Cats and Demi-gods Part I
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me. And don't read if you're not old enough.
Title: Cats and Demi-gods
Chapter: Part I - Mortality
Universe: Rurouni Kenshin
Rating: R
Genre: Drama/Fantasy/Romance
Version: AU
The first time she met him was three hundred years ago.
He was not known as he was now. Man called him other names then, but he never told her what those names had been. She had been too preoccupied with other things to ask anyway, newly reborn as she had been and completely vulnerable when he had saved her. Perhaps she might have been lucky that she was not in the Below when the change had occurred, despite it being her birth place. It was the place where her mother had died for a crime her father never told her in any detail about, though they too bore the punishment for it.
They had bound her father's powers and made him mortal because of it after all, which was a death sentence in its own way. A different type of bitter punishment in comparison to death in the Below, but death nonetheless. She too was a part of her mother's and father's punishment, though she did not know the depths of it all until much later. Her burden was not like her father's. The purpose, after all, was not only to make her suffer but to make him suffer the more in the knowing of it.
They had cursed her to lose the seal they placed upon her human back upon his death, this much she knew. To die when he died, was what they were told, linked as the seal was to her father's death. They had carved it into her to remind them both for as long as they lived, marking her for the End before she could truly remember the Beginning.
A demon, long used to claws and teeth, her father had been a great fighter. His powers and his pride were only taken from him when they placed him into a human's body. It was weak and ill and old. Above all else, it was Mortal.
They were lucky though, because he could fight with a sword, as well. It had been his weapon of choice as a demon - a strange thing too that he did not only rely on the brutality of his nature. This unusual skill lengthened his mortal life - a blessing and a curse in its own way. And he taught her the skill as well. At least, he did what he could with his weakening limbs as the years passed while she tried to learn with her unchanging, miniature form. "If humans do not kill me, mortality will," he had warned her wearily when he started to teach her the art. "Yet, I'd chose the more worthy adversary."
She was his daughter, and if he could make her live one day more, he would. It was a strange thing for a demon to have aquired, this type of loyalty. Sometimes, when she asked him about emotions and the crime that sentenced them all, her father would laugh wearily and shake his head. "You would not understand," he would say. And it sounded, as she aged, as if he did not want her to know.
He was right though. She didn't understand. She had only been a hatchling then and pain was much of what she remembered of the Below. From it, she had gained something that was not quite a mortal's body and a seal that disabled both her ability to grow as a human and a demon.
For years they were forced to travel because she could not age while her father could only age. It was dangerous on ther road, but if they had stayed anywhere too long, the humans they knew would also become too dangerous. As long as her demon was sealed, she could still be easily killed like him. And so she learned about the aging of Man as she watched her father's hair thin and whiten and his skin, that was not his skin, whither.
But her father taught her, at least, what he could. He taught her how to run with her small, short legs and how to land from a great height, for a human child. He taught her how to climb trees and fish in the river with her small, unchanging hands. Yet, they both knew the day would come when they would find an old man and a young child dead, side by side in some unknown place at some unknown time.
And so they travelled, till he was too ill to travel. They struggled to a secluded place in the mountains, so it would be harder for people to find them or notice her ungrowing body. She watched his hair fall away and his body become thinner and weaker, no matter what she fed him or how much he slept. She watched and the days went too quickly by, and one day she woke to her stomach growling. It was not that strange, but she had slowly noticed her appetite growing. She cared for her father when she could, but she was beginning to find herself always so hungry and tired and weak herself.
The weaker he grew, the weaker she grew.
One night, she woke without remembering falling asleep. It had been going on for the last few days, but it still startled her to open her eyes to the realization that she had closed her eyes without notice. Her stomach grumbled, it was the only thing it seemed to know how to do anymore.
"You awake?" her father's voice rasped, making her jump a little in surprise.
"I'll go get food," she said once she got ahold of herself.
"The time is coming," her father's voice told her brokenly, stopping her from leaving. "I must tell you while you still have the strength to listen." Her stomach grumbled a reply and he chuckled a little. It was weak and dying, like him. She did not protest, for as young as she looked and as scared as she was, she was not so young in human years and she had long lived with fear.
Tears still gathered in her eyes, but the darkness kept her father's mortal eyes blind and his mortal nose senseless to her grief. Yet, he knew nonetheless. A blind man can learn to live without his sight, so too her father had learned to live without the things that once defined him to be more than Man.
"They told me you would die with me," her father said at last. "I had believed them. Especially after they told me that if I killed you myself, the curse would be broken and I would be sent back to the Below." She looked to her father than with wide-eyed surprise, failing to repress a shudder at the name of her birth place. "I couldn't do it," her father said softly. "I thought about it a million times, because I was a demon, but this human body houses a human heart. And as I watched you age..." He paused as his voice trailed.
She blinked, because she did not grow old. How could her father see her age? Sometimes his words puzzled her.
"You have eyes like your mother, did you know that?" he finally said. "Not the same right now, because they are human eyes. The expression though, it is the same. As if there exists something else one should be aware of, other than Power." Her father's voice grew wispier as he spoke and her heart quaked at the sound. She was suddenly terrified of him dying, of what he was saying to her. The sureness of his passing was a suddenly very real weight upon her shoulders.
"I know what they wanted now, child." Her father sounded urgent again after a short pause, his breath at his throat. "You must run from here..." his wizened hand suddenly grasped her wrist, surprising her with its accuracy and touch, though its grip had lost all its strength. "You-you will not die with me," he weazed. "You-you will become Demon once more. But you must not return to the Below or let them touch you. No one can protect you there nor here. So you must run! They will know when I have died and they will come for you--"
Her stomach rumbled.
"You will change and it will be painful, child." Her arm shook till his hand could no longer hold onto her. "You must not change here. Forty years of demon growth with the onslaught and you will be utterly vulnerable! You must run! You must run! You must...you... must..."
His chant faded to silence as his last breath escaped him in the midst of his warning. He did not even sigh as his body slumped. Her mouth opened to a soundless cry of grief as the seal broke the same moment his heartbeat stilled.
---
The first taste she had was of blood. Her blood. It flooded into her sensitive mouth as her human baby teeth fell out, one by one, replaced by two rows of fangs pushing their way out of her gums. Her whole body ached as she writhed and contorted her body as her bones and organs felt as if they were exploding inside of her. She was paralyzed despite her futile attempts to struggle to the door, though her body twisted on its own as it tried to escape the inescapable pain.
Her father told her to run. His voice chanted in her head until it became her own. It screamed at her to run.
But she could not even crawl away.
She could only feel as her human bones snapped and stretched and grew to the length and size it was supposed to be. It was denser, thicker and heavier than that of the mortal child's skeleton that she had worn for decades. Her muscles shredded and healed and shredded again, trying to keep up with her skeletal growth. Her skin tore and her hair fell out, clumps landing onto the ground around her. Her back arched as her spine elongated, new nerves coming to life as old ones died in burning waves. Even her blood was escaping her and her sight turned to darkness as red rivulets of tears, the only ones she could produce, trailed down the sides of her temples and ran into her rapidly retreating hairline.
Her body was rejecting every piece of mortal flesh in the most excruiating manner. She would scream except that her vocal cords were destroyed while she cut her lips and tongue against teeth she did not yet know how to use. Her body burned, down to her finger tips as claws pushed its way out of the skin beneath her finger nails.
Her spine continued to grow, the sharp tip pushing out till it reached passed her knees. She could only wheeze as her lungs shuddered and her heart thundered louder and faster in her ears. She was growing new eyes quickly, in a nauseating and dizzing manner. She didn't know, and didn't want to know, where her human eyes went.
The first thing that came back was her ability to taste. Blood that was like iron in her mouth was suddenly sweeter, as if honey was added though the iron was still there. It lingered but it no longer revolted her. The second was smell, though gradual in its recovery as it became more and more acute, it also rapidly becoming overpoweringly so. Then, it was sight. The world was more and more painful to look at every time she blinked as she saw it clearly for the first time in the darkness. Her eyes though didn't know what to focus on and she felt even more nauseous than before as they flew about, never fully under her control.
Blessed darkness though, nonetheless, for sunlight would surely have burned her new eyes to nothing once more.
The darkness still hurt her, despite it all. New claws dug into the floor boards as her body alternated between too hot and too cold while she fought for relief from the agony. Her transformation would not wait for her to adjust and continued quickly still. Her clawing only brought her more discomfort as her bones shifted when they met resistance, but she could not stop the instinctive act. Slowly, for it felt like eternity, her wheezes became whimpers and then grunts and finally, when she could, scraping her teeth against the bittersweet taste of wood, she screamed. She screamed and screamed as her vocal cords were returned to her, the last and final sense to be given back to her.
A sudden shock jolted through her body as her transformation was completed and she slumped, finally, blissfully, into unconsciousness.
---
She woke up naked and prostrate to the feel of cold steel tracing the line of her spine.
"You awake?" a sneering, familiar voice greeted her.
Her fur bristled...
Fur?
"Half transformed," the voice continued. "You really don't have any control yet, do you?"
There was laughter and her ears flicked in reaction to the harshness of the sounds that pierced through her. Did her ears ever flick before? The voices pounded at her skull and she could smell them. It was a mingling, cloying scent of familiar things that clogged up her throat. She coughed and wiggled her nose, sharp teeth scrapping against the floor when she opened her sore lips.
"You're healing faster than I thought you would," the voice continued. "Which is good, because I'm going to enjoy this longer, by the looks of things." Then she was introduced to another type of pain as a fistful of her hair was grabbed and her neck was strained as a warm, heavy weight was placed at her back. Her tail flicked wildly before that too was grabbed. It was no less painful or continuous as they took their time with her newly sensationalized body, but it was different...
Now, at least, she had a voice to scream with and eyes to cry with.
---
It could have been worse.
She could have been killed when he had found the demons beginning the ritual of devouring a female. They might have just let her live, for such ceremonies were never specific on whether or not the female survived. Usually they didn't. Female demons were rarer than males and impregnating one was something desireable and somewhat of a social status, no matter how undesireable the mating or the mate would be. But demons were known for their brutality for a reason, and Power could be earned in varies ways and in different forms.
They still might have just killed her for the fun of it...
After all, demon killing still granted benefits of its own. It was not entirely unheard of that a group of male demons would rape and then devour their female prey. Sucking the mental and physical strength out of another powerful being had its own added bonuses and females usually contained more powers, mostly latent, than males. She had hers just restored to what it should be, and she was told, while they took it, that it had tasted tender and unblemished.
It was luck that saved her that night.
Her change had released a large amount of demon energy. If it were not for the seal and the stranger's location to her own, she might never have made it. He also hunted demons and felt her seal release in all its dark hunger. It took him longer to reach her than her own kind, and though he was a natural enemy, by then his work would not have mattered to her.
Killing her kind?
They had long stopped being her kind. She hated and despised them instead. They had killed her family, cursed her into a human child's body, forced her back into her own demon one and then tortured her in a ritual to take what little was left of her into themselves. She would have killed them all if she could have then. And at that time, she wouldn't have cared too much if he would have kill her too.
But he didn't.
She had looked and met his gaze, breasts heaving as a new sensation coursed through her, tingling every nerve and making her grimace with discomfort. His blade dripped blood onto the ground beside her as he held the head of the man who had carved her curse into her back forty years earlier and was in the process of having a few others put on throughout her body just for the fun of seeing her scream. She had nothing left then, and yet, when she met those inhuman eyes she had felt her lips curl and her new teeth meet air.
"I hope it was painful," she told him through strained vocal cords as sunlight spilled over her naked, half-transformed body.
"It was efficient," he finally said, tossing the head aside before pulling out a cloth to clean his blade.
"You won't kill me?" she remembered asking.
"Do you wish it?" he asked.
She thought about this for a long moment. "Someday," she finally said as she closed her eyes. "When I have done what I must," she said.
He did not answer her and between one relieved breath and the next she had fallen asleep again without meaning to. When she woke, there was only a jacket laid over her to tell her that it had not all been a nightmare. It had the smell of blood and death on it, but it was clean otherwise.
He was gone, though the scent of death had not gone with him.
A meal was set out for her on the table and the room was cleaned out of bodies, her father's included. She was greatful for that because it would have been too painful to bury her father on her own and too wasteful to take care of the ones who had tried to kill her after her father died. She didn't think she would see the being that rescued her again either, especially when he didn't show his face for the rest of the days she remained at the cabin. At least, she did not think she would see him again for a long time to come. In a way, by human years, that might have been true. In demon years, however, it would not be long at all before they met again.
TBC.
Title: Cats and Demi-gods
Chapter: Part I - Mortality
Universe: Rurouni Kenshin
Rating: R
Genre: Drama/Fantasy/Romance
Version: AU
The first time she met him was three hundred years ago.
He was not known as he was now. Man called him other names then, but he never told her what those names had been. She had been too preoccupied with other things to ask anyway, newly reborn as she had been and completely vulnerable when he had saved her. Perhaps she might have been lucky that she was not in the Below when the change had occurred, despite it being her birth place. It was the place where her mother had died for a crime her father never told her in any detail about, though they too bore the punishment for it.
They had bound her father's powers and made him mortal because of it after all, which was a death sentence in its own way. A different type of bitter punishment in comparison to death in the Below, but death nonetheless. She too was a part of her mother's and father's punishment, though she did not know the depths of it all until much later. Her burden was not like her father's. The purpose, after all, was not only to make her suffer but to make him suffer the more in the knowing of it.
They had cursed her to lose the seal they placed upon her human back upon his death, this much she knew. To die when he died, was what they were told, linked as the seal was to her father's death. They had carved it into her to remind them both for as long as they lived, marking her for the End before she could truly remember the Beginning.
A demon, long used to claws and teeth, her father had been a great fighter. His powers and his pride were only taken from him when they placed him into a human's body. It was weak and ill and old. Above all else, it was Mortal.
They were lucky though, because he could fight with a sword, as well. It had been his weapon of choice as a demon - a strange thing too that he did not only rely on the brutality of his nature. This unusual skill lengthened his mortal life - a blessing and a curse in its own way. And he taught her the skill as well. At least, he did what he could with his weakening limbs as the years passed while she tried to learn with her unchanging, miniature form. "If humans do not kill me, mortality will," he had warned her wearily when he started to teach her the art. "Yet, I'd chose the more worthy adversary."
She was his daughter, and if he could make her live one day more, he would. It was a strange thing for a demon to have aquired, this type of loyalty. Sometimes, when she asked him about emotions and the crime that sentenced them all, her father would laugh wearily and shake his head. "You would not understand," he would say. And it sounded, as she aged, as if he did not want her to know.
He was right though. She didn't understand. She had only been a hatchling then and pain was much of what she remembered of the Below. From it, she had gained something that was not quite a mortal's body and a seal that disabled both her ability to grow as a human and a demon.
For years they were forced to travel because she could not age while her father could only age. It was dangerous on ther road, but if they had stayed anywhere too long, the humans they knew would also become too dangerous. As long as her demon was sealed, she could still be easily killed like him. And so she learned about the aging of Man as she watched her father's hair thin and whiten and his skin, that was not his skin, whither.
But her father taught her, at least, what he could. He taught her how to run with her small, short legs and how to land from a great height, for a human child. He taught her how to climb trees and fish in the river with her small, unchanging hands. Yet, they both knew the day would come when they would find an old man and a young child dead, side by side in some unknown place at some unknown time.
And so they travelled, till he was too ill to travel. They struggled to a secluded place in the mountains, so it would be harder for people to find them or notice her ungrowing body. She watched his hair fall away and his body become thinner and weaker, no matter what she fed him or how much he slept. She watched and the days went too quickly by, and one day she woke to her stomach growling. It was not that strange, but she had slowly noticed her appetite growing. She cared for her father when she could, but she was beginning to find herself always so hungry and tired and weak herself.
The weaker he grew, the weaker she grew.
One night, she woke without remembering falling asleep. It had been going on for the last few days, but it still startled her to open her eyes to the realization that she had closed her eyes without notice. Her stomach grumbled, it was the only thing it seemed to know how to do anymore.
"You awake?" her father's voice rasped, making her jump a little in surprise.
"I'll go get food," she said once she got ahold of herself.
"The time is coming," her father's voice told her brokenly, stopping her from leaving. "I must tell you while you still have the strength to listen." Her stomach grumbled a reply and he chuckled a little. It was weak and dying, like him. She did not protest, for as young as she looked and as scared as she was, she was not so young in human years and she had long lived with fear.
Tears still gathered in her eyes, but the darkness kept her father's mortal eyes blind and his mortal nose senseless to her grief. Yet, he knew nonetheless. A blind man can learn to live without his sight, so too her father had learned to live without the things that once defined him to be more than Man.
"They told me you would die with me," her father said at last. "I had believed them. Especially after they told me that if I killed you myself, the curse would be broken and I would be sent back to the Below." She looked to her father than with wide-eyed surprise, failing to repress a shudder at the name of her birth place. "I couldn't do it," her father said softly. "I thought about it a million times, because I was a demon, but this human body houses a human heart. And as I watched you age..." He paused as his voice trailed.
She blinked, because she did not grow old. How could her father see her age? Sometimes his words puzzled her.
"You have eyes like your mother, did you know that?" he finally said. "Not the same right now, because they are human eyes. The expression though, it is the same. As if there exists something else one should be aware of, other than Power." Her father's voice grew wispier as he spoke and her heart quaked at the sound. She was suddenly terrified of him dying, of what he was saying to her. The sureness of his passing was a suddenly very real weight upon her shoulders.
"I know what they wanted now, child." Her father sounded urgent again after a short pause, his breath at his throat. "You must run from here..." his wizened hand suddenly grasped her wrist, surprising her with its accuracy and touch, though its grip had lost all its strength. "You-you will not die with me," he weazed. "You-you will become Demon once more. But you must not return to the Below or let them touch you. No one can protect you there nor here. So you must run! They will know when I have died and they will come for you--"
Her stomach rumbled.
"You will change and it will be painful, child." Her arm shook till his hand could no longer hold onto her. "You must not change here. Forty years of demon growth with the onslaught and you will be utterly vulnerable! You must run! You must run! You must...you... must..."
His chant faded to silence as his last breath escaped him in the midst of his warning. He did not even sigh as his body slumped. Her mouth opened to a soundless cry of grief as the seal broke the same moment his heartbeat stilled.
---
The first taste she had was of blood. Her blood. It flooded into her sensitive mouth as her human baby teeth fell out, one by one, replaced by two rows of fangs pushing their way out of her gums. Her whole body ached as she writhed and contorted her body as her bones and organs felt as if they were exploding inside of her. She was paralyzed despite her futile attempts to struggle to the door, though her body twisted on its own as it tried to escape the inescapable pain.
Her father told her to run. His voice chanted in her head until it became her own. It screamed at her to run.
But she could not even crawl away.
She could only feel as her human bones snapped and stretched and grew to the length and size it was supposed to be. It was denser, thicker and heavier than that of the mortal child's skeleton that she had worn for decades. Her muscles shredded and healed and shredded again, trying to keep up with her skeletal growth. Her skin tore and her hair fell out, clumps landing onto the ground around her. Her back arched as her spine elongated, new nerves coming to life as old ones died in burning waves. Even her blood was escaping her and her sight turned to darkness as red rivulets of tears, the only ones she could produce, trailed down the sides of her temples and ran into her rapidly retreating hairline.
Her body was rejecting every piece of mortal flesh in the most excruiating manner. She would scream except that her vocal cords were destroyed while she cut her lips and tongue against teeth she did not yet know how to use. Her body burned, down to her finger tips as claws pushed its way out of the skin beneath her finger nails.
Her spine continued to grow, the sharp tip pushing out till it reached passed her knees. She could only wheeze as her lungs shuddered and her heart thundered louder and faster in her ears. She was growing new eyes quickly, in a nauseating and dizzing manner. She didn't know, and didn't want to know, where her human eyes went.
The first thing that came back was her ability to taste. Blood that was like iron in her mouth was suddenly sweeter, as if honey was added though the iron was still there. It lingered but it no longer revolted her. The second was smell, though gradual in its recovery as it became more and more acute, it also rapidly becoming overpoweringly so. Then, it was sight. The world was more and more painful to look at every time she blinked as she saw it clearly for the first time in the darkness. Her eyes though didn't know what to focus on and she felt even more nauseous than before as they flew about, never fully under her control.
Blessed darkness though, nonetheless, for sunlight would surely have burned her new eyes to nothing once more.
The darkness still hurt her, despite it all. New claws dug into the floor boards as her body alternated between too hot and too cold while she fought for relief from the agony. Her transformation would not wait for her to adjust and continued quickly still. Her clawing only brought her more discomfort as her bones shifted when they met resistance, but she could not stop the instinctive act. Slowly, for it felt like eternity, her wheezes became whimpers and then grunts and finally, when she could, scraping her teeth against the bittersweet taste of wood, she screamed. She screamed and screamed as her vocal cords were returned to her, the last and final sense to be given back to her.
A sudden shock jolted through her body as her transformation was completed and she slumped, finally, blissfully, into unconsciousness.
---
She woke up naked and prostrate to the feel of cold steel tracing the line of her spine.
"You awake?" a sneering, familiar voice greeted her.
Her fur bristled...
Fur?
"Half transformed," the voice continued. "You really don't have any control yet, do you?"
There was laughter and her ears flicked in reaction to the harshness of the sounds that pierced through her. Did her ears ever flick before? The voices pounded at her skull and she could smell them. It was a mingling, cloying scent of familiar things that clogged up her throat. She coughed and wiggled her nose, sharp teeth scrapping against the floor when she opened her sore lips.
"You're healing faster than I thought you would," the voice continued. "Which is good, because I'm going to enjoy this longer, by the looks of things." Then she was introduced to another type of pain as a fistful of her hair was grabbed and her neck was strained as a warm, heavy weight was placed at her back. Her tail flicked wildly before that too was grabbed. It was no less painful or continuous as they took their time with her newly sensationalized body, but it was different...
Now, at least, she had a voice to scream with and eyes to cry with.
---
It could have been worse.
She could have been killed when he had found the demons beginning the ritual of devouring a female. They might have just let her live, for such ceremonies were never specific on whether or not the female survived. Usually they didn't. Female demons were rarer than males and impregnating one was something desireable and somewhat of a social status, no matter how undesireable the mating or the mate would be. But demons were known for their brutality for a reason, and Power could be earned in varies ways and in different forms.
They still might have just killed her for the fun of it...
After all, demon killing still granted benefits of its own. It was not entirely unheard of that a group of male demons would rape and then devour their female prey. Sucking the mental and physical strength out of another powerful being had its own added bonuses and females usually contained more powers, mostly latent, than males. She had hers just restored to what it should be, and she was told, while they took it, that it had tasted tender and unblemished.
It was luck that saved her that night.
Her change had released a large amount of demon energy. If it were not for the seal and the stranger's location to her own, she might never have made it. He also hunted demons and felt her seal release in all its dark hunger. It took him longer to reach her than her own kind, and though he was a natural enemy, by then his work would not have mattered to her.
Killing her kind?
They had long stopped being her kind. She hated and despised them instead. They had killed her family, cursed her into a human child's body, forced her back into her own demon one and then tortured her in a ritual to take what little was left of her into themselves. She would have killed them all if she could have then. And at that time, she wouldn't have cared too much if he would have kill her too.
But he didn't.
She had looked and met his gaze, breasts heaving as a new sensation coursed through her, tingling every nerve and making her grimace with discomfort. His blade dripped blood onto the ground beside her as he held the head of the man who had carved her curse into her back forty years earlier and was in the process of having a few others put on throughout her body just for the fun of seeing her scream. She had nothing left then, and yet, when she met those inhuman eyes she had felt her lips curl and her new teeth meet air.
"I hope it was painful," she told him through strained vocal cords as sunlight spilled over her naked, half-transformed body.
"It was efficient," he finally said, tossing the head aside before pulling out a cloth to clean his blade.
"You won't kill me?" she remembered asking.
"Do you wish it?" he asked.
She thought about this for a long moment. "Someday," she finally said as she closed her eyes. "When I have done what I must," she said.
He did not answer her and between one relieved breath and the next she had fallen asleep again without meaning to. When she woke, there was only a jacket laid over her to tell her that it had not all been a nightmare. It had the smell of blood and death on it, but it was clean otherwise.
He was gone, though the scent of death had not gone with him.
A meal was set out for her on the table and the room was cleaned out of bodies, her father's included. She was greatful for that because it would have been too painful to bury her father on her own and too wasteful to take care of the ones who had tried to kill her after her father died. She didn't think she would see the being that rescued her again either, especially when he didn't show his face for the rest of the days she remained at the cabin. At least, she did not think she would see him again for a long time to come. In a way, by human years, that might have been true. In demon years, however, it would not be long at all before they met again.
TBC.