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Rapture
(Berserk crossover)
Tears flowed freely down Emma's face which she could no longer touch.
She could no longer tell how long she was locked in her room. Sleeping, eating meals brought to her door, lying awake staring at nothing. No matter the state, she was always tormented by the memories of that moment, as the knife drew near her skin and made the first cut. Cutting her flesh, cutting her dignity, cutting her soul.
Leaving scars that would never heal.
She heard pleading voices behind the door. Her family still tried to reach her, even after all this time, not comprehending that she couldn't face them, couldn't face the world. She died that day, or perhaps she wished she had died, and now there was no place for her among the living.
She grabbed a pillow, intend to cover her head with it, creating another boundary between her and the world, and in the process her hand touched some small object.
Welcoming a distraction, so rare in her tomb, she brought it to her good eye. It took a few moments to blink away the tears and focus on what she held: a lucky charm brought to her by Taylor so long ago, in another world. It looked like an egg with eyes, nose and mouth splattered across it without rhyme or reason. She remembered finding it funny and charming once, but now... Now it just reminded her of her own fate.
Angrily, she threw the egg away before bursting into tears once again.
And the behelit screamed.
Taylor ran through the endless labyrinth. Each room she encountered was familiar, she saw them before, in her home, in Emma's, at school, at her father's work she visited a few times... But each of them was wrong. Broken, twisted, turned into a mad collage by someone who couldn't comprehend the importance of tiny little things scattered around these rooms making them welcoming.
The rooms were connected by long staircases stretching in all directions. Impossibly, Taylor had no troubles running on them, gravity being fluid in this place.
Between the rooms and staircases lied the void, as empty as it was hungry.
Taylor didn't know how long she was running. The labyrinth was twisting and turning, betraying any and all attempts at building a mental picture of it, yet somehow Taylor was sure she was running in a great spiral, each swirl slightly less wide, bringing her closer and closer to the center. She didn't know what waited for her there, but she had no choice other than keep running.
At some point, she started hearing voices. Echoes traveling through the labyrinths, following paths Taylor couldn't trace.
"...to be strong, to never be hurt again, to not be afraid?" One voice reminded her of her mother, opening a gaping wound in her chest she thought she healed. It reminded her of her father, too, and of Emma, of her teachers and the dockworkers visiting her home sometimes. It was the voice of affection.
And hidden malice.
"Is it... really possible?" Another voice could barely be heard, quiet and hoarse, a shadow of a sound.
"Yes... If you're willing to pay the price."
Taylor exited her room with all furniture being turned upside down, and found herself on a staircase overlooking five impossibly high pillars. One of them was empty. As for the rest...
Taylor caught her breath.
There was only one word to describe the figures standing on top of the pillars. Monsters.
"Anything!" The second voice said.
This time, Taylor was able to trace its source to the platform made out of Emma's room with its walls absent, hanging before the pillars without visible support.
A figure was crouching on a bed, looking up at the monsters.
"Emma!" Taylor shouted, recognizing her.
Emma looked up at her, startled. Taylor gasped catching a glimpse of ruined face desperately covered by hair.
Emma looked back at the pillars.
"No," she whispered.
Taylor looked around. She didn't know what was going on, whether it was a nightmare or a parahuman power or something far more sinister. All she knew is that she had to reach Emma before something horrible would happen, more horrible than whatever has left its mark on Emma's face.
Taylor jumped, flying through the cold void that cut her skin with hair-thin tendrils she couldn't feel until the blood flowed. She landed on top of a room on the spiral swirl closest to the platform, and for a few long agonized moments just laid here, trying to quench the pain. Slowly, shakily she stood up and started walking to the edge of the room. One more jump.
"Yes," the voice of fake affection said. "You have to cut ties if you want to ever stand by yourself. Your father was there when you've died. He didn't help you. Couldn't. Nobody can, not in your world of monsters and their followers. Your family was there afterwards to reassure you, to lure you with their sweet voices into the illusion of comfort and safety. You would feel safe again if you'd allow them to convince you, yes... Until next time you'll feel the edge of a knife."
Taylor fell on the platform behind Emma, making her jump and look back.
"Emma," Taylor said, trying to stand up. She didn't know what else to say.
Emma looked back and forth between Taylor and the monster on top of a pillar, her breaths fast and shallow. She brought a hand to her face to remove a stray lock of hair that fell on her eye, and froze once the hand touched her face.
"I..." she said. "I accept."
And the monster laughed.
Taylor felt unbearable pain in her neck and screamed.
Hell opened its maw and swallowed her whole, countless hands trying to tear her apart.
The last thing Taylor saw was Emma unable to look away from her, tears flowing freely down her now perfect porcelain face.
"I have to think about what's good for the team! It's... it's unfair to you, yes, but, look, we're pressured from all sides. This offer, this offer would allow our team to survive."
It was funny, Marissa thought in that haze preceding hysteria, how, standing in this garden of flesh and blood, the thing she regarded as the most unbelievable was words spouted by a person she thought her friend.
"We are the team, you bastard!" she shouted. "Listen to yourself! Are you seriously planning to sacrifice us for our own good?!"
Francis hid his face in his hands for a few moments, before shaking his head as if trying to wake up and looking straight at Marissa. His eyes were wide, his mouth twisted in a demented expression.
"Okey, fine," he said. "It's not for the team. It's for Noelle." He started to pace around, uncaring of what his feet were stepping on, his words louder with each step. "Do you think I don't know what you're all saying when I'm not around? 'Noelle is a liability.' 'Noelle will get us all killed.' 'She's not our Noelle anymore.' 'We should get rid of her once we have a chance.' Did you think I would stand for it?!" he shouted, pointing a shaking finger at Marissa.
"That's not true, and you know it," she said. They had... talks, but as long as there was hope... As long as there was hope, they would follow it.
"I have to do it," Francis said with a hollow touch of finality. "I'm sorry."
She looked at Luke for support, but he just stood there, staring at the insane landscape around them with unseeing eyes.
There was no escape from this madness but death.
There was no escape.
She had to do it.
Gathering her anger and desperation, Sundancer reached for her power, creating a sun hotter and brighter than ever before. Luke screamed, the sudden appearance of flame throwing him to what passed for the ground in this place, but Sundancer paid him little mind. Her target was before her.
Trickster was blind from her light, unable to use his own power. If she moved fast enough, the nightmare would end. She and Luke would survive.
For the first time in her life, Sundancer was prepared to kill.
And then the sun was swallowed by the void, leaving her cold, empty and alone.
She looked at her hands, uncomprehending. Where flames danced a moment ago, there were shallow hair-thin cuts with blood slowly welling from them. She fell on her knees as if she was a marionette with her strings cut. She tried to speak, but only reddish foam left her mouth.
"Now, my dear," a grotesquely fat man occupying on the pillars said. "It's rude to interrupt such an important moment."
"So," another man, this one resembling an aborted embryo, said. "Do you agree, Trickster?"
"Y-yes," Trickster said, blinking tears from his eyes. Whether they were caused by light or something else, Marissa didn't know.
"I still don't think it's fair," a woman with a pair of bat wings, whose voice sent shivers down Marissa's spine, said. "What power is there in bonds broken for another bond? He'd still be chained."
"God is merciful," a man on the central pillar said. "Even impure motives can lead to salvation by His will. But God is also just. The sinner before us desires not personal salvation, but the power to save another, and so two souls will be claimed in their place. It is decided."
With that, an unnatural silence fell upon the garden. Before Marissa's eyes, the skies parted, and a great worm made out of human bodies desperately clinging to each other descended, preparing to swallow her and Luke. As it drew closer, a serpent of exposed bone tied together with thin muscles and pulsating veins oozing blood emerged, its maws parting to show misshapen crooked teeth, both human and animal in form.
Marissa couldn't look away as she faced her approaching death, yet the serpent didn't reach for her. It twisted in the air instead, striking at Trickster's chest and clawing out his heart in mere moments.
As he fell down, clutching the wound with his hands in denial of his mortality, the worm fell apart, turning into quickly dissipating fog.
In its place stood a figure clad in crude bone armor resembling an insect carapace, with parts of rotting flesh still clinging to it. The serpent served as the left hand of the figure, though it, too, soon fell apart, leaving behind only a stump.
The figure looked at Trickster, looked at Marissa and Luke still lying here. And then it laughed, a broken sound scraping against Marissa's brain.
"You dare to mock the sacred ceremony?" the woman with the voice of sweet malice snarled. "I should enjoy teaching you your proper place."
The figure turned to face the pillars, allowing Marissa to see a long bone spike sticking out of its skull where there was a hole in its armor.
"I know the rules," the figure said, and her voice was vaguely feminine. "You have no power in this world but the one people give you. Your Apostle is dead. You'll have to leave, and I will stay, taking his life for my own."
"You are marked," the grotesquely fat man said. "Wherever you go, you will be followed. Thin walls between the worlds will rip open at your mere presence, giving us more ground with your every step. You can't run forever."
"I've survived Hell. Do your worst, and still I will kill every one of your Apostles, sever every tendril of Fate your God uses to crawl into my world."
"You truly think..." the man resembling an embryo started to say, but the man on the central pillar raised his hand, silencing him.
"You will fall," he said.
"I'm not afraid of your threats."
"Is is not a threat. Not a promise, not an oath, or a malediction or a curse. Inevitability. You will fall, and in doing so, you will doom your world."
"We'll see about it," the woman in bone armor said, but her words were hollow.
With that, she knelt before Trickster's body and found the screaming egg that started it all. She swallowed it, and the garden of flesh was no more, disappearing like a mirage and leaving Marissa, Luke, the woman and Trickster's body in the house where they stayed that night.
Marissa found her strength returning to her. Slowly, she crawled on her knees and checked Luke. He was mostly unharmed, but unresponsive to her touch and to her words, staring at the ceiling and breathing shallow breaths.
"Luke," she whispered. "Luke, it's over. Say something, please."
He didn't move.
She couldn't deal with it. Not now, not when she was still processing what just happened to them.
But there was something she could do, someone who can give her answers.
She looked at the woman, who was still kneeling besides Trickster, tracing trails of his blood with her one hand.
"Who... who are you?" Marissa asked. The woman didn't answer.
Marissa stood on her shaking feet.
"What's going on?" She tried again, and again there was no response.
She walked towards the woman, anger slowly welling inside of her. It was easier to be angry than afraid.
"I'm talking to you!" she shouted, making a grab for the woman. But bone and flesh parted before her hand, making her stumble through the woman, who didn't even change her pose.
Marissa crawled back, and didn't say anything more.
The woman continued to study Trickster's blood, which was moving before her touch, flowing into arcane patterns.
"Emma," she said eventually in a tone Marissa couldn't read.
She stood up, smeared the arcane patterns with her foot, and walked to a window. On her back delicate wings like that of a dragonfly unfolded, their translucent beauty contrasting with the rest of her armor. Flesh and bones flowed down her stump, briefly forming a serpentine construct and breaking the window.
The woman flew away, leaving Marissa among the shards of broken glass.