Screams took on faces and the sobbing was driving him insane in it's scarlet implications. Her, unspoken, cried in her pain, uneasily, as she did anything soft, and he found himself in time with her wounded cadence as his own frustration and pain ran unspoken down his face in a wet curtain. Everywhere the clear drops fell, things hissed and rushed forward to feed only to fall back in revulsion as they unwittingly drank of pure selfless suffering, love in it's undiluted form.
A scream in running red and Gourry's resolve broke a final time; the dread of the act out weighing the terror of the dark. One last gleam of a grain of sand deep inside of him flared hotly and he stopped, letting the shadows swarm him and the red threads entangle him. Cold wind promised an eternal kiss on the back of his neck and he turned to face Him. Tall and the eternal Father stood Death, in all his awe, and it was glorious in all of the longing and terror inspired. Screams rang in Gourry's head as his wide, terrified eyes met empty and darkened sockets that stared like rooms lived in; nothing to see and everything to feel. A blade glimmered in one hand held together with Impossibility and Somehow, and it's sharpened smile dared someone to mention how this wasn't possible. This is the Ender of All, here on the end of a bit of wood, and Gourry was reminded that mercy is not necessarily pleasant.
This was the terror of a species. The reminder of why Time isn't always a friend, because this skeletal taker came in all shapes and at anytime. Gourry had faced him before, but never like this. At the ready the blade was alive in the blood it drank. It drew back in an arch that was far too big, the motion a blur and Gourry screwed his eyes closed and whispered.
please.
The sensation of something falling on his cheek opened his eyes to the reality of something so sharp it could cleave the view around him into odd, wavering pieces. A gulp hung in his throat but there were things more important and more permanent that the blade stopped so precisely next to his cheek.
I BEG YOUR PARDON?
help her. please.
HELP WHO?
her. please.
I'LL NEED MORE TO GO ON, I'M AFRAID. TELL ME HER NAME IF IT SO MATTERS.
i can't!
WHY?
because!! it-it won't come out -- PLEASE! i can hear her screaming!! she needs me!!!
THEN I SUGGEST YOU SPEAK.
She burned in his mouth still and her screams burned in his ears and eyes until he couldn't see and couldn't swallow, surrounded in her and still alone. It pulsed now on his tongue and the ache that had once been a whole heart pulsed in time with it, and all he wanted was to hold her again, that was all! Just feel the secure and slight weight of her frame as she leaned against him for a moment, or climbed on his back. Even a blow to the mouth was something and better than his less than nothing state. Lips quivered against the rage of the unspoken name, and his own anger grew at this cowardly failure to her. A swordsman always could, no matter what!!!!
Eyes closed now in anger and hurt over and loss and rage and he knew that it all came down to this, to this, to this, forever lived here and he had best speak dammit!
Like boiling water in his mouth, lava, magma, the sizzle of a charred life and her final scream all, and finally his lips parted in a scream that shook the silent heart, and drove back the demons that so ruthlessly fed upon him and the other innocents of this world. Love and loss sculpted a name in startling crimson and his cry of "Lina" echoed on forever. He fell to his knees then, and gasped at Death's feet.
NOW THAT YOU HAVE MY ATTENTION, WAS THERE SOMETHING YOU WANTED FROM DEATH?
Hopeful eyes turned from Despair's grip, and in startled sickness he stared at the shard of sharpened light that gleamed in his eyes like cold incense. A frozen perfume in a worn shell that wanted to be a heart again.
yes.
that.
please.
And he pointed. Eternity cracked and Death smiled.
High and wailing was his cry, broken in his throat and sharpened jagged edges to rake him, he who seemed to exist now simply to grieve, to live in a nightmare and wake up renewed by Despair's touch. A puppet who finally came to loathe his strings and now finally had to strike back. Foreword he lept, burning vengence on the end of perfect wood that laughed it's silent, silvered laugh and promised blue death.
The first fell with an equally noiseless cry, or maybe it was all noise and his dead ears did not hear. And then another fell like the first, and a man human-born found his own spark of immortality in the feeling of this evil, letting others go in the process where they had been stopped for so long by the clinging black. The pull and release of his arms and the sensation that consumed him was a joy and an ache that nested inside him, and her name hung on his lips like red wine. A thousand tormented souls smiled for the first time in an eternity of hell as Gourry showed them the entrance and the light.
Sinuous red dragged at him as he felled the evil, pulling him deeper and deeper, closer to his stilled heart, finally pulling him down and away into a swinging run, slicing and loving the sing of the contented blade as only a master can, down and down and down into forever's definition.....
to himself...
and her.
Finally and screaming he raised the immortal weapon high and did not see what happened next, lost in his tears at the sight of her and the feelings in him ripping him apart, the want, the desire, the need to hurt those that struck at her a blister of pure hate that burst and swept him away to choke, slashing and cutting.
And then nothing.
She lay still and silent, and for a foolish moment he feared she was dead. Then he feared she was just gone inside, like a refraction of mirrors that went on and on and on but didn't really show or tell anything.
Lina.
And she was gathered in his arms and his face was buried in her hair as he remembered what her smell actually was, even Death had to leave that constant, because so much of Lina was the experience of her.
Then... a convulsion... and another... and...pain of all silly things... and ..like a blow to his face.. and a silver blade turned on him, demanding one last thread to snap and all the red sinew that bound him to Lina began to tighten and twist and pull and he knew this was what Death looked like from the inside, gathering his loved one closer and closing his eyes.
"My life is over, spared for a lifetime of horrors in my sleep, waking each day to grief."
-- Ichabod Crane, Sleepy Hollow