Fifth Sin: Performance Past And Present (Pt. 2- Rebirth)
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The world was peaceful. More so than he could ever remember it in his short painful existence. No cold, no hunger, no pain, just… peace.
And that peace it… it pissed him the fuck off.
He wasn’t quite sure, his mind as muddled as it was, but he knew that peace like this was wrong. And even knowing that it would only get better if he simply gave in and accepted the peace’s sweet embrace, his very soul raged against the idea of accepting whatever this was. (No, not now. You haven’t earned it.)
There was no telling how long he was trapped in this state, only that as he stayed like this the more of him he felt slipping away. So he forced himself to remember.
He remembered the cold setting in, forcing him to move in the hopes of outrunning it. The hunger that left him fighting to try and feel the void inside of him. The pain that meant he was still alive no matter how broken. And most importantly he remembered the rage, the thing that pushed him to change a world that wanted to drown him in the darkest of blacks.
And with all of this he held onto the things he could not let the peace take away from him. His mama’s singing as old and forgotten as it was, his dad’s encouragement, his siblings’ laughter, he used the rage to burn away anything that tried to take these things from him.
Eventually he felt a tugging within. One that he tried to resist, refusing to give into any temptation that threatened the life he’d built for himself.
The peace recoiled from the pulling, focusing more on stopping it than trying to devour what was left of him.
(And that’s reason enough to embrace it.) He thought bitterly, as he latched onto the pulling letting it drag him screaming from the peace as it filled him with a heat. So very different from the perfect temperature of the peace, the feverish warmth making the cold of the world around him all the more apparent.
His heart pounded against his ribcage, trying to escape his expanding ribcage as he hungrily sucked in as much air as he could, as if he’d been starved of the life giving substance for years.
For a brief moment he was filled with pain unending, so much more than he’d ever felt in his life. Or rather, he felt all of the pain he’d ever felt in his life as the peace made one last desperate grasp at getting him to give in and come back to her.
But he refused, enraged by the very idea.
He shot up from the bed, ready to rip someone’s throat out with his teeth and beat them to death with their own skulls.
“Shh, shh, shh, habibi, it’s alright.” A gentle voice cooed.
He blinked, his eyes quickly latching onto the familiar face. One of the few that could calm him his rage from its hellish proportions and down to its ever present simmer as he caught sight of his, “Mom…”
Tanned skin smiled beneath two faintly glowing green eyes. “Mercy…”
He couldn’t help but grimace as he felt something drag its fingers across his mind.
Taking a deep breath, he exhaled before looking around the room, taking note of the (oh so familiar) spell circuit carved into the dirt. One that while he couldn’t actually read, he could not mistake any other circuit for given just how deeply it was practically carved into his own soul.
“W-what happened?” He asked, trying to get his head straight as he looked around the dark room filled with candles, everything outside of the light an indecipherable void of darkness.
His mom gave him a sad look as she ran a hand over his cheek. “Habibi… you… you bit off more than you could handle.”
“I did…?” He asked weakly, really playing it up as he eyed his mom who was wearing her usual city wear of jeans, a leather jacket, and a green scarf over a plain hijab.
“Yes, I had to-”
He drew his gun and shot his mother point blank in the chest.
She rushed back in a burst of pale smoke as she looked at him with hurt eyes. “Habibi why-”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Okay, you’re screwing this impersonation thing up.” He told the thing wearing his mother’s face. “And I mean really screwing it up.”
The thing frowned at him. “Mercy, what game are you playing?”
“First, let’s start with the one you couldn’t account for, my eyesight is pretty much shot in one eye so I’ve got a camera in my helmet to help balance things out and it’s picking nothing up from that void outside of this light.” He told the entity before him as he stood up. “Next my mom hates wearing a hijab, and only does so because she’s embroidered enough enchantments into it to make the thing bulletproof and has enough enemies to make it worth putting up with and since people expect middle eastern women to wear them it’s a hell of a lot less conspicuous than my helmet.”
He wrapped his knuckles on his own, just to underline the point that he was in fact wearing it. “Speaking of, and this one was an amateur mistake, I felt your fingers on my face despite wearing a helmet. Might want to pull back on the mind fuckery next time if you’re one of those resurrecting demons or some shit. Though thanks for telling me you’ve got armor piercing claws.”
“Mercer, this is no longer funny.” The entity told him, getting his mom’s voice down pat, but not quite getting the right tone of exasperated -I will stab you and heal your ass if you don’t stop- fondness his mom actually had when she was reaching her limit with his bullshit.
“Going to ignore how you’re giving me even more evidence, because I’m enjoying explaining why you’re an idiot.” He assured the eldritch horror before continuing his lecture. “Next, yeah my mom can do that smoke dash trick, but hers is green due to all the Necromancy causing her to have a little more residual Ectoplasm in her system than is healthy. It’s actually why her eyes have the glowing green thing, though they do darken to a greenish brown when she hasn’t cast anything in a minute. I’m guessing the fact that yours was a pale fog means you're the entity of the Mists that clockwork sent me to run out of his theater, or part of it at least since you lot have that whole sapient hive mind thing going on most of the time.”
“Are you done with this farce yet, boy?” The entity asked, attempting to project a feeling of fear into his mind. One that ironically enough he was able to resist because when his mom wanted him to feel fear she tended to use death magic rather than psionic madness. (They are two completely different flavors of mind fuckery.)
With his life he felt safe saying he was something of a connoisseur on that matter.
“Almost done, last point. Clothes.” He tugged on his jacket, before kicking the circle at his feet. “This resurrection ritual doesn’t work when someone is wearing clothes, or at least organic clothes like my cotton shirt. My mom would’ve stripped me if she was doing this.”
He stopped to think about that, as well as what he knew about the Mists and their usual modus operandi. “Actually, you know what. I’m going to take a step back and thank you.”
The creature blinked, likely actually shocked. “Th-thank me?”
“Yeah, you Mist lot are kind of infamous for summoning up peoples families to try and mind fuck them, which for some freudian reason results in your humanoid creatures trying to physically fuck them.” He explained. “So given how the memory you're trying to poach was like three months before my mom officially adopted me when I was sixteen and I was naked here… Well, thank you for not trying to give me an oedipus complex. That bumps you up to like my sixth, seventh(?) favorite eldritch entity.”
“As if I’d have to try that hard, given how you feel about your father.” The creature scoffed, taking on an ugly look that his mom would not be able to pull off with her actual face or personality. “You know that’s the only reason I brought you back? I don’t love you, I just wanted to make him suffer for-”
“Another mistake.” He interrupted. “Two actually. First, my mom has way too much self respect to ever get hung up on a man like that… Or rather if she wanted to torture someone she’d do it personally while using magic to make sure they know they aren’t allowed to die until she gives they beg for her permission. Thinking about it she’d probably get along with you Mist folk.”
He’d have to find her one he wasn’t planning on killing. (My mom could use some non-mercenary friends. Preferably ones she won’t try to sleep w- Okay, for my own sanity not introducing my mom to any eldritch horrors.)
“Second mistake!” He called perhaps a little too loudly. “My mom adopted another kid like two months after I moved out, and I’m pretty sure she’s already eyeing a third adoptee. I kicked that woman’s maternal instincts in hard.”
“I took them in because I was done with you. You really think your so irreplaceable that-”
“My mom sends postcards to her ex’s kids along with christmas and birthday presents.” He interrupted once more. “My mom doesn’t let go of her kids or other people’s kids for that matter. I mean for a mind rape-y eldritch horror shouldn’t you know how badly she’s hounding me for grandkids? I mean if you want to bring up traumatic experiences she once had an assassin tranq me with fertility meds! Honestly, I’m just glad that Julie had to leave for a family emergency two hours before that asshole got me! Oh, oh! And when I chewed her out for this shit she didn’t see the problem because I’m her child and that means I’m hers so she can drug or enchant me if she wants as long as it doesn’t hurt me! What the fuck man?! I mean as a technically twice orphan that’s super nice and reassuring to some of my insecurities but still a little fucked up given the context! Especially since she tried it again two weeks later, which was even more awkward when the assassin -who I’m pretty sure once had a threeway with his wife and my mom- wanted to make me the godfather because I flipped the tranq on him when he thought he was too old to have kids!”
The eldritch horror opened its mouth before closing it.
He took a deep breath before exhaling. “Right, sorry about that. Kind of went off on a rant… don’t know where they came from. I’ll do some introspection type shit later or something… real big on that, helps pass the stakeout time when I get sick of my online classes.”
An awkward silence descended on both of them as the eldritch horror tried to figure out what was going on.
“Ugh, I totally killed the mood didn’t I?” He grimaced before shaking his head as he reloaded his gun. “You want to skip over the mind games -that you totally lost- and just get straight to the killing each other part?”
In response the creature lunged at him in such an obvious way that he just ducked under it grabbed it, flipped it over, and slammed it skull first into the concrete ground.
Leaping back he pointed his gun at the creature that was fading into mist, waiting for it to reform… only for it not to…
He looked around the room. “Well… that was anticlimactic…”
The lights flickered off once more.