Instinct

* * * * *
Instinct: Empty Reflection
* * * * *

Kanna was empty of emotions. It was how Naraku had made her. The soulless, colorless eyes set in her pale face watched without the capacity for judgement, pleasure, or direction. She was a body full of nothing to be directed from the outside how he wished.

At least, that was how Naraku thought he had made Kanna. For the first few hours of her life, she had indeed been only what he’d planned her to be. The problem with thinking beings, however, was that they learned from experience. Given the experience of watching certain humans and demons at Naraku’s bidding, Kanna learned that her mirror stole what she did not have: emotions, souls, and everything that came with them. Initiative, the feel of, well, feeling, and the fullness of souls all filtered into her via her mirror. Naraku had assumed he would be the outside influence over his child-void, but he hadn’t thought to curb the mind in the midst of the empty space. That mind looked at the things that entered her mirror. Had Kagome’s soul succeeded in shattering the mirror, Kanna probably would have died. It was an extension of her self, a tangible manifestation of her power. All of the things it took at Naraku’s orders were stored in her, because they had to go somewhere. That somewhere was like a pocket inside her, full of things not her own but wrapped in her essence.

It did something to her. Having a soul stored inside her wasn’t quite like having a soul of her own, but it gave her an idea of what it was like. Taking away someone’s will gave her the idea of trying things on her own. Holding emotions inside her made her aware of the lack. She didn’t feel anything, she didn’t really have the ability, but she now knew the vague gist of what she should be like. She was smart. She could figure it out. It was hard, in an academic kind of way. Considering that Naraku thought her a tool, she had a lot of time to work academically. When he didn’t have a use for her, she was shelved for later plans. Perhaps he thought that she would spend her time staring at a wall.

She had, at first. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the empty tool any longer. Once she’d known what she’d lacked, it had only been a matter of time before she sought to fill in the hole. Nothingness attracted substance; it was the principle by which her mirror worked. She had the intellect to figure out and imitate what she was missing, if not the ability to actually fill herself. Cold logic had led her to look into her own mirror, because between her inability to feel right or wrong and Naraku’s confidence in her emptiness, there was no reason not to. Everything else had come about because of that first attempt to feel like what she caught.

It went like this: emotions felt like shapes inside her emptiness. Careful study gave her the pieces for the puzzle.

Staring at a wall quickly got boring because boredom was a shape in the emotions of some peasant she’d sucked into her mirror, and she analyzed and applied it. Boredom was physical restlessness and her mind searching for something to occupy it. Her body had begun shifting as muscles stiffened, but until she made herself look for something to do, looking at a wall had been fine. She made herself be bored. Alright, so what should she do? She was made to watch, but Naraku supplied who and what she should watch. Studying the contents of her mirror-pocket, she figured out she could probably do things on her own, without orders. Boredom led to making the boredom stop. Eventually, her mind would find something to do. She turned her mirror around and looked into it.

Naraku had never told her not to, after all. Kanna didn’t feel anything, and that was the extent of Naraku’s control measures on her. He’d never seen a need for anything more. He told her what to do when she worked for him, but during those times when he simply dismissed her, she was left adrift. Emotions, it seemed to her, would provide some sort of guideline for those times. Kanna felt the lack of feeling in herself, and for lack of clear instructions saying otherwise, applied herself to recognizing when and what emotions should happen. She was empty; it was natural for things she saw in her mirror to rush in. It was effort to reason out the things she was supposed to feel, but she tried. Logic thought, *I have a father. I have a sister. I should feel…love…for them. Therefore, I will emulate love.*

Pretending to fit the pieces to a puzzle she didn’t have was complicated. Changing her behavior to fit the patterns of thoughts she associated with emotions was harder yet, but she dutifully tried. Though she didn’t realize it, she did quite well in being Kagura’s elder sister, if an extremely distant and awkward one. No one could have really asked for a more difficult relationship to judge, anyway. Kagura never indicated that she felt one way or another about it, and Kanna was so different from her it was hard to see how their relationship could have been any better. She was quiet and placid, feeling nothing at all but trying very hard to apply strange concepts of loyalty and love to Naraku and Kagura. Kagura was rambunctious and full of hatred toward Naraku, which bled off onto Kanna via association. The Wind Witch wouldn’t have let her close if she’d tried. Kanna simply assumed that her attempts to watch over her younger sibling were enough. Every once and while she would say a word of warning or silently let Kagura rant out her feelings, but mostly she just watched the vibrant woman in her mirror.

Naraku was more troublesome. Kanna couldn’t quite figure out what she was to him. A tool, obviously, but what was she supposed to feel toward him in return? There were two kinds of love between man and woman, and her child’s body confused her. She had an adult mind but a young body; was she lover or child? There were men who wanted children’s bodies. She’s seen them in her mirror while trying to understand why Naraku had created her this way. Did she want him sexually? Well, she didn’t want him either way, because want was something she understood in an abstract kind of way without really feeling it. But should she want him? Or was he supposed to be her father? Being a dutiful daughter would make sense if she was Kagura’s sister, right? She watched how Naraku treated Kagura, even stood back and watched how he treated her, and it seemed that he treated them more like somewhat bothersome children than, well, women. So. She would be a daughter.

That had been her reasoning so far in her life, and if Naraku had never noticed the difference, it hadn’t mattered much. Perhaps he would have rethought his sparse restraints on her if he’d realized she obeyed him out of the logic that she should feel a sense of obligation to him, not because she was his tool. She had led Kagura into his disciplining traps more than once just because she thought the loyalty of a daughter to father overrode the loyalty of daughter to daughter. He was their father. They should do what he told them to do.

He never told her to do much of anything. When he didn’t direct her to show him something, she assumed he didn’t wish to see it, and watched it herself. It never occurred to her to bring things to his attention. He always told her what to report to him. He, assuming that she had no initiative of her own, didn’t think that she knew more than he told her to know. He didn’t think that she watched him.

Oh, yes, she watched him. She had watched him, trying to pin down the label of what he was to her, but had continued to watch him afterward. Once she’d decided she was his daughter, she watched him because he was her father. She had decided she should be obliged to in the same distant manner she watched Kagura. She wasn’t sure if this watching was truly love, but other than loyalty, it seemed to be all she could offer. She was having a hard time imitating family love; it was difficult to apply to her family. She was supposed to love her sister, who hated her father, but she was also supposed to love her father, who regarded them both as tools. She was supposed to betray her sister at her father’s wish because her father’s share of loyalty was larger than her sister’s. She was supposed to watch over her family and tell her sister of potential problems, but her father dismissed her when he was finished with her, so she wasn’t supposed to tell him of what she thought might be problems.

Kanna, being empty of emotions, didn’t get stress headaches from emotional issues.

But…sometimes her head hurt, and she couldn’t understand why.

Today was one of the times that her head started to ache. One tiny fist was pressed to the side of her head, crushing the bottommost petals of her flower, and one of her blank eyes squinted at the pain ripping through her temple. Her brows were drawn in the mild look of confusion that seemed to be the best she could ever manage. Despite the pain and confusion, she kept watching her mirror. Naraku’s image lay within its gilded frame, the source of her problems. He was sitting quietly before one of the urns he used to birth his monsters. The intentness of his stare indicated that soon another sibling would come forth from it. That was nothing unusual; she herself had climbed from one of them, and sometimes she found an empty one to curl up in for sleeping. They were comfortable for someone of her size. More unusual was what Naraku had done before he’d reclined before the urn.

Kanna did not understand what the Kikyo woman was to Naraku, nor to her. She had watched their oft-violent couplings under night skies, and each time the dead priestess seemed unaffected by the sex while Naraku stalked away in a temper. His venomous responses to anything that got in his way soon after gave Kanna the impression of anger and hatred for the priestess, but he always went back again. She had thought it might have been a spell, but the mirror revealed none of the tracings of light she associated with the spells of witches and demons. He returned to Kikyo of his own free will, then, and hated that he returned. Kanna knew the struggle to separate the human half out of her father was the reason why he did everything, even create her, but then why did he couple with the woman who reminded him so strongly of his humanity? Strange, but Naraku had done stranger. He must have a reason that Kanna couldn’t see in all her watching.

In Kanna’s empty world, everything had a reason. Sometimes it completely escaped her that some emotions didn’t need a reason at all. Sometimes, a soul could drive someone to do the most outrageous things. Thus, Kanna often couldn’t understand Inuyasha, and especially not Kagome. The feel of Kagome’s soul in her mirror had overwhelmed her, but she hadn’t been able to grasp the shape of the emotions filling it.

If Kagome was Kikyo’s reincarnation, did that mean that Kikyo’s soul was as vast? Perhaps that was why Naraku reacted so strangely to her presence. But he didn’t try to reach for Kagome like that. Although…in all of Kanna’s watching, she’d never seen him open his robes around Kagome. Maybe he did react the same around her…

Except that Kanna had never seen Naraku come back from an encounter with Kagome to start a spell still seething with anger. His fury practically boiled off of him, but he had begun a spell in the urn without calming down. All his careful plotting depended on measured thought, and to break pattern like this confused Kanna. Moreover, before he’d retreated to his rooms to work, he’d backhanded Kagura in the hallway. He’d never done that before. Squeezed her heart, yes, and threatened to reabsorb her into his body, but never just slapped her. Never for no reason other than a bad mood. Kagura had merely been leaning against a roof support waiting in half-asleep boredom to report her activities, and Naraku hadn’t even given her a chance to sneer at him before he’d hit her. She’d sprawled at his feet in utter shock, and he’d given her this…look. Kanna’s confusion twisted further as she remembered that look. It had begun as rage and contempt, but shifted to surprised thoughtfulness. A weird kind of glee had seeped into his anger, and he’d whirled away to isolate himself in his room before Kagura had sat up.

Kanna had never seen that look on his face before. She’d never seen him so out of control, either. He was always a little on the edge after his trysts with the priestess, but never this badly. He’d started a spell as soon as he entered the room, with no precautions or meditation.

Sitting in one of the palace’s many abandoned rooms, the white child traced the symbols of light visible in her mirror. They covered the urn Naraku watched so intently, which steamed gently. She knew the signs. She had watched wisewomen and priests chant and write them on the bellies of men and women, usually at handfasting ceremonies of one kind or another. In trying to understand love, she had studied them until she understood that the spell was only physical. It confused her that Naraku would use such a spell. To separate and mold a part of himself into a demon-tool was a relatively simple process involving more concentration and bindings than actual spellwork. The coils and shimmers of this spell made her start to think that what came out of the urn wouldn’t be a sibling at all. When her mirror looked in the top of the urn, she could see that a scant fingerwidth of fluid occupied the bottom of it. It steamed softly like tea in a cup, not like the frenzied boiling of birth.

She was empty of all but reason. It took a leap of intuition to make the connection, and the puzzle-pieces of emotions were tentatively fitted into place around that. It was what made her head ache and her confusion grow, but the logic fit. She couldn’t explain it any better than that. Watching Naraku so obsessively had given her an insight into his mind that no one else could claim. Looking at her creator, thoughts scrambled and rearranged, and a flash of pain forced her to close her eyes as her headache throbbed. The extreme emotions forced out of him, the sex and his return to it. *He wants revenge, some way to get back at her, or maybe just a way to stop his reaction to her.* The look of sudden thought at Kagura. *He saw how she fit into a new plan.* The urn that didn’t hold a new sibling. *Not yet, at least. Not directly.*

Was Naraku her father or lover?

The answer had suddenly gotten more complicated.

*Kagura. It must be her that he will use. My body is too young for it.* Kanna turned her mirror away and closed her eyes. Between her brows, a furrow dipped into place on her forehead. It could have been from pain or thought, because both were racing about her head in unprecedented amounts. *She is my sister either way; he has called me her elder sister. I have never protected her from him before, but do sisters let their father do such things to each other?* She considered the emotions of loyalty distantly, trying to decide how much was owed to each member of her family. Under most circumstances, Naraku would receive the majority of it, but she had studied these emotions. The confusion of her own status only made her decision firmer. *If he is our father, then he should not seek to do this to us. If he is our lover instead or even as well, then…* She paused, the new shape of her false-emotions temporarily blurred. She tried to put it into words. *Then…I am the eldest sister. I should be first. That he seeks her over me should cause…jealousy. No matter that I cannot provide what he wants; pride and…want…should make me wish to be first.*

The pain receded a little with her decision, and she drew in a deep breath with purely physical relief. The confusion ebbed as well as she firmly planned out how she should react to this new turn of events. Most people didn’t plan how to cloud their own judgment, but Kanna was a void. She had to, compelled by the nothingness inside her to try to imitate a soul. To act as if she was natural, she had to make errors in her own reasoning.

Logically, she shouldn’t warn Kagura. They were both Naraku’s tools, to be used how he wanted. If she had emotions, however, she would react as a sister, as a lover, as a real person.

Naraku really should have placed more safeguards on his watcher.

* * * * *
End Part 8
* * * * *

I blame Kanna’s involvement on Neffy-chan, who said that the blank white child gave her the shivers. Darn you for getting me interested in her! I watched the second Inuyasha movie with Kanna helping Kagura, reread some of the manga, and suddenly the plot thickens like bad gravy. And lo, there be Kanna sex somewhere on the horizon...if I ever get around to it. And if the plot doesn’t turn again, like it seems to be prone to doing so far. What the heck. After rape, yaoi, necrophilia (hey, Kikyo is dead, ya know), and masturbation, what’s a little child porn?

Remember, feedback keeps me interested in this story!