. "I think that hanyou really does care for you, you know," he said gently.
Kagome blushed slightly, her face pale enough to make the colors clash unpleasantly. "He cares, in his own way," she murmured, "but there's...there's someone else."
"Ah." Gaka wisely decided not to press the matter any further and promptly changed the subject. "I do not think I will be able to get any sleep tonight, after what I have seen. It has reminded me too much of my childhood." Gaka shuddered and looked out at the almost full moon, his eyes distant and dull.
"What happened, Gaka-san?" Miroku asked, also willing to change the subject from Kikyou and Kagome's heartache.
"Well..." Gaka still looked at the stars, his eyes distant as the years seemed to roll backwards. His face was almost that of a reluctant child's; a child who was living in a fantasy world and didn't want to see the harsh reality that lay beyond it. Then Gaka sighed and looked down at the ground. "I originally came from the Eastern lands. My family was more prosperous than most, due to the fact that we lived by the ocean and could make our living by fishing and collecting shells to make jewelry. Even back then, when I was only a young lad of nine, I had a passion for art, although it wasn't as...all-consuming as it is now. I loved to draw everything; animals, people, my parents, my older brother..." Gaka trailed off again as his eyes shone briefly; a young boy reliving a particularly good fantasy.
"Little did I know that our lands had been targeted by one of the lords for his own use; he wanted to turn it into a sea-port so that he could control the waters and the fish that swam there. However, he didn't want any of the other lords to declare war on him, so he hired a local mercenary band...the Shichinintai."
Miroku stiffened, Sango gasped and Kagome moaned softly. The Shichinintai had been a murderous band of seven people who could do the work of an entire army. Nearly one decade ago, they had terrorized the East before they had been caught and beheaded by the warlords who had hired them. Recently they had been resurrected by Naraku so that they could serve as a shield against InuYasha and the rest of the people who hunted him while the dark hanyou rebuilt his body. They had been incredibly tough to beat, even though they were still human, and the entire group had nearly died at one point or another during the long fight with the Shichinintai.
"The Shichinintai?" Miroku asked. "Are you sure?"
Gaka shivered as he replied, "Oh, yes, I am dead sure. I remember seeing them approaching the village. No-one could believe their eyes; we had heard the rumors of a band of seven men who could do the work of an army, but no-one really believed it. Most of us just thought that it was a story to tell one's children at night and nothing more. But here they were; seven men, each one of them a murderer in his own right. Only a minute passed before the headman ordered everyone who could fight to gather the bows, poles, hatchets, anything that could be used as a weapon. My mother, who, like me, possessed the inner eye, knew that the resistance we put up would be nothing compared to their power. She took me to the beach and put me in my father's fishing boat. Then she told me, 'Do not come out of this boat, no matter what happens, do you understand?' I nodded, and she left. I wanted her to come back, to come hide with me, but she wanted to stand by my father and my older brother." Gaka shuddered, the convulsions chasing each other up and down his spine as he retold the tale of his past. "I hid under the seat and prayed to the Kami, prayed that everything would be all right, prayed that we could defeat the Shichinintai. I prayed in vain; the screaming started up shortly after I had hidden, followed by tremendous explosions and the whoosh of fire as they set light to the village. I decided that I wanted to see what was going on. I peeked out over the edge of the boat and was greeted by a bloodbath. They were slaughtering my people like you might chop vegetables; most of them didn't even seem to be trying. I remember the tears falling down my face as I could do nothing but watch as the people I had lived with all of my life fell like grass to a sickle. The blood flowed like great rivers and the fire leaped higher and higher, turning the sky black even though it was high noon. Inevitably, one of the warriors looked over and saw me sitting in the boat. I remember him well; even though he was not a youkai, he had sharp blades on each of his hands like fearsome claws and terrible markings on his face. My mother saw him looking at me, so she did something I can never forget. She ran out, managing to move faster than the murderer even though she was heavily pregnant, and pushed the boat out onto the ocean. She...she could not escape...could not..." Gaka broke off with a whimpering sob as he buried his head in his knees, overcome by the grief that he had buried long ago.
Sango bit her lip as tears swam in her own eyes. She could relate to Gaka's situation more than anyone else in the group, since Naraku and his youkai had massacred her entire village of youkai-taijiya. Miroku wrapped an arm around her, comforting her while he reached out with his other hand and placed it on Gaka's shoulder. Kagome couldn't really move because of the javelin, but she also felt tears pooling in her eyes.
They could all understand where Gaka's madness and his passion for art came from now. The pain of seeing his entire village slaughtered when he was only nine would've broken any other person beyond repair. At least Sango hadn't been a little girl watching the youkai kill her people, but an almost grown woman who had heard about her village's demise and had later seen the aftermath of the fight. She had managed to keep her sanity intact, although she did have an insatiable thirst for revenge for the deaths of her people, sometimes to the point where she would sacrifice her own life in exchange for vengeance. Gaka's obsession with his art was probably like how InuYasha and Sango both dampened the pain in their hearts by fighting: it was just a way to fight off the heartache. It was the only thing left that he had to love, and the only thing he could treasure from his childhood.
When InuYasha returned, he found that the camp was much more subdued than it had been when he had left. "What's wrong?" he asked worriedly, thinking that Kagome had gotten worse, or even...he dared not to finish that thought.
Gaka just shook his head. "Just thinking of the past," he mumbled in a tear-choked voice. InuYasha understood more than anything the reluctance to reveal painful memories, so he went over to Kagome.
"I got the water for you," he said, shaking the now full bottle at her. Kagome nodded, then tried to sit up, wincing when the movement jarred her injured shoulder. InuYasha carefully wrapped an arm about her waist and helped her to sit up, allowing her good shoulder to rest on his chest while he handed her the water. Moving carefully so as not to jar her hurt shoulder, she grabbed the bottle of painkillers and popped down a couple of pills.
"So what's with the sudden mood-change?" he asked in a low whisper. "Did something happen?"
Kagome shook her head and said, "Gaka told us about his past. He said that his entire village was murdered by the Shichinintai when he was only nine."
"Fuckin' hell," InuYasha swore. "No wonder he's so messed up."
Kagome nodded. "Seeing something like that would mess any kid up. It's a wonder he isn't completely out of his mind twenty-four seven, with all the things he's seen."
InuYasha nodded, then sneaked a peek at Gaka's subdued form. Gaka's family being murdered by the Shichinintai when he was little was something he would never have expected to have happened. Kagome was right; anyone else in the artist's shoes would have gone totally and completely off the deep end. While Gaka had his crazy moments, he was usually a pretty rational thinker. Like it or not, InuYasha now had a grudging respect for Gaka.
After that, everybody just sat around in silence since no-one really wanted to talk to anyone else. Kagome quickly fell into a drug-induced sleep, her head lolling on InuYasha's shoulder as she snoozed. InuYasha was loath to put Kagome down, but he didn't want everyone else watching them. Luckily for him, everyone else was too wrapped up in their own thoughts to really notice him holding Kagome.
"Miroku, d'you think you can put up some sort of barrier so we don't have to worry about an ambush while we're sleeping?" InuYasha hissed, trying very hard not to wake the sleeping woman in his arms. Miroku nodded, not wanting to wake Shippou or Kirara, who they had discovered to be sleeping on a patch of grassy ground not too far away from the campfire. The houshi stood up and began placing some of his ofuda on the surrounding trees, muttering a prayer as he placed each and every one.
Gaka stayed awake long after everyone else had gone to sleep, staring at the distant stars unseeingly as the terrible film of the past replayed itself over and over in his mind. The artist shook his head, then removed his pack and opened it, rooting around for the paintings that took refuge in the battered receptacle. One by one, he removed the scrolls until he had quite a large pile beside him. Then he took his time in perusing them. The earliest painting was a black, orange and red rendition of the day his childhood ended. It depicted seven men standing in a field of corpses with flames leaping and writhing behind them. All of them were saturated in blood; it dripped from their hands and stained their various weapons bright red. Gaka shuddered again. This painting was the result of his first fit of madness, the first time he had ever become less than fully conscious of himself. It was a reminder that no matter how much money he made and how much prestige he got, Gaka would never be able to forget where he came from. Gaka rolled the painting back up and picked up another one. Ah. This was the painting he had been working on when the youkai had attacked the castle. It was only half-finished, but it promised to be almost as good as his Amaterasu when it was completed. Gaka laughed to himself, then he took out his ink-pot, refreshed it with some of Kagome's water and began to paint again.
The painting depicted three possible futures he could see for the two people sleeping together on his left. Gaka didn't know which one would be their future, and he knew that it could, in fact, be none of them. But still he painted, still his brush moved across the parchment to bring the characters to life. It was the only way he could think of to distract himself from the pain in his heart. The only finished part of the painting was the first foreseeable future: a shrine surrounded by sakura blossoms, with two formally dressed people reciting their wedding vows to the surrounding crowd. After that, the painting sort of went downhill from there. The second part of the painting, the one he was working on now, was of the two people sitting next to him embracing for the last time. They floated in what looked like starlight and blackness, both glowing with ethereal light; one red, one blue. Or, at least, they would when Gaka finished the painting. The third part...the third part was definitely the worst part to come. Gaka had only sketched that part, but he knew what it would look like. The sky would be as red as freshly shed blood, the clouds nothing more than old scabs on a gruesome wound. The ground would be cracked and dead, ravished by some unknown evil. They would be sitting together; he would be holding her like he was now, but with one gaping exception: the woman in the hanyou's painted arms would never wake up again. Tears would be streaming down the hanyou's face as he wept over her body. Gaka shivered again, then resumed painting.
'Fate is up to the Kami,' he thought sadly. 'If it was up to humanity to decide what their fate would be, there would never be any unfortunate deaths in this world. If it were up to me, no-one would ever have to suffer the loss of a loved one.''
The rat youkai was running hard and fast, not caring what lay beyond the horizon as he put all his energy into absconding. When the rat had thrown the javelin at the artist with the shard, he hadn't noticed that he was with the hanyou who had killed his companions, or that he had hit the same hanyou's female by mistake. All youkai knew that the only way to repay a mate's murder was to slaughter their murderer: an eye for an eye. Afraid of facing the hanyou's retribution, the rat had turned tail and run.
Much later, the rat had to come to a stop. He was exhausted; his thin fur was drenched with sweat, his skinny chest heaving with pants and his dry black tongue hanging out over his cracked lips. "I could go fer some water," he gasped to no-one in particular; he was far too used to complaining to stop now. He collapsed by the side of a reeking swamp and began sucking gratefully at the steaming water. It was nasty, but the rat was not about to turn his snout up at water, smelly and filthy or not.
The gray fur on the back of the rat's neck stood up straight as a shiver crawled down his spine. Something...evil, far more evil than the rat was coming, and the rat wasn't about to stay around and say hello. Squeaking like the ordinary rat he had once been, the youkai leaped behind a rotting log and cowered in the shadows, his red eyes blinking slowly as he tried to calm his racing heartbeat. Whatever it was that was out there in the swamp wasn't loud, or large or making any territorial sounds. However, the aura it produced made the rat gag. It was like inhaling death, death that stung the nose and throat as it spread throughout the body. The rat began to back away slowly, hoping against hope that whatever had taken up refuge in the swamp would either be on its way or else not notice one rat youkai running for the hills.
"Did you honestly think I wouldn't notice you?"
The rat froze, the instinct to get away warring with the instinct to try and blend into his surroundings. The voice was like the aura; cold and merciless. It was the voice of a killer who stalked in the shadows, the spider who wove an intricate web, then sat back so that his prey could strangle themselves as they blundered unseeingly into the sticky strands. The rat slowly peeked out from behind his log, frightened at what he might see.
At first he was confused. Surely this was only a human male, finely dressed and completely out of place in the swamp. What was he doing here? Then the rat's eyes focused on the finer details of his appearance: the hair like black seaweed, which looked like it might come to life and strangle him at any second, the three long tails protruding from his back, the bony crests on his shoulders, and the eyes on his hands and chest. But it was the eyes in his face that made the rat feel true terror. They were red, but despite the violent color they were utterly cold and contemptuous, as if the being held every living thing beneath him. The eyes of a mass-murderer.
The rat tried to weasel his way out of trouble. "Ya don't want me, I'm jus'n ordinary rat youkai," he squeaked as he tried to back away again. "Jus' at the wrong place 'n time is all!"
"You certainly are at the wrong place at the wrong time," the being said, his eyes glinting evilly. "I'm afraid that can't go unpunished."
The rat knew then that the stranger wanted to kill him. Fear pounded through his body, making him want to bolt, or beg. He didn't want to test the strange being's running ability, so the rat went with begging, however futile it might be. "I...I'm jus'n ordinary rat youkai!" he wailed again, his bald tail writhing in his agitation. "I was busy runnin' from tha' hanyou, I can't hurt no-one! Please, sir, I'm not gonna do anyfink to ya 'cept leave an umpleasant stain on yore blade! Lemme go, please!"
The stranger paused in his advance, his eyes suddenly curious. "Hanyou? What did he look like?"
The rat saw a chance to prolong his impending doom and seized it with both claws. "Long silver 'air. Gold'n eyes. Big katana. Dog ears. Red clothing." The rat collapsed on the ground, his stubby legs having finally given up on him. "Now lemme go, sir! I've told ya all I know! I don't want nufink ta do wit ya, an' I sointently don't want nufink ta do wit that hanyou, or wit the Shikon-no-Tama! Lemme go!"
"Does that hanyou have a shikon-no-kakera, then?" the stranger asked, his eyes now taking on a greedy look. "Tell me and I might consider letting you go free."
The rat was only too happy to spill his guts. "I don't fink so, not when I was there. But there's an artist travelin' wit'em, an' 'e had the shard, las' I was there. Still might 'ave it, for all I know. Now lemme go, please."
The stranger raised one black eyebrow. "Just...one last question. Why did you run from InuYasha?"
The rat scratched his greasy head with one claw, confused. "InuYasha? D'you mean that hanyou?" The stranger nodded, a smirk on his face. "I was runnin' cuz I tried ta kill the artist, but I 'it 'is liddle filly instead. Dunno how. Now I wanna go. Lemme run away, an' I promise not ta be a thorn in yer side."
The stranger seemed to be thinking. "You're too cowardly to be a good addition to my body, and you know far, far too much for a youkai of your standing." The stranger gave him a smile that on someone else's face would have been positively radiant, but on this being's face it was like an eclipse. The rat knew then that the stranger never had any intention of sparing his life; he'd just seen a chance to milk the rat for information, and he used it. The rat turned around and promptly fled. He only made it three paces before the stranger's hand flashed in a crimson arc. The rat's head thudded to the ground as his body continued running for about fifteen feet before realizing that it was supposed to be dead. The rat's dimming red eyes fixed on the stranger's fading form, his mouth lolling open in disbelief.
"Yew...prick..." he gasped, then he died, his body and head turning into ash that was quickly absorbed into the ground.
Naraku gave the small pile of ashes a small smile as he rose into the air, his barrier shimmering around him as the Saimyoushou gathered around the shimmering shield. "Find InuYasha and his little group," he told them. "When you find them, tell me." The obedient bugs flew off in different directions, ready to scour the lands for their master's enemies.
Naraku smiled again as he looked up at the stars. 'Soon, the Shikon-no-Tama will be completed, and my enemies rotting in Hell. Naraku will win, and the world will be purged of all those weak humans and their weak human emotions.'
'I will finally be rid of Kikyou.'