Scary Sleeping
Shippo had fallen asleep long before Ankha had. In the morning she would have to tell him that she had fallen asleep before the little men came. She reflected on her time with this group while she waited for sleep to come. She thought about her fights, victories, and talks with them. She mused on how Rain's coming could affect all that. 'Oh well.' She said to herself. 'If it gets to be so that I can't stay because of him, than I'll leave.' But as she told herself this, she realized that she didn't want to go. On these thoughts she slept, and it was an uneasy slumber.
The dream came again.
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W.W.- "For those of you with weak stomachs, please skip this next part, or puke on something besides the computer. Thank you.
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It started out like it always did, pleasantly. She was sitting on a cart in the warm sun, slightly squished between her parents. She looked up at her mother, and smiled. Her mother smiled back. The cart was full of goods, for her father was a merchant. This was her first trip with them. Always before she had been left with the nanny. She was being extremely good, so that this wouldn't be her last trip as well.
A man stood in the middle of the road. Her father stopped, thinking the man needed a ride. They were trusting folk, Ankha's parents. Grateful for the stop, Ankha's mother hopped out of the cart to stretch. Ankha ran to answer nature's call in the bushes, out of sight from the road. And then, the dream darkens.
Men now jump from the trees all along the road and grab her mother.
"Daughter!" She yelled, "Hide!" A big man covers her mouth with his hand. Though she tried to bite him, it was to no avail. He simply cursed and stuck her for every bite he received. Terrified, Ankha hid under a large dense bush, that hid her from sight but did not hide the events that occurred. She watched as her beautiful mother's face became swollen and purple from the bruises.
Her father lengthened his claws and attacked the man holding his wife. More men came, the road swarming with them, and fought him off. The mother tried to defend herself but her arms were held at such an angle that if she extended her own claws, she would kill herself. Soon, the two were tied up, and the goods gone. Ankha herself was too scared to move.
A man, obviously the leader, walks toward the bound cat demons. He knelt down and spoke quietly with them. Ankha could not hear what he was saying, but it horrified them enough that they started struggling again and tried to scream through their gags. He turned, and motioned to his men. They went to work.
The little five-year-old cat demon watched on in horror as her parents were mutilated alive, the men removing all traces of their differences, all the things that proclaimed their proud demon heritage. Their eyes were gouged out, tails ripped from their bodies, claws and fangs extracted with extreme slowness, and the ears sliced off their heads. Finally, the two full-grown cat demons bled to death on that isolated road, not knowing the fate of the most precious thing in their lives, their daughter. The men cut the heads off, and left the bodies to rot. As soon as they are out of sight, Ankha ran down to where the bodies of her parents lay, once so full of life, now maimed and dead.
Ankha awoke in the tree, hissing, panicked, and grief ridden. The smell of her parents blood filled her nostrils yet again. It was nearly dawn. She jumped from her tree and ran into the woods, as far and as fast as she could, trying to escape her fears. She didn't realize she had a pursuer.
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Inuyasha - "Oh."
Kagome - "Is that really how your parents died, Ankha?"
Ankha - (Quietly) "Yes." (Shippo jumps into her lap and hugs her.) "I wish the narrators had left that part out." (Glare)
W.W.-"It's part of your story. It needed to be told."
Rain - "It's over now, Ankha. You closed that chapter of your life."
B.B- "Let's move on."
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It wasn't hard to follow her. When he lost sight of her, the cat demons path was obvious enough to him, even in the dark. Rain was her pursuer.
He hadn't slept well that night. Shippo's whispering to Ankha kept him awake. That had stopped and he had started to drift off, when he heard a low purring noise.
It had been Ankha. Soon, though, the noise had turned from the pleasant purr to little whimpers, and finally hisses and small screams. Then when she had run off, he had followed. He saw flashes in the night, so it was plain that all her claws were out. It was proven by all the shredded greenery and the giant chunks taken out of the trees. He stared a moment at a three inch deep, one inch wide gouge. Then he went on.
Ankha stopped on an open hill top. She sank to her knees, overcome with all the memories. Her parents gruesome death. Her master of seven years' death. All the people she had ever killed. Their faces swam in her minds' eye, bogging down thought and reason. A high keening noise rose from her throat. She grieved, not for the people she had killed, not for her master, no, they had all deserved their deaths. But her parents...
She should have saved them, or at least have tried! No, she had cowered in the bushes, afraid.
The keening noise was cut off abruptly. She was back in control of her own thoughts now. She thought on her parents a moment, imagined what her life would of been like if they had lived. But dreams were just that, dreams. After every dream she had the same thoughts, completed the same ritual. Ever since she could remember, even back when she was trapped in that tiny dank room every night, it had been this ritual that kept her going, kept her whole. She was carrying through a family tradition, for the mourning of the dead, the tradition of singing the souls to rest. She opened her mouth and poured out her sorrow. The song was supposed to be a cleansing thing, to help her move on. But she couldn't move on, not yet, not until she had had her revenge. It was her promise.
Rain was crying. Not loudly, not openly, but silently weeping, so sad had been her song. It reminded him of all that was lost to him as well. He didn't know what she had lost to make her so sad. He hadn't even known she was sad. Hateful, angry at the world, maybe, but not sad. He followed her again, on the way back to camp. Which, of course, was stupid.
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Rain - "Am I really that stupid?"
Ankha - "Only because you're so young. It makes you naive, not stupid."
Rain - (muttering) "Know it all demons, think they're all that just because they're so old..." (Ankha smiles)
W.W.- "Everybody, you'll learn more about the Master later. Hint, he's evil."
B.B.- "Shut up! You'll ruin it!"
W.W.- "No I won't–"
Inuyasha - (interrupting) "Have we all been forgotten about? We're still here, you know!"
W.W. - "Inuyasha..."(comes closer, pinches ear and whispers in it) "Purple dinosaurs."
Inuyasha - (Gulp) "I mean, uh, take your time, ha-ha, we can wait." (Pulls on collar)
W.W. -(smiles evilly)
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It 'of course' was stupid because even in the dark, Ankha could see the footprints that didn't belong to her all along her destructive trail: Where the being had stepped, ran, walked, hopped over logs . . . All of it. The thing about footprints is, you can't tell who left them. Since she got back to camp before Rain, however, she could guess. The assassin sank into the shadows, and waited.
She had waited for almost ten minutes, thinking 'How could anyone be this slow?' When Rain finally showed up. She pounced, knocking the wind out of him. Ankha covered his mouth with her hand, and dragged him off into the bushes.
"How DARE you follow me!" She hissed. "I went away to be alone. A blind fool could have seen that!" She removed her hand.
"I'm sorry."
"Well, you're going to be a hell of a lot sorrier you rotting pile of–"
"No, I'm sorry for whatever it is that you lost. It must have been something very important to you." Ankha looked at him for a minute. She let him sit up (she had pinned him down) and standing up, she turned away.
"It was." She said. "They were."
"Who?" Ankha sat back down.
"My parents. They were murdered when I was very young." When she looked up, their eye's collided and for the first time since they had first met, Rain saw the numerous shields down. He saw clearly the pain in her eyes, and wondered how she could be an assassin when the murders of her parents obviously hurt her so much. There was just no end to the mystery that was her. Unnerved by this new revelation of her, he said the first thing that came to mind.
"I never knew my parents. My adoptive father found me abandoned by the roadside. They used to be Bounty Hunters themselves, until they married. Then they quit to become simple farmers, not wanting to die at a young age and leave a grieving spouse behind."
"Are they both still alive? Your adoptive parents?"
"Yeah."
Angrily, she spat, "Then you haven't lost anything. If they didn't want you enough to keep you, then your real parents couldn't of been that great, and you even had a better set to take you in."
"But I don't know anything. Who they were, what they looked like, what they did for a living, family traditions, nothing." He wasn't angry at her. That surprised Ankha. She was used to bad reactions, and so could deal much better with anger then sympathy. She was silent a moment. Uncomfortable with the silence, Rain said "Well, if your parents died–"
"Were murdered."
"Were murdered, sorry, who raised you?" Ankha glared at him. She stood yet again.
"It doesn't matter." She said in a warning tone. "He's dead too."
He should have listened. Still curious, though, he asked "How did he die?"
Ankha looked over her shoulder as she walked back to her tree. Matter of factly, with a hint of satisfaction, she said "I killed him." And left. Only then did Rain feel the lock of hair drift down from where Ankha had cut it off, right next to his eye. He gulped. He hadn't even seen her move.
