Midnight/Late night Conversations.
Lord Vile and Darquesse talk. Set after Death-Bringer, before Last Stand of Dead Men.
Note; I'm not entirely sure when this is set, but it's before LSoDM starts and after Death Bringer ends. Yes, the 'shades of gray' description is accidental.
I have no offense made by mentioning Mao Zedong, I hold no opinions on him. I just needed someone with a verifiable kill-count, as it is, and Google revealed Mao Zedong.
Will possibly/probably be multiple chapters, course of one night or a couple hours. This is sort of a first-draft kind of thing, although it has been re-edited. Might be changed again.
Onc again, input would be adored. Constructive critism is welcome. Skulduggery Pleasant is owned by Derek Landy.
Valkyrie Cain lay on Skulduggery Pleasant's sofa, and she slept on, utterly clueless of the figure leaning against the doorway to the living room, watching her shoulder rise up and down from under the mass of blankets with the strange kind of detached fascination with which one seasoned hunter looked at a fossilized T-Rex. Looked at a huge predator that couldn't kill them this moment in time. The figure had on a suit, either a dark blue or black in color.
Or it might even have been maroon, but in this darkness everything had been muted to dull shades of gray. However, the point, as it was, was that the man's suit was dark. And finely crafted. How would one know the figure was that of a man? It was quite obvious, even if you didn't know what you were looking for.
From the way the person leaned against the open door-without a-door leading to the hallway, (which led to further living rooms) with the air of elegance and easy grace that seemed to emanate from him. Right down to the air of menace as thick as the smog which had curled around London in the early 1900s, which had blurred everything into unrecognizable depths.
His arms were crossed over his chest, and they were thick, and it was like the suit, magical as it was, was being slightly stretched, as if even the Bespoke thread it was made of couldn't handle the sudden increase in mass of the person who usually wore it. With anyone else, that would have been a definitive strange little thought. But with Lord Vile and with Skulduggery Pleasant, things were rarely that finely distinguished.
Despite the dark, the man's eyes almost seemed to shimmer, being faintly visible even so, as if they almost glowed in the dark, -like the wolves and faeries of the fables and fairy tales of old.
The moon moved out from behind the clump of clouds it'd been hiding behind, sifting in through the windows which had thin white curtains over them. Although the light cast on the sleeping beauty on the sofa, (who, as it most likely should be said, was still hidden under the blankets on top of her,) you could see much more of the man.
He wasn't smiling. Oh, he definitely was not smiling. But he wasn't frowning either, although there was a confused kind of tug on his features, almost. Almost. His eyebrows were nearly frowning, but not quite, as if the man couldn't be seen doing something so common. Not that there was anyone to see him, not really.
His lips were pursed slightly, the theme of the previous expressions here too, and there was a certain kind of air of superiority around him that is cast over those who actually deserve their title. Like the Queen, perhaps. Or perhaps Julius Ceaser would've been a better example, since their egos seemed better matched. Or was that Alexander the Great? Either way, possibly that and the fact that their death-toll was probably similar. Or maybe Mao Zedong, one of the more notable mortals with kill-counts.
He waited a bit more, watching her and simply watching her. He drew no perverse satisfaction from it, or any kind of arousal. He simply watched, and he thought. What, you ask? It's a bet, but since he was staring at the sleeping figure of one who would destroy the world and had proved to be quite capable of it, he was thinking about the new player in the game, the entity known as Darquesse.
He wanted to know more. More about Darquesse, not boring little Valkyrie Cain. He stepped forward, and the room got that much darker. Another step. The room continued to darken, the moonlight coming in in stark white contrast. Valkyrie Cain shifted uneasily in her sleep now, no doubt due to another nightmare. Even the man's mere presence would cause that.
As she moved, a small whimper escaped her lips and was caught by the unnervingly sharp ears of the man. And a small kind of thrill went through him, the urge to hear those whimpers of pain. Pain caused by him. But no, he had made a decision that the girl would live, and he would stick with it. Besides, he didn't particularly want to be extremely sore the next day, after getting pummeled by the girl. He hated that. That she could. When a slight thud sounded, interrupting him, he looked back down across the room at her.
He was still barely a couple of feet from the doorway, and he was in no danger of being detected, since his writhing shadows were being controlled into stillness by an offhanded command. Baron Vengeous would have been sweating and moaning with the strength needed to command those writhing tendrils. For Vile, it was as natural as breathing was to a person who actually breathed.
Ah, yes. That was what was that strangeness about the man was. He wasn't actually breathing, per se. That would happen when you were technically a skeleton wearing a meatsuit.
*[Meatsuit: Slang for body, used generally by Remnants or other possessing creatures]
{Source: Possessing Beings, written by Jameson Viol, the leading expert in the study of Remnants, shape-shifters, appearance-manipulating Senstive magic. He was, needless to say, a quite paranoid person, sure that every person he met was after him. Ironically, he died by stabbing himself, driven mad by the belief that he was not in his own body, or was a fabrication, a story.
His death is joked about often still, despite him dying in 1716. All in all, it is believed he was a quite unlucky person.}
His meatsuit was a working body, and his own previous one, but there was still no need for the lungs to have air, or for the blood to pump. His heart moved in a half-arsed thump every few seconds. That about told you all you needed to know. It also told you Necromancers were lazy. Exceedingly so.
Moving on, the thud which had sounded had been the blankets dropping to the floor, as Valkyrie Cain moved in sleep to get rid of the confining covers. Her breathing was heavy, and fast. She wore a shirt which was light in color, moonlight making it silver. The shirt was tight, and it was tiny, tightly moulded to her lithe body. The man allowed himself a moment to admire the chest, moving his eyes downward. The shirt had pulled up and, as mentioned, being tiny, allowed an easy view of her toned stomach and hips. Her arm was pulled up over her head, which was another reason the shirt revealed so much.
Her lower body was still covered with the rest of the blanket, which was more of a safety blanket -no pun intended- than a covering against the cold. It was, after all, a warm night. She'd stopped moving, now relaxed, but her breathing was still quick, and was still the kind of restrained panicky breathing one sometimes has while going through a hell of a nightmare -pun intended.
He walked over to her, now stopping right over her. He looked at her peaceful sleeping form, the tenseness in expression during the day disappearing at night, save for the twitching frowns and whimpers. She was afraid of something in her dream, and he could taste her fear from this distance. Silly girl. She should have been afraid of what was in the waking world, standing right over her. His fingers twitched in the pockets, itching to just bash her skull in right now, and save the world.
And, more importantly, his own occupation as world-destroyer. There could be only one, after all.