The Deaths: Legend chapter 1
Here we go, people; the very first chapter of the grand saga's fourth (but first-to-be-published) part! Hope you all like it ^_^
Type: Sci-fi, fantasy, romance, history, crossover
Warnings:
Betas: compli_cait and lumina17.
Synopsis: Cast into an alien world they did not choose to come to, a small human community struggles to survive. With the help of a group of talented brave men and women, they sustain, as struggles from within only add to dangers which seem to add up around them as if for some spectator's pleasure.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of the manga series X/1999, Cowboy Bebop and Hellsing and the television series Doctor Who were not my creation, though I have made several adjustments with them for plot and explanations' sake. I make no profit from publishing this fic.
Author's Thanks: To the readers of the more fanfiction-centered early version of this story. For one of this story's biggest fan and beta, lumina17 and for my long time friend and beta, compli_cait. None of this will be here without you guys.
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Chapter 1 - Once Upon a Time
There are many species living on the universe's many planets: some grand and some small. Some are lowly, while others are near-gods. Amongst species capable of extraordinary feats, one in particular is the star of this book, but their lives are also dominated by the lives of another godly kind, the Galiferiens.
This kind are a venerable thing; they are, each, an eye, a nose, a tongue and a fingertip, ready to reach out to the world outside their planet and see it and what it is, what's in it and why. A small nation, this species, but a powerful one and a clever one as well.
At first they set out merely to observe their galaxy, the planets closest to them, but knowledge is addictive to this kind, therefore collecting and analyzing it had become much too entertaining for their own good. Sending out probes and delegations to their surrounding, they'd discovered planet after planet in their solar system and soon the galaxy itself was far too small for them; like a skull too narrow for its brain.
Chasing knowledge from one planet to another, from each galaxy to the next, through wormholes and asteroid belts, their research became dangerous; the precious sons and daughters of Galiferi- each a gem of mental capacities - were incurring knowledge's toll.
Alarmed but not deflated, they turned to stay home and develop tools to bring the world around them to their doorstep. A golden age of technology for travel came to be; they merely needed to open a door and the world was their oyster.
For a while, it was enough for them.
Then their world as it was became, once more, too narrow for them. This time the question backing up their next spasm of development was not, "what's out there," but, "how did it come to be like this?". This question burned in their bones, nagging at them to be solved.
They created tools for time travel and studied the history of their universe, but that, too, was not enough. The next most obvious step to take for a kind which cannot hold itself to stop, was travelling between dimensions. Like before, the machines they created for this were marvelous, and horribly efficient.
Looking across the different worlds, the Galiferiens discovered many pleasant and wonderful things for their ever hungry minds to ponder; they'd discovered that other creatures can travel through dimensions, they discovered the other near-gods. They found simple, human creatures capable of travelling and warping across dimensions with the aid of a spell they cast, and found other humans capable of seeing the future of their world and of others' through the flow of dreams.
What struck them the most was how some things, leaping before their eyes seductively in demand of an inquiry, worked under what appears to be a code of rules. Excited and ravishingly curious, they hurled its people to investigate and explore this seeming chain of events and creatures linked together like flies in a spider's web. They called these powers, these rules, by a name: Destiny.
They realized that they, too, were flies in the web, and left the powers un-touched, turning instead to investigate the effects of these rules. A peaceful era of philosophy and enlightment ensued. That is, until one of the Galiferiens created the technology to build a dimension. The possibilities abound in this toy lured them back into frantic investigation. Dimensions which were like beakers in a lab were made, and the rules of Destiny were put to the test in them.
In the background, a single character existed watching his kind's life spin and tangle in research; the son of the Galiferien king became bored and demanded a toy of his own; a status prize fit for the high ranking person he was.
His subjects convulsed and spasmed; each of its sons and daughters worked their hardest to create for the prince the dream he desired and so, the greatest invention of the species was born: a dimension with a mind of its own.
It was a pet, a small unimportant thing the young man would once in a while fiddle with, despite his father's warnings of Destiny and its implications on all dimensions both real and fake.
The prince did not take heed and, as it always happens, he had paid the price. The whole species paid the price, as they learned once more that knowledge will often cost lives. They abandoned dimension and the whole branch of study alone, save for a single agent still wandering around from world to world in search of adventure.
And the pet dimension?
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In one dimension amongst many, the Earth had tired of its busiest children: the human kind. They were building on its back, digging into it, poisoning its soil and water, chasing and killing its other creatures; their opposable digits' glory had gone to their heads. Before it would be damaged beyond repair, the Earth planned its retaliation.
It built a scene of battle, playing a game of chess against Destiny, each with their set of players. The Earth created men and women with powers beyond their kind and a mission in their heart to shake the world until every manmade building would topple to the ground and liberate the Earth of its pests. Destiny brought about its own set; humans, too, with powers of their own, and a desire to survive and defend their way of life until its nothing but ash and dry poisonous sand.
Amongst the pawns on his side of the board, the leader of one of Destiny's teams stood now in a hall and pondered his choice in the game. So far, the events of Kamui Shirou's life have lead him to think that he had a choice in this, that he could have chosen to fight on Earth's side and now stand in a different place, with a different sword and a different team of comrades at his back. For now, Kamui toyed with the idea that had he chosen to fight with the Dragons of Earth, he might have been somewhere else now. Somewhere darker, yes, but somewhere different, which was good enough for the slightly frightened boy right now.
He didn't know he was but a pawn on the chessboard and that his set, and the board they stood on, was one of many for Destiny.
Kamui was not given the dominant appearance one would expect from a person bearing his responsibility; a slim young man with willowy pale limbs which were misproportioned to his slightly larger than average head; he looked more like a young girl than anything. His mother used to tell him his head was that big because it had to have room for those massive expressive eyes and that his eyes had to be large so that people would notice their spectacular shade: the smoothest, velvet mauve.
Just how special those eyes were, and how lucky he was to be born with them in his world's 1990s and in Japan, of all Axis countries, was another thing Kamui will never fully comprehend, not unless someone tells him the whole story, and one day someone will.
The hall Kamui stood in, with his set of warriors at his back, was underground, for the safekeeping of precious things had to be underground and the deeper the better for this particular precious thing. What Kamui held in his hand was a sword nearly his size (which wasn't much for he was a very short fifteen year old) that will be his tool to fight the leader of the opposite side of the game. He was told the sword was sacred, that it was to be kept safe in the underground under a lock of spells, that it held magnificent wonderful powers and that he was not yet to wield it.
Alas, Destiny had other plans for Kamui, in which the sword was a meaningless piece of scrap metal. So far, Destiny allowed Kamui and his group, and the Earth, the pleasure of playing their game. This time was now over as other gears in the gigantic clockwork of Destiny were set into motion.
Stepping forward to place the sword in its lock-and-key safe, Kamui noticed the ground beneath his unmanly small feet became soft, and was growing softer and softer the more pressure he applied to it. Convinced this was a part of the locking process, or at least some sort of esoteric spell pre-planned to defend him and the sword, Kamui ignored the strange phenomenon, even as his ankles became immersed in the ground and the soles of his feet cried out to his brain that they were sensing nothing below.
Only when the chairman of the school under which the locking chamber resided screamed in horror and surprise that Kamui understood the floor was not meant to do that. By then, he was knee-deep in the thing, and the sword was half immersed.
"That's alright, it feels like quicksand, this thing, whatever it is," thought Kamui calmly. "They'll just yank me out and everything will be fine. I'll just get the sword out," but the sword, like his limbs, would not be yanked out of the quagmire Kamui's dimension's fabric had become.
Now it clamped harder as Kamui's body's balance began playing a dangerous game about to topple him directly into the hole of the floor, and the portal grasped firmly onto Kamui's waist. His legs free, Kamui was able to wiggle them around, trying to grab a hold of some ledge. He was sure there was something wrong with the floor and presumed that under this hard surface of cast metal there would be some rock he could land on, but there was none and the ease with which Kamui could swing his legs disturbingly reminded him of air.
He was about to fall from the skies, and the air below him was very, very hot.
It was then that Kamui realized he was falling into something unknown to him and, like all humans, panicked in the face of the unknown. It was then that he started screaming and flailing his arms around, as he let go of the sword and began clawing at the ground around him like a maniac. His fingernails, though slightly longer and more primmed than what's appropriate for a male in his culture, had absolutely no affect on the smooth steel floor.
His friends were there, the other pawns in the game, and they leaped at him to grab and keep him from disappearing. The esoteric monk grabbed Kamui's right hand and hooked the thin limb over his shoulder, crouched and used his whole body to crane the boy up, legs and back muscles working the hardest.
The portal fought back and Kamui's shoulder became dislocated with a sickening "gluck", sending Kamui into a fit of howling pain and spew of curse words like a drunken sailor.
Various spells cast at the portal by Kamui's group were deflected like pines on a breeze meeting a cliffside and suddenly the pawns realized there was nothing to do, as their leader was nothing but a head poking through the floor grotesquely and there was nothing left to hold onto.
Kamui opened his mouth to scream one last time, as his feet sent a shock through his spine to his mind to prepare him for a long fall and a hard - possibly fatal - landing. The mistress of the spirit dog which uselessly caught Kamui's sleeve and tore it as it tried holding the boy up, was the last person Kamui's eyes met as she said, "Goodbye, good luck! Don't scream, Shiro-kun; breath!". He did.
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Abraham Van Hellsing was smarter than to believe the single vampire lord he caught, defeated and enslaved was the only one of its hellish kind in Abraham's dimension. He had lived through too much to believe such a silly, optimistic notion as to think as, "Turn off that ancient Romanian warlord and ruler and the whole network of blood drops and evil vampirism will be ripped apart forever."
And so, Abraham gave his money to banks to enhance and increase, bought a small mansion in a location which was at the time a few good safe miles from London, and reared his children there. The oldest of the boys he raised hired and trained a small army, and developed a somewhat fundamental patriotism to his country which would stick with his offspring's offsprings and beyond.
The ancient Romanian warlord was also amplified augmented and toyed with as Abraham's great-grandson discovered technology so now the small army had a 'trash man' for the vampires and ghouls the Van Hellsings and their army fought. Time flew by at a pace far too quick for mortal humans to handle with and the grandson died, leaving a daughter behind; the only female in a long line of male ancestry.
Destiny cared nothing for her, nor for the ancient vampire she now mastered like a dog. Destiny's eye set on a new addition to the small army: a young vampiress named Victoria Seras.
The little thing was bustling through the deep dark dank corridors under the Van Hellsing mansion, trying desperately to wrap her still mortal mind around the concept which now dominated her life; she had died and was now a vampire. She was not even a full vampire yet, but a fledgling, and it seemed the world was bent on the notion of ganging up on her to force her into full vampirism. This meant the drinking of blood which was the one thing Victoria was still too human to do, and was the one thing she needed to gain the respect of her new company and commanders thus making her life a lot less awkward, miserable and lonely.
And so she waited, and bid her time by training on her new fledgling skills, making huge shows of surprise and sweet innocent rapture at her enhanced vision, sight and smell, trying to coax some endearment out of her strict, grave and impatient new surrounding. Deep down inside she wished to flee this strange enhanced body and become the good old Essex girl she used to be, to be the police girl she was before a vampire abducted her and forced the ancient Romanian warlord trash man to shoot the vampire through her. He nearly killed her, yes, but before her light forever faded, he turned her into his fledgling.
Once again, Victoria was a teenager, fumbling and flailing around, desperate to get her feet back on the ground.
Which was particularly tricky, now that the ground seemed to be turning into porridge. Frowning, Victoria stared down, bending forward a little to gaze at her small feet beyond her abnormally large breasts.
Yes, it was true, the green-with-moss old rocks did, indeed, enveloped her feet. Victoria blinked at the sight, wholeheartedly believing her vampire vision was playing tricks on her in the dark gloomy corridors of Second World War fortifications. Surely, the floor is not really sinking under her feet, it didn't even warp under her, like a fabric truly aught to, Victoria thought; it was just a hole through which she was ever so slowly and serenely sinking.
Shooting her head up to gaze frantically around, Victoria checked to make sure that this silly behavior of the space-time continuum was not observed by anyone lest her presence in it embarrass her; if Abraham's son could see her now, he'd be filled with pride at Victoria's trademark British behavior.
No one was around and Victoria was already shin-deep in the floor; soon, her waist (as wide as her chest, which made her the boys' favorite as soon as her stumpy body developed this way) would be completely immersed and there might not be a way out of this.
Better call for help then, no?
"Um….uh….e-excuse me...I-I think I might need help here…." She piped up, cringing at the sound of her own frightened voice bouncing back at her from the hard walls. Her finely tuned and enhanced ears could almost see the sound waves zigzagging down the corridor before her, like zinging bullets, searching for an ear to pick them up and come to her aid.
Footsteps clicked on the cobalt stones of the corridor and Victoria sighed in relief at this evidence that the floor's wrath seems to be aimed only at her and that others were not in danger.
The old servant of the Von Hellsing family, a Romanian himself, emerged from the darkness, carrying a flashlight and a frightened look which grew only worse as his eyes fell on Victoria, now sunk to the middle of her torso in the floor.
His look switched from horror to humor and he crouched, old knees creaking, by Victoria, reaching his hands to her. "I've seen master Alucard do this through walls, Miss Seras, but I never thought it was something that could be done to floors as well."
Relieved even more, Victoria neighed a giggle awkwardly and tried smiling apologetically as best she could. "So sorry, Walter, but I never meant to even start it…"
"That's alright, Miss Seras, I'm sure it simply happened to you. Now, if you don't mind, try imagining there's something firm under your feet and stand on that." The old servant smiled at her politely and waited for the fledgling to come to grips with her powers.
"Ah…h-how…I mean, I don't mean to sound daft or anything, but…I can't feel anything under my feet…except warmth, n-no; heat…." And her round red eyes filled with worry as they reflected the sudden grey fear descending on Walter's face like morning fog.
In his youth, when Walter was just brought to the Van Hellsing's armed forces, he used to pull tricks on the ancient warlord vampire whenever the older Romanian walked through walls; Walter would hang onto the vampire's coattails or long hair strands and pull. Even the gentlest of tugs would yank the vampire out of the walls' fabric and render the vanishing act unsuccessful; so fragile and complicated was the feat that even a powerful vampire as Alucard was unable to complete it when interfered with.
Whatever it was that Victoria was now doing, it was not that trick, because she was bosom-deep in the floor and the floor tugged back when Walter tried pulling Victoria's arms out of the it.
Worried, he touched the rims of the floor around her wrists and for a moment his fingertips sank into the it, but then they burned and were pushed back, like Victoria was being eaten by a being which did not mean to take Walter in as well.
This was beyond Walter's comprehension and beyond his already shaky loyalty to the Van Hellsing family; he leaped to his feet and fled without apology, the young vampiress' miserable plea stabbing at his mind as he fled down the corridors.
Now nothing but a head poking out of the floor, her tears of misery formed two lines of blood down her plump cheeks. Then a soft touch calmed her and she bent her neck backwards to see her master, the ancient vampire warlord, smiling down at her peacefully. He placed his gloved palms on the sides of her face and tried to stare her into peacefullness, fighting the storm of her frightened thoughts with a cool steely serenity.
"Whatever it is, Victoria Seras," he said with a deep, velvety voice, "it can't be worse than here and you must remember it; wherever it is you're going, they'll never make you a prisoner like I have."
"Master…" She whimpered, suddenly forgetting her unknown destination, overwhelmed with the sudden sweet parental attitude he was showering her with.
"Nothing is worse than here, Victoria, because you will be free." He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose before the whole face disappeared.
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The air in the Bebop's rooms was getting colder as an attempt to save fuel drove its inhabitants to shut off the climate control system. The space outside its double-shielded windows was beginning to slowly freeze the air inside the small ship.
The coolness made Spike Spiegel's skin pucker with goosebumps as the drops of water still clinging to his bare chest from the shower he had taken resonated the chill. Spike's mind was not on the air; it was on the shaolin kick he had just performed almost flawlessly.
Cold or not, the air was slowly filling with that wonderful sweet smell of onions fried in sesame oil, then the scent of fried peppers burst into the main living room where Spike performed yet another flawless kick.
"Oh, godamnit…" A deep masculine sigh boomed from the kitchen where the smells were pouring out of, advancing along the ceiling like clouds on an upside-down mountainside. "Spike…I'm afraid we're out of canned beef."
"Good, maybe that nasty diarrhea I've been having all morning'll stop now."
"I told you it's because of the milk, not the spam."
"They're both out of date, Jet, it could have been either of the two."
"You're allergic to dairy products; I've told you this more than once!" The large man in the kitchen with the prosthetic arm berated Spike like a giant, half cyborg mother hen.
"I am NOT, leave me alone already!"
"Fine, go ahead dehydrate from diarrhea for all I care; why listen to me? I'm just an old, crippled man!"
"You sound like my grandmother, Jet; let it go."
"Your grandmother must have been a very smart lady."
"Oh, for God's sake…" Spike sighed and flexed shifted his lean, strong body to a smooth kick-and-punch, his muscles working together perfectly.
"Spike…"
"Now what is it?"
"I was just saying…we're out of beef…"
"Yes, Jet, you said it already in case you don't remember. Are you going senile like my grandmother?"
"…. Spike…. that means the only way I can finish making this bell peppers and beef dish is by adding pork to it…The pork's fresh…."
Spiked sighed with exasperation. "I don't eat pork, Jet." He hummed, knowing he didn't have to verbalize it to make it known to his ever bustling business partner. Jet, the 'Black Dog' was a skilled detective and as good a bounty hunter as Spike was, but he was even better at creating and maintaining a domestic environment. Spike often wondered why Jet never settled down and had a family, and why he ended up running around the Milky Way chasing escaped criminals.
"So? You'll eat only the peppers?!" The bad side of Jet's maternal instincts was his often worrying and generally frightening mental resemblance to Spike's departed grandmother. "It's enough that you have to run around half naked after having a shower when you turned off the climate control system yourself. Sometimes I wonder if you're trying to kill yourself with the flue."
Spike wanted to storm into the kitchen and give Jet a long shouting for nagging him too much. He also wanted to shut up and sate Jet's worrying mind by walking up to the sofa and putting on the Jupiter moth lint coat he had prepared for the long cold night on the Bebop. Both choices were going to prove problematic as Spike's right leg was completely immersed in the Bebop's floor.
"Say, Jet, are those peppers ready yet?" If he's going, wherever it is he's going - and Spike was definitely not getting hurled into space because his bare feet felt the void below them was hot as an oven - he might as well go there full.
"Oh? You're hungry, eh? Put a shirt on first, I'll see if I can find another can of spam…There must be something still here…." Jet rummaged through the kitchen larder, where they kept their emergency food cans; Spike was hungry.
"Uh…that won't be necessary; I just want to nibble on something…A cracker maybe?" Spike tried hard to press back against the floor as the side of his face sank into it. He thanked God for the fact that his eye which now moved through the portal was a fake.
The slight fear wavering in Spike's voice for a fragment of a second did not go unnoticed to Jet. A moment's panic fluttered through the large man's stomach and iced his limbs. The moment disappeared and Jet tore the bright pink apron off his broad muscular torso, cast the skillet carelessly at the gas cooker's top and dropped the can of spam in his hand into the hot wok.
He stormed out of the kitchen and into the icy living hall just in time to see the triangle of Spike's body from his ribcage to his left shoulder poking through the floor, his nipple sinking in forever. The arm spasmed randomly, like a decapitated alien eel, fingers twitching like monstrous gills.
Slowing his steps as realization hit him that, not only was it completely over his head and impossible to stop, but that something Spike was seeing or experiencing was suddenly calming his panic since his arm stopped twitching, Jet crouched by the palm and wrist sticking from the floor.
He gave the palm one last shake and sighed, "I told you to put something warm on, didn't I?"
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Spike, Victoria and Kamui were hurled into the Galiferi's prize possession and brightest invention: the dimension with a mind of its own, the great adventure machine, the marvelous killer.
Only one of them was planned to enter this world, but when its hunger is aroused, it's hard not to abduct some more creatures and things from other dimensions. Not long after the dimension's creator was killed did Destiny take this thing into its care and made it its favorite toy. Now, even though those brought into the dimension were often taken with no reason, Destiny would soon find them a role.
With the three abductees fully sunk into the dimension, Destiny could sit back - such as it was - and relax as it watched the cogs of events turn on the game boards. The object of Destiny's observation was not the cogs themselves, or the three travelers, but a toy it created a long, long time ago.
A toy which was, on its own, a pawn in a small clever set Destiny used quite frequently. Destiny liked playing with this particular toy especially, and with the set it belonged to in general. Its favorite set, they were: the Deaths.
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Death was dreaming. Under a cloud of sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, his mind tapped into the fog of dreams Destiny covers its cogs with, and a vision came before him, hitting him and smearing itself around his mind.
Death closed his eyes and the fog took on sights, smells, sounds and sensations; the dream's illusion was completed.
He stood in a ruin of hell, where the grass which punctured through cracks in the hard and cruel concrete grew yellow under the wearying sun. Huge flat slabs which were once ceilings lay sideways on ruins of walls, the result of a brave revolt against the inevitable. To Death's dream body's right, a similar building stood undisturbed where the rebellion had not occurred and evidence of genocide stood clearly.
Death cast his eyes around as the sky above him clouded over in that distinct Eastern European weather feature, and realized that this was no dream, but a nightmare.
Lately, as his moods forced the healers of his dimension to sedate him over and over again, he was having many dreams which began this way, but this dream was different. So far, the dreams that were showing him the hell and ruins with time sliding backwards to heal wounds. The camp's various compounds unraveled and disintegrated until nothing was left but the bog land on which the camp was built.
Those dreams were accompanied by the lovely singing of women, women dressed in sheer white dresses blowing in the wind of time, inhaling the camp into a void. This dream did not have them and the silence hurt Death's ears.
Suddenly, the memories of experiencing his dimension's version of this hell overwhelmed Death and his body buckled under him, crushing him to the weedy, hard ground. He lay there, wallowing in tears and whimpering like an injured animal, as the dirt and the ash clung to the striped camp uniform he was always wearing in these dreams: the ones he wore when he was a prisoner here.
Then, just as the images had become more powerful and gritty, and Death thought that this time his mind would truly be eaten by the pain, the sound of clicking heels snapped through the veil of memories before his eyes and once again he saw the reality inside his dream rather than the world here as it was sixty years ago.
It was a woman with bright pink-dyed hair, chemically curled to resemble western fashion. Her lips were dyed a daring dark red. Her black sleeveless dress clung so revealingly to her body that the small hill of her pubic hairs was detectable, and it seemed the only thing she wore under the long garment was the black garter in plain view through the long slit in her dress, leaving her left leg exposed.
She smiled at the prone Death and crouched by him, running her long pampered fingers through his hair, her long blood-red varnished fingernails clashing violently with the deep black bangs on Death's head.
"Why do you cry," She asked, unfazed by his tears of blood, "because of this place?" She cast her heavily made-up eyelids, long fake lashes curling above her bright hazel eyes which were quite roundly shaped for a Japanese woman.
Death whimpered at her and grabbed her delicate wrist with his small but coarse palms, begging her with motion to help him to his feet.
She did, and as she pulled him up like a pile of rags, she beamed beautifully at him, "You will be out of here soon, don't worry." She was leading him down the path away from the crematorium buildings to where the train platform lay, but Death refused to go.
She turned to him patiently. "You must see my leader," her voice carried softly on the air like the lavender perfume she wore. "He'll heal you; he'll lead you out of here."
"I've been told this before," Death argued bitterly, yanking back on the woman's wrist violently as if to hurl her back to him and stick a gun in her face until she breaks the dream and lets him wake. "Why should I believe you?" He folded his arms on his chest so that the patch on his baggy shirt, which carried his number, disappeared and all the woman would see was the hard pink triangle patch.
"Well, if you won't trust me, I'll have to bring it here," she said and the world behind her back bubbled and shriveled like a burning photograph. Behind the woman a black void opened and Death's mind and body rattled with a base fear, which only grew worse as the woman disappeared when the void engulfed her as well.
It seemed like he was observing a screen, into which a hole was burned, soon to swallow Death as well.
Whatever it was, it was only a dream and Death knew it, so, aside from the horror of seeing the provocative woman disappear like that, he faced no danger. Not a godlike creature as Death was; not in a drug-induced dream.
The black void reached him finally, flipping him into its different existence like a sock turned inside-out; this was the other side of his dream. It was like being trapped in a pure black glass ball; Death could detect the edges of the dream as they curved and hardened around him.
He was not dressed as a prisoner anymore, but in the short suit of armor in which he did battle and patrol. That caught Death's attention well enough to distract him from the last change in the dream. When he shot his eyes forward again there was something there.
It looked like a cocoon of sticky tentacles, wrapped tightly around a frail body, yet slowly slithering loose. The poor victim of this strange octopus was a young man, pale and thin and painfully fragile in the harsh reality of Destiny's dream.
The web was oozing the boy out and soon the poor, limp, naked body would crash to the hard glass floor. Death shot forward and caught the boy just in time, cradling the amazingly soft body in his strong arms. He struggled for a while to rid the boy of the web's last clinging filaments until the youth was free.
The voice of the woman resonated inside the black ball of dream glass. "You must meet my leader; he will heal you."
Death raised the boy's chin to fully appreciate the marvelous face before him, which seemed to have been flawlessly carved out of ivory by a master craftsman. The boy's eyes opened and two bold mauve orbs enhanced the facial features' beauty. Death gasped, his heart captive of those magical eyes immediately.
"Will he love me?" Death's voice wavered in worry, running his thumb down the boy's ooze-slick cheek. "Will he love me?"
The boy smiled enigmatically, his eyes distant and cold as the dream disappeared, leaving Death to wrench himself awake on a hospital bed in a dark cold room in the dimension with a mind of its own, or as its residents called it, The Lost Dimension.
Lonely and stiff with cold, Death shuddered and rubbed the backs of his arms, wishing to rub something else as waves of the dream caressed his memory like lapping water; the boy's beautiful face inflamed Death's want. His question echoed in his mind, as if bouncing off those walls of black glass.
To be continued.
Type: Sci-fi, fantasy, romance, history, crossover
Warnings:
Betas: compli_cait and lumina17.
Synopsis: Cast into an alien world they did not choose to come to, a small human community struggles to survive. With the help of a group of talented brave men and women, they sustain, as struggles from within only add to dangers which seem to add up around them as if for some spectator's pleasure.
Disclaimer: The characters and events of the manga series X/1999, Cowboy Bebop and Hellsing and the television series Doctor Who were not my creation, though I have made several adjustments with them for plot and explanations' sake. I make no profit from publishing this fic.
Author's Thanks: To the readers of the more fanfiction-centered early version of this story. For one of this story's biggest fan and beta, lumina17 and for my long time friend and beta, compli_cait. None of this will be here without you guys.
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Chapter 1 - Once Upon a Time
There are many species living on the universe's many planets: some grand and some small. Some are lowly, while others are near-gods. Amongst species capable of extraordinary feats, one in particular is the star of this book, but their lives are also dominated by the lives of another godly kind, the Galiferiens.
This kind are a venerable thing; they are, each, an eye, a nose, a tongue and a fingertip, ready to reach out to the world outside their planet and see it and what it is, what's in it and why. A small nation, this species, but a powerful one and a clever one as well.
At first they set out merely to observe their galaxy, the planets closest to them, but knowledge is addictive to this kind, therefore collecting and analyzing it had become much too entertaining for their own good. Sending out probes and delegations to their surrounding, they'd discovered planet after planet in their solar system and soon the galaxy itself was far too small for them; like a skull too narrow for its brain.
Chasing knowledge from one planet to another, from each galaxy to the next, through wormholes and asteroid belts, their research became dangerous; the precious sons and daughters of Galiferi- each a gem of mental capacities - were incurring knowledge's toll.
Alarmed but not deflated, they turned to stay home and develop tools to bring the world around them to their doorstep. A golden age of technology for travel came to be; they merely needed to open a door and the world was their oyster.
For a while, it was enough for them.
Then their world as it was became, once more, too narrow for them. This time the question backing up their next spasm of development was not, "what's out there," but, "how did it come to be like this?". This question burned in their bones, nagging at them to be solved.
They created tools for time travel and studied the history of their universe, but that, too, was not enough. The next most obvious step to take for a kind which cannot hold itself to stop, was travelling between dimensions. Like before, the machines they created for this were marvelous, and horribly efficient.
Looking across the different worlds, the Galiferiens discovered many pleasant and wonderful things for their ever hungry minds to ponder; they'd discovered that other creatures can travel through dimensions, they discovered the other near-gods. They found simple, human creatures capable of travelling and warping across dimensions with the aid of a spell they cast, and found other humans capable of seeing the future of their world and of others' through the flow of dreams.
What struck them the most was how some things, leaping before their eyes seductively in demand of an inquiry, worked under what appears to be a code of rules. Excited and ravishingly curious, they hurled its people to investigate and explore this seeming chain of events and creatures linked together like flies in a spider's web. They called these powers, these rules, by a name: Destiny.
They realized that they, too, were flies in the web, and left the powers un-touched, turning instead to investigate the effects of these rules. A peaceful era of philosophy and enlightment ensued. That is, until one of the Galiferiens created the technology to build a dimension. The possibilities abound in this toy lured them back into frantic investigation. Dimensions which were like beakers in a lab were made, and the rules of Destiny were put to the test in them.
In the background, a single character existed watching his kind's life spin and tangle in research; the son of the Galiferien king became bored and demanded a toy of his own; a status prize fit for the high ranking person he was.
His subjects convulsed and spasmed; each of its sons and daughters worked their hardest to create for the prince the dream he desired and so, the greatest invention of the species was born: a dimension with a mind of its own.
It was a pet, a small unimportant thing the young man would once in a while fiddle with, despite his father's warnings of Destiny and its implications on all dimensions both real and fake.
The prince did not take heed and, as it always happens, he had paid the price. The whole species paid the price, as they learned once more that knowledge will often cost lives. They abandoned dimension and the whole branch of study alone, save for a single agent still wandering around from world to world in search of adventure.
And the pet dimension?
*********************************************************************
In one dimension amongst many, the Earth had tired of its busiest children: the human kind. They were building on its back, digging into it, poisoning its soil and water, chasing and killing its other creatures; their opposable digits' glory had gone to their heads. Before it would be damaged beyond repair, the Earth planned its retaliation.
It built a scene of battle, playing a game of chess against Destiny, each with their set of players. The Earth created men and women with powers beyond their kind and a mission in their heart to shake the world until every manmade building would topple to the ground and liberate the Earth of its pests. Destiny brought about its own set; humans, too, with powers of their own, and a desire to survive and defend their way of life until its nothing but ash and dry poisonous sand.
Amongst the pawns on his side of the board, the leader of one of Destiny's teams stood now in a hall and pondered his choice in the game. So far, the events of Kamui Shirou's life have lead him to think that he had a choice in this, that he could have chosen to fight on Earth's side and now stand in a different place, with a different sword and a different team of comrades at his back. For now, Kamui toyed with the idea that had he chosen to fight with the Dragons of Earth, he might have been somewhere else now. Somewhere darker, yes, but somewhere different, which was good enough for the slightly frightened boy right now.
He didn't know he was but a pawn on the chessboard and that his set, and the board they stood on, was one of many for Destiny.
Kamui was not given the dominant appearance one would expect from a person bearing his responsibility; a slim young man with willowy pale limbs which were misproportioned to his slightly larger than average head; he looked more like a young girl than anything. His mother used to tell him his head was that big because it had to have room for those massive expressive eyes and that his eyes had to be large so that people would notice their spectacular shade: the smoothest, velvet mauve.
Just how special those eyes were, and how lucky he was to be born with them in his world's 1990s and in Japan, of all Axis countries, was another thing Kamui will never fully comprehend, not unless someone tells him the whole story, and one day someone will.
The hall Kamui stood in, with his set of warriors at his back, was underground, for the safekeeping of precious things had to be underground and the deeper the better for this particular precious thing. What Kamui held in his hand was a sword nearly his size (which wasn't much for he was a very short fifteen year old) that will be his tool to fight the leader of the opposite side of the game. He was told the sword was sacred, that it was to be kept safe in the underground under a lock of spells, that it held magnificent wonderful powers and that he was not yet to wield it.
Alas, Destiny had other plans for Kamui, in which the sword was a meaningless piece of scrap metal. So far, Destiny allowed Kamui and his group, and the Earth, the pleasure of playing their game. This time was now over as other gears in the gigantic clockwork of Destiny were set into motion.
Stepping forward to place the sword in its lock-and-key safe, Kamui noticed the ground beneath his unmanly small feet became soft, and was growing softer and softer the more pressure he applied to it. Convinced this was a part of the locking process, or at least some sort of esoteric spell pre-planned to defend him and the sword, Kamui ignored the strange phenomenon, even as his ankles became immersed in the ground and the soles of his feet cried out to his brain that they were sensing nothing below.
Only when the chairman of the school under which the locking chamber resided screamed in horror and surprise that Kamui understood the floor was not meant to do that. By then, he was knee-deep in the thing, and the sword was half immersed.
"That's alright, it feels like quicksand, this thing, whatever it is," thought Kamui calmly. "They'll just yank me out and everything will be fine. I'll just get the sword out," but the sword, like his limbs, would not be yanked out of the quagmire Kamui's dimension's fabric had become.
Now it clamped harder as Kamui's body's balance began playing a dangerous game about to topple him directly into the hole of the floor, and the portal grasped firmly onto Kamui's waist. His legs free, Kamui was able to wiggle them around, trying to grab a hold of some ledge. He was sure there was something wrong with the floor and presumed that under this hard surface of cast metal there would be some rock he could land on, but there was none and the ease with which Kamui could swing his legs disturbingly reminded him of air.
He was about to fall from the skies, and the air below him was very, very hot.
It was then that Kamui realized he was falling into something unknown to him and, like all humans, panicked in the face of the unknown. It was then that he started screaming and flailing his arms around, as he let go of the sword and began clawing at the ground around him like a maniac. His fingernails, though slightly longer and more primmed than what's appropriate for a male in his culture, had absolutely no affect on the smooth steel floor.
His friends were there, the other pawns in the game, and they leaped at him to grab and keep him from disappearing. The esoteric monk grabbed Kamui's right hand and hooked the thin limb over his shoulder, crouched and used his whole body to crane the boy up, legs and back muscles working the hardest.
The portal fought back and Kamui's shoulder became dislocated with a sickening "gluck", sending Kamui into a fit of howling pain and spew of curse words like a drunken sailor.
Various spells cast at the portal by Kamui's group were deflected like pines on a breeze meeting a cliffside and suddenly the pawns realized there was nothing to do, as their leader was nothing but a head poking through the floor grotesquely and there was nothing left to hold onto.
Kamui opened his mouth to scream one last time, as his feet sent a shock through his spine to his mind to prepare him for a long fall and a hard - possibly fatal - landing. The mistress of the spirit dog which uselessly caught Kamui's sleeve and tore it as it tried holding the boy up, was the last person Kamui's eyes met as she said, "Goodbye, good luck! Don't scream, Shiro-kun; breath!". He did.
*********************
Abraham Van Hellsing was smarter than to believe the single vampire lord he caught, defeated and enslaved was the only one of its hellish kind in Abraham's dimension. He had lived through too much to believe such a silly, optimistic notion as to think as, "Turn off that ancient Romanian warlord and ruler and the whole network of blood drops and evil vampirism will be ripped apart forever."
And so, Abraham gave his money to banks to enhance and increase, bought a small mansion in a location which was at the time a few good safe miles from London, and reared his children there. The oldest of the boys he raised hired and trained a small army, and developed a somewhat fundamental patriotism to his country which would stick with his offspring's offsprings and beyond.
The ancient Romanian warlord was also amplified augmented and toyed with as Abraham's great-grandson discovered technology so now the small army had a 'trash man' for the vampires and ghouls the Van Hellsings and their army fought. Time flew by at a pace far too quick for mortal humans to handle with and the grandson died, leaving a daughter behind; the only female in a long line of male ancestry.
Destiny cared nothing for her, nor for the ancient vampire she now mastered like a dog. Destiny's eye set on a new addition to the small army: a young vampiress named Victoria Seras.
The little thing was bustling through the deep dark dank corridors under the Van Hellsing mansion, trying desperately to wrap her still mortal mind around the concept which now dominated her life; she had died and was now a vampire. She was not even a full vampire yet, but a fledgling, and it seemed the world was bent on the notion of ganging up on her to force her into full vampirism. This meant the drinking of blood which was the one thing Victoria was still too human to do, and was the one thing she needed to gain the respect of her new company and commanders thus making her life a lot less awkward, miserable and lonely.
And so she waited, and bid her time by training on her new fledgling skills, making huge shows of surprise and sweet innocent rapture at her enhanced vision, sight and smell, trying to coax some endearment out of her strict, grave and impatient new surrounding. Deep down inside she wished to flee this strange enhanced body and become the good old Essex girl she used to be, to be the police girl she was before a vampire abducted her and forced the ancient Romanian warlord trash man to shoot the vampire through her. He nearly killed her, yes, but before her light forever faded, he turned her into his fledgling.
Once again, Victoria was a teenager, fumbling and flailing around, desperate to get her feet back on the ground.
Which was particularly tricky, now that the ground seemed to be turning into porridge. Frowning, Victoria stared down, bending forward a little to gaze at her small feet beyond her abnormally large breasts.
Yes, it was true, the green-with-moss old rocks did, indeed, enveloped her feet. Victoria blinked at the sight, wholeheartedly believing her vampire vision was playing tricks on her in the dark gloomy corridors of Second World War fortifications. Surely, the floor is not really sinking under her feet, it didn't even warp under her, like a fabric truly aught to, Victoria thought; it was just a hole through which she was ever so slowly and serenely sinking.
Shooting her head up to gaze frantically around, Victoria checked to make sure that this silly behavior of the space-time continuum was not observed by anyone lest her presence in it embarrass her; if Abraham's son could see her now, he'd be filled with pride at Victoria's trademark British behavior.
No one was around and Victoria was already shin-deep in the floor; soon, her waist (as wide as her chest, which made her the boys' favorite as soon as her stumpy body developed this way) would be completely immersed and there might not be a way out of this.
Better call for help then, no?
"Um….uh….e-excuse me...I-I think I might need help here…." She piped up, cringing at the sound of her own frightened voice bouncing back at her from the hard walls. Her finely tuned and enhanced ears could almost see the sound waves zigzagging down the corridor before her, like zinging bullets, searching for an ear to pick them up and come to her aid.
Footsteps clicked on the cobalt stones of the corridor and Victoria sighed in relief at this evidence that the floor's wrath seems to be aimed only at her and that others were not in danger.
The old servant of the Von Hellsing family, a Romanian himself, emerged from the darkness, carrying a flashlight and a frightened look which grew only worse as his eyes fell on Victoria, now sunk to the middle of her torso in the floor.
His look switched from horror to humor and he crouched, old knees creaking, by Victoria, reaching his hands to her. "I've seen master Alucard do this through walls, Miss Seras, but I never thought it was something that could be done to floors as well."
Relieved even more, Victoria neighed a giggle awkwardly and tried smiling apologetically as best she could. "So sorry, Walter, but I never meant to even start it…"
"That's alright, Miss Seras, I'm sure it simply happened to you. Now, if you don't mind, try imagining there's something firm under your feet and stand on that." The old servant smiled at her politely and waited for the fledgling to come to grips with her powers.
"Ah…h-how…I mean, I don't mean to sound daft or anything, but…I can't feel anything under my feet…except warmth, n-no; heat…." And her round red eyes filled with worry as they reflected the sudden grey fear descending on Walter's face like morning fog.
In his youth, when Walter was just brought to the Van Hellsing's armed forces, he used to pull tricks on the ancient warlord vampire whenever the older Romanian walked through walls; Walter would hang onto the vampire's coattails or long hair strands and pull. Even the gentlest of tugs would yank the vampire out of the walls' fabric and render the vanishing act unsuccessful; so fragile and complicated was the feat that even a powerful vampire as Alucard was unable to complete it when interfered with.
Whatever it was that Victoria was now doing, it was not that trick, because she was bosom-deep in the floor and the floor tugged back when Walter tried pulling Victoria's arms out of the it.
Worried, he touched the rims of the floor around her wrists and for a moment his fingertips sank into the it, but then they burned and were pushed back, like Victoria was being eaten by a being which did not mean to take Walter in as well.
This was beyond Walter's comprehension and beyond his already shaky loyalty to the Van Hellsing family; he leaped to his feet and fled without apology, the young vampiress' miserable plea stabbing at his mind as he fled down the corridors.
Now nothing but a head poking out of the floor, her tears of misery formed two lines of blood down her plump cheeks. Then a soft touch calmed her and she bent her neck backwards to see her master, the ancient vampire warlord, smiling down at her peacefully. He placed his gloved palms on the sides of her face and tried to stare her into peacefullness, fighting the storm of her frightened thoughts with a cool steely serenity.
"Whatever it is, Victoria Seras," he said with a deep, velvety voice, "it can't be worse than here and you must remember it; wherever it is you're going, they'll never make you a prisoner like I have."
"Master…" She whimpered, suddenly forgetting her unknown destination, overwhelmed with the sudden sweet parental attitude he was showering her with.
"Nothing is worse than here, Victoria, because you will be free." He leaned down and kissed the tip of her nose before the whole face disappeared.
**********************
The air in the Bebop's rooms was getting colder as an attempt to save fuel drove its inhabitants to shut off the climate control system. The space outside its double-shielded windows was beginning to slowly freeze the air inside the small ship.
The coolness made Spike Spiegel's skin pucker with goosebumps as the drops of water still clinging to his bare chest from the shower he had taken resonated the chill. Spike's mind was not on the air; it was on the shaolin kick he had just performed almost flawlessly.
Cold or not, the air was slowly filling with that wonderful sweet smell of onions fried in sesame oil, then the scent of fried peppers burst into the main living room where Spike performed yet another flawless kick.
"Oh, godamnit…" A deep masculine sigh boomed from the kitchen where the smells were pouring out of, advancing along the ceiling like clouds on an upside-down mountainside. "Spike…I'm afraid we're out of canned beef."
"Good, maybe that nasty diarrhea I've been having all morning'll stop now."
"I told you it's because of the milk, not the spam."
"They're both out of date, Jet, it could have been either of the two."
"You're allergic to dairy products; I've told you this more than once!" The large man in the kitchen with the prosthetic arm berated Spike like a giant, half cyborg mother hen.
"I am NOT, leave me alone already!"
"Fine, go ahead dehydrate from diarrhea for all I care; why listen to me? I'm just an old, crippled man!"
"You sound like my grandmother, Jet; let it go."
"Your grandmother must have been a very smart lady."
"Oh, for God's sake…" Spike sighed and flexed shifted his lean, strong body to a smooth kick-and-punch, his muscles working together perfectly.
"Spike…"
"Now what is it?"
"I was just saying…we're out of beef…"
"Yes, Jet, you said it already in case you don't remember. Are you going senile like my grandmother?"
"…. Spike…. that means the only way I can finish making this bell peppers and beef dish is by adding pork to it…The pork's fresh…."
Spiked sighed with exasperation. "I don't eat pork, Jet." He hummed, knowing he didn't have to verbalize it to make it known to his ever bustling business partner. Jet, the 'Black Dog' was a skilled detective and as good a bounty hunter as Spike was, but he was even better at creating and maintaining a domestic environment. Spike often wondered why Jet never settled down and had a family, and why he ended up running around the Milky Way chasing escaped criminals.
"So? You'll eat only the peppers?!" The bad side of Jet's maternal instincts was his often worrying and generally frightening mental resemblance to Spike's departed grandmother. "It's enough that you have to run around half naked after having a shower when you turned off the climate control system yourself. Sometimes I wonder if you're trying to kill yourself with the flue."
Spike wanted to storm into the kitchen and give Jet a long shouting for nagging him too much. He also wanted to shut up and sate Jet's worrying mind by walking up to the sofa and putting on the Jupiter moth lint coat he had prepared for the long cold night on the Bebop. Both choices were going to prove problematic as Spike's right leg was completely immersed in the Bebop's floor.
"Say, Jet, are those peppers ready yet?" If he's going, wherever it is he's going - and Spike was definitely not getting hurled into space because his bare feet felt the void below them was hot as an oven - he might as well go there full.
"Oh? You're hungry, eh? Put a shirt on first, I'll see if I can find another can of spam…There must be something still here…." Jet rummaged through the kitchen larder, where they kept their emergency food cans; Spike was hungry.
"Uh…that won't be necessary; I just want to nibble on something…A cracker maybe?" Spike tried hard to press back against the floor as the side of his face sank into it. He thanked God for the fact that his eye which now moved through the portal was a fake.
The slight fear wavering in Spike's voice for a fragment of a second did not go unnoticed to Jet. A moment's panic fluttered through the large man's stomach and iced his limbs. The moment disappeared and Jet tore the bright pink apron off his broad muscular torso, cast the skillet carelessly at the gas cooker's top and dropped the can of spam in his hand into the hot wok.
He stormed out of the kitchen and into the icy living hall just in time to see the triangle of Spike's body from his ribcage to his left shoulder poking through the floor, his nipple sinking in forever. The arm spasmed randomly, like a decapitated alien eel, fingers twitching like monstrous gills.
Slowing his steps as realization hit him that, not only was it completely over his head and impossible to stop, but that something Spike was seeing or experiencing was suddenly calming his panic since his arm stopped twitching, Jet crouched by the palm and wrist sticking from the floor.
He gave the palm one last shake and sighed, "I told you to put something warm on, didn't I?"
*************************
Spike, Victoria and Kamui were hurled into the Galiferi's prize possession and brightest invention: the dimension with a mind of its own, the great adventure machine, the marvelous killer.
Only one of them was planned to enter this world, but when its hunger is aroused, it's hard not to abduct some more creatures and things from other dimensions. Not long after the dimension's creator was killed did Destiny take this thing into its care and made it its favorite toy. Now, even though those brought into the dimension were often taken with no reason, Destiny would soon find them a role.
With the three abductees fully sunk into the dimension, Destiny could sit back - such as it was - and relax as it watched the cogs of events turn on the game boards. The object of Destiny's observation was not the cogs themselves, or the three travelers, but a toy it created a long, long time ago.
A toy which was, on its own, a pawn in a small clever set Destiny used quite frequently. Destiny liked playing with this particular toy especially, and with the set it belonged to in general. Its favorite set, they were: the Deaths.
**********************
Death was dreaming. Under a cloud of sedatives and hallucinogenic drugs, his mind tapped into the fog of dreams Destiny covers its cogs with, and a vision came before him, hitting him and smearing itself around his mind.
Death closed his eyes and the fog took on sights, smells, sounds and sensations; the dream's illusion was completed.
He stood in a ruin of hell, where the grass which punctured through cracks in the hard and cruel concrete grew yellow under the wearying sun. Huge flat slabs which were once ceilings lay sideways on ruins of walls, the result of a brave revolt against the inevitable. To Death's dream body's right, a similar building stood undisturbed where the rebellion had not occurred and evidence of genocide stood clearly.
Death cast his eyes around as the sky above him clouded over in that distinct Eastern European weather feature, and realized that this was no dream, but a nightmare.
Lately, as his moods forced the healers of his dimension to sedate him over and over again, he was having many dreams which began this way, but this dream was different. So far, the dreams that were showing him the hell and ruins with time sliding backwards to heal wounds. The camp's various compounds unraveled and disintegrated until nothing was left but the bog land on which the camp was built.
Those dreams were accompanied by the lovely singing of women, women dressed in sheer white dresses blowing in the wind of time, inhaling the camp into a void. This dream did not have them and the silence hurt Death's ears.
Suddenly, the memories of experiencing his dimension's version of this hell overwhelmed Death and his body buckled under him, crushing him to the weedy, hard ground. He lay there, wallowing in tears and whimpering like an injured animal, as the dirt and the ash clung to the striped camp uniform he was always wearing in these dreams: the ones he wore when he was a prisoner here.
Then, just as the images had become more powerful and gritty, and Death thought that this time his mind would truly be eaten by the pain, the sound of clicking heels snapped through the veil of memories before his eyes and once again he saw the reality inside his dream rather than the world here as it was sixty years ago.
It was a woman with bright pink-dyed hair, chemically curled to resemble western fashion. Her lips were dyed a daring dark red. Her black sleeveless dress clung so revealingly to her body that the small hill of her pubic hairs was detectable, and it seemed the only thing she wore under the long garment was the black garter in plain view through the long slit in her dress, leaving her left leg exposed.
She smiled at the prone Death and crouched by him, running her long pampered fingers through his hair, her long blood-red varnished fingernails clashing violently with the deep black bangs on Death's head.
"Why do you cry," She asked, unfazed by his tears of blood, "because of this place?" She cast her heavily made-up eyelids, long fake lashes curling above her bright hazel eyes which were quite roundly shaped for a Japanese woman.
Death whimpered at her and grabbed her delicate wrist with his small but coarse palms, begging her with motion to help him to his feet.
She did, and as she pulled him up like a pile of rags, she beamed beautifully at him, "You will be out of here soon, don't worry." She was leading him down the path away from the crematorium buildings to where the train platform lay, but Death refused to go.
She turned to him patiently. "You must see my leader," her voice carried softly on the air like the lavender perfume she wore. "He'll heal you; he'll lead you out of here."
"I've been told this before," Death argued bitterly, yanking back on the woman's wrist violently as if to hurl her back to him and stick a gun in her face until she breaks the dream and lets him wake. "Why should I believe you?" He folded his arms on his chest so that the patch on his baggy shirt, which carried his number, disappeared and all the woman would see was the hard pink triangle patch.
"Well, if you won't trust me, I'll have to bring it here," she said and the world behind her back bubbled and shriveled like a burning photograph. Behind the woman a black void opened and Death's mind and body rattled with a base fear, which only grew worse as the woman disappeared when the void engulfed her as well.
It seemed like he was observing a screen, into which a hole was burned, soon to swallow Death as well.
Whatever it was, it was only a dream and Death knew it, so, aside from the horror of seeing the provocative woman disappear like that, he faced no danger. Not a godlike creature as Death was; not in a drug-induced dream.
The black void reached him finally, flipping him into its different existence like a sock turned inside-out; this was the other side of his dream. It was like being trapped in a pure black glass ball; Death could detect the edges of the dream as they curved and hardened around him.
He was not dressed as a prisoner anymore, but in the short suit of armor in which he did battle and patrol. That caught Death's attention well enough to distract him from the last change in the dream. When he shot his eyes forward again there was something there.
It looked like a cocoon of sticky tentacles, wrapped tightly around a frail body, yet slowly slithering loose. The poor victim of this strange octopus was a young man, pale and thin and painfully fragile in the harsh reality of Destiny's dream.
The web was oozing the boy out and soon the poor, limp, naked body would crash to the hard glass floor. Death shot forward and caught the boy just in time, cradling the amazingly soft body in his strong arms. He struggled for a while to rid the boy of the web's last clinging filaments until the youth was free.
The voice of the woman resonated inside the black ball of dream glass. "You must meet my leader; he will heal you."
Death raised the boy's chin to fully appreciate the marvelous face before him, which seemed to have been flawlessly carved out of ivory by a master craftsman. The boy's eyes opened and two bold mauve orbs enhanced the facial features' beauty. Death gasped, his heart captive of those magical eyes immediately.
"Will he love me?" Death's voice wavered in worry, running his thumb down the boy's ooze-slick cheek. "Will he love me?"
The boy smiled enigmatically, his eyes distant and cold as the dream disappeared, leaving Death to wrench himself awake on a hospital bed in a dark cold room in the dimension with a mind of its own, or as its residents called it, The Lost Dimension.
Lonely and stiff with cold, Death shuddered and rubbed the backs of his arms, wishing to rub something else as waves of the dream caressed his memory like lapping water; the boy's beautiful face inflamed Death's want. His question echoed in his mind, as if bouncing off those walls of black glass.
To be continued.