Chapter 7: Interlude - Destined for Evil
Author's note: This is a flashback chapter, but also contains flashbacks within a flashback. On a side note, one of the characters (Karen Young) bears a name resemblance to a friend I know IRL but that's just a coincidence. Let me know if it does or doesn't feel like something from an animated Batman movie, because that was what I was going for. Well, let me know anything. Leave a review or a message, don't be a stranger!
Three weeks had passed since Karen Young went missing. A teenaged boy sat on a chair in the darkness with his head held down. The kitchen was lit only by the street lamps outside the sole window to the small apartment. The sound of sirens passed by; without the regular electronic screaches, it would be an eerie day in Blüdhaven.
The boy was thinking of his missing mother, and felt hopeless from his fruitless efforts to find her. The day before she disappeared, he had gotten angry at her for confronting him about the bat-costume she found in his room as she was cleaning it.
"Damon Young, what is this?" the boy recalled her demanding in a serious tone. He remembered feeling defensive at first, before something rose up within him. His first reaction was to rebel, as children at that age usually did. Looking back, it was a bad idea to go there, and he regretted it now. Something else bubbled up and out of his mouth instead of a snarky remark. There was a moment's hesitation, but he let it out and growled. The boy's eyes flashed blood red, and both occupants of the small apartment felt the room quake, and the lights flash on and off before bursting.
The last thing he remembered her saying was "Damon, this isn't you. You're a good boy. You're my boy". He remembered how she embraced him, the kindness and understanding she showed him despite the horror that just happened. The boy remembered storming out of the building. He just wanted to get some fresh air, cool down and think about what just happened, but looking back he must still have seemed angry at her, walking out on her instead.
He remembered that when he got to the communal door, he heard a scream which sounded a lot like his mother's. When he ran back to check, she was gone. The curtains fluttering in the wind echoed the absence of a human being in the room.
This was the umpteenth time he recalled the night his mother went missing, and the boy felt frustration bringing tears to his eyes. This was becoming beyond desperate. He felt the frustration turn into madness, both in the sense of anger and insanity.
He kept asking himself why he had to get so angry at her right before she vanished. She did nothing more than act like a concerned mother, yet he reacted with unwarranted contempt. Why was he always so quick to anger? He pondered more about his temper in his regret; how bad things always seemed to happen when he lost his temper, like the time his school teacher stopped in the middle of writing a detention slip and suffered a thundering headache. And right before that, he was blinded by rage and fisted another student in the face until they bled for ridiculing his lack of a father.
Why did it always happen? Why was it so hard for him to reel in his temper? Thinking about it only intensified what he had always felt throughout his young life. The fury, the violent lust to cause hurt. Before he realised it, the room started to quake again. Only this time, more violently than before. The walls started to collapse around him. He started to sink into the ground which was swallowing him up. He felt himself falling and falling and falling endlessly, and his desperate screams to cling onto something to stop him from falling. Tears filled his face, and his face flushed red hot from the nightmare-come-true, before blacking out.
When he awoke, he felt the side of his clothes damp from something. He thought he fell into a puddle, and searched around to assess the situation, only to see a puddle of cold red blood, and in it was the image of a black face with glowing red eyes and a fanged snarl. Its eyes widened in sync with the boy's own as he let out a fearful scream only to be stopped short by a voice.
"Do you like what you see?" asked the voice from across the dark space. "I have been waiting for this moment to finally meet you, Dagon."
The boy looked up and saw that the voice belonged to a dark figure who was approaching him. His face was partially lit by a nearby torch on the wall of what looked like a cavernous hall. The light revealed a long-haired blond man in aristocratic dress.
"You were kept hidden from me for a long time. But the blood that runs through you was thick enough to lead you to me. Have you ever noticed that you cannot hold your temper? Ever felt the undying urge to tear things apart and drink the pain in others? Of course you have. You are the son of Neron. You are my boy," the figure said, his face twisting into a dark smile.
The blond man gave the boy an answer he had been looking for for three weeks. "I know where your mother is. I can get her back to you."