Hello, this is the prologue to my newest story, please bare with me I know it's a little dry. It will, eventually, be poker pair, and Allen is a male. So is Tyki.
"Allen…" The grey skeleton breathed on the terrified boy. The boy, Allen, looked up with fear-filled, despair riddled eyes at the skeleton with no human-resembling forearms, instead dull metal blades poorly welded, knots somehow in the rough metal surface, as if the metal started bubbling. It's almost a mechanical skeleton, just above the nose slits a grey helmet was screwed to the skull, the ribs visibly welded together in some sort of humanoid contraption.
"Mana…" The boy said, his eyes spilling out delicate tears that slide down his pale cheeks. Mana was the name scribbled in a cursive across the skeleton's frontal bone, or the half-sphere that covered it. Mana was the boy's adopted father's name, the name on Allen's savior's grave. Mana is the man who saved Allen from a life of beatings and harassment, not this monster.
"Allen…" The skeleton said again, and is suddenly in front of the boy, standing over him menacingly. Allen shrunk away, scared of what his adopted father had become. How could Mana be this monster? The nice nobleman said he would bring Mana back. Not this thing. But it's still Mana.
"Mana?" Allen asked, still afraid of the tall form.
"It's me, Allen." Mana, the skeleton, said.
"Mana." Allen smiled. It's still Mana. It's just… a deformity. Allen knows enough about deformities to not judge his guardian on his newly found form.
"Allen, don't smile. I am not something to smile about." The skeleton said, keeping his face pointed toward the young boy in a non-existent eye-lock. The skeleton has no eyes; a helmet covers the shadowed area of eye-sockets.
Allen frowned. "How, Mana, are you not something to smile about? You are not dead any longer, can we not be happy?" Allen asked, frowning as he tried to understand Mana's words.
"Because, Allen, for me to exist in this world I must kill you." Mana said, fog spreading thickly throughout the bleak cemetery, a strong foreboding settling across the frowning, dried out and dying land.
"Why?" Allen asked, ignoring his fears. "Why must you kill me, father?"
"One life for another." Mana explained, teaching his dear adoptive son one more lesson. "You will die so I essentially never did, but I will be forced into a life of servitude."
"No!" Allen protested. "I don't want you to be enslaved!"
"Allen… you should be more focused on your own life at this point." Mana said, still hovering above his companion.
"But Mana, you saved my life, so it's only right that you take it as well." Allen says, smiling up at his guardian. "Though I don't understand why you can't just live in that shell of a skeleton." Allen admitted.
Mana is shocked by his adoptive son's behavior. "Allen, I can't live like this because it isn't a body you can live in."
"But isn't it just a deformity like mine? You're just crippled. You're just like me." Allen smiled.
Mana shook his head. "Allen, that's not how it works."
Allen just smiled sadly. "I guess I can hope." He chuckled softly, and repeated his new mantra.
Mana advanced on his loved son; smoke leaking from his skeleton mouth, signaling he needed a human host. Mana didn't hesitate, more like couldn't hesitate, as one of his arms turned to thick chords and wrapped themselves around the brown-haired boy neck. The other arm of Mana's made its way sharply across the boy's cheek and eye, leaving a deep wound and an infection that would likely result in a scar.
"Allen, why couldn't you just live without me?" Mana yells at the boy, anger at his son suddenly rising to the surface. "You made me an akuma, Allen! I curse you Allen, I curse you!" Mana yelled out to the boy, relishing in the half lidded, blurry eyes signaling lack of oxygen.
Allen felt his arm start to twitch, but payed little attention to the pulsing limb as his death was slowly being insured. There was a long rip, the sound of a glove being torn, and Allen could breathe again. He gasped for air, lungs grabbing at it like it was gold.
The boy looked around, clutching his cut face with his human arm, finally noticing his ugly, roughly red arm is no longer what it used to be. It's large, much bigger than before, silver chinks of armor strung together into a claw that attacked his guardian.
Allen gasped at his new arm that threw his father across the cemetery, and it twitched again. And again. And again, until it was finally pulling the boy along towards his guardian's twisted and broken figure.
"Stop!" Allen cried, sensing the malevolence flowing from his arm directed at his savior and idol. "Run, Mana! It's going to kill you!" Allen cried as Mana slowly pulled himself up on his bony metal hands and knees, surrounded by gloom and dust, making him barely visible.
If a skeleton could smile, Mana would be smiling at his young adoptive child. "I love you, Allen. Please, destroy me."
Allen looked at his father figure one last time, eyes wide and shocked at the words uttered from Mana's mouth. Allen's arm took the final swing, and as the deformed arm hit the unbound akuma it didn't seem to connect, Mana started to fade as he rushed towards Allen, body becoming less and less visible as the akuma came closer to his loved son's eye.
"To reverse the curse, you must find someone to build a relationship stranger than ours with." Mana whispered before his existence was swallowed up by the boy's left eye. Allen screamed, the pain unbearable all at once as the fog faded and the boy fainted from exhaustion and pain.
Allen sat on Mana's grave; eyes hollow as he merely sat thinking of his beloved father's death. All alone. Allen was alone, Mana had left him all alone with an aching eye and a curse. He was quite a sight, not that he cared.
Any onlooker would see a small, hollow boy with unnaturally white hair and a rather large mitten on one hand to hide the burden of his ugly red arm laced with a green cross. In other words, a freak.
This did not, however, stop a peculiar red-haired man rom stopping in front of the boy. The man's silver rimmed glasses shone from under his wide black hat, his face half-masked in a white piece with a red cross. A trademark.
"There was no other way to help him than to kill him." The man had said, but the boy took little note at how the man knew more than he should. The man always knew more than he should. "Do you want to become an exorcist?" The man had asked.
The boy shook his head. "I want to reverse this curse."
The red haired man looked surprised at this new information. The curse could be reversed? The kid must be deluding himself. "Yes." The man lied, hoping to snatch the boy up to train. "You can reverse your curse and save lives."
"I wonder if when I save them it will help break the curse." Allen mused out loud in a monotone, a small spark slowly lighting up in his right eye. The other eye was covered by infected skin and couldn't be seen, though the tears leaking from it certainly could.
"I'm sure it will." The man had said, crouching beside the boy. "So, you wanna become an exorcist or not?"
Allen looked up at the man. What was an exorcist? "What do I have to do?"
"Just come with me." The red head said, straightening to a stand at full height.
"No, what is an exorcist?" The boy asked, clarifying his meaning with a slight twinge of annoyance.
"An exorcist?" The man said, shocked the boy didn't know what an exorcist was considering his adopted father's past. Is it a joke?
The boy nodded. "Tell me what it means to be an exorcist."
The red haired man shifted. How exactly are you supposed to explain what an exorcist is in a good light? Just the truth, maybe is a good idea. "An exorcist is someone who destroys akuma."
"What is an akuma?" Allen asked the tall man.
"An akuma is a demon. Mana was an akuma." The man says calmly.
"You're lying! Mana wasn't evil!" The boy yelled at the exorcist recruiter.
The half-masked one chuckled. "I didn't say he was evil. An akuma is a dead soul resurrected. It's painful for the soul, so it's a good thing to kill it."
"No." Allen said, not missing a beat.
"Why not?"
"Mana wasn't in pain. He didn't deserve to die."
The tall man scoffs. "He was in pain. Trust me."
Allen shakes his head. "No, he was just deformed. Like me."
"I'm not going to say you're not a freak, but Mana's soul was forced into that mechanical contraption you saw. He didn't want to be there. He told you to kill him, didn't he?"
"Yes… but I've wanted to die because of my arm before. It causes so much misfortune." Allen shrugged.
"Look, kid, Mana knew what was happening and he didn't want it. No one wants to be an akuma. He'd be proud of you for fighting against akuma. There's no way to help an akuma but to destroy it. You'd save lives."
Allen smiled softly. "That could help break my curse, I suppose… sign me up."
(Wipes sweat from brow) Finished! This is unbeta'd, so forgive the mistakes and if anything contradicts tell me and I'll explain my thinking or just tell you I screwed up XD So yes, I don't own -Man, that would be bad for everyone…. (Laughs evilly)
Tell me what you think? This is just the set up, and it's not that different from the legitimate story. This will loosely follow DGM, by ways of some of the events that happened in the book/manga will also appear in this , the idea was from the song Reverse The Curse by Escape the Fate. The chorus is "One last chanc e to reverse this curse, stole my heart but I had it first". I couldn't resist. I'll update Simply Screaming soon enough, if any of you read it.
For those of you who were wondering, no, I don't generally write very long chapters. My set minimum is 1000 words, and I have no maximum.
Word count: 1,568
Pages:4
Lines: Roughly 180