There's always a little more innocence left to lose.
Word Count: 2869
The last week passed with a subtle rise in tension. Faustite's intentions grew clear to Umber just as Umber's ulterior motives realized suspicion in Faustite. In each spar, frequent as they were, the lieutenant oft expected Umber to execute him, but no such blow came. Whenever the opportunity arose, and it rose with terrible frequency, Umber only halted his killing stroke in a frightfully smooth pause. The motion subtly abandoned, Faustite would look to him in stark anger, and find that he could not read Umber's expression. Such a realization fueled the brunt of his frustration, and in future incidents, he forced himself to scan for any hint, any slipping fragment of Umber's second plan for him.
But none came. In that week, none sprang forth from his cruelly blank face. Faustite could find nothing among its reaches, in all the rare shows of expression that the man deigned to dispense to him. Faustite started to doubt himself, doubt his suspicions, and each passing day fueled the crippling thought that Umber wanted nothing more than Faustite's training success.
Soon, Umber qualified that suspicion. Last Wednesday, when searching to stab his house key into its lock, he found the whole of reality distorted at once and realized he stood facing off against the captain he was to meet. The captain - the one that would spearhead another portion of his training and clarify all ills he held toward energy draining. He realized, then, that Umber was searching for a better fit. He looked for a new superior for Faustite, one that clung vehemently to the last vestiges of his humanity. One that selfishly guarded all secrets of himself, all identifying factors, with the expectation that they, too, might meet an unpleasant fate at the hands of such generals. A hostage, Faustite might say.
The last few weeks presented other issues to sully his plans - while his adamant hatred for his general faltered with the diminishing of his suspicions, and his fettering bruises bloomed and spread with each more frequent training session, another force presented itself in the night's depths. Formless black rose up in the visage of viscous, black oil, and it subsumed all it touched. It coated the beleaguered warehouse with its sticky touch, its will pervading all who stepped in its pools - Faustite included. And when the creature expelled out its clutching waves to all in its path, Faustite himself was drowned in its ire. He could still feel the slinking darkness slither through his mouth, along his teeth, and beneath his tongue in an endless probing.
But even the deep-seated violation therein was not the first of memories to come to mind. It shook him, surely, and for many nights afterward he suffered from seeping nightmares as reality boiled over with more of the dark oil. He slept through classes in a dreamless state afterward, ever garnering his teachers' disapprovals. Deeper into the waking hour crept a different wretched fear, one that stemmed from the fleeting glimpses witnessed in the throes of his aggressor's oily grip. These feverdreams seized him at points of lowest vigilance, reminding him ad nauseam of a most heinous betrayal.
He knew not the story behind the brief memories, but he knew what he felt of it - an unconscionably ecstatic thrill, one that only heightened in the presence of imminent danger, wanting the coming denial, begging for it in a deeply counterposed argument of wills, and waiting with bated breath for the cold sword's descent. He recalled each shuddering, sucking breath. He felt, even in those moments, blood flooding through his lungs, his breath, his very voice. And some part of him felt satisfied for it.
With these burning memories at the fore of his mind, Faustite endured his next training session with his general. Each cleaving blow that flung his slight form across the rooftop's width shocked him with another abject denial - fingers splayed in his mind's eye, hand reaching desperately for the thin, white cloth over chest - and he struggled further with maintaining focus.
Umber noticed it as well, and paused to stand over his lieutenant with a pressing gaze. "You're distracted." A declaration, a surety, simply by looking over Faustite's face.
And Faustite hated how his gaze betrayed him in his mind's far reaches to memories shackled to him. What right had Umber to pry into such affairs? "I'm fine," he answered at last and pushed himself from the ground, past Umber's outstretched hand, with wrists sore from throws and blows.
"No." The general remained unfazed by the childish denial. "You're not."
The wicked excitement from his earlier memory seized him in its contagious grasp, plunging through him the cold mark of the sword, hilting betrayal into the core part of his being, and Faustite sprung for his chance. With Umber stilled, Faustite reached for his general's back, hand slick with chaos, fingers splaying for that brown swath --
Umber spun and caught the offending wrist in a crushing grip, his arm turning with the motion to strain Faustite's slim bones against one another. He pressed forward, thrusting a knee into Faustite's back with enough brutal efficiency to rob him of his balance and send the boy to the ground. Umber landed a shin across the lieutenant's back as he knelt, the offending hand still in his clutches. He raised the pressure on his wrist. "Explain yourself." his icy gaze fell on the boy beneath him, expecting answers at the behest of Faustite's own pending misery.
"Like you'd understand it," Faustite choked out, breathing heavy against sticky gravel. Some of the smaller flecks crawled into his mouth, bringing with them the unshakeable feeling of dripping, oily tendrils snaking through his being. His breaths came ragged, wanting. "You're the one rooting around in people's chests, looking to pluck their souls like wretched fruit. You stand over men and watch their bodies give out with a gaze as stony as the statues on this building. Empathy eluded you a long time ago and you must've been proud to see it off. What would you do about it if I told you? File a report on it? Imprison me? Shut me away in the bowels of the Negaverse like you did with your brother?"
Umber faltered not under the words. He waited, expectant for answers, for some viable word amongst the drivel expelled. As he waited, he smelled metal in the air and watched it bubble forth in a fine froth from Faustite's lips. Yet the words he waited for never came. An answering twist of the wrist ensued, and he looked on as Faustite's face contorted under the pressure.
"There it is. Cold, unfeeling indifference. What a joy it must be for the sovereigns that oversee you." With the pain came another reminder - the redhead looked on coldly, her ire frozen in her eyes. Still, Faustite clamored to deduce the purpose behind such a twisted memory. He felt delirious, intoxicated by the dregs of this mad sickness. He felt his careful demeanor slipping away amongst the rocks and detritus, out into a sea of black. He starved inside where the slick oil touched him earlier, and the last vestiges of his mind pleaded ceaselessly to reign himself in, to abandon such dark aims.
This isn't working. Umber rotated his wrist against the mounting pressure and felt the resultant crack echo up his own muscles. Now no resistance remained in the hand he held, having twisted about far past the natural level. Unfortunate. He's grown more obstinate with them. I need another plan.
Faustite swallowed against their tides and cleared his throat once more. Keening pain pierced the opaque fog that forced his reason down. He could think, though only with every thudding heartbeat that pervaded his broken wrist. With each breath, his consciousness wavered under the pain. He needed to speak quickly. "Something happened at a warehouse a few weeks ago - sending out those auric signals. It looked like a ball of tar in the shape of a man. It… Drowned the place. Everyone there sunk into these pools of black oil. Every time it touched you, the oil just soaked into your skin.
"Then they killed it, but the oil stuck around. You could feel it moving in you - searching for a place to burrow." Faustite felt the now-stabilizing grip on his hand slip, and he loosed a sharp shriek as another splintering shock of pain sieged his body.
Umber stood, qualmless. "You should've mentioned it earlier."
"Why," he rasped against the graveled floor. "So you could write another impotent report? You bore me, Umber."
"No. You would write the report. I would take you to the infirmary. We don't know what kind of lasting damage it caused to your body." He paused, then looked over shoulder toward his lieutenant's battered frame. "But the damage to your mind is obvious enough. You're young, and still malleable. It influenced you." And ruined my research. I'll have to resort to the older methods.
Faustite smiled against the ground. Pain forced a cold sweat upon him, and nausea burgeoned in his stomach where he could no longer fight it. "Yes, of course. I'm so exquisitely compromised. What would you do about that, I wonder?" Slowly, he coaxed his shaken body from the ground, with his good hand pressed flat against the gravel. His thin arm trembled terribly under the burden, when already so drained from the day's training. "What would you do with a ruined lieutenant?"
But Umber started toward the edge of the parapet, unsympathetic to Faustite's goading. He paused but once to check the ground for any lines of sight to his drop. "Get to a hospital. Have them set your arm. I'll meet with you again in a week." He dropped to the ground then, his uniform melting from him effortlessly as he straightened.
He needed time to process such information - and time was short unless he made efforts to lengthen it. As Shale, he could pace the city unnoticed, sift through the new information about a blackened entity that tainted lesser minds, and suss out his next plan of action. As Shale, pacing through the streets meant time for determining who he would contact about such an instance and what they might say. Xenotime stood out to him, surely - she would have a few words of advice for what may come of the lieutenant. Cinnabar too, perhaps. And Ashanite, with his experiences on the side of Order, might supply another needed opinion on the matter. Would he wait for Faustite to elaborate more clearly on what happened? No, he supposed not. Informing the other generals now would ensure that they came armed with their own questions - questions that he wouldn't have thought to ask.
Rather than join the bustling streets, Shale deviated down one of the older, weed-stricken cobblestone alleys where he might find a modicum of peace in the matter.
Yet Faustite found no peace. He found nothing more than pervasive pain and the same nagging excitement borne to him by that feverdream at the warehouse. And as he raised himself to a shaken stance, as he stretched his senses for any hint of his general, he felt himself come under siege by another insidious motivator - hunger. Its sinister coils tightened in his gut, and he knew no dish from man would sate it so. He knew it as the same one that surfaced and spoiled his Easter dinner with little warning - the one that sent him to the restroom to retch up cold bile. Having had one starseed forced upon him already from the previous hours of training, Faustite begged inwardly for a reprieve from it. But bodies, he supposed, knew no such logic.
The keening sense of excitement hunted him relentlessly while he forced himself toward the edge of the parapet. Cradling his broken wrist to himself, he looked down into the alleys, his gaze already interrupted by welling tears. They touched the stony outcropping as rain often did, and the moments of clearer vision identified another pair of targets. Behind them, one of the meek shadows coveted by the Negaverse. He departed from that point and gritted his teeth in a painful, silent howl as gravity jarred his broken bones. It will heal without another starseed, he warned himself vehemently.
But you can't subsist off of words and ideas. You can't eat morals. And there's always a little more innocence left to lose.
Faustite pressed forward, past the stalking shadow, his twin victims unaware of him. He reached for the man first, his wild black hair wrought into a ponytail that spilled down his back and threatened to thwart the lieutenant, but Faustite found that his hand passed between shoulder blades and through hair with no resistance. The man reacted then, stiffening and beginning to twist toward him, but Faustite wrenched the gem free of his chest before the man could confront him. Stepping over the body, Faustite pressed the starseed into his mouth and reached for a second victim, left unaware by the lack of a yell from the first. Temptation seized him, however, and he bit through the thin frame of the jewel in his mouth as his hand entered a second victim - a girl besieged by curly, russet hair. Her camisole left an easy window for his hand while the familiar strength of souls welled and sated his nausea.
Before the lifeless girl finished her downward tumble, the second starseed found its home between his teeth. Another crushing stroke, and Faustite felt his pain abate further while strength renewed his bones. He forced away all thought of the impending guilt, instead choosing to side with the delirious excitement that urged him on relentlessly, and breathed a hot sigh around the last splinters of crushed lives.
Agony clutched him without warning. Immediately it spread its probing fingers through his skull, out his eyes and down to his very fingers. Pressure built as agony wrenched backward, crushing him in its grasp, and sending the lieutenant to his knees at once. His wrist inflamed, his head pained him to the point where he grew convinced that his teeth were falling out, and his fingernails would suffer the same fate as they threatened to wrench themselves free of his agonized hands. Faustite relied heavily on the residual warmth of starseeds to deliver him through such pains, and they bade him well - albeit barely.
The shadow's whispery smoke wove about him with burgeoning interest. The lieutenant seldom noticed. Too ensconced was he in his own pain that the black rasp of a creature never registered to him. It was just as well; the creature never sounded his name. The creature never asked, and Faustite never agreed.
By the time the unprecedented siege ended, the starseeds still hummed their latent strength through his body. He opened eyes that he never remembered shutting. Blurred reality came into focus at a slow, drawling pace, and he flexed his fingers to test for pain. While he felt no further agonies in his joints, he caught sight of black in his periphery. He never recalled wearing his glove. Soon vision sharpened, and he found the ends of his fingers blacked with devil's nails curving out from the ends. Panic clutched him then, and he summoned to hand his crystal communicator while his mind clamored desperately for names.
Radioing the same general he failed to kill only bade disaster. He felt Umber's aura vanished when he chose to leave Faustite behind, and the lieutenant half-expected a summoning call in the moments that followed his strange revelation. He lay caught between hiding from a crime he failed to commit and seeking help he desperately needed, and warred with himself for a full minute on whether to use such a call, before he realized that no names came to mind.
It was just as well. The Negaverse could only ever infest the dead carcass of empathy when its soldiers pleaded for such mercies. With his blacked hands, could he expect anything more than the same?
