NaNoWriMo 2010 - True Love's Kiss [ 5a / 10 ]
When Jonathan opened his eyes, his first thought was the Hell was a rather bland place. The room he was in was small and dark, not unlike the basement he remembered being in when he had taken the knife to his wrists but it lacked any windows. There was a soft firelight brightening the room enough to allow him to look around but other than the odd torch lining the wall, there was nothing else inside the small, stone room. He tested his body slowly, testing his toes and fingers to make sure he could still feel them before trying to move his hands and feet, then arms and legs. Everything seemed to be in order.
He took a deep breath and was pleasantly surprised that he couldn’t feel the pain he had known for so long. He closed his eyes and tried to feel out his other limbs, searching for any other signs of pain, and found none. He lifted a hand, even if it was a little weighed down, and felt his own ribs, finding that not only were his ribs completely healed but his body was at a healthy weight again and his muscles were firm and defined once more. It had been years since he had had a body like this and immediately he was a little suspicious.
He gathered his strength and sat up carefully, the soft material beneath him and the firmness of a mattress worrying him for just a moment. He clearly was not in that house anymore but the fact that he was not in pain and apparently completely healed had him wary of where exactly he was. This place wasn’t hot enough to be Hell and there wasn’t enough pain and suffering going on around him. He knew enough about the old scriptures to know that he should be in agony by now for daring to commit the mortal sin of suicide.
He shifted so his feet rested on the ground and tried to listen for a sound, any kind of sound, to see if his hearing had returned as well. He couldn’t hear the fire crackling as it burned or the sound of himself shifting on the mattress but that could merely be a result of the noises being too quiet. He gently pushed himself to get up but he didn’t get far. Something tugged sharply on his neck and his wrists. He was forced to sit down again and immediately panic began to set in. He might not be in hell or even the basement of his home but wherever he was, he was most definitely someone’s prisoner. He raised his hand and swallowed hard at the sight of an old fashioned manacle and chain. What in the world was going on?
The door to the small prison room he had found himself in opened and immediately he set himself on guard. He backed up in the bed, curling up on himself, watching for whoever would come in to show any sign of hostility. He did not expect to see the man who had grabbed his arm in the diner that night, who had touched him so kindly, and his friend to walk through; both of them holding bottles of a thick red liquid that looked suspiciously like blood. He must have growled at them or something because the other man’s handsome face broke into a sly smile and the man he knew simply raised an eyebrow at him. “Is that any way to greet the man who saved you, love?” the man said, though the way his lips formed the words hinted at an accent.
Now it was Jonathan’s turn to raise his eyebrows in surprise as the pair stepped closer, though it was the man he knew that was the first to sit on the bed, setting one of the bottles aside and working on opening the other one. He was saying something about how exactly he found out where Jon lived but the deaf man’s eyes were more focused on the bottle and how disturbingly sweet the smell of the liquid was to him. A hunger the likes of which he had never known before, as if he had gone for weeks without nourishment consumed him at the smell. His eyesight grew sharper and he had to open his mouth as he felt his teeth grow longer and sharper to avoid cutting up his own gum line. Either of the other men seemed overly concerned though. The friend of the man he knew just watched him with an increasingly bored expression.
As soon as it was open and given to him his instinct took over and before he could even do so much as think that the situation was wrong, he was downing the blood as if it was water, drinking it with such haste he could feel some spilling over his lips and staining his skin. When he was done with one, it was exchanged for another, which this time he drank a little more slowly. There was a warm hand resting against his back, rubbing circles into skin he had once known was ugly and gnarled with scars but now was clear of any such deformities. The more he drank, the more the hunger abated and the less like a starved animal he could feel himself becoming. He was given a third bottle to drink and he did though this time it was less like he was dying of thirst and more like he had just taken a run in some extreme heat.
This calming of his inner animal allowed him to pay better attention to the conversation of the two men around him, though the companion, dressed immaculately in a black suit with a white shirt and a smooth, silken looking black tie with only a single white stripe wrapping around the cloth interrupting the solid color, looked more annoyed now than he did before. He was saying something in an odd tongue that Jon could not decipher, even with his apparently heightened eyesight. Still, he tried to understand whatever he could. He knew enough to be able to tell that they were no doubt talking about him.
He finished the third bottle and was offered a fourth, which he took and drank leisurely this time. He was starting to feel full with the blood and warmth was spreading throughout his body at the sensation of it filling his stomach and inevitably spreading through his arteries and veins. It was an odd feeling that he normally would have questioned had he felt that the two men around him would be amiable to answering his questions. He somehow doubted they were, at least for now, though the one he had known from before was still rubbing gently at his back. These two men, whoever they were, were rather odd men if they were the ones who had captured him.
The one in the suit eventually gave the other a stern look before picking up the empty bottles and leaving the room, though whether he locked the door behind him or not, Jon couldn’t tell. He frowned as he realized that the small conversation going on around him was the first true test he had been able to conduct as to whether his hearing came back or not but, in truth, he had heard nothing, not evening the faint ringing that sometimes accompanied those that were just temporarily deafened. He wonders why it was the rest of his body was healed but he was left with his deafness anyway. Perhaps it was because it was a wound he had endured far too long ago for it to be healable?
The man who sat beside him turned and forced a small smile to handsome face. Jonathan could tell just by looking into this one’s eyes that there was something off about him but not in a bad way. It was almost as if he was looking into the eyes of someone he had known for a long time but had forgotten the name of in the time they were separated. “It’s alright,” the man said and reached out to touch him but Jon, too used to hands hurting him, shied away from the contact. A flash of hurt crossed the man’s face and he took his hand back but his expression didn’t falter otherwise. “Paeonius was just giving me a reaming for waiting so long to go and find you. He said that if I would have gone sooner, I might have been able to make the transition easier.”
Jon drank deeply from the bottle before setting it aside on the ground, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand before raising both to sign his response, not daring to look too carefully at the stain. -What transition?- He felt different, yes. He felt stronger and faster. His remaining senses were much more sensitive and, if he tried, he was sure he could focus them a lot more accurately as well. Why this was, he wasn’t sure but he wasn’t in pain so it couldn’t be all that bad.
The man bit his lip and looked away. His brow knitted together as if he was trying to decipher how exactly to phrase whatever it was he was going to say next. Jonathan took the time to look around and clean his bloody hand on the blanket. The general feeling of the room gave him the impression of being chained in one of the old dungeons that was often found in the lower levels of the ancient castles in Europe. He wondered if that’s where he was. It wouldn’t make much sense but right now not much else did either.
“What do you remember from before?” the man asked in reply instead of answering directly, looking up to watch Jon’s reaction while he thought. He remembered the pain, so much pain. He remembered despair and feeling so utterly alone. He remembered the stinging sensation of the blade tearing into his skin and thinking that it felt like a dull pain compared to the lash of the whip against his back. Other than that all he could remember was seeing darkness and the feeling of being cold, very cold for a long time before something warm gathered him in its arms. He tried to articulate this with his hands but found it difficult. Sign language could only describe so much.
But the man seemed to understand what the meaning was and sighed, one of his hands coming up to scratch at the fine hairs at the back of his neck while his entire body language all but screamed of sheepishness. “By the time I found you, you were too far gone for any conventional sort of medicine,” he said quietly, “and no matter how much pressure I tried to place on your wrists, you continued to bleed out. I was left with no other choice.” The man sighed and turned to him again, this time with a pleading look in his eyes. “I’m not entirely sure that you’ll forgive me once you realize exactly what it is I’ve done to you.”
Jon’s dark eyes narrowed, immediately suspicious but he didn’t let his defensive position slip. Whatever had been done to him couldn’t be all that bad. He was healthy again after being sickly and in pain for so long and he was far away from the latest man to hurt him in a long string of abusers. Sure he found that odd drink that looked a lot of blood unusually satisfying but that could mean nothing and everything. So far as he was concerned it was a mild protein drink that he was given to balance his stomach out after he had gone so long without eating. He had been fasting for three days before the suicide attempt though how this man would have known about that he didn’t know. He frowned deeply and curled up tighter.
The man watched this movement but didn’t say a word about it, instead sitting closer and looking him in the eye. Even with only the firelight to see by Jonathan could tell that there was something different about those eyes now, eyes that had only been grey before. Now that he was looking more closely there seemed to be flecks of some kind of color in them but which color he wasn’t exactly sure. Still, he didn’t want to allow himself to become vulnerable just for a better look. He had made that mistake one too many times in his life.
“Jonathan, you have nothing to worry about here,” the man said, “I won’t hurt you. Neither will Paeonius. You are safe with us. You always will be.” His expression was sincere but that didn’t mean his words were. Jon snorted at the words. It was a promise that had been made to him before, one that was always broken. In his haunted eyes, there was no such thing as a man who meant what he said, especially when it came to his safety. All they wanted was to hurt him and eventually they all did. No one was safe.
The man reached for him again and this time Jon let his lips curl and something like a snarl or hiss escaped him. Why he made that sound in specific, he didn’t know but it felt right. His teeth were still long and sharp. He could feel them. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he really had gone to hell and simply had returned to earth as a demon. It would explain a few things, even if he had never really heard of such a thing happening in his own personal faith. Demons were usually intangible beasts.
But either reaction seemed to deter the man. If anything it just made the mystery color more prominent in his eyes. He parted his plump lips and showed his own set of fangs, a series of sharp teeth that overlapped his normal human ones that sharpened themselves down to fine points at the end. They were no longer than the teeth themselves for now but somehow Jon knew that that was likely to change if he continued to antagonize the man. His own certainly felt longer than his normal human teeth. He wasn’t able to close his mouth around them without tearing his own gums.
The man tried to speak but his lips were having a harder time forming the words around the fangs, which made reading them all the more difficult. What Jon could decipher was that the man was warning him to stand down before things became more dangerous than absolutely necessary for him. He raised his right hand and showed the deaf young man the fingernails that were starting to grow out into an impressive set of long and lethal looking claws. Jon stared at them and tried to calm himself down, even if this new instinct inside him was telling him to fight for all he was worth. What was going on? He never dared to think this way before.
The claws on the man’s fingers and the fangs in his mouth retracted as the color in his eyes faded. Jon felt his own sharp teeth retreat into his mouth and his sharpened senses dull back to normal again. He felt the urge to cry and fought it. He just wanted some answers but he didn’t know what questions to ask to get the answers he wanted to begin with. He was always in the dark.
The man reached for him again and yet again he ducked away but this time the man wouldn’t be deterred. His hand came to rest gently on Jonathan’s black hair, petting it softly as if he was a puppy. Warily, Jon looked up, only to see a soft smile touching the man’s handsome face. “My name is Decimus,” he said patiently, and the deaf man could tell he was purposely over enunciating the name to make sure that he would understand it, “and I am a creature like you are now. I know it is difficult to understand what is going on under the best of circumstances with full knowledge of what has just happened and your case makes it especially difficult to grasp.”
Jonathan took the chance to unfold his arms and try to scoot himself further away from the other on the bed. Did that mean that they were demons together? Then maybe they were still in Hell but at a higher level. He didn’t remember any of the torment but maybe that was normal for those like him. He reached one hand up and brushed it through his own dark hair, searching for horns but finding none. He couldn’t feel a tail either. Maybe demons had different physical forms than he was used to picturing. The best he could do was guess until he got a hold of a mirror to look at himself with.
Decimus grabbed him hand and held onto it with enough force that Jon was worried that the man might break it if he tried to take his hand back. He left it in the other’s warm palm, his gaze flickering between the hand and the other’s face. What was going on? What was the situation that apparently was so hard to grasp. He could understand becoming a demonic entity. It meant that he would have to revise a few of his own belief systems but that was a null point now that everything was set and done. His other hand went to his neck to rub at the skin in an absentminded gesture of nervousness but when his fingers brushed the cold metal of the manacle he had on around his neck, he wrapped his arm around his knees again and held them close. He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that at least part of this was a twisted dream.
Part B ---->