OKAY, MY VERY GOOD FRIEND, JEREMY, HELPED ME OUT AND HE OPENED THE DAMN DISKS, SO EVERYONE THANK JEREMY! YAH! SO, THIS CHAPTER IS DEDICATED TO YOU, MY FRIEND. that sounds kind of corny... but whatever!
Chapter six
Bloodline
"You
know, I've known you for almost three years now, and yet you've never
really told me anything besides your name. Why is that?"
The girl raised her head, her gray eyes staring into his royal blue ones.
"There's not much to say." She said in monotone voice.
"I doubt that."
A few minutes of silence followed his last words as she just sat there and stared at him.
"The same could be said for you."
He blinked. He hadn't really expected her to say much of anything. She hardly ever spoke to anyone, until a couple of weeks ago. Until He came around. Whoever that guy was anyway.
Why did she feel like she could talk to a complete stranger, but not to him? He had known her for a while now, had practically taken her in as a little sister, and yet she almost refused to speak more than a whole sentence when she was with him. Why?
He snapped out of his thoughts and looked up at her. Well, it was worth a shot.
"So, you want to know about me, eh? Well then, ask away." He told her, a smile on his face.
Nadia just stared at him for a few minutes, her hands resting on her knees with her back pressed up against the base of a tree. She tilted her head to the side.
"How did you become a slave?"
"I use to be a prisoner."
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"That doesn't explain much."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe you're not asking the right questions."
Glare.
"Fine. How did you become a prisoner?"
A dark look came over his face as he sunk his head lower. He stared at nothing in particular on the ground.
"I destroyed my village…. and everyone in it." He didn't lift his eyes up to see what her reaction was.
"Why?" Was her only response to his statement.
"… it was an accident." Akashi lifted his head up and looked at her, his eyes unusually dark. She couldn't place what the emotion was in them.
"I use to have a little sister. She would be about eighteen now."
'He killed his sister too!' Nadia thought to herself as she let her eyes fall to the ground.
"… Nadia, how'd you get that scar on your eyebrow?"
Nadia looked up and gazed into Akashi's eyes. He was right in front of her, a few inches from her face with his finger about to touch her scar.
"I… did it to myself."
His finger lightly traced over it, sending a shiver down her spine.
"What? Why would you do something like that?"
"Why would you kill your little sister?" She asked suddenly. She didn't mean for it to just come out like that, but she was beginning to regret helping him. Nadia suddenly didn't trust him anymore.
The question made him tumble back, his hand falling back to his side.
"B-but, I didn't…"
Nadia stared at him. She felt bad now for accusing him of doing something like that, especially since he sounded like he really cared for her.
"Akas-"
"It was the villagers… they used her as a sacrifice while I was gone… my family didn't even try to stop them. They just let those men take her away." He said slowly.
"When I came back, they told me what had happened. I-I lost it." He stopped for a moment, his eyes glazing over.
"She was the only person I really cared about there. She was my little sister, my little Nana. And they fed her to that dog lord like she was table scraps!"
"How could they do that to her?" He asked her, not really wanting an answer.
She didn't say anything.
"I killed them all. The men, women, and even the children. I-I don't know what came over me… I just did it." Akashi told her in a more calm voice.
Akashi felt something warm wrap around his hand and looked up to see Nadia smiling at him, her hand squeezing his lightly.
"I don't blame you. I'm sorry I said that about you."
Any doubts she had about him vanished. The thought of him killing innocent people in the name of revenge was hard to take, but she couldn't hold that against him since she had done the same.
"How about we get something to eat before it gets dark?" She said, her voice light and pleasant.
"Sure."
They were both glad for the break.
XXXXX
"This is a waste of time. They're probably all dead by now. So, someone please tell me, what the hell are we doing here?" Yusuke asked in an annoyed tone of voice.
Kurama, being the only sane, reasonable one in the entire group had an answer for that.
"Because they're innocent humans who have no way of defending themselves here. Plus, Koenma thinks that they are still alive. So, we must look for them, and hopefully find them before it is too late."
Yusuke glowered at him.
"I didn't want an answer, smart ass."
Kurama chuckled.
"Um… where's shorty?" The orange haired ningen asked.
"He should already be here."
"Well, then where is he? I don't see him." Said Yusuke.
Kurama closed his eyes, his arms crossed over his chest. He was starting to get annoyed. Of course, it didn't show.
"Hn. Cause you're an idiot."
Yusuke looked down, and to his surprise, there was Hiei.
"There you are, short shit! (A nickname I received last year) Now, can we please go so I can get home and eat?"
"Hn."
Hiei started walking in front of them, while Yusuke and Kuwabara were giggling in the back like the idiots they were.
(/telepathy/ if you haven't already figured that out)
/Hiei, haven't you figured out what that word means by now/
/Hn. Doesn't matter, Fox./
Kurama smiled to himself as he proceeded to tell him what Yusuke had just called him.
Hiei stopped dead in his tracks before he vanished.
"Oh crap."
Yusuke started screaming like a little girl as Hiei chased him around with his sword drawn.
"Kurama, help me!"
"Sorry, Yusuke. But, I can't hear you." He stated before walking away, making Yusuke scream even louder. Kurama smiled pleasantly.
XXXXX
"Why did you do it?"
Nadia looked up. She slipped the piece of burned meat into her mouth before saying anything.
"Do what?"
"Give yourself that scar." He asked as he raised his hand and ran his index finger down his own eyebrow, using it as a substitute for her's.
Nadia put her plate, a large leaf, to the side. She suddenly wasn't that hungry.
"… After I found out what I did… I couldn't believe it. I hated myself. I didn't even notice that I had scratched my face until I felt a drop of blood fall down my cheek."
"What did you do?"
The girl bit her bottom lip, almost hesitant to tell him now. She had never told anyone else what had happened. The only people who knew what happened were the ones who had found her and arrested her. But, he had told her what had happened to him. It was only fair. Besides, she could trust him, couldn't she?
"I destroyed a neighboring village and killed everyone there."
Akashi abandoned his own food and scooted closer to her.
"You know why I did it to my own village and people, but why did you attack them?"
Nadia drew a long breath.
"My village was destroyed while I was… knocked out, and when I woke up, everyone was dead. The only family I had was my mom, and I couldn't find her anywhere, so I just walked away; searching for her. When I went into the next village, I found a few women from my village that were chained up. The village I had walked into housed a large band of mercenaries, the same one's that had destroyed my village and taken our spoils. The same ones that had taken those women and were selling them as slaves."
Akashi watched her as she took a few more breaths before going on.
"One of the women called me over quietly and told me to leave, or else I'd end up like them, like my mother. She told me that my mother had been one of the women captured, and someone had already bought her. I was going to leave and find her, but someone saw me talking to them and grabbed me. They yelled at me, saying that I wasn't supposed to feed them or something stupid like that. That's when he noticed that I didn't live there, so he thought he could sell me off as a servant girl."
"I tried to run away. I screamed, kicked, and even bit him, but he wouldn't let me go. That's when more of them came over and thought it would be fun to teach me a lesson. As they chained me up, women and men from the village watched as they slapped me around and they just stood there, doing nothing to help me. When one of them tried to untie my skirt, I began… to cry. He yelled at me, but I couldn't hear him. I could only hear my mother's voice. I could picture her being taken away by these men, and them hitting her and trying to have their way with her… and before I knew it, I was screaming at them and telling them to stop hurting my mother."
She stopped and looked down at her hands as she wrung them together.
"Go on." He whispered to her.
"I don't remember anything after that for awhile, just what I saw afterwards. I was on my knees, my hands covering my eyes. When I removed them, I looked around me, and began to cry again. It was dark, but I saw everything by firelight. The whole village was on fire, just like mine had been, along with blood and dead bodies lying face down into the dirt. I-I don't know how I did it, but I know it was me. No one else was there, even the women from my village were dead. I was the one still alive, the one with blood on my skirt and hands, the one who had a reason to do what I had done."
"I had killed them all, and I knew it was wrong. So… I just sat there and cried, holding my face in my hands. I only stopped when I felt blood run down the side of my face. I had dug my nails into my forehead and dragged them down, over my eyes and down my cheeks. This scar is the only thing that I have to remind me of what I did."
Just as she had comforted him, he did the same for her. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and hugged her close to him, telling her that it was all right.
"How is what I did all right!" She almost screamed at him. She had pushed him away from her, her eyes glowing orange from the campfire.
"You were young, you didn't know what you were doing. They were hurting you! And no one tried to help you, you had every right to protect yourself." He fired back at her.
She wasn't buying it.
"B-but what about the women from my village? They only tried to help me, and look at how I repaid them!"
"You didn't know! If you had known what you were doing, then you wouldn't have touched them. But, you can't keep beating yourself up over this. You have to forgive yourself. You have to move on."
Nadia cried even more. She didn't try to push Akashi away this time when he held her, letting her cry into his chest. He kept on whispering to her that she should forgive herself and move on.
He never knew if she did or not.
XXXXX
"Okay, so where do we start looking?"
Kurama glanced over at Hiei, expecting him to know the answer.
/Don't look at me, Fox. That baby told me nothing./
Kurama sighed loudly.
"Well, we know that it was one of the demons Shizuma was dealing with. So… if I remember correctly…." He drew a blank.
Shit.
"So, you don't know either? Well, isn't that just great." Yusuke said in frustration as he placed his arms behind his head and just kept on walking forward.
"Haru." Hiei said.
"Huh?"
"The last slave owner that had the humans, that I know of." Hiei said.
Everyone turned around to stare at the little Goth.
"Y-you just said… a whole sentence." Yusuke muttered.
"Shit happens." Kuwabara said.
Everyone turned to stare at him now.
"What?"
Yusuke just shook his head.
'God, he's an idiot!'
"Whatever, so who is this Haru guy?"
Hiei just walked off in the same direction they had been going in.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"This way, bakas."
"…"
Kurama followed after him.
Yusuke muttered under his breath as he followed after the two.
Kuwabara shrugged his shoulders and trailed after all of them.
XXXXX
"Don't worry. I'll make sure that you are all okay. And when this is all over, I'll return you all to your homes." A deep voice said.
All of them listened to every word he said, wanting to believe him so much. They were scared, had been for weeks. Some of them were new and had only been in Makai for a few days, they were the ones that were frightened the most.
"W-will we have to… fight?" One of them asked.
The demon lord looked down at him, his eyes a cold, dark blue that were almost black.
"Of course not." He lied to them, a forced smile gracing his features.
XXXXX
Thank you guys so much for the reviews, and not leaving me, that means a lot to me. This is for you guys.
love you all,
Robin
