Monster
Disclaimer: I do not profit from this piece in any way. All non-original characters belong to their original creator(s), I simply borrow them to play out my fandom fueled fantasies.
AN: Thanks to everyone who reviewed the first chapter! Your encouraging words meant a lot to me, and did even more in the way of getting Behind Closed Doors out this quickly (and… I just realized it's been over half a year since I first published *whoops*). A special thanks to Joelle Hart for editing this and the previous chapter!
Towering sky scrapers and glinting window panes reflected the quiet stares of a billion stars. Below them, the city streets roared with endless life. Impatient drivers hammered on hate-worn horns while bleak faced delivery boys handed over cold pizzas — there was no real reason to hurry, thirty minute deals were a thing of the past — and feral cats screeched and yowled at the moon, each other, and nothing. Tiny white lights glittered on pointed fir trees and framed store sills.
Six stories up, the pale haired girl turned from the frosted window, her blue eyes nearly reflecting the rich red of the opposing wall, and strode across the room. The lights were off, but the space was faintly lit by both the steady shine of starlight and slivers of warm florescence from all four sides of the loosely hinged door. She'd only been here a few months, just settled in really, and already the place — though bare — felt entirely like home. Her back to the city sights, she could feel cool air sweeping off the floor-to-ceiling windows and up onto her upper back and calves. It was refreshing. The sharp bite of cold on her flesh made her alert and on edge; excited in every way.
She stepped quietly up to her room's dark-wood door. Embedded in its face was a copper peephole, the last remnant of a nosy boss. It suited the girl (though she was nearly a woman); the simply perverse act of watching people— of eavesdropping, or whatever the sight equivalent, on some of the most rich and prominent citizenry she'd ever seen in one place— was… was like the gooseflesh tingling up her legs, through her spine and body. Like that, only warmer, better. Really, she would've had it placed anyway; it was good to know what was happening out there.
Breathing slowly, her hands pressed spread-fingered to either side of the peephole, the blond peered through the glass center. The room before her was at least three times longer than it was wide — a large office space in a past life — and entirely windowless. It's mid-height ceilings attested to what it'd been before the change; they were high enough that the space had likely still felt airy filled with cubicles, but the yellow-stained ceiling tiles had been way up on her kill list; exchanged for sheltering mahogany beams within the first couple of weeks. The way the light played on them, creating darkness and patterns where there had never been before, was perfect for the place. With those in mind, the dirty old office had been reshaped into something of eloquence and beauty; an old fashioned smoking club. Professional, exclusive… light-yellowed sconces and fat white candles; those said it all. They cast the room into alternating pools of dim glow and dimmer shadows, the kind of light their cliental (their comrades, their brethren? She didn't know quite what to call them yet; if, at this point, they were anything.) most preferred under such circumstance.
The area closest to her was occupied by refurbished poker tables — square and round intermingled — and matching, low-backed chairs. Two self-service bars, made of rich, red-black mahogany, lined the walls on either side. Their open fronts displayed glittering glass bottles, crystal flasks, and row upon row of ageless labels. They had no permit to sell (or, as they were, provide) alcohol, but with these men and women in attendance, no one would bother to check. They were men of business, military, and congress. The others, few in numbers and tenfold in power, were impossible not to recognize. Such people were truly above the law, able to escape all meaningful blame with a sheepish smile and a public apology. The effort to obtain a license would've been wasted.
Sighing with a sort of thoughtful content, her blue eyes cat-like in their determination, the girl turned from her private peephole. On any other night, that section of the club would've been at the heart of the action: far from bustling, but full of quiet words, hidden faces, and the hunched shoulders of conspiring men. The aroma of warming alcohol in the air, the pungent stench of paranoia and uncertainty slowly, slowly fading… but not on that night.
Tonight it's dark in there.
On this night, cold as it is outside, in there it is hot. Hot with fear, indignation, the mule-like resolve of someone whose ignorance — no, self-induced delusion — has just been shattered. In there, it's hot with change and, soon, their heat will be harnessed into direction.
Just beyond her door, affluent men and women of America (or at least of that small portion of the East Coast) sit packed into two deep rows of long wooden benches, like those in any church. At their head, atop a narrow stage, a man with an even narrower nose and eyes just a bit too big for his face stands behind a podium, laying out the truths of their reality. On the far wall, slides flicker and twitch through the lens of a rented projector; they are the only light in this dark.
With each images thrown to the crowd, another brick comes down, another delusion is dissolved. Telekinesis. Healing factor. Human flight. There's video and pictures, even interviews ("I don't like the term firestarter. I just don't"), but that's far from all.
"So far." continues the narrow-nosed man. His voice is steady, almost passive, bored; he doesn't need to put on a tone to get his point across. "They hide from us…" He raises his hand, motions to the back wall with a flourish.
Trolls, vampires, and fairies — monsters; many dead, but most in mid-attack — paint the screen. The cold techniques of costume and of photo manipulation have come so far, many will be tempted to pass these off as hoaxes (it's a lie, it's got to be a lie) but there's something about them… the brutality, the alternating terror and hate in people's eyes, that make it seems real.
Or perhaps it's the fact that, when confronted with this version of reality, they begin to remember that stranger, that empty eyed somebody, on the street corner. That pair of eyes watching them from beneath the bridge. That strange little thing that someone had always been able to do…
Some will walk away, that's for certain, but they will all remember. Or rather, they'll begin to see what they once chose to forget.
Unable to help herself, the girl looked once again through the peephole. Edged the door open and slipped soundlessly into the dark edges of their quiet club. As the last slide faded away, there was total silence. No one breathed. The lights remained dead. When she could no longer hold her breath, a single, weepy woman — some politician's wife, undoubtedly — spoke.
"Why…" she struggled for words, "why did you show us that?" There was another, shorter pause before a handful of people called out in agreement. In that moment, they were completely naked; money and rank stripped away, they were entirely… vulnerable. Finally the big-eyed man answered.
"Because, there is a problem. They," he tilted his head to the projector, "are it. They kill, they maraud, they live beneath our streets. They are inhuman creatures masquerading as men. Completely. Un. Civilized." His voice kicked up for the first time with true feeling, as he ended it sounded as if he was going to spit. Realizing this — being such a speaker as he was, the girl was sure he did — he took a breath to compose himself. His wrinkled fingers came to rest on the front lip of his podium, knuckles white with unexpressed fevor.
"We have gathered you here, the affluent and powerful of our great city, to return the world to the way it once was… if only in your minds." The man's voice was heavy with bridled condescension, but a clearer, previously unheard tone suggested pure altruism; that he only wanted to help, only wanted to make things better again. Only, only, only. And that, the girl was certain, was the only thing any of them were going to hear. "You see, my people, we have the solution. We have the solution to our Inhuman Problem."
All in about the same heartbeat, everyone in the room took in a breath. They were right in the palm of his hand— precisely where these people, in their time of confusion and turbulence, felt they needed to be. It was exactly where they, the narrow man, and him, and herself, wanted them— if only he didn't stretch them too far…
"All we need, all we have to ask for, is your help."
And of course, he didn't. After all, he'd had more than enough practice— already, this was the third gathering— he practically had it down to an art form. Being naturally manipulative, pervasively charismatic (though in a way that made the hair on her neck rise, the back of her stomach tingle as if it was trying to inch away) did everything to seal the deal. Bated breaths were released, the air seemed lighter than just a second ago and, at once, the girl seemed a woman. Her face stretched into a smile — only narrow-nose could see it, all others were too distracted to look in her direction — and she returned to the backroom. Shutting the door quietly behind her, she took in a great breath and leaned her forehead gratefully against a crimson walls. It was met with little resistance, for the crimson was in fact a great and familiar tapestry; one hung proudly on each side of the light wood door. Breathing slowly, she fingered the soft fabric of the one before her, ran her long fingernails around one sloping half of the depicted golden gear.
Our enemies shall be destroyed, and from the ashes… a new Eden will arise. The words rang through her mind, but they were not her own. They were his. Still smiling, she answered in kind; invariably, they 'spoke' to one and other in strange, almost prayerful voices. He the priest, and she his follower.
The first weapon is ours, Humankind will burn them from the Earth, cleansing it of its wrongness.
He only laughed.
Sighing deeply, the Aryan woman pushed back from the wall and admired the pair of iron-black swastikas, one still rumpled from where her head last rested.
They'd received two complaints about them already; housewarming gifts from their neighbors across the way.
Time to get some shades, hmm?
TO BE CONTINUED…
Thanks again for reading! Please don't be put off by the lack of canon characters in this chapter, I promise they'll return to center stage in chapter three.
~LittleSun1
