Prompts: "You were never my enemy. You were never that. And it breaks my heart that you can't see yourself as more." - An echoing cave - The song of laughter
WIP: Unrelated One-Shot
Words: 1000
Tag List: (message me to be added or removed) @fourwingedsnake @whumperofworlds @pigeonwhumps @mr-orion @scaewolf
A/N: this idea grabbed me by the throat (much like our POV character) and dragged me into a 1K word oneshot in a vaguely superhero-esque setting. I'll let you decide who the hero's supposed to be here :3
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"Dammit!" He shouted, punching the solid wall of rock between himself and the outside, as if his bare hands alone could break it apart. Elsewhere, he could have.
Here, though....
I sank to the ground, suddenly overcome with sheer exhaustion. I hadn't slept in three days, always moving, always on the run, always evading the man standing on the other side of the cave, pounding at the stone fruitlessly. Now that he was here, now that he found me... it was pointless to pretend to be strong.
We both knew I wasn't.
He turned to me, and in the light from my flashlight, his face was contorted with fury, the harsh white light and stark shadows doing little to soften the expression. "You!" He screamed, stalking toward me, his voice bouncing off the cave walls. "You did this!"
I didn't move.
His hand found my collar and jerked me to the side. I dropped the flashlight with a clatter, and the shadows hid his face. "Let me out," he snarled, "right. Fucking. Now."
"I can't."
"LIAR!" He shouted, the single word joined by a chorus of echoes. "You let me out, or I snap your neck!"
It started as a scoff. It turned into a giggle. Then full-on laughter.
I couldn't help it. The situation was fucking hilarious.
He stared at me, confusion obvious even without a clear view of his expression.
"Go ahead," I forced out, gasping for air when the fit finally subsided. "Do it.... Kill me.... That's all you've wanted... isn't it? These past months... the one thing you've desired... is my blood spilled.... And when you have the chance you... you...." I began laughing again.
"SHUT UP!"
I couldn't even if I wanted to. When I didn't stop, he shouted something incoherent at the top of his lungs and threw me across the room. I instinctively curled up, trying to protect my face and neck, but it still hurt when I hit the floor. And rolled. And hit the wall.
My laughter still came in wheezing spurts until finally, mercifully, it subsided enough for me to catch my breath. I didn't bother to get up, instead watching as he paced the length of the cave, flashlight now in hand, searching for a way out.
A fruitless exercise. I may be as much a victim of this trap as he was, but even I could see no way out. I'd been slapped with enough power-dampening cuffs in my life to recognize the absence of my powers. The idiot probably hasn't even noticed yet.
Did that make him lucky, or just naive?
It didn't matter to me.
Not as much as it should have....
Hm....
"Hey, asshole, wake up."
I opened my eyes to harsh white light shining directly into my eyes. "Get that out of my face," I muttered, words slurred from sleep.
Surprisingly, the light moved. I blinked away the spots to find him standing a few feet away. His expression was resigned.
"Come to toss me around again?" I asked softly, the fatigue clearly bleeding into my voice, "toss me around like the baseball?"
"Oh, shut up," he snapped, free hand clenched into a fist. "You rigged this whole thing."
"If thinking that makes you feel better, go ahead."
"Must've had some sort of wire or trigger as soon as I entered."
I sighed. "And trapped myself in with you? On purpose?"
He paused, clearly thinking for once in his life. Finally, he exhaled slowly. "No, you aren't that stupid."
"Thank you." I pushed myself into a sitting position with my back against the wall. He tensed at the movement, but when I settled back, hands folded in my lap, he relaxed. Somewhat.
For a moment, we stared at each other.
He broke the silence first. "This was a trap for both of us."
"Possibly."
"Any idea who?"
I scoffed. "If I knew that, you'd be alone in this cave."
In a blink, he was standing right in front of me, flashlight held menacingly, if that was even possible. He had a way of making the most mundane of objects appear as threatening as a loaded shotgun.
"Listen here," he hissed through gritted teeth, "cut the bullshit. Either you help me find a way out of this mess, or I strangle you to death and use your bones to dig my way out."
I inhaled sharply, both at his speed and his threats. But my next words were not fervent agreement, nor were they defiant insults. "You..." I said in surprise, "you've changed."
He raised his eyebrows.
"I'm not saying this lightly. You're... different. Almost as if this chase has consumed you."
He scoffed. "'Consumed me'? More bullshit."
"The old you would be appalled at the threat you just made."
"So? You are my enemy." The intensity in his eyes was unnerving. "You have always been my enemy. Nothing but a thorn in my side for far too long. I was just too weak to get the job done."
"No."
He blinked.
"You were never my enemy," I whispered, voice shaking. "You were never that. And it breaks my heart that you can't see yourself as more. That you can't see me as more." I raised my chin. "Go ahead. Kill me. It's what you've always wanted."
A beat passed.
Two.
Three.
I could hear his teeth grinding together as he weighed his options. His desires. His fears. My resignation.
Our situation.
A few more beats passed.
And yet, I still lived.
Finally, he stepped back. His hands shook, and the flashlight clattered to the ground once more, rolling in my direction. We both ignored it as he fell to his knees.
"Dammit," he muttered. "They were right. They were always right. I'm too damn weak for this."
"Or perhaps," I said, "you're stronger than them."
He didn't answer. Probably thinking about how my words were utter bullshit.
"Killing someone is easy. In the heat of rage or fear, it's the easiest thing in the world. But to be in the midst of those emotions, to hold someone's life in your hands, and to choose not to? That is hard. That is strength."
He weakly shook his head. "What kind of backwards bullshit is this?"
I smiled. "It's the backwards bullshit that gets us both out of here alive."
His head snapped up. "So you do know how to get out!"
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@ailesswhumptober - day 11: hallucinations, day 14: concussion
“Echoechoecho. Echoechoecho. Wakey wakey time.”
“Go ‘way, ‘ives.” It’s barely more than a mumble, but his twin is well-versed in Echo’s morning-ese
“No can do vod, you’re sleeping on the job here!”
With a groan, Echo blinks his eyes open, staring mesmerised at the heavy cloud of dust swirling through his… ah, his single working helmet lamp.
“Do I need to come over there and start poking you?”
Echo blinks his eyes open again – when did he close them? – and tries to focus, rolling his head carefully from side to side, noting and dismissing the throbbing that flares at his temple.
He seems to be in some sort of mineshaft. He’s lying on the ground, half-buried in a pile of sand and gravel, scattered with a few fist-sized rocks like the one that must have cracked his helmet. A distant boom, and more rubble starts trickling down from the ceiling.
“C’mon Echo, stop lazing around, the squad needs you. Here, I’ll help you up.”
Fives holds out a hand, and Echo struggles to free his arm, to reach up and grasp…
... and grasp ...
His scomp falls back to his side.
“You can’t help me. You’re dead.” The quiet words break the silence of the tunel, the space as achingly empty as the hollow inside.
This time, the response when it comes is in his own voice:
And today is not the day you join him. Now get UP!
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For @whumptober 2022, days 12 and 13: Cave In and Fracture
Discordant notes litter starsong all around him, and Killan shifts uneasily, wings ruffled and feathers fluffed out.
He’s crouched in the fork of a tall tree, a bagful of supplies worn on a leather strap over one shoulder and across his chest, resting against his hip. His eyes turn upwards as stars give way to dawn, winking out one by one as an eerie red and hazy light rises along the horizon.
An immense, ancient mountain in the distance - one that seems like little more than a hill, part of a rolling range that cuts this land in half between the human communities in the valleys and plains to the east and the secluded, isolated band of western fae closer to the sea, sits between Killan and the promise of the rising sun.
He belongs to neither of them, not fae and no longer human. On his good days, he thinks of himself as a creature - on his worst, as a monster who should have been put down for his own good a long time ago.
He hides from them both, this monster and man sewn together so expertly, and yet no one ever seems to see the man in him for long. His fingers move to brush at his lips, remembering a kiss-
But he flinches back from his own touch, as it is the sharp pinpricks of talons that he feels instead. Looking down at his own hand, he can see the scars where they were stitched on, after Calon Nie took human fingers away and gave him these instead.
He's still out there, somewhere.
Maybe he has made a new creation, a better one, since sending Killan away for not quite matching his vision. Maybe there is some version of him who survived but doesn't have to live like this, utterly alone. Maybe Calon Nie kept the next one, maybe the next one was good enough to be worth keeping.
Killan, in the end, had been imperfect. He had just been the first to be alive, still, when Calon Nie rejected him.
Even still… Killan might rather run into fae, these days. At least the fae, if he saw them, would simply kill him quickly for what he is - the humans have always made him suffer for their pleasure or money instead. At least the fae would not lay heavy hands in his hair and call him pet.
He shudders with the memory, pressing himself more firmly to the rough bark of the tree, turning his eyes back to the horizon, chin tilted to scent the air in an instinct driven by the half of him that is inhuman now.
The largest of the mountains is wreathed in what he takes at first for dark fog, but the stars whisper a warning to the fae blood that twists around the human in his veins as the hint of an acrid scent hits.
Smoke.
As if in response to his realization, the tree shivers around him, the leaves rustling. There is a low rumbling that he feels more than hears, as if the very ground is in pain. The tree he perches in sways, briefly throwing him off balance, forcing him to drop his hands and grip tightly to the branch below to keep from falling. Bottles clink together in his bag.
He swallows, hard, and pushes himself to standing, leaning forward with talons on his hand dug in to the main trunk to keep him steady.
More stars flicker away above him, and the red sky is bright and intense, breaking sunlight like water against the underside of high wispy clouds.
The rising light seems nearly orange, and his own skin is tinted sickly yellow when he traces the line of his arm with fae eyes.
His heart races and pumps fae blood twined around his human cells, which only makes the starsong speak more clearly. He can't grasp it as strongly as real fae, but he hears enough to know what it tells him.
He tips his head as a breeze plays with his shaggy hair. Even the wind whispers its warning, today, as if it doesn’t dare to speak any louder.
Stars do not use words. They sing in a language older than throats, older than the sun that warms the world. Stars sing in a language of light first brought to endless dark, in the language of the time before time.
The fae know the stars sing from birth, but Killan had to learn. It wasn't his language to know.
The dead gave it to him. It's with their ears, their eyes, their blood that he listens, that he watches, that he feels the screaming of a forest that cannot flee whatever is coming.
Go to ground, children, sing the stars. Run, run, run. Go to ground.
It isn't Killan the stars are singing to.
He jolts and jerks back to the safety of his crouch with a gasp as flocks of birds take flight at once.
The starsong is briefly muffled by the deafening beat of tens of thousands of wings and their high-pitched cries. The sky dims above his head, and he cranes his head to watch them - geese and finches, robins and swallows, hundreds and hundreds blackening the sky with their bodies and fleeing east, away from the great mountains, towards the human valley below.
Below, a rumbling begins again, lasts longer this time before it settles.
Killan spreads his wings and jumps off the branch, beating his wings hard to gain air, unnaturally hollowed bones light enough - and the twisted, magically-created muscles that hold the bones to his back strong enough - that a rising breeze carries him upward, where he can see that they don't stop at the valley.
The birds keep flying.
How far do the stars tell them to go?
Beneath him, he hears crashing through the trees, and looks down to see a bear with two gamboling cubs behind her making her steady way in the same direction. Nearby, deer race through the underbrush, but the bear doesn't hunt them. She never even looks in their direction.
Killan's heart goes cold for the first time.
A hunter, deeply in need of feeding to stay strong for her cubs, who doesn't hunt even as deer nearly brush shoulders with her... it’s far more frightening to him than the red sky above.
Killan shifts and drops back to earth, using his grip on tree branches to slow his fall and swing himself safely onto his feet on a bed of pine needles and decayed leaves. The ground feels like it trembles beneath him, and he tucks his wings tightly against his back and runs for his camp.
As he runs, the animals of the forests race the other directions. He sees a fox, squirrels leaping from tree to tree. Mice are nearly a carpet, all of them moving at once.
It’s like fighting the current of a river.
Leaves shiver and rustle all around, rolling waves of ground under his feet. The earth feels like it lurches to one side and Killan is thrown sideways, smacking hard into a tree and letting out a cry as he drops to his knees.
A mouse runs over his legs.
Go to ground, sing the stars. Run, hide, flee. Run, children. Fly. Hide. Burrow. Run.
Wolves howl from somewhere nearby. Killan drops his plan to go back to his camp and turns around, taking the advice of the birds and the deer and the bear.
He runs.
He thinks about flying, but some deep-rooted instinct tells him not to.
Bare feet slam into earth in a pounding beat matched by his racing heart, kicking sticks and leaves aside as he runs through the depths of the forest. He flees east, because that is the direction the birds were flying, and tells himself he will hide from the human villages when he gets there.
The earth groans again. The rumble turns to a roar.
There is a deafening scream of ground tearing itself asunder, an explosion somewhere behind him that rolls through his body and rattles the very bones under his skin.
Where a moment ago there was ground, this time Killan's left foot simply steps down into empty air.
He falls, dropping to his hands and knees.
The ground rips itself like peeling the skin off a citrus, trees collapsing and falling into a cavernous empty space that has opened up beneath them, dragging them down, roots and all.
Just as he pulls his feet back under him, the ground throws him again, and he rolls forward off-balance. The ground is moving him down where it was flat before, following the falling trees. Something snaps and breaks in his wing, making him scream in pain as he drops - and the drop takes so long - and slams onto his side.
Killan pushes himself onto one elbow and turns back, wide-eyed, to see a huge dark cloud rising above a gap in the trees.
All the light is gone.
Around him the forest is darker than midnight, and when he breathes some kind of acrid dust sticks in his throat and down his lungs, making him cough, spitting onto the ground.
His saliva, he realizes with alarm, is black.
The burst of sound comes again, even louder this time. The ground shakes violently, and Killan's own answering scream goes unheard.
Every sound he might make is lost in his throat and swallowed by the sudden darkness that envelops him as the world is a burst of darkness and death.
Starsong goes silent.
There is one final sound, an explosion of noise unlike any he has ever heard.
The ground opens up beneath him and swallows him whole.
He hits stone this time, not earth, and dirt crumbles soft over him and lands around him. Sticks and rocks clatter down, too. A sudden thump felt through his body makes him peer through the darkness, reaching out a hand-
Nothing. His talons close around the branches of a fallen tree.
He can't stay here. He'll be crushed.
Run, hide, flee.
It can't be the stars - he can't hear them over the roar. But still he hears the voice, and he swallows, crawling forward on his elbows, his wing a shrieking agony where the larger flight bones have broken.
His ears ring, deafened except for the howl of fear he can feel in his throat and not hear.
Driven by pure instinct, he crawls as the world shakes apart around him.
At some point, he realizes that he is crawling down, further into the dark. But behind him there is only death, and the stone above him is so close he can't stand - so he crawls on.
His ears stop ringing. His muscles ache, and he keeps coughing up sludge he must spit onto the ground as he goes. But he can't stop. The rumbling, shuddering earth around him drives him forwards, pushing through the pain throbbing in one dragging wing.
He's in an old, dried-out underground riverbed. There are pebbles digging into his forearms, sharp rocks cutting his elbows. He smells his unnatural blood as it spills out.
How long he keeps going, he doesn't know.
The rumbling gradually lessens and then stops. The earth keeps shaking. The tension that had made the air feel so heavy and still lessens. The air smells like wet and mold, now, not bitter ash.
Ahead of him, he hears a frightened trill, trailing off into a hacking cough, ending in a soft whimper of pain.
Killan recognizes it - not who, but what.
There isn't any other direction to go. Nowhere to run to. So he takes a deep breath and crawls towards the sound of the fae ahead.
