creatures, characters, and concepts, including this dumb fic. And while there's not much I
could actually do to you should you for some reason steal my crap, I WILL put a hex on you. So THERE.
Author's Note: Started as a rewrite of the infamous Dark Ocean scene, now the story is growing. I guess this prologue is just a mood-setter, now. . .
Prologue
Genesis
You see this? A faint, manic laugh: desperate, dangerous. Do you see this, fool? This is mine. So hideous, so hoarse . . . so beautiful and smooth, sleek and hypnotic, rough and repulsive . . . venomous as a snake, a hundred times as deadly. This is mine . . . it is all, all mine . . . The child turned, jerked around with wide eyes, whites huge, pupil consuming color in his fear, until the frost-lavender was only a bare eclipsed ring between black and white in his pale face. There was no wind, but the deep navy wisps of his unruly bangs still jerked and flowed before his face, still blurred his vision in the dark, dark land where the sound of the too-dark, murky sea rushed and roared as though it were trying to consume the black sands with its fury alone. He clung to the object in his hands as that whispering, laughing voice curled around him like possessive smoke, holding the device against himself as though it could offer some bare protection. Everything . . . Again, the soft, mad laugh. This world, and everything in it, belongs to me . . .
The child closed his eyes for a moment, teardrops catching in his lashes, and a tiny, choked sound of fear catching in his throat. "Where . . . where am I . . .?"
And I'm afraid that if they can't play by my rules . . . It broke off abruptly, the laugh spiraling, twisting hard and loud and painful around him, and he cried out, jerking away. "No! G . . .go away!!" Why had he come here? Why? Why had that letter told him to . . .
The waves broke over his foot in the moment he realized that he was still backing up; cold, too cold water washed over his calf, and the chill crept up his spine, spread in his veins like that snakebite voice and settled at his heart, at the back of his neck where it dug into his brain with icy talons. He screamed, shook his head frantically, clutching his skull--the voice, it was louder now, clearer: deadly sweet and insinuating as a serpentine emissary, too perfect and too wrong to be real. I've been waiting for you . . .
Still holding his head, he sobbed, once, eyes squeezed shut. "Who are you? Why am I here. . .?!" Again he sobbed, wrapping his arms around himself, now, and dropping to his knees--the water came almost to the child's chest, lapping against him hungrily, staining his white shirt like blue-black blood. "I. . .I don't want to be here! I want to go home. . .!"
It was mocking him--no more words, just that agonizing laugh, spinning around him, beating down on him, eating his mind like acid. If they had wanted to punish him. . .if they had wanted to send him to hell, this was it--eternity with that wonderful, horrible sadist laughter. . .
"Stop it. . .!" The child gasped the words out, clinging to himself, to the small pale aqua object clutched in his young hands like it could possibly hold the waves at bay, like it could silence the mad and maddening laugh.
There was silence.
Slowly, cautiously, the child opened one wide, frightened lavender-blue eye, chewing his thin lip faintly as the panicked orb darted about. The waves still hammered the shore, still rushed against him. . .but they were silent. Everything in the dim, the strange lightless land. . .was silent. He opened his other eye, and carefully stood, eyes still wide and staring; wet skin and clothes dripping soundlessly back to the waves. He swallowed once, hard, as he turned a full circle slowly, seeking. . .something. Anything. A change, in the black-grey monotony of the sands and distant blade-sharp cliffs, or in the endless march of dark waves off to infinity across the horizon. But there was nothing.
He held the device closer to himself, pressing it against his trip-beating heart through the soaked and stained cloth, and closed his eyes again, lowering his head. Was this. . .punishment? Was this what he got, then, for making his brother disappear. . .?
Sound returned suddenly, in a way--the waves still pounded in silence, but there was another noise, sudden and sharp and painfully close. Footsteps. Light steps; almost delicate, graceful steps, but clad in heavy boots, perhaps, and trained to a slow predatory stalk. It rang clear as though the footfalls had hit metal, but that, of course, was impossible. . .
The boy turned quickly, eyes snapping open. . .but there was no one there. "H. . .Hello. . .?"
The steps paused, and for a moment all was still again--but no, not really. . .there was one faint sound still, the faint creak of leather, so soft the boy was not sure he heard it over the pounding of his heart and his frightened, fluttering shallow breaths. He swallowed hard, fidgeting slightly, afraid to leave the cold, cold waters. "Hello. . .? I. . ." He paused, took a deep breath to calm himself, succeeded only in almost choking. "Is anybody there. . .?" The last came out cracked with fear, almost a faint whisper, almost a gasp or sob.
He was greeted with a laugh, soft and almost gentle but for the hard, mocking mad lilt. Fools. . .
Eyes snapping wide again in terror, his mouth worked silently for a moment, before he turned, bolting across the waves, further down the beach as though the water that beat against him--slowed him down, threatened to topple him--offered him some sort of sanctuary from that sourceless hungry voice.
Insects! The voice was harder now, animal snarl; it was joined in mid-word by a sharp, earsplitting crack! of something that bit the air beside the boy, invisible. He jolted, sobbing as he tried to run faster, but he ran too carelessly, and slammed down on the side of his foot--stumbling, falling to the water. The cold dark ocean was like a slap with a glove of ice against his skin, it rushed to him, dragged him down with it's current; pressed open his jaws and poured in to fill his throat, thick and salty and metallic as blood. He struggled to escape the grip of the pound and rush of the waves, and the device was torn from his hands.
His head finally broke surface, and he gasped, sucking in air--he shouldn't have been drowning as he was, the water was too shallow to have held him as it did--the waves only came up to his stomach as he knelt there, and when he straightened on his knees, not even that. He brought trembling hands up, to brush the soaked hair from his eyes. . .and realized with a shock, with a cold stab of fear that he no longer held the device.
"No. . .! Oh. . .oh no. . ." He sunk on his knees again, hands desperately searching in the dark water, knowing even as he did that it already been washed away; that there was no way it could have not washed away. Tears burned his eyes, stinging against the salt of the ocean--not that, not that . . . it was Osamu's, he couldn't lose anything of Osamu's he just couldn't, he'd die if he did, he felt he would so strongly it had to be. . . And then his hand brushed something in the water. For a moment his hand jerked back, then he squinted down. Pale aqua, a bit of blue. . . Some small, tremulous voice in the back of his mind--not his own but familiar -- warned him away, told him to leave it be, but he reached out and grasped it tightly, lifting it from the tide-shifted sands beneath the waves.
He stopped, with his hand and the device still in the water, as that laugh flowed down around him again, and he whimpered slightly--it crept into his mind, brushed against the far dark corners of guilt and resentment, anger and violence. . .they awoke at the touch, clamoring forward in a rush that turned the small whimper into a scream of pain. His hand tightened around the device, squeezing hard enough to feel pain through the numb cold. His eyes were locked open, staring blind, as his inner demons--dark for a child, many and hungry and strong as they should never be -- pressed and pressured, clung to the eddies and strange spirals the steel-soft laughter drew in his mind. This world. . . This is all. . .
Something snapped. Something in the laughter, in the screaming, maniac prodding and pleading of all those inner shadows, broke something inside. The child's eyes narrowed, the pupils. . .somehow less human, thin slits of black against the strange, perfect dark-pale color. The laughter didn't bother him so much suddenly -- he even smiled a little, thin lips curling coldly into something more a smirk; something older and crueler than a child should wear.
I'm your worst nightmare come to life. . .
The other hand reached down, clutched around the first about the device--possessively, now. For a moment it rippled in his fingers, seemed to fade. . .but it faded out only to return something else: a sleek curved shape in his hands, death grey and black. "This. . ." his voice was hoarse--not from fear, not from screaming. . .it was a whisper drawn thick with hunger, with soft malice the nervous youthful tones had never known before.
I don't hear anyone laughing now. . .
But there was someone laughing, and whoever it was, they knew. They had the answer, and it whispered in the undertones, slid through the garbled gibberish and brushed his consciousness; held his hands tighter about the device in his hands. "This. . ." This was power. This was dark dreams realized; all he needed to prove he was there, he was real; he was more than the nothing he was treated as. He was more than his brother's shadow. . . "This is . . . mine now. . ." The smile grew, a vaguely feline, somehow serpentine expression of pleasure as he drew the device from the water, holding it almost lovingly before his face as his eyes narrowed more, thin dark slits of colored ice. "This is mine now, and no one can take it away from me, or hide it in a drawer. . ."
This world and everything in it belongs to me! Now GET OUT. . .!
This was his. It had always been his; and Osamu had only taken it away because that was what he always did, always took everything away from him. But that bastard was dead now and now, now it was time to set things straight, to show the world that he wasn't some dumb little kid, and he wasn't a nonentity, and he wasn't his 'genius' brother's goddamn fucking little shadow. . .
Now. . .the game . . . begins. . .
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again they were ice, cracked and warped--any sign of that frightened, innocent little boy crushed beyond recognition. "I'm in control now." It was a harsh whisper again--hoarse and smooth, lovely and chilling. The cold laughter curled around him again, and he held the dark, smooth device to himself, feeling the ice of the water slide through the already drenched cloth. A faint laugh escaped him to join with the mad serpentine tones staining the air, and he put his head back to the deep shadowed sky that was too familiar, too comforting to frighten as it had before. He sounded older and colder. . .desperate and dangerous; venomous as a snake, and just as deadly.