InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Asclepius ❯ Sango ( Chapter 2 )

Asclepius
.Chapter Two.
.Sango.

She was perched on a shadowed ledge, one leg dangling over the edge, both hands holding tight to a metal bar above her head. Her eyes were shut as tight as she could make them as if her eyes closed would make it all less real. A silent tear wet her cheek.

“Stop hiding!”

Her knee slipped when the young boy appeared on the ledge right next to her, and she could not restore her footing. “Kohaku, please!”

Her knife slipped out of her belt when she made a move to get back onto the solid ground of the tall building’s roof. This was it, she was about to die. She prayed to every single god she knew, begging each one of them to make it as painless as possible. “I said stop hiding!” His Kusari-gama swung back over his head and then crashed straight through the railing she’d been clinging to. Her scream, pierced through the air and she was falling, her stomach turning in circles. ‘Please, not yet! I’m not ready to die!’

~*~

Miroku and Kagome were moving quickly through their preparations, getting their ship ready for another rescue mission. They were planning on staying a few nights on this new planet, assuming that reapers would stay away for a few days to let the flesh begin to rot.

The hatch on their small ship had been replaced the night before with a bit of handy work from Kagome and their new passenger. That morning Miroku found a way to rig the door up to one of his many switches. A light blinked green when the door was open and automated closed as soon as the ship got off the ground.

While they were docked at Station Ninety-two, a tiny station with a population barely topping one thousand, they registered their ship so that it could be recognized as a rescue ship instead of a combat ship. They’d been forced to add a name to the ship in addition to a giant red cross plastered to the side. Asclepius, for a God of medicine in ancient Greece, had become their ship’s title and had been emblazed upon the side in huge white lettering. They were finally becoming official, instead a group considered suicidal.

Kagome had been in a good mood all morning and had been joking with Miroku amicably since their early breakfast. Venus was their new destination, and Kagome was quite excited. She knew that it would be devastated, but news reports were claiming that there was low casualty, mostly coming from a large family of reaper slayers who’d held off Naraku from killing the innocent people in their colony.

Their dock was on the east side of a large city that had been destroyed in the attack. It was a large clear dome, instead of a stabilized atmosphere, because Venus was much too hot to retain atmosphere and carry out life.

It was five hours of travel, Miroku testing out a few new maneuvering programs he’d found while docked, and Inu-Yasha complaining about how he hated entering and leaving planets with his sensitive ears. Kagome was thoroughly exhausted by the time they had landed and were exiting the ship.

Again, Kagome was the first to get out, gun strapped to her shoulders and a knife attached to her thigh. She shed her jacket before getting off the ship, taking note of the hot sun blazing down, but her large khaki pants and black tank top kept her at a good temperature.

There was a few smaller buildings still standing, she noted vacantly. She put her radio up to her lips and pressed her speak button. “If you see any reapers, make sure you tell me. I have to go quite a ways up here. These were empty buildings.”

“Copy that.” Inu-Yasha’s gruff reply came, surprising her. She slipped a smile on her face, but continued her walk. “Miroku is saying that everything feels normal.”

“When I get across the street, I’ll be in contact again.” She clipped the radio back onto her belt and tied her lose hair back into a high tail. She heard a faint reply on her radio, but wasn’t paying much attention. A few buildings over was where she was headed.

Quickly, she made her way to the edge of the vacant street, peering over the rubble carefully. If anyone was in these buildings she was almost positive that they would be toast. Unbidden tears were threatening her, but she did not give in, shoving her feelings back down.

She looked across the street and watched the buildings up ahead. One was partially standing, missing only a few stories at the top, which had apparently caved in.

“I can’t see much, but there’s something still standing that I want to check out.” She spoke into her radio, keeping her gaze on the ground right in front of the building. There was a mound of upturned dirt, she could see as she drew closer. Again she pressed her talk button. “Have we ever seen examples of Naraku burying his victims?”

Her brows were knitted together in confusion. There was a long silence before Miroku spoke over her radio. “No, and he doesn’t seem the type to feel bad for his victims, so I’m doubting that he would ever do something like that.”

Kagome nodded silently, now right in front of the dirt. She had her gun pulled out and kept her radio at her mouth. “You would not believe this. It’s defiantly a mass grave. There’s even a crest of some sort here… Hold on.”

She clipped the radio to her belt once again and leaned over the mass of dirt, trying to decipher the small symbol made in the dirt. The next thing she knew, something had her wrist and she was shrieking. There was a hand coming out of that mound of funeral dirt. She wrenched herself free and fallen on her butt from the momentum. Until the rest of a torso popped out to follow the hand, Kagome hadn’t known what, exactly he was supposed to do.

Immediately she had her gun pointed at the body. In a moment of sudden clarity, she pushed out the small bit of spiritual energy she’d amassed and determined this was no walking dead or reaper. It was a human girl, slightly older than she was, struggling to push up out of the dirt. The girl had been buried alive.

Kagome was back on her feet in seconds and at the girl’s side pulling her up out of the grave. The soil that had carried the crest was shifted until the crest fully disappeared, but that wasn’t important. Getting this girl away from the rotting corpses beneath her was.

Once she was free of the stiff ground, Kagome positioned her so that she was laid out on her back. The girl was coughing and Kagome could see the wounds that she’d amassed.

“Miroku!” She’d nearly screamed his name into the newly released radio. “Get down here now with a box of medical supplies and a blanket!”

“Give me two minutes.”

~*~

Miroku was offering incense to the new graves they’d dug. The small group was sure they wouldn’t last long with reapers coming in a few days, but Kagome made sure to try and spell as many as she could to keep the infernal creatures at bay. Kagome was next to offer a silent prayer, too afraid that a spoken prayer would end in tears.

Inu-Yasha had skipped the prayer altogether, opting instead to search for any remaining life in the setting sun.

The girl they’d found was clean and bandaged, wrapped softly in a blanket and stowed safely in a tent nearby. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to call the woman a warrior. Her clothing was evidence enough, with an empty belt made for knives and tazers and a vest made of thin armor to match.

Luckily the girl hadn’t any broken bones, just deep wounds, and the worse of them tracing up most of her spine and branching out like an exploding star over her left shoulder blade. After her elongated prayer, Kagome went to the reaper slayer’s tent and was surprised to see the girl struggling to sit up.

Kagome was at her side as fast as she could move. “Please, you should rest.” Her voice was a whisper, just in case the girl had woken up with the headache that Kagome suspected she would. The older woman looked positively confused.

“W-Where am I…?” Her voice was raspy and Kagome noted that she must have been yelling while she was taking her injuries. Kagome shook her head slowly and got a half emptied bottle of water that was sitting behind the struggling woman’s head.

“Drink,” she ordered, still keeping her voice down. “We’re still in your colony and safe for now. I suspect that we’ll have to get moving soon, though. As soon as you can stand we’ll get out of here.” Kagome was holding the plastic bottle to the girl’s lips, letting her drink slowly without moving too much. “I hope you don’t mind coming with us just for a little bit. Oh! Where are my manners?” She let a smile turn the frown off of her face. “I’m Higurashi Kagome. Whenever you can talk, I’d like to hear your name.”

The girl pushed away the bottle and swiped the back of her hand across her lips. “My name is Sango.” It was a way of reassuring even herself. She was alive; she had beaten the extremely low odds and come out alive. Her back and arms felt like they were on fire, but she could not keep the tiny smile off of her face. “Thank you, Kagome. I thought I was dead.”

And then, in a rush of pain, the way she’d died came flooding back. She was there with Kohaku and he’d… ‘Oh God, Kohaku…’ Her eyes pressed closed violently.

Kagome knew already, and helped her to lie back on the feather futon cover. She smoothed Sango’s hair like a mother would do and spoke even softer than she had previously. “They’re looking for others that survived, and we’ll keep you safe until you are well.”

Sango tried to reply, but Kagome shushed her and wiped a wet towel over the girl’s face. She was glad that Sango still had her eyes closed. Tears were again threatening her, but she continued her matronly ministrations. ‘We’re alone, all of us. Somehow we’ll get through it…’

~*~

Inu-Yasha scowled at the corpses they had not yet buried (Kagome simply saying that they could get to the second half when the sun was high again). It was unusual, he noticed distinctly. This wasn’t like his colony. The wounds were all the same. He realized, with a start what it was that he was looking at.

Immediately his radio was at his lips. “I’m on my way back.”

The voice that sounded back was Kagome’s. “How far out are you?”

A scowl leapt out onto his face and he started at a run back toward their small camp. His dark pants and red long sleeves would keep him warm with the night wind washing over his form. “Quite a way a way,” he replied. He paused for another long moment before speaking again. “This wasn’t a fight.”

He could see the confusion pass over Kagome’s face without her even being in front of him. It worried him that he was even being civil with this girl, much less actually nice.

When Kagome replied, apprehension laced her voice. “What do you mean? These people were legends for their ability to fight.”

He had to wait a second for a pass of static when he hit an area that interfered. “I’m not sure about it either, but these people were slaughtered. All of their wounds were made by the same exact weapon.”

“Kusari-gama.” It came out a terse whisper. Inu-Yasha’s eyes widened a bit before he hummed a slight affirmative over the two-way system.

“There aren’t any survivors out here, but all the bodies have the same colours and gear that the girl had on. I can smell a trace of toxins, the same thing that I smelled around my elevator when you pried those doors open.”

Kagome’s response was again prompt. “If you can scent that stuff, it’s already getting into your lungs. We don’t know its effects yet, but it we think it’s poisonous and stints breathing.”

He ignored that statement, still heading back to the camp they’d made. “I’ll be back before midnight.”

There was a long lull of silence and he almost thought she had dropped the connection. She did reply however, her voice low. “I’ll make sure to contact if I sense reapers. Please… be careful.”

His face flushed a deep pink as he clipped his wireless radio on his belt and continued his trek onward. Inu-Yasha’s thoughts were spinning very quickly. Kagome had been keeping up a valiant effort to ignore him in the week they’d been in the hospital and docked at Station ninety-two, but it had dissolved when they started out traveling towards Venus. Out of necessity she had started up communicating (or at least trying to) with him. He’d gone out of his way to be as quiet as he could in order to avoid a stupid slip and it had worked thus far.

He had to admit, the things she was doing were easily described as valiant, and he felt bad about calling her stupid right after she’d saved his sorry ass from a broken elevator. It was just the shock of the deaths he’d experienced the three days prior.

He leapt up to the top of a collapsing building and survey the land beneath him. Their camp was right up ahead, evidenced by the dim flashlights glowing red from inside the tent. The ship was a tiny bit further out, lights on a man scrambling round inside.

It wasn’t as if he was stupid. No, this was certainly the start of something very important.

~*~

A/N- So Chapter two a little faster than expected. Sorry about the formatting errors, this is the first time I’ve ever posted a fic with Office 2007 so I’m trying to figure out how to save to make sure it doesn’t come out messed up. So, Read and Review I hope to hear from all of you.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Inu-Yasha or anything affiliated with it. I just like putting the characters into my sick little fantasies.

EDIT: Grammar corrections, and other little things.