You missed me last weekend. You know you did. Too bad I didn't miss you...*snicker* okay maybe I did. A little. When I wasn't all excited about my new car!

I did it! I bought My very first car. Brand new. It's so new it's a 2010. silver, and oh so beautiful. I jokingly told my second family that my dog and my car now match! And they do!

Anyways, this is not much of an action chapter. We're getting back to the simple Feral point of view as she's sort of locked in a cage right now. there is no one else to observe her. Well not accurately anyway. Superstitious, fear driven fools! but I made them that way, huh.

Rumiko Takahashi did that too though, so it's fairly similar to the original show.

Enjoy it, because i've hit another story-telling snag. I'll work it out eventually. I hope...

Pandora's Box

There is a lot a person can learn about themselves when trapped in a cage without aid. Once the panic and anger subside, the true character of the individual emerges as resignation sets in.

Akemi had long since stopped thrashing uselessly around her new cage. The sharp pain from when her hand crashed a little too forcefully into the bars had awakened her to the fact that mindless movement was not going to win her freedom. She would have to be smart if she wanted to break out.

Her immediate stillness made her guards nervous, but she didn't care. As much as their nervousness irritated her nose and set her nerves more on edge, she wasn't going to start thrashing about again to make them feel better. They deserved their anxiety for locking her up for reasons she couldn't fathom, more so because her beta and pack hadn't understood the reasons either, and they were non-feral enough to comprehend the non-feral society.

All she had done was save a pup that wasn't her own. Apparently in the non-feral world this was a crime. She supposed the correct procedure would have been to alert the boy's parent and let him save his offspring… or watch the pup be flattened.

She growled to herself as she pressed her shackled claws over her own soon-to-be pups. She certainly would prefer somebody save her pups than let them die. They were innocents and deserved to experience life before death came to claim them. The last thing she'd want is for someone to stand by and let her pups die.

Her claws tugged idly at the metal clapped around her limbs. She'd tried to remove them so many times already. Her wrists were raw and bloodied from the effort. She didn't like the feel of them, the smell of them, or the memories they tugged to the surface simply by being there. If she could recollect the story of Pandora, she'd realize this situation was tugging on the lock of her very own box.

Her vision flashed and her mind filled with blood soaked feelings of pain. Pain in her raw and bleeding back as she rubbed against something rough and unforgiving. Pain in her wrists where the manacles bit into her hands and her weight pulled on the chains. Pain that lanced through her body where her pups were and the remembered smell of death.

Akemi knew these were all bits of memory from her time before the wilds. She didn't want to remember. Memories like that could bring her nothing but pain themselves and the overall feeling of claustrophobia, of being trapped in that time of pain was only compounded by the cage she found herself actually in.

Since coming out of the wilds, Akemi had spent time invariably closed in by people. Their closeness making her nervous and their strangeness inevitably confusing her, but there had always been the possibility of escape. In the car they insisted she be whisked around in, she could always leap up and out. In the hospital ward where the broken slayer had stood against her, she could always have made a new door, the walls were not reinforced everywhere. It was the same in that little room she'd found herself so crowded in for her "prenatal exam". All had their routes of escape should she feel the need, and the mere knowledge of that possibility had kept her calm and, if not completely easy, tolerably so.

It was not so in this cage they threw her in. And the space was rank with the smells of others who had been held here.

The upholstery was marred by the claws that had come before hers. The cushion underneath was stained with the scents of old, dried, spilled blood, setting one more trigger to her flight mechanism. The floor smelled and showed stains of other bodily fluids that made her refuse to touch it. Over all it smelled of male beyond the smell of her warden shifting nervously in the front seat.

It smelled of spent male, bowel, urine, and fear.

Even the air she breathed hung heavy with the remembered taint of power that was not her own. And that tugged on more memories of pain, ones that stabbed pain through an area that had only known pleasure since her Beta had come into her care.

She didn't want to remember. She didn't care to remember and this tiny place that held her against her will oppressed her with fragments of memory better left to the time before.

Akemi swallowed convulsively, what fools these non-ferals were turning out to be. If this is how they treat the Ferals that came into society from the wilds, it wasn't any wonder they believed her fellows were mindless, violent creatures.

They had refused to allow anyone she was familiar with to ride with her, to distract her and keep her calm. For the first time in seasons, she was without the ready company of her beta and she felt his absence. Before taking him in, she had been alone, but she had not suffered loneliness for it. Now she felt it keenly.

Akemi well knew that inu were normally pack animals. Youkai and lesser species, all canines were social creatures. She had thought about pack when watching the wild youkai in theirs, but dismissed the possibility for herself. Now she had one and was cut off from them. She did not like it.

She did not like that they would be worried about her, fretting on their own from somewhere they could not see for themselves she was fine. She did not like that her beta had to be in pain.

Her beta still wasn't perfectly healthy yet, he could ill-afford the kind of pain she knew he would feel at their enforced separation. And from what she'd gleaned from the members of her rediscovered pack, he'd suffered far too much of that kind of pain. Being Feral didn't mean she lost the instinct that told her what a beta needed, and what he needed was merely her presence right now.

She turned her head to try and catch sight of him as she knew he had ordered all of the principle parties involved in the street incident to the same place. He had to be near enough for her to see, to check on him.

But her gaze was arrested by the bars that held her close. These non-Feral fools kept her from doing what she needed to do as an alpha with a beta. They held her in a cage like a wild animal, like a rabid thing to be stared at in terrified curiosity and never touched.

It had not been missed by her that her prison keeper had made darn sure to touch her as little as possible.

And that youkai on the street whose son she had saved from imminent flatness hadn't been truly wary of her, he was terrified and anxious, perhaps a bit shocked. Instead of dealing with his feelings or even just being glad that the boy was alive and well, he had shoved those feelings off onto her.

The officer hadn't cared about being fair or following rules, he hadn't even cared that everyone involved and not involved had suffered no injury because of her. The minute he'd been told she was Feral; he'd had no intention of letting her go anywhere unless it involved her death.

Akemi was coming to understand there was more wrong with the non-feral view of Ferals than just a lack of understanding. They feared her, not because she was more formidable in power for they couldn't sense her strength. It wasn't because she would kill without provocation because she had yet to harm anyone. Someone had declared Ferals as the root of all evil.

She was the boogie man.

Worse, they thought she was contagious. In another situation, she might have felt amusement at that.

Ferals were the end result of a problem in non-feral society and instead of viewing the perpetrators as monsters they preferred to fear the abused survivor. Instead of sympathizing with the fearful, hiding youkai driven to the wilds by the anxiety and trauma forced upon them; they send the exterminators. Non-ferals apparently believed the only cure and healing available to such injured parties was to put them out of their misery.

The only thing Ferals wanted was to live.

All she wanted was to live, for her pups to live.

It was no wonder youkai fled to the wild when they were in so much emotional and physical pain. It was the only place they could go where people would let them be. Being alone was the most they could hope for since they could not expect sympathy or compassion. Solitude was the only comfort allowed to them.

The more she learned of non-feral society the more she found it hard to believe that theirs was less primitive than their wild cousins. Living in the wild she had witnessed her local packs of wild youkai in most every type of situation, and in the event that a member of their pack got caught alone and attacked, young or old, if they survived and remained traumatized by the experience they were taken into the pack fold and comforted and nursed back to health, mental and physical. And they did this in the wild where nursing and caring was all but impossible to do.

Contrasted with non-ferals, in their tall havens and mechanically controlled environment, with food produced and provided for them without the necessity of hunting for it, who didn't bother to offer comfort or aid to the severely abused and traumatized, where they had the aid of healing houses and easy access to the learning of others. It was a wonder more of their numbers didn't go Feral in reality.

The uniformed youkai in the front seat glanced back at her nervously in the review mirror and she glowered at him through the bars. The stench of his fear filled the confined space of the car and filtered into her cage. She hated the smell. Not for the first time her thoughts drifted wistfully to her den. At least there, creatures were wise enough to hide the smell of their fear from clogging up the air. And there was no youki screaming against her nerves there either.

She did not rightly understand the non-feral youkai. The humans she got though. Their foibles and fears made sense to her. They were like the wild youkai, trying to make sure all their numbers were cared for but unable to do so by the sheer size of their numbers. They did not shun those who suffered; rather they did all they could to help the sufferer, sometimes doing too much in the effort.

Once again she tried to look out to find her beta and was unsuccessful.

Akemi would give Sesshoumaru today to get her out of here his way. Then she would take matters into her own hands. She would get out of here or die trying. There was no way she could stand to stay here longer than that. He needed her and she wanted him.