Author's Notes: I'm not sure I like Black Flag. I don't hate them, but really they seem like car music than anything I could sit down and enjoy like I could Mozart or Pink Floyd.
Go figure.
11
I think I'm awake, but I could just as easily be asleep. I know that when my eye is closed, it's black, but when it's open it looks the same. I can't tell now if it's shut or not, just that they keep drying out.
It's so dark I can't tell if I'm lying down or hanging from the ceiling. It's so dizzying, the lack of senses, the fear that overtakes you when you wake up in some unknown…place…
I've had nightmares like this, being trapped in the dark, suffocated by it and hunted by the things that live within it…like those cockroaches…I shiver.
No, I can't think like this. Get a hold of yourself, Farfarello or you'll drive yourself crazy and useless if they ever come back. This is all assuming you weren't simply thrown into a well and left to die (which would be awful, but I don't feel any water).
I slowly reach out (at least I'm not tied up) and feel the floor around me. I'm sure I'm lying down now, on something smooth and cold, probably concrete. My shoulder and hip throbs with stiffness from where I was lying. I very slowly roll onto my back and shut my eye. I breathe very softly and slowly, ignore my heartbeat and listen. There is nothing in this room but me, if my hearing is clear. No other breaths, no shuffle of clothing, no scurrying of tiny mouse feet or the soft clicks of other, less pleasant things.
I've been in rooms like these before. They're remotely like the places kept for interrogations, but without chair and oppressive light. It's almost like the cell I'd once had in an asylum when someone was smart enough to figure I was dangerous. Of course, that cell at least had a mattress…there is nothing here, just smooth floor, and as I slide my hands and feet as far around as possible, smooth walls.
I slowly get up, blind and wondering how Crawford does it every day (he shaves without his glasses and never gets cut), my feet, bare, slapping on the concrete floor much louder that I would've liked. I feel the walls with my fingers, going slowly to try and find irregularities, clips, knobs, a fucking door, a window, but there is nothing. This is one very well made cell, I muse as I reach as high as I can to feel for a ceiling. I'm not tall enough.
I sigh and sit down. Nothing to do but wait. I feel around my head for the team link, but it's gone. It feels like some wide open space is left over from where it was removed in my sleep. Something like horror yawns wide in my stomach, but I am outwardly unmoved. I sigh again, fingering my knuckles. My hands feel cartoonish in the dark, and even though I know they aren't, my fingers feel long and thin as stretched puddy, large wooden beads for knuckles once too many times cracked. My hands are rippled on the backs, one from a burn scar and another from blood vessels, both palms are calloused from handling knives, but my right has a very small gun powder burn I don't remember getting.
Something flashes in my head, a memory, a fantasy…An uplit tree, dead branches reaching for the black night sky. It's huge or I'm small, a boy running past, running away, so many times…
I come back to the room, to my hands, wondering what that was all about. Probably nothing knowing my own canny thoughts. Nothing ever follows a line for me, nothing organized. I remember when I was very young they wondered why I was so easily distracted…
Something outside the room clanks, a door, the jingling of keys, heavy booted footsteps, wide enough for a tall man, even enough to know he is strong, broad and healthy…I am against the wall in seconds, pressing my ear against it to listen so fast I slap it against the concrete. It's coming closer, directly at me, ant then stops in front of the door.
The keys jingle and one slides into what I know to be a hole. I quickly measure the height of the keyhole against my body, it's at my hip. I listen, six slow clicks as it turns, six heavy levers to push, I figure. The door is pushed in, and there is no hiss of a broken airtight seal.
The light that pours in is blindly white and I close my eye and shrink away from it like a vampire, even as I try to look through my fingers at my captor, the large bodied man whose shadow takes up the whole doorway. He reaches in and pulls me to my feet, drags me struggling out into the hallway.
"Who are you?!" I demand, fighting his grip and loosing the battle dramatically. I think I'm drugged… "Where's my team?! Let go!"
He is unresponsive, trained to ignore his prisoners, to think of them as slabs of meat perhaps. We make some turns that I don't manage to remember and he drops me inside of another room, exactly like an interrogation room, including chair, light and a black shiny wall of one-way glass…There are other figures there, three of them. Two come and pick me up and lock my wrists to the arms of the chair, my ankles to the legs that are bolted to the floor. I vainly struggle before a voice speaks, a voice I do not recognize, accented thick Italian.
"There is no need to struggle, you will not break free. Sit, relax, I know that cell is far from comfortable."
I looked up, but there was little to see outside the realm of my overhanging light. The shapes were moving around, but I couldn't tell them apart. They all looked the same…
"Your name is Farfarello, codename Berserker, yes?" the voice asked. I didn't hear the shuffling of the inevitable file folder, my file folder. That meant this questioner was behind the glass.
I did not reply.
"Answer, please. Your name is Farfarello, correct?"
"Where is my team?" I hissed, my arms straining against the bonds. My eyes were on the shapes in front of me.
"We ask the questions here," the voice said, still genteel, "You are Farfarello?"
"Are you Esset?" I asked. There was silence, enough to signify a 'yes'. I smiled at the men looming over me in the dark. "Then you already know. Move on to the harder questions please."
"You do not feel pain, do you? Of course, it says here that you do not from a childhood disease. Is that correct?"
"Why are you still with Esset? Why didn't you overthrow them while they were weak? Why do you continue this torture? There is no way that they'll ever create a 'better world' they advertise and leave anything left for little underlings like you."
A sigh, his sigh.
"Seeing to your disability, we will find another way to draw answers you are unwilling to give. Before that time, though, would you perhaps like to volunteer any information?"
"Actually yes, I would," I snipped, my head turning to panel of glass, "I think your voice is sexy as hell. Wish my boyfriend had a voice like yours."
No reply. Any lesser men would've been either sniggering or hitting me with riot batons.
I was pulled out of the chair and led back to my cell, remembering the way there this time so I could backtrack. I gave a complimentary struggle before the guard shoved me back into the blackness.
Black as ink,
As tar,
As Nagi's hair,
As the hair of a widow spider,
As the night on the bottom of the ocean,
Black as the death of sunshine.
My days and nights feel switched, though I cannot tell the time, nor base it off of sleep. I do not sleep out of fear, much like I didn't sleep at the asylums. I know my shoulder was put back into its socket before I woke here the first time, because I felt around for it, and it was fine.
Black as a cup of black willow tea,
Black as the pupils of Schuldig's eyes,
As a winter night's sky in the city,
Black as the blood on a crucifix in Ireland, inside the black dark of my mother's coffin, wrapped so lovingly in her rotted black fingers as the black headed grub worms chow down in the six feet of rich black soil of what never really felt like home.
Black as love followed by betrayal,
Black as lost causes,
As the loss of hope.
I will not loose hope. I have light in my thoughts and they are all I need to see.
I miss the team. I wonder where they are when I'm not counting heartbeats or breaths. I wonder if they are trapped like me, speculate about what tortures would be used to gather information.
Once I hope they'd gotten away, especially Nagi. Schuldig is a close second and Crawford's right behind. They're still so young, all of them. We're all young. God, Crawford's barely even thirty now, even if he refuses to act like it.
I miss them. I miss them so bad it digits scream for something to tear apart, my stomach writhes and my throat closes to hold off any screaming.
If they think ignoring me, or forcing me to sit on my own for any length of time and break from it, they could be wrong, but not by much. I don't get bored so much anymore, since the tower when something really did start dematerializing in my brain. Or maybe it was simply lack of medications?
Who knows, and who cares? Tink keeps me company and senses telepathic presences faster than I, and it was my head Schuldig occupied the most. During those time I try to meditate, like Crawford taught me, cross legged on the floor with my back straight and stable, hands rested on my knees, palms down. I count breaths without counting, simply identifying them, letting thought go. I think of the color white.
Hospitals.
Clean linens on the line.
Those awful suits we wore during the Takatori years.
White, black, and a series of grays.
Esset seeps color out of everything. I imagine that's why I'm so pale, simply to amuse myself and to annoy my telepathic pest.
Occasionally they take me out, down a series of hallways in a hopes to confuse me, but really it's only showing me more of the premises. They ask me questions, simple questions because we're still trying to figure out what my name is. They ask, I ask anything in reply.
They say I am not aware of my situation, which I find fucking hilarious.
I know exactly my situation, I just don't care.
They don't ask me anything about the team or about my life. They try to get some information on the Takatori family and later how we managed to kill the Elders. Again, I refuse to reply.
"Let dead dogs lie," I giggle after a series of pointlessly prodding me for information. Once or twice the shadowy men hit me, one got a good hit across my cheekbone that bled for fucking ever after they put me back in my cell. I licked up the blood, smiled at them with it pink on my teeth.
Abuse meant that they were getting impatient, that someone higher up the scale was lowering them to the frying pan if they didn't get whatever I kept in my head.
They tried a few other times to hurt me, a burn to my wrist, my forearm, my opened sore of a cheek where they had hit me before. Really the burn was good, kept it from getting infected, and I didn't feel a damn thing. The smell of burning flesh made my stomach grumble. They hadn't fed me much.
"Have you ever eaten another human being, Farfarello?" the voice asked when my stomach pleaded for nourishment. I laughed and bared my teeth at the closest shadow to my arm, the one holding the red-orange hot poker. Someone else in the darkness had a blowtorch, when the poker got too cool.
"How so? Raw, cooked, just the blood? You have got to be more specific," I purred.
"Any."
Breath hissed out of me, something like the sated pleasure comfortably settling in my stomach, like after a good fuck, "Yes."
"Of course, you did not believe they were human."
"Is this a psychoanalysis? Are you trying to displace some of my insanity? Of course they were human. They screamed so nice, but the silence after I slit their throats was so much better."
I was put back in my cell without another word, laughing until tears ran down my cheeks, even from my empty eye. I counted the light fixtures as I passed them.
When I wake up, I'm in another room, this one with a light so bright I think it's boring into the back of my skull. Eye open or closed, it's more penetrating than the darkness. The room is padded and I'm in a crisp white straight jacket, the rough cloth directly against the skin of my chest, my arms tightly hugging my frame.
I'm loosing weight.
My bangs are long enough to poke me in the eye, a hundred strands at a time and I have no way to wipe them away. I give myself whiplash trying to get them away.
I'm surprised they didn't put me in a face mask. I'm not ungrateful, those are unpleasant, the leather doesn't breathe and you get sores on your face if you wear one too long.
The questioning seems to get less frequent, or perhaps time is simply slowing down. Tink is quiet for the first time in her life; she sleeps most of the time now. She's so small curled up on the peak of a pillowed section of floor. Her dress is leafy green, her skin almost the same color. Her wings are translucent, like an insect, shimmery and glossy and really rather pretty.
I'm glad she's stopped trying to hurt me.
"Good morning, Farfarello. We have decided what to do with you," Mr. Italian voice says, ever pleasant, even genteel. Even now I want to cut his balls off and feed them with eggs to a blind man.
"If that isn't' ominous, I don't know what is," I snort back.
"Even though you and your team's…actions were seriously against our Corporation's objectives and teachings, you are eligible for reeducation. Of course with your several mental and physical conditions, that is not a possibility. In short, you are no longer necessary to Esset and your employment is from now on terminated."
"So I'm out of a job, great. Can I go now?" I snapped back, struggling against my bonds, now including thick canvas with the steel.
"I'm afraid that isn't a possibility. You will be processed with the other inmates and sentenced to punishment fit for your crimes."
"What crimes?"
"You and your teammates, Oracle, Prodigy and Mastermind, were primary active members in the murder of the Three Elders."
"And what's going to happen to them?"
A slight pause. I could almost feel it ripped with a malicious chuckle. He was enjoying this, the rise it was getting out of me.
"They have already been processed and executed. Take him out now."
I was released from the chair, still in my momentary shock.
There was nothing left for me…nothing…
"Jei, you dumb bastard, this is your chance! Get the hell out!" I heard Tink scream into my ear, "Kill them! Kill them!"
I looked up and sure enough one of the shadowmen was leaning over me, his whole throat exposed and just begging to be ripped out. I thought of the lifeblood just beneath his skin and my mouth watered.
I prayed he didn't have any STD's, then lunged and bit. He screamed and tried to pull away as I sank my teeth harder. It was he who ripped his own throat out, I simply held on.
"Drop the throat, move to the next one. He's behind you with a dart gun," Tink directed.
Roundhouse kick and the gun was clattering to the floor. A second later I landed my heel into his neck, punching down hard on a pressure point. One more left, backed against the wall in fear after I'd so easily killed his fellows. I could smell it now, the fear and I savored it like a hungry dog.
The only thought I had when I was killing him was 'Ikea is a joke'.
I guessed I had less than a minute to get myself out of there. I already knew I could get out of straight jackets (made it a practice in the Takatori years, just to piss Brad off), and I got to work, my head moving around so I could find another escape route. Nothing, just bare, flat ceiling.
I could already hear the footsteps. My shoulder popped out of the socket and I winced even as I pulled the loops of sleeves off over my head and started undoing the buckle the kept the ends of my sleeves connected. Soon, they were open and I had two weapons swinging from the end of each arm.
I grabbed the dart gun from the floor and shot out the light. Everything when pitch black and I crouched down to wait.
I didn't have to wait long, the door was kicked open and men were pouring in. They stopped to look around when they saw the light was out. Someone was yelling into a radio to get the lights back on. Futile.
I waited until the last one was inside and shut the door behind them, locked it. They turned to face it, panicked like sheep now.
"Are you afraid of the dark?" I whispered, "Its okay, I am too…"
The straight jacket's off now, I've stolen the uniform off one of the now deceased guardsmen. I don't expect it to actually hide me if confronted, but at least I have clothes, and out of the corner of someone's eye, they'd never know the difference.
There is a gun in the holster, resting against my hip like the hand of a lover. I have six more tucked into my pants pockets, coat pockets, the inside of my shirt. They are all of the same kind of handgun, standard issue, semi-automatic.
I'm moving down the halls like the wind, my mind shut against any telepathic intrusion I am strong enough to hold back alone, even Schuldig's team link. I kill anyone I see, guard, white-clad man or woman I assume to be doctor or nurse. I am lost, but I know where I need to be.
A window. I need a window or a door out. Stairs, anything of the sort.
I end up walking straight past a window and have to backtrack. Outside it the dreary dark night of a city, what I think looks a bit like Paris. I count the windows and find I'm on the eighth floor.
No time to wait and think about jumping. I try to open the window, but it's locked and the wire mesh in the glass won't let it break. I shoot out the lock, loose some time trying to get it open, and crawl out onto the windy ledge.
Shit, it's a long way down…
I start climbing, looking into each window, where everyone seems frantic. Above me a young woman with dead black eyes calls after me to come back, that I'll kill myself. I keep climbing.
My grip is faltering by the time I get to the fifth floor. I'm a lot weaker than I was from the lack of food and exercise. The window I look in isn't busy and I pick the lock open quickly, kick the pane open and slip inside.
There is something sinister about this floor, something dark about the silence that is drawn over it like a velvet curtain. There aren't any screams, or the scuff of sneakers on the linoleum, but mine. There are no beepings of heart rate machines or the soft whispered conversations of inmates telling life stories.
I start opening doors, hoping to find both a way out and a clue to the whereabouts of my teammates. The Italian Voice said they were dead, but I refused to believe him.
It's there then, a tentative touch in my head, something slipping underneath my shields. I have my gun to the back of my neck in an instant, a threat. If anyone tries to hijack my head, I'll kill myself and take them with me.
The voice is soft, but harsh, the German thick and intrusive but also intimate, as if it was being whispered into my ear and not my mind.
/Farfarello?/
Where are you?
/I don't know/ the voice is tired, about to fall asleep almost, and so raggedly exhausted/Walk. I can tell you when you're closer./
I move forward, my hands on my gun out in front of me as I turn corners.
/Warmer…warmer…no, colder, go back…yes…warmer…warmer…that door, yes, that door./
I slowly unlock and open the door in front of me, thinking now that I am so stupidly trusting a voice in my head that could so easily be replicated. I push it open anyway, ready for whatever fate lies for me.
So I think.
Schuldig is there, a shivering, dirty wreck of his former self, his hair shaven to his pink scalp and his cheeks shallow with hunger. Naked on the disused floor, I can see every one of his ribs, his thin hands, his shriveled penis.
"Oh God…"
"Far…Far, get us out of here…I can feel them coming…please hurry…" Schuldig begs, on his knees now, crawling toward me, crying. I tear off my coat and wrap it around his cold shoulders.
There is no way I can carry a naked man around Paris is not be seen…I have to find him some clothes and the exit.
I haul him to his feet and lead him into the hallway, looking for an exit.
Nagi…Brad…
/We'll be no good to them dead. Go left. I can hear a guard on his radio. Kill him, take his clothes and be quick about it./
I do as ordered, put him away in a closet and help Schuldig get dressed.
I was surprised that they hadn't caught us yet. I didn't think about it much, just kept us going in whatever direction Schuldig's stolen directions led us. He took whatever information needed out of the minds of the guards and I killed them.
We were out in a matter of minutes, really, without alarms, without the murder of many guards, without a whole lot of disruptions really.
"It's too easy," I said as I eased the door open, the door the led to the open night air.
"They think we'll stay for Nagi and Brad. They don't know us. Get out there before I kick you out," Schuldig snapped.
Fin Chapter 11
Please Review
Author's Notes: School's out for me, but I'm still working. I loathe getting up at six in the morning, but it's better than scraping for every penny like I did in High School. Just spent a wonderful evening catching up with old friends back from college. It was great, we went out for sushi and even got mochi. Zoe and I got mango flavor.
And then I come home and my fake crab and seaweed high is ruined, meteorically thrown into the dirt and so deflated it could be a fallen soufflé. I was trying to make plans with another friend of mine, to be as accommodating as possible and the whole time my mother was muttering 'stupid, that's stupid, you're stupid.'
She went on to explain that I was being to accommodating and then attacking my friend about not trying to be more flexible for me. I've never taken well to having me or my friends criticized, so the moment she went outside to smoke I spat in her drink and locked myself in my room to work.
Some days living at home is worse than any dorm environment. At least you don't have call someone every ten minutes when you rarely, if ever, go out. This was the first time I've left the house for fun instead of school or work since the summer. One can imagine my mood…
To My Readers:
TheInflictedFingerNeither, actually. It's more of a childhood fear brought to the surface by the enemy telepath (much like the Strongman becoming a Bogey).
StarTrekObsessed: Movies are lied nicely packaged and sold to the viewer to make them believe that they too can do the things there. In reality, not so much. I agree completely, choreographing fight scenes are hellishly difficult, but since my early creations, I feel I have improved. So, even if this is awful, it was better than say, something I crammed out in eleven grade.
I don't read those kinds of books. And I wish desperately that I didn't get bored in a plot-less story, but that would be untrue. As it is, This is turning out more or less as I preferred, and I'm considering endings. I want a good twist to mess you readers up.
And in my last dream I was the Cat God, so no bishies, just cats feeding me offers of mice and purring at me that they approved of their deity.
Rori Barton: Evil? On, no, far from it. If I was evil, I would've ended it like that forever.
