Chapter Text
Her voice whispers insidiously to him in the back of his mind, haunting and possessive. A set of last words is echoing in his head. Not her dying whispers, but something she said when she was whole. Her words creep back into his psyche and burrow into his veins and nerve pathways, sticking to his skin like some sort of disgusting slimy mess as he claws his way out of this dust, rubble and ash. Breaks his way through the floor of a home like a demon creeping up and into the mortal plane from the underbelly of hell.
“This is a blessing, from me to you.” She had murmured so sweetly into his ear, worming her way into the crevices of his subconscious. Her silken honeyed tongue had drip acid into his mind as she tore him apart in her womb as if he was made of rags and sculpting clay. She had meticulously ripped him into shreds and folded his heart into neat, perfect, thirds as if he had ever meant anything to her at all.
It was mortifying but he feels like there is a breath of fresh air, enough to wipe her remnants from his mind, as he pulls himself out of the hole in the Earth he had created. He can shake off the weave of silk that she had thrown around him. With the spiders that had crawled out of her mouth in the form of lies, they had spun their webs of deceit so thoroughly and intricately that she, herself, couldn’t have helped but been caught in the web of her own making.
“No, it’s really not.”
He banishes the thought from his mind.
He looks up and sees someone made of ivory and heavy, black velvet. Though she has her eyes wrapped up in another scrap of velvet, she winds backwards from his gaze. Taking one step, then two as if having him merely looking at her is something corrosive. His gaze may be composed of an act of opening fire, but that doesn’t account for her wariness of him. She looks at him as if he is something unknown and unfounded.
A treasure, perhaps. He disagrees.
He takes one step closer, boots clinking against the castrated tile of this crumbling manors floor. The sounds grating, like nails on a chalkboard. It is echoing in this ghastly chamber and he can hear them scream. It is not soothing or cathartic like he had hoped his first expedition into the surface of this Earth would be. He takes a stride towards her looking for some sort of sign that she is hostile and not only scared. After all, Caim needs someone who is strong to aid him in adjustments, if she is a coward he’ll just break this world himself. Maybe he is looking for some sort of rebound, from his past life. His past world. Caim will treat her cruelly and he finds that he does not care.
Caim looks upon her, impassive, as she is backed up into a wall. She is showing no emotions, her face a stoic mask and Caim feels the wily and unruly desire, no, need to rip that look off of her face. It seems that she is a coward after all and Caim watches her hand twitch to grasp at a blade that had been discarded across the room. There is a pipe on the floor and it seems that she had seen it too. Though Caim is quicker and he wraps his fingers around her throat first.
He pulls back and slams her against the wall. Her neck is slender and it is small. Something that sits perfectly between his fingers. Her face is still impassive and it only adds fuel to the flames of his insatiable anger. Something that is burning and something that is unreasonable and illogical. He should have a level head, but he finds that he doesn’t want to. He wants to feel his loathing crashing over him like a tsunami and overtaking him with its vengeance.
He wants to be boiled alive in the gentle caress of what is known. What he knows and what knows him. Intimately. Indefinitely and infinitely. The thing that knows him as intimately as he knows it is blood. Gore and war is a sensation in every conceivable way that he has known since the age of five or so. Caim knows that he is a kid of war, a boy soldier who knows not how to speak. Even if he did his voice would have weaved a story of tragedy and horror and it will always be so. Would have always been so. It is something that will never change so when someone looks at him, well aware and says; "hey, boy soldier, let's talk." Caim cannot help the icy slush of fear from flooding his veins.
There is nothing left for them here. Not within Caim himself.
They shouldn’t need him.
They shouldn’t know him.
He gazes upon her form, pinned to the wall as it is like a butterfly pinned to the examining board. Dying. Decaying. Slowly rotting away upon that board as the entomologist takes care in preservation of a species that they have driven extinct. Unknowingly and unwittingly. Perhaps they will never discover this folly anyways- or maybe they’re like Caim. Knowing full well that they have just destroyed life and not caring in the littlest bit anyway.
Pressing down, he strangles her. Though it seems she does not breathe as she shows no reaction and he feels no puffs of gasping air from her nose or her mouth. Her chest does not rise and fall and the moment Caim presses down enough and twists to break her neck and rip off her head all that is exposed is circuitry and wires.
Something that he has witnessed at surface-level from the Emil boy’s eyes. Caim hadn’t thought much of it at first and now, marveling at this golem-woman’s neck, Caim wonders if perhaps it was witchcraft. He should have paid more attention as it most certainly is. The type of witchcraft that some of those vile gods had endorsed. Encouraged even. After all, one of the most powerful pact-makers they had created were golem’s forged through belief in their power.
It seems that Caim is barbaric in comparison to everything and everyone else. He stands over this golem made of metal, wires and plastic and he feels no remorse. She had shown no fear and would have shown no mercy, there is no reason for Caim to grant her grace. Even if there was, he finds that he wouldn’t have given her an out, given her mercy, anyways. For she was baked within a vile kiln and he has no desire to reform her. Shatter and break to smooth out the imperfections into something- into someone- who was human.
Caim moves away from her unmoving form with a jerk.
She should’ve counted her seconds, because that was all the time that she had to live.
Caim picks up her discarded sword, curling his fingers around the hilt feels like coming home. From the cradle to the grave and beyond it seems that the only place Caim finds comfort is within the harm of others. Drawing the blood of his enemies and painting battlefields red. The comfort of a hidden campsite is the best home he knows. It is time to move on from here. Stumbling past the ruins of destroyed hallways and crumbling rooms he finds his way outside through the door hanging on only by the top hinges, the other one blocked with boulders of white stone and rusted shut.
As he emerges from these ruins he is met by a skull of the boy.
Emil.
Caim tastes blood coating the back of his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He slips into the dream of a world where he smells only blood and rot, well he sits on the back steps of the cottage the fool boy called home.
He has his sword pointed directly between the eyes of this skull and he finds that he cannot make himself finish the attack.
Arbitrary traits are bequeathed only to those most animalistic, it seems.