For a moment he wondered if he was dead.
Then the stench of urine assaulted his nostrils as he took a deep breath, the smell of ammonia so overpowering it was as if he had swallowed it, and he realized he couldn't be dead. Unless heaven was a lightless basement on whose floors angels pissed.
The possibility that he had died and gone to hell never crossed his mind.
He cracked open an eye, gritty and encrusted with waste. The chains around his body clinked as he moved, shifted to a less uncomfortable position on the cold stone floor.
Something moved in the darkness, and he felt a primal kind of fear invade his brain in a paralyzing grip. Then a pair of red eyes detached themselves from the inky black, and he relaxed. It was just Shiro, after all. Shiro, beautiful white rabbit whom he had found in the Makai woods and taken as his pet. A long time ago, before his mother had died.
They had put Shiro in here with him. He had thought it an act of kindness. But he was dying of starvation, and Shiro was the only warm body he could find, the tiny pulpitating heart like a drumbeat in his ears.
He thought of a warm sunlit afternoon, sitting by the river with Shiro in his lap, and starvation seemed suddenly a better option. But the afternoon melted away, and the darkness was terrifying and death was something to be feared, so he pulled Shiro to him, long nails digging into the soft fur - white - and he bit into Shiro's neck, fur and flesh and blood, and it took a long time, but Shiro finally stopped struggling.
Days and nights, and he lay there next to the pitiful heap of tiny bones and soft white fur.
And something died and rotted away.
When he next saw the light from the open trapdoor, it wasn't a warm sunlit afternoon he remembered, but the merciless tongues of flame as it burned her flesh from her face.
whore
slept with a demon
demon child
As he looked up at the faces of those who had laughed while she burned, he thought absently that it wasn't the fire which was merciless, it was these humans, these humans who wanted him to be the demon their imagination painted him to be, a nine-year-old child who understood nothing.
He looked at the tiny bones and felt his youkai blood calling out to him. He climbed unsteadily to his feet, the chains weighing him down, but he could see the humans were afraid, and they liked being afraid, they liked being right.
He killed them quickly. He did not love them.
~end~
I have no idea where this came from. ^_^ This was written in quite a hurry, actually. Feedback welcomed and sought after.
Jan 99