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WELCOME TO YOUR PRIVATE CHANNEL, NAGITO KOMAEDA. FOR SECURE COMMUNICATION, USE 004.28.777.00 *** MrBrightside has joined 004.28.777.00 <MrBrightside> Hello there! This is Komaeda. <MrBrightside> I'm grateful that you want to talk to me. | ||||
Anonymous username(s): < Triple7 > < BlueRam >
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Not always, [ Lucius says, finally, and his pose drops back to neutral just as quickly as it had shifted in the first place. ] You said yourself that there would be no contest between us. If you cannot challenge me, I'd rather you be silent and simply die.
The trouble is, [ he purrs, grinning as he leans over Komaeda's prone form below him, ] there are some who would consider death by my hand to be a great honor. [ His sword comes up again, and this time, the flat of his blade taps a playful rhythm beneath Komaeda's chin. ] I can't go giving it out to just anyone. It'd drive the value down.
[ Not that the people who care are here, or that Lucius particularly cares himself. He straightens again, and with that motion, he slips his sabre back into its sheath. ]
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Fresh, bright crimson stands out brilliantly against his soft yellow scales, the sight of it completely at odds with the reflecting pools of his blue eyes.]
That's your only reason to not kill someone? How extremely boring. [Komaeda gives a soft huff of laughter; and then he clears his throat, coughs up a clot, swallows it back down and savors the taste of iron on his tongue. It hurts but the pain is distant, an ache felt in another life.] I already told you I can't fight you, swords are a bit scary, and my punches are weaker than a child's.
[But that doesn't mean he isn't capable of opposition. Fighting to win isn't something that occurs to Komaeda—rather, if he's going to tangle with someone, well... he plans to take them down with him.]
Still, now that I know your true nature, I can't let you leave this apartment so easily.
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Rather, his hands unfold at his sides. Rather, his arms lift. It's a beckoning motion, as if inviting Komaeda to take whatever shot he thinks he can manage—except, when he opens his mouth again, it isn't a taunt that rests upon his tongue. Instead, the question that leaves him— ]
And what exactly is my true nature, worm?
[ If there is a challenge there, it is only to the presumption that he is known. ]
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You're aimless, [when he sees Lucius, he sees her and not the parts that made her worth chasing after,] killing people or not killing them, the decision weighed only by your whim? Making threats you don't even cash in... indulging in the suffering of others simply for entertainment... Your existence is despair, and not even the kind that could be made into a strong foundation of hope.
[He tucks his left hand into his pocket, though it isn't the idle repose of someone simply settling into a comfortable stance. He's digging for something, and when he finds it, he pulls his hand free from his sweatpants.]
I'm used to doing pest control, though. Maybe when you come back, you'll be a little more interesting.
[Clutched between his fingers is a slim device—the remote for a charge—his thumb resting on the button affixed to its head.]
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[ The word warbles from him, less a laugh than it is a wheeze. Again, some unseen hilarity in Komaeda's words wracks him, and not even the threat of that detonator in his hand is enough to keep Lucius from quaking from it, loud with laughter in the stagnant air of this room. ]
Oh, how little you know! [ He practically doubles over, and as a hand comes to his face, his claws dig into its scarified flesh. Incarnadine lines peel down the flushed pink of his skin, and his other hand lifts in a wordless gesture for Komaeda to hold still.
And then, suddenly, he rights himself. Suddenly, the laughter stops. Suddenly, he takes a bounding step forward, clearing the gap that has formed between them—not to strike the charge from Komaeda's hand, but to throw his own wide, as though he could encompass the whole of the universe in that single gesture. His eyes stretch wide in his face, manic and gleaming. ]
No, no, no, you stupid boy — you speak of things you can't possibly hope to understand. How long have you lived? A decade or two?
[ He laughs again. His feet carry him with dancing steps as he begins to circle around Komaeda—not with the fluid, stalking steps of a predator, but in the tight spiral of a fanatic. ]
You're right about all that, but those things — they're nothing more than a way to pass time. A hobby, if you will. No, if I have been made aimless... [ He inhales, deeply, and then he's looking up, toward a sky that isn't there. ] You may blame the creature that has brought me here, every bit against my will.
[ He drops his eyes back to Komaeda. His too-long licks across his grinning teeth, and then his voice drops to a poisonous hiss. ]
But I am not without purpose, and I never have been. I am not my shallow and simple-minded brothers. Were I nothing more than an empty vessel seeking to be filled with petty entertainments, I would have died more than ten-millennia ago. Instead, here I stand, Champion twice over and crowned with a name feared from one arm of the galaxy to the next.
[ Lost to the heady flavor of his own obsession, he leans close, until his golden eyes hover mere inches from those deep, pelagic pools. ]
Do you know why that is, little one?
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He stands there, unflinching, unwavering in the face of that sound; and the wildly grand gestures the man before him sweeps his limbs into makes it seem as if they weren't stuck within a cloistered hallway together, but a grand stage. Theatrics, more or less, aren't Komaeda's cup of tea. Not unless he has a point to demonstrate. He can appreciate them, though. After all, theatrics make him wistful, nostalgic. It makes him miss the taste of blood in his mouth not from the punch of a pommel to his face but from the slap of a red-clawed hand across his cheek.
She laughed like that too, he remembers.]
No, but you're going to tell me anyways.
[He responds flatly, passively. A marionette doll stuck standing there because his puppeteer won't pull his strings somewhere else. To say he's not curious would be a lie, though his sanitary smile and dull eyes don't betray that.
His thumb doesn't move from the button atop the charge, either.]
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Look at you — barely two decades old and already standing there like an empty husk! [ He draws back, except as he stands straight again, his hand comes up. Heedless of the charge held in Komaeda's fingers, Lucius curls his own into the fleshy fronds that pass for some approximation of hair on Komaeda's head. ] And you believe any man, insane or otherwise, could withstand ten millennia like this?
[ His hand falls again. Still, it remains raised at his waist, clawed fingers splayed even as he turns to stride the floor of Komaeda's apartment. ]
Very well. I'll tell you. [ Over his shoulder, he glances back, and he is grinning again. ]
It is obsession.
[ Now, he pivots. With the space between them great enough for a spotlight to shine on Lucius and Lucius alone, he faces Komaeda once more. ]
A single goal has driven me since I was a mere child, younger than even you are now, and I suspect it will drive me for another ten or twenty millennia more. You see, I am not satisfied with simply becoming the best or most accomplished swordsman of an age — I will achieve perfection.
[ It is a selfish goal, certainly, caring nothing for the lives that are crushed in his ceaseless quest for challenge—but if it is a matter of drive, Lucius is greater than any other, and he will not allow anyone to declare him aimless. ]
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If there is one thing Lucius seems to live off of, it's reaction—and Komaeda has more than enough experience in playing outside of the way others want him to.
So, he listens with his gaze following that figure silently, once more keeping him in his sights until Lucius' striding figure disappears behind his back. He soaks in those words and lets their flavor mask the blood in his mouth, digests them and compartmentalizes. He's thoughtful for a long moment, even after Lucius has ended his monologue with dramatic effect—and whatever impress that quest for perfection has instilled within him, remains close to his chest in the face of a capricious nature.]
You have a beautiful hope, Lucius-san. [Komaeda hums, his voice a lulling sing-song that seems less awed and more indolent. In reality, he is impressed. Few take their goals so seriously, and he can only begin to imagine what one step on that path must be like—but—]
But... I assume there aren't any swordsman as skilled as you in Ryslig. So doesn't that mean you're doomed to stagnate? [His gaze sharpens, that placid smile once more a taunt rather than submission.] I can only imagine how frustrated you feel... your legacy ending in a place like this.
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It isn't an ostentatious movement. It begins and ends within the space of a heartbeat. Inside that fractional gap, against a victim so unequipped to challenge him, Lucius could sever his throat to a mere hanging thread; or, before Komaeda could draw the breath to protest, Lucius might have opened his flesh from gullet to groin, leaving fishy offal free to spill to the apartment floor below.
However, he doesn't. After all, as he had told Komaeda once already, such lowly scum isn't worthy of dying to the Eternal's blade.
Instead, the golden tip of that saber lances forward to pierce his gut instead. A deep bite, leaving its victim impaled on the end of his blade for the transgression of an unwise tongue—
An excruciating wound, but a survivable one, provided Komaeda has the willpower to drag himself through the doorway of his apartment to find help. He'll live or die by his own determination, Lucius decides. ]
Nothing has ended, [ Lucius hisses through his teeth. ] Must I tell you again? I am the Eternal, and I will stand long after this meager rock has been reduced to dust.
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He opens his mouth, keen to respond, though all that comes is the breathless tinny of off-tune laughter. It's staunched by blood, welling up through his throat—too much to swallow back down—as he glues his wild eyes on Lucius' sneering visage.
There's an irony to this moment, he thinks. That Lucius' temper would flare to deadly over a little needling. That his words of this murder being a sully to his sword are just as quickly forgotten with that anger. That, when Komaeda stumbles backwards again and off the end of that blade, his thumb finally presses down on the charge still held within his hand before clattering to the ground between their feet.
And that, instead of a bomb shaking the apartment and decimating them all, the popping of fireworks enclosed within the dishwasher in the adjacent kitchen is heard instead.]
And when it's reduced to dust, [he draws in a ragged breath,] you'll be stuck here, your hope rotting away...
[Rather than shock or fear of death, all Komaeda can muster is the half-hearted, wheezing laughter of a dying man as he grins up at Lucius with bloodied teeth and smug arrogance.]
cw: uhhh belated violence warning
In this moment, Lucius doesn't wonder what this child has to gain by the display. As he regards the prone form below him, eyes cold, he doesn't see Komaeda—he sees the twisting, sneering visage that stares back a him when he looks too long into a mirror or slips too deeply into a dream.
He steps forward, and then one of boots stomps down on the shape of that putrid grin. ]
You fool — what do you think a year is to a man who has lived ten-thousand? [ Again, his foot pistons downward. Komaeda's face ought to burst like a too-ripe fruit with the force; with his diminished strength, however, he only feels the crunch of a pulped nose, and so he keeps stomping, over and over. ] A decade? A century?
[ He won't stop—not until the body stops moving. ]
What are these paltry shackles to a man who makes death itself bow before his will?
cw: vague death...? loss of conscious? it is a mystery
Even if his organs weren't punctured, even if he couldn't feel the way blood wells up his throat and gushes from the wound in his stomach, Komaeda doesn't resist. Part of it is the futility of doing so. He knows what it feels like to be on death's doorstep.
The other part of it is the satisfaction he wears despite a boot coming down on his face, pulping his nose, his cheek, and knocking the rest of his teeth loose in his head. His tongue cuts on them, and when he turns away it isn't to crawl from that violence but to simply cough up blood so that he doesn't drown on it.
He doesn't stop laughing either. A wheezing, manic titter that punctuates with each crushing blow, only to start up again despite the pain and the inevitable. Lucius says he isn't worth killing and yet, here they are.
Seconds feel like minutes, but after a moment, the laughter stops. Unconscious or dead, it doesn't matter, Komaeda has finally stopped in what little movements he had been making, and simply lies in a pool of his own blood.]