Death and Pestilence-
Chapter 1- Waking Up in the Morning
Author's Note: Alright, well, I'm sure any fans of the awesome new game "Shovel Knight" on this site would not be expecting fanfiction of this game so early. Especially fanfiction that has absolutely nothing to do with Shovel Knight x Shield Knight. Thus, because this fic is going to be a yaoi (between Specter and Plague Knight at that) then I'm sorry for being *cough cough* that person. But I love this ship dearly, so if you don't like it, then don't read it guys. But anyways, enjoy!
Also, Shovel Knight and its characters are property of Yacht Club games, so I don't own any of them.
"AHHHHHH! Someone- ANYone...HEEEELP!"
Screaming, hacking, weeping: a chorus of cacophony that I've come to know and love so much...
"ARGHHH! *cough cough* Y-you..fu-ucking..g-godforSAKEN...vile- *cough cough*"
...Except for when it left me terrified, petrified, empty, and in a cold sweat in my study. Gasping for breath, I slowly picked my head up from a puddle of purple elixir. Shards of glass lay scattered around my desk, some even making themselves at home lodged within the skin of my pale, sickly, crow feather-covered flesh.
"Delightful." I grumbled to myself as I rose from my chair. The legs creaked and moaned against the cold, stony floor. "Simply...deeelightful!" I chirped, and with a lightning-quick flick of my wrist, I threw the bloody pieces of glass onto the floor. "BOOM! Hee, hee!" I giggled as they shattered into myriads of minuscule little fragments.
Standing there for a minute, I hummed to myself. "Hmmm...well." I looked to the glass shards and the blood dripping from my arm on the floor to the broken vial and all its spilled elixir soiling my desk. "It seems as though I've made a mess. A big, big mess." I whispered to myself, breaths puffing in disease-riddled exhalations. I scratched my burned head and unshaven chin with a gloved hand. I had woken up again from the same, blasted, horrifying nightmare (which I still cannot believe immortals can have! How plebeian!), and in my sleep, it seemed, I assaulted the concoction I had been working on before I hit the sack.
Perhaps my aide was correct when he said I shouldn't work so late, since I needed sleep (which is another thing I cannot believe immortals require!). And speaking of my rotten aide...
"ROoooOODNEeeY~!" I squawked, the throat-grating loudness of which almost tipping my tiny self over.
After what seemed like ages later (actually a few minutes) a tall, aged man draped in a violet wizard's cloak and his own long, smoke-gray beard ambled into the room. Using his bushy beard and robe to protect his mouth and nose from the sickness I radiated, he walked in on me licking the blood off my arms. "You called, I believe, sir Plague Knight?"
"Oh hush with the formalities."
"I'm afraid that if I do, you'll hex me with something foul."
"Hex? HEX?" I shrieked. "What the devil do you take me for, a WIZARD?! I'm a SCIENTIST, you clod! A chemist, an alchemist, a demolitionist- call me whatever you wish, but if it implies that I utilize silly 'magic' in any way then so help me..." My nightmare did not leave me in a good mood.
"My apologies, sir..-"
"Hex, HA...answer me this, Raymond. Does it look like I dance around with a bogus, rotting wooden stick and chant 'hocus pocus!' to turn my foes into frogs?"
My aide's eyelids twitched. "Um...no sir. Although you do have a rotting wooden cane-"
"You're damned right, no!" I interrupted. "Because I have method, knowledge, and intelligence, Ronny. I don't play with ideas, like magic, that have no actual substance or reason behind them, that cannot be developed into stronger implements and weapons. I utilize materials and chemicals that can be manipulated, and that I know how to manipulate in order to create bigger and better elixirs, explosives, and inventions. I work with real chemicals, real formulas, real...ARGG...and what do you mean you 'believe' I called you in here?"
"What?" The ancient yet sprightly man jumped up in shock, and his reaction made me realize just how much I had been seething. "Oh…well…you summoned a 'Rodney'; I figured you simply got my name incorrect again and came anyways."
I frowned, and looked down to the scattered glass on the floor. Perhaps I should formulate an elixir to remedy bad memory. "I...Erm...oh. I'm so sorry, friend. What was your name again?"
The wizard laughed a laugh which seemed to shake the room. "Goodness, lad. I'm starting to suspect that, although you've preserved you're body to be young, your mind is still very old! And my name is Robert."
"Oh. Ha...yes, of course, Robert. How about I call you Rob to help remember it?"
"Call me whatever you wish, sir. Though keep in mind, that is exactly what you said the last time, yet my ears heard a Rodney just now."
"Oh...hee, hee...my bad. Anyways, could you be so kind as to clean up my mess of glass, here? I believe I broke a vial in my sleep again." I mumbled, embarrassed, and rubbed the sleep out of my baggy eyes. "Thank you."
Robert smiled under that beard of his. "Of course, sir, that won't be a problem." He walked over to a supply closet in the opposite room and grabbed a broom. When he returned, I was trying to save as much of my potion as I could in another empty bottle. He chuckled at my furious scrambling. "Oh dear, good sir. I do hope that potion is worth losing sleep over."
That struck another nerve within me. I shivered in a boiling rage, almost dropping my bottle. "What?! Are you mad- this concoction is worth more than a million good night's rests, Robert, and you KNOW that! In fact, once I perfect it, I'll be able to have hours, maybe even days, of healthy, uninterrupted sleep. Once I-"
"Yes, yes, once you revive the corpse (which is no doubt now a bleached pile of bones) of that man you slew so, so long ago, you'll be able to cast off your nightmares and guilt. I realize what you desire, sir Plague Knight, but I cannot fathom why you have spent five years trying to create a potion to bring back the dead." He noted as he began to sweep up the glass off the floor.
"Because that man was...nay...IS an angel, Robert!" I began, casting cares to the wind. "Long, flowing blonde hair, a perfectly chiseled body, a handsome face, the deepest blue eyes..."
"Hah, that's new! Well if you think so highly of the dead man, then why don't you just marry him?" He replied jokingly.
"Well...yes. Actually, I think after I revive him, I will do just that."
The wizardly elder's smile fell. He stared at me in bewilderment, then amusement. "If this is your attempt to one-up me, then kudos to you. If not, then...I won't even begin to describe how peculiar that was, but why on earth would the person you killed want to marry you?"
I sighed, shrugging. "I...well, I don't know. Just wishful thinking." I held my bottle timidly, sidestepping away from the desk as Rob began to clean there. I knew how others needed their space from my aura of ailments.
"I don't understand." He pitched, sweeping up stray glass in a dustbin. "You terminate an abundance of people every day. Hell, you've even decimated whole villages with your pestilence- and for sport too. So why does the death of one man matter so much to you? One measly little farmer's son. It can't only be because you find him...attractive, and strangely so."
I opened my mouth to speak, but it ran dry without explanation. I didn't know why I found that man to be so incredibly gorgeous when I first laid eyes upon him. I supposed when I was actually younger (and not decades old but under the influence of a youth potion, as I am now) I fell for some people, but when I became the monstrous, disease-laden scientist I was now, my romantic desires curbed. So what was wrong with me?! Were my haywire hormones a result of my youth potion acting up?
Or were these past five years of regret, melancholy, heartache, and slaving over a hot cauldron for the right death-reversing elixir a result of...actual love?
I looked down at my puny hands, and cradled my face in one of them. I couldn't explain it- to myself, to anyone- why I worked so hard and so relentlessly to do the impossible, and on a man I only knew for ten minutes tops, at that. And on the same note, how could pestilence, a bringer of death, give life?
"I...I truly don't know, Robert."
"Well, when you figure it out, then tell me because I would love to know. And on the topic of your horrid memory, do not forget of your meeting on the morrow!"
"M-meeting...tomorrow? When did I- OH yes now I remember; the meeting, er, orientation, with the Order?"
"Yes, friend, the Order who lacks Quarter. You were just accepted into their league the other day..."
"Yes, by the Enchantress! To spread plague and evil across the lands, and even the world! Hee, hee! What a delightful ambition!" I jumped up and down a little, sending stray feathers spiraling to the floor.
Robert laughed at my childish enthusiasm. "Oh definitely, sir Plague Knight. Now if you'll excuse me, I shall acquire the mop with which I shall clean your blood."
"Oh, blood?" I glanced down at the floor and giggled. "...Hee hee hee...I almost forgot about that!"
The bearded old man, shaking his head, left quickly and returned with the mop. He shook his head and clicked his tongue. "My my, what I don't understand is how you can take all kinds of damage and wounds, yet remain unaffected and not feel pain. That's a gift."
"Well, I suppose but that's not entirely true. It stings a little, I just heal fast. I have a lot of bacteria in this body- maybe they help me heal quickly." I suggested. By then my wounds had closed up, leaving only little scabs.
"Perhaps, though the thought of it is simply absurd."
"Mayhap it's because you're a wizard, and not a scientist, hmm?" I jested.
Robert burst out laughing, which seemed to shake the room again as if he were in his yeti form. "Oh, slander not my magic, sir! It may not be much but it's the thought that counts." Once the floor was spotless, he began to return the mop to the supply closet.
"Heh heh heh, sure, sure. I cannot stop you from being convinced (or from using my own potions to do battle, hee, hee). Anyways, thank you for helping me. And good luck with your research." I encouraged.
"Thank you, sir! The same goes to you, my friend." He said, and left back to his quarters.
Alone now, I returned to crafting my potion. Like any old day, it was simply agonizing. I adjusted formulas and materials, yet nothing I produced could revive my test subject: a dead purple phoenix (that probably flew too close to its bombs). I thought that I could base the new concoction loosely off the one I used to give myself immortality, but not even that would work. It was futile, I knew, yet I would never give up. Not until the day I would die (meaning forever, because I could never die and join him. I had already attempted suicide countless times beforehand).
I sighed, a puff of smoke having blown up in my face from a finished mixture. I poured some down the bird's gullet. It's throat twitched, but it was just a muscular reaction, I knew.
With exhausted, baggy eyes that kept falling into slumber's eager claws, I gazed up at a window from my elixirs and the phoenix's carcass (probably just a bird, actually. It hadn't risen from its ashes yet). As a solemn moon rose into a dreary indigo sky, I yawned loudly. Moonlight shone down harshly onto the corpse. Of course my eyes were drawn to those shining, purpley-black feathers, not lacking their luster even against the sweet decay. I pondered the dying thing, and recalled a thought which I had considered before. Grief flooded over me.
What if my love was too long gone in the clutches of death to be revived by any potion? What if his body could not be healed due to a long period of decomposition in his burial? What if he still wished to kill me even in death?
"ARGGHHH!" I roared, drowning in a sea of 'what if's'. I slammed my head against the desk to force the thoughts out of my head. Yet it was fruitless, so I raged and squawked around the study, punching walls with my little fists and tossing around papers and books like a small child throwing a tantrum over a toy he couldn't have. I was enraged, as I was every night, with myself and with my incompetence.
When my short, little body couldn't take any more of that furious exertion, I padded over to my room and plopped onto my nigh unused, still made bed. Taking Robert's advice to actually get some decent rest, I closed my eyes and was out like a light.
A/N 2: Just to clear anything up now, I imagine that Plague Knight would not be wearing his mask half the time, and have half his hair burnt off because he's so clumsy. So it'll be like those guys who shave off half their hair and leave some on the other side to curl around their scalp. Hoped you liked this, dear readers, and the next chapter should be coming out soon!