A/N -We're moving in a PRE-Musou direction, meaning that Naraku has yet to actively make an attempt to rid himself of Onigumo.
Chapter 1 - Death In Disguise
He did not feel guilty. The dead are beyond such things as guilt; and though he was not quite dead, he rather wished he was. Even death would be better than the shadowlands that had become his cage. His home.
No guilt.
No hope.
Nothing.
This was death in disguise, and he had delivered himself into it.
What have I done?
It was nothing more than a dry whisper, soft and slow and infinitely resigned. Onigumo had taken to filling every moment of day and night and the time caught between the two - dreamtime, endless hours spent drifting through memories clearer to him now than they were in the days he had lived them - with gentle, ceaseless murmurings. Sometimes he spoke as a man would, with words and inflection, calling out to whomever might listen. More often, he spoke only to be sure that his voice was still left to him, and prattled on unintelligibly so that all of the sounds he made ran together, flowing as one like a cold, clear stream cutting through dark landscapes. A merry little stream, chuckling to itself in the silence.
Perhaps he muttered shining shards of wisdom to himself, such as no human man had ever before come to realize. Perhaps, if a weary traveller descended from dark, distant hills and sat by the stream - a long, winding ribbon of blue radiance, woefully conspicuous in the surrounding shadows - the murmurs and chuckles would form pictures in the air, and the traveller would see all of the dreadful things Onigumo has seen in his lifetime, would see and understand and be afraid.
Perhaps.
But there were no travellers here. No other people, no demons, no one to hear a lost little man whisper of his fears. There was only Onigumo's pitiful ribbon of light, and - around it - the vast shadowlands that were home to Naraku's thoughts and ambitions.
And Naraku had stopped listening long ago.
What have I done?
Naraku did not reply. Over time, he had learned that making any sort of response only encouraged Onigumo, gave him the strength to summon what was left of his shattered consciousness. And then he would scream for hours.
What good did it do to reply, in any case? The man's whispers were echoes of a lunatic's mind, resonating even in death - he was dead, and yet he spoke, dreamed, somehow lived without life - like a single note of music that refused to fade from the hall in which the full symphony had been played.
Naraku knew that symphony well, though he had never existed alongside Onigumo - not physically, at least - to hear it. Unique to the filthy human thief, it was music that represented everything he had ever said, done, wanted; music written to match his soul. The moment Naraku was born was the moment it reached its end, but the echoes remained and would not be banished.
It was beautiful music, in its way. Subtle. Precise. Threatening, as discoloured clouds on the horizon were; distantly, until they swept forward and unleashed a merciless storm.
Still, Naraku had grown tired of it. The rhythm was simple, repetitive, and so had quickly lost its novelty. He was possessed of an entirely superior appreciation of complexity; he enjoyed complexity, in movement, in thought, in speech.
Even in music.
Simple things did not appeal to him, and Onigumo was the simplest creature he had ever encountered. It was no wonder the man had bargained his very soul for a new life; he had been utterly inferior, blind, weak, stupid. He had been utterly human.
It was only natural, then, that he had yielded to Naraku, that he had welcomed the heightened senses of a demon, the power, the grace, the beauty spawned from the core of his own black heart. He had welcomed it in the beginning; his weak, rotting, horridly human flesh had fallen away, caught up in the jaws of a hundred ravenous demons, and he had rejoiced. They swallowed his bones, then fell on his soul with even greater hunger, flailing, clawing, melding as if commanded by his own malice, and he had rejoiced.
Only when all of the hundred demons became one and he felt the first frosty touch of Naraku's mind - so much more powerful, closing in all around him - did Onigumo begin to hesitate, by which time it was too late to undo what he had done.
What have I done?
Since that initial hesitation - delicate as the stroke of a butterfly's wings, as that last breathtaking instant spent balanced between the cliff's edge and the empty air beneath - Onigumo had resisted the presence of the demon he had summoned, the demon he had created. Like a coward, he shied away from the culmination of his own wicked hopes and plans, mindlessly huddling around his misgivings, no better than a slavering beast.
Naraku hated him. From the beginning he had hated the man, and that disdain only grew stronger as time went by. He was human, he was weak, he was everything wild and unrefined that Naraku had once been, still was, would always be.
And he would not stop wailing for the things he had given away.
At least as a human I had purity human heart human mind human soul and flesh and flaws - what now? Now what? Purity is gone look at me what have I become?
His voice was not usually so strong. Vaguely, Naraku wondered what had bolstered his courage and, having wondered anything about the man, deigned to acknowledge him, even to honour him with a response.
"I would have expected you to be pleased," he murmured aloud; there was no one near enough to hear him if he kept his voice low. He had issued the command that no servant was to enter the inner rooms where he spent most of his time until nightfall, and he had no doubt that his command would be obeyed. "You have no responsibilities in this world with which to concern yourself any longer. You are my shade, as surely as are my birthed children." The room was cool and nearly lightless, suffused at one end in a dull, golden glow produced by several candles. Seated on a low dais at the opposite end, Naraku stared into the radiant flames. "Does it not please you to exist as you do?"
The sound of his voice must have startled Onigumo; there was a brief stretch of complete, luxurious silence. Then:
As your unborn child? This body was once mine, and now it is not. Now I am a helpless shade, as you say. Do not ask pointless questions.
"You are bold today. Tell me why."
Because you are a half-breed.
Rarely was Naraku taken by surprise. Onigumo's comment itself threw him off balance; coupled with his shock that Onigumo had been able to shock him, the blow was enough to render him momentarily speechless. Somehow he felt betrayed, tricked. He felt as though he was being threatened by a person he had thought dead, with a dagger that had been in his own hand an instant before. Quite certain that he did not like feeling such things, he settled his robes more comfortably about himself, using the moment to rearrange his thoughts as well. He never enjoyed speaking with Onigumo for precisely this reason; above all else, it left him feeling so dishevelled.
Naraku did not speak aloud again. Gazing quietly at the circle of fireglow spread across the far wall, he relaxed again and simply let his question come to mind.
What?
Onigumo heard, even smiled at the stiff, insulted curiosity permeating that one unvoiced word.
That is why there is impurity. Half-breed. Neither one nor the other. I was fully human and when I could no longer be that I wished to become fully demonic. Instead I became you.
This body was never yours. Yours was destroyed.
To feed the demons who became you. I offered it to them, knowing what they would use it for. But they did something wrong.
Hardly.
There is something in here with me.
And, with that, Onigumo drifted back into the familiar ebb and flow of his soft, chuckling whispers, casting lucidity aside like an unwanted cloak. Naraku spent a moment trying to coax another concise sentence out of him, but the man would have none of it and fought to elude the touch of a foreign mind as fiercely as a prey-animal fighting for its life. Eventually, Naraku lost interest and turned his attention to the Shikon aura. The jewel rested on a low table at his elbow; when he took it in his hand, it began to sing for him, more beautifully than Onigumo's words and echoes could ever hope to do. Closing his eyes, he bathed in the luminosity of its calm, malleable power. Or tried to. Whenever he began to lose himself in the jewel's humming song, it seemed that Onigumo raised his voice to chant a disordered verse about mongrels and dirty blood.
Shortly after her birth, Naraku had asked - in such a way that allowed no refusal - that Kanna attempt to remove his own soul, trusting the theory that the only thing for her mirror to claim would be Onigumo. Of course, Kanna knew nothing of the human man who had existed before her master and had little reason to believe that Naraku was anything more or less than he appeared. To her, the request was an eccentricity. She gave him one of those long, empty looks he was slowly becoming accustomed to, then nodded and held the mirror up for him.
He gazed into it - he seated comfortably, the pale girl-child kneeling with the mirror's frame clutched in tiny, white hands outstretched before her - and studied his own reflection while he waited for something to happen. His mirror image stared back at him with cold eyes as richly crimson as a raw wound. Demonic eyes, he thought and smirked at himself.
The mirror was quiet.
After a time, Kanna lowered it to her lap and - folding her hands over it, fixing her colourless eyes on the floor - ventured softly, "Forgive me. A soul cannot be lured out if it feels no attachment to the image it sees in the glass."
"You think my soul dislikes me?" Naraku asked, allowing her the privilege of glimpsing his rarest of smiles: one genuinely amused and empty of animosity. In the girl's lap the mirror was tilted just enough to let him see his own eyes again; cool, crimson, and curved now, to match the discreet curve of his lips.
She shook her head, still kneeling and gleaming in the meagre light like a figure crafted of fine white silks and crystal. Shimmering hair framed the dainty lines of her face, brushing at her skin. She was no more substantial than a wisp of cloud. "Not at all. I only suppose that the greatest of all demonkind simply do not have a soul."
Well, she was wrong on all counts. Demons had souls; Naraku felt certain of it. And so did he. The only problem was that it did not belong to him and simply would not leave.
Fruitless though it had turned out to be, the mirror incident did provide an interesting question for Naraku to entertain in the following days. It surfaced just as Kanna exited the room and he lifted the glittering Shikon fragment from its place at his side. The jewel's voice rose up in his mind immediately, strong and sweet, masking Onigumo's chatter with the sweep of its beautiful - though somehow discordant, wavering, incomplete - song; and on the wings of that beautiful, cleansing music came the puzzle:
Did he have a soul?
He had no doubt that it was an immortal question; demons, humans and those who were both or neither must have been asking the very same of themselves since the beginning of all life. Or at least since the discovery - invention? - of the soul. Every human seemed to have one; from emperor to peasant, they were all just a little more than animated bundles of blood and muscle and bone - and Kikyo's reincarnation proved that there was something ageless within each human life, that would exist long after the physical vessel had been discarded. Demons, too, burned with an unquenchable fire that pushed them - the more powerful ones, in any case - from mere awareness into full sentience. Oh yes, demons had souls; fierce, frenzied souls from which they drew the strength to rage on and on without a cause, without a goal to be reached in the end.
But what of himself? What of Naraku the undemon, who had appeared in the place of a man destroyed by his willingness to sacrifice his humanity? He was not human, though his flesh still housed the remnants of a human mind. He was not demonic, though that flesh was woven of the skeins of power - the power in hate, rage, pain, despair - gathered from a hundred lesser demons.
He could not have the soul of either, because he was both at once.
Hanyou.
The word burned him like acid and fire. He wrapped himself in the Shikon jewel's wonderful, black aura - growing darker, colder, stronger with each day spent within his reach - and lovely voice and still he could not be free of that one, loathsome word.
It meant half-breed. A hybrid creature, the get of union between a demon and a human.
Not human. Not demon. Both. Neither.
Naraku hated it, hated to live in his own skin, knew that no matter what form he took he would always be trapped in the same cage that he hated, hated, hated –
Don't be so selfish.
Trapped by the shade of a worthless human thief.
Onigumo spoke over the jewel and the question and the screaming, wrenching hatred. He spoke clearly, with the utmost serenity.
Gave myself over to demonkind fully expecting to become one of them or to die and look I am more trapped than you will ever be trapped here trapped in unlife how dare you.
You invited it.
Not this. Never this.
The jewel will finish what remains of you when all of the pieces come together again.
If only either of us believed that.
Naraku believed it. He had to; what else was there to believe, beyond that Onigumo was the one element preventing him from achieving a purely demonic state? He did believe that the jewel would make him a full demon by removing Onigumo. He did.
But what of the soul shared between them?
It's mine. You don't have one.
Be silent.
I think I lost mine on the way here.
You have lost much more than that in your travels up to this point.
Yes.
Laughter, soft and wheezing. Naraku did not hear it often, but the sound of it always rubbed his nerves raw.
Yes, just look at me just listen mindless as well as bodiless now. I'm talking to a voice in my head.
Worse, you are hardly intelligible. Mumble to the void until you have something useful to say.
And the man laughed a little more, whispered something about a foreign presence, then was gone, lost again in his hypnotic murmuring. He was still there, in that the stream flowing with the nuances of his voice wandered on as it always did. But he might as well have been truly dead for all that he would hear or understand until he surfaced again, seeking a reprieve from the terrible, corrupting chill emanating from the depths of Naraku's mind. As if he expected to find warmth or welcome in direct conversation.
Naraku allowed himself a short sigh and gazed down at the jewel in his hand, both affectionate and reproachful. It was this glittering stone that would solve the single greatest problem in his life - which currently lurked somewhere in the ocean of his thoughts, spouting some nonsense about mistakes and betrayal - but it was also this stone that created some of the more pressing issues he was forced to deal with. One such issue went by the name of Inuyasha; most of the others followed close behind him.
Inuyasha.
Hybrid, half-breed, hanyou . . .
Closing his fingers around the jewel's cold curve and sharp, broken edges, closing his eyes a few moments later, Naraku resolved to turn his thoughts away from troubling things he could, at present, do nothing about. For now, he had more than enough to think about, like the shard he had sensed in a village several miles away. He was waiting for his children to retrieve it, suppressing his impatience with practiced expertise. Soon he would add to the faceted fragment already resting in his palm, and the jewel would grow a little stronger and his enemies would grow a little more desperate. They would come; the shards to him, the enemies to the shards. And what the shards attracted, the shards - reunited as the complete Shikon jewel - would destroy. There was nothing to fear. He should only concentrate on locating more of the scattered pieces. Quite a few of them lay about, just waiting to be claimed, just waiting for him to snatch them up and fill them with searing darkness.
Perhaps, he thought when the jewel's singing had calmed him again, he did not have a soul after all. Perhaps there was no room for one, next to his hunger for more of the power pulsing in his curled fingers. He might have used his children - such as they were - to argue otherwise; they were separate entities, possessed of their own thoughts, capable of making their own decisions. Each with his or her own soul. And, since he had created them, any essence of a soul in the children would have come from the same in him, just as their flesh had come from his flesh, their lives from his life. But they were likely soulless as well.
Soulless children, soulless father. A family of empty shells, united by their hatred for the world, their hatred for each other, nourished by the hate, driven by it and by the things around them. Not by an inner spirit. Not entirely by their own will.
Kagura, always shaking with rage and striving for freedom, striving as though she had no other purpose in life save to pursue what Naraku would not give her. Her thirst for independence burned in place of demonic soulfire.
Kanna, a lovely, empty girl who seemed to think and feel nothing, who captured the souls of others as if doing so sustained what little life and personality she possessed. She did not need her own, could simply call forth as many souls as she wished.
Goshinki, a monstrous creature, a mind-reader, feeding on the thoughts and essences of all other beings. Like Kanna, he had only to seek out a foreign soul, to sense its shape and alignment, to know it even more intimately than the entity to whom it belonged.
Juuromaru, youngest of all, fighting and thrashing through every moment of his short life, thriving on instinct alone, unable even to speak unless the words came from his strange, symbiotic twin, Kageromaru. Both were feral to the very marrow of their bones, a pair of soulless beasts.
All of them compelled by, or to achieve, things from beyond their own minds and bodies. All of them created to find and taint the Shikon jewel.
Including - especially, in fact - Naraku.
Onigumo, who might have been watching those grim thoughts swirl through the shadowlands around him, said dreamily:
What will happen to us all, when the jewel does its work?
And Naraku, nearly dreaming himself, replied:
What does it matter?
The sun glared down from the heights of a cloudless sky, bathing the silent meadow in golden fire.
Watching.
Amid tall, tangled grasses and brilliant wildflowers, a young demon drew great, black wings tight against its twisted body, shuddered violently and died. The fluids that poured from its mouth - gaping open in a soundless scream, stretched nearly as wide as its sightless orange eyes - turned the grass and flowers and even the flesh it had escaped to mounds of fine, powdered ash.
When the corpse - headless now - twitched its last and finally fell still, the wind let out its breath, and the droning insects rose up from the dust, and birds flashed across the sky. Already, fear had been forgotten. There was no time for fear. No time, now that death had done its work and left the meadow in peace again.
Only the dead had time to rest.
Kagura hid herself in the silver shadows of a slim, black tree. A heavy mantle of leaves, pale blooms and chittering birds was draped over its elegant branches; through it, she could catch only shifting, shattered glimpses of the sky, as if it was winking at her with a thousand gleaming eyes.
Hers was the tallest tree in the meadow, so far as she could see, and it was the only tree still adorned with open petals so late in the season. Rich perfumes assaulted her sensitive nose, drifting down to her from the canopy, masking the foul scent of the demon she had left to die in a little hollow less than fifty paces away. The weaker ones often fell to putrid pieces in the moment of death; this youngling - still unable to fly confidently - was no exception, and she could clearly smell each stage of its decomposition, despite the blanket of petal-perfume settling over her shoulders. Even with the added strength of a Shikon shard, it lacked the power to hold its flesh together as its spirit fled to some other realm. Soon that flesh would be gone, swallowed up by the earth and the air and the sunlight, washed away by the rain. Purified by every element.
In the meantime, it would smell very bad indeed.
Clutching the jagged shard she had retrieved from the creature's sinewy shoulder, Kagura curled against the black tree and struggled to endure the jewel's attentions with dignity. Its aura burned her, but she did not scream. It tried to seduce her, but she would not listen. Cold anxiety knotted in the pit of her stomach, twisting and slashing at her insides like a caged monster, shrieking for the shard, shrieking for more, more, more. And though it was impossible to pretend that she felt nothing, she did manage to sit motionless in the shade and conceal her hunger. It would pass quickly, as it always did.
She knew the jewel's ways by experience; each shard that touched her skin would threaten and cajole and shake the foundations of the world with its sweet siren song, until it understood that she did not actually want it in the way that so many other creatures did. The long, puzzled silence that inevitably followed gave her a chance to rest and think for a moment, even to conjure a fanciful little image of herself soaring over this field and its hidden demons without a care for some pretty rock that had been broken. That dream-Kagura – racing through the sky like a fearless phantom - knew nothing of confinement or helplessness, had forgotten about Naraku, and was obedient only to her own whims. Her heart was her own, and it led her to places far away, some beautiful, some barren, some terrifying. All of them were better than the only place she had ever seen for herself, her birthplace, her prison.
Someday Kagura would escape and become the phantom that swept past her, skimmed over the swaying grass, and then flew away to seek out new beauty. Someday she would disappear into the vault of the sky, alone. No one would ever see her again, though she would see everything in the world with a hawk's inescapable intensity.
And Naraku would not be able to punish her, would in fact be screaming for her mercy as he burned and rotted and drowned in the total darkness of the Hell she had created just for him.
Ah. What a pretty dream.
The shard in her hand pulsed with fierce heat, and even the fire of the midday sun seemed to recoil from it; her nest of shadows grew darker, reaching out from beneath the tree's mantle with long, questing fingers, reaching out to smother all light and colour and freedom. Glancing up at the broken sky, she saw that the birds perched on the black branches had become fat wasps whose stingers dripped with venom, whose faceted eyes glittered madly, iridescent with buzzing laughter and cruelty. Their wings beat in frantic blurs of hateful, droning sound - even as they dug their claws into the black bark, scoring the slender tree on every branch, clinging and tearing and ruining - and they stared at Kagura meaningfully. Behind them, leaves and petals wilted as a boiling darkness overtook the lovely sky.
She turned away from them, looking instead at the shard. It glowed smugly in her palm, knowing now that her duty was to bear it away to someone who could appreciate its value. So pleased, so arrogant, so certain that it understood and could manipulate her.
It made her curious; there were so many humans and demons running about, tearing each other to shreds over tiny fragments of stone like the one in her hand. There were so many creatures who wanted the jewel more than anything else, more than they wanted to keep their lives.
But what did the jewel want?
Fire licked at her hand again, sharply. The light emanating from the shard stung her eyes, and the awful buzzing of the wasps' wings drilled into her head. She had a duty to perform, they reminded her. She had no time to sit and ask foolish questions.
"Yes," she said softly, coldly. "I know."
Withdrawing her folding fan from the outer layer of her robes, Kagura slipped the Shikon fragment carefully into a crease between the wooden frame and the silk, then returned the fan to its proper place. When she climbed abruptly to her feet, the birds nesting above her shrieked in startled outrage and leaped into the air, wings fluttering frantically. Swirling like a storm cloud, they rose to meet the vibrant sky, flowing upward, every feather spread wide to catch the wind, and then arrowed off in the direction she could not take. Only their derisive, screeching laughter remained behind to keep Kagura company as she watched them soar to whichever horizon they pleased.
Is that you, Naraku?
Strange question to ask. This was Naraku's world, Naraku's mind. Naraku was the only one to whom Onigumo had spoken in fifty years; the very thought of hearing the voice of any other was ridiculous, nigh unthinkable.
And yet . . .
And yet the voice Onigumo had heard was different. It was soft. Uncertain. A little frightened. Naraku never spoke like that, so it was a different voice, so it startled Onigumo terribly every time it drifted down to him out of the shadowlands.
Yes. He remembered now; there were other voices in the world. Other creatures.
Weren't there?
Naraku stirred, a cold, fearsome presence that could not be escaped, that consumed all things. Exasperation flowed before him, like ripples from a stone cast into still waters.
Of course it is.
Of course it was.
But it wasn't, because the other voice trembled wordlessly out of the darkness even as Naraku replied. Whispers without meaning, a sigh, so much warmer than the frigid words that had surrounded Onigumo for half a century. Even when he murmured and sang to himself, a horrid chill curled around him, not quite touching, waiting breathlessly for him to stop so that it might swoop in and freeze him.
But this new voice was warm. The chill fled from it, as it had the first few times.
It couldn't be Naraku, could it?
No. Earlier. Did you speak?
I did not. I have no desire to converse with you.
Then it's back.
And what could it be?
Something other. Something from the world beyond Naraku, the world Onigumo had nearly forgotten.
No.
No, it came from the dark hills swelling on the dark horizon and easily threaded its way down dark paths to find the stream. Onigumo's shimmering stream of sound. The other voice was a ribbon of violet satin, nearly as dark as the prowling shadows, but rich with colour. It seemed familiar with this desolate place, though it did not quite belong.
So . . . something from the heart of the shadows? Was the voice coming from Naraku after all, from so deep within him that he himself could not hear it?
Yes. Maybe.
Yes.
He wanted to talk to it, to ask so many questions - What's it like out there? Where have you been hiding? Why doesn't he know that you exist? How did you come to be here? - but it kept shying away from him, kept calling out for someone else.
Naraku?
The only response was a low, threatening hiss. He didn't feel like talking.
Onigumo didn't care.
Naraku listen for once really listen something important you should have been listening to me before right from the beginning.
What do you want, wretch?
It wants you to say something.
I have no time for your idiot games.
A little louder; it can't hear very well yet.
A flood of anger gave the shadows teeth and claws, and they all bore down on Onigumo, snarling, enraged, monsters made of midnight ice. He wanted to scream but it would frighten the other, might even chase it away. Quivering, it watched in silence, seeming to enjoy the violence - pale colours like feathers of the sunrise flared along the length of its dusky ribbon, betraying amusement and a fierce approval - though it flinched and whimpered every time it looked at him. If he hadn't known better - if he hadn't known that every creature in the world hated him - Onigumo would have thought that this strange little wight didn't like seeing him hurt.
And then it rushed forward, sinuous as a serpent, and struck out, hissing sharply, its colours igniting like velvety flames that splashed against the shadows, burned them, killed them, chased them back.
Naraku's sudden uncertainty echoed in the darkness. Onigumo had not moved violently, and yet the memory of violence crackled in the back of his mind. He was no fool. He had to understand now, at least that something odd was happening.
And he did.
If you do not explain this immediately, you miserable -
Wait. I know what it is.
Not a lie. Not a ploy to buy time. He knew, and it made him a little proud because he understood something that Naraku did not.
He realized it just as the other threw itself at some of the bewildered shadows, hissing with malicious glee when they drew back, wary of its blazing colours. It liked to attack. It was lovely and strong. It had come from the lightless realm that belonged to Naraku.
Of course.
Everything was clear now. Perfectly clear. He knew exactly what was going on, and laughed a little at himself because he should have figured it out earlier. His spirit still ached where icy talons had torn into it, but the other's fire was soothing and it took away most of the pain.
Sensing Onigumo's crystalline certainty, Naraku was calmed; his merciless rage abated, receding with the slow surety of an ocean tide. In its place, odd curiosity bloomed. Like flowers. Black ones, but flowers nonetheless.
Tell me.
Onigumo smiled, to himself and to the other flitting about nearby.
Congratulations. There is another child in you.