Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 161
161
Banno felt... wrong.
He did not understand why he felt this way. The 'why' of it was too much for him to grasp. Even the wrongness of it, the reason for all these feelings, was something he was barely aware of. It was a deep thing. A low thing. Something he didn't need to understand, like the mechanism of breathing, or his own heartbeat. It was just there. He could feel it. It was a part of him, and it was... wrong. It was just wrong.
There was something missing.
Weight on his chest. A smear of red and white colours. Snow and blood...? Yes... he could feel it, blowing over his body and dripping onto his face. Something cold and something warm. Blood and snow. But those weren't the only things. Those weren't the important things.
James was on top of him, staring in horror at his own dripping hands. Blood was seeping through his clothes, starting at his chest and going down toward his stomach, spreading out in a fan shape.
Someone was screaming, but the sound was distorted, doubled, echoed. Maybe there was more than one. Banno wasn't sure, and neither did he care. He was looking for a different voice... a different...
That's what's missing. That's why I feel this way...
Yes. He remembered now. He was looking for that other one...
Bright like the sun. Eyes like crystal water. A smile just like Vallah's...
He was looking for Valery. And these... these things... these lifeless tumours were trying to stop him... They were trying to keep them apart... and that was the same thing as killing her. They were trying to kill her... because she was different, because she was real... Just like Vallah... just like him...
He wouldn't let them hurt her any more.
Moving purely on animalistic instinct, Banno lashed out. His arm swung through the air without any conscious effort, and his meaty hand smashed into the side of James's face with the force of a bear swiping at a baby doe.
James sailed backwards, a spray of blood trailing from his chest, and flopped onto his back in a twitching heap.
The weight was gone. He could move now. He could breathe now.
Banno pulled in a breath of air, but there was something wrong with this, too. Something different to the way he remembered it happening his entire life... something in the way?
Banno sat up, but it felt more like he was remaining in the same place, and instead it was the world tilting to accommodate his wishes. But that was the way it always was... wasn't it?
He turned his head and saw two streams of blood dripping (Down? Up? Did it matter?) and splattering, making bright red spots against planks of wood. He opened his mouth and the drips turned into a stream of crimson vomit, but that was fine. He could breathe now. But what was that other stream? The one still going...? Where was that? Not his mouth...
On some level he was aware of the voices screaming somewhere in the background, but they didn't seem very important right now. This second line of blood, though... where was that coming from...? It was closer... much closer...
Banno moved his hand to catch the drips...
My hand yes that's my hand I can see it it's real so real not like the others this is real this is me...
... and moved it upwards, staying in line until he ended up covering his right eye...
No, I don't have an eye there anymore Ander took it he took it from me tried to make me not real just like they're trying to make Valery not real...
He stuck his finger inside and felt around. There was the familiar curve of bone, but something was different now. The slit Ander had punched into his skull with an arrow was bigger now. He could feel the cracks radiating outward like a spider web. Or was this a new one? A worse one? Where did it even...?
Banno pulled his finger back and tried to understand what he was seeing. There was blood. A lot of blood. And puss. Thin yellow tendrils in the red, like wisps of smoke. But at the end of his claw... something different. A different colour. Not red or yellow, but grey... a tiny spot of grey...
There was something pounding his shoulder. Hammering. Dull thumping in his ears mixing with the screams, making the world nudge back and forth in his vision, clouded over with red smoke, red mist, red haze. Not from the fireplace, but inside. Was it pain? Was this what pain felt like? He couldn't remember...
Banno turned his head and looked down at his shoulder. There was something metallic sticking out of it. A long, sharp piece of something... An arrow? Was it Ander's arrow? No, that can't be right... Ander couldn't be here yet. Not until...
Not until it was time to crack open the egg.
Banno blinked. Shook his head. The haze seemed to clear, if only a little bit. This arrow was from the pass, he remembered now. It must have pierced through when he fell...
There was someone punching his arm, attacking him, making an awful noise, screaming and crying. He couldn't make out the words. It was just noise. Fake noise. No meaning.
Banno lashed out. He couldn't see very well, but he felt his arm connect with something soft and the screams cut off immediately.
He blinked and wiped the blood out of his eye. There was a Fox boy lying on the floor now, facedown, and a bright starburst of blood against the heavy stonework surrounding the fireplace, mirrored by another spot of blood spreading through the boy's hair. Was it one of James's boys? Banno couldn't remember their names... the younger one...
The world lurched violently. Banno tried to correct for it, but then it happened again, as if the whole world was jumping a few strides to the right... or was his head moving to the left? Why did everything feel so slow? Stretched out like strings of honey...
Banno turned his head, and the world began to swivel, to show him a different angle of what was going on. A Fox boy came into view, his face contorted into a look of seething fury, tears and snot dripping down his face and onto his exposed fangs. Which one was this? Banno tried to remember his name, but it didn't seem all that important. He was just another one of them. One of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. All dead. All fake. All just pretending.
He was so tired of this...
The boy lifted -
A chair leg, that's what that is, he's been beating me with a chair leg...
- and brought it down against his face with a solid thwack, making the world lurch once again. A warm line flowed down his cheek, just one of many. It was fine.
The boy was yelling something. Some... noise. Banno couldn't make it out. His hand was wrong. Bent in a weird way. Blood, dripping from the fingertips. Down the wrist, rapidly swelling. Broken hand. Broken wrist. Banno hoped it hurt.
He wondered what 'hurt' felt like...
The boy raised the chair leg again, his mouth opening and closing, forming whatever words were so important. Dead rocks crumbling against each other. Dead snowflakes on the wind. Dead worms boiling in the sun.
It was all the same.
Banno ripped the hunk of wood out of the boy's one-handed grip without even thinking about it, without even being aware of what he was planning on doing. There was no plan, no thought, only action.
The boy tried to stumble back, but he was so slow. Everything was so slow.
Banno swung the chair leg like a club. He couldn't feel the swing itself, but he felt the sudden stop, the shock of it, traveling up his arm as it connected with the boy's jaw in a spray of blood.
The boy -
What was his name? I can't remember his name... was it even real? No... no, it wasn't. Nothing about him was real.
- stumbled away, clutching his bleeding jaw with his functional hand, and then collapsed into a motionless heap. Blood dribbled from his mouth and flowed into the dusty cracks between the floorboards in neat, straight lines.
Now... what now? There was something he needed to do, something very important...
Find Valery. She's been waiting for you. She's been waiting for so long.
"Va... ler... ree..." Banno's voice sounded strange to his own ears. Raspy. Gargled.
He turned around, and James was lying right there, flat on his back, reeking of blood. He was the one... the one who tried to keep her away... the one who was...
Eating her, eating her just like a spider, sucking her dry, that's how he came back...
He had already taken so much. Banno would not allow him to take any more.
He would do it... He would do it for her... for Valery...
He would make it so this monster could never touch her again, and then... then it would just be the two of them. Banno and Valery...
He loved her, and she loved him. She deserved to be with him. She deserved to be one with him.
She deserved to be saved.
He crawled along the floor, pulling himself closer and closer to James's body. Fresh blood was still seeping through the bandages. It meant the heart was still beating. He could hear it. He could feel it. A steady throbbing in his head, like a spider bite...
Just a spider, that's what he is... He'll even taste like a spider... bitter... eight legs, ten legs, a hundred legs, writhing on the tongue...
Poison.
He would break the Fox's neck between his teeth. Bleed the poison out.
"Save her..." Banno was salivating as he pulled himself along James's legs, up towards his exposed throat. He opened his jaws wide, disgusted and excited at the same time, wondering how any 'father' could be so cruel as to deny his one and only daughter the chance to bloom, to become a part of him and live forever.
He closed his mouth around James's neck, feeling the warm, familiar pulse of blood flowing through the big vein, throbbing against his tongue.
This is for Valery... Banno thought, slowly increasing the pressure, feeling the resistance of James's throat against his teeth, building up to that wonderful moment when all resistance disappears and the flesh surrenders, bursting open in waves of flavour, as real as this false father could hope to ever be...
"Nooooo!!" A scream, shrill enough to pierce through even the red haze in Banno's mind.
He looked up, James's neck still clamped between his jaws, and saw the most beautiful sight he had seen since Vallah gave him that coy little smile from within the safety of his embrace, all those years ago.
Valery had come down to watch. She was standing right in front of the window he had broken earlier, and the darkness framed her head in the most spectacular way, bordered by shards of broken glass, silver against black. The wind whipped her hair about her face in glorious strands of sunflower yellow, lightly obscuring her dark blue eyes, filled with tears of joy.
"Valery..." The moment Banno opened his mouth, James dropped down to the floor with a thud. "I'm happy to see you, too... So happy..."
"Stop!" she yelled, her voice a wailing screech. "Just stop it!"
"Don't worry, Valery. They won't get in our way anymore... The wait is almost over..."
He began to lower his head towards James's throat again, but then Valery did something he did not anticipate.
She grabbed a long sliver of glass from the broken window frame and snapped it off with her bare hands. The edges bit into her palms, drawing blood, fresh blood, _real_blood. For a moment Banno was lost in that scent. He couldn't tear his eye away from her tiny little hands, shaking in the cold, smearing that beautiful blood all over the transparent surface, patterns of red in so many shades, dark to light...
It stopped being beautiful when she turned that piece of glass around and pressed it to her throat.
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