This story was based off a dream I had.
Warning: contains OCs.
Just joking, that's nothing to be afraid of. They don't bite.
A few of the characters also have aliases, because I'm mean like that.
I don't own Keroro Gunso. And thank god I don't, because there are already enough plot holes as it is.
"Mommy… Daddy… it hurts…!"
Wrapped tightly around the child's feet and wrists, the ropes strained against the young boy's tanned skin as he tried his best to wrestle out of the scratchy material. Each movement drew some more blood as he struggled against it. His hands were tied behind his back, around a wooden stake with logs piled up at the bottom. The light caught his pink hair mixed in with the crimson stains of his own blood.
"Mommy!" he whimpered again. "Mommy? Where are you?" He looked around but couldn't see a thing. The world seemed to appear a thick blanket of red, and he couldn't find his parents at all. His own eyes hid them from his sight. "Mom—" There was a sudden lurch in his chest, as if he couldn't even say her name anymore. It hurt him too much. He coughed up blood. His hand gave a small twitch, which made one of his broken fingers wobble. His shoes were soaked through with the blood that used to fill his once-intact toes. Scratches and bruises marked up all around his legs, those legs that were once so delicate, so refined, so beautiful….
His mother called desperately back to him, but all her screams were muffled as a guard flew up on a hovercraft and tied cloth around her mouth, as well as her husband's. Both the little boy's father and she were chained up against the wall, set high up on another story, too far away to reach their five-year-old child. His mother screamed, sobbing, soaking her gag with tears. His father was crying as well, but quieter, since he was almost as badly beaten.
"Mommy, Daddy help me!" the child wailed. His blue eyes ached with tears and misery. He stretched the ropes some more, and they cut deeply into his skin. "I don't like this! Let me go!" All of a sudden, his cries were cut off as he was whacked again. The child screamed.
The purple one bowed his head in the background. Had he not been chained up, too, he would have saved the boy. But he was powerless….
"Sir?" Another of the Keronians looked up at the general. He, like many of them, was armed with a club. "Shall we continue?"
The general shook his head. "He's getting too loud. It's making my ears hurt." He made a signal with his hands. "Light it."
"NO!" the boy's father yelled through his gag. The mother just continued sobbing. It had to be just a dream…. Just some horrible, surreal nightmare that would vanish with the daylight.
About ten or so Keronians gathered around the human boy tied to a stake. Each one slowly dropped their alight matches into the stack of wood gathered at his feet.
"Mommy… it's too warm," the boy moaned.
After five seconds, the fire was already blazing. The child shrieked.
"Daddy! Mommy! Help me!" he screamed. "Where are you? Why aren't you coming? Mommy! MOMMY!"
Aside from the painful screams that refused to cease, the smell of burning flesh was the worst part. It reeked of rubber and rotten eggs. Pekoponians were never something meant to be burned.
But this was no Pekoponian. It was an abomination.
There was more screaming after that. Much more, but neither parent could hear. Their eyes were too stained with tears to see their child burn, their ears too clogged with their own shrieks of protest, their throats too clogged with the horrible stench of a smoldering body.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" the little boy screamed. He broke out into uncontrollable sobs. "NO! NO! STOP IT! AAAAAAAAAH!"
The flames danced around the child, licking around his skin, and tearing away at his body. Everything about him went up in flames. Eventually the screaming ceased. More Keronians tossed buckets of water onto the flames to extinguish it. There was nothing left of the little boy, except for the charred remains of his body, and the bright violet stone that he always kept in his pocket buried in the ashes, still as bright as ever.
The general smirked and turned his head down to his son, who was weeping in chains with his wife. "I hope we all remember this day," he boomed. "Learned a lesson from it, didn't we?"
"Yes, sir!" the group of Keronian militants replied.
"You may release them now," he ordered.
"But, sir—"
The general waved him off. "My son is powerless at this moment. He would be a fool to think he could attack me now, when he just lost his only son. He knows that that won't be the only thing he'll lose next time." He eyed the pink-haired Pekoponian woman in chains beside the red frog. "Yes, he's smarter than that."
The Keronians released and ungagged the couple, as well as the purple one, from their chains up against the wall. The late boy's father took his weeping wife in his arms and wept with her.
"He was so young," she sobbed.
"Everything was useless…. We couldn't even hide him a blasted five years," he cursed, clutching his love's hands in despair. He thought a moment to say something to comfort her, but there were no words that could do that, no matter how hard he tried. It was all over now.
Her body convulsed with bawling. "Why did this have to happen?!"
"I… I don't know." His voice was barely a whisper. Words meant nothing. Everything did.
She pushed her husband off of her and began running away. "If… if he's really gone, I'm going with him!" She was speaking to the Keronians now, challenging them, as they simply laughed at her. "Burn me with him! I dare you to…. I f***ing dare you to!"
"No!" her husband shouted back to her, rushing to her side. "Please, stop… I can't bear to lose you too today…."
She screamed and tried to run away from him again, but he kept her there, holding her, as everyone else left them. There was only one that stayed behind.
"Hey." The purple one sat down next to his sister-in-law and younger brother. "Our father does have a point, there's probably not much any of us can do at this moment—"
"You have no place to say that!" the father of the burned child snapped. "You never saw your child die in front of your eyes."
"True, but that doesn't mean it's the end. …You can still walk, can't you?"
"I… I think so." He calmed down a bit and stood up, afterward helping his wife up, who was now silent and emotionless.
The two of them kept talking in quiet voices. She couldn't hear what they were saying. Maybe she didn't even want to. Everything hurt so much…. It was like some sort of nightmare. She walked over to the pile of ashes in place where her son used to be. Her husband followed, leaving the other behind to go home. There was nothing else he could do for the couple. She stuck her hands in and brought out the black corpse of her son. It felt so lightweight, like nothing. It was all for nothing…. She hugged it to her chest, sobbing. Her husband stroked her on the back.
She set her dead son back into his bed of cinders. For a moment, she almost thought she saw something glimmer. She brought it out of the dust. It was that bright stone, the one her son always kept. She held it close and fell to her knees. Teri was gone. Teri was really gone.
The woman's eyes bolted open as she laid, weak and frail in the pounding sunlight, at the foot of a large shady tree. Could it only have been that dream again? She cocked her helmet down. Probably. Even though it had been months ago, that horrible incident had haunted her sleep since. Still, she wondered how her only son would have made it in a world like this. Everyone would have known he didn't have full human blood running through his veins. A while back, she'd promised herself to never to repeat an incident like that again. I will never let them find out, she thought.
She thought about getting up, but the sun was so… warm. And not at all in a good way. In the recent battle with a few Keronians, the alien race invading planet Earth, they'd damaged her pretty well. She had to lay low while she healed. The only problem, besides her scorching throat and weak body, was the meadow. It reminded her only too much of him. So without further ado, she shut her eyes, no matter how much she battled against it. It's not like there's anything else I can do right now, she reminded herself. Nothing else but sleep, letting the dullness overtake her body that no longer had a speck of emotion left within it.
The General was a cruel creature.
In this narrow world he seemed to live with himself in, there was no such thing as "mercy." Such a word simply did not exist. Someone broke the rules, someone paid the price, and that was all there was to it. That was the way things worked, this strange circle of life, in which rule-breakers were punished. There were no excuses, not even for his own son.
His shameful son…. The General bitterly creased his lips at the memory, wanting to wash it away. It would stick with him forever.
"Please, sir!" the prisoners begged him. "Please, give us mercy! We only did what we did to protect our son…."
This couple reminded him of one he had encountered a few weeks back. They claimed that they were trying to protect their son, as the previous ones had, but he knew better. They were all just scum.
"Fools!" The General spat at them, looking down upon the Keronian couple behind bars. "You broke the forty-second rule of Keronian code and went to inhabit an enemy planet." His lips creased downward in a taunting frown. "Have you no shame?"
"Please…" the couple sobbed. "If we stay here, our son will have nowhere to go."
Ignoring them, the general continued onward, studying the cells of other prisoners and asking guards for updates on their behavior. They straightened up as he walked past, making sure to not appear as if they were slacking off in any sort of way. It would be too risky to be caught doing anything they weren't supposed to, especially by such a strict monster like the General.
"Um, sir…" A Keronian behind him swallowed a lump in his throat and tried to make his voice appear more sure, more confident. "Sir!" he said, saluting. "I have just received some information about the invasion of Pekopon…. We've got some bad news…."
"And what would that be?" asked the General. The other Keronian handed him the report. As the General read it, his face twisted into a snarling rage. "They're what?!"
"Th-they're revolting." The Keronian swallowed again. As high as he was in his ranks, the General still intimidated him, after all these years…. "It seems that the planet's organized a revolution. They're not allowing us to invade them."
The General tossed the papers against the wall, hiding his face in his hand. "Impossible! This has never happened before. And Pekopon, of all planets. Pekopon! One of the weakest planets out there!" After a moment of hesitation, he thought bitterly that perhaps he understood why it took so long for the former Keroro Platoon to have made no progress whatsoever…. But it was too late now to be thinking such thoughts.
"Well, it's as clear as it is on the report…. Some of the frontline soldiers are dropping in count by the hundreds. We may not even win this one," the Keronian continued.
"Nonsense. We're Keronians, we can do better than that," said the General. In the back of his mind, he wondered briefly if this at all had to do with the incident involving that boy a few weeks back…. And he wondered even more if the ones who had organized this revolution in the first place had been them….
"Uh, there's some good news, though," the Keronian tried to console.
The General glanced up at him, still looking angry. How could there be any good news at a time like this? Their planet was losing against Pekopon. Pitiful.
"We've found the other one you were looking for." The Keronian took out another file and handed it to him. "And now she's where she should belong. Her parents will be pleased."
"Hm… I suppose that could be a bit of good news," said the General as an afterthought. Glancing at the file, he asked, "Is she in the chamber?"
"Yes. Um…" The Keronian fumbled. "…there's one more thing you should probably know, though…."
"And that is?" he asked. Leaning in, the Keronian whispered the information to his superior in a hushed voice. The General's face turned from a light red to a burning crimson. "…AGAIN?!"
The Keronian nodded, and the General exerted a sigh.
"I cannot believe that all this has happened… and so quickly. It's unbelievable. Some of the people here are going to make us ashamed to be Keronians someday," he growled.
"Mm-hm. Such a pity," said the Keronian officer, nodding.
A brief silence lingered between them, the only sounds being the shouts and pleas of prisoners in the cells surrounding them. A dank atmosphere settled upon the dungeons.
"You're fired."
"…What?"
Nanori had always envied the people with excitement in their lives. Living a normal life himself as he did, there were no stories to tell, no thrill or adventure. There was nothing for him to do, and nowhere to go. Sometimes he felt that it was all routine, and that every day he was just retracing his steps from the day before. There was nothing catching about it, no delight or anticipation. He didn't even have many friends at school, with the exception of Himeya, who he still wasn't quite sure about, based on the strange looks she sometimes gave him….
More and more each day, he found his boredom increasing. He supposed that it was only what was meant to be—after all, he wasn't such an interesting person himself. Someone like him wasn't cut out to be living days of adventure, of excitement, of….
Oh boy. He set another piece down onto his jigsaw puzzle. He didn't even know why he was doing one. Probably because there was nothing better to do to pass the time. Aside from the occasional ticking of the clock, there were no sounds in the house. He was the only one there, since his parents had been off fighting at the revolution…. The revolution which he still had yet to believe was actually happening. Alien invaders. It was too much to be able to take in at once.
Sometimes, at times like these, he felt himself wishing that he, too, could be part of the revolution… bravely fighting off Keronians… being some noble person… being someone whom he wasn't. But those days of adventure were far from him. Just leave the excitement to the ones who are exciting people themselves, he always told himself, and then subsequently thought, I wish I could be exciting too….
With the last part of his jigsaw puzzle finished at last, Nanori leaned back in his chair to admire his work. Even though it was just a simple old jigsaw puzzle, he still salvaged some amount of satisfaction from doing one. All the pieces had fit into place.
Wow, so, I changed a lot. And I made it longer with my awesome-tastic powers of being the one writing the story. Let's see... I think I spent a little time on the General's character, if not none. And Nanori's character was finally introduced, opposed to the original text, in which he and Himeya randomly bounded into the scene with no meaning whatsoever. Aaaand I also did some other stuff, which will sink in later in the story.
Oh, by the way. Should I change this to rated M?
