(I promised I'd write it and I did. I gave this extra care because it's supposed to be a huge shock and grief moment. Hopefully it paid off, and if you are reading this, freaking respond will you? I hate having only one vocal supporter. It makes me feel like a washed out Stephanie Meyer.)
“Is he okay? Why isn’t he awake! He should be awake by now!”
“Chill Salem, he’ll come around soon. You know how much of that hocus pocus we had to stick in him just to keep his heart from bursting like a popped zeppelin?!”
Darkness.
That was all that he saw.
A swallowing darkness that blanketed him in a distorted kind of comfort.
His head felt dizzy, like if he had held his breath for too long. Dizzy and disorienting.
Especially without sight.
But the noise was the worst.
It just kept hitting him repeatedly.
Loud, then louder, THEN LOUDER.
He tried to move his head to shake it away, but it just grew louder.
Then flashes.
There where flashes.
Flashes of red and orange.
Heat flooded him as the screams began.
The screeching of a horrific monster blasted at him. Triumph dripping in the metal squeal of its throat.
“Hey, he’s coming around. Mister? Can you hear me? MISTER!”
The screams grew louder, more hectic.
He felt his skin melting away as the heat engulfed him in total.
Melting. His bones charred into crisp ash.
And those red eyes. Boring into him.
Redder than death. Redder than blood.
The flashes came quicker and quicker, overloading his mind. He felt his body tremble and shake, his muscles unresponsive.
He couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t feel.
Couldn’t see.
Just hear screams.
“Shit! He’s overloading! Get the shock! Hit him with it!”
A sparkling noise started crackling over the screams.
But he could barely hear it.
“Mister! Calm down! WAKE UP! You’re safe!”
Panic flooded him. In fear, he swung out.
His arm felt…wrong.
Heavy.
Detached.
But he didn’t care. He just wanted to get away.
Instead, his arm slammed into something hard and clunky. The noise of it hitting a wall of some kind shook him to the teeth with his already sensitive ears.
Suddenly, pain engulfed him.
Energy surged through his body.
His limbs curled and contorted.
Teeth chattered, bones bent and flexed.
Suddenly he opened his eyes, and light blinded him. The energy immediately died down as his panic stopped.
In front of him where two shadows.
One huge and imposing, the other waif-like and small.
Blinking, his eyes began to shift, adapting to the sudden light. His throat felt like a metal pipe had been dug into it, and his tongue was sandpaper against the roof of his mouth.
The smaller figure materialized into a female form. Dressed in robes of rope-like threads, the only things revealing her humanity where her hands and eyes. Gently she kneeled closer to his form, apprehension visible in her large brown orbs.
“You’re okay. Nothing’s going to hurt you here. You’ll be safe with us.”
A thick snort came out of the massive figure above. A strange glowing seemed to emanate from his chest, a sinister yellow taunting him.
In a raspy voice, tinged with the slightest aspects of an Irish accent, and echoing in a strange metal boom, the beast responded.
“Safe with us, what a joke. I’m more worried about what he’ll do to me and you once he gets up.”
The female shot a glare at her companion, before turning back to him.
“Mister, what is your name? My visions only show me people. They never give me words.”
With a cough, he managed to rasp out his name, bewildered as he was.
“M-Max. My name is Max. W-who…who are you? Where’s Lynn? Where’s Sera?”
The female’s eyes saddened at his questions, a slight tear forming and threatening to fall. Max felt bad, so he tried to move his hand to brush it away.
What he lifted up was no longer his hand.
Massive joints of steel held together cracked fingers ending in badly painted nails.
White cuffs of bondage where nailed to the limb, strapping onto it blue cloth far different from the clothes he had on before.
Max stared, gawking at the appendage.
No…it couldn’t be.
This was a joke.
He was still dreaming.
But as he willed his hand to flex, the machine responded. Lanky protrusions like fingers dangled in response.
Max began to hyperventilate.
This was a joke.
It had to be.
He must have fallen asleep at the park.
While Lynn and Sera went to the rides.
The rides….
The images of orange engulfed him, this time clearer than ever. The screams, the pain. He remembered the bird beast, the metal falling on him. The hand…. Oh God the hand.
The wedding ring...
Max panicked harder, a shrill squeal sounding from his throat.
An inhuman sound.
In a daze, he threw off the cloth rolled over him.
And what he saw almost killed him in shock.
Steel, all steel.
A glowing orb sat in the center….and in it, was a beating, thriving organ.
A heart.
His heart.
He tried to move his legs, but all he could see where spats made of iron, painted crudely in a mock image of real human limbs.
Looking up, the lumbering figure came into focus.
And familiar eyes stared back at him.
“Y-you…no…NOT YOU!”
Up close and in full view, Max could see what stood over him.
A massive beast, with human parts on metal.
Those same eyes.
The ones that belonged to the hands that killed the Vox.
And he could see clenching fists, still smeared in blood.
And charred from flames.
The beast’s face, now un-obscured by rage, came into horrific sharp focus.
It might have once been a handsome face, but stress and pain had left its mark on it. What he thought was a bald head was actually shaved, with a faint outline of red hair starting to grow back into the shape of a strong widow’s peak.
The eyes that glared down at him where blue and sharp, cold…yet pained. They were oddly shaped now that he looked.
They were almond shaped, not egg-shaped.
He was different attributes glued together to make a strange biological form.
The metal body didn’t help matters either.
Max began to shake uncontrollably, the steel wrapped around his form clanking. Near mindless, Max struggled to right himself from his back.
Instead, he only managed to fall heavily onto a rocky concrete floor from his position on a reinforced operating table.
The impact rattled him, but he didn’t care.
He had to see.
He had to prove to himself it wasn’t true.
The world was distorted, waving.
It was tilting.
Everything was tilting.
Spinning.
He sensed movement behind him, the metal freak trying to grab him.
But he didn’t care.
He couldn’t stop.
Stumbling heavily, the hideous metal spats slamming into everything, he reached what he wanted.
With a massive metal hand, he grabbed a full sized mirror and dragged it closer.
He saw a monster staring back at him.
A body of steel, massive and hulking.
The center had an orb filled with a beating heart. Etched around the sides where swirls of undulating metal ribbons. And stapled above were the words Bettermen’s Autobody. But what made him truly nauseous was seeing his face atop such an abomination.
His dark brown hair was tussled, the sides of his head looking like they were shorn of excess fur. His skin was almost hideously bleached, with black rings circling his eyes in a mocking representation of a raccoon’s facial mask.
His mustache too fared no better.
Normally he was very fastidious over his mustache, being careful to groom it every day. But what transpired against him left it looking disheveled and worn, almost drooping in mutual depression.
He could scarcely process the image.
Every cell in him wanted to laugh it off.
But he knew that it wasn’t a dream.
Half-thinking, he slowly rubbed the edge of his neck, at the junction where flesh almost appeared soldered into metal. His throat was wrapped in a white collar, tight but deceptively loose.
It was surprisingly comfortable and didn’t dig into his skin like he would think a collar would tend to do. Seeing what types of straps dogs and other animals were forced to endure in day to day lives.
But it did little to alleviate him. The large metal freak walked up behind him, his reflection towering even the massive bulk of Max.
Max could see just how alike and different both of them were.
Both men made of steel. But one more aristocratic than the other.
One’s neck was trapped in a collared bowl, obscuring the bottom half of his face.
The other had a smaller collar, but with a soldered bow-tie welded into his very frame.
Max couldn’t think clearly, but somehow he was able to let out words in his ruined throat.
“…What happened to me...Why am I…why am I…this…thing?!”
The taller metal creature’s eyes glinted and Max could almost sense a sneer spreading across his face.
“Thank Salem for saving your hide. If it was me, I’d have left you to burn. A damn bird did that to you. Crushed and splintered worse than eggs on a baseball bat.”
Max’s new hand crushed the mirror’s edge, shattering the image and scattering it over a million fragments.
Turning around, he glared with renewed hate at the monster.
“Change me back.”
The beast looked shocked for a second, before his eyes hardened.
“No.”
Max grabbed him by the ruff of his blue coat. A civil war outfit that was much like the one he wore at the carnival.
“Change. Me. Back. NOW.”
“I. Said. NO.”
Max saw himself physically lift up the beast and throw him across the dark room all three where in. A metallic yelp sounded as it hit the edge, landing painfully on several wooden shelves. Max roared in a rage, but what came out wasn’t a human sound.
Instead, the room shook as the quaking noise an almost primordial monstrous sound drew out of his throat, edged thickly with what sounded gears squealing against each other in a frantic meshing frenzy.
The noise stunned him, leaving him open for the beast to grapple him, an equally fearsome snarl emanating from his throat as well. The panic inside Max erupted once more, and he started swinging his fist, managing to smash into the collar of the other creature with horrific force. With a final blow landing on his face, the beast almost flew off, falling onto the ground with jittering force.
Max shakily stood up and grabbed the beast by the collar once more. Now blood was running down from a shattered nasal bridge, smearing the beast’s teeth in a sickening red hue.
“Now I’ll ask you nicely one last time. Change me back. Now.”
The bleeding beast let out a small whine, his blue eyes revealing tremendous pain coming from them.
Not physical.
But emotional.
“You can never be turned back. When I got you, you were split in half. Your body was destroyed. The only way to keep you alive was to turn you…turn you into…”
With a shaking hand, the beast pointed at himself.
“Why else do you think I look like this? You don’t think I’ve wanted to be human again either? My body is gone, and so is yours. Be thankfully you made it out when others didn’t.”
Max dropped the beast, and the creature whined once more, wrapping its head with a ginormous hand.
The last words repeated at him. Again and again and again.
Made it out when others didn’t.
Made it out when others didn’t.
Made it out when others didn’t.
His exposed heart began to jump once again, and he could feel his pupils dilate. The girl had moved towards the two, but in doing so she was now in his targeted path.
With inhuman speed, he lifted her up bodily from the ground by the torso, holding her easily 7 feet in the air.
“What did he mean by others not making it? What did he mean?!”
The girl struggled, but even her sharp nails had no effect on his armored ones.
“I sent him...I sent him to help. But it was too late. Everyone was crushed…only you were still squirming alive.”
His heart slowed down.
Not in calm.
But in building tension.
His hand started to clench, squeezing her painfully like a constrictor to a foolish rodent dinner.
“Where’s Lynn? Where’s my wife?! Where’s my daughter!”
She shook her head, the skin around her eyes beginning to darken from pain and loss of oxygen.
“Please, you have to understand. There was no way to grab her, to grab them. The visions, the spirits. They only showed you still alive!”
A pitched cry emanated from him and he roughly dropped the girl to the floor. He looked around, nearly tearing his freshly welded neck in his speed. A single door was open and he rushed to it, throwing aside any object in his way, nailed down or not.
The room Max went into was dark, more dark than the other one. However, a single light illuminated the room, in the center.
The heart of the room carried one single item.
A bed.
With a form in it.
Max drew closer, hoping beyond hope that his hunch was false.
But when he saw the figure, all hope was gone.
Lying in the bed, tucked into the sheets, was the form belonging to his mate.
Lynn.
She might have been asleep, but Max knew she wasn’t.
Her skin was deathly pale.
Her hands clean, but no amount of washing could hide the blood that had stained them.
And the single ring she always wore.
The one he gave her on their wedding day.
The ring glinted back at him on her finger, just as it had been every day since they solidified their union.
In silent shock, Max gently and slowly picked up her form, rubbing a hard knuckle against her cheek as softly as he possibly could. He collapsed onto steel socket knees, and hunched his back as he hugged her form.
The ragged girl stood in the doorway, her bloody friend standing behind her. She tried to move forward, but he held her hand in his and shook his head slowly.
It was not for them to interrupt.
For the first time in his life.
For the very first time he ever allowed himself to.
Max unclenched his emotions. Opened them up.
And he cried.
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