Author's Notes: I'm so sorry for it being so late!! School and Yearbook put me through the wringer this whole quarter. Whoo, this one's on a roll!! I love writing this thing almost as much as I love getting reviews (hint, hint ^_^). This is where everything starts getting weird with plot now. I've put in some nice resolution for the Devi/Nny conflict, and this is the very important introduction to the villain chapter. Guess who it is? Hee, I'm such a tease... go read now!
Disclaimer: I own nothing! Nothing!! Well, okay maybe the plot and any little insignificant people that pop up.
Desires Of The Mind
Nny'sFallenAngel
Chapter 4: The Call, A Resolution, And A Confrontation
Pepito leaned back in his father's chair and put his leather-booted feet up on the desk, staring hard at the cringing demon seated in front of him. He'd grown a lot since he'd gone to school with Squee in the third grade and destroyed the school, grown up- and into a very capable demi-devil. He had shot up, practically overnight, to be almost as tall as his father. His hair was slightly spikier and shorter than he'd had it as a child, though still in the same basic style, and his horns had grown slightly larger and sharper. His eyes had evened out in size, though the irises had remained that same deep red color. Surprisingly, this had become strangely attractive on him, along with the long thick black lashes that had grown in. This strange turn of events- becoming attractive, not the lashes- he had assumed came from his human mother's side of the family.
At this moment, however, his pretty eyes were narrowed in anger as he glared at the K'aos demon writhing in terror before him. The Son of Darkness was pissed- that was never a good thing.
"Now, Bardel'lok," he said evenly, fire smoldering in his eyes- literally-, "I'm going to allow you exactly sixty seconds to explain to me how you could have allowed this to happen. You were directly in charge when this incident occured, so the responsibility, as well as the consequences, rests directly on your shoulders. Your life," Pepito removed his feet from the desk and leaned forward toward Bardel'lok, "depends on how well you explain yourself to me now." He folded his arms and cocked his head expectantly.
The demon sunk into a sort of a half bow, wringing his hands in terror. "Master," Bardel'lok grovelled pitifully, "Master, please, it was not poor, worthless Bardel'lok's fault! Master knows that the traitor has special powers. Bardel'lok left his post for a few minutes to use the Port-O-Let and the traitor talked the other guards into letting him out!"
"Time's up," Pepito said, "and, sadly, I'm _not_ convinced." Bardel'lok whimpered in terror. "You know very well we do not tolerate failure here, and if that wasn't reason enough, you left your post for a personal reason. This is not acceptable." He lifted his hand almost lazily and his eyes flared green for an instant before returning to their natural red.
Bardel'lok began to scream in agony as his violet skin began to sizzle and drip off his body in small rivulets. His eyes rolled back into his sockets as he collapsed on the floor, his skin sloughing off in rivers and dripping into puddles, revealing the red sinew and muscles underneath. The muscles, in turn, began to turn smoke and shrivel, jerking his body back and forth as they snapped and tore from his bones, his screams of agony echoing off the stone walls. Finally, when all the skin had melted off, and all the muscles ripped from their ligaments, his internal organs began to boil and pop under the pressure. His lungs went first, then his spleen, and then his stomach. One by one they bubbled furiously, swelled, and exploded, leaving only his heart, his brain, and his bulbous eyes- still pleading- intact. Pepito looked down at the mess, smiling in satisfaction, and then noticed the organs that were left. He made a fist, staring at the carcass, and nodded when the eyes popped out of their sockets, the heart withered and sunk into the floor, and the brain liquified and ran out the nose cavity in a thick, bloody stream. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and the bones crumbled to dust instantly, coating the surrounding gore in a yellowish white powder.
Satisfied, Pepito pressed the intercom button. "Suzanne, could you call the janitor? There's quite a mess in father's office."
"Right away, sir," his father's secretary droned through the intercom.
He stood and turned away from the desk, rubbing his eyes and sighing wearily. This was quite a problem... he picked the brief off of his father's desk and read through it again, scanning the more important details:
The traitor they had been referring to was a Harvester that had tried to rebel against his orders. He had been paired up with another, complimentary Harvester and assigned to a certain individual who had had so much potential creativity that it was imperative that they get to him before anyone else. Not to mention, there was quite a force of evil trapped in a wall in one of his basements. The Thinkers had thought to kill two birds with one stone, freeing the demon-lord and harvesting the host's creativity at the same time. The two Harvesters they had sent were in charge of harvesting his mind and then persuading the individual to commit suicide, thus releasing their lord from the cursed dimension where it had been imprisoned for so long. The individual was an almost ideal host: he was quiet, introverted, an artist... the only problem with him was that the same Thinkers that had sent the Harvesters to him had, ironically, previously tagged him as a Waste-Lock. This unfortunately overlooked detail had not been noticed until it was too late. By the time they realized the mistake, it was too late in every sense of the phrase. The overloading had driven him quite insane and he became an extension of all the shit that was pumped into him, using his subverted creativity to think of gruesome ways to brutally murder and torture people who hurt him in any way. Senor Diablo had loved the irony, and respected the man himself as much as the Prince of Evil could respect a mere mortal.
When their task was nearly done, the traitor Harvester had realized he enjoyed life on Earth. He discovered a way to keep the demon-lord imprisoned for a while, and tried to keep the host alive long enough to become fully self-dependent. The loyal Harvester had refused to join him in his treason, and persevered in trying to convince the host to kill himself. Due in part to his insanity, the host became aware of what they were trying to do. Threatening to kill himself, saying that he would do it only to rest, the gun accidentally went off and shot him in the face. He died slowly, unwittingly defeating the traitor Harvester and dooming him to an eternity of imprisonment and torture in Hell. As a reward, the host had been freed of the Harvesters, of the burden of being a Waste-Lock, and sent back to Earth.
During their stay in the host's brain, the Harvesters had been named, and even now, they preferred to be called by these names... Johnny C. had christened them Mr. Fuck, the traitor; and Psycho-Doughboy, the loyalist. Eff had escaped the day before, taking Psycho-Doughboy hostage for reasons unknown.
"Ahh... I wish Father was here to help me with this," Pepito sighed again, tossing the brief back down on the desk. "Of all the times to have a transdimensional crisis, it had to be during Mother and Father's big anniversary vacation."
He cracked his knuckles, stretching his arms, put his hands behind his head and cracked his back. "Ah, well... I suppose I'll wait for a while," he murmured to himself, "See if Eff has some master plan or something, or if he's just decided to escape and torture Psycho-Doughboy for the hell of it..." he rolled his shoulders, sitting back down at the desk. "Either way, we will find him... and when we do..." Pepito allowed himself a low chuckle at what the demons would do to him then.
His pleasant reverie was interrupted by the sound of the intercom beeping. Pepito leaned over and pressed the button. "Yes?"
His secretary's voice droned through, completely monotone as per usual. "Sir, I've been instructed to inform you that The Call has been initiated. Within the next week, all demons, spirits, and forces involved with the human dimension are expected to be within the traitor's control, with few exceptions."
He felt the color leave his face- well, even more so than usual. "Fuck," he replied hollowly.
"Indeed, sir."
She clicked off.
If The Call had been initiated, every 'voice' in the human dimension- all the Harvesters, all the Trauma-Sponges, all the Figments of an otherworldly influence would lose their self-control and be irresistibly drawn under Eff's dominion. With them, he would wield an army so dangerous, so brutal, that he could conquer and control any and every dimension he set his eyes on. Even worse, if he attempted this, the balance between dimensions would be upset, causing the collapse of one or all of them. Pepito slumped back in his chair, overawed at the magnitude of the situation. It would be the end of the world as they knew it...
He reached for the phone and started dialing long-distance as the elderly janitor entered the room. Anniversary or not, he *had* to call Father.
*****
Angel looked curiously at her cousin and Johnny, her anger at Squee momentarily put aside. How did they know each other? The question nagged at the back of her mind, but she bit her tongue, interested to see how Nny would answer Devi's question.
"Still trying to immortalize the moment, Nny?" What did she mean?
He stared at her, then looked at the ground as if in shame. Almost inaudibly, he mumbled a few words- Angel had to strain to hear them, but they were there-
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Devi."
"Sorry?" Devi's shoulders drooped, and she took a step forward. "Do you have any idea what you did to me, Johnny?"
Nny flinched as though she had hit him.
"You tried to kill me on our first date. You were the last," she chuckled humorlessly, "_incredibly_ violent death spasm of whatever I had resembling a social life. You inadvertantly helped put a vicious dolly who fed off my creativity in my brainmeats. If that wasn't enough, then, ten years after I'd thought I'd finished with you and all the trauma you brought me, you show up here with your protege and nearly kill me and Tenna and Angel. And all you can say is 'I'm sorry?'"
She had kept her voice low, even, and calm throughout her speech, although he could detect a faint undertone of hurt in her voice. Strangely, that wounded him more than anything else possibly could have. He wanted to grab her, shake her, make her angry, to tell her to scream and beat and berate him at the top of her lungs, to do anything except stand there calmly and stare at him with that look in her eyes.
He dropped to his knees in front of her, hands at his sides, pleading. "My God, Devi..." he whispered, a sob growing in his throat, "what else can I possibly say?" He dragged a hand over his face and through his hair, his dark eyes quietly desperate. "I know that you hate me... why don't you show it? Show it, I'm begging you, so that I know how to react. I can't stand the way you look at me. It hurts, it makes me bleed."
Devi sighed. "I don't hate you, Nny." He looked up at her abruptly, shocked. She clarified, "I don't know why I don't, I mean, I certainly have enough incentive to hate you. It's not something I can explain. I just know that I don't."
Angel sat there, shocked, watching the two adults before her. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Squee staring in her direction. Turning to give him a look, she noticed he wasn't staring _at_ her; rather, he was staring _behind_ her, a blank look on his face. She turned, and promptly realized why. Tenna stood on the bar, wriggling around with Spooky in her version of an ecstatically happy dance.
"Mmmm... yep,"Angel nodded her head before turning back to what the others were doing.
"So... what does that mean? For... us?" Nny was asking.
Devi stepped away from him, back toward Tenna and Angel. "It means that I don't hate you, Nny. As to what it means for us, I don't know. There hasn't been an 'us' for a long time now." She turned, then paused at the sight of the locked door. "Let us leave, Nny. It's time for Angel to go home."
He sighed and got to his feet, eyes lowered, and pressed the side of his left wrist. It beeped, and without warning, the wall on the street side exploded outward. Angel jumped, surprised, then hurried toward Devi, giving Squee a long look as she passed him. He looked up at her from under his eyebrows, head bowed, for only an instant before cringing like a kicked puppy and looking away.
As they stepped over the rubble and carnage littering the sidewalk on their way out, she had a strange, unexplicably strong sense of deja vu, as if she'd seen this sort of scenario before somewhere. Angel mentally shrugged it off and hurried after Devi and Tenna to the car. She looked back at the two as they drove away, thinking hard about how things had turned out, and as she thought about it, she made a very important decision.
They remained there, half in shadow, one staring at the taillights of Devi's car and wistfully wishing their reunion had gone better, one cursing himself at how stupid he had been to go about everything in exactly the way he shouldn't have.
"Oh," Nny said, almost to himself, "Devi, whenever I thought of you, I thought of when we were 'us'." He sighed. "I just... I wish that it had happened... differently. Maybe, if I hadn't been sick... if I hadn't been so _stupid_... maybe there still could've been an 'us'..."
"Johnny?"
Nny turned around. "Yeah, Squee?"
Squee stood up, looking for all the world like the bruised, abused child with the haunted look in his eyes that Johnny had found on his tenth birthday. "Can we go home now?"
Johnny took one more look at where Devi's car had been, then turned back to the emotionally battered boy. "Yeah."
*****
I'm sorry that it's so short!!! I needed to get it out there, just so people wouldn't think I'd dropped off the face of the planet or anything. Please review it!!
Disclaimer: I own nothing! Nothing!! Well, okay maybe the plot and any little insignificant people that pop up.
Desires Of The Mind
Nny'sFallenAngel
Chapter 4: The Call, A Resolution, And A Confrontation
Pepito leaned back in his father's chair and put his leather-booted feet up on the desk, staring hard at the cringing demon seated in front of him. He'd grown a lot since he'd gone to school with Squee in the third grade and destroyed the school, grown up- and into a very capable demi-devil. He had shot up, practically overnight, to be almost as tall as his father. His hair was slightly spikier and shorter than he'd had it as a child, though still in the same basic style, and his horns had grown slightly larger and sharper. His eyes had evened out in size, though the irises had remained that same deep red color. Surprisingly, this had become strangely attractive on him, along with the long thick black lashes that had grown in. This strange turn of events- becoming attractive, not the lashes- he had assumed came from his human mother's side of the family.
At this moment, however, his pretty eyes were narrowed in anger as he glared at the K'aos demon writhing in terror before him. The Son of Darkness was pissed- that was never a good thing.
"Now, Bardel'lok," he said evenly, fire smoldering in his eyes- literally-, "I'm going to allow you exactly sixty seconds to explain to me how you could have allowed this to happen. You were directly in charge when this incident occured, so the responsibility, as well as the consequences, rests directly on your shoulders. Your life," Pepito removed his feet from the desk and leaned forward toward Bardel'lok, "depends on how well you explain yourself to me now." He folded his arms and cocked his head expectantly.
The demon sunk into a sort of a half bow, wringing his hands in terror. "Master," Bardel'lok grovelled pitifully, "Master, please, it was not poor, worthless Bardel'lok's fault! Master knows that the traitor has special powers. Bardel'lok left his post for a few minutes to use the Port-O-Let and the traitor talked the other guards into letting him out!"
"Time's up," Pepito said, "and, sadly, I'm _not_ convinced." Bardel'lok whimpered in terror. "You know very well we do not tolerate failure here, and if that wasn't reason enough, you left your post for a personal reason. This is not acceptable." He lifted his hand almost lazily and his eyes flared green for an instant before returning to their natural red.
Bardel'lok began to scream in agony as his violet skin began to sizzle and drip off his body in small rivulets. His eyes rolled back into his sockets as he collapsed on the floor, his skin sloughing off in rivers and dripping into puddles, revealing the red sinew and muscles underneath. The muscles, in turn, began to turn smoke and shrivel, jerking his body back and forth as they snapped and tore from his bones, his screams of agony echoing off the stone walls. Finally, when all the skin had melted off, and all the muscles ripped from their ligaments, his internal organs began to boil and pop under the pressure. His lungs went first, then his spleen, and then his stomach. One by one they bubbled furiously, swelled, and exploded, leaving only his heart, his brain, and his bulbous eyes- still pleading- intact. Pepito looked down at the mess, smiling in satisfaction, and then noticed the organs that were left. He made a fist, staring at the carcass, and nodded when the eyes popped out of their sockets, the heart withered and sunk into the floor, and the brain liquified and ran out the nose cavity in a thick, bloody stream. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and the bones crumbled to dust instantly, coating the surrounding gore in a yellowish white powder.
Satisfied, Pepito pressed the intercom button. "Suzanne, could you call the janitor? There's quite a mess in father's office."
"Right away, sir," his father's secretary droned through the intercom.
He stood and turned away from the desk, rubbing his eyes and sighing wearily. This was quite a problem... he picked the brief off of his father's desk and read through it again, scanning the more important details:
The traitor they had been referring to was a Harvester that had tried to rebel against his orders. He had been paired up with another, complimentary Harvester and assigned to a certain individual who had had so much potential creativity that it was imperative that they get to him before anyone else. Not to mention, there was quite a force of evil trapped in a wall in one of his basements. The Thinkers had thought to kill two birds with one stone, freeing the demon-lord and harvesting the host's creativity at the same time. The two Harvesters they had sent were in charge of harvesting his mind and then persuading the individual to commit suicide, thus releasing their lord from the cursed dimension where it had been imprisoned for so long. The individual was an almost ideal host: he was quiet, introverted, an artist... the only problem with him was that the same Thinkers that had sent the Harvesters to him had, ironically, previously tagged him as a Waste-Lock. This unfortunately overlooked detail had not been noticed until it was too late. By the time they realized the mistake, it was too late in every sense of the phrase. The overloading had driven him quite insane and he became an extension of all the shit that was pumped into him, using his subverted creativity to think of gruesome ways to brutally murder and torture people who hurt him in any way. Senor Diablo had loved the irony, and respected the man himself as much as the Prince of Evil could respect a mere mortal.
When their task was nearly done, the traitor Harvester had realized he enjoyed life on Earth. He discovered a way to keep the demon-lord imprisoned for a while, and tried to keep the host alive long enough to become fully self-dependent. The loyal Harvester had refused to join him in his treason, and persevered in trying to convince the host to kill himself. Due in part to his insanity, the host became aware of what they were trying to do. Threatening to kill himself, saying that he would do it only to rest, the gun accidentally went off and shot him in the face. He died slowly, unwittingly defeating the traitor Harvester and dooming him to an eternity of imprisonment and torture in Hell. As a reward, the host had been freed of the Harvesters, of the burden of being a Waste-Lock, and sent back to Earth.
During their stay in the host's brain, the Harvesters had been named, and even now, they preferred to be called by these names... Johnny C. had christened them Mr. Fuck, the traitor; and Psycho-Doughboy, the loyalist. Eff had escaped the day before, taking Psycho-Doughboy hostage for reasons unknown.
"Ahh... I wish Father was here to help me with this," Pepito sighed again, tossing the brief back down on the desk. "Of all the times to have a transdimensional crisis, it had to be during Mother and Father's big anniversary vacation."
He cracked his knuckles, stretching his arms, put his hands behind his head and cracked his back. "Ah, well... I suppose I'll wait for a while," he murmured to himself, "See if Eff has some master plan or something, or if he's just decided to escape and torture Psycho-Doughboy for the hell of it..." he rolled his shoulders, sitting back down at the desk. "Either way, we will find him... and when we do..." Pepito allowed himself a low chuckle at what the demons would do to him then.
His pleasant reverie was interrupted by the sound of the intercom beeping. Pepito leaned over and pressed the button. "Yes?"
His secretary's voice droned through, completely monotone as per usual. "Sir, I've been instructed to inform you that The Call has been initiated. Within the next week, all demons, spirits, and forces involved with the human dimension are expected to be within the traitor's control, with few exceptions."
He felt the color leave his face- well, even more so than usual. "Fuck," he replied hollowly.
"Indeed, sir."
She clicked off.
If The Call had been initiated, every 'voice' in the human dimension- all the Harvesters, all the Trauma-Sponges, all the Figments of an otherworldly influence would lose their self-control and be irresistibly drawn under Eff's dominion. With them, he would wield an army so dangerous, so brutal, that he could conquer and control any and every dimension he set his eyes on. Even worse, if he attempted this, the balance between dimensions would be upset, causing the collapse of one or all of them. Pepito slumped back in his chair, overawed at the magnitude of the situation. It would be the end of the world as they knew it...
He reached for the phone and started dialing long-distance as the elderly janitor entered the room. Anniversary or not, he *had* to call Father.
*****
Angel looked curiously at her cousin and Johnny, her anger at Squee momentarily put aside. How did they know each other? The question nagged at the back of her mind, but she bit her tongue, interested to see how Nny would answer Devi's question.
"Still trying to immortalize the moment, Nny?" What did she mean?
He stared at her, then looked at the ground as if in shame. Almost inaudibly, he mumbled a few words- Angel had to strain to hear them, but they were there-
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Devi."
"Sorry?" Devi's shoulders drooped, and she took a step forward. "Do you have any idea what you did to me, Johnny?"
Nny flinched as though she had hit him.
"You tried to kill me on our first date. You were the last," she chuckled humorlessly, "_incredibly_ violent death spasm of whatever I had resembling a social life. You inadvertantly helped put a vicious dolly who fed off my creativity in my brainmeats. If that wasn't enough, then, ten years after I'd thought I'd finished with you and all the trauma you brought me, you show up here with your protege and nearly kill me and Tenna and Angel. And all you can say is 'I'm sorry?'"
She had kept her voice low, even, and calm throughout her speech, although he could detect a faint undertone of hurt in her voice. Strangely, that wounded him more than anything else possibly could have. He wanted to grab her, shake her, make her angry, to tell her to scream and beat and berate him at the top of her lungs, to do anything except stand there calmly and stare at him with that look in her eyes.
He dropped to his knees in front of her, hands at his sides, pleading. "My God, Devi..." he whispered, a sob growing in his throat, "what else can I possibly say?" He dragged a hand over his face and through his hair, his dark eyes quietly desperate. "I know that you hate me... why don't you show it? Show it, I'm begging you, so that I know how to react. I can't stand the way you look at me. It hurts, it makes me bleed."
Devi sighed. "I don't hate you, Nny." He looked up at her abruptly, shocked. She clarified, "I don't know why I don't, I mean, I certainly have enough incentive to hate you. It's not something I can explain. I just know that I don't."
Angel sat there, shocked, watching the two adults before her. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Squee staring in her direction. Turning to give him a look, she noticed he wasn't staring _at_ her; rather, he was staring _behind_ her, a blank look on his face. She turned, and promptly realized why. Tenna stood on the bar, wriggling around with Spooky in her version of an ecstatically happy dance.
"Mmmm... yep,"Angel nodded her head before turning back to what the others were doing.
"So... what does that mean? For... us?" Nny was asking.
Devi stepped away from him, back toward Tenna and Angel. "It means that I don't hate you, Nny. As to what it means for us, I don't know. There hasn't been an 'us' for a long time now." She turned, then paused at the sight of the locked door. "Let us leave, Nny. It's time for Angel to go home."
He sighed and got to his feet, eyes lowered, and pressed the side of his left wrist. It beeped, and without warning, the wall on the street side exploded outward. Angel jumped, surprised, then hurried toward Devi, giving Squee a long look as she passed him. He looked up at her from under his eyebrows, head bowed, for only an instant before cringing like a kicked puppy and looking away.
As they stepped over the rubble and carnage littering the sidewalk on their way out, she had a strange, unexplicably strong sense of deja vu, as if she'd seen this sort of scenario before somewhere. Angel mentally shrugged it off and hurried after Devi and Tenna to the car. She looked back at the two as they drove away, thinking hard about how things had turned out, and as she thought about it, she made a very important decision.
They remained there, half in shadow, one staring at the taillights of Devi's car and wistfully wishing their reunion had gone better, one cursing himself at how stupid he had been to go about everything in exactly the way he shouldn't have.
"Oh," Nny said, almost to himself, "Devi, whenever I thought of you, I thought of when we were 'us'." He sighed. "I just... I wish that it had happened... differently. Maybe, if I hadn't been sick... if I hadn't been so _stupid_... maybe there still could've been an 'us'..."
"Johnny?"
Nny turned around. "Yeah, Squee?"
Squee stood up, looking for all the world like the bruised, abused child with the haunted look in his eyes that Johnny had found on his tenth birthday. "Can we go home now?"
Johnny took one more look at where Devi's car had been, then turned back to the emotionally battered boy. "Yeah."
*****
I'm sorry that it's so short!!! I needed to get it out there, just so people wouldn't think I'd dropped off the face of the planet or anything. Please review it!!