____________________________black sky: chapter one - by adire___

Softly. The glass broke softly, stretching outwards like saran wrap, like some strange plasma that was not glass at all, before it shattered with a quiet whisper, tinkling into a thousand reflective shards.

Plasma....right. He stared at the pieces on the black obsidian sidewalk, and a million selves looked back at him with accusing eyes, grinning his own lewd grin from his scarred blue-black lips, the clown’s smile in stretched stitches that he could never lose. It was beautiful, in its own way, the slick white-pink skin, the crossbars that had once been stitches, stretching almost up to his razored cheekbones. He’d always had a sharp face, called elegant with its chiseled features, called unsettling with the milky white orbs of his eyes. Unnatural. Inhuman, even before the mutilation.

Was anyone even human in this world anymore?

The knife, the microphone, the microphone, the knife....god damn it all. Sakao. Pull yourself together. He was standing outside the club, staring at the window that had never broken anywhere save for in his mind. Plastic unreality....plastic unreality and plasma.

They were expecting him inside, now....Fumihiro, Amane, Eizo, Yushiro, and Kaii. They needed him, his silken fingers, his throaty voice, the scarred beauty of his face, torn apart, psychotic and macabre beneath a wild shock of hair, blue, blue as the night sky, the night’s scars, almost as dark as its original black. He remembered himself long ago, before he met them, doe-eyed and exotic, amber-skinned and normal, with his unsmiling lips.

They’d changed him; he’d changed himself. He was something different now, something wanted and worshipped, something sultry and mysterious, empty and meaningless because they never knew what he felt when he touched his fingers to the strings, when the psychosis took him, when he threw himself across the stage, screaming “Kuroi no akane sasusora! Omae! Omae o korosu!” He didn’t even know, but they loved it. They made themselves in his image, painted his false-smile on their faces, and they were screaming for him now, inside the club, watching the dulled stage and wondering which of the figures milling aboutwas him, or which was the dulcet, boyishly innocent Amane that so many melted for, the victim to his pretend ravages in this play of puppets and performers that they put on. “Sakao!” they screamed. “Ai shiteru! Sakao! Burakku Sukai! Black Sky! Black Sky!!”

He bent down, stared at the sidewalk, remembered the year the city was destroyed, and rebuilt entirely in black glass. He stared at himself, remembered his own death, and slipped inside the club.

It was dark, and as smoky as they always were. The cliché of gothic noir, vaguely remembered from nearly a century ago; it was born in the nineteen-eighties, given less than a decade to be fashionable before it expired. It never knew that its glory was far more horrific as realism, and far less believable.

He melted through them like a dissolving cloud, untouched; their limpid eyes worshipped the stage, its indistinct shadows no darker than the kohl and blood smudged around their almandine eyes, the few remaining streaks of natural color in their garishly dyed hair, the psychosomatically depressive clothing that adorned their bodies. They didn’t see him, now, among them, one of them. I’m not here. I’m not real. You won’t know me until you see me under the lights, your ghoulish fantasy.

Would he even be real then?

"Sa." A small hand on his arm, corpse-cold. He didn't have to look at the large red eyes to know they were there, didn't have to lift his head to follow Amane backstage. The boy's scent, like licorice and burning metal, led him, drew him into the black, the dark, the empty.

The others were there, ready. Watching for him. As he lifted his gaze, Amane's back blurred and warped, turned black. His entire body, nothing but a cut-out, a moving rift in reality. Beyond, stars gazed through, each one screaming, clawing at itself to draw prismatic blood. Sakao wanted to reach for them, but instead wrenched his gaze away, looked at Kaii, prayed that he would remain solid, whole, human for just a few minutes. That his own mind would not betray him, that the world would not lift and twist beneath him, swallow him whole and pitch him down the mirror-walled tunnel into hell.

The soft brown eyes that met his own were worried; they always were. Kaii was the gentle one, it seemed. The human one. The only human being left in the entire world. But Sakao only nodded to him, would not let his compassion touch him with its feathery, clutching fingers. The floor rocked for a moment, squirmed, twisted, rippled, bucked like a great and hungry wyrm stirring from its restless sleep, and something on a table in the back rattled, fell. The sound was as harsh as a cleaving sickle in the silence, and they all grew still. Waited. Watched.

It puddled, swayed, and smoothed again. Without speaking, the six lifted their instruments, what was not already waiting on stage, and filed out into the sharp, wet-earth-scented aura of anticipation.

"Come here, " Sakao whispered under his breath. Indistinct shapes at his back, he took his place at the microphone, watching the blue sea before him, faces like moons swimming in a polluted sea. They seemed to sing in one voice, a quiet lull rather than the anticipatory roar, lilting the words to a song he'd heard long ago, when he was still...still....sane? Alive? Human? Something. "No, I won't say please...."

"You all right, 'kao?" Kaii murmured, moving closer to him as he hooked in his guitar, the red twin to Sakao's black monstrosity, how dare they use true instruments, touch them with their unsanctified fingers, rather than the metasynths that the music industry was built upon....

"Yeah, " he answered, more to the guitar than to the dark-haired man. His reflection in the black, black surface leered its wide, stitch-toothed grin. "Yeah."

They knew that he was there. Like glitter-eyed predators, hungry, they watched the silhouettes. Grew quiet. He would have thanked God for that moment of silence if he hadn't watched him die.

The stage technicians knew when the moment came, knew by some deeper sense that signaled them to extinguish all light in the club. Blackness swallowed them entirely, and for a moment silent howls battered him, and faces blacker than the dark lunged for him, their gaping mouths aching to devour, to take him deep into their perfume-lined bellies. These, he knew were real. The taste of the fear was concrete. The terrified whimpers of the crowd, accustomed to the black, but never the dark, for something always kept it at bay. Behind him, tense, the rest of Burakku Sukai waited, anticipatory, wondering if this would be the one time when they misjudged it. When the timing was just wrong. When Sakao couldn't do it.

"Shinde, " he breathed into the microphone, and threads of silver spun upon the air.

Silence fell, and with it, the cries. By the faint filaments of shining iridescence that wove through the ether like coursing streams, he could see them again, the young faces that seemed dead now in that blue-white corpse-light. Vaguely, faintly, the glint of an eye here, an open mouth there, a tongue outstretched to catch a falling spark of moonlight. A hiss of pain when fingers tried to touch. A sight of relief when the amorphous, fluxing shapes ceased their gibbering, fled.

"Shinde, " he whispered again. "Shinde kudasai....." ....and behind him the music rose, below him as well, his fingers moving before he realized it, throbbing deep and soft and as slow as his voice, the scratch of velvet to sandpaper, soothed by the sweeter cream of Amane's voice at his side, lilting, haunting, coaxing true illumination to rise as the stage lights slowly drew power.

"Splinters of ceramic on the fingers of your holy decay, " the boy murmured in melting tones, weaving his voice in between drum-beats, purring words that could have meaning only to those who would never come to hear them, not now, not when the hate was too strong. "Burn yourself into your lies, turn from me, I can't hear you say...."

"....shinde kudasai, " Sakao finished, and felt the hoarse intake of the audience's sudden sob, uniform, in unison, sink in the pit of his stomach. "In the sweetness of the TV screen, I kissed your lips and watched you die.....I won't be here, plasticine eroded dreams, colder than the words you cry....shinde kudasai."

He could see the words on his vision, blocked them out by closing the pallid, gleaming silvers of his eyes, watched them scroll on his eyelids like rolling lines of ticker-tape. No, he wasn't real, not now, not yet, but each guttural throb of the monster in his hands spun him into existence, filaments of steel coiling into his guts, softened. It ached when they did this, sadistic, making him feel again the rising of the phoenix, the chill of his own flesh as he rose from the dead. Were his limbs truly rotting, or was it his imagination? No, it was Amane's icy body, pressing to him, seeming to plead with his dulcet tones, his whispers of song. "Can't you kill me the way I need to love? Touch me with the razors of your need.... Don't make me meet you push for shove, don't make me kiss you just to bleed....just to feel....." His small body, lithe and golden, twisted against Sakao, and he felt the hunger in his throat, felt the burn in the back of his mind.

Play with the pretty dolls with me, little brother! Girlish sing-song, where did he know that voice.....His eyes never opened as he tore one hand from the instrument, crushed the boy to his side. In the vocal silence Kaii and Eizo filled the room with the wailing thrum of crescendos, Fumihiro pulsed the beat of a heart, a drum stretched tight in human skin, Yushiro raised an animal's howl from the keyboards....or was that from Sakao's own throat? He dug his nails into Amane's side, felt more than heard him gasp in unison with such an attentive mass of mindless androids, lustful, hungry for the kill, pretend-wolves circling his prey. The moan as he ran metal-clawed fingers over the smooth boyflesh of his belly vibrated into the microphone clutched in those tiny hands, antithesis to his predatory silence, and as he bowed his head to bite at his throat, scratching the flesh, an echo of Amane's thrilling cry tore over the smoky room, electrified, blended with the music.

"No, " they moan-hissed together, crumbled concrete twining with silk and broken by Amane's milky gasps of fear, arousal, the shudders of every caress that made his words crack to let the rotting swampwater of Sakao's voice to seep through more clearly for just a moment. "When the dancing forests of children reach for you, shinde kudasai.....when the sea of grass parts before you, shinde kudasai.....when they come, they come, they cum for you, shinde kudasai....no, I won't be here, I won't gather up the pieces to make you whole again, in this world of shattered glass can't you feel me falling throught he voices, through the things that made you break you hold you keep you hate you need you rape you and where were you when the ashes all fell down...." Twined like lovers, their voices rose, higher with every word, accusing, stabbing, and Amane sobbed hungrily, tears running down his face as Sakao's claws bit into the inside of his thigh, drawing blood whose scent seemed more like lavender beneath a light he had never seen. "Shinde kudasai, when the night never falls....shinde kudasai, god, can't you hear me screaming?! Shinde kudasai, it never leaves, where have the saviors gone, worn into the meaning of nothing, discord of it all.....I won't be there when you turn to die...." .....and now Amane's voice fell away into a soft, throaty moan, leaving the pounding, painful melody to die, leaving Sakao as alone as the last hole in a bleeding head to whisper into the boy's ear, into the microphone that he held so close....

".....shinde kudasai."

In the stillness that followed, Amane held his breath, sagged like a corpse from Sakao's grasp. All eyes were upon them, wating, anticipatory. On Sakao, expectant, demanding. Craved the visions that he could, would give them, when the pain fell, when he rode its ebb and throb. What more do you want from me? he wanted to scream, wanted to kiss them all to death, and it made his fingers move.

The first harsh chord that he struck cracked like digital bones splintering beneath gnawing canines. He fell into the thick, cool sea of silicone, let it fill his lungs, dampen his ears to the vicious soul-screams that he tore from the guitar. This was what pained them, what they wept for. This was what they came for, when they saw his death dancing in his fingers, weaving black skeins between the strings, saw the vision in pale white eyes that should be blind, felt something below and beyond them reaching through those tugging, mind-sucking sounds. Hypnotized, they strained, and he watched them as one rise upon their toes, leaning towards him, reaching upwards, trying to follow the crescendo of the notes, trying to capture them from the air, and he knew that some of them saw, felt the things that he played in the room, coiling about them with thick, choking black fingers of a murky, sick-cold passion, alien and dead, empty as the void and yet that emptiness itself a substance of it own, reaching out to fill them with its nothingness. They would leave as drained as they always did, aching for something to fill them, never knowing that what they craved more of was that sweet, loamy emptiness itself.

As metal stroked metal, talons on strings, in the last reverberating chord that threatened to shake his body apart in flying ropes of muscle fiber, he heard them scream and sob and cry his name, and wondered how many of them would kill themselves this time.

"Sakao!" they shouted, and he exulted in the pain even as he grieved in the hollowness of his own silence, remained unresponsive to Amane's thin arms sliding around his waist in an effusive hug, the boy's strange gratitude, before he watched those girlish hands rise to wave, rousing the masses to greater enthusiasm.

"Sakao!" came again. "Sakao! Sakao! Burakku Sukai!"

When you whisper, little ones, when you stumble, when you cry....no one hears your lament but the cold, black sky.

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