WTF is this I wonder? I could have spent the time I used up finishing chapter nine of SOTU or working on editing SR but instead I wrote another Fairy Tail oneshot... unlike the previous one, this one doesn't make a lot of sense on its own but I'm not sure if I will expand on this too much. It was a spur of the moment thing. I read chapter 155 and I thought Midnight was pretty cool, but his death was maybe a little disappointing... if he is dead yet. I almost get the feeling that he is, but I hope he's not because as far as psycho-deranged villains go, Midnight is pwnsome! I guess he must have had a pretty effed up childhood.

I'm not here to go into a lot of detail, I'm writing shit. Thank your lucky stars I didn't upload the original idea - it was fucked up even for my standards and I can tolerate some pretty fucked up stuff. Originally I was going to go into psychological details and personal problems about Midnight getting repeatedly raped and tortured by some other hermaphrodite-ish person hired by Rokuma in order to instill fear in him so that he would learn to overcome and control it, thus making him a truly terrifying illusionist who could conjure up the most horrid illusions you could ever imagine (seriously, that monster he magics up in chapter 155 was even scaring me). However, the side-effect was that it created nightmares in Midnight and made him a child insomniac. For that reason, later in Midnight's life, Rokuma decided that he would be able to control Midnight despite the power difference between them by casting sleep magic on him, promising him dreamless sleep. But I eventually decided that not only was that in bad taste, it was completely wrong and gross. I decided to leave some remanants of the nightmare idea in, though. The story still ends up being rated M, but that's because of the gore and the morbid themes... I think I've seen too much blood in the past two weeks. Watching Elfen Lied and then playing survial-horror video games makes me psycho.

Disclaimer: If I owned Fairy Tail... I don't know... it'd probably be effed up and end up being X-rated. Luckily, it's owned by Mashiro Hima.

A Child's Imagination

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He watched in fascinated horror as his father cut through the body of the woman he called his mother with blades of darkness. All he'd wanted was a glass of milk. The woman's body – dressed in a pure white nightgown contrasting her satiny black hair – was divided into six pieces: head, left arm, upper body, lower body, left leg and right leg. A splash of blood dropped into his cup, the head soared so high it almost hit the ceiling and the body fell away like a stage curtain to reveal the young child standing in the hallway before the living room to his father. Rokuma fixed his son with a hard stare. Meanwhile, the head fell to the floor at the child's feet with a heavy thud and a couple of bounces.

"Drink your milk and go to bed," he said conversationally. "It's very late."

The boy nodded, fidgeting with his nightgown. He turned away from the murder and walked up the stairs like nothing had happened. When he got to his room he put his soiled milk on his little desk and stared numbly at the full moon outside his bedroom window. It was just past midnight. The child briefly glanced at the full-length mirror in his room and for a second he thought he saw a girl looking back at him.

"No, I'm a boy," he reminded himself. But apparently not being able to tell made him special. He didn't understand it but according to his father, being a boy when others think you're a girl means you're very talented, very special and that you don't need a mother. It was something about a 'di-a-tee'.

He looked into his milk where the blood, unable to completely blend with the dairy, swirled like smoke on the surface. His mother always said that good boys didn't waste their food and drink and would have insisted that he ought to drink it all. But look. The only piece of her that was left was floating in his midnight snack. He took an experimental sip, tasting the effect. He furrowed his brow. It wasn't that bad. He thought about the time he'd spilt a milkshake on a rare steak and had to eat it. It tasted similar but it was less sugary and chocolaty. However, if the steak wasn't that bad he could deal with the milk.

He gulped the rest of it down and left the cup on his desk. He wiped the milk moustache off his lip, turning and climbing into bed. The sheets were pink. He didn't see a problem with that, but the senior members in the dark guild were always asking strange questions, like did he feel like less of a boy because he had pink bed sheets? He usually told them that he had bed sheets that were other colours too but they just laughed. So most times, the child ignored them.

The child sat in the middle of his bed, looking around his room. It was such a nice room – nicer than anyone else's. His bed was too big for him, people gave him lots of toys and presents and he had lots of clothes. This all had something to do with being the boy-who-looks-like-a-girl; that much he knew. The lesser members of the guild would practically worship him, regardless of the ridicule he received from the senior members. Flipping up the duvet he slipped his feet under the blanket and wriggled into the sheets and pillows. They were cold.

He lay awake, staring at the ceiling. He didn't want to sleep. Horrible things happened when he was asleep and sometimes he'd wake up not knowing if they were real or not. Instead, he thought about the woman he called his mother and the way her blood erupted from her body like mini tidal waves and her head shot up into the air like a toy rocket. He couldn't help but smile. There was, after all, some morbid entertainment in that kind of thing. He pondered then, for the rest of the night, what he could do to make other people's heads do entertaining things like that and more importantly: what did her face look like? He'd forgotten to check.

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The rest of Oración Seis didn't know where Rokuma went when he took his son out to train and study magic or what they did but when they returned there was always something suspicious about the circumstances. The boy was never very bloody – maybe sustaining a few cuts and scrapes – but the wounds he had mostly consisted of bruises on his arms, body, thighs and face; he looked like he'd been raped. Although that didn't seem to be the case because when asked about it the boy knew nothing about sexual activities and cocked his head to the side when older members tried to explain it to him, indicating that he knew nothing of those experiences. The Brain of the dark guild was determined to teach his son the legendary reflector magic that only a handful of mages had managed to master throughout history. Rokuma was confident in his son's abilities. He had the physique of a deity transcending gender, thus transcending nature and humanity. He believed with certainty that his child would surpass him while he was still young. That only left the question of how Rokuma would control him.

The boy stalked away to get something to eat and ended up sitting down with a lamb steak and a pile of vegetables that were all green. Ew. He hacked at his meat unskilfully until it had been torn into small, bite-sized pieces that he could manage. He skewered them mercilessly with his fork and chomped on them with a little bit more force than necessary.

"Aw, look at you," cooed a senior member as she sat down next to the boy. He looked up. She was still very young when compared with the other members of the guild but she must have been very talented because Rokuma had put her in a high station. The boy stared impassively at her and her angelic outfit that was too racy to be angelic and too sweet to be appropriate in a dark guild.

"You've got bags under your eyes again," she stated, finding some mascara and eyeliner in her outfit somewhere. "Let me cover them up for you."

The child let her but he didn't really enjoy having make-up drawn on his face by her. Her gloved hands were so impersonal.

"Oi, Angel, you know that's a boy," said another senior member – the one who always had that giant snake following him around. He was a relatively new addition to the guild, as was Angel. The older boy looked down at the child. "You shouldn't let her do that to you. Don't you have any pride as a man?"

"But he looks terrible," Angel whined. "A bit of eyeliner will hide the evidence of the bags, but if it's thick and dark he'll look like an insomniac so I have to put on some mascara to balance out the eyeliner and made him look more normal."

"He looks even girlier than he did before. What's normal about that?"

"It looks more normal than the appearance of someone who stays awake all night."

The two began to argue and the child became fixated upon that blonde curl of Angel's hair like a little halo. He remembered the woman's raven tresses flying around her head as it popped off. He looked at his steak knife. That little blade probably couldn't even cut a chicken's neck. He smiled, turning back to the curl. He grabbed it. It was stiff; hair gel and spray was applied thickly for the rigid hairstyle. With the greasy knife he sliced through her hair, sawing the serrated blade through copious hair products and fine strands.

Angel had whipped around as soon as he'd grabbed her hair but through the astonishment she hadn't been able to stop him. It hurt as some hairs were torn directly out of her scalp. The child dangled the curl in front of her, grinning. He'd never checked to see what his mother's face had looked like when her head had bounced on the ground like a ball. He imagined it now, like Angel's face, wide-eyed and an oval-shaped mouth frozen in shock-horror. He giggled.

Cobra's eyes twitched. He turned his back to the child and leaned towards Angel, whispering out of the corner of his mouth: "That kid is deranged. I don't think you should be putting make-up on him again."

Damn, that was retarded. I know Oracion Seis only has six (seven) members but I kind of imagined in the distant past that they were a much larger guild. And then when they started to get closer to their plans and gaining power and building reputation and scheming their Nirvana thing and all that jazz, they would have been like: 'screw you, little mages! We don't need you peeps.' And then... mass murder all round.

It might be a little tricky to understand this: The point I'm trying to get across is basically that the reason why Midnight doesn't know kindness and likes to hurt people is because his childhood was so impersonal that he just jumps at any opportunity to feel engaged with another human being. With his magic being reflector, I just thought that would be relevant. His world revolves around idiots worshipping him and him having no connection with anyone since everyone reveres him as a demi-god of sorts, so seeing people in misery and agony that he's caused gives him some kind of twisted satisfaction because it's a personal interaction and an intimate emotional connection even though he doesn't get close to the people he hurts. He doesn't get close to people probably because he doesn't really know how.

As for the demi-god thing, one of my friends at school told me that in some ancient cultures if you were an effeminate male, a masculine female, gay, lesbian or a hermaphrodite you were worshiped as a demi-god because your body was proof that you transcended gender and transcending gender meant you transcended nature, therefore you were holy... and their gods were obviously genderless. I think one of these cultures might have been Indian or Sumerian. And according to another friend, hundreds of years ago humans used to have five genders to suit three different kinds of hermaphrodite... I don't know where the fuck he learnt this (he tells me it was in class, but I don't believe his teachers would be telling him this when we go to a Christian school). Anyway, it was basically these pieces of information that eventually inspired me to write this (and, of course, chapter 155). And I could sort of imagine an older, larger version of Oracion Seis having a weird intersex-worshipping cult.

Also, I thought I'd make Midnight an insomniac in this story because it would give him a little bit more of a reason to want to sleep so much... in a nice quiet place where nightmares didn't get him.