Fade

Part 10

By Dierdre

Beta read by Sassyblondexoxo. Go read her fics!

Vision was the first to return, the black retreating and fading away like mist exposed to the killing sun. An abrupt awareness of watery light flickering in a staccato beat from aged fluorescent bulbs, nestled deep within a crisscrossing network of rust-mottled pipes. A corridor of bricks, dirty brown, cracked, and streaked with crumbling mortar dust.

Swelling waves of confusion, called forth by surroundings simultaneously familiar and strange, swept away numbness to expose the first diamond edge of reason. A sense of self in its most primitive form.

Then came a voice, gravely and twisted with an emotion that could not be understood, only obeyed. Just stand there, you bastard. Stand there until you rot.

Confusion ebbed and muscles relaxed as the order --clear, succinct and irrefutable-- strove to bury unwanted rationality beneath accustomed obedience. A hidden soul seeking with sad eagerness the relief of endless dark.

But oblivion never came, denied entrance by the continuing sensations of abused muscle and bone. Terror rose with every passing moment, as did a singular kind of suffering.

Trapped in limbo, balancing the trembling knife’s edge between heaven and earth, it was a swelling agony that had nothing to do with the flesh. When reason and insanity warred, when fragments of discarded memory bubbled like pus beneath the skin, threatening to burst and expel horror, there was only one word that could describe the misery:

Hell.

Oh, god, someone help me…

That single lucid thought echoed, reverberating endlessly through twisted corridors of a mind long disused and denied. Echolocation of the worst kind, for it bounced off these mental walls and sent back tiny pulses of recollection, a tangle of senses that flashed and flickered out too quickly to be understood.

A smile, wide grin beneath an orange mask; now purple; now red. Flashes of short black hair and the soft, forbidden touch of skin. Low cries of abject rage, overlaid by a soothing voice, gentle and loving. A first taste of snow, cold and sweet against the tongue, mixed with the sour tang of fear-sweat. The discordant smells of tea and grave dirt.

A confused jumble of emotions accompanied these visions, madly dancing between extremes; all too quick, all too much to take. It felt like drowning. It felt like death.

…someone help…

Salvation came in the form of a surprised cry, truncated and pain-wracked, shortly followed by the crash of wood against brick. A body fell heavily against the wall, the meaty sound cutting through chaos and providing relief, however temporary.

Habit screamed to look down and away, but sight was inexorably drawn towards a pair of amber eyes. Narrow and cloudy with hurt… and then suddenly transformed, made luminous with shock and a kind of wild hope. They were windows into memories that could not be borne, no safety within the gaze, but there was something about them, something familiar-

Red. Red-shot eyes, red mask, red wound, red… red water. Falling to the floor in strange droplets, thick and reeking of metal.

No, not water...

A terrible knowledge beckoned, so sudden and alarming that not even corporal pain could prevent a reemergence of the void. It rose up and ate away all but the barest pinprick of light and reason, seeking self-preservation through oblivion. And yet that carefully constructed safety net could not last, not while the body ached and nebulous comprehension tore through the dusty corridors of the mind like a maddened dog.

Slowly, grudgingly, vision returned and understanding dawned.

…For the first time in what seemed an age, I took a step of my own volition. Memories surged just beneath the surface at this act of rebellion and my soul convulsed in denial, but I was driven by a compulsion more profound than madness, deeper than blind obedience. It was an urge born out of a lifetime of habit, and of love.

Someone whose name I could not remember, but whose life meant more than the world, was in trouble. And though each step was agony, I had to follow this crimson trail to its source. I must.

Gritting my teeth, I began to move.