blood red moon
~ a Shadow of Destiny fanfiction
Chapter Three
Traps, traps in the threads - not exactly a threat, but still... Homunculus tried to examine them as he passed, at how the complex artificial structures had been woven into the threads of time. Warnings, they were alarms, most likely designed to alert Hugo of his presence, moving closer to his place in time, though they were easy enough to avoid.
The djinn was quietly impressed, at how far the boy had advanced from his humble beginnings, when he had been simply following Eike’s movements through the centuries. Now, though his attempts were still painfully, awkward fumbles, he was actually reaching out, to touch the threads of time.
//Of course, the doppelganger’s existence told you that much, that he’d become stronger... but how could he have found another stone, and alter it like that? Where did I /send/ him?//
He couldn’t think of an enemy powerful enough to assist Hugo, not one that wouldn’t have simply killed the child on sight.
//Unless someone was watching me, tutoring him while I was helping Eike.//
He had been rather preoccupied, it was true, to take notice of such things. Still, even the concept of ‘enemy’ was a somewhat archaic one, the djinn hadn’t even seen another like himself for eons.
A frayed thread of time curled around his arm as he passed, the cool touch filling him with a profound melancholy - he was as much time’s vessel as it’s master. Homunculus paused, gazing at the tunnel of threads softly glowing all around him, this measure of time so far in the future. He was immediately startled to see that more than one thread here had been damaged, the weave loose and frayed, and the song of time was almost one of... mourning?
The tips of two pale, thin fingers traced an invisible path, the thread glimmering beneath the djinn’s touch, revealing the troubling pattern beneath. It was a soft, quiet tragedy, as if some great cataclysm had swept across all these futures long ago, leaving them sparse, bare of the multitude of life that gave sweet substance to time.
It was disturbing, even for a demon. Any being was only defined by the universe they lived in, the creatures in that universe - in perpetual solitude, any existence was rather meaningless.
Another keen of sorrow, echoing and shivering across the threads, was enough of an incentive for Homunculus to return to the chase, though much more disturbed than he had previously been.
//What has happened here? What has that idiot managed to do?//
Whatever it was, Dopple was leading him to the center of it. There was more than one “center” of course, an immeasurable number of threads containing shades of the same events, layers upon layers - but the doppelganger had sprung from this empty time nonetheless, out of the heart of this catastrophe.
------------------
Homunculus hated shifting into real time and real space. In his own realm, he was mostly free to do as he wished. A fragile body was of little matter when he created his own reality, when a fencing foil was the weight of a sheet of paper, and all “natural” laws responded to his every whim.
The real world was much different, heavy and sharp and too dangerous in all ways, the only place to visit but rarely worth the effort of doing so.
Homunculus quickly glanced left and right as his boots touched the snow along the narrow alleyway. He had half-expected an attack, mood swiftly changing from determination to disdain as none came. The doppelganger had vanished from sight, but was close, somewhere within this world.
Homunculus turned sharply at a sudden crack, a loud crash, just too far away to register as a threat. He watched as a cloud of dust rose up above the line of houses - the roof of a building had given way, and he seemed to be the only one to witness it. The rest of the houses along the street were in much the same condition, slowly deteriorating, as if they had been vacant for many, many years, enormous gravestones in a cemetery town.
//It is a dead zone... and if the threads were singing true, perhaps not just this town.// He frowned slightly, ruby eyes narrowing. //Wait, this town... I know... no, it isn’t... is it?//
Homunculus nearly jumped as something moved beneath his foot, a twisted shape rising up out of the snow. After a moment, he lifted it up slightly, letting it fall against the snow, brushing the writing clear - Franssen.
//The sign... from the photographer’s shop. I sent him back /here/?//
All the way to this future, but Hugo still remained in his hometown. Homunculus was getting sick of these small ironies.
//... but there was nothing here, nothing he could have used, that could create anything like that pale, false twin. He wasn’t that smart.//
The djinn started moving, knew exactly where he was going.
//Wagner’s lab.// Any possibility of an answer would rest within those stone walls, where he himself had been granted another chance at eternity.
The djinn was surprised, at how every movement he made seemed to stir some sort of noise from the otherwise full, unmarked silence. A sudden storm of wings, birds flying through what remained of a storefront windowpane stopped him for a moment. Red eyes lifted, gazing toward the southern end of the Marketplace, where Eike had once juggled... badly, to save himself from Hugo’s blade.
//He looked like an idiot.//
The djinn’s memories were visual, his existence woven into time so that every recollection drew itself back into the past - and Eike’s masked, cloaked figure wavered into his view for a moment, hazy and near-transparent, before vanishing like a ghost into the empty air.
Wreckage was all that remained of Wagner’s house, just as when he had last seen it, but Homunculus was certain something had changed, that perhaps the house had been rebuilt and destroyed /again/. The door was open, hanging free off the crude latch.
The djinn stepped silently through the doorway, sensing no trap, no alarm, the inside of the house as bare and empty as the outside, except for the single staircase leading down. He moved to it, and stopped, as a sound rose up, echoing slightly from below.
“... and I went to where I saw, but there was no one there! I followed where the threads told me, but he wasn’t there...”
It was Dopple’s strange, hollow voice, almost whining now, but no one seemed to respond. Homunculus strained to hear another sound, caught what might have been a soft breath, but it just as easily could have been his imagination.
//... for all I know, she is talking to a coat rack.//
“A little... there was a little thing there, where he should have been, but it wasn’t him, but maybe it /was/ him... and I was confused. I got so confused.”
Slowly moving down the stairs, Homunculus could hear a faint reply, the words barely rising above a low, toneless buzz.
“... not your fault. You did nothing wrong, nothing you could have known about. I didn’t think... but he does have someone, does he? Interesting... that’s very interesting.”
He reached the final stair, the room no bigger than the one he remembered from that distant past, though now it was even more cramped, packed with machines, with piles of wire, metal and electronic parts stuffed in all the cracks, the basement vaguely resembling a rodent’s burrow.
//Amazing, Hugo... how many years work is this? How long did you scrounge, and collect, and plan such a thing?//
Of course, Homunculus couldn’t miss the centerpiece of the room, a now broken jar - just the same as the crucible that had once made him a body, and that had now given birth to his twisted duplicate. Dopple was now gesturing animatedly to a threadbare, filthy creature, a man who stood with his back to the djinn on the stair.
//Hugo... what did you think you were doing?//
The doppelganger’s red eyes met his over a thin shoulder, widening slightly in surprise.
“He is here... he followed me.”
“It is of no consequence.” Homunculus frowned at the raspy voice, unable to match it to the shrill sniping of the child he remembered, Hugo’s irksome waspish nature. “I knew he would come eventually... I prayed it would be too late, and it is. He can do nothing this time, to change fate.”
The man turned, one hand making nervous gestures, rubbing along his face, picking at the long blonde hair, now badly tangled and matted. Eyes like watercolor grass met shocked crimson, and the man’s lips twisted in a lunatic’s vicious smile.
“Hello Homunculus... how are things?”
The djinn had no answer, no clever comments, nothing but the sensation that on all levels, in all times, this was simply /not right/. He made no attempt to check the emotion that cracked along the edges of his voice.
“... Eike?!”
---------------------------
//So, where are you going?//
Eike threw the rest of his small load of personal possessions into the suitcase, wincing at how much space remained, how little he actually owned. The question refused to leave him alone, nagging at the corners of his mind, when there were already too many scavengers circling in his thoughts, determinedly picking away at his desperate hold on calm, and sanity.
/Out. Away. I’m going away, as far away as I can get, until I don’t have to think about this.../
//You can /stay/ and do that, you know. It doesn’t seem like there’s a real sure figure, on how long you have until you’ll start to slip, to forget. Any day now, eh? You could get to the bottom of the stairs and not know why you have a bag packed.//
/Shut up, just shut up.../
He wasn’t taking any of it with him, none of the trinkets, none of the journals, nothing but the money in the account and even that only out of necessity. It was stupid, and he knew it was stupid, to think that somehow he’d be able to walk away from his past - his /pasts/ - just like that, as if the problem lay somewhere in a collection of dusty boxes and not within his own mind.
He was scared, he’d been scared ever since he realized what that picture had been showing him, and that made it easier to be irrational. Eike knew he’d worried Eckart too, unable to answer any of his questions, unable to do much more than look at that picture and /know/...
//I’m going to find a neurologist... the best, I don’t care what it costs, and then they’re going to run some tests - all the tests - and they’ll find out what’s wrong with me, and they’ll fix it.//
Of course, even if they discovered what was happening to his long-term memories, the recurrent, total fugues, Eike doubted any doctor on Earth could explain how he’d managed to have five-hundred years worth.
//It’s true. It’s the simplest explanation, the only one I can think of, that it’s all true... but /how/?//
Once more, as he’d been doing quite often since leaving Oleg’s house, Eike looked up, glancing almost timidly at the world outside his thoughts. He couldn’t help but wonder if Homunculus wasn’t watching him from somewhere, if this wasn’t all some sort of elaborate game, the strange man watching him navigate this impossible turn just like a rat in a maze.
//If I’m not interesting enough, find a way... plant clues across time that make me think I’ve been there, that I’ve lived there... push me, to see what makes me react, what makes me panic.//
... but what of the memories, then? What of Michelle, and Paris, and the boxes and boxes of journals in his handwriting - certainly Homunculus couldn’t have created /all/ that, just to trick him? Eike didn’t know if it lay beyond the man’s power to do all of that, but it certainly seemed to be more trouble than he could imagine him going to.
Disdain, that was what he had felt most from Homunculus, as if the whole struggle to set things right, to keep him alive, to ensure that Wagner received the Philosopher’s Stone - it was all rather dull, a tangle of knots the strange man would have avoided if it had been at all possible. Why would someone like that /purposely/ torment him this way?
//Maybe he changed his mind... maybe this is what happens, if time becomes malleable, and the universe is his endless playground.// Eike smirked slightly, the panic losing some of it’s edge. //Maybe I ought to be flattered by all this attention... if I’m the most interesting thing in eternity?//
The slight smile faded, as he remembered the most important reason he believed it was all real, that this was no delirium, no game - the girl, the girl in his dream who had claimed it was his time to die, that it was long overdue. He could not forget the look in her eyes, timeless and remorseless, all her energy set on plucking him from time, forever.
//... and she might be right. Whatever happened, if it is true that I was Wagner... I should already be dead, shouldn’t I. I should have died a long time ago. Am I disrupting something, by staying here, if I shouldn’t be? It’s unnatural... but is it dangerous?//
So what did /that/ matter, if it was or if it wasn’t, what exactly were his options?!
Eike shook his head, unwilling to even imagine the possibilities, that he could choose to accept what she had offered, that choosing to die might even be the /right/ thing to do...
//No, damn it! No, I won’t do it. No matter what I did, who I was, I am /not/ that person anymore. I’m not Wagner anymore!//
He was himself, no matter how fragile, how malleable that identity seemed to be. He did not remember making Wagner’s mistakes, and he would not pay for them now, could not make the noble sacrifice of what little life he could hold as his own.
Eike had tried not to give in to panic before this, mainly by refusing to think about anything that had happened, or to change his normal routine in a way that would reveal his fears. If he changed he would have to think about, and that could too easily send him over the edge... but it was useless to ignore reality now, to think it would just go away. It was too dangerous not to be as smart as he could be, with what little he knew to be true.
He scrawled a note, aware he was shaking slightly, just as he was aware he had no idea what to write.
//No... I’m just afraid. Afraid to think that when I next read this note, I won’t remember writing it.//
Eike, you’re in danger - he scribbled that out, followed quickly by an equally useless sentence, and another, crumpling the scrap paper, but finding no words, nothing that could explain what was happening to him, only the panic and the instinctive need to run, to flee to anywhere that wasn’t here - as if that could save him, as if it were the where and not the when that was the problem.
//No, this is useless... how can I warn myself of a danger if I don’t even understand it?!//
He didn’t understand... but he was still afraid, the eyes of that pale, statue girl, steady and absolute, haunted him when he closed his eyes. Calm, she had been so confident in the knowledge that her knife would find his throat, like the sheep upon the altar...
Eike shivered, picking up his bag, heading down the stairs, leaving the paper behind. It was enough that he knew to be afraid, beyond rational thought, hopefully beyond memory... he knew to be afraid.
-------------------------
“Eike?”
Homunculus whispered, watching the hunched over figure slowly lose its confident smirk, folding in on himself slightly, eyes flickering with something like fear, though he wasn’t staring at the djinn anymore, wasn’t staring at anything, really.
“Eike... is it really you?”
A heartbeat, and those green eyes met his again, the snarling grin returning, as the man nodded, pulling the long strands of greasy hair away from his face, holding them back in a low ponytail - a grotesque, skeletal parody of the man Homunculus thought he knew. He could not help but stare in amazed horror, Eike staring back at him almost blankly, flashes of fury and rage bubbling up in an otherwise vacant gaze.
In a flurry of white, her pigtails swinging wildly, Dopple broke the moment, clapping her hands together in delight.
“Oh! It’s... oh, I get it now! I understand, I do I do! You’re him!”
Eike turned, the question plain on his face. If Homunculus had a heart, he knew it would have frozen solid, as he realized what she meant. Dopple was still smiling, bouncing happily with excitement at her sudden revelation.
“You’re the one I saw! In his portal, /you’re/ the one I saw! The one I’m supposed to kill, to hurt him!”
All of Eike’s looks so far had been cut with some measure of insanity, the distraction of one who can no longer distinguish between reality and thought, his mind a battered ship without anchor or destination, simply adrift. As he turned back to the djinn, the look on his face was pure incredulity, a surprise so thick and absolute that nothing, not even madness, could penetrate.
For a moment, Homunculus thought perhaps he could reach Eike, find some small measure of sanity, but that hope faded as watched the flicker of sanity spark, and just as quickly die, the green eyes as cold and lifeless as stone.
Eike laughed, a sound that glanced against the stone walls like a blow, his wrist immediately between his teeth to stifle the noise, body shaking with stifled amusement as those eyes continued to stare at him, burning.
“... and I’m the crazy one. I’m the crazy one, when it’s /you/, and she’s seeking me because it’s /you/...? Is your life really that dull, that watching me...? But you couldn’t be watching me, you couldn’t. I would have known and you would have tried to stop me... from making her.”
His eyes narrowed in nervousness as the anger was swallowed by confusion, hands clutching each other like a dying man’s. He took a wary step back, behind his pale creation, who was quietly watching both of them, eagerly curious but without a hint of concern.
“Eike, how did you do this? How did you create...?”
“Life?”
The man smiled, a disturbed, affectionate expression, all the more unnerving for the very real emotion behind it. He stepped forward, bowing his head to nuzzle the side of Dopple’s neck as she raised a hand back, pulling him closer with an affectionate smile. The two of them made a childish portrait, not so much one of love as worship, as if creating Dopple had required everything Eike had within him, and she loved him with a distant affection, the beneficence of the innately superior.
“Isn’t she beautiful? Of course she’s like you, a little stronger physically, I think, but not much. If I was going to win, I had do it by your rules, you see. Otherwise, you might not understand.”
“I understand. You hate me, for what I did to you, back then.”
Homunculus had not thought it possible until this moment, but they were far, far in the future now, and even he had never tested the limits of his power, the strength of the spells he cast, how long they might last.
//I never thought it would matter. I never thought it could make any difference to me.//
/I never thought./
“You know, Eike? You remember what-?”
“OF COURSE I REMEMBER!!!”
The blonde threw away Dopple in a sudden movement, and Homunculus watched the way she moved, feet sliding across the floor with impossible grace, almost hovering, the same warped physics applying to her here as in his realm - not good, not good at all.
The girl was still smiling, red eyes the same blank calm as when she had been holding him... Homunculus was starting to wonder if /anything/ could make the pale creature angry, or if she had even been created to even know such an emotion.
Eike was watching him silently, slumped slightly and breathing hard, the incredible force of his outburst seemingly more than he could withstand. It hurt, the djinn wasn’t sure how or why, but watching this pale, ragged creature stare at him, so full of hate and pain - it hurt.
//He’s not the man I knew. He’s not Eike, not peaceful like he was... he’s not Eike.//
The realization that the man’s calm, good nature was most likely entirely of his doing did not escape Homunculus’s attention. It had been a capricious action on his part, stealing Eike’s memories, done without thought or care of what would come of it... but /this/? He had never intended anything like this.
//I never intended anything at all... so I suppose, I did intend something like this. What did I /think/ was going to happen to him?//
“Do you know what it’s like to go mad, Homunculus?”
So dry, Eike’s voice, like old newspaper yellowed and brittle and crumbling on each word- why did it hurt him to hear it?
“Do you know what its like... to realize you don’t know... and then... then the forgetting, and the remembering... the memories that blur on top of one another, like falling broken glass that cuts when you try to catch it, but you can’t catch it - and then, then everything turns, and there’s one... just one, and for a moment you think it’s come back -”
A hand extended, reaching out for something Homunculus could not see, something beyond the ray of sunlight that had crept into this living tomb, baptizing the end of the lunatic’s fingers in light. Eike’s expression was the pale, drawn despair of a man seeking salvation... but already knowing... already knowing... and he snatched his hand back to his chest, as if the light had burned. So much hate, so much revulsion in those eyes.
“I remember... a smile, and a future that isn’t /mine/, when she smiled at me... and I... I...” He grinned, teeth gleaming ferally in the low light.
“I remember you. Oh yes, I remember you, and I remember what you did and why you did it and when I remembered and couldn’t stop it and it /wouldn’t/ go away... I couldn’t make it go away and it wouldn’t stay...” Eike grimaced as if in pain, one hand covering an eye, nearly tearing out a patch of his long, dirty hair. “You took it all away from me... everything... and then I couldn’t make it go, it was shattered and I was shattered and there wasn’t a way out...”
Pulling humans through time was risky, Homunculus knew that. Human minds hadn’t been created to really contemplate the idea of moving across multiple worlds, let alone to handle the stress of actually traveling through them. Ideas he took for granted they could barely even comprehend, what he thought as simplicity, as natural would drive them mad. The tug-of-war between himself and destiny, with Eike trapped in the middle, tossed from time-to-time, it must have unraveled what had been done to him, but only partway, weakening but not destroying the djinn’s spell.
//He would start to lose his memories again, but other memories from the past, those would come back. He would no longer fully forget what had happened, but there would be no way of putting what he knew in any sort of order, what was past and present, what fit together to make him who he was. A jumble... a jumble of pieces that could never be pieced together.//
Of course he went insane, there was really no other option. Homunculus had thrown him into the center of a nightmare, from which there was no waking, no escape. It was a testament to Eike’s unerring desire to survive, that he hadn’t killed himself long ago.
//... not himself, but...//
“It is empty here, Eike. /Time/ is empty here... what happened? What did you do?”
“Oh... I... I killed them. All of them. All of everyone. At least, I think I did...”
The quiet statement held no pride, fury gone as Eike rubbed the knuckles of one hand with the fingertips of the other. An axe was marking time here, cleaving out the seconds, splitting the man’s mood into a thousand separate slivers.
“How did you do that?” It was a soft question, the djinn wanted an answer, but knew each step was a potential disaster. He was still aware of Dopple’s every move, the way she hovered at the edge of their conversation - but if he was given this chance to learn what had happened here, it was foolish not to take it.
“Eike...” He gently pushed, as the man’s attention seemed to wander - and again it hurt, to see him so thin, ravaged by the endless centuries, so far gone. The djinn’s mind kept trying to replace what he saw with what was known to him, the calm, rational man he had known - and it angered him to realize that he could not. “Eike, you have touched time... you’ve affected universes completely divergent from your own, stripped them clean...”
The blonde’s shrug was sheepish, he hugged his arms against his chest, head cocked slightly as he stared back into that past, sifting through a silty sea of memory.
“I think... I wanted to do it, something happened with the Stone... or maybe I got my numbers wrong. I do that, sometimes... I lose the numbers, and I can’t remember... I can’t help it when they go. I wrote it down... but when that stopped making sense, I burned all the books. I couldn’t look at them when they stopped making sense.”
He lay a hand on a nearby machine, Homunculus assumed somewhere amidst the wires and cables and steel he would have found what had built those traps in time, what had given Eike this second chance at the Philosopher’s Stone, at creating life.
“Life dies... life dies...” The man murmured softly, to himself, emerald eyes cold and sharp and cruel when he glanced up again, the fury perhaps the only immutable truth left in his life.
“It’s been a hundred years, you know, since she went away, since I created her to come for you. I think I carved marks on the wall... somewhere, or maybe just in my mind...” Eike held up a hand, beckoning to the pale creature, who smiled, calmly taking his hand, arm extended, as if they were about to dance. He turned back, staring down the djinn with dead eyes.
“Why is it me, Homunculus? Why am I the one Dopple saw in your mirror?”
//Why are you important to me, Eike? Why does it hurt, to know what I have done, when I felt nothing before now?//
The djinn answered the only way he could, with the truth.
“I don’t know, Eike.”
Eike nodded, and the djinn felt a sharp stab of alarm, at the flash of /something/ in the blonde’s other hand, hidden as he drew Dopple closer, bending his head once more, resting on her shoulder.
“No, you don’t, and now you never will, not now that I know how to hurt you. Now that I know why I stayed alive, all this time.”
He tipped his head slightly, whispering something to the pale-haired girl, lips curving up at his words, her smile a demented, evil little thing.
Homunculus didn’t see it happen, the motion too quick and too smooth, too unexpected. He only heard the slight gurgle, a wet gasp, and watched as Eike staggered back, the long knife he had given Dopple now imbedded in his chest.
“... deeper,” he whispered, somehow managing to stay standing as the pale girl complied, pushing the knife almost to the hilt, a reflexive whimper the only sound he made.
Homunculus watched the blood trickle out of the blonde’s mouth, as he staggered back, red droplets the same color as his own eyes. Eike’s jade-marble gaze was victorious, hate and triumph and nothing else, the silent wish thrown at him down to the last gasp of life - suffer, demon. Suffer until you die.
Dopple pulled the blade out, Eike’s body falling away, slumping to the floor. The pale haired girl ran one fingertip lightly along the sharp edge of the bloody knife, before looking up at him, smile widening as she saw the djinn was watching her. The girl tipped one hand slightly, giggling as she waved goodbye, skipping backward to disappear in a burst of light, the distant cries of time - leaving him alone with the cooling body of the last man on Earth.
-----------------------
After leaving everything in the room behind him - all the notes, all the books - Eike found himself in a corner store, with a notebook in his hands, before he’d made it to the end of the street. He flipped the small book over and back in his palm, staring blankly at nothing. No wonder he’d assumed he was a smoker, with the way his hands seemed too empty all the time, fumbling for something to take up the space. He only realized now he’d been wanting a pen, that without a way to take down what was important, anything that might happen, he felt exposed, vulnerable.
It calmed him down just to buy it, and he hated himself for that, how quickly he uncapped the pen and turned to the first blank page.
//It was a routine, it had to be, if I need to do it this bad now. How long did it last... how many years did I write down everything, to try and remember, to keep it in my mind?//
He fought for the past, only to lose it all anyway, every moment of who he might have been, what he had done, good or bad. Eike couldn’t help but scan his memories obsessively now, thinking as far back as he could, panicking anytime a memory didn’t surface as fast as it ought to have, or when he thought he’d forgotten something, maybe something he’d known, even a few moments ago...
//Stop thinking... you’ll go crazy. More crazy. Just stop thinking.//
The blank page still stared up at him, a challenge, reminding him of all the pages he’d already filled, how meaningless his attempt at control really was.
//The simple things... just write down what’s really important.//
Eike Kusch, he scribbled it down immediately. He didn’t know how he got the name, who had given it to him or why, but he stubbornly held onto it... hell, if nothing else, he knew it was the name of a man who had cheated death - several times.
//Homunculus... would it be better not to mention him? Hope that he’ll just... never come back?//
He still wasn’t convinced the strange creature had completely disappeared from his life... but did it really matter, if he remembered that? He knew so little anyway.
//It wasn’t as if I wasn’t suspicious of him, even before I learned...//
He was responsible, for all of it. Hugo had been his son, Helena had been his wife, and somehow as Wagner, he had created the Homunculus. What use was knowing it, though, except to frighten himself with questions he didn’t have answers for?
//I still don’t know why I’m alive... why I can’t remember and I’m still alive.//
A part of him wanted to write it all, in even more detail than his notes during the whole ordeal, to write down everything about Homunculus and Helena, Dana and Hugo, and Margarete...
//... and if Homunculus switched them, like he said he did... then Dana was my daughter, wasn’t she?//
He didn’t feel like a father, didn’t feel /anything/, and that disturbed him most of all, the reason he had left all his journals, why he stared at his name on the page but could not add another word.
//I don’t remember loving Helena. I must have, I must have loved her more than anything, to search like that for a cure, and then, when she died... I buried my grief in my work, hoping that it might bring some understanding, that I might find a way to control... life.//
He couldn’t imagine ever having such ego, or such desperation... just as he couldn’t imagine having a wife.
Eike frowned, tearing the page out, crumpling it before he could add Margarete’s name, or anything else. How could it matter, when so much had been lost already? What right did he have to try to remember anyone, when he couldn’t even remember his own wife?
The blonde moved quickly down Newandstr, on the other side of the street, glancing up and away at the Café Sonne, swallowing a moment of guilt. He was headed for the South Gate, out of town, to take the first train at the station as far away as he could, and then the next, and the next...
//Cast my fate to the wind. At least it feels like I’m doing /something/... and it’s worked all this time, I suppose.//
He looked up, that perpetual nervous fear still gnawing at his insides as he stared at the buildings around him - would he return to this place in a year, or two, or a hundred?
Of course, he’d never remember being here at all.
Eike didn’t realize how tense he was until a sound from the nearest side alley nearly made him jump out of his shoes. He stopped, edging warily around the corner from a good distance away, the rush of adrenaline nearly making his ears ring, as a familiar figure staggered into view.
Too familiar, far, far too familiar. He could almost feel time shuddering in the space between himself and... himself, a battered and bloody but very recognizable Eike Kusch.
//It can’t be happening... this can’t...//
“I found you... thank God...” The man limped forward, one hand pressed against his stomach - Eike could see the growing stain of blood beneath his pale palm - the other reaching for him, before he gave a slight cry, grimacing as he fell to the ground, hand clenching at his badly wounded leg.
Eike leapt out of the way as the man fell, and now could only hover near the edges, watching...
“S-sorry...” Glazed green eyes looked up at him, as the blonde slowly pulled himself to his knees, unable to move further. “I forget... we can’t touch... or else we’d both...”
He gasped, and the fresh pain seemed to bring along a new burst of energy.
“Eike... you’ve got to run! S-she’s trying to kill... she’s come after us, I think... all of us! T-time... she can move across all the different times... I don’t k-know who she is or...”
The blonde shook his head as the other Eike broke off, gasping in pain.
“What are /you/... you can’t be here...” He looked left and right quickly, but the street was quiet, far enough from the Café Sonne or the square to be empty at midmorning. Eike turned back. “I don’t understand, who is...”
The other man did not answer... could not, the knife already halfway across his throat, and by the time Eike’s terrified mind had realized what was happening, the second blow was already halfway down, cutting a wide arc across his double’s back as he fell. The pool of blood already spreading beneath the body was reflected in the eyes of his killer, and Eike felt himself shudder in unwanted recognition.
//It’s her. Oh god, it’s /her/... I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming, this can’t be...//
The pale girl rose, from where she had been kneeling over the body, white hair dropping over her shoulders like liquid silver, concealing the dark lines of a... pentagram?
//The same... the same as the one on Wagner’s book - but Homunculus /hated/ that book.//
Otherwise, the creature was an almost perfect, female copy - not a girl, really, but proportioned wrong to be any sort of woman. A unique being, as he had thought Homunculus to be - the delicate measurements, the red eyes...
//My dream, this is my dream.//
The creature in his dream, though, had been a calm, relentless predator, an eternal force, patiently waiting for him. She had not smiled so, eyes glinting with a sick sort of happiness, mindless joy - and the weapon in his dream’s hand hadn’t already killed the man laying at his feet.
Him. The pale girl had killed him, and seemed very eager to do it again.
//Eike, you’ve got to run!//
He backed away, turned and fled, sprinting for the Marketplace, other people, /anyone/...
Movement, on his left as he turned a corner. Eike ducked on instinct, saw the shining blade slice in a wide arc just above his head, chipping the wall where it hit.
//How did she get in front of me?!// It was impossible, but so was the way she moved forward smoothly as he scrambled back, blood-stained knife at her side, so calm... still smiling.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?!”
A tiny frown pinched the pale space above her nose.
“It’s what you want. It’s your revenge.”
“Revenge - what I want? What are you talking about?!”
Eike couldn’t get past her now, to get to the square, couldn’t see anyone anyway - it was insane to try and think rationally, to reason with her but he had nothing else to work with.
“No. I don’t know what you think, but I /don’t/ want...”
“Yes you do, silly. You just don’t know it yet.” The crimson eyes narrowed again, as if something had confused her. “... but then again, I guess you never really will, will you?”
//You’ve had more than your share of life... more than your share...//
Eike took another step back, startled as his back hit something solid - she’d maneuvered him up against the wall, pushing him into a corner, and he realized she was about to make the final lunge, and he could do nothing to stop it.
“I don’t want to die! I don’t deserve this... I don’t deserve any of this!”
Eike brought his hands up in a pathetic defense, more trying to block the sight of the knife than the attack itself. He was amazed, at how time always seemed to slow to an eternity, in that final second before the end.
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Author Notes -
1. The music selection for this fic is even odder than the one for Whisper. Myst 3 - Exile soundtrack, some waltzes from various composers Dopple insists on, odd stuff. I wish they had the music for SoD out... I loved the ending theme.