a first dream called ocean
Word Count: 1532
The rooftops stood quiet. Winter's algid touch receded, its cripling grip stubbornly insistent, yet spring brushed it away with new blooms over the snow. The weather promised to warm, which hurried Faustite through his weekly gains. He finally neared the cusp of being too hot when outdoors, now — forties and fifties left him sweating in the ambience where thirties and below kept his mind off the temperature. But there was more to concern him than the turning seasons.
Weighing on his mind past his time in the Rift was a lurking sense of familiarity. It stalked him as he passed through derelict neighborhoods, lurked about him as he reached the industrial district, and breathed down his neck when he reached the dive bars peppering the outskirts of the airea. Something watched him, he knew. But nothing rang out over his heightened senses but the scanty traces of youma on the night air. No senshi, no knights, no agents chose to investigate him. No Dark Mirror forced their ugly visages into his view. Even the pedestrians to the city remained largely out of sight, preferring warm confines and public company to the now-empty streets. But 2AM neared, and regardless of any prescient specters, the bars would close. Their patrons would meet the streets. And Faustite would have his quota in under fifteen minutes of uncoordinated struggle.
He lurked as the shady did — tucked away in the long shadows of buildings. The narrow veins running between them almost never saw lamplight; from where Faustite stood, the sodium glare peered unblinkingly to his left and lit up no more than a foot of the opposing brick wall. Figure-shadows flickered, danced, and sped from him in their overtuned speed. Daring they were in ever circling their hosts.
He remembered shadows like that. Long, jagged, sulking — ever jutting underfoot. Ever his companion in crawling youma comforts and desolation.
The hour struck, and a scanty minute passed. Then two. Then three. Then the doors gave way to The Drowning b***h, and out came all sorts: girlfriends giggling and remarkably coherent, the loners who marinated their lives in drink, the ones who came for the bartender, the seedy conmen dressed their best while wearing the faces of failure, and the bus boys eager for their own beds. They each trickled out with a steady surety, not so close to suggest familiarity with one another but not far enough to let each other out of their unspoken sight. But there was a back to every pack, Faustite knew, and he would wait the count of seconds for the arrhythmic shuffle to beat its way across asphalt paths.
The last one eked by, at last. A kid slightly older than him, still cursed with teenaged gangliness, still wearing the establishment's assigned apron about his neck and waist. Beneath it, a black shirt worn so thin that the collar frayed. Shoes scuffed and muddied. Khaki pants damp on his rear where playful coworkers livened their evenings. White earbuds stood stark against the shirt and apron, promising distraction — and situational ignorance. Shaggy hair, boisterous and bronze, crawled out from under a black cap as an emergency handhold should Faustite require it.
Faustite moved. He slipped from shadow with a practiced step, wary and careful of the footfalls joining the group. His lackadaisical gait brought him closer to the group, but at a pace so slow that he tracked his progress over the course of lengthy seconds. His heart raced, pounding its urgency against his chest, and his hands twitched for the feel of enery coursing beneath foreign skin. Urgency hunted him. At any second, the girls up front could turn toward the man catcalling them from behind. They would spot him, the creature at the back of the pack, the menace for which they grouped themselves. They could scatter. They could attack him. Or when he finally closed distance enough to reach out and touch this soon-to-be-unfortunate bus boy, the youth might smell his smoke on the air. Taste the copper and moonstone in his mouth. Yell out a warning before a black hand clamped his mouth.
He closed distance enough that he heard the faint, tinny sounds of radio tunes. That he could smell the grease beneath industrial disinfectant soaps. That he glimpsed the slick sheen of sweat from rushing out the last of the dishes in the last of the minutes. Faustite reached, palm outstretched, and the boy began to turn with a too-human suspicion that something closed on his heels, and time wound down to the beat of adrenaline in both their ears, Faustite ever faster with his captain's speed, the boy always catching up and never quite reaching the threshold of the present, and that black-cursed hand clamped over mouth while the other found purchase on throat, and he felt those muscles tense, those feet kick in a sudden, inexorable, palpable struggle of cloth whispering violently against cloth. Faustite spared no time; smoke left with neither present as he backstepped through space to the old alley.
There, they faced the wall again. The same foot of light overtaking shadow. There, he released hand from throat as pipes grazed their sonorous tips against brick. The boy struggled, elbows flung back at every angle he could afford, and feet vigorously kicking back for unprotected knees. But before Faustite could whisper his dissuasion to the boy, he slackened entirely. The pause promised seconds enough for a sizable gain in the core of Faustite's free palm. Then his behavior turned again, and the boy no more struggled to hurt him than try in blind panic for the freedom of the streets. And once they reached that moment, Faustite realized the crux of the boy's terror.
Lurking only a dozen feet from them was a sight as impossible as the youmafied captain to an untrained eye. Veritably floating in air was a large squid, perhaps three quarters of Faustite's height, that spread and undulated its tentacles to stay aloft. And in that graceful rebellion against gravity, it propelled itself in long strokes toward the boy. Faustite recognized it then — this facetious lurker. This opportunistic dullard that skulked through darkened alleys. This parasite looking to feed off his gains.
This was the youma that set him alight in the Rift, burning him intolerably in their avid struggles. The same youma that dripped rare sustenance in that wasteland of a place. He recalled how it slipped and squirmed under his hands, resisting all semblance of traction for searching fingers. And here it was again, edging toward him.
Until it recognized him, too. The squid-youma drew its arms wide, exposing its core, where it shot a cloud of clear fluid toward the captain. It never paused to ensure the hit; it drifted instead toward the shambling, stumbling boy who tried for lamplight.
Faustite sprinted heedless through the cloud and shoulder-checked the gelatinous cephalopod into the opposing brick. It bubbled, murmuring, and left behind a damp outline where tentacles met the wall. Tentacles slapped at his shoulders with a few bracing against steel pipes. Faustite felt the strain of his own ribcage pulling away, hooked and driven back, and gritted teeth against its discomforts. Hands fought for their holds on the thick core of the creature, whether around tentacle or head or clutching some part of his core. But every attempt to seize it slipped and it wrenched itself, slowly but surely, from his grasp.
He wanted, desperately, to use his power. To smoke out the youma for all its insolence and paralyze it with the thick, domineering burn. He wanted to sear it from the inside out until it bent its will to him. But its colorless ink still soaked his body, dragging his clothes down and promising a dull hurt beneath the skin. A hurt that worked and wormed further into him with each second passed, with every struggle spent on its wriggling, boneless form. And when the youma at last popped free of him, its thousand blue stars dimmed around their points of contact, it floated again toward the mouth of the alley.
Faustite started after it and seized its tentacle again. But as soon as his wet hand closed over it, the creature simply wrenched that limb from his grip. Every try met the same result. He swept the aluminum lid from a nearby trash can and swung it against the retreating creature's body, knocking it to the side, and yet it again slithered and squirmed from his dominion. Tracked about the alley were signs of their struggles in an unexplained wetness.
The consequences of using his magic burned in his mind, staying him from subjugating the beast. Faustite hissed a sigh through clenched teeth. As he watched its retreating form, adrenaline receded to leave him bone-deep in weariness. One of the pocketed orbs was sacrificed to keep him upright and alert.
"You spent your one chance," he muttered to the night air. His watchful haunt left, it tension following it like a train, and Faustite turned back toward the darkened city's prospects. He would need a plan for this one.
