Seems like character studies are all I can do nowadays. I'm sick as a dog, and had to miss my grandmother's 90th birthday because of it, so I figured I'd just write fanfiction. Sort of AU at this point, since we discovered that the previous Master Cyclonis was indeed a woman. Any of you who know my writing will recognize why I made the previous Master into a man instead. I'll get the typos and grammatical errors later.
Don't own jack squat. Or the Storm Hawks. XD Enjoy. :3
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Times were much gentler back then. The Dark Ace assumed his position as the highest ranking Talon in the Terra, and looked upon his new life with wonder that his stony visage failed to let betray. The sky assumed an ominous red at the coming of a new master, and the abysmal black faded out as disgusting wrinkled eyes, a mole's eyes, closed forever. The violent storm tainting his stomach receded during the early years of the young girl, and for the first time in a decade his actions conveyed his heart. A fresh mind for the taking, he did nothing to corrupt it any more than it already was. Lark was born with an amazingly engineered mind, capable of calculating and scheming, of dissecting everything until there was nothing but bones and flailing wires left. Her hands could assemble anything and take it apart, assemble it and take it apart. She manipulated objects and equations like they were children's toys, barely even a challenge. She advanced prominently, the pride and joy of the scientific engineers, happy that sunshine blew out their posteriors for once.
And yet...she knew not the tinge of redness that came from a delicate kiss on her cheek. She didn't know what beat behind the left part of her ribcage, keeping her awake at night and imploring her to do something that she just couldn't identify. She understood nothing about possessing a human heart. No metal valves, no false arteries; it pumped blood, thicker than the finest wine she drank, into all regions of her body and gave it life. Lark paid attention to her lessons, gripped her pen with a purpose, scribbled down the notes to what she could have easily figured out for herself. Her manipulation with the stones was prodigal, but Dark Ace knew that her true powers would come from her mind, and the muscle that pumped within her budding chest, the muscle that she complained kept her awake at night.
At the top of the fortress, unwisely deemed impenetrable, there was a balcony fashioned to feed Lark's starvation for the outside world. In the dungeons, slaving away, she found it agreeable to climb to her quarters and stare out at the chaotic red firefly that was now her land. There she would stand for hours, until her spindly legs, thin and nearly emaciated from having no physical exercise as of yet, would grow tired, and she would draw up a chair. The wind, warm and rancid, would blow her dark violet hair across the pale sharp beauty of her face. It was these moments that he thought she looked her best. She did not yet know the boiling rush of rage that would write itself upon her face like death itself. She didn't know how to cry, didn't even know how to throw a fit, like people her technical age were supposed to do. She was now a robot, as of yet uncharacterized by the responsibility unfairly placed upon her shoulders.
And all he could was watch as her eyes, as of now, gentle and unruffled, stared out at the terrestrial anarchy that was Cyclonia. Her home. Their home.
A young man carrying within him a jagged and aging soul, he reveled in those times of slumber, before the look of perverse ambition would make its permanent stay in her features. Admittedly, he was selfish. His state would allow him to kill anyone and anything without his blood pressure rising an inkling, but he cared enough to make sure the innocence stayed on her face as long as possible. If he could preserve it, even just a little bit, maybe he could be redeemed in turn.
His purity, a chunk of his soul, was stolen from him without a second thought. At least he could give her the privilege of having a choice whether or not to sink into this immoral code.
Perhaps it was far too self-righteous, even absurd, to think of himself as the only positive influence in her life. Logically, his life was far too ridden with iniquity to even think of himself in that way. And yet, he gave her books that had nothing to do with her lessons, books to help separate her mind from this fortress of psychic torture.
It was evening. His sharp eyes could tell, even if no one else could. The sky of Cyclonia never let slip its guise, never let the sun show through its thick array of omnipotent cloud cover. Depressing to some, even maddening, to never be able to see the sun. The Dark Ace, however, was unreachable by any sort of light, literally or figuratively, for some time.
With the exception of her...
Like a ghost, she haunted him, a delicate stare or a childishly uncertain glance was enough to undo him. It pained him, for she reminded him so much of his previous master, and yet he had cursed daydreams creeping up on him with images of him cradling the girl like a pathetic aspiring wet nurse.
The very spawn of the one who had broken, rebuilt, and branded his entire psyche, was his one and only love.
She was up in that balcony, waiting for him, he could feel it. And he would go to her.
Days like this made him feel wholesome and alive. A true human, with thoughts, feelings, needs and desires. And he secretly relished in such a naturalism, a native home to nearly everyone but him, it seemed. Even though at first he didn't want to permit admittance to such a sentiment that betrayed everything he had been taught since early adolescence, it nestled in his stomach and soothed the never ending windstorm. He could pretend he was worth something, just for a little bit, even if it wasn't true. Down in these dungeons, with the blackened air and crimson glow of the heat lamps, he felt untainted for once. The Dark Ace's face guarded by the scarlet shadows, no one he passed would have ever noticed the lack of a scowl; his eyebrows rested comfortably upturned, his thin lips were free from a pursed lock down, and the intensity in his eyes, two glowing orbs that ordinarily equaled the most lethal of poisons had ceased their loathing efforts. They were calm and shimmering with an arid flame, as opposed to the sweltering combustion that consumed everything in its path. The corridors were dimly lit, steel prisons whose incarcerating auras were unaffected by the actuality of free reign.
The sonorous hum of the creaking machinery was the only thing that echoed that afternoon. Dark Ace wondered why everything was so strangely quiet. The farther he traveled from the others, the more his calm interior began to show itself upon his exterior. By the time he reached her quarters, a smile was nearly tugging at his lips. There she was, sitting with a slender face propped upon a white arm, dark hair to the middle of her back, face like an angel fallen from grace. He squinted; his soul was not worthy. And yet he savored her company, like he always deserved it, even though he most certainly did not.
He came to her side, three heads taller than her, an air of composure settling between the both of them. To her left, on the brick floor of the balcony, were her study books.
"Have you been neglecting your studies, Lark?" He ravished the title, and the time that would allow him to act so informal.
She sighed. Voice so young. "I've already read them. They contained nothing I don't already know."
He should have known. The scientists and tutors obviously knew nothing of catering to a genius.
Glancing at her from the corner of his crimson gaze, his heart sank. She looked very sad today. And though part of him wished for her all the time in the world to show such vulnerable emotions, it hurt him to see her this way.
"What is on your mind?" He asked quietly.
Lark didn't answer for some time, a streak of uncertainty marring her appearance, and his stomach lurched at how young she looked.
"All day long I'm conditioned about my place here in Cyclonia, about things I probably know more about than them."
She paused.
"I don't know anything about who I am, or where I come from."
Dark Ace's insides crumbled. Curse any moment that he had to talk about her creator. Her father, truthfully, but to befit him with such a title was heinously unfitting and just plain wrong to him.
"Not even you talk about it, Ace." She said, looking up at him with a gaze most calculative.
"...You had a father. He passed away shortly before you were born."
He wanted to protect her...
"Will you tell me about him?" She said quietly, the inquiry on her tongue like an infantile question about why the sky is blue.
...From everything.
The pain shot through his back as gnarled fingers with veins like snakes woven into the frail flesh gripped a handful of his obsidian hair. Teeth sank into his bottom lip, keeping himself from crying out. He couldn't cry out; he couldn't even whimper. No sound, no sign that he was being hurt. None at all. Or his master would kill him.
He would.
His master never lied about his threats. And yet they spilled like an oil river from behind inky gums and decaying teeth whenever Ace asked about his family, about what would become of him.
It was a session of wills. Master Cyclonis was always seeing if he could finally make him snap, if he could make his forcefully-made right hand man strike out against him. And it would seem Ace would be victorious each and every time, but such admittance for his allegiance to this dying vulture could never truly be deemed a victory.
"Would you do anything for me, boy?"
"Yes, Master."
"Would you kill millions, just so I could reap the gold?"
"Yes, Master."
The hand gripped tighter. His face got closer. He could smell his rotten breath, see his young reflection in the old man's eyes of milky gray ice, the very definition of petrifying frost.
And just like that, he let go. The hand fell from Ace's hair, and his master assumed his throne once more, inappropriately placid.
"This is why I made you the Dark Ace, my boy. You'll do great things."
His master trained him to be a killer, to pretend to enjoy gutting women, decapitating babies, and maiming the men who were fighting against him for their very lives.
His master made him the Dark Ace. Whoever he was previously may as well have never existed.
"Ace?" A tug on his tightly knit sleeve.
Out of his nightmarish reverie, he felt relieved that she was still there, the single angel in his fire pit of demons.
"You're father..." He started. Gritted teeth, a deep breath. He could do this. He was the Dark Ace; he would do anything for her, his new master, Master Cyclonis.
"...Was an astonishingly good, and powerful man."
It was a poignant moment, and he could see how obviously unsatisfied she was with his answer, but instead of pushing the subject, she slipped her childlike hand within the calloused palm of his. Smooth, soft, gentle. Nothing like the gnarly grip that once threatened to rip out his tresses by the follicles.
"Maybe someday you'll tell me the truth about him." She said wistfully. Smart girl, that she was.
Evening became night. The red turned to black. The lightning still combusted in the distance, flashing in the reflecting glint of two pairs of eyes, scarlet and mauve.
It gnawed on the back of his head, when she would finally assume the throne with an iron fist and a sneer upon her thin perfect lips. It would come. Everything would fall, and everything would rise. And he would accept the ice of her demeanor, even encourage it. Tyrant or not, she was the Jehovah of his Genesis.