Chapter Ten
Aralyn looked first to the sword that skewered her thin body. The angled, honed point dripped with red.
Her hands quivered, parallel to the strong steel.
His hands shook, taking slivers from her frame as the sword moved.
Jenova crowed behind Sephiroth's conscience.
"S-Sephi?" Aralyn breathed, eyes wide. "Sephiroth? Wha--?"
His hands, under an unconquerable influence, savagely ripped the blade from her body, and Aralyn could not suppress a scream. She fell, bent in pain, feebly trying to support herself with her broken arm on the earth. The other hand was clenched over her heart as if to stanch the wound, but to no avail. The crimson was rapidly consuming her white hospital gown.
He had drawn his beloved's blood.
Sephiroth's soul screamed with the torturous burn of it on his hands.
"Sephiroth?" Aralyn asked, and again sought out his eyes.
His blade arched again, splitting her back, and again she screamed as she was thrown to the ground by the raw force of the blow. She was down, but it was not over.
"Get up, you wretched human!" The voice was not his. With more than sufficient force, his blade was hurled downward, through her thin body and deep into the earth beneath.
There was less blood this time, and she could no longer muster enough breath to scream.
But, helpless as a puppet, he swung yet again, swooping low and then upward, and caught Aralyn in the shoulder. The blow carried her limp body with the path of the blade as she hung, helpless, from its point. He pinned her to the weeping willow tree, her feet dangling above the ground.
Aralyn was horrifically silent through the duration of the brutal attack. She made no sound as she hung from the blade, head bowed as pain and shock rendered her unconscious.
He withdrew the blade to awaken Aralyn, who began to fall forward. He held the sword at the level of her heart, warning her not to lean any more. Gasping desperately, she reached behind her, pressing her back to the white tree and gripping to the soft bark as best that her bloodied, shaking hands could.
Perfect… the entity purred.
The tip of the Masamune grazed the hollow of her neck, then slowly, leisurely, pulled upwards, drawing the barest line of blood along her throat, under her chin, until she was forced by the blade to either look up into his haunted eyes or end her life against the cold edge of his sword.
This, my son, this is beauty.
Damp hair strayed into her face as she looked upward to him, pleading with the soft tilt of her eyes, the thin crease of her lips as they opened to ask the inescapable question.
"Why?"
He silenced her with a rain of blows. He struck her face, her arms, her stomach, his blade moving faster than a whip and with much more power. The blood was flung across the clean snow, creating ugly blots that were soon consumed in thick pools splattered on the ground. The emotions that the parasite within him was inducing were excruciating. Her bloodlust was insatiable, and therefore, so was his. To her, the spilled blood was ecstasy, the screams euphoria, the anguish in his wife's eyes rapture, and so, behind his horror, he felt the same way.
"Sephi—!" But Aralyn could never call his name before a scream of pain tore itself from her flayed throat. "Seph---stop…ah! Seph – please--!""
Beautiful workmanship, my godling…stunning…
Stop this! Sephiroth's soul screamed in anguish. Pride was gone. He was begging shamefully, and it meant nothing to him. Every heartbeat that this continued Aralyn was hurt further. It wouldn't be long before her heart burst from the sorrow, if she didn't die of her physical wounds first. Stop…I'll do anything! You want me…take me! Leave Aralyn out of this!
The entity stopped the brutal assault, and Aralyn fell to the ground. She was deathly still.
No…no…NO!
Yes. Yes, my son. It is done.
But it wasn't. A soft, strangled sob came from Aralyn's lips. "Sephiroth? W—Why…?"
Unbidden, his boot smacked into her unprotected side, tossing her mercilessly unto her back. She struggled to breathe under the weight of her own chest, choking, gasping, mouth open but unable to draw in enough breath. Blood trickled from the corners of her lips.
Why won't she just die? His puppeteer growled in frustration. Her fun was over; now, it was to business.
Sephiroth's bloodstained hands locked around Aralyn's pale throat.
She screamed only for a moment, and then breathed no longer. She reached her frail hands upward, seizing the arms that constricted her neck, cleaving to her murderer. She did not claw at him in desperation, but rather, tried desperately to reach for him with open palms. She knew she was dying, but she did not know her killer, and even tried in vain to lovingly caress the face of her angel one last time while he pitilessly throttled the life's breath from her body. As he strangled her, her lips formed his name again and again, calling, crying. Her eyes were wild with disbelief. Tears of fear streamed down her cheeks.
She didn't understand. She couldn't understand. She couldn't comprehend that her husband, her angel and her strength, was killing her.
"Sephiroth!" Aralyn gasped with her precious, scarce breath. "Sephiroth, help me!" she pleaded.
He beat her against the ground, still gripping her throat in an iron vice.
Once, twice, three times he slammed her into the earth, and three times her lips parted in a soundless, breathless scream. Four, five, six times, and she couldn't even do that.
His sensitive hands felt every frantic beat of her pulse, and how it slowed…
On the ring finger of her broken arm, the diamond in her wedding band glinted in the moonlight. The blood dripping onto her sallow hand lubricated the ring, and it began to slide from her thin finger. She clenched her hand into a fist, knuckles whiter than the falling snow. She refused to relinquish it, even as her life was ripped from her tortured body.
She met his eyes one last time; not looking at him, but into him. She saw the malevolent puppeteer, he was certain of it. "What have you done?" she breathed to her husband's captor. Then, rallying the last of her strength, cried, "What have you done to my angel?!"
She fell limp in his hands, pale and cold as death, with her wedding band still clenched in her fervent fist.
Well done, my son.
The entity, the monster, raised his hands, his Masamune, and plunged it into Aralyn's chest with a savage blow that left Sephiroth with no doubt that his wife's heart had been torn asunder. Aralyn did not respond with so much as a flinch. The wound did not bleed.
The blow had not been necessary.
Aralyn lost her life under the shade of the white weeping willow tree, drenched in her own blood, killed not only by the scars inflicted by her husband's own hands, but also from much deeper, graver wounds of the heart.
As his captor dragged him away in chains, Sephiroth knew that the white weeping willow tree in the clearing would forever mark the place where he, too, had died.
A/N: ....erm....
Yeah.