Every step was tense, was blood-freezing. Walter wanted to fall through the dent behind him, fall through the wall, and plummet to the deeps of below, just to escape this – this approaching enemy. He forced his legs to creep closer to him; his arms settled, his head, with shuddering eyes, watched the Scholar come close, and closer, and closer, taking his time with his slow, patient steps. Walter thought of what he said, tried to figure it out, tried to break through it, like it was a mystery, a gift box. No present came out; no jack in the box to complete the toy's name. Everything seemed clouded, upside-down in enigma. The boy listened to the replays of the white scholar's voice, heard them plummet and repeat over and over in his mind like a recording that wouldn't stop.
"This guy," Walter moaned, voice weak as body. "What is he talking about?" he asked himself in a soft murmur, as if something inside him, something deep within him, knew the answer, and refused to tell him. The other side of him – that seemed to know everything was now speechless. Footsteps neared; Walter coughed, casually.
"I'm talking about your pain," White Cloak seemed suddenly closer, few inches away. His shadow fell upon the boy, darkened his features, shadowed away his expressions and plummeted them into deep enigma, an enlightened ebony darkness full of currents that faced every direction and sounds that shared every diction. White gloves felt silky smooth, hateful hard against Walter's neck as they picked his entire body up easily, as if he were a pebble in the hands of a titanic tree, a tremendous sapling beginning its journey with tenfold prowess. Walter could do nothing – he let himself get picked up, for it was the only way he could stand for the first time in his life. White Cloak brought him down against the wall, just like he had wished in his mind. Sediment crumbled downward, he was lost inside the dark, concave dent on the wall. It was suffocating, and so confining, like he was trapped in an iron silhouette.
White Cloak leaned in closer to Walter's ear, so he could so lightly whisper into him, an intrusion of deep, dark words into his mind – his thoughts. They were soft, and seemed so harmless, while his touch, his throttling position burned his skin, boiled his blood. Walter could almost feel the human beneath the costume, the hand underneath the gloves; felt the norm warmth of fingers that once used to share happiness, and once used to let go of things that they loved, hated, shared, smiled, shouted, everything. For once, they actually seemed… normal. White Cloak breathed. He touched. He loved; he hated, he thirsted, he lusted. For once, Walter thought, what really was the difference between this – this man who hid himself inside a cloak, inside a shroud of costume, and himself, the boy who had nothing but pain for the last eight years and on? Why did he seem so… connected? So attached, like a leech that was didn't want to be there but was now suppressed by indifference, touched by the sounds of probability and maybe. Yet, something was wrong. The loving fingers had grown cold with hate, raw with anger, the human breathing became beastly, demonically, sharing fingers became selfish and greedy, morphed into something large and ugly and distorted crossing – something so bad that they had to hide behind white, to give themselves the appearance of innocence, the appearance of power, of normality, of pureness? White Cloak brought the other mutated hand to Walter's head, and felt against his forehead; the fingers trickled over his skin softly, smoothly, pleasingly, while Walter, watching them carefully with shuddering eyes, refused, tried to pull away. He couldn't.
"I'm talking about your goals," White Cloak went on to say. Listening, Walter's teeth ground each other in reluctance. His skin quivered and feared, nowhere to hide for everything it knew and loved hid behind it. The touch continued to burn Walter's throat, his head, his brain – he was bursting with scarlet boil, turmoil began to infect from his head, his mind, fingering and sinking chaos into his blood, leeching him with great toil, work which was easily succeeded. Walter coughed. Well, at least he thought he coughed. He knew he did something, something involving his throat, his voice, puffing cheeks. He wasn't sure. Not anymore, he wasn't sure. Did he form words? What was the meaning of that last thought? He would need a dictionary, no an axe. Wait, an axe? Why an axe? What was an axe? Look, the walls were orange.
White Cloak's words were the only thing clear into his mind now; his memory – his thoughts, his other half, the people he knew, Eric, the Minors, Tsukansu, they all faded. His eyesight blurred into pure, hot whiteness, a whiteness that shot at him ten thousand times every minute, ten million times a second. The words – they droned on like hypnotism, like a brainwash that didn't seem as bad, as evil anymore – like a good kind of brainwash. An indifferent kind of brainwash. "Your desperate and blistered hands are not wet enough to wash away the pain that is your past," voices echoed – Walter was not even sure if this voice came from White Cloak. Just a voice. A voice he thought, he knew he could trust. Eyes drained of color from the inside, mouth opened wide in authorized access to his body. "If it is wetter you must become, then go, swim in the seas of revenge and lakes of power. Drain yourself from all things that are unimportant, act as if they were. Become filled until you are bursting with hate, anger, revenge, a good feeling of success, for success is all you need. Drown out your fears, everything you know and cared about for your vengeance. Nothing else matters."
Walter said nothing, he had no voice, no soul, no thoughts any longer. Images flashed in his mind. Images of pain, of hurt, of murder, fearful pictures flashing like kaleidoscope formations of eternal bleeding, of extraterrestrial monstrosity, the pain of the world, the depression of society, the killing, the stabbing, the drinking of blood, the sickening nausea that was forced away by power, the punching, the restraint, everything flooded his mind with new thoughts, new things as the pure, gloved fingers traced over the boy's forehead. He was never innocent from the start. "You think you are alone," floods of words and sentences that seemed like a thousand a letter continued to pour in like a waterfall that wouldn't stop crashing down, wouldn't ever give him a chance to fight back. "You are not. I share the same pain as you do. I know you thirst a life, so bad that you lust it; a life without pain. You've felt hurt, scarred emotions and fragile, broken love over and over and you detest it. You spit it out like a horrid acid, a poison that retches your stomach yet it keeps coming back." Walter's eyes continued to drain from reality. Blurred eyesight became blindness. Senses failed, even hearing, and somehow, he still heard words, for they were no longer words – they were omens, they were floods that affected the body, the mind, the soul. Images kept flashing – images of the world. Massacres, manslaughter, suicide, homicide, they all filled his mind. Random people dying – sharing the same pain as he. Tears shed, invisible, noir tears of picture, of screenshot and anecdote, like sightseeing through tiny, tiny glass tubes that allowed you to see a frozen memory of time, a broken piece of the past to share, to learn from, to take in and become one with a million times over, each time with a different piece, a different shard.
"You believe you can wash that pain with power, the pain of your childhood," voice went on. God went on. "You are correct. But you won't get power in a place like this. You won't get revenge from a place like this. Walter, are you listening to me?" it spoke softly, gently, gracefully. Tainted fingers picked him up again and slammed him against the wall, bringing Walter back to reality, a new reality that he now faced. The images faded away and burst away with pain, with a powerful slam, a powerful slam that took away the painful images. Walter breathed sharply, senses rebooting like a restarted computer that had been infected, and now, it no longer knew that it had been infected. His eyes rattled, calmed. "Are you listening!? Huh!?!" White Cloak screamed into Walter's face. The boy, still traumatized, said nothing. The white glove lifted from his forehead.
"Hey…" Walter said, breathlessly, mindlessly, eyes broadened in a possession of hell. His voice was monotone, crackly, uncontrolled my emotion, by thought. "Bastard…" Walter said slowly, staring into space. "Who… are you? You told me you didn't care about me…"
"No," White Cloak spoke, softer this time. "I had to say that because back then in Hanayuki, that annoying witch Shihou was there. I had to pretend I didn't care, so I could make them believe that my goal was to take your powers and rule the world."
"Make… them… believe?" Walter said randomly, repeatedly in his mind, half-conscious with unaware senses, a robotic voice murmuring softly, unable to even whistle sharply to the smallest scale.
"Yes." White Cloak seemed to tense down a bit, shoulders weakening, muscles loosening, unstressed. "Why don't you join me… Walter? Join me in the search for a world – a life without pain! The search for Utopia!"
"A life…without pain?" Walter asked most mindlessly; his presence was absent, nonexistent – on vacation. His eyes did not dilate. His facial features petrified, he found his voice lost once again. "No! You're crazy!" Walter suddenly brought himself back to life more, soul and conscience still dazzled, shaken. He shook his head wildly, knowing no words, no diction. "You're crazy!!"
"Well, then," White Cloak said, surprisingly calm. Walter stopped shaking. He shot a blank stare at the man who had long lived past his years, yet still, surely, had the voice, the movement of a young thirty or twenty year old. "I'll take that as a no. Too bad." Walter watched, confidence scarce as White Cloak drew out the bone dagger from his other hand again. It glimmered in the nonexistent light, dangerous and daring, sharp and death-defying. White Cloak held it close to his body. It seemed to smile a devious smile, and, pulling it back, White Cloak smiled, somewhat happily, somewhat disappointedly. "Then you just might as well die." Walter, eyes widened beyond belief, watched the dagger as it was turned back, then, thrust forward, and he closed his eyes, waited for the pain. Eyes squinted horribly, and began to tense up, waiting for the hurt, the stabbing, hellish dagger to dig deep into his organs, his heart, his chest or stomach, maybe. He waited for the blood to pour out, the blood that would no longer turn to blood because of lack of thought, lack of consideration. Things were confusing, even now. When he had closed his eyes, the dagger had been just seconds – inches away from his face, his throat. Why – why did he feel no pain? Was he all ready dead? Had it been so quick, so swift that he had not even realized his own blood, his own soul leave his body? Or… was it something else?
He tried to open his eyes, slowly and meticulously like shutters being pulled open by one who was afraid of the sun, the bright light – a vampire who wanted to see if his years as a monster had been over, and if not, he might as well just die anyway. A miserable life it had lead, and this is what Walter chose to do at this very moment. Slowly, they opened. Slowly, they revealed the brown eagerness in his eyes, the surprised, shocked face of Kasumi Walter. The dagger – it was just a centimeter away from his throat. He felt its cool, cleanness against his skin, dig deep into the layers, not deep enough for blood. He wanted to swallow, yet he was afraid that his Adam's apple would cause a wound as it dropped down. However, the temptation to swallow went on mindlessly, endlessly. Nervous knots tightened all around, ten of them growing at the same place at the same time, a million times larger than his body. He could no longer breathe. He was scared of that, too. He trailed his eyes to White Cloak's hooded gesture. His face, darkened in shadow and concealing of presence, only revealed his mouth, his mouth that smiled, demonically. Somehow, even though Walter stared deep into his hooded shadow, he knew that White Cloak's eyes were no longer on him. They paid attention to something else – but who? How?
"Shitnenmaru…" the lips moved, dangerously, daringly. Walter's eyes widened, he didn't know why. Even the movement of this – this man scared him now. "It's been a long time." White Cloak's head turned, turned to look past his shoulder, and to the redhead Council in the middle part of the hallway, staring at him, deviously, dangerously, nervously as a sweat drop strolled down his cheeks, and he gulped, swallowed, swallowed for Walter for he could not do it, not yet. A hard, cold glare met Shintenmaru.
"That's enough, White Cloak," Shintenmaru spoke, softly, yet strongly. He cleared his throat from all panic. He became a different person. "You've brainwashed for long enough."
"It's not brainwash, Shintenmaru-san," White Cloak joked with him with his raspy, inhuman voice.
"Enough," the council said, eagerly, coldly, coyly. "I don't plan to discuss this," he snapped.
"Is that a hint of paranoia I sense, Shintenmaru?" White Cloak asked with a smile, a smile that distorted reality and made it and molded it according to his will. Walter, still stressed, listened, tried hard to make the quick, much too fast words out into sense in his confused, clouded mind. His senses seemed ten times slower, slowly rebuilding themselves back to their original norm.
"I told you, I'm not discussing," Shintenmaru shot back, quickly. Suddenly, White Cloak felt stabbing, thin pains into his body, into his arms. He could no longer move; his nervous system was a failure now – he didn't know why. But it only took him a second for his intelligent mind to figure out. He smiled, amused, as if everything was a joke, including the world itself, society's hard word – everything a joke. Threads of glowing, bright yellow connected from various parts of his body, his limbs to Shintenmaru's body. It was the same thing Daniel had done in the Swamp of Mystery with that disked opponent. They were now connected souls. White Cloak's hands trembled, putting fear into Walter's face, distorting it horribly like mashed snow and sand together, an indecisive color. "Your life ends now."
Shintenmaru brought a glowing, holy hand and fingers to his own neck, and began to cause him a struggle, tighten his fingers. That's right. He was strangling himself. His tanned, shaded neck began to discolor, began to become thick and gray and stony, solid. White Cloak's edge of his hood did the same. "Ugh!" White Cloak was forced to choke out. "This old trick…" he murmured to himself in a rasp.
"White Cloak," Shintenmaru said, almost friendlily. He smiled, amused himself for once, as if assured of his own victory, despite taking his own life. "We've both lived too long for our own good. Society and time will move on with generations upon generations. The world does not need us anymore. We've outlived our use." Tan skin turned more into stone, reached Shintenmaru's cheeks and edge of his hair. The soft glow continued, the threads connecting their souls shimmering in the absent light. The stony hood of White Cloak did the same, and he muttered out, from pain of course. Half of White Cloak's neck, hidden beneath darkness, was stony, discolored, solid and inhuman. He was finally becoming the monstrosity he had always been, but now on the outside.
"No…" White Cloak could barely speak now. "I'm not done yet," he rasped. "Who else will have the power to bring upon Utopia!? Who else will guide others into a world without pain! I am the one that has to get rid of the interferences that the world has because they are the obstacles that prevent it from reaching Utopia by itself! You and the rest of the damned councils are just another example, a major one at that!" White Cloak began to strengthen his voice, his body. His limbs struggled to move, shuddering. Shintenmaru widened his eyes. No way… the council thought. He's resisting the Soul Link just by using brute force? Impossible! White Cloak broke his arm free of the hold, and the fingers began to glow softly in a quiet murmur of voice as he brought it up like an axe into the air. No way! Shintenmaru thought as he watched. The hand was brought down, and then – cut the threads.
The links broke away; their souls were no longer bound. Shintenmaru fell to the floor immediately. He cried out, half his face now stone, slowly breaking itself into normal again. White Cloak stood, still strong, yet half his face covered in stone as well. "Your efforts for an instant kill are useless," White Cloak ridiculed. "But I'll give it to you." White Cloak put out the stone half of his face out in the light. His grayed cheeks seemed so inhuman, so clean yet so dark. It began to crack, sift a soft noise of breaking inside, deep, deep inside. "This'll take a while to wear off." Shintenmaru did not reply. He breathed heavily, on his knees, clutching the side of his neck, begging his powers to release the half-death he caused for his own body to release itself. His stony mask began to crack, sift as well, yet slower than White Cloak's. "But – that's not the deal for you, now is it?" White Cloak chuckled. "No matter. I don't have time for this," he began to leave Shintenmaru, as well as Walter without taking a last glance at him. Walter watched, feeling unimportant. Just minutes ago White Cloak seemed so involved in him. Now he seemed to be ignoring him.
"Wait!" Shintenmaru begged, voice unstable, masked face distorted. Walter fell to the floor, weak, unable to move. His stare followed White Cloak as he went into the next hall.
"No!" White Cloak snapped. "I have business to attend to. Not too far from here." White Cloak's presence suddenly faded – faded into nothingness.
"Damn it! No!" Shintenmaru cried out, voice weak and raspy, stony. Walter was left there – unattended, scared.
PoVS
The door rattled open. It brought in light to the deep, darkened room. Two presences walked inside, their shoes clicking on the shadows, hurting them, hitting them with impatient steps. Their silhouettes became clouded, dark figures in the light source behind them. Their bare features were seen. The sounds of sleeping, purring, and low growling filled the wide room of twelve, walled cages. This was a different room – a room not of Jeremy's presence. Shihou stepped in, Kanadou hot on her trail. "It's been a rough day," she conversed.
"Yeah," Kanadou agreed. Their steps continued past a few cages. Low, beastly sounds murmured in their ears, delightful tunes. "At least it's finally over." Shihou walked over to a cage. She bent down, nodded her head in agreement.
"It is finally over," Shihou spoke softly, gently as she brought her face closer to the iron bars of the cage. She smiled, friendlily. "Isn't that right, Kibahina-kun?" Shihou smiled into the cage. A low growling from the darkness answered back. It was a weak, tired growling, signs of a long, lonely day. Shihou felt sympathy for the thing; but it had to be locked up. For its own safety – and for hers, for the whole dimension in fact. "Sorry for keeping you; you don't mind, right?" Another low, bored growl answered her from weakly, meaninglessly ground teeth.
"We can't spend too much time with the backups," Kanadou muttered scornfully, a low scowl beneath that stylish mask of his that hid his appearance – his face. He stuffed his hands eagerly, nervously into his pocket. It really had been a long day.
"Yeah, yeah," Shihou brushed him off. Kanadou sighed, weakly. "Don't call them that; don't you want to see Chiri-kun?" Shihou asked sympathetically. "I'm sure it's lonely without you."
"No, I have no need for him right now," came her answer.
"Oh, Kanadou!" Shihou scorned. "Don't be so cold!" she said, almost cheerfully, and went back to Kibahina, softly smiling at it. A low, scarce growl came from the depths of the weak shadowy cage. Today was not a normal day for it, either. It had seen something. Something horribly wrong – something it didn't want to ever experience again. If only Shihou was around enough to know. But, she, along with Kanadou, would find out soon enough anyways.