A/N: I'm not too sure about the rating for this one, so I'm following the "if in doubt, keep it M" rule. Some of the chapters might be a big graphic for some of you. I can't say all the warnings now either, since that also involves spoilers, but I'll try to give them chapter by chapter without spoiling too much (ouch, tall order).
For this chapter, warning for a somewhat graphic description of a drowned body. Which naturally involves a dead body.
And now that that's out of the way, some less pressing matters. :D First, this is written for two challenges at the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges Forum (link's in my profile) – The Tale in Fragments Challenge (with 100 prompts, easy list 4), and the Mega Prompts Challenge, writing prompts 85 – write a multichip over 100 chapters. These are very short chapters (maximum of 800 words because of the first challenge), but they're chapters regardless. They'll tell a whole story when they're done, and taking a 100 prompts list was the easiest way to guarantee this story will reach 100 chapters. :D And that I won't run out of stuff for it too. This also frames the…more gory details very nicely (if you consider this gore; I don't but I was outvoted by some old school friends on the matter).
The other thing before I throw you guys into the fic is the unspecified characters in this first chapter. If you couldn't guess from the summary or the characters listed, it'll be obvious by the last line – and if it's not, think back to Frontier canon. Which one of the twins fits closer into that last line?
And that's all from me. Future authors notes will hopefully not be as long. Enjoy. :D
Drowning in the Dark
1. Bleach
He'd always thought of drowning as some foolish sweet death: an escape from the monotone they claimed bled them dry, where the dark water could bury it all. He always thought of it as painless, like fog stifling one's senses and lulling them into eternal sleep. He always thought of it as poetic, beautiful in that the empty shell left behind was white and perfectly plastic like a doll.
That was before he saw what it really was, what sort of corpse it really left behind. Eyes not closed in acceptance, willingness and peace, but rather open, glassy and empty and yet somehow full of fear and desperation before they froze. No-one had been kind enough to close them. Not then. His own hand had come shaking forward, but it had fallen; he'd backed away and crashed into the cart before someone noticed and took away that sight.
They covered the body too, but not before the image had been burnt into his mind. Not pale and perfect skin but eyes and nose and mouth were tinged with blue – a dark blue he didn't thing was natural on a human body. But apparently it was, when that body was so desperately starved for its oxygen. And it wasn't so smooth and perfect like a marker someone had used to paint, but something horrible and indistinguishable and unarguably real.
And that blue blotched the skin as well: specks that had no sense, no pattern, stitched in white red – and the bleached pallor he'd imagined would be there was only in those eyes, and even that was lined with streaks of dilute red. That looked fake, like someone had used a red pen with fading ink, the sort that went almost pink and skipped a few strokes without fail.
No, that wasn't true. There was more white: a thin line of foam between lax lips, mixed with water trickling torturously slow. Or maybe that was just the water that clung to the body still, the water of Tokyo Bay that had taken more than its fair share of romantic suicides and had now been exposed as the monster it really was. All of that was gone now; he was alone, in the dark, but that image was still there: a face, blue and red and dead with an expression of desperation and fear fixed upon it. Immortalised. He shivered as it stole his sight again. In the darkness, there wasn't even anything else to distract him. At least the clinging salt and algae dragged into the hospital's inherent antiseptic smell had blocked his nose. The image alone had been so brutal he didn't know what he would have done if smell – or, God forbid, touch – had accompanied it.
And that was just the face; the rest of the body had been covered with a white sheet, slowly soaked.
It was a thief, that body. It had stolen all the anger he'd meant to unleash, the hatred he'd meant to cling to stubbornly until his resolve failed, the questions he'd meant to ask, the shock he'd meant to struggle against until it crumbled by his hands. It had stolen his disillusion, his ignorance – and to think, his first meeting with his brother was with a dead body keeping his name.