Author's note: I'm flabbergasted by the attention and praise this is getting. Thanks a lot everyone!
Chapter 6, Nightmare relived
Jak came to far sooner than he would have preferred. He came to soon enough to be aware of something quite unsettling being done.
He heard the sound of heavy bubbles breaking nearby, but there was no heat from lava. No, instead there was only a sense of power hanging in the air, its metallic taste filling the air as he struggled to breathe without singing his throat with it. And at the same time, part of him bared its teeth in a hungry growl, wanting to lunge for that silent calling, enticing scent of dark eco.
No. Holy hell, no, no…
Cold, ragged stone met his fingertips as he tried to move his hands, only managing to scrape his skin against the thousands of tiny crevasses beneath him. The pain in his legs had almost disappeared, but not in a good sense. He was feeling numb. This was not good.
What was worse were the nimble fingers working their way across him.
Clack.
A piece of armor which should have kept protecting one of his legs hit the ground. From his subconscious, he could recall the exactly same sound from a few minutes earlier. His legs were unprotected now.
Dry throat tearing up just with the simple task of forming a sound, but he forced the muscles to move.
"Stop it," he croaked.
"It's in my way."
The fingers moved further up, so cold that even his sedated nerves reacted to it. His nails dug into the dark cracks in the ground. He narrowed his eyes, glaring at the shape of grey even if he could only see it from the corner of his eye from his awkward, sprawled position. There was not much he could do to fix it, either… not that he felt so hot about taking a closer look.
He could feel the smirk, in flesh a backlash from the time when he just had not been smart enough to finish the fucking job.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
The darkness filled up everything, stretching out endlessly in a lazy half-curl from one end of his vision to another. Only the part where it bent to carry the gray body towards him, there was an opening. And that was where the black eco lapped at the rock, bubbling away and sending that eerie, impure purple shimmer across everything – the only reason he could see anything at all, probably. There seemed to be no other source of illumination, apart from the dull glow of the huge skull gem.
It was quite enough. More than enough.
Cold fingers brushing over his neck on their way to his shoulder armor. It was on purpose.
"Get off me."
There was only a throaty chuckle at that.
Those fingers moved far quicker than they should have. He vaguely felt the pull as the belt holding the armor in place was unlashed.
Clack.
Next a limp arm was lifted from the ground, tendrils of moving ice curling around his wrist and lifting it. And he could not summon the strength to struggle.
No ropes, no chains, just a removal of his ability to move. He would not even be allowed to writhe.
The belt against his forearm began to buckle.
"What are you waiting for?"
He snarled the question again, knowing that there was no pleasant answer waiting on the other side of the question mark.
Clack…
The arm panzer was lowered to the ground carefully, thoughtfully. His vision filled with gray, gray and the shimmer of the skull gem.
"Waiting for?"
Ice fingers brushing over his lips. Jak pinched his eyes shut, weakly gritting his teeth.
"Kor, too…"
There was a pause before the next movement.
The cold slid down his chin, passing his neck with the gift of a disgusted shudder tearing through him, slipping over to his other arm to finish with the next piece of armor.
Smirk.
"Don't touch me!" he snarled, drawing strength from the revulsion.
No reply.
Clack.
Only the main armor left now, the one protecting his body. The only piece he had received straight from his father's hands.
"Don't touch me you fu-!"
The backhand of ice cracked against his jaw, sending flares across his vision as his head crashed to the side. Even as he growled in pain, he saw the grey disappear out of sight. It returned only moments later however, lowering itself to his side on the hard ground.
Jak squinted, forcing his eyes to focus again, following the lazy gaze lingering on the gray hand held up against the blackness around them.
The fingertips were dipped in darkness, rivulets of dark eco slipping down the skin without leaving a trace, not a hiss of pain. Nothing. The darkness had no interest in harming this one.
"I remember, almost dreaming," a drawling voice started, "Kor… woke up first. We couldn't really recall anything at first. He didn't think that much of it, there was too much to do. The details didn't matter."
Kor…? Kor and this one...
Jak could not keep his eyes from widening as the realization slowly dawned on him.
Smile.
"Smart little boy. He was… impatient, not even waiting for all the memories to clear. I was still sleepy. I waited."
Fingers curled, eyes closed. A black tongue lapped up the drops of eco covering a pair of fingers. Rolling over, raising up and gazing down at him, hair spilling over gray shoulders to brush against his bare arms as those fingers reached down, dark eco still clinging to the skin but drops were forming, feeling his presence and he could not move away shit, shit, shit…
"He was too focused on revenge however, and lost his sense for experimenting."
A new smirk as Jak flinched at the last word.
The other hand came to his hair, ruffling the green roots and digging into the short blond curls in a twisted parody of a caress.
"Don't misunderstand me, I'm quite mad at you for killing him. But, I think I'll keep you."
Fingers drenched in darkness pressed down and painted two strokes of frothing pain on his cheek, the raw black eco ripping into his hungering body without accepting any attempts to stop it.
And still, still there was that part that through the agony, through the bile, through the flood of memories that was about to burst and tear his mind apart, only screamed more, more!
She smiled as he choked, eyes rolling and face constricting as he struggled against the darkness seeping through his entire being. Finally he was left gasping for air, chest heaving desperately in shuddering breaths.
Dark eco from wells and remains of metal heads was one thing – it was processed, turned into a whiff of floating darkness. It was not like the raw stuff that filled pools of oblivion all over the world, lapping at the ground it sought to corrode, searching for anything living that it could feed on. The stuff that Praxis and Erol had pumped into him. It was too raw, too much for his mind to handle.
His dark side impatiently snarled, clawing at his skin from inside, closer than it had ever been since the precursors had granted him the blessing of the white eco.
Prying his eyes open he glared up at the thing watching him with great interest.
"I swear I'll kill you too, bitch," he croaked through tightly clenched teeth.
"Will you, now?"
A chilly palm came to rest against his throbbing cheek, intensifying the pain instead of smoothening it. Fingertips ending in claws stroke the base of his ear, making him shudder again.
"Get your hands off me."
"I'm sure you're thinking that I'm an idiot for giving you dark eco, since it makes you stronger."
Smirk.
"Since you're in control, aren't you, Jak?"
The other hand pressed down on his damp forehead.
"But the dark eco is calling you," she said, "and the other you is answering it, isn't it?"
The hands disappeared, only for one set to return further down, gripping his chin and tilting his contorted face back towards her.
"Dark eco knows beauty when it senses it, boy. You will be beautiful too, more than you already are."
The dark creature in his mind snarled and whimpered, pacing back and forth like a caged animal. Jak tried to keep telling himself that it did not want to curl up and lick the gray hands moving down to remove the last pieces of his armor.
'-'
The sharp sparks of unwilling communication filled the air, cutting through the lazy bubbling sound coming from the lava far below. Torn had long since passed the state of mind where he even considered holding back on the cussing. It did not help that all eyes were on him, with impatient scowls from the wastelanders and increasing tension oozing from the Blue Guards. They had moved up a few ledges already, pausing only to blast remaining metal heads coming at them and trying to establish contact with the outside world. This would be the third try – apparently the small communicator had troubles reaching outside of the volcano's walls.
Torn was on his last fragment of patience. Arguments had been ripe between him, his men and the wastelanders about whether or not to just dash up there and start blasting everything that moved. He could have agreed on the blunt approach if it had not been for what he had witnessed via Jak's communicator. They had no idea what was up there, or if it was waiting. Daxter still had not awakened – they might be running head first into a trap if they did not slow down and tried to form a strategy.
Like Jak had failed to. Idiot.
Torn gnashed his teeth and smacked the machinery in his hand. Hard.
"Ashelin! For fuck's sake, piece of shit work you fu- Ashelin! Reply!"
That last shake of the communicator seemed to cut it. Even if it did not exactly save the day, the voice coming across the speakers was a blessing from an otherwise smirking god.
"Wh- zzzt To-"
Finally Ashelin's face sprung forth from the static lines, and the connection stabilized. Torn's attitude did not, even if he was very close to give a small sigh of relief.
"We have a situation here!" he snarled.
"What's happened?"
"Jak's been-"
"Grrreen stuff!" Daxter's voice cut in.
He unsteadily crawled into a sitting position in Sig's massive palm, head swaying back and forth. Obviously he had knocked something on the way down, or he was in a state of shock. Either way he did not seem too steady.
But he was their sole source of information.
"The hell're you saying?" Torn snarled, for a moment ignoring Ashelin's demands for an explanation.
Daxter blinked owlishly a couple of times, then shook his head with a determined "brr!". He finished off the process of anti-trauma by giving himself a slap. It would have been a surprisingly amusing sight if the situation had not been the way it was. Daxter still swayed a bit, but his eyes focused properly on Torn this time.
"Old log head! Senior Shade boy!" the rodent near-shrieked, "just get him!"
Gritting his teeth but seeing no other option but to obey if he wanted anything concrete out of the hysterical ottsel, Torn looked back to the communicator.
"Jak's missing, and Daxter says to get the Shadow!" he growled.
Ashelin tensed only for a tenth of a second, then she was just as collected as before again.
"I'll call him, hang on a sec," she said and looked away from the camera on her end of the world.
Looking back at area around him Torn found himself watching the sideshow of everyone else's interest; Daxter stubbornly smacking his furry palms against his cheeks as if he was trying to wake himself up. Finally he grated a tightly closed eye open and peered up at Sig's face.
"This aint a dream, is it big guy?" he asked, dull hope in his voice.
"No, and what the hell happened?" the giant impatiently demanded.
"No, no, no, of course not… it's never that good, nope, nosirree…"
Daxter made a strange sound in the back of his throat, almost a giggle. He gave himself another slap.
"Oh, how wonderful," came Veger's voice, dripping with enough sarcasm to soak Kleiver's shoulder, "even the sidekick is losing it."
Daxter made the same sound again, and this time it came out in the form of a high pitched giggle. He fixed almost manic eyes onto the other ottsel and grinned like an idiot.
"Oh hey, Vulgar," Daxter said, "wanna see a real dark eco freak?"
Before the disdainful eyebrow reached further up on the fuzzy forehead, Torn's communicator sparkled again.
"What is it?" Samos asked, worry lacing the three simple words.
Torn nearly recoiled out of the sheer surprise; he had never seen Daxter move that fast. Considering Sig's blink, neither had he.
The ottsel sprung up from the sitting position and flung himself over the expanse of air to the Guard commander. He landed on Torn's arm and spun around, bending over the communicator and grabbing it as if it had been the collar of some unlucky elf in for a hysteric attempt at explanation. Which was true, apart from the bit about the collar.
"I saw it, Samos!" Daxter yelled at the perplexed face on the display, "Praxis' head on a stick, I saw- that- and Jak, shit, loghead, she took Jak, he's down there with her, but she can't be here, right? Right?"
Samos' eyes narrowed further, as everyone else only could listen and stare at the crazed little furry thing. Torn's fingers twitched in the fight against the urge to slap the pest away, though.
"Daxter!" the sage finally snapped, whipping through the torrent of words, "what in green tarnation are you babbling about?"
"Get it already, ya mossbrain! Gyaah!"
Daxter hissed in a deep breath and slapped himself, realizing that he was not quite being informative. It was just so hard to think clearly with all the mental images, memories and realizations crashing down on him. Still he had to try to know that "easy does it" or they would never get anywhere.
Easy? Not when Jak's been taken in by that one!
Holy crap on a fuzzy stick.
He tried again, narrowing his eyes at the exasperated face staring up at him.
"It's her, dammit!" he snarled, "she's crawled outta there like a gigantic nightslither!"
Samos nearly burst a bloodvessel.
"Who?" he snapped.
Daxter gulped, trying to grasp control despite that voice ringing through his head that no, no, no, this was all a mistake and there was no way Jak had been abducted by a freakin' ghost of all things. But there was only one thing that his eyes had let him know, apart from the fact that Jak had, indeed, been Jak-napped.
Holy golden crap on a multicolored fuzzy stick.
"It's Maia! She's back!"
Samos eyes were always disturbingly large-looking due to his glasses, but now the beady little things behind the glass were about that size without any help. His staff crashed against the control board as he lurched forwards and smashed both hands into the metal frame for support, ignoring the angry beeps this caused. Ashelin almost took a step back in surprise.
"Maia?"
Torn's eyebrows twitched. Many times things had been bad, but not even when the palace was about to fall had the Shadow's voice cracked like that. Sadly, this did not stop Daxter's hysteria.
"Yes! And greeny, my train of thought is kinda on a rail I want it off-"
"Shaddup already!"
If Samos' reaction could not get things moving, then Torn's rough grabbing of the ottsel's scrawny body at least quieted everything down a little. The commander tore Daxter away and glared down at his communicator.
"We don't have time for this! Who the hell is Maia?" he demanded.
Samos turned away briefly, shaking his head and taking in a deep breath to calm himself.
"It was very long ago…" he finally said, "she is the sister of Gol Akuron, the dark eco sage."
As he turned back to the screen before him he pressed a hand to his forehead.
"We thought that Jak killed both of them by throwing them into the dark eco silos, but if Daxter is right then at least Maia survived…"
Daxter wrung his paws frantically, elbows smacking against Torn's fingers.
"No!" he shouted, "she's not just alive, she's a frickin' metal head now!"
"What?"
"Whaddaya mean, now?" Sig cut in, "either you are or you ain't… right?"
Even though Daxter shook his head, Samos was the one who answered first.
"No, Maia and Gol were elves like us…"
He paused.
"But the dark eco corrupted them and drove them mad, they became little more than monsters-"
His eyes began to grow wider again. Even though Daxter was out of sight with Torn's face taking up the entire screen, the sage knew that the ottsel probably made an excellent face mirroring the old man's feelings. That train of thought that Daxter wanted off, yes… he had brought Samos onto it instead.
"Shock full of dark goo," Daxter said in a faint voice.
He bit down on his furry lower lip, ears drooping alongside his skull.
"Doubtlessly…" Samos agreed, fingers tearing through his beard.
His voice had a far higher pitch than normal.
"Unnatural powers…" he mumbled.
"Pale as dead dudes…"
"White hair…"
"Fangs…"
"Claws…"
"She's huge and got a skull gem I tell ya…"
"Not possible…"
"She took Jak…"
"Fertilizers!"
"Shit!"
