End of A Reality
by Blue9Tiger/DarkMutatedBrock/La Cidiana
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A/N: Okay, so Erin isn't physically writing the fic, but she did set the basis for the entire thing---some things I really can't change, such as Brock's humanoid shape, fact he's a blood-drinker---(I won't say vampire in the traditional sense because he's not undead, and on that note, no one in this story is undead, not even Vincent, folks. x_X Or else this wouldn't be some second-rate attempt at SCIENCE-fiction--but I'm referring to my attempts, not hers, because they're ALWAYS above first rate. ^_^ GO READ
HER FICS. NOW.)--the past (thanks to her wonderful explanations on how Brock, Giovanni, Cid, and Hojo are in the very happy comfortable situation they're in -_^), and Lucrecia/Vincent. Hahaaaaa...no comment there. ^^; So, taking her name out of the author slot would be rude and plain pigheaded. Phew! That was a lot of air. Here's chapter 26. ^^
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Don't usually write this long. Hell, I don't write at all. But seein' that orange stray yesterday got me worryin'---so here I am, writing out the whole thing 'cause that fucker won't get off my window---and 'cause I gotta piece it together to know it's all true. 'Cause it's too damn warped to be real----maybe I'm just goin' psycho and it was just a real tangible bad dream.
Never liked the freakhouse up in Reactor Town. Yeah, I know that ain't the real name. Only been up there once so how's that long-ass name gonna stick? They shoulda saved up them brain cells and called it hell-----and make damn sure they nail a road sign warnin' stupid dumbasses to not go wanderin' in there askin' for a wrench. Only thing that's keepin' me from smokin' the whole damn pack is it's 026's 8th anniversary. Gives me another reason to chew the bitch out.....draggin' her ass around---ain't gonna get any faster----a slug in a wheelchair'd beat her 'fore she got past the startin' point. That's why I started smokin', you know. And the first few hook you on it. Can't stop. Don't want to stop. Calms me down, gets my mind off 026 and the damn Shin-Ra. Keeps Shera's pride black-and- blue and Shera safe. Not that I care about her. Hell no way. She shot me out of the sky and broke my wing. I'll never let her forget it.
Shin-Ra sure didn't. They nuked the Space Program---on top of that, had the balls to gave me an old junky protoype to test-fly, sayin' it was a "consolation"-----consolation my ass. Like that's gonna get Shin-Ra 026 off the launchpad. I ain't done countin' the cobwebs and the rusted spots. They didn't give a shit. It didn't = gil for 'em. Threw space in the trash.
Sure, I flew their gramps. Didn't refuel at Junon, just kept flyin', knowing there's a big guard called the atmosphere and a junky plane wasn't gonna get past it. Felt cheated outta the stars. Right above me, too. They were calling and I coldn't fucking come 'cause of Shera's slow ass. Somewheres over the mountains they stopped calling. Didn't see any of 'em anymore-----this green haze ate 'em up from sight. Same kinda haze there was in Midgar, but this was more, like it was here longer to pump out more more crap. If you ever fly over a Reactor you know it: it's like flying in green fog. Pretty damn scary at first. Flying over a reactor's entering new territory. No one wants to live near one, so it's just the people that can't go or they've got the balls to stay. Just another Reactor Town. But it's different from Midgar and Corel. Midgar ya feel at home and Corel a guest, but Reactor Town's a freakout. The people there'll ya where the inn is and where to get a wrench---yeah, they're some help, but the house up north-----I'll never forget that damn house.
Tank went empty and the assembly line reject started fallin' apart 2 miles from Reactor town. So I went to Reactor Town to grab a wrench while God was pissin' on my head. Back then the fatasses in Shin-Ra were movin' from Reactor Town to Midgar, so the place was empty and labeled the inn's long as the high-hats were gone. Wanted to fix the P.O.S. ASAP---didn't know why I wanted to bail outta there so fast---sometimes I think 'cause the Reactor looked 24/7 like it was gonna have a meltdown --maybe it's instinct that somethin' completely fucked up was gonna happen. Hell, whatever. Pourin' crap by the time I got there. Back then it was a new house. Had a doorknocker that's missin' now. They let me in to crash for the night for 12-----20 gil? Don't remember now.
Dreamed about the damn wrench. Was 'gonna look for one first thing in the morning, but some things can all your plans and make you forget what you came here for in the first place. Every once in a while you heard noises--not like leaky faucets, creaky stairs---nothin like that---that didn't happen 'till the higher-ups bailed for good and the town inn got fixed up, and the big house got real old real fast, paint peeling, dust bombs, you know the drill. Then everythin' started falling apart. These noises were like someone getting Mako-pumped for the first time. Some of the guys in SOLDIER---regular badasses that pissed their drawers when they saw that needle comin. Some of 'em bawled like babies. A real sight. I figured that poor fuck was gettin' an armful. I wasn't gonna stay to see if he came out de-aged 10 years. Got a wrench from a sideways toolbox---only thing in the room that looked used---and walked out in knee-high mud to fix it and whaddya know? Some punk stripped it good. Nose, tail, everything jacked.
I was too tired to look for the assfuck and crashed at the house. Slept through the moaning. Next day I ripped the town apart and didn't find a fucking tire. So I was stranded at Reactor Town at the freakhouse 'till the Shin-Ra got back. Wasn't my idea of the 1-week vacation they were promisin' me. Didn't get any better with that SOLDIER moaning every 10 minutes. Middle of the night---if I didn't feel sorry for the fucker I'd go down there and beat his lights out--- Until it stopped. Slept like a baby the first time in weeks. Made up for not bein' able to fly, those 2 days havin' your alarm clock off. It didn't start again anymore. The croaker must've let 'im out. Out where? I parked my ass in the room closest to the door. I'd see if a soldier stumbled out the door groaning like he was pregnant. Then I remembered, the guys got their shots, got out. Mako infusion even in those days didn't last long. No way was it weeks. Then I got to thinking maybe it wasn't a SOLDIER. I was young and a smart-ass and wanted to find out what was keepin' me up all that time, so I went downstairs.
Now I wish I let it alone.
Passed by a locked door that gave me a bad feeling. You ever let fears you had when you're a kid get the better of you? Sounds crazy, don't it? I swear I heard the door scream...or somethin' behind it. Was gonna fool with the lock and go through the door, but then there was another noise. First I thought it was the damn "door" again. It was comin' from up ahead. But it was someone talking. A kid. "Help" he said to me. Pretty strange, a kid with two big cowlicks crawlin' on the floor as if he couldn't walk yet. Something flew by my head. The kid sat up and looked at me funny. Still couldn't see any of 'em 'cept his shadow that looked like he was walking on his knees. He didn't move, just scratched his head with his balled-up hand and asked me, "Can you help me walk like them, mister?" "Kid, what the fucking hell are you talking about?" I asked right back at him. Wasn't ever fond of kids. Especially the ones that asked me somethin' that didn't make any sense.
The kid just kept on walking and said, "He says I'm more like them than momma and dad-----he says I've got to walk like them or else he'll-----" I rolled my eyes and let him get done with the drama. "- -take ny voice away," he said. "Don't be stupid, kid. No one goes around takin' voices." Then he said somethin' to me I'm still tryin' to forget. It made what we did on Sr. Ray justified. "You've got to believe me, mister. He takes voices---do you know what happens when he takes them, mister? Real bad things. He says if he takes voices away he takes people away." By then I thought he was full of it. "Okay, get lost kid-----.
He gave me this real sad look. "Mister, I'm trying real hard--see? I can stand like them! See? I can keep my voice and go upstairs and see momma and dad again! He says I can go up when I look like momma and dad!!" The kid was so fucking annoying. Was so happy 'cause he could walk around like a mountain lion-----he did it good, I had to admit. Real good. TOO good. It wasn't 'till he settled down a bit that I saw the cowlicks move... It was real dark but I saw him lick his hand for some reason. Figured he was demented. Everything got real bright all of a sudden like getting speared in the eyes with light. I coudln't see anything, and I ran like hell. The kid started crying. I saw his arm grab for me, but it wasn't a kid's arm, but a MOUNTAIN LION CUB'S---with torn-up sleeves over orangey brown hair reaching to rip me up. He started chasing me. You should've seen 'im, crying and running on all his feet, the freak blue eyes and drooling teeth looking at me like I was dinner. I got yellow as bile and ran up the stairs before "he" could see me.. Then I knew what he was sayin'. By the time I made it upstairs out- of-breath and so out of shit I wouldn't crap for a month. I wouldn't look at a cat or little kids full in the eye from then on, 'cause now I knew what the kid was sayin'. But he wasn't sayin' anymore. Two weeks went by and roaring was the only thing I heard. "He" took his voice, alright. Bet the babe on the Highwind that he's grown up now. Every cat I see since then-----they're out to get me. Gotta calm down. Have a cig. Have twenty. Shera hid the lighter again. Fuck her.
C.H.
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Chapter 26: You Aren't What You Eat
A glazed gleam coated the blazing eye which he wasn't entirely aware of. Besides shaky movements, stumbling on a wrong foot, and tripping over his tail, there wasn't really anything happening that indicated his other side was hungry. It jumped out of nowhere and wasn't just satisfied with attacking his stomach-----hell, no, had to go for anything and everything--- -probably Drac's friendly reminder that it was lunch.
"You didn't think I'd reveal my hiding-place for free, did you, Highwind?" he gave a smug growl, one half of teeth in an underhanded smile and the other half unlocked in an anguished grimace. Everything about him asymetrical and in clashing conflict, demented and two- faced, that grasped the torn fabric of a bisected soul.
Cid coughed a snarling moan when another godawful pang chomped and gnashed on his stomach.. It pulled at him, pulled him down, grasping his screaming stomach with one set of claws as if an external pain would satisfy the clamor. Maybe numb it so he couldn't feel his insides roar.
The other waited patiently at his quavering side, halved like the rest, that one side battered by a gale of pain as if...the animal somehow channeled all the craving's weight on the human. Or maybe it was just because the dragon was used to these hunger pangs...this was only Highwind's initiation.
Draconis Rex looked on his weakling side with an expectant and uncharacteristic patience. "It was inevitable. You know what you have to do," he urged, feeling half of his mouth fill with foaming saliva that dripped off one set of teeth while the other gnashed madly. Didn't matter to him. He felt the body's external pain, not the internal. That was controlled. It was natural. A sock was a disruption. That hurt. But what was normal...that was normal. That he resisted the pain, and Cid didn't---that was only how it should be.
Cid took a ride through Malebolge. for what seemed like the nth time. .
He groped for the rain-smeared stone wall and pressed his back on it, and closed one eye, the other Drac got his dirty claws on and kept wide open, keeping the dead SOLDIERs in his view, making this freaking----SICK lust worse than it already was. "Close----- damn you....." Cid growled out of his side of the twisted mouth. "Don't wanna see 'em,
Drac----let go of the fucking eye!!!" He violently clawed at the air, the dragon freezing the muscles of both his arms. "No eye for meat, Highwind. We need both of them. Now go fetch,"he commanded with a haughty flick of his foreclaw. That finally shut the friggin' eye, plunging him into the darkness' safety, the rain pouring around him, his own breath ripping apart his chest. "There's.....no target to go for, Drac. Just me, you, and the dark." He could hear Drac whispering at him like how it used to be. When he was just voices in his head and nothing physical, nothing you could feel or see. When he thought he wasn't real.
"You're still that ignorant human child, Highwind. Even after all these years. Even after so-called 'manhood'----you know..human maturation. Don't you find it laughable how a man is barely different from a child? What're ya------tellin' me?" Cid asked listlessly, stuffing his ears with rain and blocking it all out-----somehow it trickled in through the gaps in the drops. "You remember... when they locked us in the room---they blindfolded us, remember?" he asked calmly. "Ya........you ain't SAYIN' that...." His whole frame shook and the glazed eyes broadened, opened so they were bulging madly as the memory seeped in from his clouded brain. "It was just for his amusement, but I had my feed. CAN IT, DRAC. And you never knew---I had the whole thing. You sensed it---because you're a human---" He gave a musing pause, stroked Cid's broad chin in a passing thought, then changed his mind. "WERE. Don't forget that, Highwind." He pulled both eyes open, the SOLDIERs in unceremonious heaps flooding his sight. "The taste in your mouth. Remember it?" He tugged him sharply from the wall. Like the kid that doesn't know how to swim he held on, turning his back on the lure, gouging jagged, curved marks on the wall that raked his own ears with that shrill scraping.
His enemy wasn't fazed a bit. He was still as good a torturer as he was...back then. Piece by piece, it started to re-form into childhood nightmares-------that weren't nightmares at all.
"You were sick for days. It was all psychological, especially after he told you what it was you ate. He lied to you when he said it was someone you knew." They were real as the dragon. They were real as now. "You were far away from the homo sapiens even then----Stop puttin' your bullshit ideas in my head---" Cid protested vapidly, with a frozen shiver, the words empty and void: he was somewhere else far back in time, mouth open in a kid's terror at the monster under the bed.....the food long digested, long gone-- . "But you lied to yourself. You denied I was there. You said it was a bad dream---you thought you, at the infancy of twelve years, were crazy. You remember that, don't you? Nightly sedatives... we must have a hundred holes. Probably more. The needle was our best friend----Jesus Christ, enough already----goddamn it, I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT, CAN'T YA UNDERSTAND??!!" he exploded, burying his head in his claws, casting a broken shadow that melted in the rain-engulfed stone. The dragon took the man's hands off his head, bringing it in the path of the unyielding storm that clouded his child's eyes with the falling fluid that coursed down the rest of his--- and the dragon's body that treaded sweat to stay afloat. Though he knew...it was just him that was sinking.
"I understand perfectly well, Highwind..that you're still denying it. You still think you're crazy. You still don't know why you gave in. I'll tell you why. Hunger. We must feed. It's no different now. I'm sick of your tobacco and baked fish. This is YOUR end of the compromise." The dragon licked Cid's parched upper lip. "Cut it out---freak--" He felt his claws scrape along the stone wall and wrenched his eyes from the motionless SOLDIERs in the street so it wouldn't hurt more than it already did------his own rebelling body and the dragon's voice a broken record over and over again in his ears, his own voice hoarse and cracked from the lack of water-----and food. "Not gonna give in------" He bit his lips. Wouldn't admit that this wasn't the first time he made him eat his food. Probably 'cause he didn't want ro remember it. What it was. But he DID. Why else would he be pathetically hanging onto the wall like this?
Like...LAST time...
He wasn't...SICK like that.
His swimming eyes protruding from his head bursting with visible veins rolled back and he slid down, the blurred shape of the groaning SOLDIERs tempting the dragon. He shut his eyes again. Around him the rain tumbled. Inside him his stomach roared. The dragon goaded with a smile twisted with triumph. "I'll make this easier for you. You just go over there. I'll do the rest. Then it's not really you doing the work. It's---my body, Drac..," was all he said, hanging onto a greased rope and only making it more slippery with this lying to himself.
He came away from the security of the wall, gazed away. Wanted to stop gliding Vincent, limping Nanaki, and that other furball with them. Probably in a hurry to get the hell out of the city. He wanted to stop them----His wasted chlidhood forced his mind to reverse.
I have someone living inside me
But it's still lonely
There's no one that'll talk to me
They're scared of the someone
They're scared of me
No. No way in hell would he get them to come back and see what he was about to do----- whatever flimsy thread of trust was there'd break entirely. Finding himself broken under the weight, he grabbed one of the bodies on the ground, and, that ugly feeling called shame made him furtively drag it behind the rock wall. Like the other members of AVALANCHE, he was used to fighting, to killing when he had to, and didn't think of it much. Barret and Tifa occasionally went on a guilt trip, but not him. He took it in stride. And now he knew why.
He was capable of something that was much worse.
The ex-pilot tried to cover them with his wings but Draconis Rex was used to it---it was his nature. The two badly-fitting hulks sprouting out of his shoulders left the gruesome sight visible to the night visions. Swelling with pride as if about to vanquish the enemy in a battle. "Come on, take the first bite. The human won't feel it."
He lifted the body up by his arms and closed his eyes like the child with developed tastes munching brocolli for the first time. Apprehensive--- terrified of the unknown, what it would taste like. Except for Cid it was different. He KNEW what it tasted like. Drac just had to REMIND him. That this wasn't the first time. This wasn't new.
There were some things that you just didn't do. Man-eating when you were a man was, save for regions that still held such rituals sacred, off-limits in every possible way.
But
he
was
hungry
Cid bit off the hand at the wrist, the sanguine opening pouring a cascade of blood out of the ripped arteries and veins. It pooled up in the ground's cracks. Draconis Rex took the second with delight, Cid with revulsion. It was a wonder it didn't come up again and eat at nearby trash cans. Make a new pothole. Rot his teeth more. Leave a sick taste in his mouth. But the stink of half-digested lunch wasn't nearly as bad as the flavor of the rest of the human corpse that stared him in this half-draconic, half human face, twisted with conscience's burden. But only his conscience.. Draconis Rex WOULDN'T let it go. When you went so far between meals, every bite was precious. Especially since the meals had been nearly indigestible. This would be a meal that he could revel in.. enjoy. When was the last time he enjoyed what was landing in this man's stomach? So he devoured.
The engulfing engulfed all his faculties. Sight by fighting the dragon's urge to look at the feast, hearing the crunch and ooze and and slurp falling into his stomach. Feeling the man spasm 'cause he wasn't dead until Cid started picking at his vital organs that oozed out of his closed hand.
Bite by bite the body disappeared. At the intenstines Cid doubled over, dry-heaving, but his dragon side wouldn't let him throw it out-----goddamn it-----I wasn't made to eat like this---he gagged on the bile and urea that didn't get all the way through the small--- damn it---was it ever gonna end?
At one point he fell beside the sideways-turned corpse and opened his eyes plagued with horror carved in the contorted lines of his mouth at the hollow spaces where there were supposed to be heart and lungs---but they were all in his own stomach.
Why couldn't the fucker stuff the entire shit in his mouth and that was it? Why'd he have to stall...let the taste fill his whole mouth,, let it slosh around in there before he crammed the inedible crap down the food pipe?
If it was inedible..how the hell was he eating it?
Eating plus drinking.....Mako tinctured the blood that flowed down into his stomach, he could smell it mixed along with that iron smell blood has. Some of it was solid and some of it was liquid. It coated his throat all the same...coated his conscience in a staining grime."I ain't a cannibal," the once-man convinced himself. "Drac's eatin', not me. Don't share it with me, Drac, I don't want any fucking more!!!" he yelled through a confused tangle of muscle and bone that scraped against the inside of his cheeked puffed out from all the parts grinding and churning between his and the dragon's teeth. The grave answer strapped another yoke on his conscience. But it could've been he was just trying to make him go on a guilt trip. Yeah. That must've been it. "How do you think I felt when you ate everything that's indigestible to me, those hot dogs and ham sandwhiches?" he inquired with acid burning his words. "Perhaps weighed
together imprisonment was better than eating..." A grimace twisted into a knotted snarl of absolute disgust. "..the toxic waste you call food. But that's the end. From now on we eat men---" Cid lurched foward, his bloated cheeks streaming in human innards. "You're losin' it ?!!" shouted Cid, rocking pitifully on his knees as the SOLDIER's stomach juices dripped down his chin and got caught in the stubble. He fell on the dragon's hands and growled with rebellion racking his throat, "There's no way...NO_WAY. I'm not you, Drac. I...can't..." He backed away form the remains, wild with terror. The dragon's retort was the polar opposite. Controlled, dripping with conviction. "You...'can't'. Humans are always saying that. "can't". You have to. You're living with a dragon.
I'll never be a man, but you can....you WILL BE ME," he insisted with imperious finality.
The liver ruptured and squirted bile over his arms. The dragon forced half his mouth to curl into a frown. The slimy arm didn't dare raise to the foaming jaws. It stiffened. Such a stubborn child. His domineering will pitted against his insolence. This constant struggle.....he was getting sick of it. Why couldn't Highwind subimt and make it easier for both of them? He had already vowed that he'd be in control. Why wouldn't his other side simply accept it?
Perhaps he underestimated the human will. Or at least that of Cid Highwind's. But the battle was getting old. He'd wear him out soon.
The dragon let Cid loosen his grip on the liver, teasing him with the false hint that he had won this much victory. With cruelty embedded in his feral features he asked with biting malice, "Is it safer to leave evidence behind or destroy it?" He indicated the corpse with his hand, still clutching the broken organ loosely. " Everything has to go....." It dripped, crawling like a slug shitting on his elbow, layering it with crap he didn't want to know the name of, practically bathing in the bile Draconis Rex was goading him into forcing down his throat."Imagine what they'll do when they find that liver. Humans may be worth nothing, but their technology is remarkable. When everything settles down here, they'll search for their missing. We flew their planes. We saw Wutai fall. You know as well as I do how they prioritize their missing.. Blue is easily replaced, red is harder to come by, purple is indispensable." He grinned haughtily through the hideous assortment of mashed-up human. "What color is dinner?"
Throwing down the ruptured liver in brash defiance, Cid growled "red" between the muck-immersed teeth, drops of bile spotting the asphalt and the corpse itself, the shreds of a red uniform concealing part of the mngled corpse. But by now he wasn't really hearing the dragon--- --what would he care if the SOLDIER was 1st class, third class, or no class? No way he'd eat the damn liver.
He stood there on his knees apart, the borrowed jeans wearing away in the spilt HCl. Not that it'd hurt him like it does other people..normal people.
".....After this..." he laughed one of those laughs from someone lost and gone from humanity. "..Don't know if I deserve bein' called a 'normal' person. Yeah...normal my ass..." He gagged on the slime heap taking forever to churn in that bloated stomach. The slit eyes wandered to the liver, one eye satiated, the other closed so he wouldn't see the remains that was slowly reminding him of a, though harrowing time, when he was free to carry that little trinket in his pocket that he didn't ever find out what the practical use for it was. .
They started to look like..
1/35th SOLDIER. Those mini figurines you couldn't do squat with in a fight. The liver kinda looked like 'em. You could laugh and joke and say it was 135th of a SOLDIER. 'Course, it was funny when it was the actual thing, not a sick, perverse parody of it.And the other thing with those minis..Those ones were WHOLE, he reminded himself, growing a sea shade of green that was both disgust and a lead weight of guilt...guilt...and he was a fighting man----if there was guilt in a fighting man, it was hard to sense. Their body was one with the spear, sword, gun. Couldn't fool yourself into thinking it was a man. It was a weapon. Against the Shin-Ra he once fought for and the scores of freaks out there, Cid was just that.
Wasn't the same this time. Shoving a spear into a SOLDIER that's comin' at ya with a meat cleaver bigger than he is------no big deal-----so what do you do with the body? Leave it there. It'll decompose eventually. Dust to dust and all that. Maybe bury it so you don't need to smell and see it decompose. Burn it so you don't need to wait. Or be like those psychos that put the ashes in an urn and carry 'em along with them. Do ANYTHING with it...but don't...EAT it..Maybe if you were up in the mountains and you were gonna die if you didn't---there must've been some fast food joints somewhere here---he didn't NEED to.
He WANTED to.
Guilt grew fat in his gut stuffed over the brim with the remains. The liver became a crime. As twisted a crime as any. And his own personal devil=over- shoulder probed into his anguish and spat it at him.
Why do you feel guilt?
This is for survival.
Don't answer, Highwind. I already know what you're going to say.
'I'm human'.
You're not.
Can the other species eat their own raw?
You feel sick, but you're fine.
This is normal. This is routine. You'd better get used to it, Highwind. You're not one of them.
Cid drilled a crazed stare into the liver, droplets of bile and urea collecting around the organ. He didn't know he licked his upper lip. Just block him out. Not hearin' a thing. Don't believe him. "Maybe I'm one fucked up son of a bitch, but least I'm a HUMAN, fucked up son of a bitch. That's what I got to say to THAT sermon-----" He rebounded unsteadily, standing in the pool of blood and HCl instead of kneeling. Was only a foot or so higher. Didn't make much difference anywhere except the mind. It was still in acid and blood that covered his hands.
Maybe he might've truly won that round. Maybe if the liver didn't start moving on him. Maybe if Draconis Rex didn't prove him wrong. "Hey, ya asshit!" roared Cid, losing all control in his rage, his own want shredding apart the cloak of denial. "I'll teach you to take someone else's dinner, lousy sneak----" He lunged for the liver with no less ferocity than the dragon and grabbed at the organ, ripping it in two and sending a new wave of bile leaking on the asphalt. The shredded lump fell and spurted a last ooze of the fluid that ran a trail towards the invisible darkness . Cid made a blind leap and missed, landing on the pavement, covered in countless poisons that were all engulfed by the Black Rain. Sight was null here. The four other senses intensified to make up for the deficiency.
"HHgnnorghhht brghhorddhh...." A pained note molded the growl from an expected primitiveness to an emotion far more defined. Almost frantic, despairing, raking across Cid's ears, flooded with the rain but managing to hear a bestial growl. Much like his own-- when Drac was first waking up, but whereas you couldn't understand the words, but you KNEW they were words, the second voice that souned like a snake and a nondescript behemoth at the same time, no words to it, no syllables, not even letters. Just.....sounds.
"Nghhroorghh hhhwwragheee Hghhrighhhg dghhrrighhrk hhrreeirghh brghhorddh." The hollow crimson gulfs opened from narrow slits and darted to what in the darkness looked like clothes and skin white enough that it reflected the light. Skin. Human. Scale-less, fur-less---only hair on it might've been shaved 'cause of some chronic disease they call 'vanity'. Smooth-looking, too. Looked like this one preferred chicks. But that didn't matter. The red- eyed creep went after HIS liver.
Cid turned his head towards the pair of red narrows, piercing embers that gave off more light than heat. Looked eerily familar, too. Eerie or not, he glared him right in those demon eyes and picked up the mauled liver, squueezing it protectively.
"Fuck off, that ain't your food--" His lowered gaze again caught those patches of white cradled in night's arm. "You got your own there," he indicated with a jealous snarl of the animal that seeks to guard its boundaries, his words marred as he gagged on the undigested parts that still tumbled on his tongue
. "---Check and...." The last word was lost as the organ churned between both sets of teeth.
As for the second creature, he was too thirsty to notice how twisted the whole thing was--- for a human to be so posessive about the pieces of organ now smeared on one of his palms. Smelled like..liver...He didn't bother scraping it off: the Black Rain was so deep it would wash off soon enough------unlike the blood harvest in the knocked-out bodies in his claws.
It's so...easy...for me..I know when to stop...the instincts don't. Can't take the chance...
Just..ignore everything else, he told himself. Don't care about him. Find it. Then get them to a hospital..Pokémon Center's good enough for now. Anywhere's better than out here, he remarked in his mind, catching sight of the pile of bodies partially masked by the immersing darkness and the brick-and-rock wall. A wall heavy with the iron smell that was so pungrent it rivalled the odor of his own. He tasted the damp air. He was close. A silent leap under the sharp-edged wing and he landed at the blood pool. Safe for now, he assured the limp bodies under an arm bent in the wrong place. He bent his forked tongue towards the liquid, already tainted with the chemical perpetually pouring from the onyx-clad clouds.
While he drank the man with the wings ate, substances made invisible by the dark dropping in miniature cataracts of human life.
The taste was unbearable. It didn't want to seem to go down, just lodged itself there in the throat, choking him good and slow-----like Drac was savoring it, pushing his system to take in what he wasn't MEANT to take in.....he wasn't a fucking cannibal... But he was eating..parts of OTHER PEOPLE, wasn't he? He couldn't lie to himself about that. That was a liver that lodged in his throat and went down slower than Shera. A man liver. He ate a man raw. Every fucking bit of him.
The truth shrieked in his ears.
"I know what you're going to say. 'I'm not a cannibal'. You're right. Men who eat other men---they are cannibals." He passed Cid's tongue over his scaled digits on his hand, refusing to let any part of the repast waste."While we are----- perfectly normal." Cid, close to retching, pressed on hand on his stomach, the standing limp, siezed with mammoth shock at his side. "What makes you fucking think it's normal?" A horror-weakened protest passed through the half-stuffed mouth. "You're wrong, Drac---Eating people.....that ain't normal-----" The retort was without mercy. "For us it is. Don't wallow in your imagined guilt, Highwind," the dragon short of commanded, slurping the pieces of liver from Cid's chin with a sweep of the coated tongue, a growl of irritation weaving its way through the slippery chunks. He twisted Cid's neck as far as it would. Curse his limitations......even with this setback, he snatched the smell of some odious beast invading his territory. Perhaps it was the same one that threatened to steal his dinner. He gave a haughty grumble and snarled through Cid's tissue-caked lips,"I sense an enemy more aggravating than your conscience."
His nostrils snatched the scent, which registered as familiar. But he couldn't be sure...unless he used a call confined to his order.
"HREERGH....."
There was a shifting of claws on the pavement. The invisble form with its flaring eyes answered with its own roar.
"HUOARGH..."
"It's you," Draconis Rex confirmed, his immense pride bursting in the droplets of blood that raced through his body. The other detected a flash of teeth that clenched in the universal sign of hostility. "Wound my honor, would you? I'll teach you to get in my way." His pride swollen with a cut mounted in half of the dragon's teeth, the other half, unchanged from before, .twisted in agony.
"You seem surprised. A dragon connects memory with sound." The other, shadow-immersed, cloaked himself further, receding into the alley, sensing hostility bathing the human voice. . The agressor tracked his footsteps. Anything that would mark him as non- human was painted in black, only adding to Brock's disconcertion at the way the human spoke to him, not out of terror, disgust, and loathing, but of miffed pride. "You're the shapeshifter that threw me out of the sky," the unseen enemy delivered a brutal accusation, exacerbating the invisible's warning instincts further, transmitting signals that tensed his muscles that at this moment, were flexed for fleeing and not fighting. Better for him..his interrogator spoke with the voice which is off-limits, untouchable. Even if this one was in his way, ready to pick a fight with him...
"Grigh nrreeeghhreehhh to HRRUUOTREEGHT ghree ghumaasssssshh," the red-eyed beast explained in his unintelligible tongue in some lingering hope that humanity could comprehend him. It might've been better if he kept his Pokémon mouth shut, because the moment he "talked" he regretted it. He waited for an answer, whether it was a blow or a rock.
But he knew... words wounded more.
"Look, Highwind," laughed the rough, but undeniably human voice, awkward in its gruffness that clashed with a more polished way of talking to sound more important than you really are...like Gio, he thought derisively while he bore the gutting arrow of man's revulsion. "---something more brutish than your kitten and Chaos. I don't think it can understand anything beyond a thrashing," the tenor of his voice changed lwhen he grinned. It sharpens the knife with malice. Brock lowered his bald head on his chest and hissed in a morose acceptance of his worth to humanity.
What's the use of trying when they won't listen? Better to just avoid--- -Brock whipped his head in the other direction, his mouth partially opening to release a patient hiss. Really has a grudge, huh?
Brock felt the rumbling wind behind his back and he latched to the wall with one claw, dropping as soon as the attacker passed under his tail and, scrambling from the alley, swerving to the left across the broken curb and crossing the light that sunk its thousands of teeth in his his eyes, that anguishing light from the streetlamp bent by the earlier stampede that made its crushing mark on the city. The rain still ran high here, and the seemingly perpetual curtain of black added yet another layer of the opaque liquid that guarded him vigilantly, only betraying him when he bolted through a light beam. Only where the shadows weren't absolute.
But the stranger that claimed to be his nemesis tracked by---well, it wasn't sight, because the light areas were so sparse--more so now that some of the lights were busted: glass still littered the indiscernible sidewalk, and the flier was right behind him every second. He didn't stop to turn around, catch a glimpse of the creature so bent on a fight. He still had three to watch out for, and with the foreign path marked by twisted streetlamps, broken windows, collapsed awnings, and various produce submerged in the flood, he wondered if this was truly Vermillion City and not some illusion his mind made up just for the fun of seeing his body squirm one more time.
Can't be an illusion...his folorn thought nested in his head that was bent foward along with the rest of his crouched form, passing through the burning light and the ever-rising Black Rain level. Where it was here and it wasn't in Cerulean. Where he should've been and wasn't. Terror coursed through his dark blood, chilling his heart with a dread that shrieked in audible cries in his head. Nondescript, formless pleas, but gradually growing more defined in his mind's ear, until the reaction spewed from his lips. "Mreghhsteeee......Shhhhhrrrhhhzzreee..." he groaned, the black heart that furiously beat with doubled force propelling every muscle on, fed with the new blood, sending the black form shooting through the liquid of the same hue, surged on because of guilt. Suzy.....she's just a kid. Just a kid..she's going to fight...Hojo...I let her fight. If I didn't Teleport....I could HELP her....how was I supposed to control it?! It's impossible-----I don't know how-----The limber frame dashed under the bulbs aglow with a misty whiteness, hurtling through what was essentially fire. Flame to his body, but ineffectual on his mind that raced as rapidly as he did, riding the crest on a wave of loathing remorse. Don't tell me my stupid mistake's going to cost my family. He gazed at the unresponsive sky. DON'T tell me..... In his mire of despair he stopped stopped fully. His hand wandered to his head as if reaching far away---miles away---to Cerulean, smoldering in the exact same way Pewter did-- Only it was his best friend and the only sister that the cruel madness of life left to him---He felt the mental energy implanted in him sparking---if she could hear him-----maybe the telepathic signals would reach her all the way to the north......
Desperation broke the string of thoughts in some places.
Suzy...tell me if you're alive.
Tell me------
Whatever mental link he tried to establish it was slashed altogether with violent force, and the pursuer rammed straight between his spiked shoulder blades, bashing him front-first on the flooded sidewalk. The fierce impact threw Daisy from his shaken grip and she skidded over the invisible line in the sidewalk and into the road, the straightened arm holding one less human and their transporter bleeding from a scrape on his lip, though you couldn't tell. It closed with the mending rain, and even if Black Rain didn't act like a Kadabra's Recover or a Cure3, it wouldn't matter anyways.. All was submerged.
With a muffled hiss, Brock regained his footing and reached for the dripping body, the persistent shape hovering over his shoulder. He raised his rigid jaw and hissed with the hostility of anger in the place of that fear. So, not a human, huh? It was a statement more than a question on a caustic smirk. Makes it easier. He darted into the street and plunged out again, a tangle of Black Rain sliding off his gnarled heel that barely landed before the entire shape slipped away from the pursuer. It's easier to fight your own kind. They're weaker than us but they're stronger. They have power.
That's how it all got started. First Ivy...then Gio.....
Everyone ended up suffering.
Where is it? He maneuvered through the new Vermillion, so unrecognizable that it might as well have been another planet. Buildings towered above him like it was Celadon and crowded themselves in their competition for space, obstructing any view of the rather modest building that was his target. Now a blind target, curtained in ebony that continued to fall harder than ever. That this side of the street was void of intact lamps meant more security for him, but it masked him with a bloody blindfold.
All the while the flier mimicked his every swerve, climb, and bound. A shadow's shadow.....not like true shadows, of dark and light, intangible, beyond all reach except eyesight, but shadows of humankind. Twisted and stretched out of proportion and molded by the perverse. Disfigured minds produced disfigured versions of humans in some cases, and in others, changed the species entirely. Just for their experiment, Brock growled, slowing as a light in a rapidly approaching distance burned directly in his eyes. Still...no matter who I blame, what does it change, huh? Maybe it's just easier to continue hating. The spurt of rage forced him through the foaming liquid. What good is it to stop? Then you forget it ever happened? That he took away everyone and everything? I had a world. Now it's just ash.
Was Cerulean the same? When he escaped it still burned. He didn't even know if Misty was alive or not----water burning a Gyarados-----was that just another sick joke from the .four-eyed bastard? Or just some gut-wrenching coincidence that decayed a deteriorating hope that Misty would be okay. Okay...fighting Hojo.....not Gio. His arch- nemesis was stupid in rage. This enemy was half brains.
I've got to go back. What am I doing here?..! They're just knocked out. Misty could be dead. I can't leave them out here. I made a promise to her. Can't break it...it's their blood. I told her they'd be safe. I can't-----won't let her down.
The Center lights inflamed his eyes once again and he slipped by the barking Growlithe under the police line and past the cop, spilling globs of the accumulated liquid on the sterile tiles, days of Black Rain pooling in their foaming hideousness on the cold surface beneath him. Automatically he felt unwanted here, his head moving furtively, waiting for Nurse Joy's glowering visage to appear from behind the counter or at one of the vid-phone terminals with four other people with rocks and acid for words. .
But it was just the half-man with the human voice. That now, in the light, was unmistakably the dragon that wrecked Pallet. He grew cautious, falling into a defensive stance. Now wasn't the time to attack head-on. They were equally matched during that brawl, but now he was landbound. Lucky him, his enemy didn't hesitate in making sure he knew he had a disadvantage.
"You've arrived at a corner. Nowhere to escape." He heard a sharp rip behind him as his pursuer clawed through the flimsy tape and struck him in the lower jaw with a balled fist. Brock leaped with a half-hiss, half-snarl of pain and fell roughly on the floo. The dragon leaped on the demon, ready to maul him at will---when he saw the
expression. How used he was for his opponents to either cower or face him with blind determination. Nothing of the sort. The enemy's inhuman lips curled into a smug smirk... It daunted him, that expression. What did this other dragon know about that he could exploit it...?
"Ghrrigh wwraaaaghhshhh hhrrrrighhhht," the creature growled in curt reply, with thr satiated smile marred with contortions of abating pain. ". Nroghhht hrrrghhumaaarghh hraaghhttt hhhraaaaagh." He gazed long and hard at the monster with man's shape, flipping sideways to regain grip with four legs then two, rubbing the broad end of his claws on the bruised shoulder. He stood half-erect with a red grin. "Shhhrrough, gharghhe yrroughh hhgraaghn hhrighnnoossssshheeghhht hhhrrrghiktriiighm....." By now he was almost as erect as a human, with his slime-draped arms crossing. Still with that smug look. bending his mouth upwards. For all that attempt at mimicking a human, the creature's 'words' were little more than one continuous roar. "..HHhrorghhh hddgroughhh hrryhoughh ddhhreseRRRGHVhhhh rrrgheeeeeshorghhh?"
Yet no matter how far away from human speech that sounded, it didn't matter as much when the listener looked just as bad as he did. Nothing human about him either except his shape--the man and the dragon thrown together in one hideous blend.
"I don't speak your bestial language," returned the dragon with a condescending tilt of the head.. "Whatever you can't say in words, say in blows."
"Grrrrrhigh dddrghoghht wwhraaagght troughh friiighhghh," Brock answered, climbing over and around the seats in the waiting area, coating the chairs meant for human occupation in the excess fluid that trickled down his hide. He felt the dragon's shadow run into his own as he set the humans down. "Ghrrigh craaaghht graaaghforghhd trouughh. Mreeeghstie craaghhhhht graaaghfrrorghhd troug---" He stopped "speaking", the very act turning his throat raw and running his heart ragged. Better SHOW instead of tell, Brock resolved. Because this guy doesn't want to talk. He began to walk away from the stained chairs, his job there finished and his promise honored, but another instinct triggered a warning through his mind, of vague, iminent danger.. This isn't the best spot. If the room is vacant...He picked up the two women in his arms and dashed to one of the doors where they kept recovering patients. Occupied or not, he felt compelled to put them there---that unshakable feeling of a looming threat stayed in his nerves, other than the dragon, that stood with a challenging demeanor right at his back, indignant that natural events hadn't run their course.
"Why have you not consumed them yet?" he queried, with a carnivorous breath pushing against Brock's neck, licking his own chops from the leftover taste that hurtled the whole face into a clashing jigsaw of the satisfied expression after a meal and the wrenched and twisted features of complete revulsion at something so foul it made the scales that were visible wherever the rain was not turn a nauesa shade of green. Brock backed away, startled by the one face that suddenly became two, but more startled at the pitiess accusation. "See, Highwind--- this is the cannibal you've been raving about."
"Shhhhrroughh, yroughh thhhghhrighhk Hhrghimmmm shhrrroggh craaaghhibraagh?"
Brock cracked the air with the coarse, bestial laugh, edged with venemous derision. He disappeared into the room, set them on the bed, and darted back with his
claws on the doorknob. The door shut. He faced the floor reflecting the Center's lights against his body. This is getting nowhere fast. If I can't get back to Cerulean..... He closed the hot-red eyes and grabbed at the floor with a misshapen hand, hearing the tile wear away at his touch.
The red grin formed a thin line across the uneven scales. . The only thing Ivy didn't take from him---His only way of communicating with the non-Pokémon..
There was a hundred words he couldn't say right now, probably never again would he use his voice the way he used to. Brock looked at the reptile-man again with a challenging stare. If he didn't listen to reason after this......
. The monster's mockery of a hand shot out, palm flat to his striking enemy's slit eyes. The demonic limb remained there with a calm rage burning, collected, reason-directed as opposed to the unconquerable instincts. He thought he had the hostile creature under control, partially lowering his guard as his hand dropped to the floor.
But his clawed finger never reached the ground. The dragon rushed on him, snarling, diseased with pride,
"You don't have an answer? What a disappointment...and from the Dark clan...what a pity," he derided with a haughty sneer. He grappled for the neck of the weak and useless creature. What an insult---to destroy a dragon that was too ignorant to take the form of his clan. "Show your true color," he commanded, gripping him by the neck and thrusting him against the white plaster wall, an audible bang throwing Brock's head at an irregular angle, that emerged again, the eyes glowing with a leashed rage that burned in its restrained fury. . "I'll teach you to get in my way." The last word was drowned in the creature's mid-pitch roar.
"HHrghigh krowwwghhh yourghhh......" he snarled. "Trryyghh troughh deshhhhtroyyghhh Paarrreghhht. HHrghhhearghh thgreeghmm aghhhroghr graahrghh Hhrghirgh hhhghreargh youurgh aghhroghh. Ghraghhh YOUGHHRR Hrrghihg MRIGHH wwwaryghh-"
The dragon was beyond hearing at that point, hurling the demon on the floor. "The Black Dragon refuses to come out? You're pretty bold to challenge me in the first place...now to not keep your age-old honor?" he roared. "Too bold for your own good," he snarled, shoving his face on the floor with the sole of his foot. Another loud bang, a hiss in the rush of pain, hand on the back of his skull, rattling from the sudden impact that left the back of his skull bruised and his sight blurred by the
imperious foot set like a pompous human on his head. "Looks like you don't live up to your appearance, daemon. The Dark clan isn't as agressive as its reputation implies."
Brock staggered off the floor, his hand clutching his head, the room blurred, and the dragon set to strike again, frustrated with this weak creature that had so much power and was completely ignorant of it.
Brock reached blindly for his voice. He COULDN'T fail her. No way. He couldn't get into a scrap NOW..not when Misty was burning from Bubblebeams and Hydro Pumps. Not when the survivor of his wiped-out fmaily was facing a mammoth lizard with a brain sharper than his claws and with worse intent than Team Rocket. With a final attempt he squirmed out from under the dragon's foot, flipped sideways, wavered on his own feet to a squat and dug his forefinger into the floor before the dragon struck a next blow.
If nothing else was going to get this guy to get out of the way.....
T/-/ERES S0/\/\E0/\/E'S E/\R ST/(K//\/(_- 0(_)T 0F Y0(_)R /\/\0(_)T/-/, /\ /\/ /) Y0(_)RE (/\/_/_/ /\/ (_- /\/\E /\ (/\ /\/ /\/ / B /\ /_
The sentence had no punctuation, none of the conventions in ordinary written speech, but no punctuation could make it clearer than it already was.
Cid stared blankly at what he thought might be letters, then at the freakout that wrote them. It didn't get to him so much that the creep took Drac out of the sky was capable of human speech in its written form. Not so much that.....than what the letters actually read.
He lodged his hand in his mouth, almost terror-stricken at what he'd find. That it'd be right. In bewildered shock, he withdrew his hand, strung with bits of cartilage. Goddamn it, the fuck was right. Hit it dead on the nail. "It's for HIM----you get it, right?!" protested the same monster that had stomped on Brock, with the same voice, the same two-face, with a rougher way of speaking but---"HE'S eatin' it, NOT me.I DON'T want this stupid---ear--- " He chucked it across the room, a hungry roar erupting from his shared vocal chords as his body lurched violently foward, catching the ear and chewing it before it hit the floor, half his body convulsing at the torture and the other revelling in the feast.
Yeah...sure..you're not a man-eater, and I'm a dragon. Stop calling me a dragon. Only reason I can turn into one is because of HER. Don't mistake me for someone I'm not.
While the dragon chewed on the ear, he slipped under the wings, bolting for the door, for the open air. When he heard a snarl of a dog. He flattened himself on the adjacent wall, hearing, listening. The snarl was of a Pokémon barely domesticated, though it had learned to speak one word, while the tamer breed had only a dog's bark.
"Hell," corrupted by its canine voice to "Hergh." So it wasn't the police out there. They used Growlithe, Spinarak-----Ash said one even used a Gastly--but never a Houndoom.
Which could only mean...he snapped his head outside and withdrew it, hissing furiously. The orange Growlithe that was barking was lying on its side. He grabbed at its body---limp, dragged it into the light. A few leaking holes punctured the orange and white fur. He shoved himself outside, attacked by rain, and caught a flash of cerulean, crimson, and flame-orange.
Take it only when you need to, he told himself through the streaming rain. Makes them a little less red. One thing for sure. He had to get out of there. An alternate route? The window. He leaped towards it in a low bound, craning his neck backward to see the dragon-man choking on the ear on the ground. "HUUUOARGH," he caught at least one of them's attention, and he etched rushed letters on the window..
TR0(_)B/?ES ( 0 /\/\ / /\/ (_-
Whether the dragon chose fight or flight, that wasn't his problem. He slashed off the glass layers, thinning it until there was hole big enough to get through, and he slipped through it. A crimson flash flooded the side street. The SOLDIERs and the hellhounds burst in on the Center empty of monsters, aiming their loaded weapons at empty space, finding a jagged tear in the window and bits of plaster falling from the monstrous hole in the roof.
*~*~*
(_- /-\ / /-\ E/-\RT/-/
The oblate spheroid resembled more of what started as a rhombus and ended up as a lopsided oval. The other globe was more expertly drawn, though it ended up lumpy and irregular. But for a city planner and not a cartographer, it was as accurate as it was going to get.
"This is the Planet." Reeve never imagined he'd diagram with his claw rather than a ball-point pen with several extra ink replacements on hand on a clean sheet instead of the brown-black mud beneath hs paws, nor did he ever imagine that he'd have a claw in the first place. Or paws. Or any other part that marks the feline as feline. The drawing was a bit sloppy, but he supposed it was good enough for a cat.
Outside the entrance to the so-called Diglett's Cave the storm bellowed, threatening to uproot the trees and scattering them like the Pokémon that searched with dwindling hope for shelter from the heavy rain. On the entrance's opposite side the cave aside from the Diglett that still found solid ground t burrow in while the rest of the land quaked and crashed with more fearsome power than the ocean and who could care less if it was raining or not, stood the laconic man and lay the red dog. The latter watched the diagram with patient eye. It wasn't carefully wrought, all of the little intricacies such as land masses like Goblin and Round Island, sticking to the main continents. And even those were barely discernible had it not been for the lantern that a forgetful excavator left at the entrance. Vincent held it over the drawing distantly, about as far away from the cave as their scaly companion was. The shadows cast stayed the same as did the places where the light landed. The lantern froze with its bearer, casting a static intertwining of one and the other across the carved-up mud.
As an afterthought, the feline hastily added in the physical and political geography, sketching the mountain chains, rivers, and major desert in twenty strokes or less. He then took a step back, pointing his right paw at the eastern portion of the other diagram, and started,"We're closest to this island chain. But there's no way we'll be able to return from there. There's possibilities here, here, and-----" He leaned on three legs and planted his paw in the mud. "Here. Now, these Xs represent the connection point between the Planet and Earth," he continued, clawing across both drawings.
"What you mean..." Nanaki started, shifting on his good leg, "If we go to those locations, we'll find the Planet?"
"Yes and no," Reeve answered, stepping away from his diagram. "Each 'portal' leads to a specific spot on the other planet. It's likely that the-----" He ground his teeth, a grumble lost in the clenched position of the semi-sharp canines. The wind and rain outsidereverberated their-----HIS twisted achievement. With an audble exhale, he pronounced the words that left a raw taste in his dry mouth, "Research and Development department has that specific information---the executive board were given the portal locations, but as to where they lead and if they'll get us back to Gaia---" He lifted his left paw and scratched the back of his head. "-- your guess is as good as mine."
"Which leaves two options," the dog stated after a reflective pause. "Either check each one until we find one that leads to the Planet, or.....find where Hojo is and find out what he knows."
The shadows and light remained interlocked even as the pallid man spoke with some semblance of a triumph belated by more than thirty years, threatening to trickle emotion into his white lips.
"The latter choice may be-----" The shadows began to recede as Vincent stiffly set the lantern down to make a barely perceptible hand motion, the now-slanted lantern fully illuminating the two planets. His hollow shell of a voice flowed through the cavern, resonating a listless hatred. "-----improbable considering that he is enduring an ordeal that taxes his physical faculties---" Simple payback. He had his way with the world: let the world have its way on him. But the remnants of his own sadism penetrated the seed of his persistent indifference."I do not believe he will be in a competent mental state to communicate to us the needed information." He added with what vaguely resembled an empty laugh, "I doubt he will be able to speak at all."
Nanaki gave a nod of assertion, then hobbled towards the diagram, placing a muddy paw next to "Earth", running his gaze over the map of their current location. It was scrawled in an insert on the "Earth" map. AVALANCHE had already been to one of the towns, and in one of those cities, they had lost-----Cid to Hojo. One who refused to cleanse himself could only produce corrupted creatures---those that yearned to poison the Planet with destruction---the Planet bred different, but good fruit. Men distanced from the Planet bred fruit bathed in toxins.
"That leaves us no choice," Nanaki shoved that other thought to the side, and searched down the map, his muzzle's shadow crossing down the middle..
/ /\/ /) / (_- 0 P/_ /-\ TE /-\ (_)/
CER(_)/_E/- \ /\/
PE \/\/ T E R
X
X X
X
(E/_/-\/)0/\/ S/-/FFR0/\/ X L/-\\/E/\//)ER
\/ / R / /) / /-\ /\/
X
X
X X
\/ER/\/\//_/_/0/\/ X
X X
/ P/-\/_/_ET
X
X
X X
X
X
X / FUSC/-///-\ X
X X
X
C / /\/ /\//-\ B /-\ R
X
X
. "Vincent, cover 'Fuschia', Cinnabar, and Pallet. Reeve, take 'Lavender', 'Saffron' and---" He squinted at the smudged writing. 'Celadon'. I'll take the land in between. Cid----"he gave a startled whimper. In their rush to escape the city, they'd lost their fourth.
Potentially lethal poison their pilot was, he had to at least attempt to detoxify him. Solidfy the faint strand of trust if he was willing to do the same. If both he and the dragon was willing to stay with AVALANCHE.
"I'll find him," he assured, leaving it at that. "Come back here when you find a portal." Nanaki lowered his muzzle in embarassment at his own confidence that it would be so simple. That would be underestimating the tendency for technology to be unreliable. "If," he said a bit softer as Vincent took off into the night. The figure of the cat was still visible in the lantern's light, peering at the diagram. It looked so...incomplete. Mt. Moon and Diglett's Cave aside----
"There's something missing in between Fuschia, Cinnabar, and Pallet. I can't quite put my----"
The battle-seasoned animal's bold eye struck him dead on. Even in the light, still a menace. Reeve drew away from the map, meekly holding down his head.
"Is there something you're not telling us?" Nanaki asked, his tone grave, that one disconcerting eye screwed on the black-and-white cat, and into his mind which he was hastily racking to find the answer.
That was it...Shin-Ra's ships departed from....the Vermillion docks, and .smaller fishing boats from the Fuschia and Cinnabar shore.....
"Cinnabar's an island," Reeve muttered.
"You could have mentioned this earlier," Nanaki growled in exasperation. "It's up to-----" He halted, nose-down, pensive, fearing its deadly implications. "--Chaos, now." He stared at the map, doubtful if the cat was really on their side. Another cut in the fabric of trust. Perhaps Reeve wasn't physically duplicitous, but there was that other kind-----liars, which he detested and suspected of far more worse ills---his reaction to Yuffie's long-forgotten escapade was enough to reveal how he viewed them. Not much had changed. On the other hand, it could have been a coincidental forgetfulness-----but from a former Shin-Ra, that made it all the more suspicious.
In time he'd see. Reeve passed the first test. Whether or not he proved himself the second time, that was up to the cat. That kept his attitude civil, for the time being.
"Not all the portals are on land, then."
"Exactly. It was a sure way to retain Gaia's population so there's more people paying the electric bill. And if you want to know which ones are in the air, water, and land---don't ask me."
Nanaki watched the feline slink into the night. He then cast an eye on the diagram. The host of Xs was a deception. Who knows, one out of all of them could be on the ground. Within reach. At least for they who gravity tied. There was no question about it. No matter how thin the thread of trust ran between them, they needed Cid on this search.
"There's not much of a choice."
Nanaki limped out of the cavern and began the---according to the map---westward trek to Vermillion. Three of his legs were wounded, two out of the four he couldn't lick without bending them and risk ripping a tendon. So the cuts and gashes on his hindlegs went untended, and he was stuck using his front legs, one of which bore a healing slit that still bit at the entire leg whenever he moved it, the thin wound jealous for attention and constantly reminding him that it was there and it hurt.
The wind didn't help matters any as it blew his coarse fur backwards and whipped his bundles of tied hair against his neck. His two feathers The city loomed above his black nose---close if he could run. He had run to the cave in haste to get out of the city, but something gave way on the way, and there was no way he could run back..
At this rate he might as well crawl around on his rump like some dogs do with an unreachable itch. Cid could have left the city already and he could be here, knee-deep in earth and rain, debating with himself if he should walk on his paws or his flank."It's wasting time," Nanaki decided, and sat on his stiff haunches gingerly, planted his forepaws several feet ahead of him, and with a rowing motion, brought the lower portion of his body foward, carving a rut in the rolling mud.
Either way, it was going to be a long trip.
As his tense eye wandered he caught sight of bushes and fruit, leaves-- -a remorse came over him--if he did anything wrong in his short lifetime, it was that he spent too little time exploring the medicinal properties of what the Elders and young children collected outside of the canyon. He knew that some acted like a Restore Materia or a Heal, but as he saw the vast variety blowing in the volatile wind, the berries, leaves, some which had roots barely clinging to the loose soil, he regretted that he spent more time on the hunt than the gathering....he couldn't tell which ones were which. It was times like these when he really yearned for Bugenhagen's presence.
He bowed his eye towards the piles of mud alive under him, and reasoned, "They could be poisonous. I've never seen these fruits before. Maybe they won't heal these wounds," he decided, pulling himself along on his front legs in a sort of rowing motion that was distressingly slow, but at least he was moving. The cave behind him grew more distant and the city swelled. "It's more of the wilderness than the open land," Nanaki muttered reflectively through a jawful of wind and Black Rain. Not that he hated the city...this Vermillion was harmless aside from the SOLDIERs, but it wakened sleeping memories. How closely it resembled Midgar, as he'd seen it between cage bars while he was transported to the 68th foor, with its towering pillars of concrete, and the perpetually dark sky above, with helicopters swarming around the hive, coughing their pollutants into what used to be pure air. For a long while he pointed his wolfish nose to the sky. What a shame it was, that his people couldn't teach Midgar's pestilence to become pure again, for once a thing was soiled it was hard to clean it.
"Like trust," Nanaki bowed his wolfish head, and plodded on his way. Was it useless? Maybe it was the dragon that he couldn't trust, and Cid was still his own person? Or maybe he was a fool, and he'd find the silver dragon on a different wind, with Cid just as bent on indiscriminate destruction like the dragon was.. His suspicions tilted his muzzle upward again. The clouds were hidden in the storm, no way to tell if their lost member stayed in the city or had fled.
He headed for his destination again, mud clumping in his fur, soothing some of the wounds that paled in their significance as he neared the city. A short distance away he picked up the smell of machinery. Strange...it wasn't this far away---maybe the winds were carrying father than they usually did. But there could also be a possibility that......
"They've regrouped." Across the city border he saw a living worm that consisted of SOLDIERs and great lumps that must have been artillery-----tanks and cannons and that other kind of beast---of plating, wires, gears, bolts, tubes, machines in machines, as complex as a living being. But these, as a warrior, fed fear and doubt within him more so than organic enemies. The latter could be reasoned with if they were rational thinkers. But machines didn't think. They had no autonomy. A cannon couldn't prevent itself from firing. A man fired it.A tank couldn't stop itself from moving: a man operated the controls. That's what made them all the more deadly. "I can't go in without becoming a target," he told himself. "Perhaps there's a hole in their defense," he rationalized, extinguishing his tail under the mud. If he had to move, better to move aided with stealth. Stealth worked with the mind, strength with the body. He was a logical dog, and if this yields this, then that is true or untrue. If he was wounded in three of his legs, there was a definite chance that he wouldn't be able to fight any more SOLDIERs until they mended or he rejoined his comrades. He was brave, but not rash. Rash was illogical. Rash led to a short life. He hadn't existed for forty-eight years by being overly bold.
"The Gi...they threatened the canyon from underground." He stared intently at the human worm guarding their mechanical titans. An idea worked into his functional brain. He took his front paws and attempted the skill that his breed were masters of.
The mud started to pile behind him, steadily, clumping in rounded heaps that marked his progress, made slower that in he was using only two paws intead of four, but gradually he found himself sinking, the stabbed ground giving way underneath the mechanical working of his paws, concealing him from the deadly enemy at the city's border, that stood mindless hulks of towering metal.
TO BE CONTINUED........
*~*~*
A/N: Chapter 27 coming soon! ^^
by Blue9Tiger/DarkMutatedBrock/La Cidiana
*~*~*
A/N: Okay, so Erin isn't physically writing the fic, but she did set the basis for the entire thing---some things I really can't change, such as Brock's humanoid shape, fact he's a blood-drinker---(I won't say vampire in the traditional sense because he's not undead, and on that note, no one in this story is undead, not even Vincent, folks. x_X Or else this wouldn't be some second-rate attempt at SCIENCE-fiction--but I'm referring to my attempts, not hers, because they're ALWAYS above first rate. ^_^ GO READ
HER FICS. NOW.)--the past (thanks to her wonderful explanations on how Brock, Giovanni, Cid, and Hojo are in the very happy comfortable situation they're in -_^), and Lucrecia/Vincent. Hahaaaaa...no comment there. ^^; So, taking her name out of the author slot would be rude and plain pigheaded. Phew! That was a lot of air. Here's chapter 26. ^^
*~*~*
Don't usually write this long. Hell, I don't write at all. But seein' that orange stray yesterday got me worryin'---so here I am, writing out the whole thing 'cause that fucker won't get off my window---and 'cause I gotta piece it together to know it's all true. 'Cause it's too damn warped to be real----maybe I'm just goin' psycho and it was just a real tangible bad dream.
Never liked the freakhouse up in Reactor Town. Yeah, I know that ain't the real name. Only been up there once so how's that long-ass name gonna stick? They shoulda saved up them brain cells and called it hell-----and make damn sure they nail a road sign warnin' stupid dumbasses to not go wanderin' in there askin' for a wrench. Only thing that's keepin' me from smokin' the whole damn pack is it's 026's 8th anniversary. Gives me another reason to chew the bitch out.....draggin' her ass around---ain't gonna get any faster----a slug in a wheelchair'd beat her 'fore she got past the startin' point. That's why I started smokin', you know. And the first few hook you on it. Can't stop. Don't want to stop. Calms me down, gets my mind off 026 and the damn Shin-Ra. Keeps Shera's pride black-and- blue and Shera safe. Not that I care about her. Hell no way. She shot me out of the sky and broke my wing. I'll never let her forget it.
Shin-Ra sure didn't. They nuked the Space Program---on top of that, had the balls to gave me an old junky protoype to test-fly, sayin' it was a "consolation"-----consolation my ass. Like that's gonna get Shin-Ra 026 off the launchpad. I ain't done countin' the cobwebs and the rusted spots. They didn't give a shit. It didn't = gil for 'em. Threw space in the trash.
Sure, I flew their gramps. Didn't refuel at Junon, just kept flyin', knowing there's a big guard called the atmosphere and a junky plane wasn't gonna get past it. Felt cheated outta the stars. Right above me, too. They were calling and I coldn't fucking come 'cause of Shera's slow ass. Somewheres over the mountains they stopped calling. Didn't see any of 'em anymore-----this green haze ate 'em up from sight. Same kinda haze there was in Midgar, but this was more, like it was here longer to pump out more more crap. If you ever fly over a Reactor you know it: it's like flying in green fog. Pretty damn scary at first. Flying over a reactor's entering new territory. No one wants to live near one, so it's just the people that can't go or they've got the balls to stay. Just another Reactor Town. But it's different from Midgar and Corel. Midgar ya feel at home and Corel a guest, but Reactor Town's a freakout. The people there'll ya where the inn is and where to get a wrench---yeah, they're some help, but the house up north-----I'll never forget that damn house.
Tank went empty and the assembly line reject started fallin' apart 2 miles from Reactor town. So I went to Reactor Town to grab a wrench while God was pissin' on my head. Back then the fatasses in Shin-Ra were movin' from Reactor Town to Midgar, so the place was empty and labeled the inn's long as the high-hats were gone. Wanted to fix the P.O.S. ASAP---didn't know why I wanted to bail outta there so fast---sometimes I think 'cause the Reactor looked 24/7 like it was gonna have a meltdown --maybe it's instinct that somethin' completely fucked up was gonna happen. Hell, whatever. Pourin' crap by the time I got there. Back then it was a new house. Had a doorknocker that's missin' now. They let me in to crash for the night for 12-----20 gil? Don't remember now.
Dreamed about the damn wrench. Was 'gonna look for one first thing in the morning, but some things can all your plans and make you forget what you came here for in the first place. Every once in a while you heard noises--not like leaky faucets, creaky stairs---nothin like that---that didn't happen 'till the higher-ups bailed for good and the town inn got fixed up, and the big house got real old real fast, paint peeling, dust bombs, you know the drill. Then everythin' started falling apart. These noises were like someone getting Mako-pumped for the first time. Some of the guys in SOLDIER---regular badasses that pissed their drawers when they saw that needle comin. Some of 'em bawled like babies. A real sight. I figured that poor fuck was gettin' an armful. I wasn't gonna stay to see if he came out de-aged 10 years. Got a wrench from a sideways toolbox---only thing in the room that looked used---and walked out in knee-high mud to fix it and whaddya know? Some punk stripped it good. Nose, tail, everything jacked.
I was too tired to look for the assfuck and crashed at the house. Slept through the moaning. Next day I ripped the town apart and didn't find a fucking tire. So I was stranded at Reactor Town at the freakhouse 'till the Shin-Ra got back. Wasn't my idea of the 1-week vacation they were promisin' me. Didn't get any better with that SOLDIER moaning every 10 minutes. Middle of the night---if I didn't feel sorry for the fucker I'd go down there and beat his lights out--- Until it stopped. Slept like a baby the first time in weeks. Made up for not bein' able to fly, those 2 days havin' your alarm clock off. It didn't start again anymore. The croaker must've let 'im out. Out where? I parked my ass in the room closest to the door. I'd see if a soldier stumbled out the door groaning like he was pregnant. Then I remembered, the guys got their shots, got out. Mako infusion even in those days didn't last long. No way was it weeks. Then I got to thinking maybe it wasn't a SOLDIER. I was young and a smart-ass and wanted to find out what was keepin' me up all that time, so I went downstairs.
Now I wish I let it alone.
Passed by a locked door that gave me a bad feeling. You ever let fears you had when you're a kid get the better of you? Sounds crazy, don't it? I swear I heard the door scream...or somethin' behind it. Was gonna fool with the lock and go through the door, but then there was another noise. First I thought it was the damn "door" again. It was comin' from up ahead. But it was someone talking. A kid. "Help" he said to me. Pretty strange, a kid with two big cowlicks crawlin' on the floor as if he couldn't walk yet. Something flew by my head. The kid sat up and looked at me funny. Still couldn't see any of 'em 'cept his shadow that looked like he was walking on his knees. He didn't move, just scratched his head with his balled-up hand and asked me, "Can you help me walk like them, mister?" "Kid, what the fucking hell are you talking about?" I asked right back at him. Wasn't ever fond of kids. Especially the ones that asked me somethin' that didn't make any sense.
The kid just kept on walking and said, "He says I'm more like them than momma and dad-----he says I've got to walk like them or else he'll-----" I rolled my eyes and let him get done with the drama. "- -take ny voice away," he said. "Don't be stupid, kid. No one goes around takin' voices." Then he said somethin' to me I'm still tryin' to forget. It made what we did on Sr. Ray justified. "You've got to believe me, mister. He takes voices---do you know what happens when he takes them, mister? Real bad things. He says if he takes voices away he takes people away." By then I thought he was full of it. "Okay, get lost kid-----.
He gave me this real sad look. "Mister, I'm trying real hard--see? I can stand like them! See? I can keep my voice and go upstairs and see momma and dad again! He says I can go up when I look like momma and dad!!" The kid was so fucking annoying. Was so happy 'cause he could walk around like a mountain lion-----he did it good, I had to admit. Real good. TOO good. It wasn't 'till he settled down a bit that I saw the cowlicks move... It was real dark but I saw him lick his hand for some reason. Figured he was demented. Everything got real bright all of a sudden like getting speared in the eyes with light. I coudln't see anything, and I ran like hell. The kid started crying. I saw his arm grab for me, but it wasn't a kid's arm, but a MOUNTAIN LION CUB'S---with torn-up sleeves over orangey brown hair reaching to rip me up. He started chasing me. You should've seen 'im, crying and running on all his feet, the freak blue eyes and drooling teeth looking at me like I was dinner. I got yellow as bile and ran up the stairs before "he" could see me.. Then I knew what he was sayin'. By the time I made it upstairs out- of-breath and so out of shit I wouldn't crap for a month. I wouldn't look at a cat or little kids full in the eye from then on, 'cause now I knew what the kid was sayin'. But he wasn't sayin' anymore. Two weeks went by and roaring was the only thing I heard. "He" took his voice, alright. Bet the babe on the Highwind that he's grown up now. Every cat I see since then-----they're out to get me. Gotta calm down. Have a cig. Have twenty. Shera hid the lighter again. Fuck her.
C.H.
*~*~*
Chapter 26: You Aren't What You Eat
A glazed gleam coated the blazing eye which he wasn't entirely aware of. Besides shaky movements, stumbling on a wrong foot, and tripping over his tail, there wasn't really anything happening that indicated his other side was hungry. It jumped out of nowhere and wasn't just satisfied with attacking his stomach-----hell, no, had to go for anything and everything--- -probably Drac's friendly reminder that it was lunch.
"You didn't think I'd reveal my hiding-place for free, did you, Highwind?" he gave a smug growl, one half of teeth in an underhanded smile and the other half unlocked in an anguished grimace. Everything about him asymetrical and in clashing conflict, demented and two- faced, that grasped the torn fabric of a bisected soul.
Cid coughed a snarling moan when another godawful pang chomped and gnashed on his stomach.. It pulled at him, pulled him down, grasping his screaming stomach with one set of claws as if an external pain would satisfy the clamor. Maybe numb it so he couldn't feel his insides roar.
The other waited patiently at his quavering side, halved like the rest, that one side battered by a gale of pain as if...the animal somehow channeled all the craving's weight on the human. Or maybe it was just because the dragon was used to these hunger pangs...this was only Highwind's initiation.
Draconis Rex looked on his weakling side with an expectant and uncharacteristic patience. "It was inevitable. You know what you have to do," he urged, feeling half of his mouth fill with foaming saliva that dripped off one set of teeth while the other gnashed madly. Didn't matter to him. He felt the body's external pain, not the internal. That was controlled. It was natural. A sock was a disruption. That hurt. But what was normal...that was normal. That he resisted the pain, and Cid didn't---that was only how it should be.
Cid took a ride through Malebolge. for what seemed like the nth time. .
He groped for the rain-smeared stone wall and pressed his back on it, and closed one eye, the other Drac got his dirty claws on and kept wide open, keeping the dead SOLDIERs in his view, making this freaking----SICK lust worse than it already was. "Close----- damn you....." Cid growled out of his side of the twisted mouth. "Don't wanna see 'em,
Drac----let go of the fucking eye!!!" He violently clawed at the air, the dragon freezing the muscles of both his arms. "No eye for meat, Highwind. We need both of them. Now go fetch,"he commanded with a haughty flick of his foreclaw. That finally shut the friggin' eye, plunging him into the darkness' safety, the rain pouring around him, his own breath ripping apart his chest. "There's.....no target to go for, Drac. Just me, you, and the dark." He could hear Drac whispering at him like how it used to be. When he was just voices in his head and nothing physical, nothing you could feel or see. When he thought he wasn't real.
"You're still that ignorant human child, Highwind. Even after all these years. Even after so-called 'manhood'----you know..human maturation. Don't you find it laughable how a man is barely different from a child? What're ya------tellin' me?" Cid asked listlessly, stuffing his ears with rain and blocking it all out-----somehow it trickled in through the gaps in the drops. "You remember... when they locked us in the room---they blindfolded us, remember?" he asked calmly. "Ya........you ain't SAYIN' that...." His whole frame shook and the glazed eyes broadened, opened so they were bulging madly as the memory seeped in from his clouded brain. "It was just for his amusement, but I had my feed. CAN IT, DRAC. And you never knew---I had the whole thing. You sensed it---because you're a human---" He gave a musing pause, stroked Cid's broad chin in a passing thought, then changed his mind. "WERE. Don't forget that, Highwind." He pulled both eyes open, the SOLDIERs in unceremonious heaps flooding his sight. "The taste in your mouth. Remember it?" He tugged him sharply from the wall. Like the kid that doesn't know how to swim he held on, turning his back on the lure, gouging jagged, curved marks on the wall that raked his own ears with that shrill scraping.
His enemy wasn't fazed a bit. He was still as good a torturer as he was...back then. Piece by piece, it started to re-form into childhood nightmares-------that weren't nightmares at all.
"You were sick for days. It was all psychological, especially after he told you what it was you ate. He lied to you when he said it was someone you knew." They were real as the dragon. They were real as now. "You were far away from the homo sapiens even then----Stop puttin' your bullshit ideas in my head---" Cid protested vapidly, with a frozen shiver, the words empty and void: he was somewhere else far back in time, mouth open in a kid's terror at the monster under the bed.....the food long digested, long gone-- . "But you lied to yourself. You denied I was there. You said it was a bad dream---you thought you, at the infancy of twelve years, were crazy. You remember that, don't you? Nightly sedatives... we must have a hundred holes. Probably more. The needle was our best friend----Jesus Christ, enough already----goddamn it, I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT, CAN'T YA UNDERSTAND??!!" he exploded, burying his head in his claws, casting a broken shadow that melted in the rain-engulfed stone. The dragon took the man's hands off his head, bringing it in the path of the unyielding storm that clouded his child's eyes with the falling fluid that coursed down the rest of his--- and the dragon's body that treaded sweat to stay afloat. Though he knew...it was just him that was sinking.
"I understand perfectly well, Highwind..that you're still denying it. You still think you're crazy. You still don't know why you gave in. I'll tell you why. Hunger. We must feed. It's no different now. I'm sick of your tobacco and baked fish. This is YOUR end of the compromise." The dragon licked Cid's parched upper lip. "Cut it out---freak--" He felt his claws scrape along the stone wall and wrenched his eyes from the motionless SOLDIERs in the street so it wouldn't hurt more than it already did------his own rebelling body and the dragon's voice a broken record over and over again in his ears, his own voice hoarse and cracked from the lack of water-----and food. "Not gonna give in------" He bit his lips. Wouldn't admit that this wasn't the first time he made him eat his food. Probably 'cause he didn't want ro remember it. What it was. But he DID. Why else would he be pathetically hanging onto the wall like this?
Like...LAST time...
He wasn't...SICK like that.
His swimming eyes protruding from his head bursting with visible veins rolled back and he slid down, the blurred shape of the groaning SOLDIERs tempting the dragon. He shut his eyes again. Around him the rain tumbled. Inside him his stomach roared. The dragon goaded with a smile twisted with triumph. "I'll make this easier for you. You just go over there. I'll do the rest. Then it's not really you doing the work. It's---my body, Drac..," was all he said, hanging onto a greased rope and only making it more slippery with this lying to himself.
He came away from the security of the wall, gazed away. Wanted to stop gliding Vincent, limping Nanaki, and that other furball with them. Probably in a hurry to get the hell out of the city. He wanted to stop them----His wasted chlidhood forced his mind to reverse.
I have someone living inside me
But it's still lonely
There's no one that'll talk to me
They're scared of the someone
They're scared of me
No. No way in hell would he get them to come back and see what he was about to do----- whatever flimsy thread of trust was there'd break entirely. Finding himself broken under the weight, he grabbed one of the bodies on the ground, and, that ugly feeling called shame made him furtively drag it behind the rock wall. Like the other members of AVALANCHE, he was used to fighting, to killing when he had to, and didn't think of it much. Barret and Tifa occasionally went on a guilt trip, but not him. He took it in stride. And now he knew why.
He was capable of something that was much worse.
The ex-pilot tried to cover them with his wings but Draconis Rex was used to it---it was his nature. The two badly-fitting hulks sprouting out of his shoulders left the gruesome sight visible to the night visions. Swelling with pride as if about to vanquish the enemy in a battle. "Come on, take the first bite. The human won't feel it."
He lifted the body up by his arms and closed his eyes like the child with developed tastes munching brocolli for the first time. Apprehensive--- terrified of the unknown, what it would taste like. Except for Cid it was different. He KNEW what it tasted like. Drac just had to REMIND him. That this wasn't the first time. This wasn't new.
There were some things that you just didn't do. Man-eating when you were a man was, save for regions that still held such rituals sacred, off-limits in every possible way.
But
he
was
hungry
Cid bit off the hand at the wrist, the sanguine opening pouring a cascade of blood out of the ripped arteries and veins. It pooled up in the ground's cracks. Draconis Rex took the second with delight, Cid with revulsion. It was a wonder it didn't come up again and eat at nearby trash cans. Make a new pothole. Rot his teeth more. Leave a sick taste in his mouth. But the stink of half-digested lunch wasn't nearly as bad as the flavor of the rest of the human corpse that stared him in this half-draconic, half human face, twisted with conscience's burden. But only his conscience.. Draconis Rex WOULDN'T let it go. When you went so far between meals, every bite was precious. Especially since the meals had been nearly indigestible. This would be a meal that he could revel in.. enjoy. When was the last time he enjoyed what was landing in this man's stomach? So he devoured.
The engulfing engulfed all his faculties. Sight by fighting the dragon's urge to look at the feast, hearing the crunch and ooze and and slurp falling into his stomach. Feeling the man spasm 'cause he wasn't dead until Cid started picking at his vital organs that oozed out of his closed hand.
Bite by bite the body disappeared. At the intenstines Cid doubled over, dry-heaving, but his dragon side wouldn't let him throw it out-----goddamn it-----I wasn't made to eat like this---he gagged on the bile and urea that didn't get all the way through the small--- damn it---was it ever gonna end?
At one point he fell beside the sideways-turned corpse and opened his eyes plagued with horror carved in the contorted lines of his mouth at the hollow spaces where there were supposed to be heart and lungs---but they were all in his own stomach.
Why couldn't the fucker stuff the entire shit in his mouth and that was it? Why'd he have to stall...let the taste fill his whole mouth,, let it slosh around in there before he crammed the inedible crap down the food pipe?
If it was inedible..how the hell was he eating it?
Eating plus drinking.....Mako tinctured the blood that flowed down into his stomach, he could smell it mixed along with that iron smell blood has. Some of it was solid and some of it was liquid. It coated his throat all the same...coated his conscience in a staining grime."I ain't a cannibal," the once-man convinced himself. "Drac's eatin', not me. Don't share it with me, Drac, I don't want any fucking more!!!" he yelled through a confused tangle of muscle and bone that scraped against the inside of his cheeked puffed out from all the parts grinding and churning between his and the dragon's teeth. The grave answer strapped another yoke on his conscience. But it could've been he was just trying to make him go on a guilt trip. Yeah. That must've been it. "How do you think I felt when you ate everything that's indigestible to me, those hot dogs and ham sandwhiches?" he inquired with acid burning his words. "Perhaps weighed
together imprisonment was better than eating..." A grimace twisted into a knotted snarl of absolute disgust. "..the toxic waste you call food. But that's the end. From now on we eat men---" Cid lurched foward, his bloated cheeks streaming in human innards. "You're losin' it ?!!" shouted Cid, rocking pitifully on his knees as the SOLDIER's stomach juices dripped down his chin and got caught in the stubble. He fell on the dragon's hands and growled with rebellion racking his throat, "There's no way...NO_WAY. I'm not you, Drac. I...can't..." He backed away form the remains, wild with terror. The dragon's retort was the polar opposite. Controlled, dripping with conviction. "You...'can't'. Humans are always saying that. "can't". You have to. You're living with a dragon.
I'll never be a man, but you can....you WILL BE ME," he insisted with imperious finality.
The liver ruptured and squirted bile over his arms. The dragon forced half his mouth to curl into a frown. The slimy arm didn't dare raise to the foaming jaws. It stiffened. Such a stubborn child. His domineering will pitted against his insolence. This constant struggle.....he was getting sick of it. Why couldn't Highwind subimt and make it easier for both of them? He had already vowed that he'd be in control. Why wouldn't his other side simply accept it?
Perhaps he underestimated the human will. Or at least that of Cid Highwind's. But the battle was getting old. He'd wear him out soon.
The dragon let Cid loosen his grip on the liver, teasing him with the false hint that he had won this much victory. With cruelty embedded in his feral features he asked with biting malice, "Is it safer to leave evidence behind or destroy it?" He indicated the corpse with his hand, still clutching the broken organ loosely. " Everything has to go....." It dripped, crawling like a slug shitting on his elbow, layering it with crap he didn't want to know the name of, practically bathing in the bile Draconis Rex was goading him into forcing down his throat."Imagine what they'll do when they find that liver. Humans may be worth nothing, but their technology is remarkable. When everything settles down here, they'll search for their missing. We flew their planes. We saw Wutai fall. You know as well as I do how they prioritize their missing.. Blue is easily replaced, red is harder to come by, purple is indispensable." He grinned haughtily through the hideous assortment of mashed-up human. "What color is dinner?"
Throwing down the ruptured liver in brash defiance, Cid growled "red" between the muck-immersed teeth, drops of bile spotting the asphalt and the corpse itself, the shreds of a red uniform concealing part of the mngled corpse. But by now he wasn't really hearing the dragon--- --what would he care if the SOLDIER was 1st class, third class, or no class? No way he'd eat the damn liver.
He stood there on his knees apart, the borrowed jeans wearing away in the spilt HCl. Not that it'd hurt him like it does other people..normal people.
".....After this..." he laughed one of those laughs from someone lost and gone from humanity. "..Don't know if I deserve bein' called a 'normal' person. Yeah...normal my ass..." He gagged on the slime heap taking forever to churn in that bloated stomach. The slit eyes wandered to the liver, one eye satiated, the other closed so he wouldn't see the remains that was slowly reminding him of a, though harrowing time, when he was free to carry that little trinket in his pocket that he didn't ever find out what the practical use for it was. .
They started to look like..
1/35th SOLDIER. Those mini figurines you couldn't do squat with in a fight. The liver kinda looked like 'em. You could laugh and joke and say it was 135th of a SOLDIER. 'Course, it was funny when it was the actual thing, not a sick, perverse parody of it.And the other thing with those minis..Those ones were WHOLE, he reminded himself, growing a sea shade of green that was both disgust and a lead weight of guilt...guilt...and he was a fighting man----if there was guilt in a fighting man, it was hard to sense. Their body was one with the spear, sword, gun. Couldn't fool yourself into thinking it was a man. It was a weapon. Against the Shin-Ra he once fought for and the scores of freaks out there, Cid was just that.
Wasn't the same this time. Shoving a spear into a SOLDIER that's comin' at ya with a meat cleaver bigger than he is------no big deal-----so what do you do with the body? Leave it there. It'll decompose eventually. Dust to dust and all that. Maybe bury it so you don't need to smell and see it decompose. Burn it so you don't need to wait. Or be like those psychos that put the ashes in an urn and carry 'em along with them. Do ANYTHING with it...but don't...EAT it..Maybe if you were up in the mountains and you were gonna die if you didn't---there must've been some fast food joints somewhere here---he didn't NEED to.
He WANTED to.
Guilt grew fat in his gut stuffed over the brim with the remains. The liver became a crime. As twisted a crime as any. And his own personal devil=over- shoulder probed into his anguish and spat it at him.
Why do you feel guilt?
This is for survival.
Don't answer, Highwind. I already know what you're going to say.
'I'm human'.
You're not.
Can the other species eat their own raw?
You feel sick, but you're fine.
This is normal. This is routine. You'd better get used to it, Highwind. You're not one of them.
Cid drilled a crazed stare into the liver, droplets of bile and urea collecting around the organ. He didn't know he licked his upper lip. Just block him out. Not hearin' a thing. Don't believe him. "Maybe I'm one fucked up son of a bitch, but least I'm a HUMAN, fucked up son of a bitch. That's what I got to say to THAT sermon-----" He rebounded unsteadily, standing in the pool of blood and HCl instead of kneeling. Was only a foot or so higher. Didn't make much difference anywhere except the mind. It was still in acid and blood that covered his hands.
Maybe he might've truly won that round. Maybe if the liver didn't start moving on him. Maybe if Draconis Rex didn't prove him wrong. "Hey, ya asshit!" roared Cid, losing all control in his rage, his own want shredding apart the cloak of denial. "I'll teach you to take someone else's dinner, lousy sneak----" He lunged for the liver with no less ferocity than the dragon and grabbed at the organ, ripping it in two and sending a new wave of bile leaking on the asphalt. The shredded lump fell and spurted a last ooze of the fluid that ran a trail towards the invisible darkness . Cid made a blind leap and missed, landing on the pavement, covered in countless poisons that were all engulfed by the Black Rain. Sight was null here. The four other senses intensified to make up for the deficiency.
"HHgnnorghhht brghhorddhh...." A pained note molded the growl from an expected primitiveness to an emotion far more defined. Almost frantic, despairing, raking across Cid's ears, flooded with the rain but managing to hear a bestial growl. Much like his own-- when Drac was first waking up, but whereas you couldn't understand the words, but you KNEW they were words, the second voice that souned like a snake and a nondescript behemoth at the same time, no words to it, no syllables, not even letters. Just.....sounds.
"Nghhroorghh hhhwwragheee Hghhrighhhg dghhrrighhrk hhrreeirghh brghhorddh." The hollow crimson gulfs opened from narrow slits and darted to what in the darkness looked like clothes and skin white enough that it reflected the light. Skin. Human. Scale-less, fur-less---only hair on it might've been shaved 'cause of some chronic disease they call 'vanity'. Smooth-looking, too. Looked like this one preferred chicks. But that didn't matter. The red- eyed creep went after HIS liver.
Cid turned his head towards the pair of red narrows, piercing embers that gave off more light than heat. Looked eerily familar, too. Eerie or not, he glared him right in those demon eyes and picked up the mauled liver, squueezing it protectively.
"Fuck off, that ain't your food--" His lowered gaze again caught those patches of white cradled in night's arm. "You got your own there," he indicated with a jealous snarl of the animal that seeks to guard its boundaries, his words marred as he gagged on the undigested parts that still tumbled on his tongue
. "---Check and...." The last word was lost as the organ churned between both sets of teeth.
As for the second creature, he was too thirsty to notice how twisted the whole thing was--- for a human to be so posessive about the pieces of organ now smeared on one of his palms. Smelled like..liver...He didn't bother scraping it off: the Black Rain was so deep it would wash off soon enough------unlike the blood harvest in the knocked-out bodies in his claws.
It's so...easy...for me..I know when to stop...the instincts don't. Can't take the chance...
Just..ignore everything else, he told himself. Don't care about him. Find it. Then get them to a hospital..Pokémon Center's good enough for now. Anywhere's better than out here, he remarked in his mind, catching sight of the pile of bodies partially masked by the immersing darkness and the brick-and-rock wall. A wall heavy with the iron smell that was so pungrent it rivalled the odor of his own. He tasted the damp air. He was close. A silent leap under the sharp-edged wing and he landed at the blood pool. Safe for now, he assured the limp bodies under an arm bent in the wrong place. He bent his forked tongue towards the liquid, already tainted with the chemical perpetually pouring from the onyx-clad clouds.
While he drank the man with the wings ate, substances made invisible by the dark dropping in miniature cataracts of human life.
The taste was unbearable. It didn't want to seem to go down, just lodged itself there in the throat, choking him good and slow-----like Drac was savoring it, pushing his system to take in what he wasn't MEANT to take in.....he wasn't a fucking cannibal... But he was eating..parts of OTHER PEOPLE, wasn't he? He couldn't lie to himself about that. That was a liver that lodged in his throat and went down slower than Shera. A man liver. He ate a man raw. Every fucking bit of him.
The truth shrieked in his ears.
"I know what you're going to say. 'I'm not a cannibal'. You're right. Men who eat other men---they are cannibals." He passed Cid's tongue over his scaled digits on his hand, refusing to let any part of the repast waste."While we are----- perfectly normal." Cid, close to retching, pressed on hand on his stomach, the standing limp, siezed with mammoth shock at his side. "What makes you fucking think it's normal?" A horror-weakened protest passed through the half-stuffed mouth. "You're wrong, Drac---Eating people.....that ain't normal-----" The retort was without mercy. "For us it is. Don't wallow in your imagined guilt, Highwind," the dragon short of commanded, slurping the pieces of liver from Cid's chin with a sweep of the coated tongue, a growl of irritation weaving its way through the slippery chunks. He twisted Cid's neck as far as it would. Curse his limitations......even with this setback, he snatched the smell of some odious beast invading his territory. Perhaps it was the same one that threatened to steal his dinner. He gave a haughty grumble and snarled through Cid's tissue-caked lips,"I sense an enemy more aggravating than your conscience."
His nostrils snatched the scent, which registered as familiar. But he couldn't be sure...unless he used a call confined to his order.
"HREERGH....."
There was a shifting of claws on the pavement. The invisble form with its flaring eyes answered with its own roar.
"HUOARGH..."
"It's you," Draconis Rex confirmed, his immense pride bursting in the droplets of blood that raced through his body. The other detected a flash of teeth that clenched in the universal sign of hostility. "Wound my honor, would you? I'll teach you to get in my way." His pride swollen with a cut mounted in half of the dragon's teeth, the other half, unchanged from before, .twisted in agony.
"You seem surprised. A dragon connects memory with sound." The other, shadow-immersed, cloaked himself further, receding into the alley, sensing hostility bathing the human voice. . The agressor tracked his footsteps. Anything that would mark him as non- human was painted in black, only adding to Brock's disconcertion at the way the human spoke to him, not out of terror, disgust, and loathing, but of miffed pride. "You're the shapeshifter that threw me out of the sky," the unseen enemy delivered a brutal accusation, exacerbating the invisible's warning instincts further, transmitting signals that tensed his muscles that at this moment, were flexed for fleeing and not fighting. Better for him..his interrogator spoke with the voice which is off-limits, untouchable. Even if this one was in his way, ready to pick a fight with him...
"Grigh nrreeeghhreehhh to HRRUUOTREEGHT ghree ghumaasssssshh," the red-eyed beast explained in his unintelligible tongue in some lingering hope that humanity could comprehend him. It might've been better if he kept his Pokémon mouth shut, because the moment he "talked" he regretted it. He waited for an answer, whether it was a blow or a rock.
But he knew... words wounded more.
"Look, Highwind," laughed the rough, but undeniably human voice, awkward in its gruffness that clashed with a more polished way of talking to sound more important than you really are...like Gio, he thought derisively while he bore the gutting arrow of man's revulsion. "---something more brutish than your kitten and Chaos. I don't think it can understand anything beyond a thrashing," the tenor of his voice changed lwhen he grinned. It sharpens the knife with malice. Brock lowered his bald head on his chest and hissed in a morose acceptance of his worth to humanity.
What's the use of trying when they won't listen? Better to just avoid--- -Brock whipped his head in the other direction, his mouth partially opening to release a patient hiss. Really has a grudge, huh?
Brock felt the rumbling wind behind his back and he latched to the wall with one claw, dropping as soon as the attacker passed under his tail and, scrambling from the alley, swerving to the left across the broken curb and crossing the light that sunk its thousands of teeth in his his eyes, that anguishing light from the streetlamp bent by the earlier stampede that made its crushing mark on the city. The rain still ran high here, and the seemingly perpetual curtain of black added yet another layer of the opaque liquid that guarded him vigilantly, only betraying him when he bolted through a light beam. Only where the shadows weren't absolute.
But the stranger that claimed to be his nemesis tracked by---well, it wasn't sight, because the light areas were so sparse--more so now that some of the lights were busted: glass still littered the indiscernible sidewalk, and the flier was right behind him every second. He didn't stop to turn around, catch a glimpse of the creature so bent on a fight. He still had three to watch out for, and with the foreign path marked by twisted streetlamps, broken windows, collapsed awnings, and various produce submerged in the flood, he wondered if this was truly Vermillion City and not some illusion his mind made up just for the fun of seeing his body squirm one more time.
Can't be an illusion...his folorn thought nested in his head that was bent foward along with the rest of his crouched form, passing through the burning light and the ever-rising Black Rain level. Where it was here and it wasn't in Cerulean. Where he should've been and wasn't. Terror coursed through his dark blood, chilling his heart with a dread that shrieked in audible cries in his head. Nondescript, formless pleas, but gradually growing more defined in his mind's ear, until the reaction spewed from his lips. "Mreghhsteeee......Shhhhhrrrhhhzzreee..." he groaned, the black heart that furiously beat with doubled force propelling every muscle on, fed with the new blood, sending the black form shooting through the liquid of the same hue, surged on because of guilt. Suzy.....she's just a kid. Just a kid..she's going to fight...Hojo...I let her fight. If I didn't Teleport....I could HELP her....how was I supposed to control it?! It's impossible-----I don't know how-----The limber frame dashed under the bulbs aglow with a misty whiteness, hurtling through what was essentially fire. Flame to his body, but ineffectual on his mind that raced as rapidly as he did, riding the crest on a wave of loathing remorse. Don't tell me my stupid mistake's going to cost my family. He gazed at the unresponsive sky. DON'T tell me..... In his mire of despair he stopped stopped fully. His hand wandered to his head as if reaching far away---miles away---to Cerulean, smoldering in the exact same way Pewter did-- Only it was his best friend and the only sister that the cruel madness of life left to him---He felt the mental energy implanted in him sparking---if she could hear him-----maybe the telepathic signals would reach her all the way to the north......
Desperation broke the string of thoughts in some places.
Suzy...tell me if you're alive.
Tell me------
Whatever mental link he tried to establish it was slashed altogether with violent force, and the pursuer rammed straight between his spiked shoulder blades, bashing him front-first on the flooded sidewalk. The fierce impact threw Daisy from his shaken grip and she skidded over the invisible line in the sidewalk and into the road, the straightened arm holding one less human and their transporter bleeding from a scrape on his lip, though you couldn't tell. It closed with the mending rain, and even if Black Rain didn't act like a Kadabra's Recover or a Cure3, it wouldn't matter anyways.. All was submerged.
With a muffled hiss, Brock regained his footing and reached for the dripping body, the persistent shape hovering over his shoulder. He raised his rigid jaw and hissed with the hostility of anger in the place of that fear. So, not a human, huh? It was a statement more than a question on a caustic smirk. Makes it easier. He darted into the street and plunged out again, a tangle of Black Rain sliding off his gnarled heel that barely landed before the entire shape slipped away from the pursuer. It's easier to fight your own kind. They're weaker than us but they're stronger. They have power.
That's how it all got started. First Ivy...then Gio.....
Everyone ended up suffering.
Where is it? He maneuvered through the new Vermillion, so unrecognizable that it might as well have been another planet. Buildings towered above him like it was Celadon and crowded themselves in their competition for space, obstructing any view of the rather modest building that was his target. Now a blind target, curtained in ebony that continued to fall harder than ever. That this side of the street was void of intact lamps meant more security for him, but it masked him with a bloody blindfold.
All the while the flier mimicked his every swerve, climb, and bound. A shadow's shadow.....not like true shadows, of dark and light, intangible, beyond all reach except eyesight, but shadows of humankind. Twisted and stretched out of proportion and molded by the perverse. Disfigured minds produced disfigured versions of humans in some cases, and in others, changed the species entirely. Just for their experiment, Brock growled, slowing as a light in a rapidly approaching distance burned directly in his eyes. Still...no matter who I blame, what does it change, huh? Maybe it's just easier to continue hating. The spurt of rage forced him through the foaming liquid. What good is it to stop? Then you forget it ever happened? That he took away everyone and everything? I had a world. Now it's just ash.
Was Cerulean the same? When he escaped it still burned. He didn't even know if Misty was alive or not----water burning a Gyarados-----was that just another sick joke from the .four-eyed bastard? Or just some gut-wrenching coincidence that decayed a deteriorating hope that Misty would be okay. Okay...fighting Hojo.....not Gio. His arch- nemesis was stupid in rage. This enemy was half brains.
I've got to go back. What am I doing here?..! They're just knocked out. Misty could be dead. I can't leave them out here. I made a promise to her. Can't break it...it's their blood. I told her they'd be safe. I can't-----won't let her down.
The Center lights inflamed his eyes once again and he slipped by the barking Growlithe under the police line and past the cop, spilling globs of the accumulated liquid on the sterile tiles, days of Black Rain pooling in their foaming hideousness on the cold surface beneath him. Automatically he felt unwanted here, his head moving furtively, waiting for Nurse Joy's glowering visage to appear from behind the counter or at one of the vid-phone terminals with four other people with rocks and acid for words. .
But it was just the half-man with the human voice. That now, in the light, was unmistakably the dragon that wrecked Pallet. He grew cautious, falling into a defensive stance. Now wasn't the time to attack head-on. They were equally matched during that brawl, but now he was landbound. Lucky him, his enemy didn't hesitate in making sure he knew he had a disadvantage.
"You've arrived at a corner. Nowhere to escape." He heard a sharp rip behind him as his pursuer clawed through the flimsy tape and struck him in the lower jaw with a balled fist. Brock leaped with a half-hiss, half-snarl of pain and fell roughly on the floo. The dragon leaped on the demon, ready to maul him at will---when he saw the
expression. How used he was for his opponents to either cower or face him with blind determination. Nothing of the sort. The enemy's inhuman lips curled into a smug smirk... It daunted him, that expression. What did this other dragon know about that he could exploit it...?
"Ghrrigh wwraaaaghhshhh hhrrrrighhhht," the creature growled in curt reply, with thr satiated smile marred with contortions of abating pain. ". Nroghhht hrrrghhumaaarghh hraaghhttt hhhraaaaagh." He gazed long and hard at the monster with man's shape, flipping sideways to regain grip with four legs then two, rubbing the broad end of his claws on the bruised shoulder. He stood half-erect with a red grin. "Shhhrrough, gharghhe yrroughh hhgraaghn hhrighnnoossssshheeghhht hhhrrrghiktriiighm....." By now he was almost as erect as a human, with his slime-draped arms crossing. Still with that smug look. bending his mouth upwards. For all that attempt at mimicking a human, the creature's 'words' were little more than one continuous roar. "..HHhrorghhh hddgroughhh hrryhoughh ddhhreseRRRGHVhhhh rrrgheeeeeshorghhh?"
Yet no matter how far away from human speech that sounded, it didn't matter as much when the listener looked just as bad as he did. Nothing human about him either except his shape--the man and the dragon thrown together in one hideous blend.
"I don't speak your bestial language," returned the dragon with a condescending tilt of the head.. "Whatever you can't say in words, say in blows."
"Grrrrrhigh dddrghoghht wwhraaagght troughh friiighhghh," Brock answered, climbing over and around the seats in the waiting area, coating the chairs meant for human occupation in the excess fluid that trickled down his hide. He felt the dragon's shadow run into his own as he set the humans down. "Ghrrigh craaaghht graaaghforghhd trouughh. Mreeeghstie craaghhhhht graaaghfrrorghhd troug---" He stopped "speaking", the very act turning his throat raw and running his heart ragged. Better SHOW instead of tell, Brock resolved. Because this guy doesn't want to talk. He began to walk away from the stained chairs, his job there finished and his promise honored, but another instinct triggered a warning through his mind, of vague, iminent danger.. This isn't the best spot. If the room is vacant...He picked up the two women in his arms and dashed to one of the doors where they kept recovering patients. Occupied or not, he felt compelled to put them there---that unshakable feeling of a looming threat stayed in his nerves, other than the dragon, that stood with a challenging demeanor right at his back, indignant that natural events hadn't run their course.
"Why have you not consumed them yet?" he queried, with a carnivorous breath pushing against Brock's neck, licking his own chops from the leftover taste that hurtled the whole face into a clashing jigsaw of the satisfied expression after a meal and the wrenched and twisted features of complete revulsion at something so foul it made the scales that were visible wherever the rain was not turn a nauesa shade of green. Brock backed away, startled by the one face that suddenly became two, but more startled at the pitiess accusation. "See, Highwind--- this is the cannibal you've been raving about."
"Shhhhrroughh, yroughh thhhghhrighhk Hhrghimmmm shhrrroggh craaaghhibraagh?"
Brock cracked the air with the coarse, bestial laugh, edged with venemous derision. He disappeared into the room, set them on the bed, and darted back with his
claws on the doorknob. The door shut. He faced the floor reflecting the Center's lights against his body. This is getting nowhere fast. If I can't get back to Cerulean..... He closed the hot-red eyes and grabbed at the floor with a misshapen hand, hearing the tile wear away at his touch.
The red grin formed a thin line across the uneven scales. . The only thing Ivy didn't take from him---His only way of communicating with the non-Pokémon..
There was a hundred words he couldn't say right now, probably never again would he use his voice the way he used to. Brock looked at the reptile-man again with a challenging stare. If he didn't listen to reason after this......
. The monster's mockery of a hand shot out, palm flat to his striking enemy's slit eyes. The demonic limb remained there with a calm rage burning, collected, reason-directed as opposed to the unconquerable instincts. He thought he had the hostile creature under control, partially lowering his guard as his hand dropped to the floor.
But his clawed finger never reached the ground. The dragon rushed on him, snarling, diseased with pride,
"You don't have an answer? What a disappointment...and from the Dark clan...what a pity," he derided with a haughty sneer. He grappled for the neck of the weak and useless creature. What an insult---to destroy a dragon that was too ignorant to take the form of his clan. "Show your true color," he commanded, gripping him by the neck and thrusting him against the white plaster wall, an audible bang throwing Brock's head at an irregular angle, that emerged again, the eyes glowing with a leashed rage that burned in its restrained fury. . "I'll teach you to get in my way." The last word was drowned in the creature's mid-pitch roar.
"HHrghigh krowwwghhh yourghhh......" he snarled. "Trryyghh troughh deshhhhtroyyghhh Paarrreghhht. HHrghhhearghh thgreeghmm aghhhroghr graahrghh Hhrghirgh hhhghreargh youurgh aghhroghh. Ghraghhh YOUGHHRR Hrrghihg MRIGHH wwwaryghh-"
The dragon was beyond hearing at that point, hurling the demon on the floor. "The Black Dragon refuses to come out? You're pretty bold to challenge me in the first place...now to not keep your age-old honor?" he roared. "Too bold for your own good," he snarled, shoving his face on the floor with the sole of his foot. Another loud bang, a hiss in the rush of pain, hand on the back of his skull, rattling from the sudden impact that left the back of his skull bruised and his sight blurred by the
imperious foot set like a pompous human on his head. "Looks like you don't live up to your appearance, daemon. The Dark clan isn't as agressive as its reputation implies."
Brock staggered off the floor, his hand clutching his head, the room blurred, and the dragon set to strike again, frustrated with this weak creature that had so much power and was completely ignorant of it.
Brock reached blindly for his voice. He COULDN'T fail her. No way. He couldn't get into a scrap NOW..not when Misty was burning from Bubblebeams and Hydro Pumps. Not when the survivor of his wiped-out fmaily was facing a mammoth lizard with a brain sharper than his claws and with worse intent than Team Rocket. With a final attempt he squirmed out from under the dragon's foot, flipped sideways, wavered on his own feet to a squat and dug his forefinger into the floor before the dragon struck a next blow.
If nothing else was going to get this guy to get out of the way.....
T/-/ERES S0/\/\E0/\/E'S E/\R ST/(K//\/(_- 0(_)T 0F Y0(_)R /\/\0(_)T/-/, /\ /\/ /) Y0(_)RE (/\/_/_/ /\/ (_- /\/\E /\ (/\ /\/ /\/ / B /\ /_
The sentence had no punctuation, none of the conventions in ordinary written speech, but no punctuation could make it clearer than it already was.
Cid stared blankly at what he thought might be letters, then at the freakout that wrote them. It didn't get to him so much that the creep took Drac out of the sky was capable of human speech in its written form. Not so much that.....than what the letters actually read.
He lodged his hand in his mouth, almost terror-stricken at what he'd find. That it'd be right. In bewildered shock, he withdrew his hand, strung with bits of cartilage. Goddamn it, the fuck was right. Hit it dead on the nail. "It's for HIM----you get it, right?!" protested the same monster that had stomped on Brock, with the same voice, the same two-face, with a rougher way of speaking but---"HE'S eatin' it, NOT me.I DON'T want this stupid---ear--- " He chucked it across the room, a hungry roar erupting from his shared vocal chords as his body lurched violently foward, catching the ear and chewing it before it hit the floor, half his body convulsing at the torture and the other revelling in the feast.
Yeah...sure..you're not a man-eater, and I'm a dragon. Stop calling me a dragon. Only reason I can turn into one is because of HER. Don't mistake me for someone I'm not.
While the dragon chewed on the ear, he slipped under the wings, bolting for the door, for the open air. When he heard a snarl of a dog. He flattened himself on the adjacent wall, hearing, listening. The snarl was of a Pokémon barely domesticated, though it had learned to speak one word, while the tamer breed had only a dog's bark.
"Hell," corrupted by its canine voice to "Hergh." So it wasn't the police out there. They used Growlithe, Spinarak-----Ash said one even used a Gastly--but never a Houndoom.
Which could only mean...he snapped his head outside and withdrew it, hissing furiously. The orange Growlithe that was barking was lying on its side. He grabbed at its body---limp, dragged it into the light. A few leaking holes punctured the orange and white fur. He shoved himself outside, attacked by rain, and caught a flash of cerulean, crimson, and flame-orange.
Take it only when you need to, he told himself through the streaming rain. Makes them a little less red. One thing for sure. He had to get out of there. An alternate route? The window. He leaped towards it in a low bound, craning his neck backward to see the dragon-man choking on the ear on the ground. "HUUUOARGH," he caught at least one of them's attention, and he etched rushed letters on the window..
TR0(_)B/?ES ( 0 /\/\ / /\/ (_-
Whether the dragon chose fight or flight, that wasn't his problem. He slashed off the glass layers, thinning it until there was hole big enough to get through, and he slipped through it. A crimson flash flooded the side street. The SOLDIERs and the hellhounds burst in on the Center empty of monsters, aiming their loaded weapons at empty space, finding a jagged tear in the window and bits of plaster falling from the monstrous hole in the roof.
*~*~*
(_- /-\ / /-\ E/-\RT/-/
The oblate spheroid resembled more of what started as a rhombus and ended up as a lopsided oval. The other globe was more expertly drawn, though it ended up lumpy and irregular. But for a city planner and not a cartographer, it was as accurate as it was going to get.
"This is the Planet." Reeve never imagined he'd diagram with his claw rather than a ball-point pen with several extra ink replacements on hand on a clean sheet instead of the brown-black mud beneath hs paws, nor did he ever imagine that he'd have a claw in the first place. Or paws. Or any other part that marks the feline as feline. The drawing was a bit sloppy, but he supposed it was good enough for a cat.
Outside the entrance to the so-called Diglett's Cave the storm bellowed, threatening to uproot the trees and scattering them like the Pokémon that searched with dwindling hope for shelter from the heavy rain. On the entrance's opposite side the cave aside from the Diglett that still found solid ground t burrow in while the rest of the land quaked and crashed with more fearsome power than the ocean and who could care less if it was raining or not, stood the laconic man and lay the red dog. The latter watched the diagram with patient eye. It wasn't carefully wrought, all of the little intricacies such as land masses like Goblin and Round Island, sticking to the main continents. And even those were barely discernible had it not been for the lantern that a forgetful excavator left at the entrance. Vincent held it over the drawing distantly, about as far away from the cave as their scaly companion was. The shadows cast stayed the same as did the places where the light landed. The lantern froze with its bearer, casting a static intertwining of one and the other across the carved-up mud.
As an afterthought, the feline hastily added in the physical and political geography, sketching the mountain chains, rivers, and major desert in twenty strokes or less. He then took a step back, pointing his right paw at the eastern portion of the other diagram, and started,"We're closest to this island chain. But there's no way we'll be able to return from there. There's possibilities here, here, and-----" He leaned on three legs and planted his paw in the mud. "Here. Now, these Xs represent the connection point between the Planet and Earth," he continued, clawing across both drawings.
"What you mean..." Nanaki started, shifting on his good leg, "If we go to those locations, we'll find the Planet?"
"Yes and no," Reeve answered, stepping away from his diagram. "Each 'portal' leads to a specific spot on the other planet. It's likely that the-----" He ground his teeth, a grumble lost in the clenched position of the semi-sharp canines. The wind and rain outsidereverberated their-----HIS twisted achievement. With an audble exhale, he pronounced the words that left a raw taste in his dry mouth, "Research and Development department has that specific information---the executive board were given the portal locations, but as to where they lead and if they'll get us back to Gaia---" He lifted his left paw and scratched the back of his head. "-- your guess is as good as mine."
"Which leaves two options," the dog stated after a reflective pause. "Either check each one until we find one that leads to the Planet, or.....find where Hojo is and find out what he knows."
The shadows and light remained interlocked even as the pallid man spoke with some semblance of a triumph belated by more than thirty years, threatening to trickle emotion into his white lips.
"The latter choice may be-----" The shadows began to recede as Vincent stiffly set the lantern down to make a barely perceptible hand motion, the now-slanted lantern fully illuminating the two planets. His hollow shell of a voice flowed through the cavern, resonating a listless hatred. "-----improbable considering that he is enduring an ordeal that taxes his physical faculties---" Simple payback. He had his way with the world: let the world have its way on him. But the remnants of his own sadism penetrated the seed of his persistent indifference."I do not believe he will be in a competent mental state to communicate to us the needed information." He added with what vaguely resembled an empty laugh, "I doubt he will be able to speak at all."
Nanaki gave a nod of assertion, then hobbled towards the diagram, placing a muddy paw next to "Earth", running his gaze over the map of their current location. It was scrawled in an insert on the "Earth" map. AVALANCHE had already been to one of the towns, and in one of those cities, they had lost-----Cid to Hojo. One who refused to cleanse himself could only produce corrupted creatures---those that yearned to poison the Planet with destruction---the Planet bred different, but good fruit. Men distanced from the Planet bred fruit bathed in toxins.
"That leaves us no choice," Nanaki shoved that other thought to the side, and searched down the map, his muzzle's shadow crossing down the middle..
/ /\/ /) / (_- 0 P/_ /-\ TE /-\ (_)/
CER(_)/_E/- \ /\/
PE \/\/ T E R
X
X X
X
(E/_/-\/)0/\/ S/-/FFR0/\/ X L/-\\/E/\//)ER
\/ / R / /) / /-\ /\/
X
X
X X
\/ER/\/\//_/_/0/\/ X
X X
/ P/-\/_/_ET
X
X
X X
X
X
X / FUSC/-///-\ X
X X
X
C / /\/ /\//-\ B /-\ R
X
X
. "Vincent, cover 'Fuschia', Cinnabar, and Pallet. Reeve, take 'Lavender', 'Saffron' and---" He squinted at the smudged writing. 'Celadon'. I'll take the land in between. Cid----"he gave a startled whimper. In their rush to escape the city, they'd lost their fourth.
Potentially lethal poison their pilot was, he had to at least attempt to detoxify him. Solidfy the faint strand of trust if he was willing to do the same. If both he and the dragon was willing to stay with AVALANCHE.
"I'll find him," he assured, leaving it at that. "Come back here when you find a portal." Nanaki lowered his muzzle in embarassment at his own confidence that it would be so simple. That would be underestimating the tendency for technology to be unreliable. "If," he said a bit softer as Vincent took off into the night. The figure of the cat was still visible in the lantern's light, peering at the diagram. It looked so...incomplete. Mt. Moon and Diglett's Cave aside----
"There's something missing in between Fuschia, Cinnabar, and Pallet. I can't quite put my----"
The battle-seasoned animal's bold eye struck him dead on. Even in the light, still a menace. Reeve drew away from the map, meekly holding down his head.
"Is there something you're not telling us?" Nanaki asked, his tone grave, that one disconcerting eye screwed on the black-and-white cat, and into his mind which he was hastily racking to find the answer.
That was it...Shin-Ra's ships departed from....the Vermillion docks, and .smaller fishing boats from the Fuschia and Cinnabar shore.....
"Cinnabar's an island," Reeve muttered.
"You could have mentioned this earlier," Nanaki growled in exasperation. "It's up to-----" He halted, nose-down, pensive, fearing its deadly implications. "--Chaos, now." He stared at the map, doubtful if the cat was really on their side. Another cut in the fabric of trust. Perhaps Reeve wasn't physically duplicitous, but there was that other kind-----liars, which he detested and suspected of far more worse ills---his reaction to Yuffie's long-forgotten escapade was enough to reveal how he viewed them. Not much had changed. On the other hand, it could have been a coincidental forgetfulness-----but from a former Shin-Ra, that made it all the more suspicious.
In time he'd see. Reeve passed the first test. Whether or not he proved himself the second time, that was up to the cat. That kept his attitude civil, for the time being.
"Not all the portals are on land, then."
"Exactly. It was a sure way to retain Gaia's population so there's more people paying the electric bill. And if you want to know which ones are in the air, water, and land---don't ask me."
Nanaki watched the feline slink into the night. He then cast an eye on the diagram. The host of Xs was a deception. Who knows, one out of all of them could be on the ground. Within reach. At least for they who gravity tied. There was no question about it. No matter how thin the thread of trust ran between them, they needed Cid on this search.
"There's not much of a choice."
Nanaki limped out of the cavern and began the---according to the map---westward trek to Vermillion. Three of his legs were wounded, two out of the four he couldn't lick without bending them and risk ripping a tendon. So the cuts and gashes on his hindlegs went untended, and he was stuck using his front legs, one of which bore a healing slit that still bit at the entire leg whenever he moved it, the thin wound jealous for attention and constantly reminding him that it was there and it hurt.
The wind didn't help matters any as it blew his coarse fur backwards and whipped his bundles of tied hair against his neck. His two feathers The city loomed above his black nose---close if he could run. He had run to the cave in haste to get out of the city, but something gave way on the way, and there was no way he could run back..
At this rate he might as well crawl around on his rump like some dogs do with an unreachable itch. Cid could have left the city already and he could be here, knee-deep in earth and rain, debating with himself if he should walk on his paws or his flank."It's wasting time," Nanaki decided, and sat on his stiff haunches gingerly, planted his forepaws several feet ahead of him, and with a rowing motion, brought the lower portion of his body foward, carving a rut in the rolling mud.
Either way, it was going to be a long trip.
As his tense eye wandered he caught sight of bushes and fruit, leaves-- -a remorse came over him--if he did anything wrong in his short lifetime, it was that he spent too little time exploring the medicinal properties of what the Elders and young children collected outside of the canyon. He knew that some acted like a Restore Materia or a Heal, but as he saw the vast variety blowing in the volatile wind, the berries, leaves, some which had roots barely clinging to the loose soil, he regretted that he spent more time on the hunt than the gathering....he couldn't tell which ones were which. It was times like these when he really yearned for Bugenhagen's presence.
He bowed his eye towards the piles of mud alive under him, and reasoned, "They could be poisonous. I've never seen these fruits before. Maybe they won't heal these wounds," he decided, pulling himself along on his front legs in a sort of rowing motion that was distressingly slow, but at least he was moving. The cave behind him grew more distant and the city swelled. "It's more of the wilderness than the open land," Nanaki muttered reflectively through a jawful of wind and Black Rain. Not that he hated the city...this Vermillion was harmless aside from the SOLDIERs, but it wakened sleeping memories. How closely it resembled Midgar, as he'd seen it between cage bars while he was transported to the 68th foor, with its towering pillars of concrete, and the perpetually dark sky above, with helicopters swarming around the hive, coughing their pollutants into what used to be pure air. For a long while he pointed his wolfish nose to the sky. What a shame it was, that his people couldn't teach Midgar's pestilence to become pure again, for once a thing was soiled it was hard to clean it.
"Like trust," Nanaki bowed his wolfish head, and plodded on his way. Was it useless? Maybe it was the dragon that he couldn't trust, and Cid was still his own person? Or maybe he was a fool, and he'd find the silver dragon on a different wind, with Cid just as bent on indiscriminate destruction like the dragon was.. His suspicions tilted his muzzle upward again. The clouds were hidden in the storm, no way to tell if their lost member stayed in the city or had fled.
He headed for his destination again, mud clumping in his fur, soothing some of the wounds that paled in their significance as he neared the city. A short distance away he picked up the smell of machinery. Strange...it wasn't this far away---maybe the winds were carrying father than they usually did. But there could also be a possibility that......
"They've regrouped." Across the city border he saw a living worm that consisted of SOLDIERs and great lumps that must have been artillery-----tanks and cannons and that other kind of beast---of plating, wires, gears, bolts, tubes, machines in machines, as complex as a living being. But these, as a warrior, fed fear and doubt within him more so than organic enemies. The latter could be reasoned with if they were rational thinkers. But machines didn't think. They had no autonomy. A cannon couldn't prevent itself from firing. A man fired it.A tank couldn't stop itself from moving: a man operated the controls. That's what made them all the more deadly. "I can't go in without becoming a target," he told himself. "Perhaps there's a hole in their defense," he rationalized, extinguishing his tail under the mud. If he had to move, better to move aided with stealth. Stealth worked with the mind, strength with the body. He was a logical dog, and if this yields this, then that is true or untrue. If he was wounded in three of his legs, there was a definite chance that he wouldn't be able to fight any more SOLDIERs until they mended or he rejoined his comrades. He was brave, but not rash. Rash was illogical. Rash led to a short life. He hadn't existed for forty-eight years by being overly bold.
"The Gi...they threatened the canyon from underground." He stared intently at the human worm guarding their mechanical titans. An idea worked into his functional brain. He took his front paws and attempted the skill that his breed were masters of.
The mud started to pile behind him, steadily, clumping in rounded heaps that marked his progress, made slower that in he was using only two paws intead of four, but gradually he found himself sinking, the stabbed ground giving way underneath the mechanical working of his paws, concealing him from the deadly enemy at the city's border, that stood mindless hulks of towering metal.
TO BE CONTINUED........
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A/N: Chapter 27 coming soon! ^^