Quote:
Prompt 3: In the dark of the night, evil will find you--and this is the worst kind. This is the kind you did to yourself. Before bed, between one tired, fluttering blink and the next, you see a figure in the darkest corner of your room--a ghastly silhouette hovering. You lock eyes with it--and then it hits you. A wave of regret, pulsing and unyielding. The combination of something embarrassing or horrible, or a regret nagging at you for an unfinished deed, or remembering a failure of yours--you are consumed with the thoughts of something you regret. It feels like an eternity passes as you're wracked with guilt and grief and regret; you don't remember falling asleep, but when you wake, the figure is gone. If you're lucky, the regret is too.
Saleh was completely ready to go to bed that night. He hadn’t even done any patrolling that night; he was just egregiously tired from work and thoughts and life and bills and a million dumb little things that regular life happened to place in front of him. No room for Negaverse duty tonight, just bills and work and needing a nap. And by nap he meant sleep.
He was just about to let the sweet randomness of dreams take him when he thought he saw something move. His eyes slammed open and he sat bolt upright, only to metaphorically lock eyes with a pure dark specter. At that moment, a wave of physical and mental dread spread over him, distinctly causing the heart-dropping-into-stomach feeling and evoking a sense of what could only be called horror.
Something was wrong, everything was wrong, and he was definitely wrong. He grasped for a moment that his whole premise was ridiculous. His dream of coexistence was a farce at best. Cor Caroli was right about one thing: one body was still a body count. Bezel had died to push him to Captain, and he was hoping that Cor Caroli would be corrupted to push him to General, but what if that wasn’t enough? What if a senshi was exchanged for no change at all? The Negaverse had taken its time in promoting him to Captain, and who was to say it wouldn’t do so to promote him to General? Or, worse yet, would they take his offering of a senshi corruption and just leave him there forever?
He’d done his best to appear on the straight and narrow to everyone in the Negaverse. The people who knew of his plan were White Moon senshi and Knights who weren’t likely to blab about him to other Negaverse agents. All they had done was whine about the “parasite overlord” at the top of the Negaverse food chain and how the Negaverse’s methods were impossible to redeem or justify. That was true, he knew it was, but he kept believing this whole time that he could change it from the inside out.
It looked to him like some of the new Lieutenants were good folks that might be able to make use of his teachings. How long was it till their actual Generals got to them and “corrected” their meandering tendencies? Nambulite was probably a lost cause, what with his penchant for grabbing every shiny bauble he could and going for the starseed every once in a while as well, but Cafetite was a kind woman who had somehow talked a senshi into being her captive at one point (a curious case, that one). Lawsonite and Cacoxenite (that was right, they’d applied to change their names in the Negaverse database officially) didn’t look like terribly like converts either, what with Lawsonite’s generally apathetic demeanor and Cacoxenite’s predisposition towards punching things. Lawsonite’s lack of strong feelings one way or another could be taken as a positive in that she might not actively seek trouble, but she would also probably go with whatever seemed to work best in the moment.
Saleh was starting to see the situation in all or nothing terms. Either he let Cor Caroli go and fled, or he converted his captive and stayed. Letting Cor Caroli go would set him up for a great reprisal and the possible extinguishing of his plans right then and there, and staying would mean the sacrifice of someone new. Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he’d kept Cor Caroli hostage for all this time instead of straight-up corrupting him for a reason. He was hesitating, and he had a feeling that people were watching him and they knew about it.
Upon reflection, he was beginning to feel not so attached to his regular life. Work was work. He didn’t speak to his family much these days. The Negaverse and the pursuit of his ideals seemed to be the only thing he had. Would anyone notice if he just popped out of existence in the Negaverse? Maybe Sylvite would. Sylvite was all right. If she came for him, he wouldn’t be surprised. Other than her, a few stray lieutenants, and whoever was undoubtedly watching from higher up in the chain, he didn’t think many people knew he existed or what he was trying to do, both on the surface and deeper down.
He gave a derisive huff at himself. He was being ridiculous, utterly ridiculous. To stay was to be foolish and to leave was to be foolish. If he left, what was all his hard work for? What would Bezel have died for if he left? At this point, it felt like he was chewing on his thoughts over and over again, like his teeth would pierce his brain if he didn’t. He was thinking in circles. The whole ruminating process needed to be halted now. The question could be simplified: did Paracelsian trust the Negaverse to give him what he needed? Now he wasn’t so sure.
He could test the system in a few ways. Perhaps it was possible to let Cor Caroli go and stay in the Negaverse while he worked out what he truly wished to do. All or nothing thinking was a fallacy anyway. It was entirely possible that he didn’t have to act right away (he hadn’t so far, for sure), and that his superiors wouldn’t act right away either. If he could believe that he could change the Negaverse from the inside out, then surely he could believe those things too.
Eventually, he managed to placate himself enough to drift off into an uneasy sleep, filled with dreams he couldn’t remember beyond the fact that they existed and that they were rough in the moment. He refused to get out of bed at first, staring at the ceiling for a while, but he was sure of one thing when he did get up: he needed to pay his captive a visit.
It was time to commute Cor Caroli’s sentence, one way or another.
