Spirited Away on Halloween 2; Hirac's Return
That took a while. I'm distracted. Have to do a bug collection. Hate bugs. Hate collecting. Hate getting a late start on school projects. Love writing fanfics. Let's go.
Pyramus popped his head out of the snow, shaking away the small mountain of ice crystals that had piled onto his head. Jack's head appeared next to his wing, the Pumpkin King moaning in pain. Pyramus reached out and touched him with his wing. "Are you all right?"
Jack didn't answer, but pulled himself out of his snow-hole with his long, powerful claws. He began to tramp through the snow on all fours, his expression blank and his body sinking into the snow with every step. Pyramus studied his loping walk, and how his wings and tail limpy dragged across the ground...
But nevertheless, he obediently followed, choosing to walk on his hind legs to keep his head above the snow. The cold snapped at his wings, so he tucked them close to his stone body and followed his draggy leader, still unsure of whether or not this was King Jack or it just looked like him. "What are you?"
No answer.
Pyramus clenched his fists and sighed. "What are we doing now?"
Jack kept walking, his face falling into the snowbank at regular intervals.
Pyramus growled in fury, every muscle he could spare burning with rage. They were going nowhere, wandering into a vast expanse of snow without direction (which is the worst thing to go without when walking in a vast expanse of anything). He felt a primal nervousness derived from a lack of a flock around him, especially with the memory of his precious Thisby breaking into a million pieces right before his eyes still wringing his brain into a throbbing ache...
"Get up!" Pyramus, acting on instinct, punched Jack between the shoulderblades, knocking the Pumpkin King back into consciousness... and, subsiquently, back into skeleton form. Pyramus stumbled back in shock; Jack shook his head and focused his vision. "Wha... where am I?"
"Who are you and where are we going?" Pyramus asked, his voice echoing an authority that Jack had heard him use with his "children", but no one else as of yet.
Jack rubbed his head, his memories foggy after he saw Sally getting spirited away. "Pyramus... I... I don't know where we're going... I don't even know where we are."
"It does not matter where we are. Where are we going?"
"...Away. Anywhere away from here."
Pyramus reacted; his body straightened and his eyebrow ridge slipped up his head. "Is that an place?"
"I don't know..." Jack held his head in his hands and fell into the snow. He felt numb, strangely emotionless and yet in the very depths of sorrow. The cat that was hiding in his chest popped its head out and meowed, but the Pumpkin King ignored it. "There's nowhere to go. The town's destroyed, Sally's gone, and we're lost..."
Jack fell headfirst into the snow, the cat inside his chest growling in anger. The jelly ball twitched once, then stopped; Jack didn't bother to acknowledge it. He hadn't felt this terrible since the Christmas incident; a low-pitched, far spread ache that settled in the very marrow of his bones and stuck there. A tear escaped his eye, but he choked back the urge to sob...
But had no problem screaming.
He fell back into the snow and jumped up just fast enough to keep Pyramus' fist from punching through his spine. He began to retreat, the huge gargoyle making sure there eyes made contact. "Pyramus, what are you doing!"
"Show yourself, gargoyle!"
"I am not a gargoyle!" Jack shouted back. "I am not some mysterious beast that hangs around in the shadows that's strong enough to kill anyone in my town, but not strong enough to protect it- WAH!"
Jack dodged the swipe of the gargoyle's fist with a graceful backbend and tried to flip away from attack, but tripped in the snow. Pyramus picked him up by the neck. "Show yourself!"
"What are you talking about!" Jack was surprised to hear himself speaking; Pyramus wasn't holding him tight enough to keep him from breathing. It was just a given (to him) that you had to hold whoever you were fighting tight enough to make him suffer. What confused him more was that Pyramus was calling him a gargoyle! "I'm not a gargoyle!"
"Yes you are! You showed me!" Pyramus threw him into the ground again. "I can see the tracks you left! Show your-"
He didn't finish. Jack the gargoyle flew out of the hole in the snow and caught Pyramus by the hands. With one swift flick of his arms, he had thrown Pyramus to the ground and had clenched his hands around Pyramus' neck, snarling viciously.
Pyramus smiled. "Look."
Jack, being ignorant, decided to look...
"My hands..." Jack stood back up, and then reached down and touched his feet. "My legs... but-"
"I don't know what happened," the huge one explained curty. "All I know is that you are a gargoyle."
"But... I'm not!" Jack scuttled backwards and tripped over his tail. He tried to breathe, but began to hyperventilate. "What's going on?"
"I wish I knew, bu-" Pyramus' face suddenly froze in a perplexed pose, his ears slowly lowering on his head. Jack sat with his head reeling, confused and dizzy and still much larger than he could ever remember being before. The stone gargoyle shook his head. "I know."
"You know?" Jack shifted his weight and made himself comfortable, his toe bones sprawling in the snow. "Know what?"
"I know..." Pyramus pointed to Jack. "You were made half-gargoyle by a spell."
It was Jack's turn to be confused past all reason; he gave up trying to emote in confusion and collasped in the snowy background. "That's the last thing I needed to hear."
"You were made that way..." Pyramus stated, as if he was learning all of this at the exact moment he spoke it. "By the king before you..."
"My father never did anything to me," Jack disagreed, not moving from the snow. "Literally. All he did was read his books and go to wor-"
"Your father was not the king before you."
They heard the "WHAT!" all the way in St. Patrick's Day.
"I don't know who it was," Pyramus monotoned, holding one of his horns. "But it wasn't your father..."
Jack stood now, dumbfounded in his clawed feet and the snow. His jaw hanged open slightly (hanged his a word). The cat in his chest was sound asleep now, bored out of its mind. "You... are... kidding."
Pyramus shook his head.
Jack smacked his forehead; most of his anger either distilled or taken out on Pyramus. "This sounds like those stupid 'fanfictions' Charon makes me read..."
Pyramus shook himself back into sense. "I am sorry..."
They stood in silence for a while, Jack absentmindedly whipping his wings about just to see if they worked. Pyramus finally spoke up. "I am sorry you are angry at me... We must go back to HalloweenTown."
Jack sighed. "Why?"
"Because we are gargoyles." Pyramus recited. "When there is nothing left to fight for, fight for the fight."
Jack gave him a puzzled look, which Pyramus had once himself given his grandfather when being given this information for the first time. "It is better to die knowing that you were fighting for your cause than to live and explain to everyone how you were the coward who ran away."
The Pumpkin King held onto his wings and sighed... something inside of him thought that bit of advice was appealing. But still... there was no reason. HalloweenTown was a lost cause... everyone was gone... his chest pounded with Sally's memory and the fact that the pumpkin head might have eaten her...
A gust of wind whipped past his nose; he smelled cakes and pies!
His heart sprang into his throat! CHRISTMAS! "Pyramus, we can get help from Sandy!"
"Who's Sandy?" Pyramus asked.
Jack, in his joy, changed back into a skeleton and began to run towards the smell (which he now barely detected without his gargoyle nose). "He's our way out of this mess! We'll amass an army of elves and reindeer and we'll take back HalloweenTown..."
He slowed to a snails pace. He smelled something else; fire.
DONE!
One sitting write again. Sorry if it's hokey. More to come after I update my Thunderbirds fanfiction.
