|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2015 2:58 pm
Chaos Runs Deep [1787 words]
It takes him months to figure out what he wants, but he does.
He wants out, he decides that much, because he’s sick of dreaming of blood. He’s tired of being swallowed by the darkness that’s wrapped around his heart, creating cracks in his soul and seeping through them. Chaos is a poison, he knows, but he’s uncertain of how to keep it from infecting his entire being.
He used to be okay with the idea it being all consuming and he’d once been quick to fan the flames of his demise, but now he is plagued with doubts, uncertainty.
He is a soldier uncertain of what he is fighting for and that makes him dangerous.
The problem is, he isn’t sure if that turning traitor is something he’s capable of doing. Not because he has a weak resolve, but rather because of the consequences that come with such a move. He is both a pawn on the chessboard and the player moving the pieces, conflicted and torn over what is right, what is wrong, and what he wants.
A morally gray character by nature, he’s not sure which way the shades bleed this time around.
He is increasingly frustrated by the haze that plagues him when he moves and how his two resources for information are increasing elusive. Iris doesn’t care to talk to him, evidenced by her violent behavior the last time he requested an audience. Hvergelmir was difficult to locate and often, when he wished to find her the most, he found the brash, foul-mouth senshi of rainbows instead.
His surprise visit from Laurelite hasn’t helped anything either. Fear tactics are effective at times, but it did little except get beneath his skin and remind him that something was wrong. He is not an easily intimidated person, not since Samuel died, but the General-Queen struck terror within him. The reminder that they can take away what he’s been given easily keeps him up almost as much as his nightmares do.
Insomnia is not a pretty feature on him anymore.
He is too gaunt, too pale, too thin.
(He is sick, sick, sick.)
And whenever he powers up, he is hit with a wave of nausea, but he knows that he cannot hide because they have made it clear that they will find him if he steps out of line. So he forces himself out into the night and lets the poison wash through him and tries not to gag or vomit when he gets a sick feeling of pleasure as the power flows through him.
(Power corrupts, he knows, and he’s barely keeping it from consuming him.)
There is an itch beneath his skin, that sinks bone deep, that he cannot reach and he thinks it might be driving him a tad bit insane. (It is.) So he does the only thing he can think of, he seeks out the company of the few who can calm it.
But he does not find either.
Instead, he is attacked as he walks along the dimlit streets of the city. The energy signal had been strong, creeping closer to him as he moved but, foolishly, he’d hoped that it was one of the two women he was looking for that found him.
He is wrong and he is thrown into the ground as a result.
His assailant has thrown themselves into his back with enough force to send him flying forward, skidding across the cement. His palms ache from his poor attempts to catch himself and his chin will likely bruise from where his jaw slammed against the ground. “What the hell,” he growls, springing to his feet.
Bright eyes search the dark alley and find nothing. Cursing, he whirls around in time to be punched in the face. He recoils backward, hand flying up to nurse his wounded cheek, nostrils flaring when he attempts to tamp down on his first instinct.
He doesn’t want to get in a fight. He doesn’t want to fight because fighting means giving into the urgings of the chaotic poison thrumming through his veins and because he will shed blood.
He fears that if he spills blood, then there will be no salvation for him.
He needs salvation, he thinks. (If he believed in a god, he might even pray for it.)
“What to do you want?” He spits at the shadowed person.
“For you to pay for your sins,” the person hisses, stepping forward--it’s a knight he realises, one of Saturn, he thinks. “I know who you are reaper. I know what you’ve done and I’ve seen what you will do.”
Labyrinthite feels nauseated, his stomach turns and he can feel the bile starting to rise. He doesn’t remember this knight, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t. He knows he doesn’t remember everything like some of the others-- and thank Cosmos he doesn’t, because he doesn’t know what he’d be like if he did-- and this knight thinks he should pay, probably rightfully so.
“I--” he tries, but his words get stuck in his throat.
“You loved when we’d beg for mercy,” the knight cooes, stepping forward and into the light. He wears a handsome face, Labyrinthite notices idly, with a sharp jawline and dark eyes. His hair is light, straw colored and there is a pang of some sort of recognition when he looks at him, but he cannot place it. “If we didn’t beg immediately, you’d make sure we would while you cut us up.”
The knight is bitter, disgusted, angry.
The general cannot blame him. (He would be--is disgusted too.)
“I am not that man,” he argues, half-heartedly. “I don’t--I don’t want to be the reaper.” The admission feels good, pulls a weight off his shoulders, because he’d never said it aloud until now. For so long, he’d wanted to be the Reaper King and now--now he didn’t know what he wanted.
He just knew he didn’t want that.
“Oh don’t worry,” the knight sneers. “I’m not going to let it even be a possibility.” He moves forward, brandishing a blade. “Death is at your door,” he mocks, using Labyrinthite’s favored catchline, darting forward with intention to kill.
He reacts quicker than he expects, instincts taking a hold of him, and he summons his weapon in time to block a fatal blow. “I don’t want to fight you,” he barks over the sound of metal clashing.
“Fight and die, or die anyway!”
His reply gets caught in this throat as the knight whirls back then strikes out again. The attack connects painfully with his side, right in between his ribs, and he is thrown off balance. “I don’t--” Labyrinthite tries again.
“Enough of your excuses!”
“Stop! This will only--”
Labyrinthite barely manages to defend himself from the brutal assault, blow after blow being blocked by the staff of his weapon. Eventually, it reaches a point where he knows that if he does not fight back, then he will die.
He used to think he wasn’t afraid of death.
He was wrong.
He is not ready to die.
So, he fights back more aggressively than he intends. Metal clashes against metal and he knows that his skin is painted with his own blood and that his muscles are screaming but all he can focus on is survivesurvivesurvive.
It ends in bloodshed, oh god, so much bloodshed.
The Saturn knight lays dead at the General’s feet and Labyrinthite stares, stares at the body of the blonde-haired boy dressed in lavender lying in a pool of blood. His stomach sinks and he’s dropping to the ground, knees slamming against the cobblestone and hands splaying out to catch him.
He inhales sharply, tries to fight back the urge to gag, vomit and spill what little is in his belly all over the stone and fails. His weapon is discarded on the ground, blade slick with dark red and his hand-- oh god, his hands, are caked in the color of rust.
“You will always be the reaper,” someone whispers in his ear and he’s jolting forward, scrambling to turn around and finds no one behind him. His heart, ********, it’s pounding against his ribcage, threatening to break him apart and leave him with his chest ripped open, bleeding out.
“It is your destiny,” the voice says and his head is whipping around again, face contorted with pain and confusion. “You reek of death,” the voice snarls and all Labyrinthite can do is curl into himself, clamping his hands over his ears.
“No. This isn’t--” He barely chokes back the sob threatening to overtake him. “I didn’t want this. I-- I tried. I don’t want this.” He rocks back and forth, fingers digging into his scalp. “I didn’t want this. I tried.”
“Trying isn’t good enough.”
He hates the disembodied voice. He wants to be rid of the hallucinations. He wants to feel sane again.
He wants to be sane again.
“You can’t change who you are.” The voice says, sounding eerily like the knight dead at his back.
“You are a murderer.” Another voice pipes up, young and innocent.
“You have blood stained hands.”
The voices, they just keep talking, accusing him.
“You can’t be saved.” This time, he hears Hvergelmir's voice. “You would be better off dead.”
“NO!” He screams, then screams wordlessly to drown out the rest of the voices. “It’s who I was, but not who I am. It’s not who I am.”
He shakes when he picks himself up off the ground. The voices are still talking to him, but they’ve dropped to whispers, murmurs of dissent. He hears the word monster more than he cares to admit when he turns the knights body, closes the corpse’s eyes, then reaches into his chest and pulls the glittering starseed out.
The knight is dead, what use does he have for his starseed?
With the fragile soul-fragment, Labyrinthite takes off running. The voices follow, of course they do, so he runs faster. It doesn’t help, but the roar of his pulse in his ears drowns them out, makes him feel a little less like a monster and more like a human when he stops, on the verge of collapsing.
It’s then that he teleports home, powers down, and falls face-first into his bed. The starseed is still clutched tightly in his hand and his last thought is that maybe he can bury it, give it a send off back to the cauldron.
It’s nothing like burying the actual body, but he’s not ready to face the fact that despite trying to resist the chaos thrumming through his veins, he’s still a killer.
He’s still a monster.
(He is sick, sick, sick.)
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Oct 15, 2015 3:28 pm
Waking Nightmares [1390 Words]
Nightmares are a b***h.
Chase wakes with a jolt and a thud, landing on the floor in a tangled mess of blankets and pillows. He’s hot all over, skin shiny and sticky with sweat, and his muscles ache. His skin feels rough, raw like he’s been rubbed all over by sandpaper and he thinks he might have a split lip.
Frankly, he doesn’t remember much from the night before, until he smells the metallic stench of blood and he’s hit with a wave of nausea. In a panic, he scrambles backward, kicking the blankets off, eyes searching for the source of the stench. He doesn’t find it, just sees the bruising on his skin, the scratches and open cuts already starting to heal along his body.
His head hurts and, ********, his body aches.
The memories don’t hit him until he sees the starseed, purple and dull, settled into the carpet next to one of the bed legs. The nausea builds within him again and he lurches forward, hand clamped over his mouth, to keep the bile from leaving his mouth.
(He is sick, sick, sick.)
Somehow, in a daze, he stumbles into the bathroom in enough time to expunge the contents of his stomach into the toilet.
(There’s not much in it, mostly just stomach acid. His mouth tastes bitter like ash.)
He dry heaves a couple more times and by the end of it, his sides ache like he’s been kicked repeatedly and his throat burns. It takes what little strength he’s got left to push himself off the floor, gripping the toilet seat so tightly it leaves imprints in his palms, and wander over to the sink. His intention is to brush his teeth, wash out the taste of acid and ash, but instead all he can do is stare at himself in the mirror.
He’s a hot mess, to put it gently.
The bag under his eyes are a dark purple and his face is gaunt, hollow-looking. There’s bruising on his neck, scratches on his face, and a cut along his collarbone. He looks like a shadow of the man he once was.
(He can’t remember what he used to be like.)
He sways when he looks at himself, has to grip the bathroom sink tightly to keep from toppling. (Where did all his strength go?) He searches his reflection for something, tries to will the light back into his bright eyes. They’re supposed to reflect gold, not tarnished metal.
His hair is a disheveled mess, the pink fading white and he looks a bit like a skunk, too long on the sides for the style he likes to wear. He’s too thin-- he can’t remember the last time he ate, but the idea of eating makes his empty stomach churn.
He looks like the empty shell of a person.
He forces himself to turn away, Chase can’t stand to look at himself and know that he looks nothing like the person he used to be, who he should be.
(Where did he go, what has he become?)
(Monster, the voices whisper.)
He’d done so well, gone months without blood on his hands, without death on his conscious and now? Now he is coated, drenched in his sins.
Can sinners ever really be saved?
He hopes so.
He has to hope so.
(He doesn’t have much else.)
He trudges back into his room, picks the covers off the floor and tosses them haphazardly on his bed. The starseed catches his eye again, his stomach drops, but he reaches for it anyway. Chase swallows, runs his fingers over the smooth planes of the gem.
He should get rid of it, crush it, eat it, do something with it.
He can’t bring himself to do anything but stare and try and swallow the lump back down his throat. It doesn’t work, but he pretends.
(He is so, so good at pretending.)
His head is a whirl, a foggy mess of mixed realities, jumbled time streams, and pieces of memories from last night. He didn’t mean to kill the knight, but he’d been backed into a corner and his fight or die instincts kicked in before he knew what was happening.
It doesn’t make him any less a murderer, he knows.
The guilt sits heavy on his chest when he finally closes his fingers around the starseed.
What he does next probably isn’t in his best interest, but he wants solace, redemption of some sort.
He powers up and travels to the rift.
The youma around him are antsy, restless because they can sense the starseed in his possession. It calls to them, because few things are sweeter than a powered person’s starseed between your teeth-- hard to obtain things always tasted the sweetest --and they begin to collect in a circle around him.
The youma eye him warily, hungry. The dead are gone and the living are hungry, he thinks absently, watching as they begin to edge closer, bumping each other and snarling warnings. They won’t attack him, or at least they shouldn’t.
He is a general, he has control over them, he has nothing to worry about.
Still, there is a wicked unsettling energy buzzing around him as he steps through the crowd of youma. The starseed pulses weakly in his hand, growing tarnished from being exposed for so long. Starseeds aren’t meant to be outside the body for so long.
He thought about eating it, putting it between his teeth and crushing it into fine shards.
And then he thought better of it.
Starseed addiction was an ugly thing, something he’d seen too many good soldiers rely on. He was no junkie, he was wrecked without an addition already. Besides, he’d gorged himself on too many months ago, when his starseed needed healing, and he didn’t want to taint himself further.
That was a laughable thought, so much so that the lone general barked out a dark stream of laughter with his head tilted back and his fist against his chest.
He couldn’t get much more tainted than he already was.
(Monster, the voice in his head hissed.)
He continued to walk, holding his empty hand up in a halting motion to the restless creatures behind him, ordering them to heel. He reached a desolate skeleton tree, with wicked branches that curled upwards like a grasping hands, and knelt before it. He pressed a palm against the dried bark, dragging it down until it touched the hard ground.
“May you be reborn in the right life, on the right side,” he murmured, stuffing the starseed in his pocket so he could claw at the ground. His attempts did little and the youma were edging ever closer until he sighed and gave up.
He pulled the gem from his pocket and set it at the base of the tree where his half-hearted attempt to dig a hole showed wear signs. He lingered, hesitated, and second-guessed himself before forcing himself away. “May you be recycled and repurposed,” he whispered, taking one step then two and so forth.
Everything felt wrong, but then again, nothing ever felt right anymore.
The moment he was past the gathered youma, they lunged for the treat he’d discarded. Before, it would’ve brought a smirk to his face but now, it brought a grimace.
This is the circle of life, he reminds himself, forcing his feet forward. An unsettled feeling finds it’s way into his stomach and he tries not to feel queasy. His sides ache from all of his dry retching over the last few weeks.
He looks back because he cannot help himself and sees nothing but carnage in his wake. His stomach churns.
The dead are gone and the living are hungry, he tells himself, making as quick of an exit as he can manage.
Yet the dead continue to haunt the living, he laments, when he returns home and imagines blood splattered across his walls.
There is no rest for the wicked.
He falls to his bed and laughs, desperate barks of laughter that quietly slip into sobs.
(Monster, you are a monster, the voice in his head reminds him. There’s no salvation for you.)
(You’re wrong, he insists.)
(It’s not wrong.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Thu Oct 22, 2015 11:59 am
Temporary Serenity [2816 words]
In the days following his venture into the Rift, Chase fares better.
Not much better, but--it’s a start and he wants to start somewhere.
He dreams of the Saturn knight infrequently, but his despair and hallucinations have begun to fade in his waking hours. It’s not much of a victory, but the man is desperate for a win so he counts it. Hvergelmir flits in and out of his dreams; her twisted, carved up face, screaming in agony contrasting with her whole, unmarred, face smiling sweetly and offering him promises of a miracle.
Then there were the occasional drop ins from Princess Iris, which were always interesting. Only because it was never Sailor Iris with her crude language and lack of empathy, but always Princess Iris. Objectively, he knows they are the same person not two different people in one body but he couldn’t shake the feeling that sometimes, when he talks to her, there is a shift and she is someone else.
Then again, he could be certifiably insane and be making up the shift in his head because he wanted to believe there was a side of Iris who would listen before talking with her fists.
And that’s a laughable thought, that he’d rather talk to the senshi of rainbows than trying to rip the starseed out of her chest.
But he’s not exactly in the most stable of states, so he tries not to overthink it too much.
It helps that his mom’s been around him more, rather than shirking away from him like she had when he first snapped at her after his night terrors began. She’s a calming presence in his ever chaotic life, his anchor as it was. They don’t talk much, but Lara understands that he’s a broken child, just like she’s a broken woman and there’s solidarity in their silence.
Lara makes sure her son eats too, something he’s prone to neglecting even on his good days, and that helps too. It’s like he’s got his own personal rehabilitation center in his mother and since it’s not being forced upon him, he takes it pretty willingly.
And it doesn’t hurt that he hasn’t powered up since he went to the Rift and left that starseed by the skeletal tree.
He still feels it, that itch of chaos thrumming beneath his veins, but it’s easier to ignore when he keeps from powering up. It’s a simple enough concept; keep from powering up and chaos will start to loose it’s grip on you, but Chase knows it’s not that easy.
Chaos is parasitic, a symbiotic parasite, but a parasite none-the-less because chaos took more than it gave.
There’s a part of him that craves the rush of power through his frame, a part that demands splintered starseed fragments across his tongue, and he tries to resist, oh he does, but the call and thrum of chaotic power is so strong.
Chase is strong too, but the allure of General Labyrinthite is stronger.
It’s funny, he thinks, to have his life ruled by someone other than himself, because while Chase is Labyrinthite and Labyrinthite is Chase, they’re different identities. It’s not like schizophrenia or multi-personality disorder, because he doesn’t get lost in his own head and he doesn’t have another personality telling him what to do or taking over.
(He has voices that haunt him, but they’re ghosts, not other personalities.)
Labyrinthite is Chase, it can’t get more simple than that. They’re both parts of him who embrace different things. Chase clings to the scraps of his humanity and Labyrinthite cloaks himself in the darkness that blossom’s around his heart.
If they were locked in a battle, Labyrinthite would come out the victor he knows, because Chase is losing what little stability he has and is grasping at threadbare strands of what keeps him anchored.
He wonders if this is what it was like for the soldiers returning from war zones across the seas, to feel a loss of identity when they weren’t on edge ready to fight or die. To suffer from the shock of reliving every horrible thing they’d done in the name of survival or for their cause.
Chase is so, so weary.
He makes it three weeks after the battle with the Saturn knight before he powers up again. He’s riddled with anxiety and nausea with nerves when he steps from his home and briskly makes his way across the city. He walks and walks until he deems himself safe enough from prying eyes-- he knows his business partners eye him warily after his father died and more so when his mother was hospitalized --and powers up.
It’s strange feeling, to be both elated and sick at the same time. The rush of power rising to the surface is something he’s not sure he’ll ever get used to and it feels right in the moment, but once the uniform is formed and the initial surge diminishes, he’s filled with a stomach churning dread.
His mouth dries out, his hands get clammy, and his body trembles when a feeling of wrongness washes over him.
His chest hurts and he lurches forward, gloved hand digging into the fabric draped across his chest. It’s not a physical ailment, not really, because it’s not his heart or any of his bodily organs but the one that encompasses his very essence that’s grieving him. It’s a subtle reminder of the damage the asteroid princess inflicted upon him nearly two years ago. It’s a reminder of the flare of chaotic energy General-Queen pumped through her hand and into his starseed.
It’s a reminder that he has duties he’s been neglecting and if he values anything about himself, he better get on it. He’s fortunate that no one in Spec-ops has been pounding on his door wondering where he’s been or why he hasn’t been showing up for trainings or conducting them.
It’s probably because the solidarity of Spec-ops has fallen to pieces when their General-King was called to a different mission. There was only so much mutual respect among Generals, power was a tempting thing after all. And it wasn’t like he was close to any of his fellow officers, not any more.
All of his friendliness was for the sake of appearances.
He didn’t know if there was a single person that he’d trust with his life in his division.
(But it’s not like he ever really trusted anyone.
Not after Alkaid.)
He’s fortunate that Laurelite hasn’t paid him another visit, the warning in her words still echoing in his head.
So, he forces himself to breath and calm down until the feeling of uneasiness dissipates and he feels a little bit more like the Labyrinthite he’s familiar with. Confident, normal, without bloody hallucinations dancing in the edges of his vision.
He really wished that his promotion hadn’t come at such a vulnerable time.
He had wanted it as a reward, not as a punishment.
(But he was used to not getting what he wanted.)
The general sucks in breath after breath until his chest inflates and deflates evenly. Until the threat of a panic attack subsides. Until he feels comfortable sliding into the skin that used to be his natural one.
It’s only for a night, he tells himself, eyes fluttering open to get his bearings. You’re fulfilling your energy quota so you stay under the radar.
Do his duties, act like a good little soldier, fall in line.
No insubordination, no rumors of fraternization with the enemy, no rumors of deflecting.
He is not a traitor.
(He’s not.
Yet.)
Engage if necessary, avoid if possible, he reminds himself. That’ll be the hard part, he instinctively attacks on sight if he can and he’s got a lot of enemies. Probably more if they’ve got memories like he does. Only seek out correspondence with Hvergelmir, Iris, or her asteroids. Anyone else is not worth the risk.
Even if he’s got names supplied to him.
It’s not like he knows what he wants anyway. He’s still teetering precariously on the fence after talking to Hvergelmir. Iris didn’t help, she was the brash foul-mouth senshi he’s always known, not the calm, collected persona he’s interacted with.
If he’s honest, he’s avoided thinking too much about it because he’s found that not thinking about it keeps the hallucinations at bay. Sometimes. So far.
Be fast and efficient. The long you stay powered the more likely the memories will resurface, he warned himself. That had been his first mistake, when he woke up in the aftermath of his death.
It had been like waking from a long dream that twisted and turned until it was a nightmare. It figures that he would die by Iris’ hand, just like she would die by his. His journey started with her after all.
Had he been naive when he jumped at the offer Laurelite had extended to him?
Probably, but his descent into darkness was of his own choosing. He wanted to be the reliable soldier, the effective and deadly agent that they went to when they wanted results. He chose to dedicate himself to Metallia and her cause, he still, mostly, believed that what they were doing was right.
But at the same time he was conflicted about how much he knew their supposed purpose.
Yet, the negaverse had always been there for him. He had agents who’d come to offer condolences and comfort when he lost his father. Howlite had extended a hand and reassurance. Dustin helped him grieve with shitty humor and poor attempts at flirting.
Senshi killed people important to him.
His head pounded from all of his over thinking and his chest constricted, breath catching in his throat.
Breathe, he ordered, demanding that his body obey him. Oxygen flooded his lungs at once and his vision cleared. Chaos itched beneath his skin, reminding him of the power lining his bones.
He needed to hurry up and do what he came out to do.
Gritting his teeth, he tilts his head back to look at the stretch of the buildings that made up the alleyway he’d tucked himself into. Backing up, he darted forward, using the dumpster like a trampoline to rocket himself into the air until his hands could grip the ledge of the building’s roof.
Hoisting himself up, he took a second to asses his location and then, he took off running.
The steady pound of his boots against the concrete surface helps keep him focused, keeps his mind off of his indecision and looming choices. He has to concentrate to keep his breathing even, something he’s unaccustomed to, and his chest aches, but he likes the pain.
It reminds him that he can still feel something and he needs that.
Labyrinthite doesn’t have much of a destination in mind, probably some seedy dive bar where no one will notice his unusual outfit or the way the people he’ll hit on seem so terribly drained after interacting. Of course, then he can blame it on the alcohol and he’ll likely avoid running anyone he knows.
Not that it’d matter much, being recognized, what with his glamour, but he’d rather not take the chance.
He’s stable-- mostly --right now and he’d like to keep it that way thank you very much. Labyrinthite isn’t sure what will set him off anymore.
So he launches himself from roof to roof until he finds what he’s looking for, an unmentionable bar with a good host of people. His heart rattles against his ribcage as he drops down, adjusts his uniform to look presentable and slips into the building. It’s been awhile since he’s siphoned energy off of someone, at least a couple months, so he’s a little nervous.
But he is General Labyrinthite and stuff like this is natural, easy like breathing to him.
(Too bad he’s been struggling with that breathing thing.)
Human interaction proves to be weird because Labyrinthite can’t remember the last time he properly interacted with someone that wasn’t his mother. He proves to be rather inept at flirting, which is a first, and he’s left wondering when the last time he hit on someone was.
It hits him that it’s nearly two years ago and he pales at the thought.
He knew he was disconnected, but he hadn’t thought that he was that disconnected.
It proves to not matter, ultimately, because a sleazy girl slink over to him and starts hitting on him instead of the other way around. It’s flattering, the way she finds his mild awkwardness endearing and her natural touchiness makes things easy for him. Before long, he’s got a nice size energy orb and a half-drunk girl he can abandon at the bar.
The interaction gives him a bit of confidence too, because his words are coming out smoother the more he talks.
It isn’t too long before he’s feeling comfortable, natural in a way he hasn’t in a long time. This is what he’s good at and it makes him puff up with pride and pleasure as he successfully drains girl after girl.
There’s still an uncomfortable buzzing beneath his skin, an itch he can’t scratch, but it gets easier to ignore.
Four drowsy girls later and suspicious stare downs by both the bartender and the bouncer, Labyrinthite decides that it’s as good of a time as any to leave.
His pockets clink with pair of energy orbs stuffed in both as he makes his way home, but there’s a lightness to his steps like a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. It’s perhaps the most light-hearted he’s felt since he woke, startled by death.
So, naturally, something has to go wrong.
Like the cloak of his uniform catching on fire, for example.
The development catches the general off-guard and in his haste to put out the flame, he doesn’t notice the senshi until there’s a fist in his face and he’s sprawling backward. Tripping over his own cloak, Labyrinthite hits the ground hard.
“And down goes the reaper-king,” the senshi says in a sing-song voice, a fake smile plastered to her face.
Labyrinthite stares up at her, gold eyes bright and with, with his brows arching upward in surprise. There’s a faint tickling of recognition in the back of his head when he looks at her, takes in her red and orange and white uniform. He can’t miss the decorative wings that peek out from behind her skirt, the tell-tale signs of an eternal senshi, and there’s no way he misses the narrowing of her ruby colored eyes or the way hatred seeps from every part of her.
Another bitter enemy from a future yet to come.
His fight or flight instinct flares and he’s on his feet as quickly as he can manage. Reactively, his fists come up and his body shifts into a defensive stance. They circle each other warily, exhaustion seeping into the general’s frame while her lips curl into a wicked grin.
“I don’t want to fight you,” he tries and she laughs in his face.
“The big bad reaper doesn’t want to fight?” She scoffs. “I thought you were always raring for a fight, or is that just when you’ve already got your hands wrapped around their neck?”
Her words sting and he visibly recoils, sweat beading along his temple when his heart rate doubles. He was having a good night, well a better night, fighting with her will ruin it. But his instinct is to fight, because he’s never been much of a runner unless he knows the battle can’t be won.
Still, he’s weary and exhausted, his high dropping like his energy levels. If he fights now, there’s a good chance it’ll end badly and he knows, knows that he cannot handle more blood on his hands. Not not.
Maybe not ever, but definitely not now.
“I don’t want to fight you,” he says again, dropping his fists and inching backward. “I am not going to fight you,” he clarifies, whirling on his heel and teleporting away.
It’s a bit of a cheap trick, but it does what he needs, and he ends up in living room of his house. He wastes no time powering down, lest someone sense his energy signature and attempt to investigate-- he’s not willing to put his mother at risk like that, he doesn’t need another repeat of Samuel.
He doesn’t make it to his room, hell he’s lucky enough to make it to the ratty couch in the living room, before he collapses and passes out.
Perhaps Cosmos is smiling down upon him when he sleeps without dreaming.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:47 pm
TRIGGER WARNING; Gore, mutilation, decapitation, dismemberment, death
Burn the Reaper-King [4043 words]
Chase Black is used to the feeling that he’s being watched, because he’s a solider in the goddamn negaverse who can’t seem to fall in line. So, when the prickle on the back of his neck tells him that someone is watching him, it puts every part of him on edge. When the feeling persists for weeks, he finally decides to do something about it.
It’s a dreary, wet, fall night that’s particularly cold-- a warning for a chilling winter to come --when he slips out of his house and makes his way across the cobbled streets of downtown Destiny City. He picked the night specifically, because he’d sent his mother on a trip to visit her estranged parents who’d been calling since Samuel died begging her to visit. He needed her out of Destiny City for a few weeks, in case his adventure compromised his identity and put her at risk.
He feels more comfortable going out and powering up even if he felt watched if his mother is safe. She’s the last thing he’s got and he’s holding on to that more tightly than he probably should.
He times how long it takes before he’s approached.
It’s not even five minutes after his energy signal flares that something lights on fire beside him. His gut feeling had been right; the person stalking him had waited until he powered up to confirm their own suspicions.
He sighs, pulling his cloak around him, when he felt the sugary pulse of a third-rank senshi. “How long have you been stalking me?” He asks, voice echoing off of the tall building around him. Flames shot from the darkness and he barely moved in time to miss catching fire.
“Does it matter Reaper?” The senshi remarks, dropping down from the building above. “You’ll be dead soon enough.”
He grits his teeth, resisting the urge to call forth his scythe and lash out at her. He doesn’t want to fight, not when it would lead to someone dead. He isn’t ready for that, not after last time. “I don’t want to fight you,” he says, inhaling sharply as a way of calming himself. “Can we just talk?”
“The time for talking has long past,” the fire senshi replies, rushing at him.
He turns, cloak whirling around him and his arms lifting for defense. His hands knock away the fists thrown at him and he slides his foot forward to trip the woman and send her flying towards the wall. Nothing he does is for anything other than her fists.
“That person you’re so bitter against, that’s not me,” he tries, retreating away. If he puts space between them he didn’t have to resort to doing more than defending himself from her attacks. “That person I--” He stops because she was flying at him, having vaulted herself from the wall, and her kick landed square in his stomach and sending him sprawling into the ground.
He groans, clutching his abdomen as he stands. “I don’t want to hurt you, so please don’t make me fight you.”
“You’ve always loved fighting Reaper,” she sneers, pushing herself up from the ground. “You’ve always been a liar, why would I believe you know? I know you killed Mamoreal.” Her voice drips with venom as she slowly approaches him.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about!” He retorts, panic swelling in him. His thoughts flashed immediately to the Saturn knight he’d left in mangled pieces on the street. “I didn’t--” he chokes, flashes of the horrible fight piercing his memory. “It’s not what I wanted! I tried--” he shakes his head, recoiling away from the senshi until he backed up against the wall.
The girl lifts her hand, a ball of fire filling her palm and creating sharp, contrasting shadows across her face. “I don’t care,” she hisses, red eyes narrowing as approached, hand poised and ready to throw the fireball at him. “You’re a liar and a murderer,” she states, “I would never believe a word you said.”
He swallows thickly, Adam’s apple bobbing, and he lifted his arms defensively. “I don’t want to fight you,” he tries again, knowing it was likely futile.
“Oh,” she cooes, “but death is at your door reaper.” He winces when she uses his old catchphrase against him. “Earth will be so much better without you,” she tells him, lobbing the fireball at him.
He barely manages to avoid her attack, the flames searing across his left arm when he throws himself forward, heart pounding in his ears. Panic floods him, survival instincts filling his frame as he tuck and rolls. His arm stings in the aftermath, though the flames are gone and his uniform singed.
“Please,” he begs, kneeling on the ground with wide eyes. “Please, I don’t want to fight,” he tries, panic beginning to overwhelm him as his instinct tell him to fight back and the chaos within him curls and uncurls in his stomach, daring him to do what he should. “If you continue to provoke me, I won’t--” he tries to explain, but she’s lobbing another ball of fire at him.
Dully, he wonders how many more she can conjure before she exhausts herself or her magic, but he’s too distracted by trying not to be roasted to think too much about it.
General Labyrinthite has never been good at listening to the flight part of his fight or flight instinct and when the senshi gets close enough to nearly kick him in the face-- well, fight gets the better of him.
He catches the girl’s leg before the axe kick can get too close to his face. His bright, gold eyes darken and narrow as his fingers wrap and dig into the skin of her ankle. “I warned you,” he growls. When he stands, pushing upward with all of his strength, he uses his momentum, and the grip on her leg, to throw the sailor scout into the ground. Hard.
She let out an audible grunt when her back hit the ground and he could hear the thud of her head hitting the concrete. He can tell that she didn’t expect him to be so strong and, well, he can’t blame her. He hasn’t been training in months and his cloak makes him look smaller, less muscular than he is
Still, if she knew him so well from the future then she should’ve known not to underestimate him. Underestimating got people killed.
He looms over her, shadow draping across the alleyway from the moonlight overhead, swallows and says, through ragged breaths. “This is your last chance. I. Don’t. Want. To. Fight. You,” he growls, emphasising every other word. “Either you leave now, or we fight and you die.”
There isn’t a doubt in the general’s head that if it came down to it, he’d win the fight. The girl is strong, experienced, but in it for revenge and she’s sloppy. He’s a general in the Spec-ops division and his primary motive is to fight, incapacitate, turn, or kill. He’s good at what he does and the chaos itching beneath his skill is demanding he do what he’s best at.
Engaging in combat.
“Please.” The word comes out strained and pleading. He doesn’t want this, but if his choices are survive or die, he will pick survive every time.
“No,” the senshi snarls, launching herself off the ground and driving her shoulder into Labyrinthite’s gut. He groans in response, stumbling backward before regaining his footing. His arms wrap around her midsection and he throws himself backward, hoping to flip her behind him. It works-- sorta, because she’s no longer jamming her shoulder into his ribcage and she’s crashing in the dumpster.
He hates it-- the way the rush of adrenaline feels right and how he feels comfortable in his own skin for the first time since who knows how long.
He turns on his heel to face her just as she picks herself up off the ground, hand wiping across her mouth as she fixes a glare his way. “Burn in hell reaper.” Her words slip out of her mouth in a hiss, ruby eyes dark and narrowed as she throws both hands to her sides and mutters something, her senshi magic undoubtedly, because her hands alight with a flame.
Pain flickers across his face as he exhales tiredly, arm already extending to accommodate the weight of his scythe and it materializes in his hand from subspace. “I really wish you hadn’t made me do this,” he laments as she charges him.
There is fire everywhere.
It’s on his cloak, flying past his hair, scorching his sleeves, and marking up the wall. Her flame cover hands are gripping the front of his uniform and it burns, but he grits through the pain and forces his blade between them. His weapon is heavy in his hands, feels foreign when it should feel like an extension and not like something he doesn’t know how to use.
Still, he manages to force her back using the blunter side of the blade. It still cuts into her skin and he can hear her hiss in pain, and he certainly doesn’t like the way it sends a shiver of pleasure down his spine.
He isn’t that man--creature from his future. He isn’t.
(He is. Will be. Is.)
(Monster, his demons hiss, clawing at what good is still left in him.)
Instinctively he swings his scythe at the senshi now that space is between them and he strikes her across her midsection. She cries out in anguish, blood staining the white of her fuku immediately. He can already tell, despite the darkness, that the cut is deep and would need stitches, if she managed to get away.
A dark hunger blossoms in his stomach, threatens to consume him. He tries to swallow it down, to ignore it, but he fails, miserably, because the beast inside of him overwhelms him and he can’t think past his sudden bloodlust. His mouth sets in a determined line while his bright, gold eyes darken, narrowing as he steps back, rotates the staff of his scythe in a circle before swinging again.
The girl is still reeling from the attack on her stomach, hands pressed over the wound in a sad attempt at stopping the bleeding and barely has time to dodge his follow-up. She throws herself into the ground, crying out when she lands poorly on her arm.
Labyrinthite drops his weapon, the bone-scythe clacking against the stone, advancing on her fallen form wearing a dark, sinister grin. He presses a foot against her sternum, shoving her down with his weight, and digs the heel of his boot into her chest. “Is this what you wanted?” He sneers, gloved hand slapping against his shoulders to put out the lingering wisps of fire clinging to the fabric of his cloak. “Did you want to have death looming over you so that you could validate your stupid need for revenge?”
“Go to hell!” She spits, straining against his weight.
“I’m already there,” he snaps, leaning in. “You created this,” he informs her, clenching his jaw when he shifts, reaching for her fuku. “I tried to keep this from happening, but no, you had to keep pushing. You demanded that the reaper you hate so much surface.” He shakes his head, disgusted. “You created this moment and you will suffer because of it.”
She coughs as he lifts her, feet dangling helplessly, “I didn’t create something that was already there.” Her gloved hands wrap around his wrists, nails digging at his skin through the fabric. “The wolf that grows is the one that you feed and all you feed on is death and darkness.”
Her words strike a chord within him and his grip falters. She collapses to the ground, wheezing, clutching at her wounds when she skitters backward. His dark expression slips into something vulnerable, uncertainty flickering through him.
She’s not wrong.
There has always been a seed of darkness nestled down in the core of him. He’s never been a child of light, despite how he tried. He’d given to chaos so easily, succumbed to their expectations and demands, accepted it readily into his life.
He is not a rebel, a visionary, a savior. He is a soldier, a weapon, a harbinger of death.
“I become death, the destroyer of worlds,” he whispers, stumbling back. His eyes flutter close and his chest constricts, he can’t breathe.
When he opens his eyes, the fire senshi is on her feet, swaying precariously but determination bold in her posture. “If I die here, I’m taking you with me,” she declares.
He snorts, lips curling upward in a smirk. “I doubt that. You’ve used too much of your magic to be a threat.” He steps back, stooping low to pick up the spine of his scythe. “Death is at your door seems too...redundant now that you and your friend have tried to use it against me.” The darkness is coiling around his heart and constricting, an ever present reminder that it is always there.
He moves towards her slowly, like a wolf closing in on it’s prey, dragging his scythe against the ground, the sound metal against stone echoing off the walls. Chiiiink. She retreats, shrinking into herself.
Despite all her boldness, she is afraid.
This realization makes Labyrinthite grin broad and sharklike. “Are you afraid girl? Where are your threats and all your boldness?” The shift from the Labyrinthite grasping at his humanity as it slips through his fingers to the ruthless General Labyrinthite of Spec-Ops is startling, almost like he’s someone different entirely. Or perhaps his true self is just awakening, forcing itself to a head, sharp gleaming teeth bared in all it’s glory.
He cocks his head at her when she collides into the dumpster, the metallic sound filling the night. “Or have you finally realized that you’ve made a grave mistake?” Amusement lines his voice when he reaches up and taps his chin. “You poor thing, too bad you didn’t listen when I begged you to go.”
Her hands alight with fire one last time and Labyrinthite knows this is the girls last stand, the last use of her magic, and oh, a thrill of pleasure surged through him.
“You asked for this,” he cooes at her, rolling his shoulders back and grabbing his weapon with both hands. “This reaper-king you so desperately wished to extinguish? Well he’s flaring to life because you lit the flame.” The blade comes up and the end of the staff thuds against the pavement.
The senshi looks terror stricken as she shifts her stance and raises her arms defensively. “No,” she croaks, shaking her head defiantly. “It ends here.” Her voice shakes, wavers as she glares at him with all of the hatred she’s got left. “The fire goes out, with both of us,” she boldly declares, sucking in a breath and charging at him.
The end of the fight goes like this:
He swings and she jumps, narrowly avoiding the cutting curve of his blade. She lunges for him, grabs him beneath his cloak and burning the front of his shift through until her flame-covered hands are pressed into his skin, searing heat against his flesh. He recoils backward, teeth clenched together while he hisses in pain. Her hands claw at his skin, snake upward and wrap around his neck.
The flesh bubbles and he howls, grip shifting and twisting on the staff until he grip the sharp metal and bring it towards them. He doesn’t hesitate when he tears it through her arm, dismembering her, because all he can think is that he needs the fire gone, out. The useless appendage falls to the ground and the girl stagger backward, screaming in agony.
There’s a string of incoherent words pouring from her mouth, a mixture of curses and wordless howls, as she stumbles in the alley gasping, staring, clutching at the bleeding stump that used to be her left arm.
He is unfazed, though his hand is bleeding from where his own weapon pierced his skin. A necessary evil. His advance is slow, curious as his gaze travels from her fallen, charred, hand to where she’s bleeding out. “Pity,” he cooes, lips twisting upward in a sickening grin. “Let me help you match,” he tells her readying his scythe for another strike.
“N-no, no!” She screeches, waving her hand desperately.
It’s a shame that her movements make it so much easier to lop that hand off too. Her knees hit the ground and her eyes lose their sheen as she shares up at him, hopeless. “No,” she whispers, energy seeping from her.
It’s the resignation that makes him pause, scythe poised high in the air, ready for one final attack. It puzzles him to see the senshi giving up, finally. He expected her to keep fighting, tooth and nail, with or without hands.
He’s disappointed.
He shows it by shaking his head and clucking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Where is your fire now senshi?” He asks. She doesn’t answer and he sighs. “Death comes knocking,” he chirps and swings.
It’s a sick sound, his sharpened blade cutting through the flesh of her neck, sliding through her bones. The cut is clean, unlike the guillotines of the old days where the blade was never sharp enough and some of the skin held, because her head hits the ground with a thud, rolls across the concrete seeping blood everywhere. Her body collapses forward when there is nothing left to hold it up and he turns it with his foot, kneeling beside the mangled form.
He takes the point of the scythe and carves her chest open, exposes her ribcage and organs. It’s unnecessary, considering he means to reap her starseed, but fascinating as he break her ribs open and pulls out her beating heart. It’s barely beating at all, moved slow and sluggish when he first wraps his fingers around it, and it stops when he rips it free.
It’s likely a terrible sight to see, should anyone cross him, because he lifts the organ into the air so the moonlight can was over it and he can properly examine it. When he’s finished, he tosses it carelessly to the side, hand returning to her chest before he plunges down, into the subspace where her soul rests.
He tugs the gem free and it shimmers dully, red like the skirt of her fuku. He doesn’t bother to study it, like he did the heart, but pockets it instead-- to deal with it at a later time.
He stands, wiping at his mouth and smearing the senshi’s blood across his face.
Gold eyes rest on the separated head, lips pursed contemplatively. There’s a pang of something that resonates within him, his shoulders slumping in the aftermath, but he can’t pinpoint what he’s feeling because it’s not guilt, or remorse. Yet.
He turns on his heel, saunters out of the alley with his heels clacking against the pavement. His cloak billows behind him as he walks, the sound of sirens filling the air.
Someone undoubtedly heard her screams and called the police.
Labyrinthite isn’t worried, he’ll be long gone before they arrive and if anyone sees him, well it’s at their own risk. He’s already claimed a life tonight, what would a few more matter? He could teleport if needed to, but he wants to walk.
He wants to stroll through the streets watching as anyone who catches sight of him-- with his singed uniform, burned chest, blood smeared across his mouth and staining his hands --shrinks back immediately. He walks and walks and walks until his exhaustion catches up to him and he collapses to his knees.
Something squeezes around his heart and he gasps desperately for air, fingers grasping at his chest. He winches as his nails scrape against the bubbled, burned flesh but he digs them deeper because he wants to feel the pain. To be reminded that he can feel something, even if it’s only physical pain.
He powers down, almost involuntarily, but there are no energy signals near enough for him to care. A sob rips from him, a mangled mess of a noise, lurching him forward until he’s curled into himself. It’s unexpected, takes him by surprise as the chaos leaks out of him. Instead of a loud noise in his ears, it’s retreated back to the quiet hum beneath his skin. Ever present, but ignorable.
The blood is gone, magicked away like the rest of General Labyrinthite until there is only Chase Black, the shredded remains of the person the general used to be.
He cannot keep his shirt on, the fabric scratching and irritating the second-degree burns the senshi managed in inflict before he cut off her hands. He pulls it up over his head in a hurry, discarding it on the ground even as his hands shake. He knows that there is no blood on his skin, but he cannot help but look at his hands like there might be remnants.
He stays like that, knees pressed into the gravel and fingers pressed beneath the burns and against his chest, until the n** of the cold is too much to bear and he has to stand. He picks his shirt up, wraps his hands up in it and tries to pretend that his shaking is from the cold and not the unsettlement that’s resting in his belly. He heads home, because what left is there to do?
Every day he is less Chase and more Labyrinthite.
Once, he would’ve been proud of that knowledge, worn the mantle that was his alter ego proudly, but now he is walks the line of imbalance, uncertainty. He needs to decide what he wants, quickly, because he knows that he will only burn himself into ashes if he continues the way he is.
He is both thrilled and sick to his stomach by his actions. So many parts of it felt right, natural and he knows that it is the human side of him that is tortured, crying out like a wounded animal that cannot be saved. He had tried, pleaded with the girl to give him a chance to right his wrongs and she refused.
But had he really done anything wrong?
He’d spent months in defiance, rebelling silently against his leaders, his faction when he met with Iris and pleaded for her to listen to him. He’d spent too many nights looking for Hvergelmir like she could offer him a miracle, a salvation he didn’t need, doesn’t deserve.
This reaper-kind you so desperately wished to extinguish? Well he’s flaring to life because you lit the flame, his own words replaying in his head.
He never second-guessed himself, his place, before Iris attempted to purify him, why was he doing so now?
Was it worth fighting the inevitable?
He didn’t know and the two sides of him were at war over it. Chase pited against Labyrinthite, because his foolish civilian side couldn’t cope with fact that loss was a part of war. It made him weak, it made him second guess himself. Labyrinthite was the strong one, the dutiful soldier with a deft hand. Chase was the human side, reminding him that there were things to fight for, that the war had taken things from him. His father. His mother. Himself.
But wasn’t it worth it?
There was a part of Chase Black that had been born in darkness. The wolf that grows was the one he fed and he’d always feed the darkness.
Maybe that’s just what he was, someone who existed in the darkness he created himself.
Perhaps it was time to accept that the cosmos wanted, needed him to be the Reaper.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2015 9:44 am
Repercussions [2608 words]
He deals with this death better than he dealt with the death of the Saturn knight, Mamoreal he reminds himself. The knight had a name, a wonder, an identity. He doesn’t even know what the fire senshi was called, what planet or star or moon she originated from and he doesn’t know if it cares.
Identities don’t matter when their owners are dead.
He doesn’t wake up sweaty and screaming, so he counts that as a small victory. He does, however, spend at least three hours after he wakes up on his computer, seated at his work desk. The thing hasn’t been used in nearly a year, is coated in a fine layer of dust, and is covered with outdated legal documents that have started to yellow.
It reminds Chase that he should do some cleaning, or pay someone to clean his house, because the room smells like musk and he can’t remember the last time it’d been vacuumed. It’s not like his mother does housework, he wouldn’t let her even if she wanted, he thinks she’s too frail.
The stupid computer has to do a system update before he can even get on the internet, much to his annoyance, and he spends the first forty minutes splitting his time between glaring at the screen and flipping through the stacks of paper. Over half of them get tossed into the garbage, with only key pages of his father’s will kept and reorganized. By the time he can finally log into the computer and use it, the space looks less like a pigsty and more like a functional, useable work space.
He spends the next half hour googling how to properly treat second-degree burns without a trip to the hospital. His hand absentmindedly skates over the bubbled, damaged skin while he scrolls, hisses of pain slipping through his teeth now and then. He likes the feeling though, the reminder that he can feel something even if it’s just physical, because his emotional spectrum is so muted. The burns are sticky and dry, red and angry looking, which Chase takes as a bad sign when he reads up on treatments.
He goes through six different medical web pages and reads every yahoo asks he finds before concluding that, unlike regular scrapes and cuts, burns need to be kept moist and covered. He spends the other hour and fifty minutes scrolling through reddit and rolling his eyes at the stupidity. It’s the most normal thing he’s done in, ********, years and it’s oddly therapeutic.
Until he wanders into the bathroom with all the medical supplies to find that they don’t have an vaseline, gauze, or wrapable bandages. It certainly sours his mood, anger flaring hot in his stomach at the nameless girl he left in pieces in the street, when he realizes that he has to go to the store. He hasn’t done that in, ******** knows how long.
He pays someone to cook and keep the kitchen stocked, he hasn’t been to the grocery store since he roomed with Vanessa.
He’s not exactly keen on putting on a shirt, because the fabric rubs uncomfortably over his collarbones and shoulders, irritating his wounds, but he does it and tugs on his leather jacket and riding gloves. He doesn’t care that it’s in the middle of fall and too cold to reasonably ride his sports bike, but he’s stubborn and he hasn’t ridden Hermes since he picked his mother up from the hospital.
If he has to go out and public, be mistakenly taken for a drug addict because of his wiry frame and dark circles beneath his eyes, he might as well do it his way.
The ride is short and the trip inside the store is shorter. He makes a beeline for the pharmacy aisle and spends three minutes debating what type of gauze to buy-- he settles on the non-stick, hypoallergenic kind --picks up three boxes, the biggest tub of vaseline he can find, and six rolls of clean, white bandages. He’s shoving his purchases into the saddle bag he had attached when he gets the distinct feeling he’s being watched.
His head jerks up immediately, gold eyes narrowing and lips pressing into a thin line, and he looks around for someone out of place. He spots a blonde with blue eyes glaring daggers his way, but when their eyes meet, she grins darkly and waves. His stomach flips and his mouth dries up because, when he blinks, she’s gone, disappeared into the throng of people. When he turns, he catches sight of someone else eyeing him distrustfully.
It’s a tall, broad thing of a man with tanned skin with freckles splattered across his skin, with dark curly hair matted to his face. When their eyes meet, he grins dark and shark-like, mirroring the flash of teeth that the blonde shot his way.
It sends a chill running down his spine and he frowns, perplexed by the reaction the strangers are garnering from him. And then the blonde pops out of the crowd, coming to stand next to the freckled man. Chase nearly laughs at the sight of them, because she is short, stands just under the height of his shoulders yet still strikes him as the more terrifying of the two.
Something tells him that she is the blade and he is the force behind it.
It occurs to him that they’re something to be worried about, especially when they’re watching him with matching gazes, her hand sliding into his as she squares her shoulders and glares at Chase. He stares back, frowning, while he tries to figure out what they might want and when he decides to approach them, the crowd shifts and they’re both gone.
His stomach drops, his hands fumble and one of the rolls of bandages slips out of his hands and onto the sidewalk. He spends a minute and a half chasing it down the street before he manages to grab it and stuff it in his saddlebag. He zips it up, mounts Hermes and gets the ******** out of there and back home asap.
He spills the contents of his shopping bag into his bathroom sink, hands shaking all the while while he slathers vaseline onto his gauze pads and slaps them onto the angry skin around his collarbones. His bandaging job is hasty and sloppy but it works, so he leaves it like that and tries to shake off the nervousness the glaring couple had managed to instil in him.
His body trembles when he slams the medicine cabinet shut, grips the sides of the sinks and tries to steady himself. When he looks at his reflection, he only sees a shadow of himself. He sees a pale, gauntly young man with terrible bags beneath his eyes, his hair is wild, matted to his face by the sheen of sweat coating his skin. Though bandaged, his collarbones protrude and so do his cheekbones.
When he can no longer stand the sight of himself he turns his sink on, splashes his face with water, then storms out of the bathroom in a huff with his face still dripping. He storms out into the empty living room, furnished with a simple couch and nothing else, and flop face-first onto the couch. That, immediately, proved to be an incredibly stupid idea because the rough fabric of the couch cushions pressed irritably against his bandages and the already angry skin around it. Groaning he rolls over, legs dangling off of the arms of the couch he was too long for, and draped his arm over his face to block out the thin rays of sunlight peeking through dirty blinds.
He really needed to pay someone to clean up the house, preferably before he let his mom come home.
That was his last thought before he drifts off to sleep, body succumbing to exhaustion.
He woke less than two hours later to the sound of glass shattering and boots crunching the broken shards against a tiled floor. He jolts up, hissing when his burns prickle in protest, with wide eyes darting back and forth. Cautiously he swings his legs off the couch’s armrest and presses his palms against the cushions, listening as another pair of feet drop onto the glass and he catches the barest hints of whispering.
Chase curses under his breath, fingers digging into the scratchy couch fabric, then stands, adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows and inhales sharply to center himself. His fingers twitch nervously as he slinks across the expanse of his living room, presses his body against a wall and peers around into the kitchen. He only catches a glimpse of the intruders, but there’s definitely two of them and his stomach twists when he recognizes the dark, curly hair and tanned, freckled skin. He catches a flash of straw colored hair, bright light the sun in the right light, and his mouth dries up.
It’s the pair from earlier and his hands turn into fists when he jerks back, presses his head against the wall and has to remind himself to breathe.
“Come out, come out wherever you are~” A feminine voice calls, far too cheerily. “We know you’re home Reaper~”
Involuntarily, he winces at the name.
“We can play hide and seek all day long,” a gruff voice grunts and Chase knows it’s the man. “But we will find you and it’ll be easier if you just came out.”
Chase doesn’t answer, doesn’t move because his whole body is trembling and he can’t tell if it’s out of rage and irritation or panic, fear.
He doesn’t do fear though, so he suspects it out of rage this time because how dare they.
They find him easily, round the corner and come face to face with him. The man is scowling with his arms across his chest and the girl, she’s grinning broadly-- wide and shark-like with all of her teeth showing.
Briefly, Chase wonders if that’s what his manic grin looks like.
(Probably.)
“What do you want from me?” he spits, sliding off the wall and backing away.
“A lot of things,” the blonde spits, grin slipping and her expression becoming cold, stony. “First, I’d like you to bring my friends back, you know the ones you massacred and left scattered across alleyways?”
He opens his mouth to protest, to feign innocence, “I--” she cuts him off before he can get any words out.
“I know you know exactly who I’m talking about. Don’t bother pretending otherwise,” she snaps, stepping forward like she’s ready to lunge at him. The only thing that stops her is the freckled man’s hand coming to rest on her shoulder. “But since you can’t we’re here to give you a message.”
She glances at her companion, who sighs and begins to speak. “We know exactly who you are, who your dad was, who your mom is and we promise that you will feel every ounce of pain you’ve made us feel.” His tone is steady, calm but Chase can hear the traces of hurt, anger, grief lacing every word. “We know what happened with your dad, how you killed him and we can prove it.” The man smirked and Chase’s stomach twisted again. “We know that you’ve sent your dear, fragile mother off to see some relatives and where those relatives live--”
“We know that you don’t feel any real remorse for the things you’ve done, the sins you’ve committed. We know that you don’t care that Mammoreal is dead or that you left a dismembered Allie dead in the streets,” the girl interjected, advancing on him. “We’re going to make you regret not letting them kill you.”
“We’re not going to kill you,” the man said, stepping forward and using his slight height advantage and broadness to attempt to intimidate Chase.
It didn’t work, Chase just stood taller and glared right back at them. He would not be intimidated, refused to be threatened or let it show that he was nervous about his mother’s safety.
“We’re going to do so much worse,” the pair promised, words spoken in unison.
“Not if I kill you first,” Chase snapped, teeth bared and eyes narrowed.
“We’d like to see you try,” the girl snorted.
“You came as civilians, I may not know your name but don’t doubt that I’ll find you,” Chase countered, digging his nails into his palms.
The man leaned in, face inches from his, “We’re untraceable.”
“Don’t doubt the length I will go to to protect her.”
“It’s what we’re counting on,” the girl replied cheekily, glancing at her companion and nodding at him.
The man swung, sucker punching Chase right in the gut. He hunched forward, stumbling back before swinging in retaliation. The man let out a throaty laugh as he dodged easily and Chase could feel the hatred building within him. He ached to power up, to lash out at the intruders and to separate their heads from their shoulders but he didn’t.
He ignored the thrumming beneath his veins, the bloodlust curling around his heart because now wasn’t the time or the place for a fight. Not if they weren’t going to start it.
“We’ll be around, don’t worry,” she said cheerfully, seeming to take pleasure in his pain. Her blue eyes dark with something he couldn’t name but recognized. He’d seen the same thing reflected in his own eyes too many times not to. “It’ll be so much fun Reaper, we’ll play all those games on you that you liked to play on us.”
“Do you remember them Reaper?” The man asked, cocking his head slightly.
“No.”
“Pity, but it’ll still be so much fun,” he cooed, reaching for his companion’s hand. They began to back up, wearing matching grins as he watched them. “We’ll see you around, Chase.” They slipped around the corner and by the time he did too, they were ********,” Chase cursed, flexing his fingers before forming a fist and slamming it into the wall he’d been leaning against. “********!” He shouted when pain shot from his knuckles and up his arm. His hand was covered in plaster, from the jagged hole he’d punched in the wall.
He should’ve known better.
He’d been so stupid to think that it ended with the flame senshi in the dark alley way. He should’ve suspected that she’d been part of a team when she’d come after him in the name of vengeance for a fallen comrade. He’d been naive to think that the actions of his future self wouldn’t affect his present self, he’d been naive to think that people wouldn’t think he was nothing more than a monster no matter what he did in this life.
Monster, the voice in his head, that sounded eerily similar to his dead father’s, You’ll always be a monster.
He sighed, didn’t bother to argue because what was the point.
Embrace it already, the voice demanded. You’re smarter than this Chase, Labyrinthite. General, it cooed. Do something about them. Finish them.
He nodded to himself, resolve settling over him comfortingly. He would do it. He would find them before they found him, or his mother, again. No more games, to more hesitation, no more resistance.
Reaper, the voice whispered and Chase nodded.
“Reaper,” he muttered, assenting.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Fri Nov 27, 2015 12:57 pm
Reaper Rising [2510 words]
He hasn’t used the cork-board since he plotted his big showdown with Iris when he was but a new captain, but he dredges it up out of the hidden compartment tucked away in the back of his closet because it was time for him to do some planning. The board was still filled with pins and notes about the rainbow senshi, what he knew of her, and what her weaknesses were and it took him a solid ten minutes to pull all the pushpins out and to stack all of his research into a neat little pile.
He sits at his work desk, free of clutter and dust because he’d hired a maid to clean the mansion, with his laptop booted up along with the desktop. It’s been awhile since he’s done recon, and his fingers are stiff as he types but pushes through it, determined. The internet is far more useful for research this go around, because there’s no glamor protecting the pair like it was Iris.
He’s immensely thankful that his fancy prep school taught him a bunch of coding and some hacking knowledge, though most of the hacking knowledge came from some of the more mischievous students he coerced into teaching him. He briefly considers enlisting the help of Domeykite, but decides against it considering how...unhappy the lieutenant was the last time they’d interacted.
This is stuff he can handle, he’s sure.
Of course, he’s sorely out of practice and he was never very good at all this computer hacking crap which means it takes him three hours before he gets to put names to their faces.
Eliza Griffen and Robert Blake.
A twenty-two year old and a twenty-seven year old respectively who are almost always seen together, from what he gathers given the pictures he managed to find. One works in an art gallery and the other at a history museum. Neither have any type of social media, which is annoying and limits his options, but he’s determined.
They threatened his mother, he’s not the type to let that go.
After another three hours of dead-end research, Chase decides that the best sort of recon he can do is the kind where he does a little bit of stalking. So he changes into a worn t-shirt, dark jeans, and a zip-up hoodie and heads out, keys to Hermes grip tightly in his hand.
He goes after Eliza first, because while he thinks that she’s the dangerous one, she lacks the brute force that Robert has. If there’s a physical altercation, he’ll have the upperhand. And, if he gets lucky, she’ll be forced to power up and reveal if she’s a senshi or a knight and he’ll be able to better prepare for her disposal.
He gets a little queasy thinking about that, the way his immediate reaction is to kill her, but he knows it’s really the only option. She’s too volatile to corrupt and he doesn’t want to waste a General-Sovereign’s time. Especially on someone he thinks would be too much of a berserker, given her manic grin and harsh demeanor.
Of course, his true motive probably has more to do with the fact that he doesn’t want anyone else in the Negaverse involved in his personal affairs. They’re his pests to deal with, he doesn’t need help and he certainly doesn’t want it. Well, and he’s not ready to face Laurelite again.
Not after last time.
He mounts his bike, peels out of his driveway, the crisp almost-winter air nipping at his skin and he almost regrets not wearing his leather jacket over his hoodie, but the cold grounds him. It keeps him focused and with all of the other things going on in his life, he needs all the help focusing. He reaches the art gallery in twenty three minutes, parks his bike a few streets down and walks the rest of the way.
They know who he is, she’d recognize his bike easily, because who else would be foolish enough to ride a bike this late in the year? He needs to be as inconspicuous as he can manage. Which isn’t that well, if he’s honest.
When he reaches the building there’s a moving truck parked in front of it, with people milling in and out of the building caring sculptures out and painting in. A change in displays, it seems. It gives him the perfect idea, and excuse, to infiltrate the gallery between set ups. He pretends to be one of the workers, keeping his hood up to hide his stark pink hair, and starts moving pieces.
Eliza is inside with a clipboard pressed against her chest and a stern look on her face as she argues with what he assumes is the other art director. From the looks of it, they’re fighting over the placement of a stone statue-- it’s a mermaid coiled around a rock with sea foam bubbling around her tail and hands --then, she starts to turn his way and he’s forced to drop his head.
He curses under his breath when she approaches him and the other mover and he tries to keep his head down and his face obscured by the thick frame of the large, heavy painting they’re holding between them. He thanks Metallia, and more quietly Cosmos, when she directs her instructions to the other guy and stomps off, heels clicking against the tiled floor.
They carry the painting to wherever she directed and Chase makes some excuse to duck out for a minute, something about needing a bathroom break. The other guy is obviously exasperated, given that there’s still a ton of art to move, but he waves him off irritably. And, he does head towards the bathroom, taking a second to find Eliza before ducking through one of the doors marked Gallery Employee’s Only.
He never could resist a keep out sign, or it’s equivalent.
Finding her office is easy, seeing as they’re all marked with the occupant’s names on the glass. Getting inside isn’t as easy, because it’s locked like he should have expected. He hasn’t picked locks in as long as he’s done recon, but he’d used the skill more liberally and it comes back much faster than the computer crap. Between one of his unused credit cards and the bobby pin he keeps in his wallet for when he’s in a pinch, he gets the door open in no time.
He takes a second to be pleased with himself before slipping into the office and locking the door behind him, that way he’ll hear her if she’s trying to get in and he’ll have a split second to hide.
He spends the next five minutes riffling through the papers littering her desk. He doesn’t find much information that doesn’t pertain to the gallery and it’s current exhibit so he starts to go through her drawers. He’s seen enough crime shows to know that if someone’s hiding something in their office then there’s probably a trick drawer to their desk.
It turns out the Eliza has two.
One of them is beneath the big opening of her desk, where her chair sits, and it’s filled with numerous documents revolving around well, himself. Chase Black. There’s the police report for the break in and the subsequent murder case that followed. While it was ruled as a death by robbery, there are a bunch of homicide notes and his name is circled multiple times.
That’s not really a surprise though, considering he knew that he’d been the prime suspect given that he’d been estranged up until his father suddenly gained custody over his legally an adult son. Still, they hadn’t enough evidence to convict him and the case was closed.
What is shocking is how many pictures they have of him, of everything following Samuel’s death. Pictures of him and Naomi, who’d run away not too long after the picnic in the photograph, pictures of him going to visit his mother in the hospital. Worse still, was that there were pictures of him dipping into alleyways and re-emerging as General Labyrinthite.
His stomach twisted into a knot as he hurriedly stuffed the folder back where it came. This evidence begged the questions of, how long have they known and who have they told?
His hands began to shake and he had to press them against the cool wood until he could calm himself. Then, he rummaged through the second secret drawer hidden within the last drawer on the left. This one was filled with photographs of the carnage he’d left behind when he’d fought Mammoreal and the fire senshi, Allie, if he remembered correctly.
He hated thinking about them by their names, it reminded him that they’d been people once.
But he’d tried to reason with him and they’d forced his hand, helped create the monster they wished to kill.
(The monster who’d always been coiled around his heart waiting for it’s chance.)
He found pictures of them before their mutilation, in a joined picture with Eliza and Robert, all of their arms looped around each other’s shoulders beaming brightly at the camera. When he flipped the photo over written on the back was, don’t ever forget, or forgive, the reaper must pay. He clenched his jaw, fingers clenching slightly and creating dents in the photograph.
He dropped it back into the drawer and was about to continue his snooping when he heard the distinct sound of a key jingling around in a lock. He dropped to the ground, hastily replacing the top of the false drawer and shutting the real one before squeezing himself in the space beneath the desk.
His lanky frame barely fit and he held his breath as she rounded the desk and came to stand right in front of him. His fighter instincts reared it’s head and demanded that he grab her legs and toss her to the ground, but he resisted knowing he couldn’t get the proper vantage and the right kick to his burns would leave him writhing on the ground without the assistance of the chaos beneath his skin demanding he power up.
She is on the phone with someone when she drops her clipboard onto the table unceremoniously, the clacking of the plastic against the wood ringing in his ears. He closes his eyes, focuses on her voice and what she’s saying.
From what he gathers, she’s talking to her partner because her tone is close to hysterics and she’s pacing angrily back and forth.
“We need to strike fast,” she says and he can see that she got his back to him. “He’s dangerous Bob, I’m worried we’re in over our head.” He can hear the gruff voice of Robert on the other end because he’s yelling but he can’t make out the words. “Yeah, we should’ve had a more solid plan before we threatened him,” she snaps and Chase takes the opportunity to sneak out from beneath the desk. “You know what, it’s fine I’ll figure it out,” she growls.
It happens in a blur and he reacts instinctively. The flare of power washing over him when she turns, recognition in her eyes and her mouth dropping, poised to scream, wail, demand help. She’s fast, moving to duck around him but he’s faster, especially since he’s powered and she isn’t.
His gloved hand finds her mouth, covers it and he digs his nails into the skin of her cheek. He uses his strength advantage to shove her against the wall, pushing her head against the glass and creating a hairline crack, then forces her to turn around, pressing her face against the glass. His other hand is snaking around her frame, locking her arms into place.
“You picked the wrong man to mess with, Eliza,” he hissed into her ear, using her name as a taunt. “I don’t think you or Bob understood the resources I have, what I’m capable no matter what you think you remember.” His nails dug in deeper, hard enough to draw blood. “If your friend hadn’t attacked me, they wouldn’t be dead.”
She squirmed against him, attempted to break free and it only made him strengthen his grip on her, fingers digging into her arm hard enough to bruise. She did manage to dig her heel into the top of his foot, though and he hissed in pain. “I tried to ask for penance, forgiveness for crimes I had yet to commit but they insisted that I was nothing more than what my future told me I would be and they died for it.”
He shook his head, jerked her backward and threw her into the ground with all the force he could muster. Then, he picked her phone up off the ground and stowed it in his pocket, for later. There was a plan forming in his head and a wicked grin spread across his mouth as he stepped towards her.
“You’ll die for it too,” he told her, crouching so his face was level with hers. She scowled at him, fingers digging into the carpeted floor, before she spit in his face. He didn’t react, except to frown, as though he was disappointed in her choices. “If you’re going to scream, then you should do it now,” he suggested, wiping his face.
She did, screamed a scream worthy of a banshee. It hurt his ears, being so close to her open mouth when the high-pitched sound burst out of it, but pleasure also ran through him from the sound of sheer terror.
“It’s a pity that they’ll hear you but can’t save you,” he told her, grabbing her with both hands and hauling her towards him even as she struggled, hand swiping across his face while the other reached desperately for something on her desk.
He stood, hauling her tiny frame into the air with him. His attention turned toward the desk until he saw what she’d been so desperately grasping for. He adjusted his grip, held her suspended in the air with one hand and reached for the pale blue pen topped with a star. “Did you want this?” He asked, cocking his head at her.
Her eyes widened in panic when he twirled it between his fingers. “Don’t worry, I’ll let you use it later.”
“What the hell are you planning?” She gasped wrapping her small hands around his wrist in a poor attempt to pull herself free.
“Well, I’m sure you’re dying to find out,” he chuckled, pocketing the henshin pen as the sound of heavy footsteps reached his ears.
“That’s my cue for us to leave though, can’t have them ruining all my fun,” he chirped, tossing a wink her way.
The door to her office burst open only for the gallery employees to find it empty. Labyrinthite had teleported them away.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2015 3:17 pm
TRIGGER WARNING; dismemberment, death, violence
And so the Warehouse Crumbles [3642 words]
He takes Eliza to the old, abandoned warehouses on the outskirts of the city-- the very same ones he used to take his recruits, his soldiers, to train. There, he binds her hands above her head to one of the metal pillars that make up the structural components of the building. He ties the knots deftly, with practiced fingers and does so, so tightly that the woman cries out as the twine digs into the skin of her wrists.
Her legs are bound too, for good measure, because he can’t have her kicking at him until he wants her to.
He doesn’t bother gagging her, he wants to hear the angry hiss of words, the strings of profanity that she lodges his way. He wants to watch her suffer, to see the consequences of her actions. Of her team’s actions.
“You’re a sick, twisted, b*****d. You know that right?” The lithe blonde hisses, blue eyes dark and expression cold as ice.
“I am a product of circumstance,” he replies, lifting his head from where it was bowed when he bound her feet. “Besides, I believe you were the one to threaten me,” he comments, tilting his head curiously when he stands and smooths out the planes of his shirt.
He’d powered down once they’d arrived, lest someone other than her companion come rushing to her rescue, curious of such a large dark aura warping the area.
His fingers thread through his pink and black locks and he looks at her earnestly, despite the way she scowls in return. “Now, don’t give me that look,” he sighs, frowning when he drops his hands. “I’m not saying I’m the good guy here, just that we’re both the bad guy here.”
Eliza grits her teeth, squirms against her bonds in a futile attempt at freedom.
“How long do you think it’ll take Robert to get here, after I text him the address?” He asked, pulling her phone from his back pocket. The screen was locked, but he knew ways to get around it, like forcing her thumb against the touch pad lock. Scrolling through her contacts it didn’t take him long to find “Bob” complete with a contact photo of the guy who tried to intimidate him just a few days ago.
“He’s going to kill you,” she snarls, thrashing futily against the metal pillar.
Chase laughs, a dark manic laugh that fills the warehouse and echos off the metal. It sends shivers down Eliza’s spine. “I’m counting on his bloodlust,” he remarks, lowering the phone so the only thing he’s focused on his her. His free hand darts out, grabs ahold of her face by the jaw with his thumb pressing hard against her cheekbone. “If you think I am afraid, then you do not know as much about me as you think you do,” he warns, liquid gold eyes narrowing into slits when he slides forward, crowding her.
Her head shakes violently, like his touch is acid, but his hold is firm and does not break. “We’re not afraid of you!” She shrieks.
“But you should be,” he replies, tossing his head back to laugh that cold, dark laugh.
Eliza stills, despite the panic beginning to well up inside her, and when Chase looks at her again, he can see the fear in her blue eyes. “Didn’t you ever watch Charmed?” He asks, releasing her face and returning his attention to the phone, typing out an address into a message box. “Wyatt became the big bad because someone tried to keep him from being the big bad, because they terrorized him in a poor attempt to keep him from a dark destiny.”
“What’s your point?” She hisses, willing her voice to become steel.
He looks up at her, just as he taps the grey and blue send button, and smiles at her. It’s the kind of smile that shows no teeth, but stretches across the mouth like the person is harboring poor intentions. He can tell she doesn’t trust the grin.
He doesn’t mind, because she shouldn’t.
“He became what they feared because they were trying to destroy him instead of nurturing the good in him,” he explains, pocketing the phone and wiping his hands along the fronts of his dark jeans. “In this case, I am Wyatt and you are Gideon. You have brought your monster to life, pulled him from the depths to the surface.”
“You would have become a monster regardless of us,” she tries to counter.
He shakes his head, looks at her like he pities her when the chime of her phone receiving a text goes off. “I was on the path to redemption when your friend, Mammoreal I think, attacked me. I pleaded for a chance and he refused. He died because he would not relent.” He sighs, plays with the sleeves of his hoodie, then continues, “the girl, Allie? She was the same and by the time she pleaded for a redo, she was a good as dead.”
Allie would have bled out on the streets from her missing hand before anyone found her, beheading her had been a mercy, but something told Chase that Eliza didn’t care.
People who were out for blood, for vengeance, never cared.
He would know, he often was one.
“But that is neither here, nor there,” Chase muses, fishing the phone out long enough to read the previewed I’m on my way text. “You and your companion will be dead before the sun rises in the morning.”
“He will kill you,” she tries again, but some of the heat is lost when she presses back into the cold metal.
“He is going to try,” Chase amends, tugging his hood over his hair, “but I doubt he’ll succeed. If you’re lucky, I might let him free you so that you can watch him bleed out and know you can’t stop it.” He grins again, this time with all of his teeth, menacing and sharklike, a grin not suited for his youthful handsome face.
He backs away from her, winks wryly before spinning on his heel and slipping into the dark shadows of the warehouse.
“Eliza?” A gruff, masculine voice calls tentatively, the sound of a door creaking open echoing across metal walls.
“It’s a trap!” She wails, just as his figure comes into her line of view. “GET OUT!” She screams, thrashing against her pillar.
“Eliza!” The man calls, whirling around desperately because he can hear her voice but cannot see her in the darkness.
“GET OUT!” She shrieks again when a figure drops behind Robert, Chase she assumes, “he’s behind you!”
The freckled man barely has time to react before Chase is throwing punches his way. He deflects the first three with open palms but the reaper’s knuckles catch his jaw and send him reeling. He recovers quickly and charges forward, body hunching down, catching Chase with a shoulder to the stomach.
He grunts in pain, but grasps Robert’s midsection and uses the momentum to throw both of them backward. His opponent hits the ground first, but Chase lands wrong and slams his shoulder into the concrete when he goes down. He still gets up faster than the other guy, even if his chest is heaving and he can feel the adrenaline coursing through him.
It’s been awhile since he fought someone hand to hand without being powered up, so it thrills him. He doesn’t plan on powering up until the other guy does, even if it means he’ll take quite the beating without his added strength.
Chase Black is all lean length and subtle muscle. It’s noticeable when he’s shirtless or wearing something particularly form fitting but otherwise? It’s hard to tell.
Robert, on the other hand, is obvious muscle, from the shape of his biceps to the broad expanse of his chest. His figure screams buff and if Chase didn’t have five years of grappling, fighting, and brawling beneath his belt, he’d be screwed.
As it is, Chase is solider. He knows how to fight, exploit and win.
They’re both on their feet, circling each other like angry cats when Robert throws a punch and Chase slides beneath it easy, smoothly and rams his shoulder in the the bigger man’s gut. There’s a grunt in response, then there are arms wrapping around his back and fingers squeezing his ribs but Chase pushes forward, forces Robert back. He only stops moving, because his back hits a metal pillar and there’s nowhere left to go.
Chase shifts just enough so he keep punching at his opponent’s gut even as he gets railed on in response. There’s a sudden shift in how Robert holds himself and Chase stiffens, realization hitting him too late.
He’s thrown across the room before he can even attempt to stop it.
Chase hits the ground with a thud and a groan, face and palms pressed against the cold stone of warehouse floor. When he lifts his head, he sees the red and gold uniform of a Mars knight and he swears under his breath when he launches to his feet. The change is instantaneous, power flooding through him, twisting and shaping him until Chase no longer exists and only General Labyrinthite stands in his place.
“Martian,” the Reaper growls, voice low and gravely as he turns and his cloak sweeps across the floor. “Did you know that the fire that fuels your rage is the same that the phoenix rises from?” He cocked his head, fox-grin sliding across his mouth with his dentist-white teeth glistening in the low light.
“To hell with you Reaper,” the now-knight hisses in response, fists raise and gauntlets glistening.
Labyrinthite laughs, loud and twistedly, with his head tossed back until his hood slides off. “I’m already there.” Then, he runs, scythe materializing in his right hand as he charges forward to meet the Mars knight in the middle. He swings, using all of his dormant muscle strength to lift the blade off the ground and into the air one handed.
His attack hits, sharp blade clashing against the durable gold of his opponent’s own weapon. Despite his weight and pressure, it does not bend or move like Scholomance’s cane had. Angrily, Labyrinthite banishes the weapon and jumps, twisting in the air so that when he lands, he is facing the knight’s back.
“Tell me your name Robert,” he demands, hands gripping the metal plating in the armor and yanking back until his fingers can wrap around the soft flesh of his through. “Your real name.”
The knight twists and grunts, fingers grasping uselessly at the hands cutting off airways until finally, he sinks to his knees and caves. “Salazen,” he wheezes and Labyrinthite lifts his foot to press it into the man’s back. He kicks hard when his hands let go and the knight, Salazen, hits the ground.
He retaliates quickly however, now that he can breathe, and rolls over, kicking Labyrinthite in the stomach hard enough that he staggers backwards. There is only a split second of recovery as Salazen is back on his feet, sweeping out the general’s from beneath him.
The soldier barely prevents himself from hitting the ground, uses the momentum to throw himself at the knight in a Black Widow fashion-- wrapping his legs around Salazen’s neck and using his weight to throw him into the ground. He scrambles back to his feet, scythe returning to his hand when he brings the end of it down onto the martian’s sternum.
“If you are smart, you will stay down,” he growls, digs the bone-staff deeper into man’s chest. The weight is sure to leave a bruise, but Labyrinthite doesn’t intend on letting this one live.
He pulls away, the bones clanking against the concrete before he shifts his grip and the head scythe crashes into the ground with a clang. He moves slowly, steps deliberately as he crosses the expanse of the warehouse to return to the blonde he’d tied up earlier. <******** you,” she hisses when he comes to stand before her. She even spits on his face and he sighs, looks at her like she’s a child that needs to be scolded.
“Language my dear Eliza,” he chastises, lifting his weapon until the point hooks into the start of her bonds. “I’m just releasing you.” The blade cuts through the bonds like they were nothing, like frayed thread. He drops the scythe again, unbothered by the clang and shiiink that follow, sticks his hand in his pocket and throws the henshin pen at her.
“You have five minutes,” he stated, gaze flicking from the woman to her companion who’s made his way over to them, anger bristling beneath his skin like an angered cat.
He disappears from their line of sight, teleports into the shadows of the rafters and waits.
“He’s not letting us go,” Eliza mumbles, fingers closing around her pen when she steps free of her ties. “It’s a trick Salazen.” Her voice cracks and Labyrinthite’s chest puffs with pride when he realizes, she’s scared..
Serves her right for threatening him in his own home, for threatening his mother.
No one threatens his family and lives.
The first senshi he killed is a testament to that.
“Eliza,” he hears the gruff knight say. “We can get help, five minutes is enough time. We can do something else.”
“No we can’t,” she cries and Labyrinthite feels the pulse of a new aura fill the cramped warehouse. “We’re not running. I will not run from him. It ends here, tonight,” she declares determinedly.
Labyrinthite thinks that if she hadn’t made this personal, she would make a great addition to the negaverse. Especially if he could mold her into a soldier like himself. As it stands, she and her companion need to perish.
This is personal and Labyrinthite doesn’t take prisoners for personal affairs.
“Mirana, please,” he hears Salazen beg.
“It’s kill or be killed. It ends here,” she reaffirms and he thinks he hears her scaling a pillar. “Reaper!” Her voice booms, loud and clear and he rises, taps his scythe against metal so she can’t miss the distinctive chiink.
He spots her eyes, crisp blue and full of hatred, before he sees the rest of her but he figures out her alignment pretty quickly, when a flurry of icicles fly his way. He blocks the attack easily, ice splintering against the dark metal of his scythe. “I expected better of you Mirana,” he cooes, cracking his neck as he gathers the staff into both hands.
He hears the distinct sound of feet against metal and knows that Salazen has joined them in the rafters. His lips curl in a dark, sinister grin as he all but glides forward, towards the stubborn blonde glaring at him with her hands tightened into fists. “I believe death comes knocking,” he says in a slow drawl.
“For us or for you, that hasn’t been decided,” she spits back. Her eyes dart to something behind him and he doesn’t bother to look knowing that it has to be the Martian. He does not falter, continuing toward her purposefully.
“Perhaps, but I think you know how this ends,” he retorts.
All things considered, it ends like it starts, quickly.
Mirana rushes him at the same time Salazen does, but Labyrinthite ducks, leg sweeping out one way and this weapon the other and both get knocked off their feet. How they stay among the rafters, he cannot say.
He just knows that she swings around the rafter, feet catching him in the jaw and throwing him off balance enough for Salazen to regain his footing, anger flaring in his expression. The senshi is throwing punches and kicks his way relentlessly and with a practiced knowledge that only comes from being trained in a martial arts. It irritates him, but pleases him at the same time because it means that she’s a worthy opponent.
Someone who knows what they’re doing and what they’d gotten themselves into.
Her partner however is sloppy in his punches, obviously only knowing how to fight from getting into fights, which makes him easier to dodge. Still, he has more of a force behind his punches and while they hardly connect, he recoils harder when hit by one of the knight’s.
At some point, it becomes difficult to fend them off with the weight of his weapon and he drops it, hearing the clatter of the bone against concrete when it hits the ground. With both hands free, he grabs a hold of Mirana’s wrists before she can launch her barrage of icicles his way. He spins in a full circle, lifting her off the rafter despite her best struggles to break free and uses her weight to slam hard into the Martian, who immediately drops his arms and braces himself as best as he can against the attack.
Labyrinthite knew that Salazen would do whatever it took to keep from harming his partner.
Both order-aligned fighters go flying off the rafter and crash into a pile on the concrete floor of the warehouse, with the Martian coiled around the senshi in an attempt to lessen the blow.
“There are two of you and yet, I am the one standing,” Labyrinthite taunts when he drops to the floor with a heavy thud, cape billowing out behind him. “How pathetic,” he taunts, stooping low enough to pick his weapon up by the end and drag it behind him as he advanced on them.
Mirana is quick to her feet, but her knight is not. He groans as he struggles to sit up and somewhere, he is bleeding. Still, he managed to stand and the gold of his gauntlets begins to glow while her hands go blue. There is a part of the soldier that knows that this is their final stand.
It makes him grin, wide and sharp, with all of his teeth.
“To hell with you reaper!” The girl shouts, charging towards him swinging her arm at him to unleash the flurry of ice that nicks his cheek, tears at his uniform but does not deter him when he lifts his scythe and swings.
The senshi does not have enough time to react, but her faithful Martian registers what is about to happen and throws her out of the way, his gauntlets only managing to catch the barest edge of the blade. His feet skid across the concrete and he activates his aspect of Mars, determined to be a little more durable if it means getting his senshi out of the way and to safety.
It fails him as his legs give out beneath him and his block slips.
Mirana’s scream fills the warehouse when the scythe sheers through Salazen’s flesh and bones-- cuts him in half.
The Martian’s death comes quicker than Labyrinthite had expected, but the knight had grown sloppy in his desire to protect the senshi. A mistake that cost him his life.
“You’re a b*****d, you know that right?” She shrieks, sharp blue eyes glossy with unshed tears.
She runs at him, flips acrobatically in the air until her legs wrap around the general’s neck and she flips him to the ground black widow style. She summons her magic one final time, this time taking the form of a large, sharp icicle and has it poised over his heart about to sink it in when he moves too quickly for her to block, as she is blinded by her grief.
His fingers wrap around her throat, cut off her airwaves until she’s forced to let go and the ice shatters against the floor. Her fingers claw futility at his hands, desperate to free herself, until she can no longer fight and her eyes go dark, her body limp in his hands.
He tosses her off of him, onto the dismembered body of her partner, and climbs to his feet. When he stands, he goes over to their corpses and plunges his hands into their chest, collects their starseeds then brushes the dirt and blood off his uniform.
When it is all said and done, Labyrinthite powers down-- the glittering starseeds chiming against each other in his palm --then gathers the gasoline that he’d stored in the dark corners of the warehouse. He is meticulous in the way he pours the liquid across every part of building until the smell burns his nose and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to inhale without smelling gas for days.
Three gas cans later and he’s satisfied, pouring the remains over the two bodies he’s piled in the center. “The fire that grows it the one you feed,” he muses allowed, amber eyes raking across their fallen, mangled forms. There’s a sting of something in his chest-- guilt he thinks --when he looks upon them because they’d both had such potential, they would’ve made great additions.
But they threatened his mother.
And that was unforgivable.
So he lights a match from the matchbook he fishes out of his hoodie and drops in over their gasoline soaked bodies. “And so it ends,” he says, when the bodies light up, fire reflecting in the bright gold of his eyes.
The rest of the warehouse begins to go up in flames as Chase exits with his heart hammering in his chest and his hands shaking.
This might not have been what he-- or they -- wanted, but it was the same result in the end.
Two more dead, blood on his hands, and no guilt on his chest.
And so the Reaper burns on.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2016 4:47 pm
TRIGGER WARNING; dismemberment, death, violence
Liars and Monsters: Blood Must Have Blood (1520 words)
With the warehouse going up in flames and what he assumes to be the leaders of Skaikru to be dead, Labyrinthite foolishly thinks that his war against the White Moon team to be over. Unfortunately, he learns very quickly that he is wrong when a girl - no woman - confronts him several weeks, no months later.
He cannot tell if his sense of time is lost or if he’s been swept up in so much other nonsense that he doesn’t have time to stop and think about the knights and their senshi. Things have been going smooth for him lately, he’s got a wonderful team building and growing together and -
He’d been so foolish to think it was over.
“Blood must have blood,” the girl hisses when she corners him one night while he’s out making his rounds. He hadn’t felt her approaching and he chalks it up her having waited for the right moment before powering up because the signal flare of an eternal senshi is upon him before he realizes it.
He only has half a second to respond or react before rocks are being thrown his way. One clips his jaw and another slams into his chest, but he manages to avoid the rest of the barrage after one hits him hard in the shoulder. He does not, however, have the chance to summon his weapon and launch a return attack before she lunging out of the shadows and using her weight and momentum to throw him into the ground.
He hits the concrete hard, the pair of them skidding backwards from the force of her magically enhanced strength. They only stop before they should because he’s digging his gloved hand into a cracked piece of the street and they whirl to a stop. His back stings from the force but his cloak and uniform layers protect him from the road rash.
They don’t, unfortunately, protect him from the punch the senshi lands on his face. His head cracks against the concrete and he audibly groans because, hood or not, it ******** hurts. As painful as it is, it’s enough to orient his senses and allow him to take charge of this surprise fight.
Both hands, the glove frayed and torn at the fingertips, push flat palms against the senshi’s collarbones with enough force to throw her off of him. She’s quick to rise, but so is he and this time, she doesn’t have the element of surprise on her side. They both charge each other and for a moment it’s almost a dance, the way they throw punches, dodge kicks and twist around each other.
By the time they’re both stilling, their muscles are screaming in protest and Labyrinthite is certain he sports a bruise along his jaw. His nose might even be bleeding, and he suspects it is, just like her lip is split and blood is trickling down her chin.
“Marmoreal was right about you,” the woman laughs brightly like they’re not probably fighting to the death but like they’re merely companions who decided a spar was in order. “You certainly live up to your name.”
Labyrinthite doesn’t bother to respond, instead he summons his bone scythe and wastes no time slicing across her midsection. He only managed to catch her side, which blossoms red immediately, because she quick and obviously well trained.
She retaliates with another rock based attack and they slam into him with more force than before. It’s expected, the distance between them is minimal.
The wind is knocked out of him when he’s also knocked off his feet. He hits the ground with an audible thud weapon flying from his hand and shattering the concrete where it lands, and the girl is upon him instantly, legs straddling his hips as she lands punch after punch on him.
With great effort, and with help from his enhanced strength, he manages to flip them and turn the tables. When he stands and retrieves his weapon, the blade glistening in the moonlight with her blood staining the metal, she barely manages to rise to her knees.
He has to commend her for her spirit and the determination in her bright blue eyes. “Get knocked down, get back up,” she hisses, the words obviously painful for her to say. He probably cracked her ribs, if the gash in her side wasn’t doing her in.
“Then get up and walk away,” he growls, offering her a chance to leave.
“My fight is not over,” she gasps.
In the end, she does not get up and leave because she can’t her body protesting even sitting on her knees as she glares at him.
Their gruesome fight ends like that, with Labyrinthite giving her one final chance to walk away and live, it’s after the woman’s spits in his face, blood trailing down her chin from where her lip was split. “Blood must have blood Reaper,” she snarls, struggling to stand but her body is too beaten, worn to do anything but kneel before him.
The general can tell that it takes all her strength to remain upright, with her knuckles clenched so tightly against the ground that they’re white. He clucks his tongue and sighs at her, shakes his head slowly as amber eyes trace the outlines of her fuku which is stained red from the gash in her side.
“You wanted revenge so badly that you, and your friends, are willing to die for it?” He asks slowly, letting the words roll of his tongue like he’s testing them. She’s the only one he’s left alive long enough to have a conversation with, or at least, she appears to be the only one who seems to have enough wits about her to give him answers.
Eliza and Bob had been too dangerous to even consider it, but this girl, this senshi has a fire in her eyes that Labyrinthite recognizes as being the same, if not at least incredibly similar, to the one he carries.
Her body had been pinned to a wall messily, the severed parts hastily tacked up and put up against weak points in the building’s structure. A messy scrawl written in her blood above and around her.
“It’s not revenge,” she spits, literally spits at him again this time with a mix of saliva and blood that smears across the white of his card themed shirt, “it’s justice.” And she says it with such conviction it quite literally shakes the reaper-general to his core.
Her words remind him of his youth, of the days when he did nothing but relentlessly hunt down Sailor Iris and all the information he could gather about her. The scar on his ankle burns with ghost pains, as it does whenever he thinks too much of times long since past.
The burning sensation makes him wonder if the rainbow senshi would give him the time of day if she knew what he’d been up to. How he’d been unable to commit to abstaining from killing, how he’d once again allowed himself to be soaked in chaos, to let it run rampant through his veins like it was in his genetic makeup.
But Shaikru has proven time and time again, that no matter what General Labyrinthite does. He’ll never be anything but the loyal knight of Metallia’s because blood will always stain his hands and once again, his resolve is strong.
For now.
No, his resolve is permanent and his faith is strong.
Perhaps Iris’ view on him was never wrong. There’s no salvation for the damned.
“Pity, but I suppose that’s why death comes knocking,” Labyrinthite replies stepping back and hefting the head of his scythe off the ground, grasping the bone shaft with both hands. There’s a glimmer of pity in his gold eyes as he swings.
The senshi gets out one more sentence before the metal sinks into the skin of her neck, “Blood must have blood!” It comes out in a garbled shriek, blood filling her mouth just before the blade slices through cleanly. There was little resistance.
Labyrinthite’s heart is not as heavy as it’d been with the others.
He rips her starseed from her chest, the crystal already dimming in his hands, and tucked the precious thing into his pocket. He’ll dispose of it later, he has her body to attend to now.
Methodically, he separates her limbs and finds ways to pin her disassembled body to the crumbling wall near by. Then in her blood, he writes;
Who’s next?
Who’s looking for me?
Come find me. I’m waiting.
Beneath that, was a general location, the roof of one of the taller buildings near the outskirts of the city by an abandoned bakery. Then, there was a poorly drawn scythe as the signature.
Satisfied, the general takes his leave opting to venture into the rift and visited that skeleton tree where he’d left all the other starseeds at.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
