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Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
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Currently Reading:
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Category:
DarkFic › General
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
3
Views:
2,654
Reviews:
4
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The Author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.
Beyond the Door
Well, here's chapter 2!
Note: To answer I_Plead_Obsession's question; yes, this story will be yaoi. There may be some M/F rape, but ultimately the only romance is between males, though one of them is underage. Thanks so much for the review, by the way :D
==============
My grief is anchored in the rain
I feel the pleasure and the pain
But happiness is mine
And I feel fine
Pastel shades
Shades of gray
I’ll fade away it doesn’t always
Have to rain
André had never been one for pain. Pain, to him, had always seemed like an easy way out when inflicted upon others, a way to get around talking. Pain, to him, had always seemed like a way to keep him from questioning, when inflicted upon him by others. Pain was something that interfered with life, something that interrupted existence with its hot fire. It carried the sick scent of broken promises and the quivering loneliness of abandoned dreams.
Pain was something that stayed harbored behind defeated eyes long after the actual feeling had subsided. Pain was permanent and yet ephemeral, cold and merciless in its quick precision. The scars on his body tingled as he thought of that old, familiar feeling, and the feeling of empathy was acute. He knew the scars were there; an intricate pattern over most of his body, and he knew they still ruled his actions almost completely. He was a slave to their pale white smugness. Unless it came to Dimitri.
He could smell that cold, metallic scent that was pain now as he stood leaning against the cold plaster of the wall, across from the door to Lillia’s chambers. He kept his eyes (a cold and glowing crimson that still chilled him, he knew) anchored to the floor before him, focusing on the tiny cracks in the stone, the little imperfections that kept his attention away from the sounds that met his ears. And then there it was. Impossible to ignore. That sound that nothing could shield him from.
The scream was cold and piercing, and it blasted into his ears with the force of hot melted iron. It overflowed his mind, building tension and pain just at the sound of it. A visible shudder wracked his body, bitter scarlet agony setting in at the thought of what was going on in that room. Slow movement brought his eyes to the door; that cold slab of metal before him, dull and aged, and yet completely impenetrable and unchallengeable, just as the inhabitant of the chambers it allowed access to was. Strands of feathery, shoulder-length white hair blocked it slightly from his vision, and he pushed them behind his ears and out of the way.
Standing rooted in that space, he closed his eyes tightly. Reject the world, shut out the world, annihilate the world. These things shall someday cease to exist. The inner mantra quelled the ferocious swarm of emotions that raged within only slightly. There was still a tempest of stress and agony at the sounds that emanated from that room. Screams, muffled by the heavy steel door and yet still somehow so painfully audible pierced his consciousness like poisonous darts. Reject the world, shut out the world, annihilate the world. These things shall someday cease to exist.
The screams repeated for what seemed to be hours, offering no release from the torment that filled those sounds and burrowed itself deep within him. André could recall emitting those same screams during nights so much like this. The more time he spent here, the more everyone’s screams sounded like his own. They all sounded the same eventually, melding their tormented harmonies to form one single, monotonous scream that went unheard by most.
The cold chose to ignore the cries for help that came in those wordless screams. The indifferent listened but pushed the screams away. And the affected (André counted himself as part of this group) heard the screams, listened to the screams, and shared their agony, shared their pain, sympathized wordlessly with them. And as he stood silently listening, feeling the burning desire for freedom, the raw cries for help resonate to his very core, he wondered, if during his own ‘training’, his screams had broken the heart of someone at ear as Dimitri’s broke his.
He could still remember those days. He had been alive then; warm and alive, with brown eyes that did not chill the soul as his crimson ones did. He could recall the punishment sessions with Lillia, his Master, as clearly as though it were yesterday. The floor had been cold beneath his hands and knees as he crouched, trying to remain indifferent to the blood that dripped to the cold stone he rested against. His own blood, given freedom by the sharp edge of a dagger, the white-hot sting of a whip, anything Lillia chose to use, was always so hot. It contrasted so deeply with the cold of the room, and was the only thing that gave him warmth against the icy stone of the floor. Lillia’s voice, so cold and methodical as she spoke to him, had chilled him far deeper than the temperature in the room, and he had listened to his Master speak with a kind of detached horror, always steeling himself for the next blow.
He liked to think now, looking back on all of it, that sharing similar experiences with Dimitri, having Lillia as his Master just as he did, gave them some sort of bond, a special kind of closeness that time and interaction alone could not forge. Since André had come to live at the House -- the name for a large manor that housed the vampire clan and all its impending members-- everyone he had come to know had been cold, detached, as though the things they witnessed and the nonlife they lived had forced them to draw inward toward some source of hope outside of the real world. He sensed a distance between himself and the other vampires, sensed it as real and palpable as if he could touch it. The distance between them was like a wall, and no one seemed to be receptive to his weak efforts at forming any sort of relationship. But since Dimitri had arrived here several months ago, things had been different. He didn’t sense that detached feeling from Dimitri. He sensed something else; a strong, vibrant life that did not want to be extinguished, a fierce willingness to accept those around him. It was something André cherished, something he deeply wished would not soon he overshadowed by the terror of living the life they lived.
A particularly loud scream ripped through him, and he kept his eyes opened and stared intently at the steel door. Even though Lillia was not doing anything directly to him, André saw the screams she generated from the helpless boy as a battle; if he flinched, if he closed his eyes and tried to force them away, Lillia won. Instead, he had to stand and fight. He could not allow Dimitri’s screams of pain to go unheard. He could not allow the child-- that was indeed what he was; still a child, though he seemed quite mature for his age-- suffer in the darkness alone. Though he was outside the room, mentally he was with him; feeling his pain, hearing the cold hiss of the Master’s voice as he fought growing waves of terror and revulsion. And that, small as it was, was the greatest comfort he could give to Dimitri in his time of need, though he was sure Dimitri was even unaware of it, human that he was.
Stay strong, Dimitri. Do not let her break you. Once she breaks you, you stay broken. You do not want to be broken. André pushed locks of white hair from his cheeks and leaned the back of his head against the wall, reclining in repose for a moment in between fervent spurts of fear for the safety of the young boy behind the closed door. Stay strong.
The silence that pressed in on him them was deafening, pressing with the weight and pressure he could not have imagined, and he knew that for now, it was over. For this one, blissful moment, he released the breath he had been holding in, the calm before the moment when he could have to face Dimitri in his wounded and heartrending state. Several deep breaths. Much-needed oxygen for his brain. Clearing and relaxing. And then the creak of cold steel told him his reverie would have to end.
“Good evening, André.” her voice was just as cold as it always was, and it chilled him deeply, though this time he managed to stop the shiver that threatened to pass through his body. André gave a weak, acknowledging nod and brushed past her as she headed down the hallway, walking with a kind of detached confidence as she always did. André managed to catch the door as it closed, forcing his way through it and into the room beyond.
The colder air inside hit him almost immediately as he stepped into the room, and he shuddered involuntarily, trying to ignore the chill in the air as he stepped farther into the dim room. The darkness was punctuated by the remote clang of metal hitting metal as the door slid closed against the doorframe. He was sealed in for the moment, and though he knew that he was now strong enough to open that door and walk out as he pleased, it was still a claustrophobic feeling, left over from his younger days when Lillia had done this same thing to him… left his shut in the cold room with no escape, his arms too weak to push the huge slab of metal open wide enough to let himself out.
The room looked exactly like it always did --and exactly how it had when he was Dimitri’s age and suffered through the same vile punishments. The floor was the same cold stone, the walls were the same faded crimson plaster, draped with tapestries and wall hangings, all painted with dark scenes in an array of bleak colors. The entire room spoke of hopelessness, of pain, and there in the center of the stone floor, surrounded by spatters of his own blood, lay the epitome of all misery, the very reason, it would seem, that pain and punishment were invented.
“Dimitri…” the word passed André’s lips softly, and he didn’t care whether the boy heard it or not. He was walking briskly across the floor toward him, and when he reached him, he took a step back, his face drawn with horror. Dimitri lay, naked, in the fetal position. His skin was barely visible under a sheen of blood, and what skin he could see was mottled under and expanse of endless bruises, a minefield of purples, blacks, and yellows. His back no longer resembled a human back, and André shuddered involuntarily and stayed on his feet despite his knees’ desire to simply collapse beneath him.
The skin of Dimitri’s back was torn in long trenches, exposing the red, raw flesh inside, flesh that should never have had to feel the open air. In a long, precise trail down the center, the skin was cut away above each vertebrae, exposing each intricate bone slightly like knobs on the back of a reptile. The boy’s entire body quivered, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. As André moved around him and knelt in front of him, he caught a glimpse of Dimitri’s face. It was drawn in an expression of complete agony, his eyes shut tightly as though he could block out the world. A pang of compassion hit André square in the chest, and he reached out a hand and placed it gently on the boyis cheek. As if responding solely to the tenderness in the touch, he raised his eyes to meet André’s face. Their depths held things that until this moment André could never even have imagined, and he stroked lightly at the skin of his cheek as those dark brown eyes stared up at him
Help me, they pleaded silently, and André did all he could not to look away. He held the gaze fiercely and continued to stroke the softness of the blood-smeared cheek.
“Can you walk?” he asked softly. Dimitri shook his head dimly, and the only sound that escaped from him was a tiny, barely audible whimper. André nodded back. “Alright… I’ll carry you out of here… can you lift your arms and put them around my neck?”
Dimitri complied obediently, and when André was sure that his arms were clasped firmly around his neck he lifted him carefully off of the floor. The boy’s legs automatically locked around his waist for support, and André stumbled slightly but held his ground, slipping his arms under Dimitri’s thighs to hold him upright and began to move forward, one foot in front of the other. Dimitri left a small pool of blood behind, and André did not look back at it, instead carrying him farther and farther away from the spot of his horror and toward the semblance of normalcy that lay on the other side of that terrible door. He could feel Dimitri curl almost instinctively against his neck, seeking closeness to the source of his comfort, and he steadied himself and moved on, determined that he would get him out of this room.
“It’s alright,” he whispered softly as he reached the door, turning his head to speak against the smooth mass of Dimitri‘s black hair, matted and caked with blood. “I promise it’s alright. Just stay with me, Dimitri. It’s going to be alright.”
Note: To answer I_Plead_Obsession's question; yes, this story will be yaoi. There may be some M/F rape, but ultimately the only romance is between males, though one of them is underage. Thanks so much for the review, by the way :D
==============
My grief is anchored in the rain
I feel the pleasure and the pain
But happiness is mine
And I feel fine
Pastel shades
Shades of gray
I’ll fade away it doesn’t always
Have to rain
André had never been one for pain. Pain, to him, had always seemed like an easy way out when inflicted upon others, a way to get around talking. Pain, to him, had always seemed like a way to keep him from questioning, when inflicted upon him by others. Pain was something that interfered with life, something that interrupted existence with its hot fire. It carried the sick scent of broken promises and the quivering loneliness of abandoned dreams.
Pain was something that stayed harbored behind defeated eyes long after the actual feeling had subsided. Pain was permanent and yet ephemeral, cold and merciless in its quick precision. The scars on his body tingled as he thought of that old, familiar feeling, and the feeling of empathy was acute. He knew the scars were there; an intricate pattern over most of his body, and he knew they still ruled his actions almost completely. He was a slave to their pale white smugness. Unless it came to Dimitri.
He could smell that cold, metallic scent that was pain now as he stood leaning against the cold plaster of the wall, across from the door to Lillia’s chambers. He kept his eyes (a cold and glowing crimson that still chilled him, he knew) anchored to the floor before him, focusing on the tiny cracks in the stone, the little imperfections that kept his attention away from the sounds that met his ears. And then there it was. Impossible to ignore. That sound that nothing could shield him from.
The scream was cold and piercing, and it blasted into his ears with the force of hot melted iron. It overflowed his mind, building tension and pain just at the sound of it. A visible shudder wracked his body, bitter scarlet agony setting in at the thought of what was going on in that room. Slow movement brought his eyes to the door; that cold slab of metal before him, dull and aged, and yet completely impenetrable and unchallengeable, just as the inhabitant of the chambers it allowed access to was. Strands of feathery, shoulder-length white hair blocked it slightly from his vision, and he pushed them behind his ears and out of the way.
Standing rooted in that space, he closed his eyes tightly. Reject the world, shut out the world, annihilate the world. These things shall someday cease to exist. The inner mantra quelled the ferocious swarm of emotions that raged within only slightly. There was still a tempest of stress and agony at the sounds that emanated from that room. Screams, muffled by the heavy steel door and yet still somehow so painfully audible pierced his consciousness like poisonous darts. Reject the world, shut out the world, annihilate the world. These things shall someday cease to exist.
The screams repeated for what seemed to be hours, offering no release from the torment that filled those sounds and burrowed itself deep within him. André could recall emitting those same screams during nights so much like this. The more time he spent here, the more everyone’s screams sounded like his own. They all sounded the same eventually, melding their tormented harmonies to form one single, monotonous scream that went unheard by most.
The cold chose to ignore the cries for help that came in those wordless screams. The indifferent listened but pushed the screams away. And the affected (André counted himself as part of this group) heard the screams, listened to the screams, and shared their agony, shared their pain, sympathized wordlessly with them. And as he stood silently listening, feeling the burning desire for freedom, the raw cries for help resonate to his very core, he wondered, if during his own ‘training’, his screams had broken the heart of someone at ear as Dimitri’s broke his.
He could still remember those days. He had been alive then; warm and alive, with brown eyes that did not chill the soul as his crimson ones did. He could recall the punishment sessions with Lillia, his Master, as clearly as though it were yesterday. The floor had been cold beneath his hands and knees as he crouched, trying to remain indifferent to the blood that dripped to the cold stone he rested against. His own blood, given freedom by the sharp edge of a dagger, the white-hot sting of a whip, anything Lillia chose to use, was always so hot. It contrasted so deeply with the cold of the room, and was the only thing that gave him warmth against the icy stone of the floor. Lillia’s voice, so cold and methodical as she spoke to him, had chilled him far deeper than the temperature in the room, and he had listened to his Master speak with a kind of detached horror, always steeling himself for the next blow.
He liked to think now, looking back on all of it, that sharing similar experiences with Dimitri, having Lillia as his Master just as he did, gave them some sort of bond, a special kind of closeness that time and interaction alone could not forge. Since André had come to live at the House -- the name for a large manor that housed the vampire clan and all its impending members-- everyone he had come to know had been cold, detached, as though the things they witnessed and the nonlife they lived had forced them to draw inward toward some source of hope outside of the real world. He sensed a distance between himself and the other vampires, sensed it as real and palpable as if he could touch it. The distance between them was like a wall, and no one seemed to be receptive to his weak efforts at forming any sort of relationship. But since Dimitri had arrived here several months ago, things had been different. He didn’t sense that detached feeling from Dimitri. He sensed something else; a strong, vibrant life that did not want to be extinguished, a fierce willingness to accept those around him. It was something André cherished, something he deeply wished would not soon he overshadowed by the terror of living the life they lived.
A particularly loud scream ripped through him, and he kept his eyes opened and stared intently at the steel door. Even though Lillia was not doing anything directly to him, André saw the screams she generated from the helpless boy as a battle; if he flinched, if he closed his eyes and tried to force them away, Lillia won. Instead, he had to stand and fight. He could not allow Dimitri’s screams of pain to go unheard. He could not allow the child-- that was indeed what he was; still a child, though he seemed quite mature for his age-- suffer in the darkness alone. Though he was outside the room, mentally he was with him; feeling his pain, hearing the cold hiss of the Master’s voice as he fought growing waves of terror and revulsion. And that, small as it was, was the greatest comfort he could give to Dimitri in his time of need, though he was sure Dimitri was even unaware of it, human that he was.
Stay strong, Dimitri. Do not let her break you. Once she breaks you, you stay broken. You do not want to be broken. André pushed locks of white hair from his cheeks and leaned the back of his head against the wall, reclining in repose for a moment in between fervent spurts of fear for the safety of the young boy behind the closed door. Stay strong.
The silence that pressed in on him them was deafening, pressing with the weight and pressure he could not have imagined, and he knew that for now, it was over. For this one, blissful moment, he released the breath he had been holding in, the calm before the moment when he could have to face Dimitri in his wounded and heartrending state. Several deep breaths. Much-needed oxygen for his brain. Clearing and relaxing. And then the creak of cold steel told him his reverie would have to end.
“Good evening, André.” her voice was just as cold as it always was, and it chilled him deeply, though this time he managed to stop the shiver that threatened to pass through his body. André gave a weak, acknowledging nod and brushed past her as she headed down the hallway, walking with a kind of detached confidence as she always did. André managed to catch the door as it closed, forcing his way through it and into the room beyond.
The colder air inside hit him almost immediately as he stepped into the room, and he shuddered involuntarily, trying to ignore the chill in the air as he stepped farther into the dim room. The darkness was punctuated by the remote clang of metal hitting metal as the door slid closed against the doorframe. He was sealed in for the moment, and though he knew that he was now strong enough to open that door and walk out as he pleased, it was still a claustrophobic feeling, left over from his younger days when Lillia had done this same thing to him… left his shut in the cold room with no escape, his arms too weak to push the huge slab of metal open wide enough to let himself out.
The room looked exactly like it always did --and exactly how it had when he was Dimitri’s age and suffered through the same vile punishments. The floor was the same cold stone, the walls were the same faded crimson plaster, draped with tapestries and wall hangings, all painted with dark scenes in an array of bleak colors. The entire room spoke of hopelessness, of pain, and there in the center of the stone floor, surrounded by spatters of his own blood, lay the epitome of all misery, the very reason, it would seem, that pain and punishment were invented.
“Dimitri…” the word passed André’s lips softly, and he didn’t care whether the boy heard it or not. He was walking briskly across the floor toward him, and when he reached him, he took a step back, his face drawn with horror. Dimitri lay, naked, in the fetal position. His skin was barely visible under a sheen of blood, and what skin he could see was mottled under and expanse of endless bruises, a minefield of purples, blacks, and yellows. His back no longer resembled a human back, and André shuddered involuntarily and stayed on his feet despite his knees’ desire to simply collapse beneath him.
The skin of Dimitri’s back was torn in long trenches, exposing the red, raw flesh inside, flesh that should never have had to feel the open air. In a long, precise trail down the center, the skin was cut away above each vertebrae, exposing each intricate bone slightly like knobs on the back of a reptile. The boy’s entire body quivered, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. As André moved around him and knelt in front of him, he caught a glimpse of Dimitri’s face. It was drawn in an expression of complete agony, his eyes shut tightly as though he could block out the world. A pang of compassion hit André square in the chest, and he reached out a hand and placed it gently on the boyis cheek. As if responding solely to the tenderness in the touch, he raised his eyes to meet André’s face. Their depths held things that until this moment André could never even have imagined, and he stroked lightly at the skin of his cheek as those dark brown eyes stared up at him
Help me, they pleaded silently, and André did all he could not to look away. He held the gaze fiercely and continued to stroke the softness of the blood-smeared cheek.
“Can you walk?” he asked softly. Dimitri shook his head dimly, and the only sound that escaped from him was a tiny, barely audible whimper. André nodded back. “Alright… I’ll carry you out of here… can you lift your arms and put them around my neck?”
Dimitri complied obediently, and when André was sure that his arms were clasped firmly around his neck he lifted him carefully off of the floor. The boy’s legs automatically locked around his waist for support, and André stumbled slightly but held his ground, slipping his arms under Dimitri’s thighs to hold him upright and began to move forward, one foot in front of the other. Dimitri left a small pool of blood behind, and André did not look back at it, instead carrying him farther and farther away from the spot of his horror and toward the semblance of normalcy that lay on the other side of that terrible door. He could feel Dimitri curl almost instinctively against his neck, seeking closeness to the source of his comfort, and he steadied himself and moved on, determined that he would get him out of this room.
“It’s alright,” he whispered softly as he reached the door, turning his head to speak against the smooth mass of Dimitri‘s black hair, matted and caked with blood. “I promise it’s alright. Just stay with me, Dimitri. It’s going to be alright.”