Under the scarlet sky
Chapter Seven
'Meltdown'
There's something strange in the way Erika looks at her. It flitters across Erika's eyes like dust motes dancing through the air, or butterflies.
Butterflies are so fragile though, aren't they?
The emotions are unspoken, almost unnoticeable, but Bernkastel still sees.
She notices more than she wants to.
More than is good for her.
What are those emotions that dance across Erika's eyes?
Unwavering loyalty. Admiration. Maybe a little fear- but that's good. Pieces should be fearful of their Masters; pieces should know their place. If humanity ran on a hierarchy of fear the world would be a much easier place to live in. Nobody would step out of line. Nobody would commit crimes of love or passion. People wouldn't die pointlessly.
Fear's a simple emotion to understand; even easier to manipulate.
Bernkastel knows fear.
Everybody does.
But 'love' is only an illusion; and yet people still use it as an excuse to hurt others. That's beyond ridiculous.
It is at times like this, when Bernkastel contemplates the pros and cons of a world run on pain and hate with all that disgusting tenderness cut out, that she thinks she might not have a heart at all. She's beginning to sound insane, even to herself. You can't condition human beings to feel only one thing; that's impossible.
You could still try, though.
Lambdadelta's words worm their way through Bern's head. The more she tries to suppress them, the louder they resound.
Erika's in love with you.
Maybe she is.
Maybe, despite the loyalty and admiration and, above all, the crushing fear (Bernkastel holds Erika's lifeline in one hand, a pair of scissors in the other), there's love in there, too.
Love is a disease.
It worms its way into the coldest of hearts.
When Erika looks at Bernkastel with that look the tea in Bernkastel's mouth turns to copper, thick and red. It tastes of blood. Something's corrupt here; a sickly fetor stoppers Bernkastel's mouth and curdles in her stomach.
Bernkastel feels sick.
"M-master, thank you for helping me!"
"I wasn't helping you out of kindness," says Bernkastel coldly, surveying Erika over the top of her teacup.
Tea, tea, it's always tea. It's the one thing in life that never gets boring.
It's the one thing in the world (in all the worlds) Bernkastel could perhaps admit to honestly, truly loving.
"I was helping you because you're pathetic. You failed last time- and without my help, surely you would fail again. How irritating. A piece who has to rely on her Master all the time is worth no more than dirt, wouldn't you agree?" says Bernkastel, her words carefully chosen to piece and penetrate; to embed shards of ice inside Erika's heart.
Bernkastel will stop the emotions that circulate in Erika's eyes before they have a chance to root and grow. Bernkastel never entertained any illusions that she would, one day, return Erika's feelings.
She doesn't toy with hearts.
She isn't quite that cruel.
Instead, Bernkastel reaches her hand into chests and tears hearts away- leaving a gaping wound where ribs have been broken open and flesh pushed aside. That's the kindest thing to do. If people had no emotions they couldn't get hurt.
It's a simple philosophy.
Bernkastel isn't like Battler.
She's not a monster.
You need to smash hopeless dreams before they bloom out of control.
When Bernkastel's spectral fingers reach inside Erika's chest they rip and twist and tear with every word that comes out of her mouth, pulling out handfuls of roots smeared with thick blood like strawberry jam.
It's not enough.
She didn't hurt Erika enough.
Those emotions are still present in Erika's eyes; a helpless kind of hope that's more depressing than it has any right to be.
"Y-yes, you're right, Master. I-I... I was a failure... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry!"
Erika doesn't understand.
She's just as bad as Beatrice.
"B-but now I, Furudo Erika, have the duct tape, I-I will win!" says Erika. She's trying to sound confident but her voice falters, the words on her tongue tripped up by fear in a tangled mess. Bernkastel doesn't bother to lift her head. "M-master...? Master, I promise, I won't fail you, n-not this time!"
Visions dance through Bernkastel's head. Her hands are at Erika's throat, choking the life out of her.
She holds her head under the waves and bashes her skull against sharp rocks, watching with curious interest as the sea, the sky and the sun all turn scarlet and run red. As the blood drains from Erika's body so, too, do all those feelings; those flowers foreign to Bernkastel that bloomed from twisted roots to make something even more hideous and confusing.
Love.
But it's all bleeding out now.
Bernkastel expects that image to be comforting.
It's not.
After all this time (one thousand years?) Bernkastel would like to say she doesn't have nightmares anymore. Not now.
She's not afraid.
Bernkastel is on her pedestal; a soulless, empty-eyed witch who purged herself of all weakness- all emotion. The only feelings left within her blackened heart are a sick amusement for mind games and boredom. The boredom always, always remains; stalking her, clinging to her skin like droplets of rain.
You cannot hurt a corpse. It's already dead.
That sounds like a good defense mechanism from all life's evils, doesn't it?
Bernkastel is the corpse now. She doesn't even move when Lambda shoves her fingers inside her.
But when Bernkastel's asleep she can't control the things the thinks. The memories- darkened rooms, enclosed spaces, cruel laughter and locked doors- come back to her in a rush, a deluge, a flood. How do you stand when your legs have been swept away from underneath you?
Bernkastel builds her defenses when she's awake; rebuilding over and over again, then slipping into the shadows like an alley cat whenever something threatens to hurt her. However, when she dreams the rush of remembrance always comes back to wash everything away.
When she dreams she's not a witch anymore.
She's nothing.
Hardly even a human.
In her dreams she's usually alone, but not all the time.
It's better when she's by herself.
It always has been.
When you're alone nothing can hurt you. Humans harbor strange beliefs that being alone means being defenseless, but what is there to defend yourself from if the only person in the locked room is you? Thoughts can grow claws and teeth and rip and tear, pulling people apart from the inside- but not if you sit by yourself in a corner, a broken doll, and forget to think.
If you forget you're a human being at all then being alone isn't so bad.
You become unreachable.
Emotionless.
Being emotionless with a paralyzed body isn't so bad.
But Bernkastel isn't always alone in her dreams (nightmares, really- but that's not true, either, because they really happened. At least, she thinks they did. She can't remember).
That woman, the tall woman with the purple eyes and straight black hair, is all cruel smiles and false kindness in her dreams nightmares memories- and sometimes Bernkastel isn't herself (not her current self; but then again, in her dreams she never is; in her dreams she never has any power, none at all) but a younger girl who looks a lot like Erika.
Bernkastel trusted her once.
Bernkastel trusted that woman with the purple eyes and cruel smiles and the love for stories- any story (because all witches hate boredom).
But Bernkastel had never realized, until it was far too late and her innocence was slipping away like water through cupped hands, that Auaurora would willing to play around with the life of her 'beloved miko', too, for the sake of creating an entertaining tale.
She was nothing more than a character in a story.
A world that works like a loaded dice; each throw designed to show only failure.
A world where everything worked against her.
She wasn't meant to win.
But she did anyway.
"I'm sorry I was so cruel to you. I never meant to hurt you so much, my poor little miko..."
That never happened.
"You're such a talented little miko! You have such a lovely way of speaking; your voice is so expressive~ I could listen to you read aloud all day, kukuku~"
"A-ah..." her face flushes light pink. "T-thank you, Master!"
That did.
She was abandoned and left to die- just like a cat kicked out onto the street.
She doesn't know how long she's been here, but she supposes it doesn't matter.
She hardly even remembers who she is anymore; she's been playing a role for so long.
Her real name.
Her age.
Her reason for being alive.
Is there a reason?
But she does remember her.
Purple eyes and long dark hair. A comforting smile. They used to sit and drink tea together, didn't they? She would read aloud from a large book split open on her lap, the pages turning underneath her ivory fingers, and her her Master's eyelids would flicker shut and she would lose herself inside the story.
Bernkastel used to be good at telling stories, she remembers; her words shaping new worlds that rose from the dust, giving life to the people that populate them. She spun amazing stories of witches and demons and battles like games of chess where pieces were expendable and death could be reversed by magic. Reading tales like that always filled her heart with happiness- but when her Master smiled at her she felt even happier.
If she closes her eyes and tries to remember, she can still taste the tea on her tongue.
She can still remember the stories she used to read.
She can still see the smile on her Master's face.
The smile when she sentenced her to death- to wither and rot away, for eternity, in this closed dark place until she can hardly remember who she is anymore.
But she remembers her Master.
Her friend.
And her executioner.
She thinks there might be rats in the walls.
They're watching her in the darkness.
Thousands of them.
When she closes her eyes (though she can hardly tell whether her eyes are opened or closed anymore, it's so dark) she swears she can hear scuttling. Paws on the floor. Drip, drip, drip. Is there leaking water somewhere, or is she merely hearing things? The only comforting, constant noise is the sound of her own heartbeat, nestled safe and warm in her ribcage like a bird in a nest.
Her Master will save her.
Her Master cared about her.
R-right...?
She won't leave her here in the dirt to pick up the pieces of her long-forgotten game.
She wouldn't.
She was more than a piece- she was her Master's friend.
Wasn't she?
Maybe her Master got bored of her.
Or maybe her Master never really meant what she said to begin with.
She would hate her Master if she had enough energy.
And, foolishly enough… she still clings onto the hope her Master will save her.
Her Master hasn't forgotten her.
The taste of tea spreads across her tongue; tea parties of eons ago when they sat together eating sugar cookies from ornate plates and sharing smiles like real friends. She would read stories, and her Master would smile and say "I'd be quite lost without you, my little miko."
But that was a lie.
She is the one who is lost without her Master- like a doll whose eyes have been poked out, rattling around inside her skull.
She was always good at telling stories, but she can't even make herself believe her Master will return anymore.
The rats are watching her.
She can hear them scuttling about in the shadows.
Inside her brain.
She wonders if she's becoming paranoid.
Then she wonders if she's gone insane.
After a while (days? Weeks? Months? Years?) the imaginary sounds of imaginary rats are a comfort.
They don't exist.
But if they did, maybe she wouldn't feel so lonely.
It's alright to welcome delusions if there's nobody left to judge you.
Who's going to call her crazy now?
She pinches a lump of skin between her fingers and feels pain- but she can't trust what she sees and what she hears and what she feels anymore because it's all distorted with desperation.
The rats aren't real.
Neither is the water- but it still drip drip drips inside her mind at every waking moment.
The pain feels more tangible, though.
Pain.
If she can feel pain she still exists.
Your emotions can lie to you- but pain can't.
When she pinches herself she doesn't wake up.
When Bernkastel awakes her head is a pool of mixed-around memory that ripples and distorts with every slight movement. It's difficult to distinguish the real world from the dreamscapes splaying out inside her head.
She can still taste tea on her tongue and feel the tears in her eyes.
She thought she left those feelings behind her- but every single night her dreams prove her wrong, until it feels like her own brain is laughing at her. This is a fun game, isn't it? Isn't it?
Bernkastel's pale fingers fist in her hair (it's just like Erika's; no, that's not right, Erika's is just like her's), tugging, trying to dissolve the dreams that still swarm her like flies.
There are rats in the walls.
They're watching her.
When Bernkastel's eyes flicker open she's met with red, red, red; all-consuming red that eats up her vision and freezes her in place.
There's laughter, too.
Lambdadelta is sat on Bernkastel's stomach, her gloved fingers threading through Bern's hair. Lambda's toes, devoid of shoes or socks, curl against the crumpled bed sheets. Lambda is missing her usual hat, too, and her cruel smirk. Instead, there is only a small, soft smile.
Lambdadelta hums to herself softly, some strange tune Bernkastel doesn't know (and Lambda probably doesn't, either- but she was never the most musically minded of people), as her fingers continue to play with Bernkastel's hair.
It's filled with knots.
Bernkastel is falling apart under Lambdadelta's fingertips. She can almost feel her body crumble. Bernkastel's skin is ashen, too pale, and deep purple grooves are carved under her bloodshot eyes. The veins on her wrists stand out with alarming clarity under the paper-thin skin; a reminder that maybe she's not quite that untouchable after all.
Lambdadelta could kill her if she wanted to.
It wouldn't even be very difficult; not when Bernkastel's mind hovers half-way between the real world and memories and she feels more like that naïve little girl than her hollow, heartless self.
She looks like a wreck.
Ugly.
Not at all a sleeping beauty.
Bernkastel knows it.
Even so, Lambda says she's beautiful.
Then, slowly, Lambdadelta leans down and presses a light kiss to Bernkastel's forehead.
"Bad dream?~"
When Bernkastel replies her voice is emotionless, as always- but the monosyllabic response conveys more than it should. "...No."
It's true.
If it was a mere dream, it wouldn't have unsettled Bernkastel nearly as much.
Lambda keeps smiling- but not it's deranged or mutated or twisted at all. Unlike Lambda's other smiles, it doesn't look like a gash carved hastily into a pumpkin with a sharp knife; her teeth aren't like glass and her pointed tongue isn't cruel.
A band of light flitters across Lambda's face, playing through her blonde hair so it shimmers gold.
"I guess it was a bad memory, then?"
More like a bad life.
But that would sound melodramatic.
And then the princess married the prince and they all lived happily ever after.
How does that work?
It doesn't work.
Not in the real world.
Her eyes are burning. Her throat is sore. There are creatures crawling under her skin and images flickering through her mind.
She thinks she might be going insane.
Then she realizes she doesn't really care.
Bernkastel tries to console herself by drinking tea. Her miserable reflection stares back at her; skin sickly like a ghost, held together over her skull and pulled a little too taught. Her eyes are even more blank than usual. Her fingers are trembling.
Bad dreams...
But Bernkastel doesn't 'dream', not really.
She remembers.
The memories bite through her in bursts of pain. Pain means you still exist and you still feel and the world under your fingertips won't explode into shadows and lies and stardust, so the memories must be true. When she's asleep she's trapped inside that room again-
Just like him.
But he escaped.
Didn't he?
He deserves to suffer much, much more.
"M-master... I-I'm so sorry, Master-"
"Be quiet."
"B-but Master-"
"Stop crying," Bernkastel says, her voice cold. "You can cry only when I say it's allowed."
Erika thought she was going to die during her confrontation with Beatrice in the chapel. She even cried; tears running down her cheeks, her eyes red and puffy (how undignified! It would have been funny if it wasn't so pathetic) as her body melted away. Two truths can exist at the same time; she'd learnt something new.
Today is a day of discovery for Erika, it seems.
You can die more than once.
Bernkastel will teach her that, too.
Hope, hope, hope; as long as you cling onto 'hope' can you really be defeated? But life is hopeless; especially for a piece like Erika who was only placed on the game board for Bernkastel's own amusement. She was always destined to die.
How did that so-called 'detective' dare stand there, her body melting away from underneath her, with a look in her eyes that declared, proudly, she was better than Bernkastel?
But Bernkastel won't let Erika die. Not yet.
Not for a while.
Erika can't die unless Bernkastel lets her.
She won't die until she's learnt her lesson.
"This will hurt a little, but I'm doing it for your own good~" says Bernkastel, a sick little giggle forcing its way from her throat.
"M-master-"
"I'd be quite lost without you, my little miko."
Liar.
In Bernkastel's memories (or is this a nightmare?) she sits with Auaurora, a teacup held in her fingers. She presses the rim of the cup to her lips-
The liquid that passes through her lips isn't tea. It's thick and heady, and nearly makes Bernkastel gag.
She draws the cup away from her mouth, looking at the contents.
The liquid is bright red and it tastes of copper.
Thick, white, wriggling bodies squirm about in the sea of rusty blood.
Maggots.
"What's wrong, my miko?" asks Auaurora, tilting her head to one side. Her purple eyes are soulless. "Do you not like your tea?"
If her Master says it's tea, then surely…
It looks like blood.
It smells of blood.
It is blood.
Bernkastel still drinks it, though.
She has to obey her Master.
Her Master would never do anything so cruel- so, obviously, she was seeing things.
It still tastes of blood, and it burns when it goes down.
She's been trapped in the dark for so long- a doll without eyes, inside her skull, blind and lost and all alone- that she no longer remembers to fear her Master.
Instead, the only emotion that stirs inside her empty heart is hate.
With the loss of hope came the birth of hate. It fuels her body; keeps her going onwards.
It makes her strong.
Everything else was cut away and thrown aside.
Bernkastel's index finger presses against Erika's left eye. The lids are forced open with duct tape ("you know what this is, right, Erika?~") so Erika can't even blink. She can only accept her punishment.
"You can scream now."
Erika's eye doesn't pop under the pressure as Bernkastel would have hoped- that would have been more theatrical, after all. Lambda would have seen the beauty in such a thing. It doesn't pop, though. Instead, Erika's eye merely seems to… give up. It caves in on itself, leaking transparent fluid that dribbles down Erika's cheek.
A parody of tears.
Erika shudders, her head cracking against the floor and her fingers spasming- but she doesn't scream, not even when Bernkastel slowly, deliberately, draws her index finger in and out of her ravaged eye socket; scrambling round the watery mess of vitreous fluid as though she were mixing the contents of a teacup with a silver spoon.
Erika doesn't scream.
Erika's teeth break through her lower lip, carving it like paper. Blood drips slowly down her chin in reddish, coppery lines; a stark contrast against her white skin.
But she doesn't scream.
Bernkastel's eyes narrow into slits.
"Haven't you forgotten I'm your Master?" Bernkastel hisses, her finger- two fingers- jabbing deeper into Erika's ruined eye socket, twisting; there must be so many delicate nerves in there that are being mixed around, sticky with the grey fluid of Erika's punctured eyeball. "You'll scream when I tell you to scream."
But Erika doesn't.
...That's okay, though.
They could do this all day.
Maybe she will.
a/n: ...meltdown is a very fitting song for this chapter :D
Hmn, I don't know how I feel about this chapter. I was going for a rather disjointed, messy style here for 'effect' but I don't know how effective it really was XD Hmn. I'm not sure how happy with this.
Also, I don't know the details on the logic error Bern was in (was it Higurashi? Was it more like the closed room Battler got stuck in?) so I didn't give it too much detail XD But now I really want to write a Bernkastel/Featherine fic… XD
This chapter was /greatly/ inspired by music, too. I listened to a bunch of songs on repeat in my own awesome playlist made for this chapter; Meathook and Eat the Dirt by Hannah Fury, Castledown by Emilie Autumn, Angeldeamon and Coloured by Leandra and Girlscout by Jack off Jill (esp for the last section) :D And, of course, Meltdown. There are numerous references to these songs scattered throughout this chapter :D
~renahhchen xoxo