Instinct

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Instinct: Teacup Rebellion
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Her life resembled nothing so much as the shattered teacup at her feet. Porcelain-frail, delicate and sculpted into a work of art that nonetheless served as a part of a matched set, its broken pieces seemingly abandoned on the hard floor. Had she been dropped for a reason, or had the smashed pottery been an accident all along? There was a purpose in its shape that could be seen in the exquisitely painted shards rocking back and forth on the wood floor, but just as a dropped teacup appeared innocent to the first glance, her pieces were meant to cut unwary hands and feet. This teacup had not been made for its entirety, but its shards. Only the hands that created it could have been so devious in using it this way. There would be no repairs, no gentle hands to fit the puzzle back together and glue it into a complete shape once again. Unless, of course, that somehow fit the master’s plan, but then the hands would manipulate the teacup no matter its repair.

As always the teacup would serve its maker, marred by hairline cracks and subdued before a practicality that wished it repaired for outside purposes, not the inherent artistry of its design. A teacup couldn’t choose the hands holding it.

Poor teacup. No one ever asked the teacup if it wanted to be a teacup. No one asked if it wanted to be part of a set, or stand by itself. She had been constructed and deconstructed according to precise calculations, the beautiful form cracked into the shape of a tool. Her inherent nature as a demon centered on deception; unlike their younger siblings, she and her elder sister had been made attractive works of art on the surface to disguise the weapons they really were. Underneath the skin, however, they were a warped set of psychotic siblings like teacups lined in a row. Perfectly formed for what they’d been made for, to be used and disposed by the hand that sculpted them: Naraku, the mad potter.

Her elder sister sat before her now, poised and polished as a new cup that had never been used. Her appearance changed rarely, and Kagura had observed that the most extreme situations only drew muted responses. They didn’t seem connected to real feeling. The black-eyed child’s limited range of expressions resembled the minimal strokes of paint gracing the curve of the cup in her hands: frozen and seemingly painted on by someone else. Even her hair rarely changed. The pale, straight strands refused to succumb to sweat or dirt. Like a new teacup, Kanna waited with empty patience for whatever the potter chose to pour in.

Where Kanna held nothing, Kagura had nothing to hold anything with. Kagura was the ‘dead’ teacup, the weapon of polite society; razor-sharp edges coated in her maker’s poison would finely slice whomever she was dropped before. Kagura, so pretty and so unexpectedly dangerous. She had stubbornly assembled the pattern out of her broken nature and constructed a fragile balance, each piece fitted together just under porcelain-fine skin. The sharp edges were glued only by her determination and honed to a deadly jigsaw. This teacup would cut the hand that held it, including her maker’s. Had she been complete, every piece in place…but Naraku had cunningly taken one of the scattered pieces. Without it, she could never be whole.

Inside her, the pieces she’d painstakingly gathered trembled with the meaning of the words still ringing in her ears. The missing part, had it not been stolen from her, would have seized in her chest. *He. Is. Insane.* Shock had stopped time and shaken her to the core. Tremors of emotion started at her fingertips, returning feeling to the numb hands that had let the teacup fall. Doubt simply didn’t occur to her. She’d seen worse crimes and more terrible things done to far more innocent beings than herself. She’d done quite a bit of it herself, actually. Doubting that Naraku would turn upon her? Only the terminally stupid were that naïve.

*How…dare he. How dare he!* Anger sparked inside the shock. Knife-edged, angled thoughts grated against each other as they violently shifted, and the new direction ignited her temper. Where Kanna existed in cold logic, Kagura thrived in the high heat of emotion. The last of horror-struck astonishment flared incandescent behind red eyes, turning them to burning crimson, and her nails dug into the palms of her hands with the strength of her hatred. *How dare he!*

Kanna’s emotionless eyes met Kagura’s seething glare. Wind witch and a mirror of nothingness, empty and shattered staring each other down. Living weapons, the both of them, parts of the world’s most lethal tea set, but metaphors evaporated with the impact of ice and fire over the table. Teacups made a comparison for a frantic mind, but in the end these two were demons. Enslaved demons, in Kagura’s case, but even Kanna’s smooth brow showed the subtle sign of a troubled crease. “You are warned, Kagura,” the pale child whispered. “What…will you do?”

Her foot stomped down on the floor with a furious crackle of powdered ceramic. Blood immediately stained the wood under her feet, but she didn’t care. The small pain only fed her fury. “What will I do?!” Kagura showed her teeth in something between a snarl and a sneer, anger and disgust seething at the base of her throat. Verbal bile rose and spat from between gritted teeth. “I’ll raise a typhoon on his head and tear him into bits on the wind! My Wind Blades will slice off his testicles and burst them in front of his eyes! Dragon Serpents will drill into his anus so far he’ll spray shit every time he tries to speak, and his voice will come out of the hole I’ll rip in his belly! I’ll dice his limbs to every corner of the world and slaughter every baboon who even reminded me of his stinking fur!”

Heedless of the shards in her feet, the wind witch tracked blood from one side of the room to the other while her precious winds rattled the paper screens and flapped tapestries on the walls. A futon unrolled and tumbled clumsily across the floor. Kanna’s robes fluttered and tugged with the winds, but her hair only swayed. If there had been humans left alive in the castle, they would have gaped as angry winds whipped the sky into dark gray stormclouds overhead and howled through the courtyards. Kagura’s voice lowered to a venomous hiss even as her eyes crackled crimson lightening the windstorm outside lacked. “We’ll see how often he can regrow parts of himself when I hack off his penis. Splinters under his fingernails and coals on his eyes, acid under his foreskin and knives though his feet.” She slammed her fist against the wall and whirled to shriek, “Damn him to the deepest pits of every inferno with an ogre for each torture I forget--gods damn him!”

The child kneeling at the table at the opposite end of the room calmly pushed the teapot out of reach of her wayward clothing and took another sip from her cup, unruffled by her younger sister’s red-faced rage. Kagura’s hair had fallen out of place during her rant, and she tossed it over her shoulder impatiently as she limped back toward Kanna. “But I can’t do any of that, can I?” the darker daughter said bitterly, throwing herself down at the low table with no regard for the ceramic chips that tore the heavy silk of her kimono. “If that son of a gutter whore didn’t have my heart …” She shook her head. “If I don’t do what he wants, he’ll squeeze it like a child’s toy.”

Kanna’s robes subsided as the winds whirled through the room one last time and rushed away. They whistled through the halls, seeking and finally finding escape routes to the outside. Painted paper screens punched out all over the castle, and a torrent of air surged up into the sky to suddenly hit the gathered clouds. Like the windstorm mistress’ mood, the sky didn’t clear. The winds only spread the clouds enough to change near-darkness to a sullen overcast.

Kagura appropriated another teacup--light enough to have been overturned by the winds and bearing a nick along the rim as a memento of her temper--from the tray Kanna had brought in and filled it with steaming tea from the teapot also on the tray, more out of habit than thirst. Gore-coated images oozed around the inside of her head, spilling out her mouth in a constant mutter under her breath. Spikes and chains, red-hot brands and rusted blades flavored the weak tea with hate. Kanna never had learned how to make proper tea. Frustrated, Kagura almost pitched the cup across the room at the wall she’d already dented. As volatile as her winds, however, she merely settled back on her heels and resentfully nursed the cup in her hands as she brooded. One finger continually stroked the sharp edge of the missing chip, picking at it without conscious thought on her part. Unnoticed, a faint crack began to spread under the constant pressure, slowly creeping down the curve of the cup. Kanna sipped her tea and let her think.

*Insane or not, I’m still his shade. His sliver, his child, flesh of his flesh, and he’ll melt me back into that flesh again if I disobey him. He’s made that clear enough.* She frowned into the tinted water pretending to be tea, but she couldn’t care less about the beverage. In the distorted reflection, her dark-haired image resembled Naraku’s visage eerily. Her frown deepened, and she raised the cup to her lips so she wouldn’t have to see its contents. *He won’t hesitate to kill me if I defy him. I can’t risk telling him to fuck off and trying to run. Knowing him, he’d absorb me just enough that I’d still be conscious but unable to get loose.* His hand could crush her heart at any time, and had. That was a pain she hated and feared, but pain could be dealt with. She would risk some pain to escape this, but getting reabsorbed into that pulsing blob of flesh..? She shuddered involuntarily at the thought.

Her eyes flicked to Kanna, still sitting there watching her with those unreadable, black eyes as she drank her own cup of tea. Kanna’s silence said more than words could convey, most of the time. Today she’d spoken more words in fifteen minutes than Kagura heard from her over the course of a month, and now her silence pressured for a response. Kagura looked down again at the tea in her hands. Her older sister didn’t seem to notice that she’d failed, once again, at making it right. To be fair, probably nobody had ever told her she’d done it wrong. She’d almost certainly never had tea made by anyone else, and observing the process at a distance certainly wouldn’t tell her what the stuff was supposed to taste like. Before, the little failing had always amused Kagura enough to let it pass without comment. It had made Kanna seem less of Naraku’s creature--even if she knew better.

The winds were free. The winds needed no one. Kagura, despite her solitary nature, was not the wind. The winds were part, not all, of her, no matter what she wished occasionally. The other parts of her remained a slave to Naraku and some form of a sister to Kanna. When it came to companionship, her choices were slim. She couldn’t exchange barbed comments with Sesshoumaru all the time, which pretty much left Kanna and multiple enemies who wanted her dead for one reason or another. Sometimes it seemed as if Kanna regarded her the same way in return. At least, she’d never told Kagura to get lost whenever the wind witch wanted to be around someone, and it wasn’t the first time they’d shared Kanna’s rather pathetic attempt at tea.

That didn’t make her any less a tool of Naraku.

*What is your role in this, dear sister? You came in here and told me of this, saying it was a warning. When have you ever warned me? You’re Naraku’s watchdog, and you’ve been set on me more than once. You’ve led me into his traps!* Her eyes half-lidded defensively under Kanna’s impassive stare, the lashes hooding her red gaze. *Are you supposed to provoke me into confronting him?* Was this a trick to get her to attack Naraku out of blind rage? Prodding her into charging hellbent into her own demise would fit her creator’s tendency toward sick mindgames. *Although the only other times you’ve brought me tea has been to tell me something strange. You’re boring to talk to, Kanna, but sometimes you tell me the oddest things out of the blue.* Kanna had that weird habit. Kagura never saw her eat or drink any other time she’d hung around the mirror-child, but every once and a while, Kanna would turn the tables and seek her out with a tray of something to share. Boredom and curiosity usually led the wind witch to tolerate the intrusion into her solitude.

Heck, it wasn’t as if anyone else ever talked with her (beyond begging for mercy or threatening to kill her), and nobody else brought snacks. Well, if random grotesque demons didn’t count, and it wasn’t tea they wanted to share with her.

In any case, Kanna may not be the greatest conversationalist, but sometimes the things she said were important. There had been the occasional warning about staying away from Sesshoumaru, which she had thought came from Naraku at the time, but afterward…*Those were the times Naraku turned his schemes on him. I thought he wanted me to stay out of his way, or maybe he thought I would betray his plans to the dog. That doesn’t make sense. I give Sesshoumaru every hint but straight-out telling him everything Naraku tells or shows me, and if Naraku knew that, he’d kill me. Wouldn’t he?* He’d punished her treachery before after catching her holding out information on him. If he actually knew that she regularly sought out Sesshoumaru, he’d surely destroy her for trying to goad the white dog demon into destroying him for her.

Unless Naraku had planned it all.

Or…if he hadn’t..?

She’d become so accustomed to being manipulated that she nearly dismissed the idea out of habit. Because if Naraku hadn’t planned it all, then the linchpin of her justified paranoia jiggled loose. Knowing something like that at least gave her a starting point. Without that, her certainties fell into chaos.

A regular woman wouldn’t know how to face this. A demon probably wouldn’t either, but she was a daughter of Naraku, and Naraku broke every rule in the sickest way possible. *Or impossible, if it involves him not dying when he should, the bastard.* The point being that as Naraku’s child, Kagura didn’t react with hysterical fear and desperation like a relatively normal female. Her foremost feelings at the moment were a completely healthy fear for her survival, utter disgust, and creative-minded rage. Neither resignation nor helplessness paralyzed her; instead, she immediately began planning. There had to be a way to escape this. If not, there had to be a way to foil Naraku, for no better reason than sheer spite. She might not be able to stop him, but ruining his plot would be some form of comfort against the perversity visited upon her.

“Why did you tell me this?” she snapped abruptly, slamming the teacup down. The last of her tea sloshed out onto the table between them, and the slim crack in the cup widened. Her eyes lifted to meet Kanna’s gaze directly, a challenge and a question. “What did Naraku think I’d do, run away? I’m not stupid!” Sometimes foolish, and, yes, she had panicked, but cold reason chilled the bloody imagination behind her eyes into an ice-crackled horror show put on hold for the facts of her life. In her, a woman’s ‘delicate sensibilities’ were twisted from birth, and her hands had slaughtered enough humans and demons to dull whatever had lingered.

“Naraku did not send me,” Kanna tonelessly said. “He does not know I am here. I came because…as my sister, you are my responsibility.” Said by the proper voice, those words could have been inspirational, conspiratorial, even resigned or sad. The white child’s flat voice gave it an eerie finality instead, almost as if an elder sister’s duties were writ in stone.

“…what?” Kagura’s red eyes went blank, and the racing mind behind them stumbled. In all the time she had existed, never once had the idea of familial duty crossed her mind. It was one thing to think of Kanna as her older sister; the word was a convenient way to describe their relationship. To baldly make that kind of statement grabbed the mat out from underneath the wind witch and left her jaw hanging. “I…what?!” She shook her head violently. *I don’t even know how to respond to this!*

Her sister blinked at her with an impassive face. “It is my duty as the eldest to shelter you as best I can,” she stated, as if it were entirely reasonable that Naraku’s most obedient creation would suddenly turn on him just because of his newest scheme. “I cannot…stop our father, but I have warned you. The rest is up to you.”

“Why?” Kagura blurted out, too confused by Kanna’s bizarre conviction to really think her words through. “We’re constructs, not sisters! He’s not our father!” She shook her head again, lunging to her feet with a speed few women in a kimono could. She swiftly walked across the room, plucking the fan from her sash to flip open and closed as her anger turned on this new lunacy. Wind began to build up the clouds outside when her temper boiled over again. *How could he possibly think I’d believe she’s turned over a new leaf as my ‘sister’ when she’s exactly the same?! Look at her! She hasn’t changed at all, and he’s trying to get me to believe she’d help me?* His poison miasma had clearly started to dissolve Naraku’s brain. “You’ve never protected me from him before, Kanna, so why the act now? Do you think I’m an idiot not to see that you’re setting me up for something?” she accused, spinning to snap the fan closed and point it straight at the pale girl. “I’m not Naraku’s toy! You think you can fool me with this little act of yours?! Crawl back to your master and tell him he can shove his head up Kikyo’s cunt with a dead fish and a fire iron--and they can both rot in the abyss!”

The white child’s face changed not a bit at the accusation. “Naraku does not know I am here,” she repeated. “He has taken the venom wasps after a Shikon shard in the mountains to the East.”

“Hmph.” She sniffed distain at the paltry excuse. “You’ve never needed him around to follow his orders--“

“There…is no shard,” Kanna said, her sighing words cutting through Kagura’s contempt. “The image I showed him in my mirror was false. He will return by nightfall and call you to him. The time I have bought you is limited. Do not…waste it.”

Gaping at her elder sibling was becoming a nasty habit. “You did what?!” Reality wobbled alarmingly as a linchpin disintegrated and left her poised on the brink of a vast change. One lie. All she had to believe was the truth of one lie, and everything she thought she knew about her world would collapse into wrong assumptions. *Gods above and below, how many times did I not do something because I thought Naraku was watching and told her to tell me to stop? Has she been covering my ass all along?* If Kanna had lied to Naraku, a whole series of odd statements over lousy tea took on a different light, switching Naraku’s mouthpiece into the weirdest version of an older sister any human or demon family could boast.

Outside, the returning windstorm puffed out like the sky had been sucker-punched. The dark-haired woman wandered back to the table and knelt before her abandoned teacup. She looked down at it with crimson eyes wide and clouded with bewilderment.

A hint of a crease crimped Kanna’s brow. The reasons that made sense to her evidently did not fit into Kagura’s own twisted view of the world. It took effort to dissemble her careful train of logic to explain, and the pale child took a slow sip of cold tea as she tried to understand Kagura’s shock. What was obvious to her couldn’t seem to penetrate her younger sister’s irrational approach to her emotions. Perhaps it would be easier if she approached this in a different way, one that might better fit Kagura’s denial of their ‘family.’

The faint crease eased. “I am the eldest,” she said. “He should have…chosen me instead of you. It is my right.” The breathless, whispery voice held no hint of the jealousy those words would have had coming from anyone else. Kanna knew what the feelings should be; what she lacked was the ability to actually feel them. The void inside her compelled to try, anyway.

Poor little teacup, conscious only of her emptiness.

Foolish Naraku not to have guarded the set more closely.

Pride, jealousy, and loyalty, for instance, filled her when betraying Naraku now just as duty and loyalty had filled her when serving him yesterday. A teacup didn’t care who filled it, or even with what. All it felt was the shape of the liquid inside and the unnatural lack when it was poured out. Just because it was not part of her did not make her need it any less.

Kagura stared at her elder sibling with revulsion, her slack jaw closing with a click of teeth. “You want him?!” The frantic scramble of realigning thoughts in her mind slammed to a halt as she flinched back from her sister, revolted. This entire conversation felt like running blindfolded down a path on a cliff; she had no idea where it was going, and every other step kept tumbling her off in short falls that knocked the breath out of her--while in the back of her head was the knowledge that she was one wrong move from falling to her death. The mental image of Kanna and Naraku (or anyone and Naraku, really) going at it almost made her wish for that fatal fall.

Black eyes didn’t change at Kagura’s reaction. “It is not a matter of…want. It is how it should be.” Stark white hair swept forward slightly as Kanna lowered her gaze to the empty teacup in her hands. “It is only…proper,” she whispered without emotion, “for the first to be chosen for this plan.”

The dark-haired wind witch reached for the teapot absently and poured for them both with a distinct lack of grace. She didn’t know about Kanna, but she needed the tea to wash the taste of this subject out of her mouth. It left her distinctly queasy. Pouring tea also bought her a few seconds to restart her mind, seconds that she needed badly. *I never thought she was so…so…* Words failed her, and Kagura floundered for something to compare Kanna to. This was so far outside her realm of experience it was laughable. *Formal. She’s very formal. I suppose that could even make sense. I always thought she was so distant because Naraku made her to be empty and not care about anything. She’s never done anything but what he orders, but if she was only doing what she thinks is her duty…* If she truly had misled Naraku today, then that would widen Kagura’s perception of what exactly Kanna had done in the name of ‘duty,’ and she had the feeling that Naraku would certainly be surprised by Kanna’s definition of it as pertaining to him.

Come to think of it, if that were true then Kanna’s behavior didn’t differ too much from that of some high-born women. They seemed to lack personality and do whatever their male relatives commanded with as little thought as a windmill. Just because Kagura and the female demons and humans she encountered were unconventional didn’t meant that Kanna had to be. She acted like a perfect tool of Naraku--or a well-raised daughter of her time.

*It’s not as if I’ve been around her enough to notice anything I didn’t expect to see.* It had never occurred to her that Kanna might not be a mindless sliver of Naraku, totally subservient to his will. Kagura had often tried to lull Naraku into a false sense of security by obeying him and behaving as he wished. Kanna had never given him a reason to suspect her of disobeying.

The whole thing set Kagura on her head, and as she set the teapot down, she speared Kanna with a wary look. “He’s chosen me over you for his plans before.”

Kanna refused to rise to the sneer in Kagura’s voice, or maybe she was unaffected by it. “There have been no plans like this before,” she countered.

A good point. Naraku was sick, but this was a new depth of depravity. Previous plans had tricked, hurt, punished, and even come within a hair of killing her, but none of them had involved Naraku raping her. Even on her admittedly convoluted moral scale, a father impregnating his own daughter was an outrage. Death, at least, was clean. *If he’d tried this plan before, I’d be dead by now. There’s no way I’d voluntarily bear his spawn. I’d either kill the goddamn brat in the womb or slit its throat before its first breath.* She grimaced and sipped her tea, then made another face and pushed it away. Kanna’s tea did not improve by sitting in the pot. *Then Naraku would kill me.* As he still would, because she would fight him to what would probably be her death over this. From what Kanna had said, in the mood he was in he wouldn’t tolerate her fighting back much, if at all, over this, and hell if she’d be a broodmare quietly or willingly. *If Kanna hadn’t told me, I’d have been insulted and angry that he’d rape me, but not all that shocked. He’s done worse to me before. But when the child started to show, he’d have to restrain me the moment I figured it out, and by then it’d be too late for me to do anything about it.*

In a way, Kanna’s warning had robbed her of a couple months of living. She would have gotten over Naraku raping her fairly quickly despite her disgust. Hatred would carry her, as it had her whole life. The moment she discovered her pregnancy, however, Naraku would have to all but absorb her to keep her from killing the child, and he’d have no reason to keep her alive after that. But at least she’d be alive for those few months of freedom beforehand.

Knowing what she did now, Kagura had to escape somehow, and that would spell her death sentence. If he couldn’t impregnate her naturally--an odd word in this situation--he’d settle for destroying her enough to use her body as he willed.

The strange thing was that had Naraku chosen anyone but her to use for this, it would have been nothing but another one of his unnecessarily convoluted schemes to her. He’d probably chosen her because he could control her, and terror would likely cause most women, human or demon, to miscarry his seed. As Kanna had explained, Naraku continually sought to separate his demon and human halves and make himself fully demonic. Separating the demon part of himself out into children like Kanna and Kagaru required far less effort than taking out the humanity, much as lesser demons reproduced on the power of hate, anger, and death instead of physical coupling. Each time he’d taken the time and effort to force the human Onigumo out of himself, the process had been too much like birth; it strained him unmercifully, and the resulting child had taken freely from both halves of the half-demon. The children had turned out too much like him to be useful; his attempts had turned or been turned against him, taken something vital from him, or simply not worked.

But to transmute his human heart into a real child would render it into an innocent. A real babe without the taint Naraku’s creations tended to carry could be a greater weapon than any sliver-child he created. Kohaku could stand testament to how others could be used through a child. The master of manipulation could turn a vulnerable infant into a terrible thing by all the right actions and words, shaping it into a monster inside an innocent form or an innocent manipulated unknowingly into a monster. Inuyasha’s group of annoying misfits would turn itself inside-out trying to save it, or they’d destroy themselves if they had to kill it. Sired on Kagura, the thing would be a half-demon, but that would hardly matter to those soft-hearted fools.

Kagura could even see how Naraku would use this as revenge on Kikyo. She had been startled when Kanna revealed his compulsive midnight trysts with the undead priestess, but she’d already known about his unwilling attraction to her. While Kikyo had never hesitated to kill a demon before, a half-demon child might give her pause. Plus, the child would be a blatant piece of proof that Naraku didn’t need her, that he could destroy her and walk away at any point. Whether or not that was truth was a point of curiosity for Kagura, but she had enough trouble comprehending everything Kanna had told her today. More revelations could wait for another day.

So it came to this: to trust Kanna or not.

No, not quite. No, she was too canny to ever fully trust her ‘sister.’ The question was whether trusting Kanna enough to use her supposed warning could possibly be worse than what she claimed Naraku already had planned.

That was hard to believe.

A puddle of tea had formed under her teacup, leaking out the crack. When it spread to touch her fingers, it jolted her out of the silence that had fallen over the table. “I won’t,” Kagura said, picking up the empty cup to study the crack running down its side, “birth his spawn.” Just saying it out loud invoked something worse than nausea in her. Even to save her life, she couldn’t do it.

Her pale sister held her own full cup and didn’t drink from it, letting the stillness communicate the question for her. The wind witch frowned under the weight of the silence. It made it clear that it was her problem. Kanna had already delivered her warning. Kagura turned the teacup and used her palm to seal the crack so she could pour the rest of the tea into it. Handled right, even a shattered teacup could be used. One just had to know how to plan around the breaks. *Naraku’s taught me that. There aren’t many undamaged cups left in this dead palace.* Of all the things she’d learned living as his construct, that had to be the most benign. Everything else was learned by experience, through pain, fear, and deceit. She learned from every trap he’d sprung on her and every order she’d followed in his plans. *The bastard never thought I’d learn the lessons he taught me so well.*

Naraku wasn’t the only one who could scheme. Unfortunately, she had very few options for her own plans. “I could find a midwife and force her to abort the thing, but Naraku would find out.” Red eyes cut across the table accusingly. “You’d show him.” Duty would only compel Kanna so far, surely. Kagura just didn’t know what that limit was. *Will you help me, sister?*

“My mirror is not infallible. I will fail to find you,” Kanna responded quietly. Kagura blinked, momentarily elated, and started to open her mouth, but her sister continued, “It will not work. Naraku…will know if you do not bear a child.”

Kagura’s frown deepened. Kanna was right. Naraku wouldn’t just throw away his humanity. She didn’t know why, but every one of his separation attempts had resulted in a living being, and he’d tracked each one obsessively through Kanna and the venom wasps. If Muso was anything to go by, once separated and growing on its own in Kagura’s womb, Naraku wouldn’t be able to control or track the baby by his power alone; he would likely set the venom wasps and Kanna to watch her. So long as it was within Kagura, he’d know where it was.

Kanna had implied that she would play blind, and Kagura could probably fool the venom wasps with some creative padding under her kimono. Face to face with Naraku, however, it would be rather obvious that she wasn’t pregnant.

Which begged the question, of course…

A sly smile curved her lips. ”Would he be able to tell if the child was his?”

* * * * *
End Part 14
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First time I’ve updated in a year, and I give you five pages of plot development. *cackle hackle hackle* I’d be ashamed, but frankly, I’m too relieved to have it out of the way. I have the worst time writing Kagura in character (I don’t have a sufficiently vulgar vocabulary to really get her hatred across). Think of it this way--this part sets up later parts for child porn, tentacle sex, and a whole lot of angst, probably in unexpected ways that are the epitome of un-hotness.

*gasp* You mean I’m not going to make it good for everyone?

No. No, I’m not. Whaddya know, it’s the revenge of reality. A story with sex instead of sex with a story tacked on…

Well, you know the drill. Feedback (dementedangel@hotmail.com or reviews) keeps me interested in working on this story, I’m still looking for places to host this fic and related fanart, and *snicker* poke the author and get a (pornographic) prize!