"Though
this be madness, yet there is method in't."
-William
Shakespeare
It's All in Your Head
Leon woke up.
His eyes inched open, and the extreme sunlight that blasted through the clouds blinded him with an intense yellow-white. He decided to close his eyes, the rays burning his face, causing a dull orange color to pulsate under his eyelids.
He groaned uneasily and moved his neck about an inch to the side.
Ouch!
He became rudely aware that every muscle in his averagely toned body was sore. His body was splayed clumsily in a bed of soft grass that was comforting under him, but didn't alleviate the sharp pangs of pain that started around his lower back and shot up violently to his shoulders.
Leon allowed himself to sit up, slowly, slowly, his back arching forward tenderly, his abs scrunching to make the action possible. He sat upright, finally, with his eyes still closed. Then he gradually opened them again, the light still prominent and stinging, yet not as harsh as when he stared into the sun directly.
Leon inspected his condition. His AC/DC shirt was ripped relentlessly and caked with dried blood. His jeans were also frayed with rips going across the material in sets of three, revealing Leon's thighs and calves which were covered in the same trio-pattern of marks in the fashion of deep, red wounds. His right foot was covered with a tennis shoe with a gaping whole in the toe. His other foot was naked, void of even a sock, and was slashed up and swollen as well.
With a odd sense of defeated incredulity, Leon looked at his ravaged self, simultaneously noticing that his long blond locks were not tied back as usual and hung loosely over his face, dancing over a puncture wound Leon discovered he had on his cheek when he brushed his hand over it, seeing that he could stick half a pinky finger in the gash. He was messed up. Really messed up. Leon was surprised he wasn't in twice as much pain.
It
was a beast that fucked me up, Leon
surmised in his head. Yeah,
a giant thing, with claws. Like a lion... D!
With a new-found energy surging through his body, fueled by intense anger, Leon stood suddenly. He clenched his injured hands, looking into the horizon, but not really seeing anything, his mind filled with only the androgynous-looking Chinese man that always had a smile dancing upon his lips and claimed to "sell dreams".
Count D…D…D…!
Leon rolled the name in his head, loathing it more every time. He let out an animalistic grunt, full of fury, ironically becoming like the animal that had attacked him. Leon charged forward, mad and directionless in the plain meadow, and after a few steps he tripped and fell quickly, gravity pulling him down as fast as his determination had formed.
Urg…
Then Leon began to really feel it. The soreness surged through his limbs anew, his ankle on fire with pain, twisted from the fall. As Leon squinted his eyes shut, waiting for the throbbing to subside, sweat from frustration and the heat glazing his skin, Leon realized that he would only get out of his current dilemma if he had a clear head and was calm and collected, a hard state of mind for him to reach especially when he was badly injured.
First, Leon decided he would study his location. He looked around thoroughly, taking in the scenery, only to find that he was surrounded by abnormally even and green grass, covering plain hills that rolled endlessly into the horizon.
But then he noticed something; in the distance was a tall tree that shot up into the sky, its leaves a glistening green and its bark a deep reddish-brown.
Leon decided it wasn't too far off, and that the key to getting out of the "world" D had placed him in would probably be found around the tree, so, carefully, he stood once more and headed toward it.
He walked toward it limping, easily, easily, off into the distance, his torn clothing taped to him by sweat, his body lurching forward lethargically, and heat waves wobbling in front of his view…
____
After walking for what seemed to be hours, possibly over a day, Leon had collapsed on the too-good-to-be-real grass, his body buried in its thickness, his hopes buried by the intense aching that had engulfed his every limb.
The sun had never gone down, and had succeeded in torturing Leon with several mirages and sunburns.
This is bullshit!
Once again, Leon wanted to scream, to beat his chest, to claw his hair out, but he had no energy for self-harm. His stomach rumbled audibly; he was hungry, starved. He certainly couldn't remember the last thing he ate, and his chapped lips begged for moisture.
I could…
Leon shook his head vigorously, hoping the thought would fly out of his ear or something, but it remained on his mind. A type of survival tactic reared its ugly head from Leon's memories.
I'm not gonna drink my own piss!
But it was tempting to. Leon rolled his tongue in his mouth, feeling how abnormal the organ felt around his teeth in its dry and chaffed state. Just when Leon had made the decision to consume his own waste, he saw the unthinkable:
Melons.
Bulky, perfectly round, greenish-yellow melons rolled down the hill where Leon was situated. There were five, eight? around ten, maybe…Leon couldn't count them all. He stood slowly, astonished, as a drove of juicy-looking melons rolled down the grassy knoll with nothing in their way to stop them.
Melons?
Leon's mouth was agape with wonder. He wanted to lunge for one, but what if they weren't even real…?
D's fucking with me…
But even the animosity burning in his chest couldn't stifle Leon's desire to unglue his stomach from his back. He decided to catch a melon. When one rolled over the hill right in front of him, he stopped it abruptly with his foot and strained to pick it up. It was quite weighty, the skin was tough and glossy, and the smell…Leon smelled it cautiously. It smelled fruity, just as expected.
But how to eat it? Leon stupidly tried to bite off a bit of its flesh, but failed, his teeth stinging from its encounter with the tough outer-layer of the fruit. So, Leon placed it back on the ground and kicked it around, hoping to dent it with his foot enough to expose some of the meat, but alas, he failed.
How the fuck do I crack this thing open?! Leon thought.
But then he realized the inadvertent wisdom in his words: he would crack it. He picked the melon up once again and threw it on the ground with all the energy he had left. The melon burst open, exposing purple insides. Though it looked suspect, Leon dipped a finger in it and tasted the juice. It was synonymous to the taste of an orange, surprisingly. Deciding it was safe to eat, Leon consumed the fruit in minutes, wolfing down its flesh, his hands becoming sticky with its juices and dried blood on his hands made watery again.
Leon only stopped his actions when he tasted something odd. He spit out the contents of his mouth into his hand, finding that with his last bite of the mysterious melon he had also almost eaten a piece of paper. He read it: "Look to your past to discover your future. Look inside another melon to reveal your destiny. Your lucky numbers are: 144,000, 666, 7."
"That fucker," Leon spat, the first words he said aloud in a long time escaped his mouth in a raspy form. Leon didn't want to be played with and didn't want to be just another piece on D's Chinese checker board, but he was hungry, so he decided to eat another wacky melon.
He ate another.
And another, and another, and another.
Leon ate so many melons that he stomach looked slightly bloated. Each melon had a piece of paper with a generic fortune-cookie saying. Each piece of paper told him to open another melon and had the same three contradictory "lucky" numbers.
It wasn't until the last melon Leon ate that the slip of paper had a different message: "Look up."
So, he did.
What the fuck!?
Leon found that he was under the tree that he had been trekking toward before the melons came. His hands were clean, his stomach felt comfortably full, but not impending explosion like it had when he had eaten his second to last melon. And the sunlight, it was shielded from his back by something or someone besides the tree.
Leon spun, actually expecting what he saw.
Count D.
D stood, calm as usual, ornately dressed in a purple Chinese gown, a smile lifting his thin lips.
"You've made it Leon," he said soothingly.
"You…!"
"Unfortunately, I have to kill you now…"
Leon gasped as D transformed into an ugly thing with claws, and then D…!
____
Count
D… D… D… D…!? D…!!
"D!!!" Leon screamed from the top of his lungs, lunging forward in his seat, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He looked himself over, but found no marks; his t-shirt and jeans were still intact, his hair tied backward tightly. Then he looked around, ancient birdcages with rare cockatiels and parakeets hung from the ceiling, cats with exotic eyes and fur lounged on plush couches and chairs, and strange insects peered at him from their glass boxes on the many heavy, wood tables of varying sizes placed throughout the room. Then a scent, so delicate, tickled Leon's nose and forced him to sneeze.
"You really shouldn't yell like that. Chris, T-chan, and the others are having their afternoon nap and you'll scare away my customers."
Leon looked directly ahead. Count D sat across from him, dressed in a heavily embodied dark blue Chinese gown and black slippers, his hair neatly parted and hanging a short ways past his ears. Annoyance tugged at his womanly features, but he softened a bit when he noticed the confusion on Leon's face. D's almond eyes, one golden, one a bluish-green color, buried into the blond man, knowing everything about him. He smiled, picking up a small porcelain teapot from the coffee table between them. Leon just watched, breathing steady but at a quickened pace due to the frightening nightmare he had.
"You should get more sleep, Detective Orcot," D added sugar into the teapot, a small laugh escaping him.
"You…drugged me with something," Leon mumbled, glaring at the smaller man. D fixed his gaze on him for a moment, and then resumed his addition of copious amounts of sugar to the tea.
"I would do no such thing," D said, his smile unwavering. "You shouldn't make such claims, Detective, especially if you haven't any proof."
"You! I know what you did! I…I had a freaky dream, with you in it! You probably used one of those weird Oriental drugs on me! That's illegal, you know! I'll get you for drug trafficking, D!" Leon, pounding his fists on his knees, threw his accusations at D, but the Count took little notice. He continued to grin, still adding sugar to the tea.
"You shouldn't get so upset, Detective. If you arrest me, then who will care for Chris?" he spoke calmly. Leon sat back in his seat, yet kept his eyebrows irately knitted. He felt defeated.
"Anger will age you early," D continued. "Then you'll get wrinkles, and that would be, well, ugly. But then again, humans always have such mundane features…" He finally placed the spoon back into the cup of sugar, and then dipped his finger into a smaller bowl. When he lifted it out, a runny red substance covered his fingertip.
Blood!?
"W-what is that…?" Leon asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
"Oh, this?" D asked innocently, letting the red liquid glisten in the dim light of the pet shop. "This is a special type of nectar. I got it from a rare, feisty plant that arrived at my shop suddenly one day, although it comes and goes. The plant is a bright golden in color, and it's in the same family as the Venus flytrap, yet oddly enough, it originated here in the North America," He dipped his finger into the tea pot, swishing it around to thoroughly mix it in. "Yes, this nectar very rare indeed. But even though it comes from such a vile plant, this nectar is so very sweet. I thought I'd add it to today's tea."
Without asking Leon if he wanted any, D poured two cups of tea and placed one in front of the detective. Reluctantly, Leon reached for the cup, an orangey aroma much like the one he smelt from the fruit in his dream arose from it. He took a short sip, but then abruptly stopped when he felt something running down his chest. He looked at his shirt; blood had suddenly begun to seep though it, blood from a wound that he had overlooked somehow before.
The stain was the shape of a heart.