I don't know how, but KOSMOS decided not to kill me. I must be the luckiest girl in the world (cries as KOSMOS stares her down). Please enjoy chapter six.
Ch6: Family Drama
A pale man sits in the same chair inside the dim lit room. He mutters incoherently, his head swaying as he sits slumped in the chair. The man's eyes slowly shut. A hand suddenly smacks his face hard, shaking him awake. His eyes open to the source of his sleep deprivation, the Matriarch. The woman with red eyes looms over him, impatient with the man who continued to stall.
"Where is it, Wilhelm?" The woman asks. When the man doesn't say anything, a high pitched noise begins invading his mind. His eyes went wide with horror. Wilhelm starts screaming again, shaking and thrashing in the chair trying to break out. A set of hands were behind him, continuing to hold him down in place. The restraints of his chair were starting to cut into his wrists again; blood seeping onto the arm rests.
He wanted her to stop, the pain feeling too immense to bear any more. But if he showed any weakness, he knew, he knew she would be inside him. She would see everything she needed to know. The noise stops attacking his mind, giving Wilhelm a second to hyperventilate in the chair. The set of hands behind him refused to let go for fear he would try to escape again.
"Just one more layer, I can feel the last layer breaking." The Matriarch gives a crooked smile, taking her fingers and raising his chin up so he would look at her. Wilhelm's vision was becoming disoriented. He hadn't stopped trying to evade her attempts to read his mind for what was days now. The struggle between them lasting longer than what the Matriarch liked. She needed the last two pieces to make everything come together.
"Now, boy, this has gone on long enough. I know where the Failsafe is already. Now tell me where you hid the squire?" Wilhelm looks up at the set of hands that held him down. His eyes started pleading with his sister who kept looking away. "Last chance," The Matriarch says in a threatening voice. Wilhelm trembles like a small child, his hyperventilating gone. The woman gets closer to him waiting for him to come clean. The man responds by head butting her, shouting incoherently about lambs to the slaughter. Shouting out his prophecy to deaf ears as his sister looked away. The Matriarch recovers from her head but, grabbing onto his hair and forehead. The last barrier into his subconscious finally destroyed as the high pitched noise starts up again. He lets out a blood curdling scream. Images from his memories enter into the Matriarch's vision like a cornucopia of movie scenes. Before she cuts the link into his mind, one particular scene stands out to her. Her search leads her to a recent conversation between him and an adolescent in the park talking about stars.
The Matriarch lets go of the man's head, finally finding what she was looking for. Wilhelm went limp in the chair, not unconscious or dead, just staring at nothing with zombie like eyes. The woman behind him lets go of her brother, realizing he would stop struggling now. "What a pretty name," The Matriarch responds after processing the memory she saw. Melvina looks up at her mother waiting for her to explain what she saw. The woman just chuckles sadistically, running her hand through her wild brown curls.
"Melvina, it is now time to move on to phase three of our production. The squire is much closer to us than we realized. The hands of fate certainly wish for things to occur as so."
The woman takes Melvina's hand and mentally tells the woman where to go. "How would I be able to flush her out?" Melvina responds. "You will find a way. Use her foolish nature to your advantage." The woman replied. Melvina nods, bowing and walking to the door of the interrogation room. She turns around to look at her brother and asks, "What do you wish for me to do with him?" The Matriarch crouches down to Wilhelm's level to look into his dull eyes. It was going to take a long while for Wilhelm to recover from what she did to him.
"He will be no chore for me to take care of. You should focus on collecting the squire before the metamorphosis is complete. Until then, I think your brother and I will spend some time catching up." The Matriarch replied. Melvina nods quietly, eager to leave the room before witnessing anymore of her mother's torture methods again.
-A few days later-
In the small apartment, after another visit from chaos, Lydia was cooking dinner for her mother in the kitchenette. The woman turns the lock on the apartment front door before walking in exhausted from work. Lydia smiles at her mother before turning off the burner on the stove, and placing the stew in the two bowls. She brings it over to her mother, then the two sit down to dinner. Angeles chuckles at her tomboy wearing her frilly yellow apron. "My, what have I done to deserve this?" Angeles asked.
"I just thought I treat you to dinner for once," Lydia replied.
"Well it looks lovely," the older woman smiled.
The two eat their dinner quietly like always before one of them makes small talk at the table. Usually it was Lydia, talking about school or friends. Her mother would normally just smile and listen quietly to her daughter. But today was different ever since chaos and the others showed up. No, I think ever since she turned sixteen actually. Her mother was increasingly becoming more anxious, agitated, and down right paranoid than the norm. Angeles had a right to be, since she had the Federation and the Fifth Jerusalem government harassing her. Jin tried along with Ziggy to get her to explain more about the signal they found during the hacking leading to their apartment the night of the disappearance. Ziggy through Hammer's hacking skills noticed the signal kept coming back even long after Wilhelm disappeared. The woman had her suspicions on who it could be...
"Lydia," Angeles finally speaks up for once instead of the girl.
"Hmm?"
"I know you've used up the last of our minutes making long distance calls," Angeles said. Lydia stops mid spoonful of stew and looks at her mother. 'Shhhhiiiittt', the girl mentally cursed. Angeles gave her usual motherly guilt stare to the teenager, which made Lydia shrink into her chair.
"Maybe," Lydia admitted.
"So who have you been calling so often?" Angeles asks Lydia with suspicion.
"My friend from Second Miltia," Lydia replied quickly. Lydia had been trying to get better at lying to her mother. But for some reason, Angeles was amazing at detecting when she was being deceitful.
"Oh, Setsuki. How is he doing?" Angeles asked with an angelic smile. Lydia curses in her head not realizing her mother would ask about Setsuki, despite the fact she had maybe two total in friends.
"Oh-you know, he's been good. His parents recently took him on some ship called the Dammerung for his dad's new job. He sounded excited about the move," Lydia mumbled. Angeles' eyes narrowed when hearing the name of the ship. "You were calling just Setsuki all that time?"
"Well yeah, who else would I call?" Lydia asked. Angeles just sat silently. Lydia felt uneasy watching her mother's eyes change from happy to fearful within minutes. "Mom?"
"Lydia...I know since you've gotten older, you've been interested in learning more about the past. How you came to be, why it's just you and I, why we're always moving. But there are just some things in the past that should never be looked into," Angeles solemnly spoke. Lydia holds her mother's hand avoiding her eyes. She hated seeing the anxiety eating away at her mother.
"Mother, I just wanted to say hello. I don't think he'll even talk to me anyway."
"So you did talk to him!" Angeles became angry when hearing Lydia confessing.
"Yeah, but what of it? You're the one lying about him being dead." The girl became defensive.
"I have my reasons about that, Lydia. You need to stay away from him," Angeles begins to yell at her daughter.
"Oh you've done a great job at staying away from him, haven't you? We just happen to get money from some random guy for no reason whatsoever," Lydia shouts sarcastically.
"How do you know about that?"
"You don't think I've been doing my own investigating about you and Dad." Angeles was shocked. The older woman just stammers and become scarlet with anger.
"It's just a legal obligation. It doesn't mean anything," the woman argued.
"Well he can't be all that bad if he's giving you child support," Lydia argued back.
"You don't know him. You don't know what they are like."
"I just want to know the truth, mother!"
"The truth isn't always a pleasant thing to know Lydia," Angeles replied with gritted teeth.
"Why can't you just tell me why?" Lydia shouted.
"Because I'm trying to protect you," Angeles starts to become agitated and upset.
"From what? Reality?! I just want to know why I can't talk to my own father. It isn't my fault you slept with him-"That's enough!" Angeles slaps the girl's cheek, shutting up the teenager. There was a moment of silence before Lydia balls her hands into fists. Her eyes flash pink with anger, the room beginning to shake. She gasps with her pink glowing eyes returning to their usual red. Lydia runs into her room. Angeles gasps at her actions and calls out to Lydia. The bedroom door slides shut.
Lydia had her face buried in a pillow on her twin bed for thirty minutes ignoring her mother, occasionally wiping the angry tears from her face. She had the music blaring in her tiny bedroom to the sounds of heavy metal. Her eyes stare up at the ceiling moping. Her video panel starts to ring a pleasant tone amongst the furious lyrics. She turns to see her bunny icon dancing on the screen with a cellphone. Lydia lets the video call alert continue until it stops ringing, once she noticed the unknown number on the screen. She returns to gazing at the ceiling and watching the sun slowly set in the west.
The bunny on her video monitor pops up suddenly shouting in a high pitch voice, "You've got a message!" Lydia sighs before pressing the button on her messages to listen to what it was. "Maybe its Setsuki," she guessed. Lydia wasn't lying when she said her friend moved onto that space ship with his family recently. He told her he would call back when they finally got settled on the ship. The video message appears on the screen when she selects play, with a man speaking in a soft voice. Lydia gasps when she sees his face.
Things are starting to get interesting. I thought adding an OC to the story would be fun as a whole. I hope she isn't coming across as being too bratty. I promise chaos will be in the next chapter, along with a few others as well. Stay tuned! :D