#elinuts

(*google translated: )

I should have said a tender and friendly word But I just told you nothing Then gently you stuck to me And for the rest, it's up to us.

The thick film of smoke that had seemed to rise from all the holes in the cavern was slowly –but gradually – clearing, broadening Chrome’s view of the underground passage and everything that surrounded him. He continued to walk, drawing closer to some unknown, unseen destination, but knowing all the same that he must regardless of what he might find up ahead.

When, with quite a bit of alarm, but no real surprise, he glimpsed a familiar silhouette turn in the direction of his footsteps, Chrome’s own body made him halt.

Immediately, here was a flash of lightning, which blinded him for a couple of seconds, while all of his companions were struck, wounded into a state of unconsciousness. They collapsed on the floor without even uttering a cry.

Before he even saw them fall, however, Chrome saw the lightning.

Lightning, which he best recalled from his first years of life, when it had come to his village on the wings of a storm, with its friend thunder, but thunder hadn’t scared him as much as lightning.

When Chrome woke up in the middle of the night to realize lightning was brewing in the sky, his face would fill with fright and he would fall back into his bed, covering himself with all the sheets he could reach and fearing the brightness of the electricity that streamed in through the windows.

He was too afraid to wake his parents, but his brother had seen him once, as he lay shaking on the mattress with tightly shut eyes and the beginning of tears forming in the corners.

Robin hadn’t felt any sympathy for him. He hadn’t been afraid of the lightning and he didn’t see why Chrome was so terrified of it. He found it ridiculous, laughable even.

When their mother finally awoke to comfort the younger brother, Robin had stared with such frigidness in his eyes that Chrome wouldn’t be quick to forget it. It was hard to tell sometimes if it had scared him more than the light of the storm.

“Humph. Why’s he being comforted? The storm can’t even do anything to him. What is he so scared of?”

Chrome gazed deep into the face of the Masked Mage, or at least what he could see of it.

Yes. Even now, it was the same –lightning sparking between them, electricity swarming all around, ready to strike at any moment, any amount of times, and he wasn’t in the least bit afraid of it.

The Masked Mage didn’t look like he was afraid of anything, actually. Not of lightning, or death.

Not of himself.

“Monster,” The two syllable word slipped out from the cracks between his gritted teeth, floating into the tense air between them like a cloud prepared to rain on a dry valley, enriching it once more with the beauty of life.

It was an unexpected moment of weakness in the Masked Mage’s otherwise flawless posture –his silence and his pose, so tall and with that sense of utmost superiority, except without arrogance, because he was simply a machine now and he hadn’t been instructed to doubt his own victory.

Chrome, too, was surprised. He took a step backwards, feeling guilty because that very word had crossed his mind when he had first approached, and realized that for the last three years he had been chasing a shadow that had never left him; that should have left him.

Could this grotesquely altered version of his once beloved brother read his mind and decided to say it aloud? Had he detected the impression that he emitted with his presence? Was he familiar with the term, familiar with hearing it spat through terrified and sometimes hateful mouths, at him for following the instructions that had been encrypted in his system?

Chrome’s body began to shake. He felt it in his chest first –a powerful shudder, like the tremors of the earth when it was upset, and then, soon, the rest of him, too.

He wanted to back away further, but a game of cat and mouse was useless –he’d be caught, confronted, and attacked, regardless of his any type of struggle.

The only choice he had –and he could see this in the Masked Mage’s expression as well, which was as cold and dreadful as the blankets of frost that grew over flowers in winter and cause them to wither– was to push in the opposite direction, to try and force his enemy to surrender, by whatever means necessary.

He thought “whatever means necessary”, but Chrome knew that, in reality, he didn’t have nearly as many options as it suggested. “Whatever means necessary” is what he had been told, countless times, in countless voices that carried innumerable emotions, about saving the world, and where did that bring him?

Here, in this dark, desolated cavern, deep underneath the waking world and the sun he so loved.

Here, where beasts powerful enough to destroy this entire planet slept waiting to be disturbed, an act that would culminate in nothing less than the annihilation of the earth –but whether there was still a horizon to gaze once it was over, and people to admire it, depended entirely on who was the one removing the final needle from the ground.

Chrome didn’t want to kill his brother to claim that honor.

He took a deep breath, and it wasn’t merely an act of instinct. He was thinking his movements through now, and his surroundings too. Whether it was the flicker of an eye, or a piece of rock that broke off from the neighboring chasms to fall endlessly into the void beneath it, he stood still, and listened.

He absorbed. He understood.

It was his gift to feel everything, a talent inherited partly by his psychic powers, and partly by the immense sensitivity that he extended towards others –both living and otherwise–, even the bad ones.

And Chrome’s greatest sense of all, was that of companionship.

Support, solidarity, encouragement, and trust.

He may have not been born with the greatest courage, but he had developed it slowly, over time; after all, he had feared many things in his life.

But his brother wasn’t one of them.

Not when he left for the edge of the world to never return; not now that he recalled nothing of him, sent to crush him before he could come close to touching the last needle.

Cruel irony bared its fangs in the secrecy of moonlight, where nothing but the thin, wavering bands of silver could illuminate what little wished to be revealed.

In the darkness, the greater picture remained obscured, the whys and hows and for what have I been fighting for since I set out from home and decided to stop at nothing until I had reached the bottom of this crisis?

Now, more than ever, there were questions that Chrome wished to ask. But there was no time, or means. Fate had finally detached its elusive petals, blooming like a flower by the sea that loved the sound of the unknown rushing through its leaves and the touch of the sand as it held it tightly.

Chrome longed for an embrace as pure as that, more than anything else. More than hearing his brother say his name again.

Such are children –drawn to those that hold and comfort them in hard times rather than those that roughen their edges so they can fend against the future storm.

But he was not alone, and the proof glared before him. The Masked Mage was the same, below his menacing robes and destructive abilities. He was a boy wrapped in the warmth of his mother, gone to sleep amongst that bliss that only innocence could have perceived so beautifully. He had never woken up from that dream, lying upon his mother’s lap while she rocked back and forth on a chair of wood, humming soft, soothing lullabies into his slumbering ears.

Chrome stared at the figure of his brother, and he saw him for what he was –he saw him for his flesh and blood and bone, and his wide, enigmatic eyes that had once swirled with eagerness and wonder and excitement. Those had been the eyes of a child that truly wished to sink his teeth into the world and devour every last bit of it, no matter where it took him or how harshly it tried to shake him.

Now, Chrome feared seeing those eyes again, and realizing exactly how deeply they had been transformed. But there was no avoiding it. The Masked Mage would have to lift his hood, whether by force or by choice, and Chrome would see, everything he had missed over the course of the last few years.

Everything that had started with a single time-traveling accident –everything that had bred from the pillars of fire that had spread through their old forest, and everything that had begun after the peaceful animals had been modified and turned vicious like humanity at its darkest times.

A dream, that’s what had started back then. It’s what Chrome’s brother was trapped in.

A dream where their mother was alive and safe, and back at home, never to leave or wander off into the woods ever again.

And Robin was with her forever and never feared seeing the end of that marvelous moment. It was ageless.

Perhaps, Chrome pondered, his brother had chased death’s tail with the very intention of joining it –perhaps, secretly, he had known that he stood no chance, and hadn’t deceived himself into believing otherwise. He had wished to catch the wonderful dream of their childhood before it was whisked away by the tragedy that was their mother’s death, before it was too faint for him to continue living in it.

If Robin had died that day, a lot of the suffering that now crushed Chrome’s soul would not be there. He would simply walk forward and pull that needle from its nest, lay to rest the tattered world so that a new one could blossom from the soil of ruins.

But that was a path he’d never know, because things were as they were for reasons, and though those reasons might seem strange and unfair, they remain, the reasons for which we are whom we are.

Chrome saw past the Masked Mage, past his brother, and past everything that stood between him and awakening the Fell Dragon. Chrome saw the needle, or rather the light emitted by it, and he thought of the past.

He thought of lightning, and how he had once feared it, and how humiliated he had felt when his brother hadn’t experienced the same, and instead looked down on him.

For a moment, Chrome let those bittersweet memories become blades of grass growing from the ground and leaves extending from a tree’s branches, and he walked into that forest, he tasted that air of melancholy and longing and regret, and love.

The Masked Mage’s right hand twitched, lit suddenly by a tiny sphere of light, and Chrome focused on him once more.

For some reason, he feared that the end of this battle would be decided by those same bolts of blinding lightning.