DISCLAIMER: noun. Dis-claay-meer.
I do not own anything by Stephen King. Yeah, this isn't really a serious fanfic. I thought about using the same characters as were seen in Desp/The Regenerators... but I decided Tak needed a fresh start. Some parallels. Maybe I'll do a fanfic with the original characters or maybe they'll appear here, I dunno, but for now I don't own TAK. Even though I think he's a pretty great evil character. Yeah, how many Tak fics are there here? Not many, I guess? Anyway, enjoyyyyyy
"There are other worlds than these," the television set in the other room blared, the light flickering into the dull twilight of the kitchen "Each one a hair's breath away, a heart beat, a murmur away, intangible but there, brilliant and terrible and alive"
Lena Zachanassian, sat at the slender breakfast bar of her modern, recently refurbished kitchen, tapped her lacquered nails against the smooth faux-marble surface and stared into nothingness. She was by all standards an unremarkable woman, the child of immigrants from the old country (which she understood to be some little land inlet in Armenia, cast in dark and earthy blood-rich hues and dank, fermented history and superstition which had festered over the small township's meagre history), single mother, smoker, drinker, underachiever. She was a singularly handsome, but far from commercially typically beautiful woman, with her parents' dark features, Middle Eastern skin tone and thick, untameable woolly dark brown hair which had been cut into a fashionably androgynous pageboy. Dark crimson fingernails, chipped, dark brown eyes, eloquent, jaded, guarded, unremarkable unrecognisable blurred generic accent, the good teeth of a dentist's ex-wife. She wore her thirty-four years of existence well but would never see twenty-eight again, didn't smile enough; the sole thing which would bring a lingering smile to her features was her young son, Jared, and even then he had given her enough to worry about over the past… Lena's features creased in a nervous frown, fingers reached unheeding for the tumbler of amber fluid that she downed more and more often with each coming day… well, normally Jared worried her about normal, every day things. Asking where daddy was, looking more like the missing man day by day, secreting away in libraries rather than duly marching home when school was out for the day. She gulped, unconsciously scrunched her face at the burning fluid. But now… now… now she really was worried about Jared.
Her fingers bumped the glass and it tumbled from the work surface, shattering on the cold faux-flagstone floor. She swore foully, scrambling from her seat to retrieve the shards of shining amber-glossed glass, forgetting and instantaneously remembering that Jared was in the other room, watching his sci-fi programs, chomping on the foul tinned spaghetti-o's and frozen-meal burger with lashing of ketchup and chocolate milk that had become his permanent diet. It wasn't unusual, she told herself; children like that kind of food…but Jared had always been such a good boy with broccoli and peas and cauliflower and…and… apples for his snack at break. She couldn't understand what had changed, but her mind was dragged back to reality by pain and spreading wetness. In her haste, in her fear that Jared or the dog would walk through and cut themselves, in her absent minded speed, she'd sliced her hand open on a shard of glass, a sucking red slash across the palm of her hand which dripped red on the flagstones and stung with mindless, feral viciousness. It was difficult not to…stare at the cooling red on the floor. It made her think, and the thought made her stomach clench threateningly, of the ketchup that Jared drowned his food in as of late. They used to use ketchup in bad movies as fake blood, and that was what it reminded her of. The room swam. Dizzyingly.
It is in a parent's nature to hide from their children when they are injured. That is why, when Lena and Edward, Jared's father, broke up four years previously, the four year old child that had been the only good thing to come out of a broken marriage had known nothing of the secret battle behind closed doors. That's why when Lena had found the good dentist's receptionist's lacy pink panties in a balled up mess in her husband's trousers; Jared hadn't known what a pig his father was. That's why she lied lies of soberness to her blissfully oblivious son when she was piss-faced and aching forewarning with the sting of forthcoming middle aged years of empty singleness ahead of her. Children should never have to see their parents at their weakest, more for the parents' sake than anything. That was why when the telltale news jingle sounded over the television and the telltale smack of bare feet on tiles told her that her eight year old son was on the move, she'd grabbed a damp dishcloth to hind her hand, the blood, the wide cut which would probably not get the stitches it merited.
In all honesty, she was almost afraid of Jared. That sounded stupid, didn't it? Didn't it? She had to tell herself every time the fear gripped her that it was ridiculous to be afraid of any eight year old child, let alone her own son, but their was no denying the fact that Jared had changed… a change she'd only just noticed, but must have been going on for much longer than that. It was a change that shocked her and, more than that, she swore that sometimes when she looked at Jared, it wasn't her son who looked back and, more than that… it was Jared who walked through the door, pale, slightly mentally disabled, snotty-nosed Jared with ketchup smeared over his chin like some comical vampire and his father's great big apple green eyes. On Edward they had been lady-killing eyes, eyes that Lena had once thought to be the most beautiful eyes on the planet; on Jared they probably were the most indisputably beautiful eyes on the planet – dull, often-absent and not the eyes of the brightest bulb in the hardware store, but gentle and misty-soft puppy dog eyes… most of the time. Most of the time. She tried not to shudder at the memories of the side of Jared that she was quickly labelling SLB – snarling little boy.
But it was Jared who stared at the broken glass and blood with uncomprehending gentle eyes, Jared with ketchup on his lips and Spiderman comic t-shirt two sizes too big on his skinny frame and vulnerably bare feet. Lena clenched the dishcloth tighter and managed a ghostly thin-lipped smile, shaken but not stirred, ever the mother. "Jared, sweetie, don't come in here. Mummy had… a little accident. No, where're your slippers? The Batman ones daddy bought you last time you visited him?" – the slippers had caused a lengthy telephone argument between Lena and Edward – a pause, silence in those green moonlike eyes – "Here, go back to your sci-fi show. I'll bring you some chocolate milk through'.
It was funny, she realised. Not so much funny as... almost deranged, sick. Sometimes when she looked at her son, he wasn't her son. Sometimes she was afraid. And sometimes she thought something terrible had come to her sleepy little rural life, and sometimes she felt almost as if she knew when it had begun.