Snow and Ash - Eight Part 1B
I teleport to the door in the back of the room, or what’s left of it, and open it, running into the hallway and looking in every room I can. They all look the same. Jail cells. Some covered in blood from mutants whose bodies are not yet used to their powers, and some in shambles from those who came around to join us the last time - the ones who, deep inside past the brainwashing, hated it here.
Every hallway is the same - filled with empty rooms.
Just as I re-check one of the hallways, I hear something, something that sounds like a scream.
My heart is racing already, but that just makes me even more anxious. Because no matter how many times I look, he’s not in any of the rooms. I check, re-check, and check once more, but he’s not in any of them.
Every time I pass a certain room, I can hear the screaming. It’s also the only room that is dark. I enter the room, flipping a light switch, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t work. I begin to feel around the walls, thinking there might be a door somewhere. No luck.
I know the voice is Shige’s - his voice, screaming in pain, and as the clock continues to tick, counting down to the destruction of the building, I can’t find him. Before I know it, a tear of frustration trails down my cheek.
I wipe it away quickly and get down on my hands and knees, feeling around the floor for a trap door. The tile scratches the skin of my fingers as I press down and run my hand across it, trying to find a crack where a door could be.
When I reach my hand under the bed, I touch something cold, something that feels like metal. I wrap my fingers around it. A handle.
Without further delay, I hastily pull on one of the bedposts to get the bed away from the hidden door. I go to the other one and pull, rotating between both of them to fully move it. If I could see it, I would have been able to move it with my mind by now, but I can’t.
Once the bed is off of it, I feel around for the handle once again and pull it up, and it reveals a staircase leading down into a dimly lit hidden area of the first floor. I don’t bother with the stairs; I look at the floor and teleport down, but when I do so, the screaming only gets louder.
What, Shige? What is hurting you?
I follow the sound down a few more hallways before another voice joins it.
“Shut up!”
I turn the corner and see the source of the other, a mutant I remember as the one who could create ice. He pounds his fist on the door.
“Stop screaming, you idiot! That’s all you’ve been doing for the past hour.”
Anger rushes through me and I lift up the mutant, exerting a force that is strong enough to break every one of his bones. “Is that your response to someone in pain? Annoyance? Then should I get annoyed at you for screaming right now?”
His hands turn to ice and I lose my patience and pin him against the far wall, breaking the wall and throwing him into the next room.
The screaming only gets worse until it stops entirely. He might not have been in pain at all. Perhaps he was trying to lead us to him.
“Well, well.” Katori rounds the corner with a wall of knives behind her. “Did you really think I could be killed by something that my body created?”
“Leave, Katori. There’s not much time left before everything in this building will be destroyed. Including you.”
“I am leaving,” she says with a vengeful smile. “But I wanted to get a little revenge first. I wanted to show you how it felt to be stabbed by these knives.”
My thoughts go back to the dreams I had of being stabbed to death when the curse was passed to me.
“Stop!” Shige screams from inside of the room right beside me.
“No,” is all she says before over thirty knives are thrown at me.
---
I open the door, once more looking at the knives on the ground before turning back to the contents of the room.
It’s not much different from any of the other rooms in the building - a bed, one end table with a lamp, and a door off to the side leading to a bathroom just big enough to take two steps in.
Shige is sitting in the corner of the room, knees pulled halfway to his chest, writing feverishly in a notebook in his lap.
“Shige?”
He doesn’t answer, just continues to write and by the movement of his lips it seems like he is also saying something, though it is too low for me to hear.
I take a few steps closer and he turns away, his face tightening and his words silenced. A few more steps, and he holds his head with the hand he’s not writing with. A few more cautioned steps and he seems to lose it. I rip the notebook from his grip and with my heart still pounding, I retreat back to the door. When I do so, he sits up straight again, his eyes to the floor, and his lips beginning to move once again.
I look at the old notebook in my hands and open the cover to see the first page covered in the same three words. I flip through, and every single page is covered.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
I drop the book in horror before heading back over to him. He turns away, gasping in pain that seems to get worse as I get closer. But why?
“Make it stop…stop…” he whispers and I notice that his fingers are covered in blood from where he scratched the wall.
“Make what stop? What is hurting you?”
He continues to whisper the same three words and I grab his shoulders, turning him to me. “Shige, look at me.”
“Get away from me.”
“I have to get you out of here.”
He looks me in the eye for a moment before once more turning away and pressing himself into the walls of the corner “Leave. Get away from me.”
“Why?”
“It hurts.”
“What hurts?! I’m not even doing anything.”
Tears begin to blur my eyes. The lights are already out in the hallway, and every minute something chips off and falls. We don’t have time. Or maybe, it’s already over.
“You. You do. Get away from me.”
“How am I hurting you? Tell me and I’ll stop.”
He begins to rock back and forth, whispering again and clawing at the floor, every few moments gasping or choking or something else. I can’t take it anymore.
“Forget all of this, Shige. It’s not worth it. I don’t need to touch you…let’s just go back. Okay?”
I reach over to the metal necklace but just before I am able to touch it, my hand stops. I try to move it, but I can’t.
All of a sudden, my head feels funny, like my consciousness is slipping away like when falling asleep but I’m still aware of everything. My arm moves back, and I get to my feet, backtracking towards the door. Then everything stops again, and I’m thrown back, like waking up from a bad dream, and Shige grips his head and screams.
I don’t need him to tell me what just happened. I already know.
Mind Control.
“Get out of my head.”
He coughs. “I…can’t, Ryo.” Tears begin to stream down his red cheeks. “I can’t make it stop.”
“Yes you can. Take the necklace off.”
“I can’t give it up.”
Idiot.
I look out into the hallway and see a single light hanging from the ceiling. It falls. “This is what you want?” The blanket of my emotions is frayed along the edges already, but this is ripping it apart even more. My power slips for a moment and the bed moves, the pillow floating up in the air.
It’s hurting him, and I close my eyes, willing myself to calm down and stop. When he has his mind set on something, he’s as stubborn as I am. We still have a day and a half to decide, so right now I have to get him out of here.
“Shige, tell me. Tell me what I need to do to make it hurt less.”
“Don’t…don’t use your power. It’s strong enough when you’re not using it.”
I make it over to him and help him stand up. I can see bruises on his face from where they must have beat him last night but I turn away, not able to lose control of anything right now. Being pissed off can come later on.
“It didn’t hurt much,” he says as we head towards the door. I shoot him a look, and he nods. “I can hear what you’re thinking.”
Of course.
We make our way through the dark hallways, using the few lights that aren’t destroyed as guides. We take the staircase up to the dark room and it’s no longer dark, but lit by walls of fire. “Damn it, Pi.”
It’s hard to breathe around it and so, with my arm still tight around his waist, I lead him towards another staircase leading to the third floor.
Down another hallway past where the leader is struggling, there’s a single door leading to the staircase leading to the first floor. I turn the handle but it’s locked from the outside. Koyama and Massu must have locked it to prevent the leader from leaving.
“We’re trapped.”
I let go of the door handle, giving up, and look into his narrowed eyes. It must hurt to be so close to me, but we have no choice. “A window would work, too.”
I let go of his waist and run down the hallway, anxiously searching every wall and room for a window. I can hear his footsteps behind me, but I still continue to look back to check. I can tell the building doesn’t have much time left, and just when I think to look for a staircase leading to the roof, I see a window at the end of the hall. “Finally.”
I take his hand and pull him to the window, looking down. “I’m sorry. I have to.”
He nods in understanding. “Go ahead.”
I teleport us both down to the ground below, and once we make it there, everyone calls his name and comes running.
My entire body is in excruciating pain and I feel as if I’m about to pass out, but that all has to wait.
“Shige…” Koyama says and falls to his knees, holding Shige’s hands and healing his fingers. “What is wrong with him?”
He’s slipped back into the whispering thing he was doing before and I know it’s a response to everyone around. “Remember the mind control mutant?”
“Yeah…” Yamapi says, suspicious. He is covered in burns, everywhere but his face. Koyama must have healed that first.
“Here he is,” I respond.
Their eyes widen, but the attention is brought back to Shige as he begins to cough. He holds his throat as if he’s choking and Koyama begins to try to help him. I bite my lip nervously, hating every second I have to see him like this. “Why isn’t he stopping?”
“I don’t think he’s choking.”
If you can hear the thoughts of everyone around, how can you separate theirs from your own?
“I have to get him out of here.” I kneel in front of him, taking hold of his now healed hand. “I’ll take you to a place with less people. It’s going to hurt and it’s going to suck but I can’t carry you like this. It’ll take too long.”
Ignoring the questions and comments of the others, I look to a place in the woods in the distance and teleport there, and use that as the means to move the both of us away from the thoughts of everyone around. In the distance, I can hear the explosion.
But can it be considered a success?
End of Part One
A/N: Sorry about this being chopped up even more into A&B but copying over from Microsoft Word made it so the post was too large for LJ. ._. *fail* The time-travel mutant's power is kind of confusing, but hopefully it'll become clearer later on. I'd love to hear what you think about the new development :D Part Two will probably be out sometime this weekend :)
Every hallway is the same - filled with empty rooms.
Just as I re-check one of the hallways, I hear something, something that sounds like a scream.
My heart is racing already, but that just makes me even more anxious. Because no matter how many times I look, he’s not in any of the rooms. I check, re-check, and check once more, but he’s not in any of them.
Every time I pass a certain room, I can hear the screaming. It’s also the only room that is dark. I enter the room, flipping a light switch, which, unsurprisingly, doesn’t work. I begin to feel around the walls, thinking there might be a door somewhere. No luck.
I know the voice is Shige’s - his voice, screaming in pain, and as the clock continues to tick, counting down to the destruction of the building, I can’t find him. Before I know it, a tear of frustration trails down my cheek.
I wipe it away quickly and get down on my hands and knees, feeling around the floor for a trap door. The tile scratches the skin of my fingers as I press down and run my hand across it, trying to find a crack where a door could be.
When I reach my hand under the bed, I touch something cold, something that feels like metal. I wrap my fingers around it. A handle.
Without further delay, I hastily pull on one of the bedposts to get the bed away from the hidden door. I go to the other one and pull, rotating between both of them to fully move it. If I could see it, I would have been able to move it with my mind by now, but I can’t.
Once the bed is off of it, I feel around for the handle once again and pull it up, and it reveals a staircase leading down into a dimly lit hidden area of the first floor. I don’t bother with the stairs; I look at the floor and teleport down, but when I do so, the screaming only gets louder.
What, Shige? What is hurting you?
I follow the sound down a few more hallways before another voice joins it.
“Shut up!”
I turn the corner and see the source of the other, a mutant I remember as the one who could create ice. He pounds his fist on the door.
“Stop screaming, you idiot! That’s all you’ve been doing for the past hour.”
Anger rushes through me and I lift up the mutant, exerting a force that is strong enough to break every one of his bones. “Is that your response to someone in pain? Annoyance? Then should I get annoyed at you for screaming right now?”
His hands turn to ice and I lose my patience and pin him against the far wall, breaking the wall and throwing him into the next room.
The screaming only gets worse until it stops entirely. He might not have been in pain at all. Perhaps he was trying to lead us to him.
“Well, well.” Katori rounds the corner with a wall of knives behind her. “Did you really think I could be killed by something that my body created?”
“Leave, Katori. There’s not much time left before everything in this building will be destroyed. Including you.”
“I am leaving,” she says with a vengeful smile. “But I wanted to get a little revenge first. I wanted to show you how it felt to be stabbed by these knives.”
My thoughts go back to the dreams I had of being stabbed to death when the curse was passed to me.
“Stop!” Shige screams from inside of the room right beside me.
“No,” is all she says before over thirty knives are thrown at me.
---
I open the door, once more looking at the knives on the ground before turning back to the contents of the room.
It’s not much different from any of the other rooms in the building - a bed, one end table with a lamp, and a door off to the side leading to a bathroom just big enough to take two steps in.
Shige is sitting in the corner of the room, knees pulled halfway to his chest, writing feverishly in a notebook in his lap.
“Shige?”
He doesn’t answer, just continues to write and by the movement of his lips it seems like he is also saying something, though it is too low for me to hear.
I take a few steps closer and he turns away, his face tightening and his words silenced. A few more steps, and he holds his head with the hand he’s not writing with. A few more cautioned steps and he seems to lose it. I rip the notebook from his grip and with my heart still pounding, I retreat back to the door. When I do so, he sits up straight again, his eyes to the floor, and his lips beginning to move once again.
I look at the old notebook in my hands and open the cover to see the first page covered in the same three words. I flip through, and every single page is covered.
Make it stop. Make it stop.
I drop the book in horror before heading back over to him. He turns away, gasping in pain that seems to get worse as I get closer. But why?
“Make it stop…stop…” he whispers and I notice that his fingers are covered in blood from where he scratched the wall.
“Make what stop? What is hurting you?”
He continues to whisper the same three words and I grab his shoulders, turning him to me. “Shige, look at me.”
“Get away from me.”
“I have to get you out of here.”
He looks me in the eye for a moment before once more turning away and pressing himself into the walls of the corner “Leave. Get away from me.”
“Why?”
“It hurts.”
“What hurts?! I’m not even doing anything.”
Tears begin to blur my eyes. The lights are already out in the hallway, and every minute something chips off and falls. We don’t have time. Or maybe, it’s already over.
“You. You do. Get away from me.”
“How am I hurting you? Tell me and I’ll stop.”
He begins to rock back and forth, whispering again and clawing at the floor, every few moments gasping or choking or something else. I can’t take it anymore.
“Forget all of this, Shige. It’s not worth it. I don’t need to touch you…let’s just go back. Okay?”
I reach over to the metal necklace but just before I am able to touch it, my hand stops. I try to move it, but I can’t.
All of a sudden, my head feels funny, like my consciousness is slipping away like when falling asleep but I’m still aware of everything. My arm moves back, and I get to my feet, backtracking towards the door. Then everything stops again, and I’m thrown back, like waking up from a bad dream, and Shige grips his head and screams.
I don’t need him to tell me what just happened. I already know.
Mind Control.
“Get out of my head.”
He coughs. “I…can’t, Ryo.” Tears begin to stream down his red cheeks. “I can’t make it stop.”
“Yes you can. Take the necklace off.”
“I can’t give it up.”
Idiot.
I look out into the hallway and see a single light hanging from the ceiling. It falls. “This is what you want?” The blanket of my emotions is frayed along the edges already, but this is ripping it apart even more. My power slips for a moment and the bed moves, the pillow floating up in the air.
It’s hurting him, and I close my eyes, willing myself to calm down and stop. When he has his mind set on something, he’s as stubborn as I am. We still have a day and a half to decide, so right now I have to get him out of here.
“Shige, tell me. Tell me what I need to do to make it hurt less.”
“Don’t…don’t use your power. It’s strong enough when you’re not using it.”
I make it over to him and help him stand up. I can see bruises on his face from where they must have beat him last night but I turn away, not able to lose control of anything right now. Being pissed off can come later on.
“It didn’t hurt much,” he says as we head towards the door. I shoot him a look, and he nods. “I can hear what you’re thinking.”
Of course.
We make our way through the dark hallways, using the few lights that aren’t destroyed as guides. We take the staircase up to the dark room and it’s no longer dark, but lit by walls of fire. “Damn it, Pi.”
It’s hard to breathe around it and so, with my arm still tight around his waist, I lead him towards another staircase leading to the third floor.
Down another hallway past where the leader is struggling, there’s a single door leading to the staircase leading to the first floor. I turn the handle but it’s locked from the outside. Koyama and Massu must have locked it to prevent the leader from leaving.
“We’re trapped.”
I let go of the door handle, giving up, and look into his narrowed eyes. It must hurt to be so close to me, but we have no choice. “A window would work, too.”
I let go of his waist and run down the hallway, anxiously searching every wall and room for a window. I can hear his footsteps behind me, but I still continue to look back to check. I can tell the building doesn’t have much time left, and just when I think to look for a staircase leading to the roof, I see a window at the end of the hall. “Finally.”
I take his hand and pull him to the window, looking down. “I’m sorry. I have to.”
He nods in understanding. “Go ahead.”
I teleport us both down to the ground below, and once we make it there, everyone calls his name and comes running.
My entire body is in excruciating pain and I feel as if I’m about to pass out, but that all has to wait.
“Shige…” Koyama says and falls to his knees, holding Shige’s hands and healing his fingers. “What is wrong with him?”
He’s slipped back into the whispering thing he was doing before and I know it’s a response to everyone around. “Remember the mind control mutant?”
“Yeah…” Yamapi says, suspicious. He is covered in burns, everywhere but his face. Koyama must have healed that first.
“Here he is,” I respond.
Their eyes widen, but the attention is brought back to Shige as he begins to cough. He holds his throat as if he’s choking and Koyama begins to try to help him. I bite my lip nervously, hating every second I have to see him like this. “Why isn’t he stopping?”
“I don’t think he’s choking.”
If you can hear the thoughts of everyone around, how can you separate theirs from your own?
“I have to get him out of here.” I kneel in front of him, taking hold of his now healed hand. “I’ll take you to a place with less people. It’s going to hurt and it’s going to suck but I can’t carry you like this. It’ll take too long.”
Ignoring the questions and comments of the others, I look to a place in the woods in the distance and teleport there, and use that as the means to move the both of us away from the thoughts of everyone around. In the distance, I can hear the explosion.
But can it be considered a success?
End of Part One
A/N: Sorry about this being chopped up even more into A&B but copying over from Microsoft Word made it so the post was too large for LJ. ._. *fail* The time-travel mutant's power is kind of confusing, but hopefully it'll become clearer later on. I'd love to hear what you think about the new development :D Part Two will probably be out sometime this weekend :)