Disclaimer: I don't own Shaman King.
I've been uploading the detritus of fics saved on my PC. This one was written after reading The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, and all the quotes in italics are from that.
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I think we are in rat's alley
Where the dead men lost their bones
Faust had become used to waking up in a hall of bones.
He thought it had originally been a crypt, but any church that had been nearby had long since been buried under factories and warehouses. He had found it purely by accident, searching an old graveyeard in the middle of the city. It had been too late to go back the way he came and find somewhere to rest for the night, so he'd sheltered in one of the old warehouses. Something there had felt odd. Too much like being in a graveyard. He could feel it oozing up from beneath the floorboards, the dry decay of bodies long dead.
He'd found the trapdoor after a little searching, and it had opened easily enough. The passage underneath had been mostly caved in, but after just scraping the surface he'd found the first of the bones. It was part of a man's pelvis, a jagged crack showing where it had been violently battered with something. He couldn't tell whether it was before or after the person had died.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of bones, and a chuckle spread from ear to ear
When he'd first gotten into the room, he'd been delighted. He had more specimens to work on than ever, in a percetly private place and none of the cleaning up to do after. The place had been in disarray, with bones scattered everywhere. So he had sorted them. Femurs with femurs, skulls with skulls. Then he had practiced calling the bones to each other. The skeletons wanted to fit together.
All the King's horses and all the King's men
If he found a skull and the rest of the skeleton just happened to be in the room, it would happen in the blink of an eye. If some of the smaller bones were missing it didn't matter so much, but if it was a large bone or a part of the spine it sometimes took hours to 'find itself'
Couldn't put Humpty together again
So he had worked. The bones became his obsession. There was a neat row of skeletons, lain side by side, next to the piles of bones. Sometimes he thought he could hear them whispering in the night, before he knew he was going mad.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?
Nothing again nothing
The skeletons began to move during the night. First a finger, then an arm. It was when he woke up with a bony hand twined around his outstretched fingers he decided it was time to leave. Only he couldn't leave the bones half-finished. They called to him.
One the last day, he waited until the sun was fully up, then listened until he could hear the whisperings again.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.
He called to them just like they called to him, to each other. He felt each of them die, spilt, shatter and crack. They had all died, and in that moment so had he.
When he opened his eyes again, they were all complete. Some of the skeletons with parts missing had stolen bones without bodies, creating child's heads on adult's necks, misshapen fingers and twisted limbs.
There was one jawbone left on the floor. Child sized. He picked it up, put it in his pocket and moved on.