A/N: "Creative meltdown" isn't exactly the word, and neither is "Eresh is a lazy faggot", though that last one was pretty damn close. It's more like "Eresh needs to go through his to-play and to-watch lists before he can get around to doing a fucking decent job". Here I come, Cataclysm, Kira Kira, Genocyber and Utena. Also, NaruTaru/Shadow Star, Nanoha, Texhnolyze, Black Lagoon, Genshiken and Z yeah.
Do not worry, there will be more. I am the god of being inconclusive, so I decided to split it into parts.
First Final: Epilogue of Prologue; Prologue to Second Act
Detroit, 8th October 2010, 01:23 AM
What a shithole. Yeah, it had nightclubs and stuff, but the smell of oil and rust still stuck to the place. It just wasn't big enough. Detroit was no place to live a dream.
Dahlia Evans sighed. She loved her family and her BF, of course, but in the end, she couldn't make it big in freaking Detroit of all places. She'd had to choose, and she'd chosen. Screw pollution and smog to hell, she was going to New York. Big city life and a possibility to make it big, and she didn't care whether the boy holding her hand right now was coming. She loved him and all, but her mind was made up. It was her fate, and if he began whining, she was gonna leave him there in the fucking ditch. Then, when his ex was living the high life, he'd see just why she should have listened.
Stevie squeezed her hand and smiled warmly at her. "Hey, sweetie, you all right? You look spaced out."Blond, fit, handsome and nice to boot, even though he was a bit of a chauvinist pig at times. Good catch. Dahlia smiled back and looked up at him in a way that was clearly intended to tell him that she wasn't all okay, and that she needed him to take care of him. That was how she kept her boyfriends. "Yeah, I'm fine. You're right, I was just out for a bit there. I guess I had a bit too much to drink." That was a lie, and she was proud of it. Dahlia saw herself as a nice girl, and most people would agree. But she needed to be ruthless. She'd need it the day she made it big. She put her hand around Stevie, and together they walked quietly along the Detroit streets, the light from the nightclubs being filtered through the smog to form a multicolored, luminescent haze that enveloped the city and its people in a cold, mostly sodium-yellow glow - something that made it seem special.
The glow dissipated slowly as the two came closer to the inner suburbs, where Dahlia lived. She squeezed Stevie's shoulder to make him feel like she needed to be protected from the deepening darkness. He was nice, but easy to screw with, and that was why she loved him. The smog clinging to the buildings drifted slowly away towards the city, blown by a chill wind. Stevie held his hand in front of Dahlia's face to shield her from the acrid haze blown by the sudden downdraft in a show of mock machismo.
Suddenly, his whole body twitched, so abruptly that even Dahlia got caught off guard. "Stop. Wait here, baby, there's some freak out there." He stepped forward, a look of fierce determination on his face. "Hey, freakshow, I know you're out there. Fuck off me and my girl, or I'll beat you down." Dahlia regained her composure, amused by Stevie's overdeveloped feeling of ownership. Paranoia, chauvinism and a threat, all in the same sentence.
Someone stepped out from the driveway to a closed courtyard. There were three of them. A skinny guy with a mop of tangled, light-brown hair, wearing a heavy brown woolen coat and a shy expression on his face, was backing off around the corner. The second guy looked slightly less pitiful, though the wide eyes that darted back and forth furtively from below his mussy black hair made him look quite like a scared rabbit, as did the way he fidgeted with the grey turtleneck sweater he wore.
In front of these two pathetic boys stood a girl about Dahlia's age, maybe a year or two younger, which would place her at seventeen or so. She wore her light blonde hair in two pigtails, which clashed with her arrogant pout and her frankly slutty clothes. "Who you calling a freakshow?" She tilted her head and smiled. "Is that the thanks we get for coming all the way out here to get you?" Stevie's face was getting red, and he was clearly trying to keep himself from lashing out. A spike of fear ran through Dahlia, and she knew that she had to get him away before he broke her face. She nudged him lightly with her shoulder, but he didn't react.
The girl smirked, lowered her head and looked at Dahlia through her eyelashes. "Wouldn't help. We're here for a reason, you know, and you're the first viable ones we've found." Viable ones? What was she talking about? Stevie rushed forward, red-faced and completely lost in his anger, and Dahlia closed her eyes and prepared for the sound of cracking bones. She waited breathlessly for five, then ten seconds, but no sound came. After about fifteen seconds, she began hearing Stevie grunting in pain. When she opened her eyes, she saw the girl holding his raised arm in a vice grip, now clearly accompanied by the creaking sound of bending bone rubbing against bone.
The girl turned her head, unfazed by Stevie rooting around in his windbreaker for something, and talked to the two boys behind her. "Take the guy to number seven and the chick to number two. He doesn't want us to screw up. You know what to do first, though."
An almost imperceptible nod from the black-haired guy was the only signal Dahlia got before the demure-looking, brown-haired guy leapt forward twenty feet in the blink of an eye. He landed a heavy kick on Dahlia's right shoulder, and though she nearly blacked out from the pain, she still heard the oddly fascinating sound of her own shoulder bones getting shattered.
Before she knew of it, the brown-haired boy had pinned her arms and legs down. The realization struck Dahlia with the force of a knife to the ribs. She was going to die. These people were going to kill her. She was never going to see New York, Las Vegas or Tokyo. Her life and all her dreams were going to end at just past eighteen years old. The scream that came out against her will was unlike any sound she'd thought she could make. It was a shrill, rough cry filled with every ounce of the piercing, soul-crushing despair she felt. "I don't wanna die, I don't wanna die, I can't die, I can't die..." Every word tore up her throat as she felt the blood ooze rapidly from her shattered shoulder. She noted with detached clarity that a sliver of bone had probably severed an important blood vessel. Now that she knew she was going to die, it was much easier to think of herself as just another homicide case, the body of an eighteen-year-old girl who was killed by unknown culprits a late October night in Detroit. So easy...
"Oi, Rick, move over. I want her." Through the tears that filled her field of vision, Dahlia could make out the silhouette of the blonde girl standing over her. "You heard me. I like her. Definitely bright enough to be mine. The pressure on Dahlia's body eased up, and she could just see the girl leaning in close. Her lips moved, curled in a prideful sneer that could not be hers, could not be normal. "You're mine. Forever, you hear?"
As Dahlia's vision faded out, she felt another, faint pain just above her shoulder, and then her her body, her whole soul and being, were flooded with pleasure. As she greedily hung on to the last drops of pleasure as they slowly drifted out of reach and a bitter, acidic burn flowed down her throat, she heard those words again. "You're mine. Forever. And don't you ever forget that."
Dahlia woke up to a total absence of pain. Even her mind felt anaesthetized, older emotions faint and out of reach. She was lying on a mattress on the floor in a dilapidated room, its walls a old, dusty shade of grey. She wasn't wearing the miniskirt and tube top she had been wearing before, and instead she was wearing a black T-shirt, a pair of loose navy jeans and lightweight canvas sneakers. Something was in the way of rolling over, something hard down by her hip. As she traced its contours with her fingers, she realized that it was a sheathed knife, about ten inches long. As she began to pull it out of the sheath, a now-familiar voice rang out through the room.
"Don't go trying to kill yourself with that thing now. Oh, and it was all real. Just wanted to make sure you knew that." The blonde girl was sitting lazily in a chair beside Dahlia, filing her nails. "You're alive now, and that's all that matters. Sure, you'll be working for us, but well..." Dahlia wheezed out the first words that came to her mind.
"City... I want to go... I won't... I won't make it there, will I?" The girl looked slightly amused. "The city? You wanna get into nightlife?"
Dahlia nodded weakly, surprised by that she felt so much stronger than she should have been feeling. "Heh, nightlife. That's perfect. You'll be able to do whatever you want when you're not on a job for us, so don't worry. I'll be here to help you, for a long, long time."
She extended her right hand, and Dahlia, even with her shoulder splintered mere minutes ago, effortlessly shook it by force of instinct. "I'm Chelsea. Chelsea of the Volturi, but don't worry about them right now. For now, it's me. And remember, you're mine.
Forever."