Scroll Nine
The un-named place
Sesshomaru was dead.
Sesshomaru was also royally pissed.
One might normally consider these two states of being to be mutually exclusive, however this was Sesshomaru, and, as in many things, one could not expect him to be normal.
"I will not stand for this!" he roared, or tried to, but nobody paid him any mind; not the two unconscious Kanamis', not the cat watching him in the corner, nor the tattered remains of his body at his feet.
It was absolutely unfair; he was Sesshomaru! Somebody should be listening to him, even in death. Were was Jaken? Or Rin? And were was that insufferable Nirakumi, wasn't she supposed to be the Goddess of death? Why wasn't any body helping him!
Sesshomaru stopped his pacing, trying to get a grip on himself, and wondering why he felt so unhinged; surely death was not a reason to lose all decorum. He thought about his situation carefully, going through it in his mind and looking for a reasonable course of action.
The way he saw it, he had two options: stay dead and move on, or not stay dead. His personal preference being the latter, he began wondering how exactly one went about coming back to life. Surely it couldn't be all that difficult, even without Tensaiga; Nirakumi could do it after all.
He fixed the bloody remains of his body with a piercing stare, willing it to move. He haphazardly wondered how he was going to get all that blood out of his hair when finally succeeded in his goal, he didn't particularly want to be a red head.
But stare as he may, his body just lay there while the blood slowly cooled and clotted. It's face was untouched, and almost seemed to be sleeping, if not for the tattered rents in its chest.
His once pristine white clothing was shredded and stained, and his armor shattered to fragments that lay scattered about the charnel house. His silver hair lay spread in the blood, no longer the swaying mass of moonlight light it had once been, but tangled and matted in the lake of red. The bodies altogether counted twenty five, twenty six counting his own, which rested in state in the center of the carnage.
Desperately, he dropped to his knees, heedless of the blood, indeed, not even feeling it in his spirit state. He tried to put his hands on the body, to attempt to shake himself awake from death, but his hands passed right through. He stared in shock at his arms, now elbow deep inside his own chest; he might not have been quite so shocked under other circumstances, for the gashes in his body sometimes went clear through to the ground beneath, but the fact that he could not feel the flesh at all set him back. It was not right, if the universe had any decency at all, he should at least be able to feel his own blood.
But the universe was not a decent place, and he felt a fool for expecting it to be.
He would obviously not be able to accomplish the task unaided; he would need help if he was to be resurrected. It should not prove too difficult, all he had to do was find a human with spiritual powers; Mikos could see the souls of the dead, couldn't they?
So he would find a miko, and trick her into helping him find Tensaiga, then after he was alive again… well he would destroy that bridge when he crossed it.
First things first, find a miko. He stood and brushed his knees off out of habit, though there was nothing there to dislodge, and surveyed his surroundings, searching for an egress. He quickly located it, his sharp eyes picking it out in the gloom, and went to it. Upon reaching he found that once again his physicality had become mutable as evidenced by his hand passing right through the doorknob.
Unfortunately, his hand would go no further than the doorknob, no matter how he tried, he could not force his way through the closed door. On the one hand it was nice to know that he could actually touch something, but on the other, this was very bad news; he had been sealed to the place of his death.
He glanced calmly around the room, not in the least deterred. A small question was tugging at the back of his mind though, and before he could ascertain his next course of action, it floated to the surface; Where were those small creatures? They were always there, whenever he resurrected something, they were hovering over the body, yet they had not come to force him to the afterlife. Just as well, it would save him the trouble of destroying them, though just how he would go about doing such a thing he had not quite figured out. Perhaps it was because Nirakumi was otherwise occupied. Or maybe it was as Nirakumi had said, that his clan was different, and thus moved on to the afterlife in a different manner.
Whatever the case, they had not come, and he could not help but be a little grateful.
Putting the creatures aside for a moment, he glanced up at the skylight he had fallen through when he had been knocked out of the sky by Kanami. Not expecting any different results than the door, he jumped up and attempted to fly out. He was not surprised or disappointed when this failed.
"You can't get out without help." A voice behind him said. He turned, expecting to see one of the two remaining Kanami shells. But he saw nothing, just the two unconscious forms, an Abyssinian cat, and a mass of dead humans.
Thinking that he was just vocalizing his own thoughts without realizing it, he turned back to his examination of the room, wishing that the two Kanami's had not survived the fight. His one consolation being that her mind must have been reduced to a sub sentient state due to the loss of so many of her shells. From the looks of it, one of them had already been that way. It was just galling that even a part of his opponent had survived while he was reduced to the dilemma of attempting to return from the dead in what might as well be a locked room.
"Are you even going to acknowledge me, or are you too busy brooding?" the voice said again, this time most definitely not voicing his own thoughts. He turned once again, to be greeted by gold amber eyes much like his own. The cat blinked at him, yawned luxuriously, and sauntered across the blood spattered room as if it were a bed of radishes.
Stepping gingerly around the holes in his chest, the cat circled a few times before sitting unceremoniously on Sesshomaru's tattered body.
"What are you doing?" Sesshomaru asked icily.
"I'm sitting." The cat replied.
"On my body." Sesshomaru growled. "Have you no respect for the dead?"
"No, but then, you don't either." The cat said flippantly as it began to groom its paw.
"I have respect for the dead, I just don't have any respect for the living." He stated, surprising himself with the truth of it.
"Then why is it that you want to return to the living?" the cat asked innocuously. "It seems to me that you would respect yourself more this way than if you returned to your body."
"That's not the point. I still have to-" he stopped for a moment. "How did you know what I'm planning?" he asked sharply.
"If you really expect me to divulge that information, you really don't know that much about cats." It said with a smug flick of its tail.
"Considering that I was previously unaware that the common cat could even communicate on a sentient level, I suspect you are correct." Sesshomaru said, attempting valiantly not to lose patience with the infuriating feline.
"Ah, but if we admitted that, we would be expected to work for a living." The cat half closed its eyes, apparently satisfied with its superiority.
Sesshomaru turned away from the cat; at the moment, there was nothing he could do about the small creature. Perhaps when he returned to life, he would find the time to teach it some manners, but he doubted it, it was hardly worth his time.
He moved across the room to were the two remaining Kanamis' rested, thinking perhaps that if he possessed one of them, he would be able to leave the room. The two lay sprawled across each other, as they had fallen when he had thrown the one across the room.
Being newly dead though, he was unsure as to how exactly one went about possessing anything. He had read many accounts by followers of both Shinto and Buddhism upon the subjects of exorcisms and the behavior of the dead, but that gave him no knowledge of how the ghost arrived in that position in the first place.
He resolved to have a scroll on the subject commissioned as soon as he went back to his own place in time. He would even be gracious enough to resurrect the lucky author a few days after he killed him, so as to make it easier for the fellow.
Having no better place to start, he put his claw tipped hand to the forehead of one of the two bodies of the small woman. He felt nothing, and as he moved his hand just a centimeter lower, his hand passed right through her skull without effect. He withdrew his hand and focused on her attempting to discern a means of control. As he focused on a spot between her eyebrows, he noticed a faint purple sheen. When he drew back his head and blinked his eyes in surprise he noticed that there were several different spots of color lined up along the core of her body, ranging from red at the base of her spine to white at the crown of her head.
He looked over at the cat to confirm the growing suspicion in his mind, and sure enough, seven color points were visible on it too. Though with the cat, the white and purple points were considerably brighter than on Kanami.
It seemed to know what he was seeing and yawned casually.
"I can tell you what you need to know, for a price." It told him. Sesshomaru thought for a moment, wondering if the cat was even worth his attention, before finally deciding that any information at this point was good information.
"And what would this price be?" he asked it.
"Your soul." The cat said.
"I don't have a soul." Sesshomaru responded with a slight noise in the back of his throat that could, if liberally interpreted, be construed as a derisive laugh.
"Then what have you got to lose?" the cat asked him.
"Fair enough, but the information must at least be useful to even make this conversation worth my while." He said disdainfully. The cat stood up, and with a twitch of its fur, walked to the Kanami that Sesshomaru had been concentrating on. It sat down near the top of her head.
"The crown charka, when not properly warded, is the weakest spot to an astral attack." It informed him.
Sesshomaru glanced at the cat, and then regarded Kanami critically for a moment.
"Hn." Was the only indication he gave that he had even heard the cat.
In truth, the information was invaluable. Sesshomaru was extremely powerful, even in death, and now that he had a point of attack it took but a flex of his power and he had broken through the white charka at the top of her head.
Sesshomaru would have smiled triumphantly, had he not otherwise been occupied by the sensation of being ripped in half.
And so concludes another vastly late chapter of golden eyes, and are left with the following questions;
Will I ever create a likeable original character?
Is Sesshomaru now a woman, or two? WTF?
Did Nirakumi get lost on the way to the bathroom?
It wouldn't surprise me.
Huzza for my newest chapter and a double huzzah for anyone who remembers me. Yes that's right, my latest chapter, it's only been what, half a year? In my defense, I've been very busy writing in my story and several other fanfics at the same time.
If any of you fans of Sesshomaru are interested, he will be showing up in my next update for 'Kagome; a twisted fairytale' when ever that happens (it might be a while, but he will be there.)
Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, I'd write individual responses, but I don't have online access right no, so I can't see your reviews and write tailored responses. If you all review this one, I'll print them out and write the responses before I even write another chapter (or not, if you'd rather have another chapter sooner.)
See you all next time.