Disclaimer: I do not own The Cain Saga, Godchild or Dominic Crehador. All rights to Kaori Yuki.
A/N: Ah…I really shouldn't be here. This is totally wrong. I told myself I would only return to fanfiction to pick back up on my Soul Eater chapter fic 'Godless.' However, given that I experienced possibly the most hellish semester of my life, I decided to alleviate some of my stress by rereading Godchild for the umpteenth time – and when I noticed that this website has a severely depleted amount of Crehador fics – I just had to do it. It's only a simple oneshot…so…I suppose I've only half-sinned? /blushes sheepishly/
Godchild is one of my biggest inspirations. I actually believe that everything I write, original or not, has been touched by this masterful series. It's shaped who I am as a writer and truly showed me the beauty of gothic plotlines. Although I'm only a writer, not an artist, Kaori Yuki is honestly one of my prominent role models – she's one of the core influences that led me to writing/studying gothic literature. I've always had the intention of writing a Godchild fanfic – and hopefully one day I will! – but I want it to be a story that truly reflects the depth of love I have for this series and these characters. I have some ideas in mind…but nothing I can play around with until I finish my Soul Eater fic.
That being said, this pitiful oneshot does NOT do justice to Crehador, Godchild, Kaori Yuki's work, or my love for the series. It was written solely on a whim because I was saddened by the lack of Crehador fanfics out here. C'mon, am I the only one who likes him? /met by crickets/ x'D
I'm sure there are historical inaccuracies involved here. For that, I'm truly sorry. Since it was a oneshot written on a sporadic pump of inspiration and love for a particular character, I did not do a heavy amount of research. My aim was simply to evoke the sort of ghostly angst Crehador gives off in the manga…not that I succeed.
Ah, I'm sorry for chewing your ear off. I have too little people who share my obsession with Godchild in real life, it seems. I really had a little spazz-attack of happiness when I discovered that fanfiction/net had an archive for it.
As always, thank you for taking the time to read this short and random story. Comments are much obliged, but it's entirely up to you to give them!
Oblivion
Very likely, I am mad.
The graveyard smiles at them.
The child notes this, and he informs his mother, who sits still and somber as a statue and pretends not to hear. She has been fighting with his father again: he can tell by the white hands knotted in her lap, the thinness of the lips smeared with rogue, the purple shadows that sweep beneath her eyes. The dark hair, usually tacked up smartly, now coils around her shoulders in a way that reminds him of a noose.
That's what life is, really. The child reflects on this and finds his logic sound. Life is a noose. The rope is sewn from coins and dollars and the glitter of rich women's brooches; the hangmen are whispers in banquet halls, cruel murmurs behind finely gloved hands, lofty remarks laughing from expensive mouths. His mother rocks sideways and collapses on the silk-bedecked gallows, groveling in the ruins of their pockmarked name. His father seeks salvation in whores.
He knows too much for a child. He sits now besides the carriage window, swaying with each rickety clop of the horse outside, and sees more than he ought to. He knows things about the Living, about his parents, but he does not understand them. He knows they hate each other, he knows his father loves strange women with painted faces – he knows his mother frets, tears holes in lace handkerchiefs, prays for her husband's death and then throws herself into his embrace whenever he comes home. And this the child does not understand.
He knows about the Dead. He feels them, always watching, the way he always watches. And this he understands.
They seek Oblivion.
"The graveyard smiles, Mama," he tells his mother again, but the woman has quarantined herself entirely in her thoughts. Even when he moves to shift the veil further away from the carriage window, she does not stir.
Outside, the world is dark and silent and mist: the stones are crumbling and finite, mossy lumps that mourn their fatality, but the wraiths swirl and beckon and call to him on the tides of the wind, their long fingers twisting away into nothingness. 'Dominic,' they say, 'Come to us, Dominic. We love you, little child – come, come, come. Let's go play in the Gardens of Eden,' and he feels their honeyed loneliness, so similar to his. Their voices are no more than insubstantial vapor against the ivied temples and cold dirt and rotted flesh of their empire; their smiles dissipate on the nighted breeze, and their eyes are unhallowed moons that long to draw the warmth from his heart. He presses his hand to the window and watches them and does not answer their calls.
"…I would not do this, if we had the money. Surely, he must understand that. Mustn't he…Dominic? Surely, your father understands."
The child does not think so, but he responds, "Yes, Mother."
"I can't believe this client wants to meet at his dead mother's grave…! It's entirely unnecessary and only further besmirches our poor title. It's not as though I want you to do this – you understand, Dominic, of course. I love the name Crehador, but will it pay for our expenses? The meetings are in bad taste, certainly…but given our situation…don't you agree?
The spirits are haggard, they are starved for attention. They flicker, only half-real, and watch him watching them, blow kisses and curses. 'I love you,' they whisper, 'Little child, little angel…! Why have you gone from us? Let us go play – in the Fountains of Heaven!' and as the words melt away, the Dead replace them, 'Die, die – wretched child! Why does your heart still beat? Why do you have the warmth I covet? Why are you not made out of shadows and dark? Here – let me kiss you. Let me kiss you to the grave.'
He does not let them.
"Dominic! Are you listening? Don't you agree?"
His mother snatches up his hand, and its whiteness and coldness reminds him of dead people. The nails bite into his skin.
"You agree that these meetings are in bad taste?"
The child watches the Dead. "Yes, Mother."
"…are they here?"
He understands what she means, but he does not answer right away. His mother tightens her grip on his hand; he thinks it a strange sensation – she rarely touches him. Despite its original clamminess, the underlying warmth of blood and tissue eventually seeps into his cramped fingertips. This is what the Dead will look for in Oblivion, the child knows – they will seek out the warmth of the Living.
"Dominic…! You're frightening me –! Are they here? Are they watching?"
The rickety carriage stutters to a halt, the horse whinnying as the frostbitten driver yanks irritably on its reins. Marble tombstones loom like makeshift phantoms in the dark, the ground's emerald tresses a smoky color in the night. Flowers lay wilting over neat, packed soil, the granite angels stare with sightless eyes. In these wealthy parts of the cemetery, the ignorant assume the departed float on lavender clouds and smile aimlessly at the Living. The opposite is true. Indulgent lives must make the afterlife lackluster; the wraiths writhe and wrench and wriggle in agony, chattering jealously and scratching bloody words into the still-beating hearts of their descendants.
"Thank God –!" The client calls from his mother's grave, "I don't know what to do – you must speak with her, please! She's terrorizing my wife!"
He child does not respond to this remark. He turns to his mother, eyes nearly opaque in mists and secrets.
"They are always watching," he answers.
Surely, I am damned.
The boy heard nothing – not even the drip of the faucet.
He heard nothing, but he remembers what it looked like. An absurd portrait: the water still and clear, the floating hair like silt at the bottom of a lake; the legs a demented, crooked tangle. Drowning is not a beautiful way to die, he realizes.
"It's not a suicide," he tells the police, steadfastly, "Mama didn't kill herself."
But they simply cross themselves and drain the bath and cart away the bloated body.
There is no funeral.
He must go to The Institution, the authorities inform him. He does not remember which or what institution, only that the man who told him had an iron-gray beard and eyes as bleak as midnight. He had struck him when the boy corrected him – "Your mother's death has left you destitute," the man explained, "And your father has eloped with another woman. You have no where to go and no heritage to speak of. The Crehadors were once a noble family, but poverty has cheapened them."
"But Mama's death was not a suicide," the boy countered, "She must have drowned in the bath."
The man's fist was hard and flinty – he still feels it now, the blue of a bruise rising to his cheek.
And now no one touches him. He feels estranged, hunched lonesome in the corner of his bedroom. Strangers sometimes come, not to give condolences, but to express a morbid curiosity. The boy thinks of himself as a little raven, delirious among the ebony feathers of larger birds. A hollowness channels its way into his center, and he imagines the feeling is a worm, winding its way through the soft flesh of a corpse. He thinks of the bathtub, the still water, the disturbing tangle of legs. Why did he not hear the facet drip? Why did he not hear his mother's smothered breaths? He thinks about his mother, her clothes prim and pressed, her eyes sharp and hard – he thinks about the hardness of her hand when she would slap him, the glasslike quality of her voice, crying – 'Why, Dominic? Why do you see these things?' And those few other times, rare and velvet flowers, blooming at strange moments: his mother tucks him into bed, whispers, "Good night, child," or touches his cheek with remarkably warm fingers and says, "I love you, Dominic," before she closes the bedroom door.
His room wavers and shifts, silk veils and lilies. Where are the Dead? The Living suffocate him.
He closes his eyes and imagines his father in the doorway, holding the porcelain arm of a rich woman, her lips painted up in scarlet smiles. Her curls are blonde and glint like burnished gold. She tilts her head and murmurs something to his father, and they cast their laughter across the room like a shroud – like a spider's web – and ensnare him in their lazy voices.
'A suicide…!' the blonde woman shrieks, 'What mother commits suicide?'
'Lady Crehador, that's who!' his father chortles, and the boy does not recognize his voice or his face, even though the vision is his own fantasy, 'She no longer desired the company of a child who consorts with the dead!'
'A child who consorts with the dead?' the mistress mimics, 'What sort of child is that? An evil one, perhaps – a child who should join the dead!'
'He's no son of mine,' the stranger who is the his father who is a mere daydream rumbles, and the boy feels an invisible chasm open up beneath him, feels his heart and mind descend into an echoing spiral of nothingness, an endless coffin. He no longer wishes to dream.
Still water. Bloated body. Tangled legs.
Why did he not hear the facet drip?
Nausea slicks the back of his throat.
He found her there – silent, desolate. No one was there, not even the Dead. Everything was water: puddles on the floor, reflecting the small, pale face of a child, condensation rolling down the walls like tears, the lifeless catacomb that was a bathtub that housed the drowned thing within. Surely, it was not his mother – the snakelike hair, the foggy eyes, the gaping mouth – he could not ascribe the thing to either the Living or the Dead, but simply as a swollen monstrosity, a bread crumb breaking up slowly in clear liquid.
The Church would not give her a proper funeral. They yielded up an unhallowed patch of dirt, rolled her soaked corpse in like a bedraggled doll. The boy dresses up his room like a funeral parlor – he throws lilies on the floorboards and casts raven veils over the windows – but no one comes to play pretend with him.
No one touches him. Not even the Dead.
He flails in the emptiness and drowns in the knowledge that neither the Dead nor the Living want him.
Surely, surely, it was not a suicide?
The thing writhes up like a worm, a long-faced, ghastly column of human suffering.
Surely, I have never loved you!
He cowers and nearly falls into the candle: the dancing wick watches him like the eye of a demon.
Mama, Mama – how was it that you died?
It gasps and rattles without breath, it watches him without eyes.
'Dominic…If you hadn't been born – I wouldn't have had to die!'
The thing swallows him whole; it drenches him in its suicide; it clutches his heart; it shrieks to him the words of hell and tells him over and over, 'You are a child of death! You are a corpse in a playground! A ghost in boy's clothing!' And now he flounders at the bottom of a bathtub, and the dark water rushes to fill his eyes and his nose and his mouth, and he remembers that drowning is not a beautiful way to die, and that the police will cross themselves before removing his waterlogged corpse, and surely, surely – surely this is a suicide – ?
Surely, I will never love again.
And when the woman with the ruby necklace whispers that she loves him, Dominic Crehador does not believe her until the bath water closes over her head.
And that's all…?