A/N: Sorry this chapter took so long, and thanks to all of you who said nice things and followed! I'm really glad that lots of people have decided to follow from DWHP. There's also more of a personal narrative tone here rather than a general narrative from the last one because Bickslow's personality just. really loves to shine through.
"If only I'd known how to save a life."
- How to Save a Life, The Fray
Everybody loved Bickslow in that small village. Especially the kids. He was tall for his age, strong, and didn't ever stand for injustice towards anyone. He protected them from bullies. He was just like a knight, and everyone was fond of him and they were fond of his parents, who were popular far and wide.
They did puppet shows, and Bickslow had to really think to find something better than it. They did everything themselves and worked day-in and day-out. They made the scenery out of felt and scraps of wood, and carved little characters out of wood and sewed them from elegant cloth. The kids loved it when he ran out to them and showed them what he'd been working on, and he loved it when they insisted he do the funny voices and show them what the next show was going to be.
Man, he loved hearing people laugh.
He was content. He and his family lived comfortably. Lots of people came far and wide to see their famous puppet shows. He loved getting underneath those wooden stages that he made with his own two hands, his own work, and he loved making the puppets dance and be someone he wasn't. It was the ultimate form of pretend. He could be anyone under that stage
Bickslow loved it. He loved everyone. He loved everything.
He loved his father, a tall man with piercing green eyes and messy black hair, who had a penchant for forgetting his work tools at the most critical of moments. Bickslow suspected that he'd gotten his scattery personality from him. He also loved his mother, who was taller still and had curling navy hair that tickled his nose whenever she leaned in for a hug. Her work was always neat and smooth, and she was no novice when it came to painting sceneries. His mother's hand was always so warm and guiding whenever she held it to help him create a nice, neat stroke on a background for their next show.
He really loved those kids who always came tumbling to meet him whenever he stepped outside. There was a young boy about six with brown hair. An adorable eight-year-old redhead girl. A set of triplets, each identical with freckles and blond hair and mischievous grins. There were more, of course, but those five were always there, and always treated him like a big brother, and they were at every single puppet show.
He stopped loving things, though. Stopped loving them on the day that everything tumbled to the ground and shattered, just like an expensive vase in the homes of nobility that he frequently visited to entertain their children. Shattered. Just like that. Into clean, crisp pieces that would cut you if you held them too hard.
A dark guild stormed the community, gone mad with bloodlust, screaming to one another about Zeref and an R-System, and blood flew left and right. There were children too frightened to scream as their parents were rendered headless in front of them, parents who screeched to their deaths as children who were too young were pummeled into mush, and Bickslow wanted to vomit when an ax was buried in the shoulder of his father and blood sprayed high into the air and came down like rain.
A man tried to rip him from his mother's arms while she screamed, and when he bit so deeply into his arm that blood started to gush into his mouth, the man howled, shook him off, and pointed a crossbow at him. The end of the arrow was so sharp that while Bickslow stared at it, he was certain he was already feeling the pain in anticipation. He clenched his eyes shut, took in the last sounds of his mother screaming, and braced for the pain.
There was the sound of the crossbow firing.
It didn't come.
He waited some more.
It didn't come. The pain. It didn't. What did come was a hot spray of blood on his face and the taste of iron just barely on his lips.
Slowly, really slowly, he opened up his eyes. At first, there was only an indistinct shape, kneeling in front of him as his eyes readjusted. The shape soon made itself out to be his mother, her favorite pink dress torn and ripped and stained with a bleeding red. An arrow was lodged in her chest and stuck so far out that the end almost touched his nose. She choked, a stream of blood came out of her mouth, and she collapsed after only a second. The arrow in her chest lodged itself in his waist when she fell atop him.
He didn't scream when it stabbed him.
He screamed when he felt a burning on his face, much hotter than the blood, and felt his eyes scorch. The pain was so intense. It was magma. It was the sun. It was bliss. The pain felt so wrong, but so good.
There was the indistinct screaming of people around him, the sounds of fire ravaging the village, and he passed out atop his mother to the sounds of terror.
When he woke up, the sky was gray and wet and hid the moon. There was blood in his mouth and the rain on his face stung in the most comforting way possible. His mother's body was still below him, and he rolled her over and put a stray curtain that had whisked itself over to them on top of her so that she wouldn't be cold. The man with the crossbow was dead only a few feet away. Bickslow put a broken piece of wood through his chest.
The remnants of the village were strewn with the dead. Every dark guild member seemed to have killed themselves. There was glass in their throats, arrows in their chests, and some looked like they had pummeled their own heads against walls until they died.
As he walked about, soldiers ran around him, yelling to one another and holding their lances close. They did not see the young boy walk through the mud, didn't see him walk past and gather the bodies of the children whom he'd loved and who had loved him, and they didn't notice when he searched to and fro when he heard familiar voices in his ear. They only took him as an afterthought, dragging him away from the ruins and bodies as he yelled and thrashed around.
They took pity on him and seemed to find something odd about him. They gave him a place to stay at a base near the ocean. It was pretty nice- he had to take quite the walk to get into town, though. And his room was dull, with dull navy wallpaper, a tiny bookshelf and desk, and a bed with blankets that were so thick they were uncomfortable. One of the older members at the base, a sweet old woman, gave him a small ball, much like one he'd had as a kid. He spent most of his time throwing it up at the ceiling and waiting for it to come back and hit him in the face.
Bickslow would've rather been back home.
The Council treated him like a fascinating subject and kept him close at hand. He had been the only one left in the ruins of a massacre, after all, and there was something very weird about that. He had a "disgusting feeling" around him, a Chairwoman said while she circled him like a vulture searching for pickings. That big black tattoo on his face was also obscene; what kind of parent would let an impressionable boy get that?
Sure, sure, pick on the poor orphan boy, why didn't she?
The big black "tattoo" had the vague appearance of a person. A person who was long and bulky and made of squares, actually. He didn't notice it until the Council had pointed it out and he immediately looked in a mirror to poke and prod at it. It didn't have the same sheen of ink that his father's tattoos had had. It looked just like skin. Only after it was pointed out to him did he realize that it still seared when he touched it.
It definitely wasn't a tattoo.
Could this have been the cause of the boiling pain from back then?
In any case, it set him apart. When he left his room to go out shopping or to exercise, everyone moved out of his way. Council members shuffled past him quickly and sometimes pulled their hoods up to avoid his gaze. They whispered about him, how he was "off," about the disgusting feeling he radiated. He was the survivor of a massacre that had started to make the history books, and wasn't that just the oddest thing, that he only came out of it with an odd marking and a few scratches while everyone else was dead and bloody?
He could never hear those whispers above the ones that were always groaning in his ear. Sometimes they even screamed. He'd thought that they would go away soon after the massacre. He thought they had just been a lingering after effect of the trauma.
They scared him. Sometimes they sounded like his mother, but mostly they sounded like those kids that he'd loved. They talked to him constantly, screaming in were a constant echo in his mind, and he felt like he was going out of his mind after a month, two months, then three. He smashed pillows against his head, curled up and jammed his ears shut, yelled to drown out the sounds, but the voices were just there. They wouldn't go away.
What the hell what the hell what the hell was happening to him? What had he done to be punished like this? Hadn't he suffered enough?
Even when he went to the ocean, dunked his head under the water, they followed him and talked and talked and never ever shut up. Was he going insane? Was he really going mad? Had the massacre finally caught up with him?
Maybe he really was mentally damaged, just like the psychiatrist and therapist and everyone else tried to tell him.
Maybe he really was going crazy from grief at last.
Great. Just great.
Eventually, an alternative to insanity presented itself in the form of a batch of books. The Council suggested that, since he showed no discernable skills beyond carving wood and had no motivation for anything, he learn magic. The same old vulture woman from months before brought him stacks and stacks of books and tomes. They were on all sorts of magic: Fire (boring), water (too not-him), celestial (complicated and weird), lost magics (not unless he wanted to become even more of a freak).
Black Magic.
Now that sounded interesting.
Seith Magic: The ability to manipulate and connect with various forms of souls. To those with a natural inclination to the magic, souls of the deceased would cling to them in desperation.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe he wasn't insane. He wasn't making up the voices. The voices, those poor souls that he found himself having immense pity for, were just what was left of the dead and damned. And maybe it was wrong, maybe he was just reaching, but maybe, just maybe, these were the souls of people who had lived in that village with him. Maybe they were even those kids who'd been dumb enough to love a creepy kid like him.
The souls must've been cold, he thought. Lonely. They'd been floating around him for months at that point. They needed a place to stay. They'd suffered enough and he'd keep them safe from then on. The people in the base looked at him a bit (or a lot) oddly when he asked for as much wood and paint and lacquer as they could give him, but nobody ever wanted to make Bickslow mad. They were all too scared to do so. He was scary and creepy, after all.
His dreary room began to look almost like home had.
Very heavy emphasis on "almost."
The studying desk turned into a crafting desk covered with carving tools and stained with paint. The bookshelves became tool shelves as he swept all the books off and lovingly put each tool in its own place. Cans of paint and lacquers, some tipped over, littered the room carelessly. Piles of wood and chunks of scraps were scattered around, and he picked them up as he pleased.
Now this was the stuff.
The base members looked inside at his back, hunched over the desk, frequently and always muttered about the mess. When were they going to be getting rid of him again? That time just wouldn't come soon enough. That disgusting feeling around him was just getting stronger and stronger and he was a hassle to have around.
Screw them. He was a damn delight.
The voices became more than voices one day. He woke up and on his trek into town to get a hot breakfast, when a particularly chattery voice in his ear stopped and there was a shimmer ahead of him. He blinked, squinted, blinked again, but it was still there- the vague shape of a young child, mostly transparent, wobbly, and green. It hovered towards him, reached out for his hand, though it passed uselessly through, and the voice began to chatter about nothing once more.
Great. Now he could see them.
He started to see the shimmers and gleams inside of people, too. The baker's soul was a dark purple and fluttered warmly inside his chest. The librarian's was silver and tiny, curled up in a shy manner.
Kinda cool. Only kinda, though. It made it really distracting and hard to work on his projects. But it was nice to be able to look at a person and see something warm… something fluttering and soft. It was also nice to look at people with heavy, black souls that burst around wildly and know he had to stay away from them.
It took a long time, a really long time, but eventually the first puppet came along nicely. He'd intended to make it bigger, but he'd made too many mistakes and had settled on making it a small, rounded square. It lacked character, though…
He put wings on it. What in the world had more character than wings? Nothing. Wings were the freakin' best.
It'd be weird to put the souls inside something without a face. Bickslow knew he'd hate not having a face, so he drew and painted one on, a happy little smiling face with a quirked and mischievous smile.
The whispers in his ears turned from dreary and agonized to curious as he worked, and when he finally started talking back and telling them about what he was doing, they began to sound very happy and excited. They chirped his words back to him eagerly and even learned to imitate his laugh. Sometimes they would even quiet down while he worked and gave him peace and quiet for the first time in over a year. They began to speak individually and he was able to count out five distinct voices.
(There had been five kids who loved him.)
That meant five puppets.
He created all of them slowly, carefully, with even and expert strokes and eventually had a complete and matching set. They were stout, the size of his head, and painted festively. He made them look alike but gave them different faces so that way he could learn to distinguish between them. If they were never going to leave him alone, he should at least be able to identify them so he could tell them specifically to shut up whenever he couldn't hear himself think.
It took a while to reason with the souls and convince them to take up residence inside the vessels, but he did his best. They'd be safe there. They'd be warm and happy. Bickslow'd take good care of them, so, really, they should go into the puppets. He'd take care of them. He would. Honestly.
Once they did, the constant voices stopped. When they did talk, it was only to repeat him and laugh at his dumb jokes. He could no longer clearly see the gleams of the souls, though the shimmer remained around the puppets. A week after they'd settled in, they began to hover and fly around, thoroughly shocking everyone.
Denis from the weapons department fainted the first time he saw them zipping around. Gertrude from the library department had a heart attack later the same day she discovered them, but Bickslow convinced himself that, no, it hadn't really been his fault, and even if it was, it had been a small heart attack. She was fine. And besides, she liked to smack his hands with a ruler whenever he put them on her desk, so no, she was not going to get sympathy from him.
On Bickslow's fifteenth birthday, over a year after the massacre and soon after he'd began seriously developing his magic, the Council let him go and advised him to become part of a guild and become a proper and professional mage. Basically, this was Council Speak for "You're-annoying-and-we-don't-want-to-be-associated-with-you."
Despite their eagerness to get rid of him, they took time to tell him to absolutely not go to Fairy Tail, because it was rowdy and improper and not the right place for someone with his talents and who had been in the official custody of the Magic Council to cultivate his magic.
He went to Fairy Tail.
What could he say? He loved to piss those old weirdos off.
Everyone stared the day he walked into the guildhall with shrieking blocks of decorated wood zipping around his head. Their jaws may as well have been just sitting on the ground. The master of the guild seemed impressed with him and took him in immediately, particularly upon learning that he had kind-of-sort-of joined the guild for the sake of pissing the Council off.
Oh man, people who liked to piss of the Council? Definitely his kind of people.
He cultivated his magic well under the instruction of dozens of books on black magic in the guild's library. People leaned away from him at the tables when they saw his books on the subject. Sometimes they just up and left.
Sure, it may have been black magic, but he couldn't see those innocent little-kid souls inside his puppets as anything dark and malicious. They were helping him do good. They were excellent at helping apprehend the bad guys from his jobs, so he shrugged off their fear and wariness. There was nothing "evil and creepy," as they were wont to say, about his babies.
The puppets followed him and sang songs with him, played hide-and-seek, and helped him whenever and wherever, even if it was to clean a high shelf in his apartment. Nobody else really wanted to talk to him. Maybe it was because he laughed too loud, let his tongue hang out of his mouth, or maybe it was because of the big black tattoo on his face. But if they didn't want to talk to him? It was their loss. Bickslow was hilarious, clever, and strong. It wasn't like he was longing for a person with flesh and bone to come along and be his friend, no sir, not at all. He wasn't waiting to connect with someone he could touch. He was fine with just the blocks of wood and their constant echos.
But he did. He found an actual, real person.
He met him.
