Chapter Thirty-Seven: Kidnapped
After what she'd seen in the village, Rue had been spooked.
Even after the day had ended, and everyone made camp, the moment she fell asleep... she started having bad dreams.
In the end, the only thing she could do was stare at the ground.
Her mind was filled with the frightening images of everything she had seen. Ever since she'd been attacked, Rue had been exceedingly jumpy and paranoid... but who could blame her? She'd come across a slaughtered village and had been attacked by a group of hostile monks who'd thought she was the one who'd done it.
In spite of that, though, the pale girl hadn't exactly managed to find the courage to tell anyone what she'd seen.
She wanted to, but she didn't know how... especially since she figured there would be some anger there once she confessed what had happened. Inuyasha and Kagome were already suspecting that she was keeping something from them, and although Nanami and Saelind hadn't said anything about her behavior, they knew her well enough to understand that something must have happened. However, out of everyone, shockingly enough... Miroku seemed to be the most worried.
After she'd finished crying and had blinked herself awake, the girl slowly sat back up and stared at the ground.
They'd been searching for leads on Naraku all over the place, but nobody really knew where to look.
Not even Inuyasha.
It was incredibly frustrating, but if she was going to be honest, Rue Thompson had actually been losing her motivation to continue fighting him: she no longer wanted to hunt him down... in fact, she didn't even feel angry about losing the people in the cavern village. The only thing left was a deep, inherent sadness that refused to go away.
She missed everyone who'd died, but after everything that had happened, all she wanted was for her friends to be safe.
That was the only motivation she had left for hunting the bastard down.
To keep those she cared about out of harm's way.
Pulling her hair back, Rue finally climbed out from under her sleeping roll and glanced at her friends: she was thirsty and didn't want to wake them up since it was still somewhat dark, so she carefully climbed to her feet and stretched her aching limbs. Then she grabbed her backpack and padded off in the direction of the river.
However, Sango's completely alert voice startled her into stopping.
"Where are you going?" she quietly demanded, looking at the albino girl's luminescent yellow eyes when she turned. "It's still pretty early to go off again, you know."
"Yeah, I do, but I didn't want to wake anyone up," Rue sighed, rubbing her eyes; she watched as the demon slayer's silhouette rose from the ground and slowly started walking closer to where she was standing. "I wasn't trying to run away again... just in case you were wondering."
"Miharu, are you okay?" the woman sighed, walking until she was standing by her side. "You've been acting strange for a while now. I feel like you've somehow detached yourself from everything again. Not as extremely as before, but still... "
With a shake of her head, the pale girl shrugged and began to walk toward the river again.
Sango and Kirara came with her, walking so close that the woman's arm brushed her shoulder every time she took a step.
"I'm kind of sad about Sesshomaru, that's all," Rue sighed, shrugging. "It's not your fault, I promise..."
"Oh," Sango sighed, shaking her head. "I thought you might have been upset because we made Kagome read your diary."
"My life is kind of a touchy subject," Rue quietly explained, not lifting her eyes. "I won't deny that much, but I wasn't lying when I said I'd have told you all about it if you'd asked."
The two of them were quiet for a while after that, since Sango didn't know how to respond.
"Miharu... what you said a few weeks ago... about Kohaku," Sango murmured, making the smaller girl wince. "I'm sorry for not understanding your feelings. Until you explained it, I didn't even realize that... I was in the same kind of situation."
Rue jolted to a halt.
"I'm the one who should be sorry," she muttered, shaking her head. "It was cruel of me to make a comparison like that."
"You did what had to be done," Sango sighed, frowning at her. "I wouldn't have understood it had you not. In truth, I'm actually grateful for it, because it helped me to understand you better. Not to mention... no matter how awful it was, your comparison was completely true. Sometimes the truth is ugly, you know? Anyway... mind telling me what the secret is?"
Rue blinked, realizing almost immediately that Sango had caught on.
"Fine..." she muttered, shaking her head with a disturbed expression. "Everyone already seems to suspect something happened, so I guess there's no point in trying. See, yesterday, I went off on my own for a while. I'm sure you know that, too, since everyone went looking for me... but, while I was off running, I... I kind of ran into a bad situation."
"What kind of situation?" the demon slayer demanded, eyes sharpening in an instant. "Tell me."
"Well, as stupid as it was... I went too far from you guys and lost track of where I was," Rue tentatively explained, lifting her arms and hugging herself with a nervous expression. "So, I decided to head into a nearby village to ask for some directions. I figured someone could tell me how to get back to the gorge we'd camped by, but... everyone in the village... they were dead."
The woman twitched and stared at her, eyes large with shock.
"Describe what you saw, right now!" Sango hissed, clutching her shoulders. "Tell me, Miharu!"
"Well, when I first walked into the village, it was quiet and all of the houses looked like they'd been ransacked," the albino explained, giving a tiny shrug. "Then I got to the center of the town... and... and there was a mountain of bodies that had been piled on top of each other, like someone had just thrown them there. And at the very top, a... a... baby... had been impaled on a... a..."
Before she could finished, Rue's stomach clenched and she clamped a hand over her mouth. The memory seared behind her eyes, making her double over and retch. Sango stepped back and watched with stunned eyes as the girl's knees buckled: she pressed her head against the ground as she heaved.
"A-are you okay?" the woman asked, slowly stepping forward and putting a hand on her back. "Hey, come on!"
"No, I'm not okay... not at all. It was awful... just, awful," Rue coughed, slowly sitting back up. "After that, though, a group of monks walked into the village and attacked me. I don't know who they were, but they surrounded me and tried to exorcise me with some sort of weird power."
"This sounds like Naraku's work," Sango muttered, shaking her head with a serious frown. "I think you found a clue!"
"There's something else," Rue stated weakly, making the woman glance at her. "When the monks first saw me, one of them said 'the demon has returned,' but they didn't even give me a chance to speak."
When the demon slayer didn't say anything, Rue cast a wary glance at her.
She was surprised to realize that Sango had stopped a good deal back: the woman was staring at her with furrowed brows.
Rue frowned as well, worry lacing her fragile features.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" she asked, uneasily rubbing her arm. "Come on, cut it out!"
In truth, she was a little frightened by the intense way the woman was looking at her.
When her eyes began to glow with an inner violet light, however, Sango took a deep breath and exhaled sharply.
"I didn't notice it before..." Sango growled, angrily turning her head away. "How could I not have noticed it?!"
"Noticed... what?" Rue asked, blinking in total confusion. "What do you mean?"
"There's a demon child that looks similar to you," the woman whispered, clenching her fists. "Damn you, Naraku."
"Huh?" Rue asked, totally at a loss. "Sango, what do you mean? There's a demon child that looks like me?"
"We found out about it after the incident at Mount Hakurei," the woman explained. "You've heard the rumors about the woman and child showing up at temples and killing the priests there, right...? Well, during one of the times when you ran off to who know's where... Kagome was kidnapped by Kagura."
Rue halted in her tracks and turned.
"Are you serious?!" she whispered, staring at the demon slayer in shock. "Where was Inuyasha?!"
"Looking for Kikyo," she stated grimly, shaking her head. "We discovered not long after that situation that Kikyo might actually be alive... but it's a fleeting hope. While he was out searching, however, Kagome was abducted by Kagura... and that's how we found out about... the infant."
"The... infant?" Rue asked, not liking the ominous tone of voice Sango was taking with her. "That's not sketchy at all."
"She went through a very strange situation," Sango sighed, shaking her head. "According to her, it's one of Naraku's incarnations... but this one is different than the others. When everyone wakes up, you need to tell them what happened at the village."
Rue turned away.
"This is a little... unpleasant," she uneasily replied, fidgeting under the woman's gaze and finally turning to face the direction they'd been walking in. After a moment, she paused and glanced over her shoulder to see that Kirara and Sango were still keeping pace with her as she walked to the river. "Sango, do I really look like one of Naraku's incarnations?"
"If how Kagome described him is accurate..." the girl angrily muttered, glaring at the ground, "aside from the color of his eyes, you could literally pass off as his big sister."
Big sister...
Rue twitched and froze in place.
Those words... they held some deeper meaning to her.
Something that made her feel extremely nostalgic.
Her pupils contracted as something vaguely memorable flickered into her mind... but then it faded away again.
"Big sister...?" Rue whispered, eyes going blank as unidentifiable anguish swept through her. "What are you saying...?"
"It's nothing so important that it needs to be discussed right now," Sango muttered after a moment, shaking her head. "It's not a pleasant subject, so let's wait. Anyway, what are you planning on doing? Are you heading for the river?"
"Yeah," Rue sighed, shrugging a little. "I'm gonna bathe and wash my clothes, since they've gotten kinda dirty."
"If you say so," Sango chuckled, inclining her head and leaping on Kirara's back. "Don't wander off again, Miharu!"
When Sango and Kirara finally left, neither one noticed that Rue's eyes had filled with blank tears.
Nor did they realize that a huge lump had formed in her throat, preventing her from doing anything but watch them leave.
After a moment, the pale girl furiously rubbed her eyes and headed down to the river with thoughts of being clean in mind.
A light mist had covered the ground: after looking around, she spotted some blueberries growing on a bush.
Tenderly picking a few of them off the branch, she popped them into her mouth and knelt by the river. She cupped her hands and brought the freezing water to her mouth, taking large gulps before splashing her face with it. Once she was somewhat more awake, Rue shed her school clothes and slowly unbuckled her wing-harness, carefully allowing the feathered appendages to slide free. Fanning them, the white-haired girl groaned in surprise.
She hadn't realized it until then, but the appendages were really, really sore since she hadn't unfolded them even once since the incident with Sesshomaru.
Dunking her school uniform into the river, the girl scrubbed it clean using some of the soap that Kagome had given her.
Then she hung it up on a branch to dry.
Once that was done, she stepped into the frigid water herself: Rue hissed and danced a little, but then, she merely dealt with the iciness: her silver hair swirled around her slender body in silken tendrils as she moved forward, the ends just barely dipping into the water that was soon cascading around her thighs. After taking a deep breath, Rue squeezed her eyes shut and dove forward, letting the unpleasantly cold submersion wash over her small frame.
Instantly coming up for air with a breathy gasp, she shivered before taking the shampoo and conditioner out of her backpack and washing her hair.
She hummed a little song while she washed herself.
Once her body was completely free of dirt, grime, and the dried blood from a few scratches on her knees, Rue decided to fool around a little. So, focusing her mind, the small girl lifted her hands and took a deep breath as a familiar violet aura engulfed her body. Swirling blue marks once again slid across her torso and wound around her frame as she lifted her hands and pulled a wall of water out of the river. She twisted her arms gracefully above her head as streams of crystalline water swirled around her body in spirals, twisting in shimmering strands before they were sucked into balls of shifting liquid.
The girl then froze the balls of water and grabbed them out of the air.
However, they were cold, so she started juggling them.
"It's nice to just goof off once in a while," Rue mumbled, trying to keep the juggling going without dropping the frozen water balls. "Let's see how long I can do this for."
She juggled for a long time, trying to keep going as long as she could: whenever she dropped the ice balls, she would lift her hand and pull them out of the water without touching them. Then she would start all over again: however, she was too immersed in her own playtime to hear the footsteps wading through the water behind her.
She was too focused to notice that someone was coming until it was too late.
Just as she beat her record of five minutes and jumped into the air with a whoop of delight, someone unexpectedly grabbed a fistful of her hair and jerked her backwards. Rue's eyes went wide when she felt a rope being slipped around her throat, and she almost fainted when a large hand clamped down over her mouth to muffle her scream. She instantly bit down on the hand that was covering her mouth, sinking her fangs into the flesh and shuddering when she tasted blood.
Once her assailant let go, the girl let out a wild scream that could have shattered a room full of glass.
"INUYASHA!" the girl screeched, trying to bolt across the river. "SANGO! SOMEBODY, HELP!"
Before she could fly away, someone tackled her and she went flying into the river: struggling to get free as a cloth was tied over her mouth, the girl flailed and kicked in an attempt to get free of her attacker. She kicked and bit at him, but the guy was easily able her still: she felt rough hands on her shoulder and all of a sudden, she couldn't move and her head was dunked underwater. Rue's eyes went blank and she immediately held her breath, struggling to keep from passing out.
However, after a moment, she was dragged out of the water by her arms.
Then, something that burned her skin was slapped between the wings extending from her shoulder blades, making her body feel like lead.
"My… what a lovely tengu demon," an icy voice purred, making the girl's eyes go blank. "I never would have guessed that a creature so beautiful could be so wicked. The bounty is as good as ours."
"Mmf!" Rue protested, face going pale as her body was wracked with prickling shivers of disgust: the very sound of that oily tone was almost enough to make her skin break out in hives. When she began to renew her struggle, Rue realized that her eyesight was blurring and her muscles were becoming weak from some sort of demonic seal that had been placed across her back. She felt her eyes filling with tears, but by then she had become so weak that she could barely move.
Sango! Rue silently called, weakly flailing her limbs. Kagome! Shippo! Someone, anyone, help me! I can't fight back!
In the distance, however, a flash of movement caught her attention and she saw a young boy's figure looking down at her.
She struggled to lift her head, to call out to him, but her entire body went limp before she could gesture for help and she quickly lost consciousness. The boy watched with unfeeling brown eyes as the winged girl's body was tossed onto the saddle of a horse. For a moment, he merely stood there... but when the group of Asian men started riding away, he began to run, blue demon slayer outfit clinging to his legs. Without a word, he drew a scythe-like weapon and trailed them.
It wasn't his problem whether or not she had been taken before him.
After all, his orders were to capture her at any cost.
If he had to kill other people to do so, so be it.
Kohaku didn't care either way.