[Fanfiction] Echoes Of A Scream, Chapter 1: Six And Six
Series: Echoes Of A Scream
Title: Six And Six
Part: 1/?
Warnings: angst, gore, swearing, sequel
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Moonchild does not belong to me, nor do its characters or anything else related to the movie. I make no profit out of this story, it is written merely for fun and entertainment of other fans. Yadda yadda.
Notes: Sequel to " And Yet I Scream"
Dedicated to someone special. This couldn't be the same without you. This couldn't be without you.
Summary: A building set nine stories down into the earth has collapsed. The survivors struggle. But are the dead truly beyond rescue?
Echoes Of A Scream
Chapter 01: Six And Six
~*~
At one uncertain point in time, everything changes. A peculiar… warmth, blooming where the cheek of a living being would be and then spreading from there. Tendrils of it curl through me, dig into me, take a hold of me. The sensation grows more acute, more defined, and the word pain momentarily has meaning again before it disappears from the ruin of my mind and leaves behind only that overwhelming, burning sensation.
There is blue the shade of the sky on a warm summer afternoon, and just a hint of gold, sun-kissed or maybe rays of sunshine, soft and filthy and familiar; and light, a light in the dark, a light so bright it hurts my eyes. The scorching sensation, the pain is still there and I scream, yet there is no sound.
Then everything fades once more within the blink of an eye. The need to scream dies out, the burning fades to warmth which becomes cold and then nothing, the light dims and darkness descends once more.
The final curtain.
I am scorched from existence, plunged into the kind of darkness that is too deep to ever be released from.
I die.
And yet...
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve minutes to open his eyes again.
Everything was upside down, and he felt sick. The world, never black and white, was now one single shade of grey. Flakes drifted down to earth. Not snow, not ash. Dust maybe. Who could be sure? There was no sound, as though the world held its breath. Just a very faint buzzing in what he guessed had to be his ears. He was neither warm nor cold and couldn’t feel his body.
Was he dead?
Maybe.
The last thing he recalled was someone reaching out a hand from across the room. Trying to push him away, trying to grab him? There was no way to tell. Had he run to that person or tried to go up the stairs? Why had everything been shaking?
What had happened?
He couldn't really feel his body at all.
Something was missing, some fragment of memory or maybe something more, and if he could just wade through the slog that was his mind and dig deep enough, then everything would make sense again. He needed things to make sense right now, because otherwise... what would happen otherwise? If this was really afterlife, would there be a consequence? Or was this just the limbo between here and there, now and then, painful knowledge and blissful ignorance?
The grey nothing around him lurched, and it took him a while to register that someone had rolled him onto his back. A face was hovering above him, smeared with dirt and tears and blood. Dark eyes were wider than they should be, so wide he felt he could lose himself in their white. The mouth opened and shut slowly, jaw going up and down, like a gaping maw opening, like floorboards splintering and crashing and swallowing a blond figure, tearing something out of his life and...
“... SHO!”
Sho jerked, coughed and winced as the pain registered in his mind. His leg throbbed, and his side burned, and hurting even worse was the knowledge that he made it out when someone else had not. A tear trickled down his cheek as the world came rushing back to him. He realized that the grey around him was the dust cloud settling after a building had collapsed nine stories deep into the earth. There were no sirens in the background, because you didn't usually get those in Mallepa. But there was Toshi's voice, loud and shrill because he didn't know if his friend was okay. He had probably been worried sick.
Grabbing Toshi's arm for support, Sho coughed. He had to turn his head to spit out dust and blood and bile, and even then he felt as though he had been to hell and back. When he tried to sit up, Toshi's shaking hands kept him down. “Don't move. We're getting you to a hospital. Son is getting the car.”
Moving him might make the damage worse, but there was no other way. The place would be swarming with thugs of one gang or another in a minute who craved to see what the hell had happened here and maybe get their hand on any sort of valuable leftovers.
Son... Toshi and Son had still been further up when the explosion had been set off. Sho vaguely recalled bellowing into his walkie talkie, yelling over and over again to run, get the fuck out, escape before the explosion far below made the whole structure collapse.
He remembered a cold hand grabbing his wrist, dragging him along.
They had made it to... no, he didn't remember. What floor had they been on? The cold hand had left his wrist, a sharp voice had ordered him to keep running as a surviving thug lunged at them in blind panic. Sho had made it to the stairs when the floor shook badly under his feet and a pillar burst with the sound of a heavy whiplash, forever imprinted in his ears.
A voice crying out his name, a hand reaching out... and then the ground opened up and swallowed him and he fell, beyond reach, beyond rescue; fell and disappeared just like that...
“SHO! Sho, can you hear me? Where is Kei?”
Toshi's voice brought him back to the present, and he turned his head, blinking into the settling dust. Cold panic gripped him when he saw that there was nothing left of the building that had once been the entrance to the underground structure.
And then everything went black.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve days to scare away two of his best friends.
Yi-Che cried so much. Son was very silent these first couple of days. In a way he felt guilty for having survived when Kei had not. What he didn't get was that Kei wasn't dead. Could not be dead. He was in there, alone, helpless, crushed. And Sho was just as helpless as he tried to push his body into motion when he couldn't even stand upright on his own two feet.
Crybaby.
The pain was excruciating, but he refused to take painkillers. Somewhere Kei suffered alone and in darkness, his body in who knew what kind of a horrible state after the vampire had fallen several stories deep with the whole building collapsing on top of him. No, he didn't want the pain to ease, even though he was unable to find sleep. He needed this to cope.
Son thought it was just his way of dealing with Kei's death, the pain a sharp reminder of a close friend lost to a horrible accident. Yi-Che thought it was his way of mourning chances never taken. Toshi thought he was being stubborn and whispered of getting better soon for Kei when they were alone. But they were all wrong.
Sho's mind was already wrapping itself around a plan, and it was a good plan. He simply needed the time to execute it properly. Money was the most important thing of course, and then he needed men and he needed equipment and he needed it all as fast as possible, preferably yesterday and he really didn't want to wrap his head around what had happened not so long ago and...
“SHO!”
Son had entered his bedroom and stood next to him with an expression of anger and pity in his eyes.
“Yi-Che is devastated.”
Of course she was, what with Kei's situation.
“I wondered why she was so upset every time she came here.”
Because it reminded her of Kei's horrible fate, and because Sho sometimes yelled at her when the pain became too much.
“I overheard what you just told her, Sho. About digging Kei up.”
Good. Then maybe now they could move to the actual planning phase of the operation. He had struggled to figure out how to break it to them, but apparently his own pain-deluded brain had already moved on that point.
“All that talk about vampires...”
It didn't actually matter if they believed this. They just needed to trust him and accept that they needed to help Kei. If Son and Toshi pulled a few easy job now, and Sho joined them as soon as his leg was healed properly... Yi-Che had seemed rather optimistic about the leg, after all.
“Yi-Che won't be coming back.”
And then... wait. What?
Sho blinked and struggled to sit up, gasping in pain. This wasn't what was supposed to happen.
“I can't let you upset my sister like this. You know what this looks like, Sho? It looks like the grief over Kei's loss made you lose your mind.” Son looked down at him and kept his distance. It was as though there was a huge chasm between them, and it widened with each heartbeat that filled the room's silence.
“Son... I know how crazy this must sound to you. But please. I'm begging you. We need to look for Kei...”
“Kei is DEAD!”
“NO HE'S NOT!” Sho roared, nearly toppling out of the bed. Why couldn't they see? How could they just disregard the truth like this? Kei needed their help, needed his only friends in this fucked up city. “Don't turn your back on him, Son! He needs us! We need to save him! He's SUFFERING, don't you get it?”
Son slowly backed away, shaking his head. “You've snapped, Sho. You've lost it. I'm sorry, but I have to think of me and my sister first and foremost... I'm sorry.” He took some more steps backwards, then just turned around and left without another word.
Sho yelled for him to come back for half an hour. In the end he fell back onto the mattress, pain and fear bubbling up inside of him, and so he just cried. Not silent tears, but gut wrenching sobs, the kind that hurts in the chest and makes the head spin. Things were falling apart and he couldn't do anything about it. Kei needed him, and he had no way of getting to him.
His world was shattering bit by bit, and bit by bit he was losing those he needed to keep it together.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve weeks to walk again.
It wasn't even because of the severity of his wounds. He'd been through worse. But as with everything in Mallepa, health care was also all about money, and Sho didn't have any of that available currently. They scraped together whatever they could, Toshi and Shinji and him, just like old times, but it didn't really help all that much. His doctor, if you could call him that, was barely able to keep infections from settling in, let alone speed up the healing process. Sometimes Sho felt it would have been better to just get the hell out and home.
Yi-Che would have been able to piece him back together better than this, of that he was sure.
A small smile lit Sho's face as he lay in his bed, eyes never leaving the stain on the ceiling. It was vaguely hand-shaped, and reminded him of many things. On good days it reminded him of the way Yi-Che would treat their wounds after a rough job and how later that same night cool hands would always check over the dressings once again to make sure everything was fine. A cigarette dangling loosely from full lips he once dreamed of kissing, and a small smile curling around that mouth whenever Sho winced. Crybaby. Good times. On bad days, the stain reminded him of a stretched out hand that just seemed to hover for a moment. White against a black background. And then time came back with full force and the hand vanished. Gone.
It was the reason why Yi-Che had never been able to come around and help him again.
It had taken less than two weeks for everything to fall apart.
Mad with pain and desperation, Sho had tried for the longest time to make all of them see that they had to go back. Only he and Toshi knew that there was no way Kei could have died down there. Which left only one horrible, terrifying conclusion that Sho was absolutely not yet ready to face.
His dreams revolved around that possibility.
Splintered bones and crushed flesh, cracked skull and tears shed in between endless tons of rock.
The possibilities were too horrifying. They haunted his dreams, made him weep in despair and vomit with disgust. And no one but Toshi believed him. After twelve weeks, he could stand without falling again. After twelve weeks, he was left with nothing but a barely healed body, one friend in all the world and an impossible task ahead of him.
For now, he just lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, not sure how the future would play out. There was just one goal in his mind left: Get Kei out, not matter what the cost. Three months had already passed. Months in which his best friend in all the world had probably suffered a fate much worse than dead.
It was all Sho could do just to hold on to his own sanity. Though Son had believed it to have slipped away already, Sho was sure it still remained, safely tucked away in between despair and determination. Now that he could walk on his own two feet again, he would do everything to get Kei back.
He had but one purpose in life, and he would fulfill it.
No matter what he had to do.
No matter what it would cost him.
No matter how long it would take.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve months to start digging.
Sho couldn't say he was proud of what he'd done in order to get the money he needed. In the end, he had probably betrayed every moral rule Kei had ever erected for their jobs twice over, and even then he hadn't gotten the money together quite fast enough.
A year. God, it had been a year. The mere thought of what damage time likely had done...
But no. Surely, Kei had managed to stay calm and wait. Maybe he had just gone into deep meditation, a way to protect himself from being aware of his situation for 365 fucking days.
A whole year...
Against her brother's wishes Yi-Che had paid him very secret visits every now and again. Not often, but just often enough to see the severity with which Sho battled his own demons. There was something needy and desperate about his eyes all the time, as though he was off a drug and looking for the next fix. In a bizarre way, he was. And each day passing without that fix was torture. Each step closer to that fix was bliss. Torn between both extreme he felt hollow, trying to reach a goal that seemed impossibly far away.
There had been a time when both he and Toshi had been close to giving up. What was the point? Even if they scratched together the money for competent men and equipment and then were able to pull off the digging... who was to say they'd even find him? Who knew just where the collapse had pushed his body to?
Sho had spend a week getting piss-drunk, each glass chasing away the guilt he felt at spending hard-earned money on alcohol when it was supposed to speed up Kei's rescue.
But there was no way he could rescue Kei. And the more Shinji hammered away at him like a sculptor trying to force a perfectly fine piece of rock into an unnatural shape, the more Sho started listening to him. What if he was right and Kei was really dead? What if he was right and Kei really had been a figment of his imagination? What if he was right and this had all been a needless panic induced by the pain of his leg so many months ago? What if he was right and Sho should just forget about all this? Maybe this wasn't real, maybe Kei didn't need him, maybe, maybe. However, in the end he would cry himself to sleep and dream of pain-filled green eyes and knew he was simply lying to himself in order to escape a burden so heavy it threatened to crush him, avoid a task so enormous it seemed more sensible to simply stay put and do nothing about it.
That wasn't himself though. That was just lack of sleep and lack of food talking. Sho was more stubborn than that, and after this one week of weakness, he yelled at Toshi and Shinji and Son, when he randomly saw the latter on the street, and went back to grim work.
This part was the grimmest of them all.
Sho stood still, night air as lukewarm as piss lapping greedily at his skin, oily and thick with tension. He hated being back here, where everything had gone wrong.
The wreckage of what had once been a building had made him puke upon first sight so long ago, when he had come back here for the first time. Ever since his leg had decently healed, Sho had come here almost every night or day. Maybe he had adapted to Kei's habit of tormenting himself with reminders of what had gone wrong, but that hardly seemed to matter anyway now. During all these months, he had clung to the desperate hope that Kei would be able to feel him, sense his presence or his heartbeat. Anything to give him the strength to hold on, because maybe he would read the signs right and realize that Sho was coming to get him.
Was Kei close enough to the surface to pick up on that?
Probably not, Sho realized over the coming days. As they dug deeper and deeper and unearthed rotting thug after rotting thug, he faced the possibility that Kei was so deep down he had been completely shut off from anything that happened so far above him.
Each night was torture as they kept digging. Each day was full of nightmares as Sho slept. Each second ticking by without news of Kei made him lose his mind.
The first few times when they had found a body, Sho had perked up, believing it to be Kei simply because part of him was still that naïve little boy who figured that this was how it was supposed to go. But it wasn't.
It never was.
Over the passing days he started to lose hope.
Then, one fine day, there was the sound of someone retching their guts out. Probably another one overworked. He'd have to hire new people soon, before they dropped dead from exhaustion. But a few of the workers were standing there and stared at something in the hole beneath them.
Hope apparently didn't die quite that easily.
Sho made a run for their new find and stopped dead.
Blood everywhere. Dark red, dried on stone and clothes and pale skin. Bone, whiter even than the body. His insides glistened in the spotlight directed at the dig site. Sho slowly lowered himself into the tiny space, a hollow area in between heavy rocks. Kei's body was twisted and broken, bent ad odd angles and torn open.
„Kei... please open your eyes...“ He bent down further to touch him, caress his cheeks where they were not showing too many claw marks. Sho was trying not to gag. This was Kei. There was no reason to be disgusted. And yet he could only make himself touch a part of unharmed cheek, nothing else. How to move him out of here? How to help him? Sho's world was crumbling yet and there was nothing he could do. „I'm here... it's going to be okay. It's...“
Sho's warmth was seeping into Kei, spreading from the vampire's cheek and curling through his body, bringing back feeling to dead limbs and so much long forgotten warmth that it's like being burnt.
Those green eyes he had missed like a lost piece of himself snapped open. Madness gazed back at Sho and he flinched, nearly losing his balance and crashing down on Kei's severely broken legs. Empty, those mad eyes reflected the overly bright spotlight. Tears gathered in eyes the colour of the sky on a warm summer afternoon, and Sho wiped at them angrily with sun-kissed fingertips, coming away filthy from all the dirt gathered on his skin. It didn't matter as long as the tears were kept at bay, but it was a losing battle.
The ruin of a body jerked. There was a sickening crack as the skull slammed back against stone and broke further. A horrible sound reached Sho's ears, tearing through his heart and mind. Choking. Dead lungs fighting to fill themselves on pure instinct
„It's alright... Kei... Easy... breathe...“
Tears slid down Sho's cheeks as finally Kei coughed, a wet, wrong sound. The green eyes rolled back and he was gone again, eyelids closing like heavy curtains and the twisted ruin of a body slumping as the vampire's conscious awareness was plunged back into the depths of his own mind. He looked as though he couldn't be anything but purely and utterly dead, his soul scorched from existence.
Sho was ashamed to admit that part of him was glad those eyes were closed again. Part of him feared those eyes. Part of him wanted Kei to be dead, for this ruin couldn't possibly be Kei. Part of him wanted to curl up in a corner and weep in silence and solitude.
Part of him knew that if he gave voice to the anguish in his bleeding heart, he would confirm to himself that this was not a nightmare but gruesome, inescapable reality.
And yet Sho screamed.
~*~
to be continued...
Title: Six And Six
Part: 1/?
Warnings: angst, gore, swearing, sequel
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Moonchild does not belong to me, nor do its characters or anything else related to the movie. I make no profit out of this story, it is written merely for fun and entertainment of other fans. Yadda yadda.
Notes: Sequel to " And Yet I Scream"
Dedicated to someone special. This couldn't be the same without you. This couldn't be without you.
Summary: A building set nine stories down into the earth has collapsed. The survivors struggle. But are the dead truly beyond rescue?
Echoes Of A Scream
Chapter 01: Six And Six
~*~
At one uncertain point in time, everything changes. A peculiar… warmth, blooming where the cheek of a living being would be and then spreading from there. Tendrils of it curl through me, dig into me, take a hold of me. The sensation grows more acute, more defined, and the word pain momentarily has meaning again before it disappears from the ruin of my mind and leaves behind only that overwhelming, burning sensation.
There is blue the shade of the sky on a warm summer afternoon, and just a hint of gold, sun-kissed or maybe rays of sunshine, soft and filthy and familiar; and light, a light in the dark, a light so bright it hurts my eyes. The scorching sensation, the pain is still there and I scream, yet there is no sound.
Then everything fades once more within the blink of an eye. The need to scream dies out, the burning fades to warmth which becomes cold and then nothing, the light dims and darkness descends once more.
The final curtain.
I am scorched from existence, plunged into the kind of darkness that is too deep to ever be released from.
I die.
And yet...
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve minutes to open his eyes again.
Everything was upside down, and he felt sick. The world, never black and white, was now one single shade of grey. Flakes drifted down to earth. Not snow, not ash. Dust maybe. Who could be sure? There was no sound, as though the world held its breath. Just a very faint buzzing in what he guessed had to be his ears. He was neither warm nor cold and couldn’t feel his body.
Was he dead?
Maybe.
The last thing he recalled was someone reaching out a hand from across the room. Trying to push him away, trying to grab him? There was no way to tell. Had he run to that person or tried to go up the stairs? Why had everything been shaking?
What had happened?
He couldn't really feel his body at all.
Something was missing, some fragment of memory or maybe something more, and if he could just wade through the slog that was his mind and dig deep enough, then everything would make sense again. He needed things to make sense right now, because otherwise... what would happen otherwise? If this was really afterlife, would there be a consequence? Or was this just the limbo between here and there, now and then, painful knowledge and blissful ignorance?
The grey nothing around him lurched, and it took him a while to register that someone had rolled him onto his back. A face was hovering above him, smeared with dirt and tears and blood. Dark eyes were wider than they should be, so wide he felt he could lose himself in their white. The mouth opened and shut slowly, jaw going up and down, like a gaping maw opening, like floorboards splintering and crashing and swallowing a blond figure, tearing something out of his life and...
“... SHO!”
Sho jerked, coughed and winced as the pain registered in his mind. His leg throbbed, and his side burned, and hurting even worse was the knowledge that he made it out when someone else had not. A tear trickled down his cheek as the world came rushing back to him. He realized that the grey around him was the dust cloud settling after a building had collapsed nine stories deep into the earth. There were no sirens in the background, because you didn't usually get those in Mallepa. But there was Toshi's voice, loud and shrill because he didn't know if his friend was okay. He had probably been worried sick.
Grabbing Toshi's arm for support, Sho coughed. He had to turn his head to spit out dust and blood and bile, and even then he felt as though he had been to hell and back. When he tried to sit up, Toshi's shaking hands kept him down. “Don't move. We're getting you to a hospital. Son is getting the car.”
Moving him might make the damage worse, but there was no other way. The place would be swarming with thugs of one gang or another in a minute who craved to see what the hell had happened here and maybe get their hand on any sort of valuable leftovers.
Son... Toshi and Son had still been further up when the explosion had been set off. Sho vaguely recalled bellowing into his walkie talkie, yelling over and over again to run, get the fuck out, escape before the explosion far below made the whole structure collapse.
He remembered a cold hand grabbing his wrist, dragging him along.
They had made it to... no, he didn't remember. What floor had they been on? The cold hand had left his wrist, a sharp voice had ordered him to keep running as a surviving thug lunged at them in blind panic. Sho had made it to the stairs when the floor shook badly under his feet and a pillar burst with the sound of a heavy whiplash, forever imprinted in his ears.
A voice crying out his name, a hand reaching out... and then the ground opened up and swallowed him and he fell, beyond reach, beyond rescue; fell and disappeared just like that...
“SHO! Sho, can you hear me? Where is Kei?”
Toshi's voice brought him back to the present, and he turned his head, blinking into the settling dust. Cold panic gripped him when he saw that there was nothing left of the building that had once been the entrance to the underground structure.
And then everything went black.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve days to scare away two of his best friends.
Yi-Che cried so much. Son was very silent these first couple of days. In a way he felt guilty for having survived when Kei had not. What he didn't get was that Kei wasn't dead. Could not be dead. He was in there, alone, helpless, crushed. And Sho was just as helpless as he tried to push his body into motion when he couldn't even stand upright on his own two feet.
Crybaby.
The pain was excruciating, but he refused to take painkillers. Somewhere Kei suffered alone and in darkness, his body in who knew what kind of a horrible state after the vampire had fallen several stories deep with the whole building collapsing on top of him. No, he didn't want the pain to ease, even though he was unable to find sleep. He needed this to cope.
Son thought it was just his way of dealing with Kei's death, the pain a sharp reminder of a close friend lost to a horrible accident. Yi-Che thought it was his way of mourning chances never taken. Toshi thought he was being stubborn and whispered of getting better soon for Kei when they were alone. But they were all wrong.
Sho's mind was already wrapping itself around a plan, and it was a good plan. He simply needed the time to execute it properly. Money was the most important thing of course, and then he needed men and he needed equipment and he needed it all as fast as possible, preferably yesterday and he really didn't want to wrap his head around what had happened not so long ago and...
“SHO!”
Son had entered his bedroom and stood next to him with an expression of anger and pity in his eyes.
“Yi-Che is devastated.”
Of course she was, what with Kei's situation.
“I wondered why she was so upset every time she came here.”
Because it reminded her of Kei's horrible fate, and because Sho sometimes yelled at her when the pain became too much.
“I overheard what you just told her, Sho. About digging Kei up.”
Good. Then maybe now they could move to the actual planning phase of the operation. He had struggled to figure out how to break it to them, but apparently his own pain-deluded brain had already moved on that point.
“All that talk about vampires...”
It didn't actually matter if they believed this. They just needed to trust him and accept that they needed to help Kei. If Son and Toshi pulled a few easy job now, and Sho joined them as soon as his leg was healed properly... Yi-Che had seemed rather optimistic about the leg, after all.
“Yi-Che won't be coming back.”
And then... wait. What?
Sho blinked and struggled to sit up, gasping in pain. This wasn't what was supposed to happen.
“I can't let you upset my sister like this. You know what this looks like, Sho? It looks like the grief over Kei's loss made you lose your mind.” Son looked down at him and kept his distance. It was as though there was a huge chasm between them, and it widened with each heartbeat that filled the room's silence.
“Son... I know how crazy this must sound to you. But please. I'm begging you. We need to look for Kei...”
“Kei is DEAD!”
“NO HE'S NOT!” Sho roared, nearly toppling out of the bed. Why couldn't they see? How could they just disregard the truth like this? Kei needed their help, needed his only friends in this fucked up city. “Don't turn your back on him, Son! He needs us! We need to save him! He's SUFFERING, don't you get it?”
Son slowly backed away, shaking his head. “You've snapped, Sho. You've lost it. I'm sorry, but I have to think of me and my sister first and foremost... I'm sorry.” He took some more steps backwards, then just turned around and left without another word.
Sho yelled for him to come back for half an hour. In the end he fell back onto the mattress, pain and fear bubbling up inside of him, and so he just cried. Not silent tears, but gut wrenching sobs, the kind that hurts in the chest and makes the head spin. Things were falling apart and he couldn't do anything about it. Kei needed him, and he had no way of getting to him.
His world was shattering bit by bit, and bit by bit he was losing those he needed to keep it together.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve weeks to walk again.
It wasn't even because of the severity of his wounds. He'd been through worse. But as with everything in Mallepa, health care was also all about money, and Sho didn't have any of that available currently. They scraped together whatever they could, Toshi and Shinji and him, just like old times, but it didn't really help all that much. His doctor, if you could call him that, was barely able to keep infections from settling in, let alone speed up the healing process. Sometimes Sho felt it would have been better to just get the hell out and home.
Yi-Che would have been able to piece him back together better than this, of that he was sure.
A small smile lit Sho's face as he lay in his bed, eyes never leaving the stain on the ceiling. It was vaguely hand-shaped, and reminded him of many things. On good days it reminded him of the way Yi-Che would treat their wounds after a rough job and how later that same night cool hands would always check over the dressings once again to make sure everything was fine. A cigarette dangling loosely from full lips he once dreamed of kissing, and a small smile curling around that mouth whenever Sho winced. Crybaby. Good times. On bad days, the stain reminded him of a stretched out hand that just seemed to hover for a moment. White against a black background. And then time came back with full force and the hand vanished. Gone.
It was the reason why Yi-Che had never been able to come around and help him again.
It had taken less than two weeks for everything to fall apart.
Mad with pain and desperation, Sho had tried for the longest time to make all of them see that they had to go back. Only he and Toshi knew that there was no way Kei could have died down there. Which left only one horrible, terrifying conclusion that Sho was absolutely not yet ready to face.
His dreams revolved around that possibility.
Splintered bones and crushed flesh, cracked skull and tears shed in between endless tons of rock.
The possibilities were too horrifying. They haunted his dreams, made him weep in despair and vomit with disgust. And no one but Toshi believed him. After twelve weeks, he could stand without falling again. After twelve weeks, he was left with nothing but a barely healed body, one friend in all the world and an impossible task ahead of him.
For now, he just lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, not sure how the future would play out. There was just one goal in his mind left: Get Kei out, not matter what the cost. Three months had already passed. Months in which his best friend in all the world had probably suffered a fate much worse than dead.
It was all Sho could do just to hold on to his own sanity. Though Son had believed it to have slipped away already, Sho was sure it still remained, safely tucked away in between despair and determination. Now that he could walk on his own two feet again, he would do everything to get Kei back.
He had but one purpose in life, and he would fulfill it.
No matter what he had to do.
No matter what it would cost him.
No matter how long it would take.
~*~
Six and six is twelve.
It took him twelve months to start digging.
Sho couldn't say he was proud of what he'd done in order to get the money he needed. In the end, he had probably betrayed every moral rule Kei had ever erected for their jobs twice over, and even then he hadn't gotten the money together quite fast enough.
A year. God, it had been a year. The mere thought of what damage time likely had done...
But no. Surely, Kei had managed to stay calm and wait. Maybe he had just gone into deep meditation, a way to protect himself from being aware of his situation for 365 fucking days.
A whole year...
Against her brother's wishes Yi-Che had paid him very secret visits every now and again. Not often, but just often enough to see the severity with which Sho battled his own demons. There was something needy and desperate about his eyes all the time, as though he was off a drug and looking for the next fix. In a bizarre way, he was. And each day passing without that fix was torture. Each step closer to that fix was bliss. Torn between both extreme he felt hollow, trying to reach a goal that seemed impossibly far away.
There had been a time when both he and Toshi had been close to giving up. What was the point? Even if they scratched together the money for competent men and equipment and then were able to pull off the digging... who was to say they'd even find him? Who knew just where the collapse had pushed his body to?
Sho had spend a week getting piss-drunk, each glass chasing away the guilt he felt at spending hard-earned money on alcohol when it was supposed to speed up Kei's rescue.
But there was no way he could rescue Kei. And the more Shinji hammered away at him like a sculptor trying to force a perfectly fine piece of rock into an unnatural shape, the more Sho started listening to him. What if he was right and Kei was really dead? What if he was right and Kei really had been a figment of his imagination? What if he was right and this had all been a needless panic induced by the pain of his leg so many months ago? What if he was right and Sho should just forget about all this? Maybe this wasn't real, maybe Kei didn't need him, maybe, maybe. However, in the end he would cry himself to sleep and dream of pain-filled green eyes and knew he was simply lying to himself in order to escape a burden so heavy it threatened to crush him, avoid a task so enormous it seemed more sensible to simply stay put and do nothing about it.
That wasn't himself though. That was just lack of sleep and lack of food talking. Sho was more stubborn than that, and after this one week of weakness, he yelled at Toshi and Shinji and Son, when he randomly saw the latter on the street, and went back to grim work.
This part was the grimmest of them all.
Sho stood still, night air as lukewarm as piss lapping greedily at his skin, oily and thick with tension. He hated being back here, where everything had gone wrong.
The wreckage of what had once been a building had made him puke upon first sight so long ago, when he had come back here for the first time. Ever since his leg had decently healed, Sho had come here almost every night or day. Maybe he had adapted to Kei's habit of tormenting himself with reminders of what had gone wrong, but that hardly seemed to matter anyway now. During all these months, he had clung to the desperate hope that Kei would be able to feel him, sense his presence or his heartbeat. Anything to give him the strength to hold on, because maybe he would read the signs right and realize that Sho was coming to get him.
Was Kei close enough to the surface to pick up on that?
Probably not, Sho realized over the coming days. As they dug deeper and deeper and unearthed rotting thug after rotting thug, he faced the possibility that Kei was so deep down he had been completely shut off from anything that happened so far above him.
Each night was torture as they kept digging. Each day was full of nightmares as Sho slept. Each second ticking by without news of Kei made him lose his mind.
The first few times when they had found a body, Sho had perked up, believing it to be Kei simply because part of him was still that naïve little boy who figured that this was how it was supposed to go. But it wasn't.
It never was.
Over the passing days he started to lose hope.
Then, one fine day, there was the sound of someone retching their guts out. Probably another one overworked. He'd have to hire new people soon, before they dropped dead from exhaustion. But a few of the workers were standing there and stared at something in the hole beneath them.
Hope apparently didn't die quite that easily.
Sho made a run for their new find and stopped dead.
Blood everywhere. Dark red, dried on stone and clothes and pale skin. Bone, whiter even than the body. His insides glistened in the spotlight directed at the dig site. Sho slowly lowered himself into the tiny space, a hollow area in between heavy rocks. Kei's body was twisted and broken, bent ad odd angles and torn open.
„Kei... please open your eyes...“ He bent down further to touch him, caress his cheeks where they were not showing too many claw marks. Sho was trying not to gag. This was Kei. There was no reason to be disgusted. And yet he could only make himself touch a part of unharmed cheek, nothing else. How to move him out of here? How to help him? Sho's world was crumbling yet and there was nothing he could do. „I'm here... it's going to be okay. It's...“
Sho's warmth was seeping into Kei, spreading from the vampire's cheek and curling through his body, bringing back feeling to dead limbs and so much long forgotten warmth that it's like being burnt.
Those green eyes he had missed like a lost piece of himself snapped open. Madness gazed back at Sho and he flinched, nearly losing his balance and crashing down on Kei's severely broken legs. Empty, those mad eyes reflected the overly bright spotlight. Tears gathered in eyes the colour of the sky on a warm summer afternoon, and Sho wiped at them angrily with sun-kissed fingertips, coming away filthy from all the dirt gathered on his skin. It didn't matter as long as the tears were kept at bay, but it was a losing battle.
The ruin of a body jerked. There was a sickening crack as the skull slammed back against stone and broke further. A horrible sound reached Sho's ears, tearing through his heart and mind. Choking. Dead lungs fighting to fill themselves on pure instinct
„It's alright... Kei... Easy... breathe...“
Tears slid down Sho's cheeks as finally Kei coughed, a wet, wrong sound. The green eyes rolled back and he was gone again, eyelids closing like heavy curtains and the twisted ruin of a body slumping as the vampire's conscious awareness was plunged back into the depths of his own mind. He looked as though he couldn't be anything but purely and utterly dead, his soul scorched from existence.
Sho was ashamed to admit that part of him was glad those eyes were closed again. Part of him feared those eyes. Part of him wanted Kei to be dead, for this ruin couldn't possibly be Kei. Part of him wanted to curl up in a corner and weep in silence and solitude.
Part of him knew that if he gave voice to the anguish in his bleeding heart, he would confirm to himself that this was not a nightmare but gruesome, inescapable reality.
And yet Sho screamed.
~*~
to be continued...