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Backdated to early November.
A young man of sixteen with disheveled, crimson hair highlighted with brown and blonde, exhaled deeply upon traversing an overpass. He had his hands buried deep in the pockets of his thick jacket and though it was dark, he could still make out the sight of his breath steaming in the chilling autumn air. It reminded him of the glimpse he caught when Elex’s wound steamed after he’d been attacked by spiders at the botanical garden. And then there was that finger that had been broken recently. Jack wondered how he had been getting along, but then he chided himself for worrying about things he had no control over when he had his own injuries to consider.
It wasn’t so much how they were healing that troubled him as it was how his parents were taking them. There had already been countless occasions where he had woken up one morning and come down to breakfast bruised and battered. At first, he’d been able to pass the damage off as the work of over-enthusiastic bullies at school, especially because some of the more minor scrapes and bumps really had been their fault. At that time, Jack had managed to convince his parents not to take action by claiming he had needed to stick up for himself and fight his own battles in his own way. His persuasion had been successful for a while until he began coming home with more serious injuries such as signs of strangulation and deep cuts.
Now, Jack had never intended to allow himself to come to harm even as a senshi. He hadn’t ever meant to play the hero; just a super-powered spectator who watched from the sidelines as the two main opposing forces attempted to destroy each other. As of late, however, the war had become more and more difficult for him to avoid. Mirrorspace itself seemed to refuse allowing its own Dark Mirror Court to remain idle long. A certain half-youma captain was also partly to blame in Sinope’s eyes, because if he hadn’t behaved so perplexingly, Sinope doubted he would have been so intrigued by him and sought him out regardless of the danger involved.
The Burnett couple wasn’t thrilled with these new developments regarding their only child having sustained damage that suggested threats on his life, particularly when they were only aware of the negative results and not the causes. They had grounded him, essentially placing him under house arrest with the exception of school. After about a month or so of these restrictions (and Sinope avoiding the threat of wounds as best he could when he slipped out), the boy’s mother and father eased up and granted him more leeway. He gained their permission to attend the Destiny City Bootanical Gardens event, and although that had been something of a disaster, at least the media had shed some light on what, exactly, had threatened and harmed Jack.
As their son had survived the attack of spiders in a much better state than many other victims that night, he effectively managed to convince his parents that he had learned from his run-ins with bullies and could handle taking care of himself in hazardous situations. After all, despite the pair of times he’d been nearly strangled, he had returned home from each occasion alive and breathing. With this argument, they somewhat reluctantly permitted Jack to attend the Masquerade Ball charity event he had saved up so much to attend in costume. As that had gone relatively well, their constant, hawkish vigilance had finally relented once more and the high schooler had permission to spend more time out on his own after school. Besides, they worried for his capacity to befriend others and hoped that his outings might have allowed him more chances.
Between his Romano’s uniform, his Halloween costume, his masquerade ball attire, and his Dark Mirror Senshi outfit, the redhead had sorely missed his old, comfortable, casual clothes. It was relaxing to wear them outside with the freedom to head to a convenience store or the mall or any library he was still allowed in. As he took in the cool, November air and the changing colors of the deciduous trees, however, Jack halted to lean over the railing of the overpass and gaze out over the oncoming traffic below. With the holidays rolling in, so too were family members arriving from everywhere to be together during the coldest seasons of the year. Not everyone was able, though.
Despite all his self-berating, Jack couldn’t help wondering about Elex. He at least kept in touch with his brother, yes, but how was that relationship now? Had he ruined it for good? And what of the rest of his family? Did they even know he was alive? Did they know what had become of him? How much did he still miss them? While the senshi recalled that the half-youma captain claimed to envy him for being able to date, did he also envy him for being able to go home to his own relations whenever he so chose? What must it have been like being cut off from them with only the smallest of windows and the greatest limitations framing his opportunities to meet them?
He heaved another sigh. He didn’t know. How could he? The closest he’d come to that had been the brief span of time he’d spent stuck in Altea’s palace, but that wasn’t the same since he’d been stuck in another world. It would have been a hundred times more heart-rending to have been able to see a loved one from afar but not be permitted to go to them even when that was likely the one thing both you and them would have desired most. For all the fighting and bitterness Sinope had seen, for all the magic and weaponry, the Dark Mirror Senshi still believed that secrets and lies seemed to deal the most devastating damage of all. But the war made them necessary.
'We do not keep our ships ever to port.'
'Monster is more of a morality thing, isn't it? So really. Who’s to say a psychopath is a monster when they don’t realize what they’re doing is bad? For a lot of people, it would be both psychopaths and sociopaths they’d consider monsters. For me, I think it’s the sociopath. The one who knows better but doesn’t care.'
'An officer is due respect as per their rank. Then the corrupt senshi, and then our enemies… It is by that truth that I chose to live by, rather than the vagaries of personhood.'
'I suppose it would depend on your own expectations of yourself. How good of a person you intend to be and how likely you are to step on everything and everyone around you to meet your goals.'
I know how to obey unspoken moral doctrine like a ship following a lighthouse. Obedience isn't the problem.
It's acceptance.
Can I accept being morally obedient to the Negaverse and to Destiny City? Can I still be a moral person when choosing to disobey morals? What concessions will I have to make?
The handful of thoughts from a handful of different people boiled with his own into a dichotomous stew of opinion. Like shattered stars they danced over an ocean of dark, largely drowning in their own ineffectual trials. Thought threatened to immobilize him. Thought threatened to anchor him out as a ghost, a specter, a warning to all those in the Negaverse that think too dearly on their own position. On their own actions. They were trained, as lieutenants, to act on command without want for qualm. Without want for reflection. That, for most, freed them from the responsibility of their actions. They acted as agents for an organization that oft set its teeth to their throat. All those unwanted, errant thoughts of hurting others found justification in the Negaverse's plan of action. But Faustite never took that bait.
Here, in the dead of fall, he challenged himself. He forced away thought and philosophy and doctrine and scripture and singsong advice, the lot of it all, and urged himself to action. Movement without internal repercussion. Result without reflection. So he moved, under the cloud-addled black of night, seeking and sleuthing and searching for the next quota's bulk of energy.
But the streets ran silent and wind whispered with truck wheels and car tires. Faustite bent his patrol far out of the opulent districts, toward the middle-class areas where the buildings looked as worn as the people. Where bridges arced out in great upside-down grins to connect a city hewn by water. Faustite crossed these with a certain hesitance, self-preservation humming through bird bones as he approached the zenith of the bridge. Below, traffic hummed and sung its strident song through the bridge supports. He looked, a half-mistake, and saw the great gap between feet and ground.
But beyond that, a lone victim. A head of red hair bobbing in the dark. Hesitation warned him, but he leapt.
He leapt, and his captain's strength delivered him to the ground, ankles whole and shins unbroken. Fear loosed its grip.
Preternatural speed carried him faster and further than a civilian's tread, and he ran upon the boy in moments. A blacked hand reached out to press the foreign chest to overpass rail, barred with suicide fencing, and his free hand readied to spin up energy. "Move and you'll die."
Aw, ******** had forgotten he couldn’t exactly check for nearby energy signatures as a civilian. What a fool, having let his guard down after having just recently earned back his freedom.
The moment Jack heard the young man’s familiar tenor, his heart skipped a beat for paradoxical reasons. He was simultaneously delighted and aghast to find himself in Elex’s presence, enveloped in the tell-tale perfumes of copper and moondust as the sensation of the hand on his back caused him to tremble against his will. While the teen discovered the touch roused his fear from past memories of what that hand had done to him, he also found, to his utmost dismay and disgust, that it stimulated the fantasies regarding what he had imagined it would do to him. Though he did his best to turn his thoughts away, his body remembered them well and being pressed up against the railing of the overpass wasn’t helpful in the attempt to calm himself.
He managed not to dwell on his personal humiliation as the urgency of his predicament spurred him to keenly assess the situation and consider his available options instead. The high schooler knew the who and the where of his aggressor, but what about the rest? What was he doing there? From the sounds of it, it seemed like Elex was simply attempting to take energy; a pastime that Jack himself participated in quite often. The redhead might not have minded but for a few particulars. One was that he had little to support his assumption with, so he couldn't have been certain that was Elex's true intention. The other was that he recalled all too well what the captain had said to him the night he'd first met him as a Negaverse officer.
"Fear, adrenaline, survival instincts. They pour out energy straight into your hands. And afterward? When they're out cold, and you're still standing? You can take their starseeds. Feed the fear engine that runs off the heart of this city."
Jack had little interest in being drained to the point of passing out on the sidewalk of an overpass bridge for the night. Furthermore, Elex might not have taken Sinope's starseed in the past, but that wasn't to say he wouldn't take Jack's after draining him.
And what could he do to resist or defend himself? As a civilian, even if he'd been adequately skilled in techniques of self-defense, there was little he could do against the enhanced abilities and magic of a powered being, let alone a half-youma captain.
If he played dumb and acted as though he thought he was being mugged, perhaps he might have been able to reach into his pocket with the pretense of retrieving his wallet to hand over, only to grab his henshin pen instead. The endless droning, honking, and clamor of cars, trucks, and motorbikes whizzing by on the road below warned him why his idea was sure to end in disaster. There would have been too many people around to attract the attention of and bear witness to his flashy transformation. The potential danger of a revealed identity aside, he might even have caused an accident as a distraction to drivers.
It was a shame. Even as Sailor Sinope, with his meager powers, he might not have been able to combat Elex properly, but at least he could have been recognized by him. Come to think of it...would he recognize me as Jack? With his back to the captain, he couldn't say if Elex might have recollected the boy from the gardens who aided him, Rowan, and Troy against the spiders. He might not exactly have been fond of the middle-class teen, but there hadn't necessarily been reason for him to dislike Jack, had there? At least not to the point of wanting to drain him dry and steal his starseed.
He keeps his lives as a captain and a civilian separate, Jack pointed out to himself. Even if, as Elex Yorke, he recognized me, why would he let that get in the way of his duties as a Negaverse agent? Then he countered his own argument. Not true. Even though he had drained Rowan once before as an agent, he decided to meet him again as Elex. Not out of any obligation to his faction, but because he wanted to see Rowan's reaction. He doesn't care. He grasped the cool metal of the railing tighter, his grip slick with sweat from his palms.
Enough. That situation doesn't necessarily apply to this one, the high schooler concluded, perturbed that he had unwittingly compared himself to Rowan once more. Maybe this is an opportunity to get answers to the questions that have been plaguing me for the past few weeks. His attention shifted to the very edges of his peripheral vision.
“...What do you want from me?” Jack asked, contriving to keep his tone steady and placid even if he couldn’t do the same with his quivering frame.
The boy spoke, the vague familiarity in his voice dismissed to the winds.
"Quiet." Energy sung beneath his skin, Faustite felt it -- a veritable sea of energy stoked and roiled into a maelstrom. Adrenaline stemming from youth was sweetest, he found, most potent in the spheres and spheres of runoff into his palm. Only light concentration remained to draw all the brilliant gold threads of energy to the nape of the neck, to the contact point, and into his blackened palm for chaotic taint. Like livewire, it struck hot through his body to his opposite palm. There, a deep purple orb bloomed in hand with Metallia's unmistakeable signature. The orb grew and grew and grew until it sat with a snowglobe's width in his palm. He dismissed it to the ether.
The process would repeat. Again and again he would bind the boy's energy to his will, draw an orb, and dismiss it to the fine clutches of Negaspace. Behind him, traffic roared unwittingly. Before him, his victim remained steady.
But beneath his palm, nary six inches in distance, lay an immutable realm. An unspoiled sanctuary. A holding space for the culmination of thoughts, feelings, desires. The starseed tantalized, toying with his nausea-hunger over a taste of it. He yearned for it from his own dearth of experiences, he knew. He seldom tasted joy on his tongue, seldom felt happiness, seldom experienced freedom and passion and contentment. Life as a half-youma was a life spent in hunger, in poaching old memories for comforts nearly forgotten. Every interface with society dredged them anew. Every simple visit a curse.
His mother's structured tea time. Hopeite with her frantic cooking. The few hours spent with Rowan or Sinope.
But he could ingest all such tantalizing familiarities in the span of a starseed. Exotic places and swimming trips and interesting shoes and smart conversations and disciplined studies each packed themselves into a simple gem. It waited just below his palm, just within his grasp. It called for all the memories left unexperienced. You can have it all, it promised.
All he had to do was pluck.
Of course… He should have been able to guess that was how Elex would have handled this sort of task; briskly, efficiently, and with as few words exchanged as possible. He didn’t seem curious in the least regarding his target’s compliance. Perhaps he had thought him too afraid to act otherwise. It almost caused Jack to smile. The reality of what was happening began to exert its pressure, however, once the half-youma began the actual process of draining his energy. He wasn’t even afforded the privilege of watching due to the arrangement of their positions. Oh no...this won’t do. The high schooler deemed he’d been quiet long enough.
“So...you do this often?” he asked in conversational tones, daring to try to glance over his shoulder as if simply speaking to a stranger on an elevator ride. Nevermind that his limbs continued to quake uncontrollably as he defied the two commands he’d been given. Even as he spoke, he could feel himself growing wearier by the second, but it was vital to his purposes to maintain his composure as best he could manage for as long as possible.
It came to mind that perhaps the raven-haired teen might have preferred Jack to face away from him so as to avoid a negative reaction to his less human traits. If he caught sight of him and didn’t behave as though anything was amiss, Elex was sure to have become suspicious. Should he have affected some sort of horror? Disgust? The high schooler didn’t think he had it in him to treat the officer as abhorrent or abominable in any way, but he wasn’t willing to allow Elex to uncover the truth of his identity so easily, either. What to do…?
When he saw those fathomless eyes, however, black and shining as obsidian, his mouth spoke as effortlessly as thought. Terror evaporated in the plume of steam that issued as a single, breathless word.
“...Beautiful.”
As often happened around Elex, the gravity of Jack’s actions was delayed in reaching him. Once it had sufficiently seeped in, it set fire to his visage in a blaze of crimson. Oh s**t. OHSHIT. SHITSHITSHIT!! He saw my face, too! s**t...damn it…
What he’d thought was he knees giving way from embarrassment turned out to be a lack of energy to sustain the muscles to stand. Jack’s legs collapsed from under him and he dropped to a kneel before Elex. He reached out instinctively to grab the railing in order to break or at least slow his fall, but instead of finding purchase, they lightly brushed the cold metal and slid off. Soon it was becoming a struggle just to remain conscious, but what consciousness he maintained was clouded with anxiety and humiliation.
What’s he going to do? the teen panicked, staring up at the captain under heavy lids as the edges of his thoughts grew fuzzy. The way he was illuminated by the soft, colorful lights glancing off and reflecting from traffic still gave him an stunning, ethereal appearance that struck Jack with a sudden bout of melancholy. If he takes it this time...he might find out.
The boy shot his mouth off. A likely stress response by the glass-cut lines along neck and shoulders. Tension sung out more energy for Faustite's collection. Soon he crumpled, knees driftwood brittle and buckling under the boy — bot not before a response of note.
The boy called him beautiful, and Faustite wondered for his sanity. Stockholm syndrom never acted so quickly; how did his victim enamor himself with abuser in such a short span? This boy played a game unfamiliar in all his time spent draining energy, and the captain grew suspicious for it. They screamed or railed or fought back, but never did a draining victim throw compliments at their attacker. Faustite's mouth tightened. His brows drew down. Did he poach for a startle response? A jarring reaction to bequeath an opening for escape? There would be no reprieve — not with his draining finished and disposal remaining.
A dim spectre of headlights crossed his victim's face and gave meager insight into a known identity. Jack, then. Jack called him beautiful.
"That won't buy you time." With Jack collapsed, he had but to stoop and seize nape of neck along with the tuck of his a**. A captain's strength gave him to will to jerk his target upright, to straighten him, to face traffic with him. A low retaining wall provided meager protection from a popeline full of steel and glass and plastic. Muscles tensed their standing cords through his body. He heaved the redhead upward and thrust hiim over the waist-high wall, straight into the left lane.
Faustite did not linger for the horns, the screeching tires, the too-late too-shocked aftermath where everyone called themselves the victim. His muscles griped from the throw of such a weight; he rolled shoulders but once before he vanished in smoke.
Buy me time? the sophomore wondered with the faint vestiges of his consciousness. Ah...perhaps another civilian might have thought so, but Jack knew better. He had already experienced first-hand how quick the captain could be when he made to grasp a starseed. Any second now, there would be that awful agony that it seemed no physical injury could parallel...but it never came. Instead, he felt his limp form lifted with a strength that, even prior to the draining, he would have been no match for.
What’s he...I thought… He struggled harder to possess what cognition was left to him. The Negaverse agent wasn’t behaving as expected, and while that was disconcerting enough, the actions he was taking were just as perplexingly alarming. ...Is he trying to get me run over?
Jack’s keen survival instincts, which had been oddly MIA since the night Sinope had discovered Elex, returned in full force in accompaniment of a new revelation. If he died, Elex would never know what had become of Sinope. He might even have thought he’d abandoned him. Jack couldn’t let that happen no matter what. So long as he still harbored his starseed, he thought he could manage to stay alive. He simply had to will himself to do so. You can’t leave Elex alone. You’re not allowed to die.
Steeling himself with this resolve, he shut his eyes and braced himself as best he could against the impending collision. The scream of braking tires and warning bellow of a car horn assaulted him first, heralding the subsequent impact of a gleaming Prius that attempted and failed to stop in time. Mercifully for Jack, he was out cold before the car even came to a complete halt.
Kitomyx
