- Part Two -
"Lance..."
He's now holding my hand in a tight binding that is only just visible in this darkened prison that we have been forced into. He turns to face me and...a mirror? Is what I faintly see in his face a mirror of what I am showing? Why does he look so worried, scared?
"Look through there."
And he pointed towards the last archway which led to the one room that they had yet to walk into. Lance pulled away and began to walk towards it.
"Aren't you coming?" Red's presence still lingered a little way away, exactly where he had left it. He shook his head stubbornly and just like that he was anchored where he stood.
"I'll wait here for a while." he replied, nervously, confusing Lance. Then he examined the wall.
That same worry that had shrouded Red was beginning to seep into Lance's veins, even in his oblivion. It was beginning to rebound.
The next room met Lance's eyes with a momentarily dumbfounding effect, then a silent, stomach lurching horror; for the contents of it were surprising, although not completely contrasting to the other chambers. There was a small collection of yet more pedestals except they were...tanks.
"It looks like a laboratory," Lance stepped in further, and more horror gushed over him. "So this is a treasure too...research on Pokémon?" he hissed...
A scuffling sound alerted Lance's attention again; he turned just in time to notice the boy take a step back. The unaware Dragon Master sadly acknowledged the reason for the behavior he saw.
Something draining my emotion...so that I can't see others'...I can't believe I couldn't see his reason. It's fear.
Red's eyes shone faintly from their distance, the emotion that Lance had only just recognized strangely obvious in their glow.
He was afraid of my anger so stayed away...what have I done?
I have to now aid him to embrace that fear and...swallow it up.
Perhaps this entire world has broken him...
Y...you can come now...
The anger has gone...but the pain remains..
The pain, it's...within me, but it's not...what is this curse? What's happening to me?
The two of them entered the room again, browsing just as they had done with the others. Around the circumference of the roughly dug out chamber were those cold, lifeless tanks with what looked like cold, lifeless contents.
The two of them cringed in their disgust and loathing, vehement thoughts wheeling around in their heads. They gradually moved about the area, making their manners a threat to the absent presence. Red paused when his eyes caught onto something in particular.
It was something that appeared to have told him to stop. There was a lurch as his eyes brushed past it, and instinct brought him to stop. Instinct, or was it some form of destiny...fate? No, that didn't bear thinking about and was too farfetched, but this object – for a reason he no longer questioned – was drawing him in.
"Lance? What's this?"
Lance blinked slowly at the sight of Red's return to his side. What had he brought? One of his common little interrogations again...and he pointed at it.
"That's a Porygon. Isn't it?"
This time both of them peered through the glass at what looked oddly like a ball of crystals, suspended in midair – or in whatever the unearthly atmosphere within the casing was.
"I just...I couldn't tell what it was. Look at it. It's just in embryo, by the looks of it, wrapped in a casing."
The Porygon embryo twitched slightly.
"Do you think it's still alive? They must have dumped it down here for some reason. Perhaps it's important?"
"Have you seen anything in here that's important, even slightly, yet?" Lance replied.
Red's eyes automatically fell upon the folder still tucked safely under his arm, but returned them to the embryo without argument.
"It has to be here for some reason. Perhaps they bred it for something?"
There was a slumping sound as Lance sunk down the wall and sat there, motionless as if he were an abandoned rag-doll. His expression continued to be strained, though he looked fatigued. It seemed as though they were stopping here.
Red's pity drove him to also sit down, but those exact same emotions continued to pound at his mind. For a split second his stomach lurched, nauseating him over the strange reminder of death that Lance had portrayed when he collapsed against the wall, a weakness that was somehow uncharacteristic of him. His mind angered him because he thought of this, angered by the force of nature that told him that such a thing was sickening, angered by the force of nature that told Lance that his heart was troubled...
His worried thoughts were temporarily cast away when the sound of Lance rustling papers caught his attention. The Dragon Master sighed and leafed through the contents of the folder he had purloined from the database room. It mostly looked like brief or abstract notes, sketches and equations that neither of them could interpret.
Red shuffled through it all without catching much of its meaning, watching a variety of words, numbers and rough diagrams flash past his eyes. Lance was only staring at one sheet in particular, decorated with a faded, pencil lined drawing that barely showed upon the stained, brittle paper.
"They all look like crystals that have been attracted to each other." He looked up. "That Porygon: there are details about it in this folder. It looks as though...it's been genetically modified to have some sort of quality...that prevents dimension breakthroughs? What the hell is that supposed to mean?" He dropped the paper half-heartedly.
"Well...it had to be here for some reason," Red replied, watching the drawing float down to rest on the tiles. "And it's this one but...what are these Dimension Breakthroughs?"
"I can only guess that it's got something to do with stopping vermin from entering this earth; a bit like something to stop viruses from entering a computer system."
They were silent whilst they watched the tank above them, with its indescribably alien atmosphere and mysterious contents - tiny, insignificant, but oh so powerful. Something about that one object was incredibly foreboding; it omitted such a creeping, sinister feel that it dominated the entire area. The sense of fate that Red had tried to disagree with earlier was steadily becoming more and more apparent and – with unwilling courage – agreed that, at that point, it had been very wrong to deny that truth...
That it was fate...but what kind of fate?
The silence, the kind of silence that would be at the end of all things followed. Lance still sat sprawled on the ground, gazing into nowhere and with one hand positioned over his heart.
It's impossible to stay happy throughout your entire life, but this is...impossible. To suffer enough pain that it begins to worry other people so much that it's unhealthy...
No...but I can't see if the pain is true or not because...because of that façade...
A façade that's cruel. A façade that should not exist, please, for the love of Moltres almighty...A façade that I vaguely think I've met before, in a different shape, on a different person...
Otherwise...like I saw once before...if I have no reason for this lightened philosophy of hope, the abyss will crush me.
"Red? Hi, Red..."
You just said that in your nervous voice to act, you did, to act over the fact that you detested my existence. You were charred and twisted up on the inside, slashing the blame into me because you didn't really care.
"I'm going out, would you like to come?"
Don't do this to me. Why did you do this to me...?
But I still smiled up at you, unaware...naive towards that lying façade that you foully used to cover up your despising nature...
I still saw you as my...'mommy'. I still viewed you as a dictionary definition of such a thing. Now I can't even see you as if you were a person, you were a thing now I think back on it. You were a monster, a monster had grown inside you, for reasons I was again oblivious of...
Even in that unbearable, darkened environment that I dwelled in as a child, I remained as something similar to the sun's light. Somehow...
Now I see that it irritated you. Now I do. Why were you the one person in this world who tried to plunge me into hopelessness whilst I was somebody who tried to exist to see...
Smiling faces...
But I don't want to see this smiling face. There's something broken in this face when you smile, it doesn't seem right.
The face consumed my sight – the face that was strained, forced, tortured into something attempting to be warm but was actually iced up with torn emotion. The owner of the pain held out her arms and wrapped me in them. Even though I still believed that this frozen warmth was real, I still recoiled. But still, I thought her mask to be real...I think back on it and...it just seems like it was a Childhood Fantasy.
"Don't smile at me, Red...it does nothing..."
Why? Why could you not just smile? It changes the world; it changes your world...
She stood, leaving me stranded. After she swept out of the room, out of the area, out of the house...out of my life...I felt the smile drain away. Even if it was a smile that could never have been mirrored in that person's face, it was for her. I didn't want her to give up the way she just gave up. I didn't want her to give up on smiling at somebody, just once, and feeling the smile, meaning it. I didn't want her to give up on the universal struggle.
When they came around later, I was terrified. There was nobody around until they came in and found me there, sitting exactly where I had been when she glided away like gossamer so easily, with the same expression on my face, except it wasn't smiling.
I never understood...for so, so long...what had happened. I was so ignorant...in some ways I thought that she had been right; you can't smile the whole time. But you shouldn't give up the entire game, the entire fight just because you cannot smile with honesty.
They told me that they had found her. They had found her but she wasn't there. I didn't understand. They had brought her back, but she had gone. Even though I didn't understand what she had done to herself back then, I still knew, with my engulfing naivety that I had to find somebody else to show my smiling faces.
So this is what it is, this Innocence...
It's because I don't know. I don't know a philosophy of hate, or any other purity of reality. I just have a philosophy of a little boy's opinion; that the entire world shouldwear smiling faces...
But now...in this cold, dark prison...in this atmosphere of ultimate ending...what can that mean...? What are the meanings of my smiling faces?
He was screaming. He was screaming and he wouldn't stop...
The crystals that hovered and glowed faintly, ever so faintly inside the glass dome sparked with a last illumination of farewell then collapsed with a clatter.
Another spasm of searing pain stabbed through the brittle body, causing its owner to writhe in his pitiful, defenseless state. The human form was etched with infection, an infection of another life form, a creature trying to find its home within another physical body. This body was vulnerable, part of a species with poor individual defenses...a human that seemed to be connected with the invading creature's type, a human that spited itself and was about to regret...
"Red, get back, go away!"
The words drowned out in the hissing of the beast trying to burst through, be born through its 'host's' skin, engulf his soul with its strangling, scaly coils.
Lance curled up on the ground, the pain having ebbed away, waiting for the invisible claws to return and gouge out his flesh from the inside. The atmosphere trapping him was saturated and humid with the stench of perspiration and urine, overall swimming in a sense of fear and extreme distress. Red did as Lance advised and gradually stepped back, despite the drum-like pounding of worry with each heartbeat flooding to every inch of his body.
The only noises were the harsh, shallow breaths. The sobbing. The heartbeat. The distressed heartbeat. A third heartbeat, powerful enough to burst free from a body.
The screaming.
Its deafening rattle coursed around the area, turning again into the other creature's hiss. The waveringly possessed body shuddered and thrashed again, unable to conceal the thing...unable to keep it within boundaries...
Within a body...within a heart...
"Red, close your eyes..."
He pulled together enough energy to look the boy in the face with frightened, glassy orbs. Red watched the gaping mouth spill a stream of burning crimson as it formed the words to complete its sentence:
"Cover your eyes...please..."
Shaking as if he was caught in headlights, Red brought darkness to his vision with the trembling palms of his hands.
The next horrendous explosion of noise tore through Red's ears and he cringed again against the unforgiving earth. Tears streaked his face, running down more freely as each horror broke into his ears.
The screaming bellowed out again. That was engulfed by the hissing, the toneless hissing. That was engulfed by another alien noise, a sickening explosion of living flesh erupting from fissured skin; that flesh that had emerged being just as alien as the sound that it had created...
Seconds after, the powerful patter of ejected blood splattered against Red's body and, with the odour of flesh that the creature had discarded sickening his senses, allowed shadow and unconsciousness to splinter his form.
- End of Part Two -
(A/N:) o.o ... ... ...
Innocence, Hate, Grace, Sincerity, Mind and Youth are somewhat random. I made them up to suit Finis...
Red's Innocence: I think of it in a certain way that's not quite apparent yet. I know, in some ways...no... (shifty eyes) but that's not what I mean by Innocence, or lack of. (shifty eyes again)
That chamber thing that Red and Lance were in reminds me of the Lost Library from Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation...or, I could have got it from Harry Potter Order, the Department of Mysteries...
'Universal struggle' was in a text in my English exam today. Sorry, they're getting to me.
I know that 'whatever happened to Lance if you get it' is overused. But I'm doing it for a different reason, with different effects and different causes. The fic I took it from was the original Finis. If you ask to read this old crappy fic I will gouge out your eyes with a spork. A SPORK I SAY.
This new description is gorier, definitely. More criticizing, more violent, more angsty...
Bye, folks. If you have any questions, catapult them at me in the form of a REVIEW, PLEASE! ;P AND, IMPORTANT: I'm stupid for not mentioning this earlier, but none of you mind character death later on, do you?