Chapter 13: Omen of Battle
A/N: Chapter title is a reference to the Return to Dream Land/Deluxe boss prelude theme. It's called battle on the horizon in the Jukebox, but I think Omen of Battle sounds cooler, and fits this chapter more. This chapter contains brief descriptions of grossness (mainly from when El found Barb), Dark Matter, and a bit of gore (the latter of which is nothing you haven't seen if you've played Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards)
Let's get into it.
The Kirbies and their chosen Human friends watched with baited breath as El flipped the T.V to a static channel, before sitting cross-legged on the floor. Mike, with Kirby still on his shoulder, slid off the armchair he'd claimed and began whispering gently to his girlfriend. "El, I know you think you have to do this, but you don't."
Kirby saw Max, over by the couch, rolling her eyes. Ordinarily, Kirby would've given her a disappointed frown. As it stood, however, he had to agree. Not with her attitude, but with her opinion. This was most definitely something that had to happen; no matter how much Kirby didn't like it. Otherwise, this place would end up just like Ripple Star did, before Kirby and his friends saved it. So when Max looked back at Kirby, he nodded his agreement sadly.
He ignored Tuffy's rare look of concern, from where the Puffball clung to Max's shoulder.
He only caught a brief glimpse of Max's shock before turning back to face El, along with Mike. "It's just..." Mike continued. "You've only done this before once. And... your mom... she loved you, and wanted you to know what happened."
Kirby remembered that story. El had told it not long ago, as, unlike the Human kids (Nancy and Jonathan were just as unaware as the Kirbies) the Kirbies had never heard such a story. They didn't know El had the power to look into a person's memories. Keeby had cried after hearing El's story, Greeny just looked numb and quietly huddled in on himself, looking like he had given up on this world, Tuffy had been pissed hearing what El's life had been like before she met Mike, Lucas, and Dustin, and Kirby, already prepared for such a story due to having found out El's past recently, could only wonder what could've been; what it would've been like if El had lived a normal life, or if she'd grown up in Cappy Town, like him.
But that's not what matters now. What was done was done, Kirby told himself; and right now, they had to focus on ensuring there was a future before they could mourn the past.
"But," Mike continued. "Billy's mind is sick; diseased."
It was true; Kirby knew. Billy's mind had been reduced to a passenger in his own body, and his body had been reduced to little more than a puppet for a god of pure Dark Matter. Kirby didn't know what might happen if a pure mind interacted with one infected with Dark Matter; there were no psychics in Dream Land besides NESP's, and he'd never come across one during the Dark Matter catastrophes. There was no telling what could happen.
But whatever was going to happen had to. Kirby had been siding with Mike before, but that was only because what El was doing was unnecessary. Now, though, they wouldn't get anywhere if she didn't do this.
"Zero is in him," Mike stressed. El turned to look at Mike and Kirby, eyes red and slightly watery, likely brought on by Mike's words of tender concern. She must have seen the fragile, yet encouraging smile a scared Kirby was giving her (unbeknownst to Mike) because she returned a small, grateful one of her own, before making eye contact with Mike.
"He can't hurt me. Not in there," she said. "We don't know that," Mike said with a small shake of his head, clearly having trouble holding himself together. El turned to face him more directly, entwining her hand with his own. "Mike," she said, gently.
"I need you to trust me."
Mike turned to Max, for some reason. The girl only raised her eyebrows at Mike expectantly. Tuffy scowled in his characteristic "what are you lookin' at me for" face. Kirby ignored him and gave Max a grateful nod with a small "Poyo."
Turning back to El, Mike said "Yeah. Just... be careful."
Kirby reached a nub out to where the two teens were holding hands, placing his nub over top of their own. He looked deeply into El's eyes. "Good luck, poyo. Come back safe."
El nodded to Kirby and Mike, and the two boys returned to their armchair. They noticed Max returning Kirby's earlier nod, and nodded back, the three children appearing to reach an understanding.
As the television hissed on, El closed her eyes and tied the black blindfold around her head.
The water was, as always, strangely warm around her bare feet. El found herself in a familiar dark void, approaching a distant Billy, who looked the same as the last time she'd seen him: sitting on his bed, staring blankly downward with empty eyes.
El took a deep breath as she looked down at him. Her eyes were still teary. They remained that way, because her heart broke every time she looked at Billy. One of the side affects of her powers was that she could sense the emotions of others, provided they were strong enough.
The sheer sadness and rage quietly emitting from the unnaturally still Billy was unlike anything she had felt before, except for when the attack at the sauna had happened. Right now, though, she couldn't tell whose emotions were whose. She know some of it was definitely coming from Billy. She also knew most of it was probably coming from the thing inside him.
Zero. The name made sense, didn't it? The sheer bitterness she could feel coming from him spoke more than words ever could. Everybody else was happy; but he could never be. Everybody else was cute and colorful; round and pink, and yellow, blue, red, green, any color of the rainbow.
But he could never be.
Everybody else had friends, but he never could. Everybody else was loved, while even before he made it appropriate, he was feared.
Zero. Void. Nothing. She knew what he'd done. She knew what Kirby told her; she knew what Will told her. She'd seen what Zero, through the Demogorgons and monsters of the Upside Down, had done. She'd been told what had happened to Bob, the man who could've become Will's father. She'd heard it straight from her own dad.
He didn't make it, Kid.
She'd seen what he'd made the Demogorgon do to Barbara. Those empty eyes, that pale skin, covered in a thin layer of ooze, a slug slithering out of her mouth.
The certainty that she was gone, gone, gone.
All because of him.
And still, the only thing El could feel for Zero was heartbreak. Heartbreak, because Kirby, her sweet, endlessly happy, supportive pink friend...
That could've been him.
It all came down to luck. Would you be born good, or bad? It all came down to how the universe was feeling at that particular moment. And that was where Zero's bitterness came from, wasn't it? The unfairness of it all. Why couldn't he have been Kirby? Why couldn't he be happy? Why did everybody else have what he couldn't?
Yes, El felt nothing but sorry for Zero, even after all he'd done; even after he kidnapped Will, killed Barbara and Bob, possessed Will, and created a monster made of melted Humans.
He was Kirby. Just a bit emptier.
Regardless of how she felt about Zero, he needed to be stopped; she couldn't forget that. El had come here to do something, and she was going to do it. She reached for his hand and gently entwined it with her own, ignoring the black spots slightly higher up his arm; spots where little orange eyes sometimes opened and gazed into her own deep brown ones.
"Billy," she whispered, trying her best to reach past the Dark Matter coating his body and soul to the angry, scared boy beneath. "Can you hear me?"
"I want to see," she pleaded. "I want to see what happened."
Billy finally, finally looked up at her, eyes just a bit more aware, now. Had she done it?
His hand closed tightly around her arm. The rage was stronger than ever, now. She panicked, beginning to hyperventilate.
"Something's wrong," Mike said worriedly, as he watched his girlfriend hyperventilate. The Kirbies watched nervously. They all sensed that something was off. Horribly off. They shared a concerned look with each other.
El twisted her arm in Billy's grip, crying out in pain and fear. There was a direct mental link between them, now. It was not her arm he was grabbing. It was her mind. He had grabbed her and wasn't letting go; had forcefully made a connection with her soul.
She continued struggling as she watched, to her horror, the black moving down his arm, toward where his hand gripped hers. Where their minds connected. She felt the shadowy essence of Dark Matter slide onto her arm-into her mind and body-just as he let her go.
She immediately fell backward due to how hard she'd been pulling against him. And she saw...
Everything.
She gazed at her now black-covered forearm in terror as she fell backward, those little orange eyes staring right back. Countless images and accompanying information flashed through her head in rapid succession as she fell, screaming. Billy screaming in the sauna. A terrifying monster made of melted rats shooting a mouthed tentacle at her-no-at Billy's face. A PINK CRETIN-a familiar pink Puffball swinging a strange wand and firing orange hearts at a gigantic white sphere with a red eye-ME-in the center of a storm of Dark Matter.
The meat monster shooting a tentacle that latched onto a man-onto Tom's-face. Her discovering the possessed Billy in the void for the first time. Heather shooting upward in the tub of ice, before being pulled under, screaming for help.
A world of red skies and black clouds, a Puffball and a Fairy shooting glowing blue crystals at the same sphere-ZERO TWO-from before, now with a halo, blood-soaked wings and tears of blood streaming from its new eye.
The old one exploding out of Zero in a shower of blood.
A Human girl with a paintbrush.
A creature resembling Kirby, but tan and without a mouth; quickly becoming a cyclops.
A big blue penguin in red robes-King Dedede? Kirby said he looked like that-stomach ripped open; ribs forming a gruesome set of teeth that chased a terrified Puffball riding a large hamster-Rick, right?-along with countless other animals.
And at the center of the stomach-mouth, sat the same orange eye as the ones now coating her arm.
A...splash...? Cold water soaking into the back of her shirt. Blue sky, white clouds, seagulls. El gasped from the shock and the cold. She crawled in circles on her hands and knees, taking in her surroundings. A beach. This was a beach. She knew from the pictures and books Dad had shown her.
She scrambled to her feet, the waves rushing in around her legs from where she stood in the shallows.
It was cold.
Her arm was cold.
She gazed down at it.
Little orange eyes blinked up at her from the blackness.
"El, are you okay?" Mike asked. Kirby was shivering. All four Puffballs in the room were. Because Mike was right. Something had latched onto El, and was now in the room with them all. They could feel its hatred from here; its disbelief and rage as it sensed more than one Puffball in the room.
"Are you okay?" Mike repeated. El exhaled loudly. "I'm okay..." she whispered. "What's going on?" Mike asked. "I'm... on a beach..." she answered. "Okay," Lucas began slowly. "I may be dense; but the last I checked, there weren't any beaches in Hawkins."
The kids all shared wary looks.
"What else do you see?" Max asked softly.
In the distance, El saw a woman. She was...pretty. She wore a white sundress that flowed in the breeze. She turned and waved at El.
"A woman," El said.
"I think she's looking at me," she muttered.
The woman bounced a bit, waving happily in El's direction. El tilted her head in curiosity. She felt something cold creeping along her arm. She looked, and saw that the watchful darkness was spreading further up her arm. She snapped her head back up when she hard the woman cheer, "Woo! Yeah!"
El looked to her left to see a little blond boy with a surfboard in his arms running excitedly toward the woman. The darkness that had latched onto El's mind told her without words that it was a younger Billy.
"You did it!" The woman congratulated.
"There's...a boy..." El said. Her friends shared curious looks with each other.
"Did you see that?!" The little boy asked excitedly. He reminded El of Kirby, a bit. "Yeah, I saw that!" The woman said, sounding proud. She kissed the boy on the head. "That was at least seven feet!" The boy said. "Well, I don't what it was, but it almost gave me a heart attack," the woman replied.
The boy tilted his head. "Ten more minutes?" He asked. The woman looked at the setting sun with a look in her eyes that unsettled El. She looked like she was considering something far more important than how much longer to stay at the beach.
After a few more moments, she looked back down at the boy (her son?, El wondered.) "Yeah, okay, ten more minutes," she said. "Okay," the boy happily called back to her as he ran in the opposite direction, back toward the water. "But any longer than that, Dad's gonna be mad, okay?" The woman said. "Okay!" The boy cheerfully replied.
As the boy picked up his surfboard and returned to the water, the woman got a worried look in her eyes. "Billy?" She called. Both the boy and El turned to look at her. So El's suspicions were true. It was a younger Billy. It was a memory.
"Watch out for rip currents!" The woman warned.
"I know!" Billy responded, before wading into the water.
"It's Billy," El said from the outside. The Kirbies gasped. "It's California," Max said. "Huh?" Keeby asked with a tilted head. "It's a memory," Max said, knowing there was no time for explanations about states, but that the memory part was the important thing. Keeby made a noise of understanding.
Kirby, meanwhile, was deep in thought. The woman must have been the young Billy's mom. Kirby couldn't help but think back to that night he'd been left at Max's house and overheard her stepdad-Billy's biological dad.
"He's probably out with some whore, the son of a bitch."
"Hah! And ain't that the truth! Son of a bitch! Haha!"
The Susan lady he was talking to would have probably been Max's biological mom, which left Billy's mom nowhere to be found. And considering how the Niel guy seemed to feel about her...
Back in Billy's mind, the sun had gotten a little lower over the beach than it was when El arrived. The water continued running over the shore in a wave of foam. As the seagulls squawked, El heard thunder in the distance. She looked toward the horizon, way further down the beach, and saw the source of both the thunder and the Dark Matter still spreading over her arm, infecting her mind and body in the real world.
Kirby shivered as he felt the Dark Matter inside El take further root. She had to know about it, but she was likely not saying anything for the same reason as Kirby and the other Puffballs who could sense it; for the same reason Will was visibly squirming as he struggled to stay quiet about it, Tuffy glaring at him to get him to keep his silence.
She still had to find the source. They could worry about Zero possessing her right afterward.
She just had to finish quickly.
"I think I see it," El said. "The source."
And it looked like that time was fast approaching.
El took a deep breath, checked and glared at the spreading darkness with its watchful eyes on her arm, faced the storm with red lightning in the distance, and started toward it.
A/N: Uh-oh! Looks like Mike was right! El connected with Billy's mind to find the source, but it wasn't only Billy's mind she connected with. Billy's mind is mixed with Zero's. She connected to both of them, and as a result, Zero is now slowly possessing her through their mind-connection, but the Kirbies and Will won't say anything until El finds the source, otherwise they'll come out of this ugly situation with both no progress and a possessed El on their hands.
This was a bit of a new experience for me. This was the first time in this fanfic I've really written in the P.O.V of someone besides Kirby, who wasn't in this chapter much.
Did you enjoy? Do you like where this is going? Did you despise both the chapter and the plot? Whatever your thoughts are, please sound off in the reviews. It makes my day, keeps my motivated, and lets me know I'm not wasting hours of my weekend writing something for nobody to read it. Reviews speak louder than silence, follows and favorites, after all (though those last two are still very much appreciated)!
I hope you enjoyed, have a great day or night, and I will see you guys...
Next time...
