Haven't written anything in AGES, but I'm glad to be back.
Thank you's go out to: My big sister, who gave me a bunch of Dresden Dolls music that really helped, and ReadingChick, who betaed this for Shelke's voicing.
Disclaimer: I don't own Dirge of Cerberus.
I open my eyes and stare across from the couch in a daze. My mind recounts details to me slowly. Incineration, sedatives, dependency. Everything is blurred into Weiss' soothing tones, murmuring, "I want you awake for when you join us." I experience a rush of clarity and pull my head off the couch. They want me to join them. They want me dead.
Will I join them? A week ago, I would have said no. Of course not. I have no wish to die and dying with them is absurd. But, with this level of dependence on them, I don't believe my mind will let me live without them. Perhaps this is why I created these delusions; To keep myself alive. But now, knowing that my psyche is on the more fragile side of breaking without them…
I would have never contemplated something like this before. "You're being ridiculous," I say aloud, into the empty apartment. I have to hear it resonate, at least for a moment, before being absolutely certain that it's me and not Nero or Weiss.
"Did you know," Nero asked, rounding a corner with a book in his hand, "That the brain signals love emits have a pattern similar to mental illness? Perhaps you truly are insane, dear Shelke."
"I know I'm not insane."
"Then you are in love."
"We have already established that."
"Indeed we have." Nero closes the book (A novel from my room) and sets it on the coffee table. "Has Weiss told you his intentions?"
"For my death?"
"Yes. Do you want to do it?"
I burn holes in the carpet with my eyes to avoid watching him sit next to me. "I don't know. I am divided on the matter." Nero presses his cold lips to my neck, prompting a shiver. I don't wrench away though. There's no point.
"It… Doesn't hurt after a while." I look at him. I can't tell if he's talking about dying or the state he's in now. "It's as if…" Nero stares into the depths of the coffee table, taking in all the burn marks that weren't there yesterday. "As if you stop simply being in a fire. Suddenly, you are fire. Light and pure, but powerful enough to blacken anything you choose."
He must be talking about dying now. "How did you become like this then? A…" I feel as if ghost is the inappropriate word, but nothing else really fits.
"Weiss and I had no wish to leave you. We still love you."
"So it's your wish for me to die as well?"
"I never said that. I… I'm uncertain as to what I hope to accomplish by staying here, but I do know that if I had left you alone with Weiss, you would have been dead by now." Nero takes a deep breath that he doesn't really need and takes one of my hands. Deathly cold though they are, I don't pull away from the contact. "Weiss is quite selfish. He doesn't want to let go of you, ever. Dying is a form of losing you because you will move on. If he stays here, haunting you forever, then he won't lose but he won't truly possess you and he will not have won."
"By joining you two in the afterlife he will have me."
"And he will have won," Nero concludes. "And typically, no one would want to die and be won over by a phantom of their lover. But your sanity is quite dependent on him giving you peace."
"And you." I have no doubt that if Nero had been absent when I went out to the couch, I would not have fallen asleep.
"And me."
"Nero…"
Nero looks up and, even though his eyes are lackluster, they still silence me effectively. He puts an arm around me, pulling me into his cold embrace and presses his lips to mine. When he pulls away, I can feel myself shaking.
"Shelke, your happiness is something that Weiss isn't paying attention to. My wish is for you to be happy, but I also want you to be with me." He pauses. "I do wonder which desire is stronger." With that, Nero leaves me shaking on the couch, picks up my book and walks back to my bedroom. Before he closes the door, he pokes his head back into the room. "By the by, Miss Kisaragi is coming up the stairs. She will be knocking on the door in around 30 seconds."
"So, I say to him," Yuffie garbles, taking another bite of fruit salad and gesturing wildly with her fork, "I say, 'Vincent has free incoming calls, so I c-' Uhm, Shelke?"
I stop examining the dregs of my coffee and look up to her confused face. "Yes?"
"Wow, you're really out of it. You okay?"
Typically, my lack of response would be a result of insomnia, but honestly I'm reacting more or less to the shock of Yuffie coming by my house twice in two days. And this time, we're actually outside, in a café. The sunlight is a bit painful, reflecting off the snow.
"Yes."
"Good. Look, Shelke?" I look up to see a grave expression on her usually excited face. As she fiddles with her fork, she says, "You can talk to me, you know that, right? About, like, anything? I mean, I may not get it, but I'll listen if you want to talk. You know that right?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"No problem." Instantly, the mood lightens again as Yuffie smiles and drops another grape into her mouth.
" Yuffie?"
"Yeah?"
"What month is it?"
"It's almost March! I hate all this snow all over the place, but, you know. Whatever!" Yuffie pops another spoonful of fruit into her mouth. "It's almost my half-birthday."
"Really?"
"Yeah. You'd never know it, from all this snow all over the place, right?" The snow comes up to my mid-shin when it's piled up on the sidewalk. I was expecting it to be more around mid-January. "It sucks, I wanna go to the beach!" Yuffie whines a bit.
She's rambling at this point and I watch her. It's difficult to know how to respond. Is she venting? Does she expect me to join her in her verbal disdain of everything slick and frozen? Does she want me to fix these problems for her? Or is she trying to make conversation?
Weiss, Nero and I rarely had this problem. We were all very quiet.
"Hey, Shelke?"
"Yes?"
"You okay? You're still kinda distant."
"I'm fine."
"Oooh, I know what it is!" She grins triumphantly.
"What?"
"You're thinking about a guy."
The situation is laughable, really. "You could say that."
"I knew it! It's the guy who smokes right? That's why your place smells like cigarettes right now, right? And why that ashtray is there, right?"
This is just the epitome of black humor. "Yes. That's why." With her fork hanging out of her mouth, Yuffie digs around in her bag and surfaces with a small purple tube.
"Take this."
"What is it?"
She pops it into my hand. "It's lipgloss." I examine it. I've never worn make-up in my life but I can still identify it as lipgloss. What I actually wanted to know was why she gave it to me. "Trust me, it's how I got Vincent Valentine to call me last year."
"He called you because you stole his coat and he wanted it back."
Yuffie waves her hand spastically in the air. "Details, details… The important thing is that he called me and it's because of this stuff, I swear." I move my hand across the table to deposit the lipgloss on her side of the table but Yuffie pushes my hand back. "Take it! Trust me, whatever you were thinking about will totally be resolved when you wear that. I promise."
I doubt that cosmetics were going to solve my problem, but the gesture meant something to me. I almost tell her about Weiss and Nero, the fact that they're in my apartment, waiting for me to come back. I want to tell her about the fires and the corpses and the things I've done. I refrain from doing so. Instead, I put the gloss in my pocket.
After my visit with Yuffie, I had passed out immediately upon entering the apartment. I wake up to the sound of my name. "Shelke? Wake up, Shelke. Come on, get up." I open my eyes. It's dark in the apartment, indicating the evening had descended while I was asleep. A cursory glance at the clock tells me it's 8:34. Weiss is leaning against the end table.
"What is it, Weiss?"
"Get up and get dressed, okay?" He looks excited, almost as excited as when we'd go to set fires to something alive. "I have something for us to do, and it's important, but we need to go now." Anything that Weiss wants done will not be good for me in the long run. I stare blankly at him. He tries a different tactic. "We can do this one of two ways. You can be good and get up, or we'll drive you absolutely insane. In the worst way. You'll never sleep again. Now get up."
I get up and put on a coat. Weiss follows me out the door. We walk for hours, Weiss in the lead, through the winding streets of the city until we get to a long stretch of road that leads out into the woods. Considering the time and who exactly is leading me, I don't want to enter, but I plow forward, regardless of my own wants at this point. Weiss is the only one who matters.
I don't know how far into the woods we walked, but eventually we came across a tank of kerosene and a book of matches. Neither of them are mine, but there is a trail of kerosene leading out from a small hand-dug pool into an entirely different direction. He wants me to burn something.
"No."
"If you'll recall, I won yesterday. You said that you could sleep without me and you were wrong. Now you have to do what I say. Light the match and drop it, Shelke."
"I refuse."
"Shelke, this is the second-to-last burning you'll ever have to do in your life. Strike the match. Drop it on the trail. By the time we leave, the house will have burned down to the foundation."
"A house?" We are about to destroy someone's house?
"They're already dead, Shelke. This is just clean-up. Please? For me?"
Weiss places the box in my hands and loops his arms around my waist, drawing me close to him. My head suddenly feels foggy. He grips my hips, his fingertips digging into the bones, as I drag the red-tipped match against the rough side of the box. I hesitate for a second, watching the flame consume the wood. We've never made physical contact during a burning.
"Do it."
I drop the match into the small pool and, as I do so, Weiss tilts my face upwards to look at him. He brings his lips to mine and kisses me harshly, hungrily. After we pull away, we watch the fire flare up and start to consume the trail. Weiss removes his hand from my body and begins walking away as the trail proceeds deeper into the woods. I follow behind him, walking at double my usual speed.
When we're almost out of the woods, a high-pitched shriek fills the night that blurs my vision and sends shivers coursing through my body. All I can think is, "I've killed someone. I'm a murderer."
I wake up in my bed with no memory of getting into the bedroom, the apartment or even the city limits. Shifting my head to the side, I see Nero seated on the floor, with his back against the bed, flicking a lighter. He draws sparks, but no flames.
Flames. Screams. I've killed someone.
"Nero," I groan quietly. He looks up in my direction and abandons the lighter, dropping it onto the floor with a clatter. "Nero, I've killed someone."
"Yes. Go speak with Weiss. He's waiting out in the living room for you."
"Nero…"
"Shelke, I know. And I know it hurts but this is just one more thing to bring you closer to us. One last step," he murmurs. "Go speak to Weiss."
I look to my bedroom door and my blood makes several changes; Lava, ice water and cement seem to inhabit it within a few moments of each other. I pull myself off the bed and leave Nero to his lighter.
"Shelke," Nero calls softly before I open the door.
"Yes?"
"I know what I want now. I want to be with you forever. I know that you're only happy and stable with me, and I would do anything for that. Even if it hurts you, I know you need me."
"And Weiss."
"And Weiss," he amends. "Go to him."
"Took you long enough."
"Who were they?"
"The people we killed?" Weiss lights a cigarette. "Rosso and Azul. You should feel special. You're the last one alive who knows about that island now."
"And Argent?"
"She's drowned herself," Nero replies, coming out of my room and shutting the door behind him.
Weiss tosses the pack of cigarettes to Nero, which he catches one-handed and effortlessly. "I think she was trying to distance herself from us. We died in a fire, so she died in water. Pointless, though. We're all murderers, so we're all going to the same place."
"You said you didn't kill people," I shakily say, sitting on the couch next to Weiss.
"I said it wasn't my job. I never said it didn't happen. What do you think happened to the men who molested me and Nero?"
Recoiling in shock would be overkill, so I settle for just sitting a tad straighter. I should have guessed that would have been their ends. The casual air of his voice is what makes the statement disturbing.
"Now what?"
"Now it's time for you to leave."
I have to actually look at him to make absolutely certain that Nero is the one who said that. He's staring down in my direction with a cigarette hanging loosely between his lips. He seems to be looking through me rather than at me.
"Leave?"
"We need you with us," Weiss says, taking my hand in his. "We've missed you so terribly, Shelke."
"I don't want to die."
"Don't consider it dying. Consider it crossing over a bridge."
"You've never liked being here anyway." Nero sits on the other side of me and takes my other hand. "You've always hated people and the state of the world. We're opening a door for you to leave it forever."
"You have nothing left."
"That's not true."
"What do you have then?" Nero asks.
Who do you have then?" Weiss lays a kiss on my cheek. "Yuffie, who only wants to be around you because you're interesting now?" He places another one on my neck. "Your parents and sister who never talk to you?" Very quickly, another one on my lips. "Your therapist who only cares about you because she's getting paid to care?" Weiss looks me straight in the eyes. "You have no one."
To my look of horror, Nero kisses my lips quickly. "Except for us. We would never leave you."
"I…"
"Get your jacket on. Or leave it off. But we are leaving. Now."
"Where?"
"To the crematorium, of course."
As this will be my last journal entry, my last will and testament, I would like to confess what I have done.
I am in love with Weiss and Nero Eldritch. I have been since I've known them, but not since we met. It was not love at first sight and I want that to be explicitly clear.
The night of my conviction, I had received a phone call from Nero, asking me to come to the crematorium, saying that he needed to see me. Static had cut off the rest of the call, but Nero tells me now that he wanted to see me, "one last time." I took a bus the three hours out and found a row-boat (that the police had later identified as belonging to Argent Palmer) and rowed towards the island.
Once I was there, I treaded the path to the crematorium and heard screaming. When I went to the door, I could see Weiss' eyes peering out. Thinking they had locked themselves in somehow (though, in retrospect, it never could have been an accident), I picked up Nero's abandoned cell phone and called the ambulance.
I tugged on the door, recklessly burning my hands, and promptly realized that it was locked. Weiss and Nero lit the crematorium, crawled inside and locked the door. They committed suicide by fire.
I remember trying to speak to them while they were inside. I remember saying, "I'm sorry," and, "Please don't leave me." I remember screaming desperate pleas for them to leave the flames. The last thing I remember were the paramedics, pulling me away from the door as Weiss and Nero's bodies burned.
Since then, they have haunted me. They have invaded my home and, as I begged, have left the flames and will not leave me. They wish to be with me forever and, lacking a stable mind without them, I will go with them.
Please tell Shalua I'm sorry for not being a normal sister. Please tell my parents I'm sorry for not being a normal daughter. Please tell Yuffie that there was nothing she could have done.
~ Shelke Rui
THIS IS NOT THE END! Stay tuned for the final chapter and epilogue!
