Let's change it up a bit, shall we? Ha ha...here are our favorite bats in the world, from "Children, Children" to "Inside Your Heart"/"Mine, All Mine" to "Apology to a Cow".
And if you have not read Retribution by LadyLore3, then shame on you. Go read it! Unless, of course, you ARE LadyLore3, in which case: Hi!
#10
When night fell, the bats emerged.
They had lost their beloved son months ago. It seemed to lurk in the back of all their minds, for hadn't they all been its parents? Together they had taken the abandoned child and let him grow in the utter darkness of the cave. They had saved him from predators and starvation and, and this they sensed only with the deep inner thoughts they had when they brought all their minds together, his mother.
Now they fluttered about the woods and the trees, into the fields, preying on the cattle and the deer, the smaller mammals and the birds, and even the occasional human. They swooped low upon the earth, so tiny most couldn't see them, infinitely careful. They were bats – feared, even hated, fragile yet incredibly resilient.
Suddenly they sensed something – a once familiar smell, a voice that had changed yet remained distinct to them.
It was their son. He had returned to them.
Painfully they recalled when their boy had been dragged from them. They had flown and bitten at the two others who had grabbed him and forced him away, but it had not mattered. Even their numbers could not make up for the sheer size of those humans. They had lost their son. They had mourned for many days afterwards, and searched through the woods and fields for him. But they had failed, and they dared not venture into the human homes, out of fear of the strange beings that inhabited that region.
So they waited, and as weeks passed by they had slowly given up. Sometimes they would fly by and catch a whiff of his familiar scent – half them, half something different, even feared – but these occurred less and less frequently. They fed, they mated, they raised their own young, and they started to forget. They were bats, and while, when together, they possessed a hive mind that could recall everything through shared experiences, many times they were apart, they were separate, and individually each started to lose him.
But now his overpowering odor was back, along with that of someone not as familiar. They sniffed – it smelled like him, the other half of him, and they accepted her. She was female, they sensed, and quite young – perhaps as young as their boy. They shared parts of the same scent. They listened too – they heard her call for him, and they liked her voice. It sounded like him as well, but different, closer to their pitch.
They flew nearer, perched along the branches, unseen in the dark, and folded their wings. It was quite dark, but with their eyes, their ears, they could sense them.
They saw the boy, hidden amongst the trees. They tried to recall what they remembered of his strange habits and movements. Many times they had wondered at how slowly he grew, how helpless he had been. Their own children grew quickly to independence, yet this had taken so long to grow…
They recalled when he had been frightened by the frequent storms near their cave. He had hidden himself in the back of the cave and had made strange sounds there; he had not leaped up to his usual perch but crouched in the back until the storm had abated. Right now, he was acting the same way, and they chattered amongst themselves, wondering if they should go to him.
Then the girl they had smelled made her way to him. He rose up, seemed to calm himself, touched the girl. She leaped around and then grabbed at him – some lifted their wings, wondering if she was attacking, but others who had spent days amongst humans reassured them – and gave him something small and white that puzzled the bats.
A few fluttered around them, though the two remained ignorant of them. Those few were disappointed that their boy no longer recognized them, but the majority were unsurprised. It was the way of the world for the young to grow, forget their elders, and start families of their own, who would continue the cycle. The few returned and assured the others too that, yes, their son was ready to mate as well. Several clicked happily – it was good for him, for he was finally an adult, and to be with one with such a similar smell was even better.
The girl continued holding him for a bit, until the bats started chittering unhappily. It was time, they were clearly ready – why weren't they doing it? Others, more patient, cautioned them into silence.
The girl started to pull off those strange bits of color she wore, shocking several younger bats – they thought she was tearing off her own skin. The older ones quietly explained that their boy and others like the girl often covered themselves in such a way – how often had they gotten tangled up in them while flying unawares?
The girl was now free of those bits, and she helped the boy quickly. The bats flapped impatiently. Their smells and movements seemed to be short, tense, building up. It made them jittery.
Then the two collapsed to the ground, the girl clinging to the boy. He held her tightly, pressing himself to her, connecting, bonding, at last. The bats squeaked; as one they flew into the air, beating their wings happily in time with the others, rejoicing with their son as he joined the one they knew he had chosen as his mate.
They flew in the cool night air, chirping their happiness to the owls, the trees, the mammals sleeping in their woodland home. They dived up and down amongst the branches, forming a great circle of bats.
After a few moments they settled down. The two children were sleeping, curled together in a little nest. The older bats chirped their approval; some of the younger ones, though, interrupted. They too had their own young, and they were getting hungry.
There was a herd of cows gathered on the hill. Several of them released themselves from the tree branches and flew off. They settled on the cows' bodies, so light that the large animals didn't even noticed. They bit into the tough skin, lapping up the blood and allowing their children to feed.
The older ones, without young of their own, watched the other two children below. They recalled trying to feed the son when he was young and helpless – far more helpless than their own ever were, for even right after birth their children could hang from the ledges, could twitter for their parents. This new son had squalled whenever it was hungry, when its skin grew too cold or hot, when a strange noise echoed through the caves. They had shared food amongst themselves and did the same for this strange, adopted child of theirs. It had taken to their food easily, but had wanted a great deal more blood than the bats could provide.
Soon after, though, it had started crawling about. Unable to fly (and this had puzzled the bats, for their young were all equipped with wings), it had imitated the scratching, crawling movement the bats did, using their clawed wings and tiny feet to clamber along. Then they had had to watch him all the time, making sure he didn't wander into the dangerous parts of the cave or skewer himself on the stalagmites. However, they had never had to keep him from the entrance. Their son disliked the light and the strange things outside the cave, and hid from them.
So he had grown up amongst them. They could not keep track of time, they lived in the present, yet together they knew that their son was different, was growing and developing at a far slower rate than their own children. Some had wondered about his mating habits, yet he had never seemed to give off the signals their males did. But they were bats; they did not dwell on such unsolvable problems, they did not worry, and they forgot about it.
How proud they all were now! The returning bats came back, chattering about a strangely familiar presence making her way through the woods. They exchanged scents, and the oldest bats nodded. They recalled the woman – how utterly powerful her scent had been! None had cared, then, that she was bigger than them, that she was not one of them – then she was part of them, and they had joined up with her. And their son, they knew, was the product.
The bats continued flittering. The woman shared a similar scent to the girl below them. Apparently the mate their son had chosen was the woman's child as well. Yes, that made sense to them – that was why the two scents were so extremely similar. Mating between bats of such close relations was rare, but they had occurred.
They sniffed at their son. He seemed worried, stressed. They were reminded of the days of his babyhood, when he had hungered and they had struggled to feed him. His actions were similar. He got up, attempted to run from the girl. The bats yelped, cried out – would their boy abandon his mate, especially in her condition? Bats remained together to raise a child, after all.
The girl followed, and she did something very strange – she held out one of her limbs. Some bats noted, peripherally, how different it looked from their own limbs – no wings at all. The boy twisted, and they noted the conflicting pheromones – he hungered, yet some part of him didn't wish to. They wondered about it. He had never been unwilling to eat. They had never been unwilling – it wasn't anything they could control, after all.
The girl came close to him, held him the way mates did. They touched, placed their heads close together. Their son's body relaxed. He took her arm and opened his mouth. The bats watched eagerly.
Suddenly the woman burst in, startling the bats into flight. They flapped amongst the trees, regaining their calm. But when they landed they knew something had changed.
Their son howled. They had never heard such a wrenching sound, but for when a bat died, terribly, painfully. And then he ran, ran from his mate, while the girl was left, not chasing him, with her mother, every movement of their body signaling pain, terror.
But they could not stay with the females. They followed the boy. Their son no longer crawled – he ran, faster than they could follow at times, and without any sense of the direction the bats had tried to teach him. He twisted along difficult routes, turned on a whim, seemed not to care or notice where he was going.
When he stopped the bats did so, though some, taken by surprise, went flying on ahead and had to double back. There they stopped and watched their son's agony. They mourned softly in their own language as he screamed his rage, his grief, his shame. They understood nothing of his language, yet every movement, every sound produced told them what they need to know – he had lost his mate, his love.
A calmness overtook him, one that the bats had never seen. He looked up and saw them. They twittered as he climbed up and joined them, hanging from the branches as he had done when he was younger and needed comforting. Several mothers licked him as they would lick their young, hoping to soothe him from his troubled state. He didn't move, and the younger ones wondered if they had helped. But the wiser ones knew not. It was hidden, but they could sense it – the anger was still present, yet latent, dormant. Soon, they knew, it would be unleashed. Only a few shivered, fearing this unfamiliar power.
Bats whirled back, crying out about the people smashing through their woods. Yet the strength in the group seemed to increase; they drew together. This was their son, and nobody would harm him. They would die to protect this boy.
They surrounded him, covering the branches, the trees, an eerie sight if humans could have beheld it. Edgar, however, felt only the soft, nameless comfort of a child. He felt as if time had spun back, as if he were once again merely a strange boy in a cave, unaware of the world outside, thinking of nothing except how to get his next meal.
A gunshot blasted through the woods, the force tearing through branches. The bats scattered.
The shock of the sound brought him crashing back to reality. He could never go back. He was not a boy any longer. He had done too much, caused too much suffering. No one would ever forgive him. He could not forgive himself.
He was alone now. He had always been alone.
He pulled himself off the branch and landed in front of the mob. They might as well not exist; his eyes were focused only on Dr. Parker.
"Hello, Father."
Random Note: I did quite a bit of research on vampire bats, a lot of which was incorporated in here (and which made me realize, as I madly re-edited entire paragraphs, that I probably should have done the research BEFORE writing the chapter). One thing I did take creative liberties with was their sense of smell. The stuff I read emphasized more their echolocation and their infrared sensing. But hey, it's a story and smells (with pheromones and hormones and all that) worked better.
PLEASE READ: Okay, so I, in my crazy insane obsessive way, decided (pretty early in this story, actually), "I wanna do a chapter showing the viewpoint of ALL THE SUPPORTING CHARACTERS!" So pretty much, every person who has a frigging NAME in the script got a part. (This means people like the Doctor or the Institute Man or...I dunno...Meredith's Parents DID NOT get anything - so I'm sorry if you are HUGE FANS of them, nothing about them in the next chapter. Or anywhere here, LOL.) Anyway, being the person I am, it ended up...oh, around 10,000 words long. Yikes. So, rather than inflict a horrendously long and potentially boring chapter on all you lovely, devoted readers, I split it into 4 chapters, which will be released over 4 days. And that is it. Something for you all to look forward to. Or to ignore. I'm guessing more the latter. :)