Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Dragon Ball Z and its respective characters (obviously) do not belong to me.
A/N: It's a story about Seventeen, and really, that's all the warning you need. Enjoy.
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EXSTINCTOR
by Avens
He loves the way they look when they first see him, the way they do that double take at the handkerchief around his neck, at the long straight fall of dark hair, eyes widening as they recognize the slanted pale eyes and the angular pristine features. He loves the tears that some of them shed, the way it mixes with their screams and their blood, salty and vibrant and full of life up until he snaps their necks and the life fades away into nothing. Sometimes they run, and he loves that too, chasing them down and blasting the ground at their feet to watch them fly up forty, fifty feet in the air before hitting the ground with a dull crack of bones. But sometimes they don't run, and they don't scream, but they merely stare at him in baffled confused resignation as they die, asking why—why do you hate us so, to kill us so?—as their breathing stops and their eyes close, and he loves that most of all.
He's fascinated with fire. He often floats above a city he's finished playing with and lingers, watching the inferno, red and orange and yellow licking at stone and ravaging wood, roaring to life with every new scrap of fuel. If the fire's hot enough, it sends out ripples of heat in all directions, distorting the air and smudging the horizon, melting the steel edges of snapped skyscrapers into slick molten waves of past grandeur. If enough people are still alive, still trapped beneath sunken structures, he can hear their howls, their pleas, their sobs as the citywide bonfire swallows their oxygen and eats away at their skin. And if he times it right, sometimes the flames reach their peak just as the sun sets, lighting crimson with crimson, setting the sky ablaze with smoke and screams and scarlet. He likes that. Likes that a lot.
He lives for the storms, the howls of wind, the flashings of sky, the menacing rumbles of thunder in the distance as dark clouds roll in to blanket the earth in shadows. He never gets tired of watching that. Never gets tired of listening to that. Never gets tired of the way a thousand pastel umbrellas sweep back to reveal surprised faces an instant before he swoops down and renders them permanently incapable of surprise, the way a thousand unmanned umbrellas swirl and dance in the storm-driven wind after he's done. Sometimes, he stands in the middle of the streets—the cracked, empty streets—and watches the rain fall in torrents and droves, washing the streets of his work—their blood—his amusement—their pain. Sometimes, he brings his head close to the ground and listens to the guttural little hisses fire makes as it fights the water and loses, its once flamboyantly sultry, brilliantly sharp intensity giving way to long, grey wisps of smoke and fading, rising in silent, mute tribute to a flame that had once burned bright. And sometimes, standing there, he closes his eyes, tilts his head back, and laughs himself out of breath.
He dreams sometimes, and when he does, his dreams are filled with an abyss of silence, with still tranquility, with dark compulsions he doesn't quite understand but itches to follow, itches to obey. And in these dreams, a voice, gravelly and low and old and somehow familiar, murmurs to him, speaking of promises and power and possibilities, oh, the possibilities, ever spiraling, ever growing; and he listens to it, feeds off it, wakes up in the morning and chooses a direction, any direction, and gives a pat on the head to the first boy he sees, kisses the first girl that catches his eye, smiles at the first family that passes his way before razing their city down, down, down to the ground, sending their grey souls wisping brokenly into the weeping sky.
And today is Kamakura and tomorrow will be Yokohama and the day after that he thinks he can reach Tokyo if he moves—kills—quickly enough, and he knows he'll smile as the buildings come tumbling down, as the people swarm panicked and screaming out of their collapsed homes and straight to their deaths, out of the frying pan and into the fire, and someday he knows he will have the world, will have ashes and dust and the rattling last breaths of six billion dead to follow him like an euphony that only he can hear. The voice tells him so. The voice whispers to him.
And God help him, he listens.