Demon Diary Fan Fiction ❯ Acidic ❯ For I've Hurt You, and I've Wronged You, and I've Scraped Your Soul Raw ( Chapter 5 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]

A/N: Ummm… Yeah. I might have kinda sorta gotten myself grounded from the computer for three months. clears throat But to make it up to everyone, I'm giving you a double length chapter! You still love me, right?

Disclaimer: Roses are red, violets are blue; me no own, so you no sue!

x(X)x

“But that doesn't make any sense!”

Raenef regretted the outburst immediately as Eclipse lifted his bowed head from over the dog-eared textbook and fixed him with a baleful glare.

“It would make sense,” the rocker purred maliciously “if you had memorized the algebraic principles we discussed. But seeing as you obviously didn't, this is a complete waste of my time.”

x(X)x

Watching Raenef's lower lip jut outward in a sulky pout, Eclipse was momentarily distracted from his anger. Glancing upward, he nearly bit through his tongue in shock.

Their coloration was totally different, but there was something about the familiar way anger made the boy's eyes blaze that caused the glowing embers of lust he had been struggling to suppress all afternoon to spring to life, painful in their intensity.

Four.

Slowly he leaned forward to catch the velvety mouth with his own…

And snarled when it was jerked away.

x(X)x

He refused to allow himself the luxury of being upset.

Quietly picking up the textbook and other articles that Eclipse had thrown around the room in his fury, he refused to remember how much it resembled the devastation left by one of the many battles between his parents before their divorce. Refused to admit, for even a moment, that he regretted the instinctive act of withdrawal.

Refused to cry for someone he might have just been able to love.

x(X)x

As his furious scribbling subsided, Eclipse leaned back, sated. By the time he was twelve he had figured out how to use writing as a channel for powerful emotion. Oh, the fury and desperation would return later, but for now he was too exhausted to feel.

Sinking into the threadbare sofa, he idly buffed an elegant black nail. It had been a while since he unleashed his temper to that degree. Unless he counted the time since he had met Raenef, which seemed to involve him behaving without restraint all too often.

Looking at his watch, he had to fight the urge to grind his teeth. 1, 2, 3… Krayon and Meruhesae did not disappoint. On the dot, they began banging their fists against the door as though they had been waiting for five hours instead of five seconds. Uncoiling from his seated position, he stalked over to the door, but made no move to open it.

“Stop.” Though he spoke lowly, his malignant growl was easily discernible. The knocking ceased abruptly.

Giving the knob a vicious yank, he paused to grab his jacket off the hook before slamming the door behind him.

“We're going out to eat.”

Krayon and Meruhesae, who had been trailing behind him like kicked puppies, screeched to a halt. While the raven-haired drummer simply gaped, her eyes threatening to pop out of her skull and escape, Krayon finally mustered up the composure to speak.

“You don't believe in eating out! You're always lecturing us on `artificial ingredients' and `today's butchery of the artful cuisine'. What the hell are you doing?”

“Andare all'inferno!(1) We're going to a sushi restaurant a few blocks away. Their tempura is decent. It can't hold a candle to mine, of course, but it's edible. I'm buying.”

Shooting each other bewildered glances behind his back, Krayon and Meruhesae followed.

x(X)x

“I don't care if you hate his guts, or whatever the hell else you think is wrong with him - when a gorgeous guy who's completely into you wants to make out, you generally oblige!” Erutis screeched

Raenef squirmed futilely from his position on the couch. Apparently being the “little brother” of a psycho meant getting pinned every now and then. He snarled as politely as possible.

“Has anyone ever told you that you're way too strong to be a girl?”

“No, I don't think I've ever heard that one.”

x(X)x

“Me lady love is love-ly, me lady love is fair, me lady love is ten-der…” Krayon pushed the remains of what had turned out to be near-orgasmic tempura around his plate. Still humming, he glanced up at his bandmates.

“What?”

Meruhesae rolled her eyes eloquently at Eclipse, who roused himself enough from his increasingly drunken stupor to shrug in response. The drummer “tsked” slowly, wagging a finger.

“How much sake have you had?” she said accusingly.

Krayon attempted to hide a hiccup. Failing, he changed tactics and offered the scolding drummer a bright grin.

“Not s'much as `Clipse,” he slurred cheerfully. Pushing himself up from his rickety chair, he swayed dangerously but managed to avoid collapsing. With a waggle-fingered wave, he stumbled out of the florescent lighting of the restaurant and into the less painful darkness.

Eclipse watched him with mild interest, more concerned with the two other Krayons following the first out the door. This was quite worrisome; he wasn't sure he'd be able to feed four people instead of two on a regular basis… Particularly when they kept spinning around like that. How terribly rude of them! He attempted to explain this to Meruhesae, but trailed off in mid-sentence to begin toying with her hair. Long and black and soft and…

“You straightened your hair.”

“So you noticed. Do you like it?” she purred, teasing as always.

Glancing up at her, he dropped the silky tendril, all levity tossed aside.

“You look like Four.”

Enough said.

x(X)x

Sinking mercifully into the couch, Eclipse tried not to notice the way all the objects in the room seemed to close in hungrily, their shapes cold and distorted. Only the bookshelf looked friendly, but he knew from past experience that it was a pacifist, and wouldn't butt in. The coffee table was unreliable, always switching sides. After all, the furniture had a union, but Eclipse had lemon-scented wood polish.

Meruhesae's slightly blurry head ducked into view.

“What happened? I haven't seen you this drunk since-" she cut herself off abruptly, but the unspoken words hung in the air. Eclipse could even see them. Red neon in a font rather like Times New Roman.

Since he died.

“You're a good girl, `Hesae. You worry about me too much,” he mumbled, neatly evading the question. With surprising agility for someone who had downed multiple bottles of sake, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her down next to him.

Though obviously startled, she quickly collected herself with a feline stretch. It was, after all, quite a night for surprises.

“You'd better be careful, sugar. I might just try to kiss you again,” she teased in a voice that made Eclipse's ears ring from the close proximity. All the same, the sentiment expressed was comforting. Scary, (as were most things with Meruhesae), but comforting nonetheless. He grumbled slightly.

“Well it's good to know that someone wants to kiss me. I was beginning to wonder if I was cursed… But I'm fortunate enough in that respect. Less so in other areas.”

The sober drummer stared blankly at him for a few long moments before the proverbial light bulb flared into life above her head. The light hurt Eclipse's eyes and forced him to look away.

“You mean Raenef? Oh, sugar…” She reached gently for his shoulder.

When she found herself pinned, she tried vainly to understand how he had rearranged them without seeming to move. Both of her wrists were trapped within iron grips as they were pressed into the sofa on either side of her head. A gust of warm, sake-laden breath caressed her skin, and she flushed. For what seemed like an eternity, he rested his forehead against hers, staring impenetrably into her eyes.

When he finally kissed her, she kissed him back.

x(X)x

“But no one hooks up with the nerd! The rest of them are fairly well-accepted anyway, but even when they all `learn to understand one another,' still no one wants to make out with the little skinny guy who could have turned out to be Bill Gates!” Raenef shouted, his cheeks flushed and his eyes glittering in his conviction. “The Breakfast Club is so unfair!”

“Then why do you keep watching it, Rae?” Erutis asked wearily. Not like they got into this argument every other week.

“Because Emilio Estevez looks like a Greek god! Granted, he's a jock, but he makes up for it. I'd prefer if the grand finale involved him and Judd Nelson riding off into the sunset… But no cigar.” He sighed dramatically. “They even did St. Elmo's fire that year, and still nothing!”

Erutis willed the tension out of muscles still taut from the argument she had let drop in favor of movie night, managing to mask her concern for Raenef, as difficult as it was to do. She hadn't lied when she described their relationship as that of siblings; and she hadn't lied when she told Eclipse that Raenef needed him. Now it seemed as though the two of them would manage to thwart her efforts.

This was simply not acceptable.

“What's wrong with you?” she barked, interrupting Raenef in the middle of a lecture on teen romances in the eighties. Stunned for a moment, the poor boy collected himself almost instantaneously.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said icily, making the seamless transition into the cold, distant Raenef she knew all too well.

“You even try to bullshit me and I'm out of here Raenef. Now tell me what's so hard to do. This is the type of thing that almost never happens to people in real life, and it's happening to you!”

Raenef attempted to stand, presumably so he could storm off, but Erutis grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him back down, bunching the fabric beneath her fingers threateningly. When the petite blonde furiously refused to meet her eyes, she gave him a rough shake.

He jerked his head around with animalistic reflexes, his eyes searing her with such cold fury that she released her hold on him in shock. They'd had arguments before, certainly, but there had always been an exasperated affection underneath the surface anger.

Raenef had never looked at her with hatred.

“You don't know a fucking thing about it,” he spat out. “And you certainly wouldn't know anything about how people get hurt in real life. My dad's only been dead half a year, and you already want me to trust somebody else! I don't think I'm the one who's messed up here. Now get out of my house.”

So wrapped up was she in the sharp, bitter words themselves, she almost missed the weary tag at the end.

“Rae, I…”

“OUT!”

x(X)x

Back in her cramped apartment, (shared with a roommate she never saw, it seemed) Erutis began grabbing clothes to take to the Laundromat a few blocks away. Feeling more dejected than was reasonable, she slipped out of her jeans so that she could wash them, pulling on a pair of baggy green sweatpants instead. Out of habit, she slipped her fingers into each pocket to check for any spare change.

When paper crinkled against her fingertips, she pulled out what appeared to be the corner of a napkin in vivid emerald. The coloring, at least, told her it was from her last visit to Oz, but the phone number on it?

Oh.

Him.

The foppish looking glam rocker who insisted she take his number, “lest he perish from heartbreak” At the time she had dismissed him as not worth the breath it took to say his name, but that had been before the situation with Eclipse and Rae had grown so dire.

And with what she had garnered from her earlier conversation with one blonde primadonna, she doubted that Eclipse would be as cooperative this time around. And she didn't know the drummer well enough to call in any favors.

Which left…

“God, I am so not doing this,” she snarled, reaching for the phone.

x(X)x

When Raenef's phone rang, startling him out of sleep, sunlight was just beginning to stream in through his bedroom window. Groggily fumbling around, he finally got a hold on the torture device, punching a button before bringing it to his ear.

“Hello, you have reached the Chicago Morgue. For recent obituaries, press one. For funeral dates, press two. For body identification, press-"

“Are you still doing that?” Erutis cut in, exasperation warring with amusement.

“Are you still calling people at obscene hours?” he murmured acidly, feeling her flinch at the knife edge in his voice.

“You don't have to talk to me if you don't want to. I just thought I'd let you know that you're supposed to be at rehearsal this morning.”

“Actually, I'm supposed to be at school. I'm just on my way out the door, in fact.”

“Chris is the only one of us going to school today, and we all know it. Now get out of bed and put some clothes on. You need to be at Eclipse's apartment at nine.”

As he scrambled to follow instructions (damn the way Erutis sounded more like a mother than his own did) a blurry thought floated to the surface. “Hey, how did you know we had rehearsal this morning? I didn't tell you guys.”

After a few seconds of electric silence, Erutis groaned. “I had the questionable pleasure of doing my laundry with that airhead guitarist of yours - do you know he's the first Liberace fan I've ever met who was actually willing to admit that he was a Liberace fan? And he knows every-single-goddamn-song!”

x(X)x

Raenef knocked again. As with the first few hundred times, there was no answer. He turned the knob irritably, not expecting to find it unlocked. The door swung inward with a muffled creak.

He might have left it at that. He was more than half an hour early, after all - he had made sure to be, hoping for the chance to talk to Eclipse privately, and maybe - “maybe” being the operative word - maybe trust the man just a little. But if Eclipse was still asleep, or for some reason not home, it would be rude to just traipse in. And, having never been to the apartment before, it would have put him on edge.

He might have left it at that, if he hadn't caught a glimpse of the bedroom. Tip-toeing across the cramped living room, he could see a sliver of an unmade bed, and just a few tantalizing inches of dark hair and ivory skin. It would be the work of a moment, to push the door open, just for a glance…

Five blocks away, panting from his sudden sprint, his fingers clenched convulsively on the strap bisecting his torso. The case on his back that held his base had beat against him with every flying step, and there would be bruises later. Was it raining? He couldn't tell. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

Kneeling on the slick concrete, he finally allowed himself to scream.

x(X)x

“Well, I certainly didn't think this was how I'd find you.”

Eclipse hadn't realized he was awake, but the cutting chill in Krayon's voice made him sit bolt upright.

It was far too easy to forget that the self-professed drama queen of their group wasn't as silly as he acted. Far easier for them all, if they didn't think about the calculating intelligence that never slept.

Krayon leaned nonchalantly against the opposite wall, the sleepy, glazed look in his eyes causing Eclipse to stiffen. Closing his own eyes, he sunk back down into the sheets.

“What did I do last night?” It was a whip-crack demand.

Krayon's cold, quiet laughter sent icy fingers scurrying up his spine.

“It's more a question of who you did last night.”

The guitarist may as well have kneed him.

Exhaling loudly through his teeth, Eclipse rolled over and opened his eyes. Meruhesae met them with her own hurt ones. Sliding out of the bed slowly, she left the sheet. Although wrapping it around her pale, glistening form would have been more modest, she had never been one for pretenses. And there was a strange, powerful dignity to her as she walked stiffly out of the room.

“Care to explain, Eclipse?” Krayon murmured with venomous sweetness. “I wasn't under the impression that you'd started batting for the other team. Or are we going to get into another spat over the existence of bisexuality?”

Eclipse swore roundly under his breath, reaching over the bed for a pair of pants lying crumpled on the floor. When his probing fingers met an empty cigarette package, his cursing intensified.

“Nicotine won't provide much of a fix now, I'm afraid. Major things like the guilt that comes from betrayal… Well, I'm not sure you've got enough hard liquor around here for something like that. Now,” he added as he gently scooped up Meruhesae's clothes, “I'm going to get our girl fixed up. You're going to get yourself together, take a few aspirin for your head - I assume you're hungover, seeing as your little bout of drunkenness is the best excuse you'll be able to come up with for last night's discrepancy - and get ready to rehearse. Bassist number three should be here soon, and I'd rather your behavior didn't cause us to need a fourth one.”

x(X)x

Raenef leaned over a little more in order to better his examination. No runny nose, no red eyes… No sign that he'd been crying. Excellent. He stepped away from the rearview mirror of a grimy SUV.

When betrayal was involved, it all hinged on the reaction of the betrayed. If he broke down and even hinted that he was affected… Not weak. Never weak. Can't be weak. Why flatter the bastard by letting him think that his actions meant anything?

Testing the doorknob again, Raenef found it locked. Before he could knock, the door opened sharply.

Eclipse flinched like a man wounded, and Raenef tasted the guilt rolling out of him. This was better than expected - and not an opportunity to waste.

He'd tear the asshole to shreds.

x(X)x

Eclipse continued to stand in the open doorway, even after Raenef brushed past him. The boy's bright, cheery grin left little lights winking in his wake.

It would be one thing if it had been Four - not that he ever would have left the man's bed for someone else's. But Four had been just that; a man. Old enough to take care of himself, to handle whatever was done to him with that calm, infuriating distance in which he shrouded himself.

Four hadn't young, or innocent, or naïve. Four's eyes, though commanding, didn't shine with hope.

Raenef's did - and it might just kill him.

Clearing his throat, he turned from the threshold, using his foot to close the door.

“Shall we begin?”

x(X)x

Smoke hung thickly in the air, refracting the strobe lights pulsating flashes. The sounds of the crowd were drowned out by blaring music.

Erutis glanced at the musicians' seated around her again, and wondered what could have happened to cause the sizzling tension she now felt. Raenef was on his best behavior, for once, so she reluctantly dismissed the idea that he'd repeated one of his prior battles with Eclipse. Which meant it lay with one of the other three - and she didn't want to get inside any of their heads.

When the tenth band began to wrap up, Demonic rose as one, not looking at each other as they strode coldly to the “waiting area” for bands preparing to take the stage.

No one who wasn't a member of one of the bands was allowed backstage right now. Otherwise, Erutis would have been there in a flash; ready to do whatever was necessary to remove the malicious gleam she had glimpsed in Raenef's carefully blank expression.

x(X)x

“You give me the reason.
You give me control.
I gave you my Purity.
My Purity you stole.

Did you think I wouldn't recognize this compromise?
Am I just too stupid to realize.
Stale incense old sweat and lies, lies, lies.

It comes down to this.
Your kiss,
your fist
and your strain.

It gets under my skin.
Within.
Take in the extent of my sin

You give me the anger

You give me the nerve.
Carry out the sentence.
I get what I deserve

I'm just an effigy to be defaced.
To be disgraced.
Your need for me has been replaced.
And if I can't have everything well then just give me a taste.

It comes down to this.
Your kiss,
your fist.
and your strain.

It gets under my skin.
Within.
Take in the extent of my sin”

Every word was clear, fresh. He knew each one as well as his own name. But as the crowd screamed their approval, clapped in unison, shouted lewd suggestions… There was no performance. No memory of having sung in his mind, even as he walked offstage. Only the continuing awareness of the young, lithe form a few feet behind him, just out of sight.

x(X)x

A/N: That's it for now… Though I do promise not to take so long on the next chapter. And yes, you lot will eventually get that kiss I know you're dying for.

Leijhana tu'sai to all readers and reviewers!

And the song is “Sin,” from the album Pretty Hate Machine, by Nine Inch Nails.

(1) Go to hell, in Italian