Week Six - Prompt #2
Tittle: The Existence of One
Author: Moonflames23
Word Count: 1042
Genre: Introspective
Rating: PG-13 mild mention of gore
Universe: Canon
Summary: We are not always as we appear on the surface.
Ok folks, I am not too sure how this one turned out, I was a tad bit hesitant to post it, but I thought, "what the hell".. :) So here goes....
He stared into the flames, slowly sipping the sake he poured himself. Naraku wondered if all past conquerors who had come before him had felt this way, this slight feeling of nerves. He angrily pushed the feeling away. He had no time for this. He had a world to conquer and no one, not hanyou, mouthy little priestess or dog demon would get in his way.
He had not the time or the patience for nerves. Nerves he scoffed, that was for humans..not for me...neither human nor demon but some wholly unnatural mix of the two.
I am Naraku
Evil they called him. What did humans know? For a moment his eyes were caught by the soft golden glow of his sake. Dimly he remembered what it was to be human. To be so woefully ignorant, blindly stumbling along looking for such empty things as acceptance, fairness...bonds. A mirthless laugh escaped his lips.
For the moment he allowed himself to remember because now he was so very near the end and his manacles of his almost humanity would be broken forever. His life as Origumo was nothing but a shadow of memory, but he was always especially grateful for the shadows. If not for the worthless waste of his human life he would not have had the ability to create the being he was today. He would not be standing on the precipice of world domination.
Watching the pale yellow liquid swirl in its alabaster cup he allowed himself a second more to remember, to think back to a time before. This was not how it should be. This is not what he wanted before. Recalling the hopelessness, the hopefulness the tragic mixture of the two that caused him to ache, to beg for the demons to consume his soul. And for what? For the love of a human woman? The acceptance? The comfort of that cool dry hand? His human foolishness was a blessing in disguise. Bitterly he barked a laugh that scraped his throat raw and carried with it fractured notes of desolation. Because now...
I am Naraku
World conquest was his for the taking and no one human, hanyou, or demon would take that ultimate prize from him. Perhaps the nerves were not small tendrils of nervousness for the upcoming battle, because he was certain he would be victorious. No these nerves were for the after. He would win, he would conquer them all...but what after. But the after promised him nothing, it was just an empty void of darkness that beckoned him further in with every blink of his glittering ruby eyes.
But there was no place in his corrupted soul for nerves. You had to care enough to be worried and he cared not. The world would be his. HIS... Naraku...not Origumo’s and not any of the other the demons that slithered within his soul.
I am Naraku
Evil; they clung to that conception of him as if it was some type of sacred mantra to explain who he was, explain the reasons for his actions. Who did they believe they were to explain away his actions? To dare to comprehend the whole of who he was?
Good, bad, evil...indifferent...those lofty useless labels were human creations designed to define what their small, short reaching brains could never truly encompass.
He was not evil, he was not good, he simply was...Nothing more, nothing less. And in that darkened fire lit room there was only the dancing of his shadow against the walls that reminded him that he existed.
I am Naraku.
With every death that he dealt, with every frail heart he held in his hands he was no closer to validating his existence. And the blood that poured in sweet sticky earnest through his fingers did not fill the empty cracks and crevices of his hollow soul.
The warm gush of blood that lovingly flowed over his tentacles with every tear into a body, the blood did not flow into the fractures of his soul filling them with life, filling them with something. No joy, no sadness, no pain, no crushing desire. Each kill filled him with more nothingness than before. But still he kept trying, still he kept yearning that the next kill, the next time it would be the final one that would shut up that vacant, barren place that once harbored a soul. Staring again into his sake he pondered the path he taken, but it did not truly matter because...
I am Naraku.
He would kill them all. Destroy them all slowly. That disgusting group that glibly threw in his face their pathetic bonds of friendship and love. His mind recoiled in revulsion at the word that skittered madly through his brain.
He would start with the reincarnated priestess, the one that taunted the edges of his mind with memory. It was that pathetic priestess that had the gall to remind him of his once humanity...of his before. It was she who had weaved those unbreakable bonds within her ragtag group of nobodies; she had wrapped those silken tendrils amongst them all and created a tapestry of one. Each one would die for the other....Yes each one will die. He would see to that.
I am Naraku
But it was Inuyasha that he would force to endure the most, the damned hanyou whose very existence multiplied the nothingness of his own life tenfold. Inuyasha he would kill with painstaking slowness, watching as the hanyou suffered seeing each member of the little group die at his hands. And finally there would be pleasure in the killing. He would rip Inuyasha’s still beating heart out of his chest. He would squeeze till the blood sang to him as it poured over his hands in a never-ending river. And then maybe...maybe then he would feel alive enough to make his final wish on the Shikon jewel.
Standing up in black rage filled with disgust he angrily threw his cup of sake into the flames. He would have the Shikon jewel and he would emerge victorious. Even if not a soul was left alive it was not relevant. And all those haunting, mocking afters be damned. What truly mattered in the end was that the world would know once and for all that...
I am.