THE LANGUAGE OF FROGS
A Claymore short story
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Disclaimer: Claymore & its characters belong to Norihiro Yagi & his affiliates
Rating: M (sex and language)
On this Fic (01.01.2013) -
In early 2012 I was approached by Shiek and Dany le Fou to write a story involving Raki and Riful (the requirements can still be visible on Dany Le Fou's profile page). Both Raki and Riful were to have escaped the Organisation and the chaos involving the Destroyer, meeting up and becoming more than friends. I've chosen to interpret this literally, adding my bleak viewpoint of how Riful and Riful would treat each other. This first chapter develops the characters and sets the tone for the rest of the story, which will be in three parts depending on length.
An earlier edit of this story appeared on MangaHelpers forum. Thanks to Shiek and Dany for their feedback.
Chapter 1 - Croak
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
- Samuel Johnson
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At their first fight, Raki floors Dauf.
They clash in the woods near the farm where they're all hiding out. The trees stand so thick in this forest that Raki finds it impossible to turn without slashing across a trunk or a branch. As he rains blow upon blow on Dauf, he realises he can't see Riful anymore. His audience of one has been replaced by hundreds of pencil-thin trees whirling around him like a stampede.
Dauf lunges, throwing his full weight behind his final move. Raki misjudges the attack, and the force of Dauf's weight propels him into the nearest trunk. He feels it warp under the impact. He shields his face against any further attack. But Dauf's panting, his lower lip blown up like fist and leaking blood.
When Raki brings his fist down on Dauf's face, he feels his entire frame shift to accommodate the thrust. He feels his entire shoulder pulse with blood, his nerves discharging, the wings of his back jammed with muscle. He sees Dauf's face collapse inward, and the larger man falls to the ground. When he doesn't recover, Raki backs away, and finds something for support. His arms burn. He knows something in him has changed.
"Very good."
Riful emerges from the trees behind Dauf. Bright shapes of sunshine streaming through the foliage makes it seem as if she's wearing a crown. She looks at Dauf, and then back to Raki.
"Did you feel something different?" she asks.
Her question disturbs him. "My arm," he says. "Do you think –"
"It doesn't matter what I think," she says. "What do you feel?"
Raki wipes his face on his sleeve. His vision blurs, but returns when he sees his sleeve comes up bloody. Whatever good feeling he'd felt before is gone. All he feels right now are the ache of overused muscles and something swelling at his abdomen.
"So." Riful approaches, puts an hand on his arm to steady him. "You won. You win the spoils."
She strips. She removes her dress with a flick of her arms, and dumps it on a hedge. There are parts of her that are raw and still unhealed, discoloured wounds with shredded muscle. But Raki still feels the blood rise to his chest, his own body tightening as presents herself before him.
"I'm not going to claim it," he says.
"It wasn't a fair fight!" Dauf has recovered. He tries to get up, but fails. A faint odour – no, a visible aura – smoulders off his skin. "If I awakened –"
"If you awaken, those creatures would be here and all of us would be dead!" Riful snaps. She returns to Raki. "You have to claim your prize. This is life, not some gentleman's game."
She seizes his hand and forces it between her legs. But Raki elbows her away. Riful stumbles and lands awkwardly. Her hair splashes across her face. For a moment, she looks like a little girl, lost and lonely among the trees, the entire forest a dangerous prison.
But when she looks at Raki again, her arms are already turning into streams of flesh – ribbons tense with muscle.
"Get out of my sight before I kill you."
And Raki flees. But he knows he'll be back.
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They have come to an unspoken arrangement: they tolerate each other only because they are weak. They stay close because the world beyond the farm is full of death. In staying close, they have fallen into a sort of routine.
Raki always leaves the farm early, before the wide open sky begins to lighten at its edges. He collects his sword and heads into the woods up north. He leaves because he's the only one there who needs eat to survive and recover. He has to hunt far and wide for game, because every living thing avoids the farm.
From the verandah of the farmhouse, he views the dark clouds of overgrown crop spreading in all directions. It surrounds the lone farmhouse like an army. He will cut through the crop, heading for a strand of willow trees at the foot of a small hill. There he hops through an animal fence, marking the northernmost boundary of the farm.
On his way, he will pass the pond. He will glimpse the ominous body of Riful floating in the shallow end. She'll turn to face him, stretching herself out like a predator sunning herself, in a haze of water insects and tadpoles. He'll see the wounds made by the Destroyer and the Abyss Eaters, like smudges of watercolour on her skin.
They don't exchange words. Raki continues walking, he doesn't look back. But with each step, he will hear the blood pounding in his ears. He will feel her eyes, like hot coals, boring into the back of his head.
When Raki returns after his day of hunting, he will drag whatever game meat he's gathered to the back of the farmhouse. There he'll build a fire, eat his only meal of the day. In the pitch-black darkness, the fire splays out like a beckoning hand, drawing out Riful and Dauf. They appear out from the night, perched on the threshold of fully revealing themselves.
"You should know better than to start a fire," Riful will say, or something equivalent. After a day in solitude, her voice is like melted butter, like a song he's been straining to hear
"I have to eat," Raki says.
"Listen to Riful," Dauf will add. His voice has the heavy, grumpy tone of someone who has just woken from deep sleep.
Then they settle into silence as the fire slowly ebbs into embers and ash. They stare at each other: Raki in one corner, Riful and Dauf in the other. Her shoulders are turned, making it obvious a comfortable distance between her and Dauf.
This is the arrangement: he knows they cannot awaken to regenerate or heal themselves, lest they give away their location to the hordes of Abyss Feeders roaming the woods. Then again, he knows he's not in the best of shape either after his escape from the Organisation. So they stare at each other as Raki's fire dies and gives way to darkness.
But Raki knows there's something that makes these arrangements unstable. He feels it pulsing, as if driven by a separate heart. His entire right arm – and the flesh sticking out of it – tingles as the wind rises. Whatever Priscilla put in there makes him restless, gives him an appetite for half-cooked meat and, possibly, is turning him something other than human.
He holds his right arm against the last light from the fire. He clenches his fist, sees the muscle bunch around his wrists and triceps. From the other end, he catches Riful watching him, head cocked to one side. He thinks he can see her smile, but then the fire dies completely.
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"Show me."
Riful makes the request in the presence of Dauf. Raki sees him tense, completely stop his restless pacing just outside the wall he broke. With three of them orbiting around some unsaid intention, everything done in each other's presence seems to be significant.
Dauf acts disinterested, but loiters nearby. In the sheer curtains of dust dancing around the room, Riful stands between them, her hands absently playing with her torn dress.
When Raki pulls off his vest, he feels his joints crackle. He turns on the spot. His shoulder aches as he stretches it out for display. In the faded mirror that rests on the far wall, he sees the angry bruise where his right arm joins the shoulder.
He flexes. Riful strains her head to see. To help, he directs her hand over the chunk of shoulder still tender and sore from his fight with Dauf. Her small, twig-like fingers finally reach the point where the Priscilla made the incision of her flesh. Riful runs her ghostly touch over the point. Raki feels it pulse.
"Did you feel that?"
"What did you do?"
Riful's mouth curves into a small smile. Raki hesitates, then decides it's enough.
"You know, I'm not a freak you can touch and poke –"
But his right arm responds. It trembles, his skin bubbles, as if he's got a muscle spasm. Riful reaches out to touch it again. And then everything explodes in pain.
"Hold still," she says.
The next thing Raki knows he's on the floor, splinters of wood pressing into his face. He sees Dauf through a haze – watching – his face screwed up with disgust. The pain comes again: blurring, shredding, strangling. His entire shoulder dislocates.
When he reaches out to feel it, he traces the beginnings of another arm, fingers and all.
He sees everything: the entirety of Priscilla's thrown-away arm, sticking out from his shoulder – reaching out to Riful – drawn by something – the yoki she emanates. Just when he thinks both sets of fingers will touch, the arm warps into an armoured wing.
"Dauf!" Riful shouts.
Within seconds, he's surrounded by ropes of muscles and flesh. A hundred ribbons from Riful's arms contain the offending limb into a cocoon. He's suffocating. He's swallowing. He screams. He gags.
"Dauf!"
He's had enough. Raki clenches his right fist, summons the same feeling that he experienced when fighting Dauf. He feels every roll of flesh fastened on his arm. With a heave, he grabs a handful of Riful's tendrils and pulls himself free from her grasp. A rain shower of blood tells him he's not trapped anymore.
As Dauf approaches, he darts aside. Dauf's punch meets the floor. Its momentum rocks the farmhouse.
Raki scrambles aside. Everything spins. Dauf is screaming something, cursing him.
"Shut up, Dauf," says Riful.
His arm burns. Pieces of Riful's torn flesh melt from his skin in crisp flakes, filling the wrecked room of the house with the awful scent of cooked meat. He has a vision of his nightly feasts, his biting into dead bodies as the darkness overcomes him, his two Awakened allies just out of view –
Riful appears before him. Raki sees she's missing one arm. Her entire left portion her body is a palette of every shade of crimson imaginable.
"What the fuck are you?"
Riful collapses. She doesn't get up.
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Raki takes Riful's trembling body down to the pond near the farmhouse. He does it before a hysterical Dauf has any time to react. He leaps into it, plunging Riful's body underwater. She's so light she seems to float. When he surfaces, the pond has turned into a bowl of copper red.
His vision hasn't fully stabilised. He isn't sure if the warped pounding in his ears is the after effect of Riful's experiment or Dauf's frenzied bawling in house. But he tears what's left of his shirt and pants, fastening a something to stop the bleeding over the stub of Riful's right arm he tore out.
It's when he's finished with the knot that Riful's other arm comes to life. It splits into shaky tendrils, coils around Raki's waist, up his bare crouch. But the effort infuses the pond with another rose of blood.
"You're going to kill yourself if you try to awaken," he says.
Her limbs slip up his rear, fasten themselves around his thighs. They anchor him into the soft mud at the bottom of the pond.
Her eyes flutter to life. She sputters fresh blood all over his chest.
Her first words are: "I could kill you now. I could kill you and be done with it."
Raki replies, "But you won't."
"Then claim your prize."
He tries to summon the memory of the punch that realigned Dauf's face in the early days of the arrangement. The mere thought of it jolts his right arm into anticipation. But no – he stops it, and thinks instead of the cool red water and Riful's hands all over him.
He's tempted. But he knows it's not time.
"Not yet," Raki declares.
"You pussy."
She tries to stimulate him.
"I'm not going to fuck you."
This time her touch wavers, then drops away completely. Her remaining arm recedes into itself. She hacks and coughs, but turns to face him and buries her bloodied face into his shoulder. Raki's ends up hugging her tight, arms curled around her open wound to stem the bleeding.
"So you're going to save my life?"
"Yes," he says.
Dauf gives out a yelp. Riful doesn't respond. They lie tangled in the pond as frogs belch and crickets sizzle in the crimson-stained water.
"You're such a freak."
When Riful's hands dart back to his right arm, he jerks it at her. Rolls of her flesh fasten themselves on his arm.
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END CHAPTER 1
First edit on 24.12.2012.
NOTES: If possible I would like readers to comment on the situation Raki, Riful and Dauf are in. Is it feasible? Could such a balance of power take place? Also, I wonder if Raki's condition could actually be possible in the Claymore universe.
Next chapter will be out end Jan 2013 or earlier.