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 Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 5:41 pm
Remember When -
He dreamed of July, the sky white with heat and the sidewalks mirages of water that turned everyone into dancers.
He dreamed of sweltering nights in a room with grey carpets and a few hundred plush pandas that were more a family to him than any other living person who called that house their own. There was some part of him that had come to accept that that was just the way families were; that it was normal that they never hugged, barely spoke and that almost every conversation that they ever had turned into a fight over one thing or another.
He was used to hearing his mother sob at the phone and beg, say what she’d do if only he’d pick up, if only he’d answer. She said it was love… she said it was true and that she didn’t mean the things she said last time. Every time it dissolved into her cursing him and he knew with every swear word that passed her lips that it was a nail in the coffin. The man was never coming home… he didn’t care, nothing left in this house mattered to him anymore, maybe it never had.
He was used to disappointment and disrespect, life was bullies and people taller than he was, might made right. Minds mattered only to a handful of teachers and some of them considered him trouble just because he didn’t want to play with the other children. They blamed him for being bullied the way you blame a nail for being hit with a hammer… he just stuck out one said. His mother transferred him again when some of the larger children locked him in the school’s janitorial locker covered in the chocolate pudding that had been intended for that day’s lunch. He was of course blamed for taking it though no one addressed the fact he’d been locked in from the outside, or why he’d have worn it rather than eat it.
The next school hadn’t been much of an improvement; one girl lost her hand cream when they used it to cover his desk with insults and several curious misspellings of his name. It was after that; he realized he’d have to make things better on his own. He started by doing his best to ignore the bullying, when that didn’t work he lapsed back into angry retorts, if he were going to be punched and thrown he’d at least deserve it.
In the world of dreams the transitions between grades and places were seamless, his behavior only grew more malicious, he was withdrawn and his stare far too intense for someone his age. He found the best ways to make himself safe was to get the dirtiest secret of the biggest people and use them as a line of defense, it worked fine till high school when there were too many things that no one cared about. Kisses were no longer taboo; alcohol was a brag to impress others.
He thought once that the only good things in his life, would forever be trapped in a whole separate house in the arms of Beth and her own mother. The two of them seemed like some mirror world had spat them out to be the bright reflection of his own family. He thought light and vibrancy like that would never be is…
And then he met Demy. Sugar high, glow stick obsessions and afraid of the dark, he ignored every rule that Zac tried to set in place, most especially personal space which might have been the one rule that Zac needed to be ignored most.
After that… it was like a chain reaction. People crept in at the edges of his life. Linarite… Fayalite… familiar faces got closer, Beth meant more than ever, and Dem… Dem just got under his skin the way no one had a right to.
He dreamed if a sweltering July with the sweat running down the back of his neck and his whole life running through his mind like wild horses. He saw so clearly that singular point in his life. The thing that everything prior to it had drawn towards, and that everything after sprang from.
Fate had a funny way of putting her mark on things… and she wasn’t done yet.
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Posted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 6:50 pm
Holding Together -
Zac scowled at the phone, it was mocking him. It was just a piece of plastic and circuits but it was mocking him with its blank face showing no new messages, just the time.
He had finals to do, his papers were not nearly as polished as he wanted them to be, he had subjects that he could review again, he had notes he could take a second time to help cement them in his memory. He had flash cards he had written out of pure habit that did him little good unless he broke down and delivered them to Dem…
And there in lay the problem. He tapped his foot and drummed his fingers and tried to concentrate on the tasks at hand. He wrote pages of notes in his quick jotting personal short hand, but he still had to cross out and re-write a few times, that was unacceptable.
He re-read his paper and fixed errors in grammar, added quotes and situations and saved it again quickly growing too fed up to look at it. He was quite sure it would get a passing mark… but normally ‘passing’ wasn’t good enough.
He stood and paced, the room echoed slightly, it lacked the things that once muted the ego, absorbing it into clothing left on every surface, contraband video games and worn out sneakers. Plush gerbils and more forgotten note cards than could be counted. Sugar sticks, soda cans, and half finished candy bars… it was all missing now and it still didn’t feel right.
There was a time he’d have given so much to be RID of Dem, too messy too loud to… to HIM. But now… now he’d had a place worn into him like a river eating a canyon…
He drummed his fingers again and paced, he pulled down his notebooks and tried reviewing old pages, but he wound up on a page with information on Lyra, which cross-referenced Scheelite of course. He tossed down the notebook and pinched the bridge of his nose and fished through his desk drawers, disarming and re-arming the little traps with practiced ease. He even went so far as to set up brand new traps around the door to help make the room that much more of a strong hold of inconvenience and irritation. Woe be tide whomever was next assigned Zac Bantock as a roommate, they had some rather colorful shoes to fill.
Returning to his desk he put away the pieces of thread, the extra ink reservoirs and the extra seam ripper that he hadn’t in the end needed, he wondered if he should use it anyhow just in case. Rather a shame that he couldn’t make people take their shoes off before entering, he’d have lined the mouth of the room with jacks… he made a small note to buy gorilla glue and then stopped. A whole separate plan had just lit up embers in the back of his mind, he knew what he needed to do to get his focus back.
Using his chair he fished on top of the wall mounted shelves and pulled down something he’d stashed there back at the beginning of his ‘time with Dem’, he looped it over his wrist and jostled it so it spun, its cardboard ring thumping against his arm like a tiny hoola hoop as he punched speed dial 3.
“Dem… yeah it’s Zac… I thought we might meet up again soon… maybe tonight?”
He smirked at the roll of duct tape looped over his arm and plotted his winning strategy.
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Posted: Thu Dec 23, 2010 7:39 pm
Visions of.... sugarplums? --
The snow globe was heavy in his hands; he didn’t want it… he told himself that over and over again as he had with every step he had made on his return from the mall where he had won the infernal thing.
It was familiar, the shapes, and the colors, the tiny figure inside that did a slow sad turn over and over again as the music plinked out in tiny sad notes. It should not have been as memorable as it was, but each note hooked tiny fingers into his thoughts till he found himself winding it again and letting it play, the little princess doing her slow sad dance over and over again. He caught himself after the fifth time, fingers closed around the little brass key as he had already started to wind it again. It played a single ‘plink’ as though pleading him to twist the key and finish its song again.
What was –wrong- with him? He set it down, he intended to slam it down actually but it twisted in his chest when he did, damaging that would be like crushing a small bird in your hand. He had drive, ambition, even had proved himself at times to be cruel and uncaring about the fate that befell others… but he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
He picked it up again almost without thinking and ran a hand over the cool glass and then over each petal of the lotus.
He was just studying it, no harm in that. The queen had dismissed them certainly but there was no harm at all in being absolutely certain. The queen wasn’t –infallible- after all… else she would have known that the crystals bonded. Every ruler needed –some- help from dedicated and driven followers. He could certainly assist her on that front! He felt more satisfied and pulled it to him and wandered to the window to lean against the cold and lightly frosted panes….and then blinked.
He must be crazy… or dreaming. Maybe both…
He could swear he just saw a tiny woman in a tutu dart past the window. She danced, swirled with a gust of wind and pirouetted with a tiny but enthusiastic wave and then vanished from view leaving him to make nose and finger prints against the glass as he tried to stare after her without quite opening the window and letting in the cold air… or potentially other tinier ballerina.
One thing was for certain, after seeing that, he wasn’t going to have ANY eggnog, or be watching any of the Charles Dickens’s Christmas specials, the last thing he needed on his mind was wondering if the ghost of Christmas past was going to appear to him as a dying glow stick.
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Posted: Fri Dec 24, 2010 7:32 pm
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Posted: Thu Dec 30, 2010 6:43 pm
The Best laid Plans -
Zac sat in the middle of the floor of the empty dorm room, it was normally so neat and organized, but now… now it was strewn with papers, little jotted notes, hasty sketches, measurements and the like. All in great detail, all carefully and precisely recorded in painstaking and exquisite detail.
Not a lick of It was useful… he’d decided that hours ago as he plucked through them, page after page after page as he wrote his short hand to long hand to try and pull from it some new and vital revelation that would give him the key to finally being able to trap Sailor Lyra…
He couldn’t focus, too many other things drifting through his head, unanswered phone calls, nagging phone calls, long conversations with his mother on how it was ‘just a phase’ anyhow, and he hadn’t even bothered answering her because these days he was sure of so few things, even then what once had seemed to be solid ground felt as though it had turned to sand under his feet and was sliding away through some enormous hour glass. Relationships… friends’… family… FEELINGS, god-forsaken feelings that dug there fingers into cold facts and turned them into a knot of sticky confusion and disuse.
He took a handful of papers and flung them away from himself and dug thorough more papers to uncover his notebook and started writing again, half formed plans flowed onto the paper in abnormally disorganized patches. Half reconciled thoughts on the crimson crystal, what plans he had for it, what it was capable of, who could he trust, drawing arrows to things that were so utterly unrelated as to be absurd. Lyra, her attacks, her height, her weight… that CAT, with a large circle drawn about it and then crossed through with such vigor that it tore the paper. Normally that would have arrested him in his tracks but he continued writing, almost furious, maddened with the need to try and lay his thoughts to order when they seemed to refuse all such instruction or desire.
What about Beth… half sister, his father? THEIR father, not the man he had always thought, always BELIEVED to be his father… and yet the man didn’t seem to care a jot more; after all he was just another sign of his infidelity, foolishness. His Aunt…dead… Scheelite’s fault…DEMY’S fault… would any of this ever have come to light but for the removal of that star seed? Part of him still wished that particular tragedy had struck closer to home… how much simpler it would have been if it had been HIS mother whom had died…wretched woman, slowly drowning herself in the bottom of a bottle
Adira… Kirin… Beth… Lina… Faya… he clutched his head in his hands and bent forward till his head rested against the cool tiles and tried not to swear. Too many thoughts, not enough plans… he had to do something, or surely he would go mad.
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Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 4:29 pm
Avatar -
Strange events, could things even be called strange anymore? He rubbed his eyes and stared out the window, he couldn’t see them right now, but he could imagine the strange ‘things’ that were pin wheeling above the other school. They didn’t feel ‘normal’… not like Senshi and not like ‘them’… they just were, like nightmares or shadows sprung to life, lovecrafian horrors with unknowable psychologies and intents.
He was sure there was more to it, but he held only a few pieces of the puzzle in his hand, he lacked anything that would allow him to make any leap beyond “its Elyison’, he could assume all he wanted, flying creatures after winning that field where they all flew? Hardly a fantastic leap to tie those two events together, but that they attacked Senshi and Nega both was…unique and unpleasant.
He closed his eyes and shifted his shoulders slightly with a deep sigh. His back hurt where he had been clawed, the burns hurt, the bruises were already fading because he heeled faster than he once had…but the memory of them made him stiff and aching all the same.
What would happen when they returned… battles remained to be fought and won, questions were left unanswered. Would this same thing happen if the Senshi had taken the field? He couldn’t answer that, there was no answer until the next battle and part of him was filled with apprehension for that day if only because they lacked that information. Had they unleashed something more terrible than they realized on the world? What about the ‘radius’ that they seemed to prefer?
He glanced down at his lap and unfolded the paper he had printed out, a well distanced map on which he had marked red X’s denoting attacks that he had found mentioned, internet, school gossip and the occasional
Borrowing of a CB radio so he could listen to what he could of the police scan channel, simple kit really, he’d picked it up at Radio-hut. Meadowview… that was Beth’s school too, it made him anxious to know that they were there, day and night. They put her at risk and that was unacceptable, He was even tempted to send his Yoma to watch her, but … that too was a risk. “Christ…” he cursed and stared down at the map.
Idly his finger traced over it tapping the other two ‘main’ schools. Hillworth, and Crystal… Hillworth, hmmm… in one corner he marked a ‘H’…and then a small red squiggle, in the other, a C …with a small uneven blue wave. It was a foolish thought, but it was at the same time like being able to play chess with his future self. A little bet… ‘this is what I’m thinking’ and in the future he would grin…or call himself a DAMN fool.
After all, there were other school’s in town, other places that might very well match the idle thoughts that marched like soldiers though the back of his brain… it might not even be schools they circled about next.
One thing he did wonder though, two more guardians… would they each mark the points of a triangle? Was the center of that speculated pyramid… somehow related to Elysium itself? Stupid… stupid thoughts, he took things too far and shouldn’t, but he could not let it go… could not stop gnawing at that ‘bone’ until the next battle was fought…
Till then, all he could do is watch and wonder.
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Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 6:02 am
General Solos --
-Grace -
Words… just words, they clawed at his consciousness one after the other. Hospital, Audrey… critical…
More and more…worse and worse, he closed his eyes to try and squeeze out the memories of the sounds, click click click of the monitors, the smell of it, the horrid impersonal crawling humanity of it all. None of them cared, they were paid bodies, paid corpses who stomped around in white shoes and coughed into the same hands that poked needles into skin that had turned as translucent as parchment because there was no one there to stop them.
All that mattered was the bottom line, same as the rest of this twisted up world; no one cared unless it was they who lay on the pavement bleeding, cry rape and people walked by. Cry fire…people came to watch…cry murder…well…
//I loved her. And because of it she has to die.//
Bright blue eyes so full of anger, so full of self-loathing and self-denial that they might very well have believed every word he said. Love… such a deep and treacherous poison; it tasted so sweet till it clawed you up inside. Polite words though he could hardly feel the saying of them, he felt thick and numb like his mouth was full of cotton and his skin felt as though it were crawling with ants.
There was a cold pit inside his stomach as he turned and headed for the door…
He made his way down the nearly empty halls on auto pilot, he didn’t remember the stairs, the faces he passed… or the words exchanged.
None of them mattered… nothing mattered right now but one thing. One simple thing, he would go to her, his Captain, his General, his mentor… if they would let him in he would stand by her until all thought subsided, until nothing remained but the purpose that had taken root inside him. The single-minded determination to do something of ‘worth’ for her, even if she never saw it, never opened her eyes again.
It was a selfish want, a personal need but in the end it was at her feet where he would lay it… a shrine ringed with blood and daisies.
//Her love is grace itself…//
He waited for the bus, as though nothing had changed, when in truth the world had shaken to its core… he climbed the steps and paid the toll and wondered why he hadn’t started crying. He wondered at that moment if he could, or if it simply wasn’t right for them to do so. Perhaps they had lost that right.
No more grace… they had fallen from it… each and every one of them. This is where heaven ended…this is where hell began.
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Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2011 6:27 pm
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Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2011 5:09 pm
Back Solo - Sense of Direction
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“You will fight, and fight, and fight, until these things become instinct. Until thinking is no longer required and your body responds because fighting is all it knows. It is your decision if that is the path you wish to choose, Captain, or if you will serve the Negaverse in another way.”
The words haunted him as much as the aches and pains with each step he took away totting his shattered dignity with him. He couldn’t do this… he just couldn’t DO this. His fist slammed into a wall and seconds later he was cursing and pressing it under his other arm
How fortunate that his punches were still lacking or he might have broken something. He closed his eyes with a sigh and vanished from the Negaverse, back to his room, back to sanctuary and solitude and things as structured as his notes. He sat there in the middle of them and closed his eyes, rocking slightly to try and keep off the worst of the bruises.
People… every sheet of paper was someone, nega, Senshi… civilian…
Every sheet of paper was a life that he was turning into chains of information. Facts both simple and complex, segments of their lives as caught in a cobweb of gossiping eyes, confirmed by sparse interventions, sharp eyes peering over hot tea in coffee houses.
Sometimes, just to listen he’d bring his most boring looking tome and a few note books with pre-written notes on the topics like he was studying for a big test. It was harder, because of his height. But the books normally turned people away, who were they to question ‘an introduction to psychology’ or ‘illustrated grey’s anatomy’. Both interesting, both available at the “Mega-book” bookstore for a surprisingly reasonable fee, he was even fascinated by them, even if he struggled to remember the vast NUMBER of names and things in the anatomy book. More so he found it harder for him to make great use of it… short of learning acupuncture he really had little interest in removing a heart or kidney…
He made a small note to ask about the formation of a Nega Med-team, Senshi had magic healers; they had to eat energy that in turn, drained their resources. Something to hold over the badly injured … could be invaluable.
He rubbed his temples again remembering each impact, each precise swing of her arm… she was so… elegant, amazing, if you traced the path of each swing it accounted for the least effort absolutely necessary, conserving her power and strength and giving her ultimate brutality. No matter how talented anyone who came after her might be… even wolfram would never replace what she was. She was… she was battle, everyone had a roll, everyone had a place but him it seemed.
He sighed and finally stood, his joints aching with every move he made and stripped down and grabbed his robe to head to the showers hoping to clear his head. She was what he should be… or so he thought… so he warred with.
He had to be better than just –himself, didn’t he?
He had to at least be capable of the things they were… didn’t he?
He cast a long look back at his notes, there was an answer there, somewhere… he felt it deep In his gut, but just then, he was worried he was still ‘thinking too much’, too willing to try and follow in the steps or Uranophane, Obsidian, Wolfram and everyone else who did better in battles.
So hard at times, to turn the clarity of thought and vision, back on yourself when you thought the world said you must go one way…
So hard to admit you were walking another path all together.
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Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 5:33 pm
Day: ??? - a few day’s hunt into the BMC
He sat hunched over the maps, layers of them printed out at some cost on huge sheets of semi-translucent paper. Blue X’s marked out points of interest, connected by red lines. Post it notes littered the page like dried and curling yellow leaves in an early fall of thoughts with small snail tracks in blue ink.
Fingers sank into his hair and kneaded into his scalp as though by doing so he could massage out the answers, like some thought would be formed from the mixture of information that lay before him like the pieces of a puzzle.
Everything he needed was here, or enough of it that he should be able to make an intuitive jump towards the next possible location.
But he couldn’t… he just couldn’t find enough clues in what they had gathered to piece together the nagging thoughts that lingered in the back of his mind. They hadn’t found anything conclusive about where they might have been taken. Even trying to triangulate from the scraps of uniform left around the city had done them no good. For all he knew, one of those scraps of uniform could have been left right on top of the place they were looking for.
What was he missing!? The thought was maddening as he tore back one of the huge sheets and rolled it to one side, a tidal wave of notes and hexes to examine once again some of the cities oldest architecture. There was always some chance that they had set up a strong hold in the sewer ways, the abandoned pipe lines interlaced by enormous steam pipes that still honeycombed the city, he was honestly pondering their usefulness for his own work if he could establish that they were clear, after all… everyone took to the rooftops.
Nothing, nothing rose from the hen scratches and short hand, nothing seemed to stand out from anything else and it was beyond frustrating. He had to do more… he would beat this because he wanted to, because he needed to…
Because he had to…
He took a deep breath and re-layered the prints, smoothing a hand over the paper, its sandy-waxy texture almost soothing under his finger tips as he stilled himself and re-focused on his work.
What stood out from the rest? What here caused him to pause…was there –anything-, they couldn’t be that good, they could not be –perfect- because that wasn’t possible. Frustration surged again for a brief moment before he froze suddenly and rapped a knuckle sharply against the desk. A lance of pain shot through it but he wasn’t focused on that. He just pointed at the maps grinning and then chuckled.
“Oh…god yes… stupid….STUPID.” he said and picked up a harmless chunk of glass that rested on his desk, rendered for the time being useless because one of it’s brethren had been sacrificed to Ares, of the very same faction he was currently hunting. He had the tools to find them, he could find the missing details that would lead him and his ‘team’ to them and he would use their own faces, and those of their comrades to do it.
Now… all he could do was pray he was not too late.
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Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 5:28 am
BMC Solo -
Frustration was nothing new… trying to find people who knew anything about the BMC and their ‘Operation Rota’ was harder than he cared to admit. What had he even learned?
He knew they were being abused, tortured… even the Negaverse hadn’t stooped to torture, and they were so often touted as the ‘evil’ faction by the Senshi. The irony had not escaped him but it disgusted him to no small degree.
He’d learned a cat was somehow suppressing the auras of the missing, something he hadn’t known COULD be done, he had even tried searching, to no avail for the aura of a cat.
The closest he’d come to finding them had been the night when he’d imitated Ares, only to run into Ares herself. The lieutenant he’d been speaking to had headed in a fairly definite direction, but that too had seemed to fade into a Dead end. He had no way of being positive that he didn’t have to account for side streets, for dead ends and the like. The city was just too big.
Tanzanite, Wolframite, Dioptase, Uranophane, and the two lieutenants Helicase and Primase. He wondered if he should be preparing already to visit their funerals, and how to burry some of them. Tanzanite with her monstrous arm would never pass unnoticed into a civilian Cemetery, would she be encased in crystal as a lesson to them all?
Nausia twisted in his stomach and his shoulders ached as he stooped again over the maps. He shoved aside papers and notes of the confirmed BMC members that were being tracked to little avail.
He rubbed his temples and glanced out the window before stooping to grab at the grocery bag he had smuggled into the dorms. Scheelite would have been proud of the contents, but he thought he’d need them for his next effort to find them. Every time he went out it could ultimately be his last chance to find them.
Why he took this task so personally he couldn’t say, he just knew he had to try. Everyone was trying but somehow it felt like it would be his own fault if he didn’t uncover the vital clues, or try to. Somehow if they died, their blood was on his hands.
What if they found them, what if they were being lead into a slaughter? What if the first trap was now the bait in a much larger trap… of course it was. The BMC was too clever by half if they had already captured the likes of Tanzinite and wolframite, not only bright and clever; they were also dangerous in a fight.
Add to that people like Uranophane, with her propensity to fight with Yoma rather than engage herself… why hadn’t she gotten away? What could they have done to lure in someone like her? He rubbed at his temples and pulled out one of the cans of ‘Rockstar’ and popped the lid, it launched tiny flecks of sweet into the air as the liberated contents let off their own personal fourth of July.
“Demy forgive me… if you could use the crystal I might have sent you out to do this.” He said to the can, as though it were some small shrine to his one time roommate.
He made a face and downed the contents as fast as he could; he paused only to breathe and shudder at the amount of sugar and caffeine he was imbibing. Not only would he need it to stay awake, but also he thought he would need it to affect the personality best suited to interrogate a very deliberate next target.
“See you soon sailor Lyra… I pray you have the answers we need.”
He spoke to the window glass, staring out over the city, it’s heartbeat of moving cars and neon lights seemed distant, evasive as the information he sought, but it was his city, THEIR city…and he wouldn’t stop now.
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Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:38 pm
BMC Solo -
“As you wish…” He said his scowl darker than his starseed.
“You made two grievous errors just now… shame you won’t live long enough to rationalize them.” He snapped and swung at her with the punch he’d been aiming for Lyra. So much better when you weren’t struggling to merge your feelings of hate for Senshi with love of family, he could channel ALL that hate into one place.
Well… most of it. Scheelite was going to get sucker punched for giving them the information to pull this off.
His punch clipped her, probably because he was not well known for his fisticuffs, certainly not for his reach. She spat a globule of blood onto the toe of his boot and then launched her own attack. She drove a punch into his already cracked rib and he doubled over in agony. “Bitchhhhhh…” He snarled and reached out to try and snag at her Fuku so she couldn’t get away again, he had no idea after all if she could use her power again or if everything she had already done would have tapped her out.
She drove an elbow between his shoulder blades and drove him to his knees, she laughed, a violent and terrible thing filled with pleasure at the pain of others. Anyone who thought that only the Negaverse could fall to such depths hadn’t done their homework.
Zink slammed a punch into the side if her knee and she screamed, things inside it tore and it gave under her with all the support of a noodle, something had cracked under the blow. She was magically a tank, but physically, even as a ‘tidbit’ he was stronger.
He reached for her star seed, his fingers even making it just past her chest before she sank a punch home across his jaw and he spun to one side, he thought his teeth felt loose after that, but nothing seemed to have come free, at least not yet.
She hit him again, or tried to, he managed to put up an arm and deflect the punch from its intended target and responded by twisting back into a punch of his own, she folded over this time, and for once the crack of ribs under his hand was satisfying.
She gasped for air like a fish and he reached into his pocket to pull forth the indigo crystals that so resembled star seeds. He tucked them neatly inside her gaping codfish of a mouth before grabbing a hank of hair and her jaw and clopping her mouth shut on the fragile things, “Breathe Deep…” He hissed as she choked and wheezed and dribbled blood from the tiny fragments of what had moments before contained the gas.
She clawed at her throat, maybe she had swallowed some, maybe she was more sensitive to it, maybe… m aybe… but it didn’t matter and he didn’t care. There was only the fight and the ultimate goal. His hand vanished into her chest and he made sure…utterly sure that she was dead. Her crystal was warm in his shaking hand, but glancing up towards Ever, the shock in his eyes, that cold loss… knowing he didn’t yet understand, somehow he couldn’t meet that pained gaze….
He glanced at Scheelite, his expression a dead blank, shut down somewhere inside like the night he’d attacked Castor, this was not where Zink was at his best… he was functional… but after that?
“Glad you’re ok…” he managed hoarsely and tucked the second star seed away… two… one night. He’d never done that before… he half prayed he never would again.
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Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:22 am
Like hope ---
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They had taken Lyra with them… he’d taken Lyra with them, under orders. No one knew… he hadn’t found the time to pass on the information… who she was… why this was suddenly harder for him.
But she was here… she would be turned or she would die a slow and tortured death like that which she, and the other members of the BMC had tried to force upon so many.
He shuddered and folded his arms around himself and tried not to think of what he had seen. It was one thing to expect the carnage; it was another to inflict it… even for a short time. Yet what he had seen, what he had smelled, the very air so heavy with filth and blood that it was like a yoma, unseen but its presence felt, terrible and heavy bearing down on the senses.
What he had seen when he entered Uranophane’s chambers… the rats… god he hated them now. He could still see small and wicked black eyes, curved teeth and little ‘hands’ far too human for comfort.
Lyra had been part of that, and that meant Beth had been part of that, how…how could they have twisted her so. How could they have turned someone so sweet and so kind? Someone who had lasted SO long against the wretched nature of the world and turned her into that. They had turned her into a monster that would have better suited the horror films that so fascinated him. Not the ones where there was some form of twisted morality that straddled the line of right and wrong… but the ones where there was only mindless blood and screamed justifications for behavior that couldn’t even be called human.
Yes… they might turn that on her, Beth…HIS Beth, might find herself a ruin, a victim of her own participation in a terrible crime.
How could they spend so much time scolding him for being ‘judge’… when they were so quick to judge themselves, so hasty to justify and so blind to anything that did not stack neatly in their razor edged ‘morality’. Their blind want for conquest and power that would ultimately destroy the world….
How could they do that and have done such things… he might never understand.
Lina… he didn’t realize he’d spoken her name to the still night air till it was too late. He moved a hand to cover the offending mouth as though the simple utterance of her name might summon the woman she had become; brash…angry… as judgmental as the rest of them. How could she, how COULD she have betrayed them, how could she have left them. No… how could she have left HIM…
He sank to his knees on the roof top, numb to the world, dead to everything but the hollowness that threatened to consume him. She thought he would ‘see’… she was so sure of it that some part of him questioned it. Was she right… were –they- right?
They were not thoughts that one survived, hey were not thoughts to be uttered or overheard by any. They were traitors thoughts, questions that should never have been contemplated yet there they were.
She’d poisoned him as surely as she had betrayed him, sunk terrible questions into his thoughts that he never gave a moments grace before, but that now haunted him, with her voice whispering in his ears. // Where was the queen//
He bent double till his brow pressed against the cool marble trim of the building and his shoulders shook, wracked with the sobs he dared not share with anyone else. He had to be strong; he had to be a brave face because he was the one they were supposed to look up to. He was a General; he shouldn’t ever have questioned, he shouldn’t want… on any level to reach out for her.
He still had the Negaverse, he had that family and he would cling to it in desperation as one by one the Senshi stripped away what he loved. He had Scheelite, Ilmenite…. Tanzinite… Wolfram… more. He clung to the names like fragile threads that held him dangling over the abyss of despair, fear… and loss.
Lina… she called him Number one… she still called him that and it hurt so much. It was too familiar, he –wanted- it too much and wanting was too close to hope. It was something you reached for, something beautiful and frail that cut as deep as razors.
But god help him he wanted it…
He wanted it even now…
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Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2011 9:55 am
The Wise old Owl –
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It was a foolish risk, it was a stupid choice, but he needed…something. Something had to sooth the ache, something had to make it better… had to make it feel less like she was gone forever.
It wasn’t hard to figure out which room was, or had been hers; he could see through the curtains just enough to make an educated guess. He appeared first, late in the evening when the lights had finally gone out, in the tree that her Room overlooked. He remembered the pale blue walls from the riskier day trips. He remembered just being able to see her bed from the neighbor’s chimney top, a risky perch but he’d felt more sure it was her room when he saw the daisy print coverlets and pillow that rested on that full-size bed.
He lingered a long moment, feeling the wind push at him as though it wanted him to simply fall, crashing through the branches till he was nothing more than the broken remains of ‘some boy’ who’d tried peeking into the wrong window.
It was a morbid thought and so hard to push aside, too easy to believe that the world had turned against him for his ‘crimes’ as the world was so quick to remind him that he had committed.
He took a deep breath and reappeared within her room, he stood there for a long moment, breath held as though he expected to find someone else already there… already waiting. Nothing happened, no alarm, no cry of shock… not even her voice, though he could all too easily imagine that it belonged there.
He let his eyes adjust to the darkness for a while, he wasn’t sure he should risk even the small desk lamp that perched on her enormous desk. He examined it as quietly as he could but all it contained were some smattering of boxes. Nothing that he could have clung to, nothing that really said ‘hers’.
He glanced around and saw a day bed, covered in pillows and plush toys, some new some old, he reached a hand to brush over the stuffed plush tufts of the great horned owls, the smooth velveteen of a painted barn owl. Normally he found the latter beautiful, but right now the black button eyes reminded him far too much of the rats that had boldly scoured the room where Uranophane had been kept.
He turned back to the full size bed, he sat on it, gingerly as though he had just entered a shrine. It was a strange thought, a strange place… what would his mother say to know that the girl he had been ‘dating’ in her mind, was missing. He remembered their plunge into the pile of his own stuffed mountain; pandas as she tried to teach him to better defend himself.
How disappointed she must be… he remained, torn apart and conflicted. Confused and broken and still capable in a fight only because he lashed out unpredictably, because he rendered himself hard to find and made those he fought against suffer with his smoke.
He glanced around the room again, trying to meet all the glass and plastic eyes was impossible, and he finally gave up but not before realizing.. ‘Lady O.’, Lady Obfuscation whom he had given her that day that resulted in a plush-pile dive… was missing.
He stood and glanced at the higher shelves, searching, his heart beating in his chest but she was nowhere to be seen. Damn hope… planting again a tiny seed in his chest, he could feel it burying in to places it didn’t belong but he couldn’t fight it.
He did see one thing though that caught his eye, an very old owl, it’s eyes scratched with years of love to an almost cataract haze. It’s material threadbare in places till he could almost see the cotton fill, One ‘tufted’ ear flopped to one side giving it an inquisitive look, while the other remained upright like a tin soldier.
He reached up with a shaking hand and pulled it down, clutching it to his chest. He had never felt as vulnerable as he had these last few days… so exposed. He closed his eyes and breathed deep of the years of subtle smells that had become part of the fabric…even the slightest whiff of her soaps and perfumes.
Somewhere in the bowls of the house someone stirred, someone woke and padded quickly down the hall in bare feet, woken perhaps by some dream, or some small sound. Perhaps they were hopeful to see their daughter. No doubt they hoped for answers… but as the lights flicked on, a harsh awakening to the still of the evening, the only thing that greeted them was an empty room… and one, inexplicably missing owl.
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Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 5:24 am
No rest for the Wicked –
The battle raged on, he found himself again in mirrored halls, there, he fought himself and won, but he also lost because it was truly himself had had fought there.
His own face twisted in surprise and agony as he launched himself backwards through one of the great dark mirrors, its reflection too perfect somehow, too real.
The glass seemed to fall endlessly, a shower that never stopped, reflective daggers that exploded into a dangerous tsunami of tiny cutting fragments. What had been his doppelganger was little more now, than meat… the smell was terrible, though they say you can’t smell in dreams. The color worse…
He stumbled backwards from it, horrified, he saw in the remains of himself everything he had done to Castor, crucified… lacerated now as well, an empty shell of a man who bled darkness and dark crimson. Was he right, was he wrong…
//Where was the Queen?//
Her voice echoed all around him like a ghost, he turned expecting to see her but saw nothing, nothing but the smooth surface of a mirror in which he no longer cast a reflection. It showed only the ruined thing he had just turned away from. So then was he a ghost?
His hands drifted over the cool surface, almost desperate as though he might find some small truth that said it was a trick, some illusion, but he found no comfort there, no peace… so he turned and ran.
//I’m a Senshi….//
Beth’s voice now… he covered his ears desperate. He couldn’t hear this again; he wished he had never known. He ‘wished he had never’ for quite a lot of things. Never opened up, never let people in… people who were now rubble, a world that was now only dust and ashes on a sea of sand.
“STOP IT!!!” He screamed at the darkness, as though that would make the terrible thoughts go away, but all he heard were the sounds of small rat feet in the darkness and he ran, horrified.
He ran strait into the arms of Scheelite, who lifted a piece of glass, and explaining with a smile said he didn’t want to fight any more, and cut his own throat. Nothing slowed or stemmed the bleeding; all it did was stain his hands red as the light faded from acid green eyes… and when it was over, he turned into a tiny phoenix, flapped its bright burning wings and flew away never once turning back.
He stumbled back to his feet staring at his hands, and after the small bird and felt Lina’s arms curve around him. “Shush now, you’ll understand soon…” She assured him, her voice so confident, even happy. But then there was Castor… and she was gone, running into his arms all smiles. He folded her in his great black wings, cast a terrible smirk and turned her to a pillar of ice.
A great scaled hand closed gently over his shoulder, turning him to meet Dark purple eyes, beautiful, sudden and terrible. “General Queen!” He stammered, still adjusting to the title… still stammering over her Death, she was their miracle, once she had almost died, the queen had Saved her… this time she had died and…
//Where was the Queen?//
“Those…are traitorous thoughts General” She said soothing a hand over his cheek, the great clawed hand came to rest, almost lovingly against his ribs.
“You know better than that…” She said her expression darkening, and then twisting into a shadowed and crazed grin as her monstrous hand tore through muscle and bone as though taking a bite of an apple.
His blood and more vital things spilled out over her dark and cutting hand and hit the floor with a sound like rain as she held him close, drinking in his screams as the parasitic hand devoured him from within, the thick wet sounds of chewing mingled with his own half choked efforts to breathe more than his own blood as it finally closed around his star seed, yanking it free as he tumbled, finally soundless to the ground, his body twitching in small jerks, refusing to believe that it was dying, that he was dead.
“Wake up General…” She hissed, as his eyes rolled back in his head, out of air…out of time…
He jerked awake and stifled a very real scream into his pillow as he folded all together poorly around the broken rib. The very real world source of his dreams about ‘arm’, it was making it hell to sleep at night.
Drenched in sweat and shaking, he finally gave up on trying, staggering half hearted to find his things for a hot shower to try and wash away the night terrors. If he couldn’t sleep… he’d just keep working till he no longer cared.
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