Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (80 page)

It was like the air got sucked out of the room. Everyone stood still, frozen in their places. Everyone but Silas who had retracted his hand from Sanguine’s trembling cheek.

“All – all chimeras kill,” Silas said in a confident and soothing voice. “I’m not cross you killed Ludo, sweet one. My lovely chimeras are pre-dispose to violence. It’s fine. Does it make you understand some of the things that made you angry at me before? The things that made you run aw-”

“STOP!” Sanguine suddenly cried. With a frustrated scream he pushed Silas hard.

The king stumbled back and was caught by both Perish and Elish. He stared at Sanguine in shock as Sanguine slammed his fist against the granite countertop.

“Why can’t you accept I need help!” Sanguine cried. “How can you possibly… possibly think I’m okay? I’m not okay!” he screamed. Tears sprung to Jack’s eyes as he watched his brother and friend breakdown in front of him. “Are you that much of a selfish asshole that you’ll let your own guilt over Jasper keeping me prisoner overshadow the fact that I’m fucking pleading for help? How can you be that selfish? How can you be that stubborn!”

“I might be fine now. I might be fine for months but this keeps happening and it keeps getting worse. Something is wrong inside of my head and it seems everyone in this fucking family has accepted this but you,” Sanguine yelled.

“Don’t say it,” Silas whispered. His face had turned ashen, behind him Elish and Perish both gripped Silas’s shoulder in a way that suggested they wanted to make sure he couldn’t flee from what Sanguine was threatening to say.

Sanguine’s eyes widened, but it was no look of surprise. He looked livid. “You knew all along didn’t you?”

“Don’t say it,” Silas whispered again; he started shaking his head back and forth. “It never happened, so don't even give the delusion light.”

“Delusion?” Sanguine said incredulously. He took a dangerous step towards Silas, who had now refused to make eye contact with him.

It was a strange and terrifying sight for Jack to take in. The black-haired chimera, his grey face a mask of solid stone, and his red eyes blazing like two burning cigarettes, slowly approaching the King Who Ended the World like he was Satan himself calling on him to finally answer for his crimes.

Silas wanted to create a demon – and he had indeed succeeded.

“You think… what Jasper did to me… was a
delusion
?” Sanguine’s voice dropped to such a low level Jack’s chest seemed to vibrate and rock under the rasping tones. “You think I imagined him raping me several days after he tricked me into coming to his farm? You think him locking me in that piss-smelling, dark basement with nothing but my own desperate loneliness, until I almost wanted him to come fuck me just so I had some human-fucking-contact, someone to talk to… was a delusion? Three times a week, Silas, sometimes four. The only break I got was when I started becoming a man and that was only because he brought in other boys. Two of them you have now. Tell me you never asked Juni and Levi just why they were there?” Sanguine snarled.

Silas kept looking to his side, his eyes glaring suns and his lips welded shut. Like the others the king seemed frozen by Sanguine’s leaded words.

“You let this happen to me, you let an six-year-old boy fend for himself in the greywastes because you wanted what? This? Is this what you wanted?” Sanguine continued, his face now dangerously close to King Silas’s. He kept moving his face as if trying to force eye contact, but Silas refused. “Is this your ideal end result? Admit it to me, Silas. Admit that you know what Jasper was doing to me in there. And admit you let your own creation fall into the hands of some depraved pedophile.”

Sanguine took a step back. “And then you can admit that you expect him to be absolutely fine with a few lies and some new clothes.”

Silas’s eyes remained glaring and focused as Sanguine’s last words hung heavy on the toxic thick air. They lingered on everyone’s ears until they were drowned out by the sounds of five racing heartbeats.

Then those same eyes shot to Sanguine, and they did not soften, nor did they look away when Sanguine glared right back at him.

“You’re not only an insane defect, you’re a compulsive liar,” Silas said coldly. “You’re full of shit like an attention-starved teenager. You fucking delusional lia-”

Sanguine let out a loud, gut-wrenching bellow and lunged at Silas. Elish snatched the king and pushed him into Perish’s arms before grabbing the insane chimera and pulled him back.

“Fuck you!” Sanguine screamed, tears running down his face. “You inhuman monster! How the fuck can you say that? How can your own feelings, your own stubborn denial, be more important than admitting it? ADMIT IT!”

“You’re a fucking liar!” Silas screamed back, the crazed glint in his eye matched only by Sanguine’s. “It never fucking happened, you attention whore! You fucking attention whore!”

“Elish, get them out of here!” Perish shouted. “He’s about to blow. I can feel it gathering. Get them out of here, now!”

“He needs to fucking accept it so the god damn boy can move on!” Elish suddenly, and uncharacteristically, yelled at Perish.

“They’re both still mortal and if he fills this room with radiation the roof will blow off of this skyscraper!” Perish yelled back, holding Silas tight in his arms as the king shouted and screamed cruel and biting insults at Sanguine. “Get them out of here. I need to take him outside. I’ll take him outside; I’ll take him outside.”

Elish’s teeth clenched as Perish started dragging the king, seemingly in his own insane psychosis, towards the sliding glass doors.

He turned to Jack, and pushed Sanguine towards him. The chimera had stopped thrashing and trying to get to King Silas; he seemed to have gone back to his stunned state. “Get out of the building, take Sanguine some place safe and wait for us there. He’s your responsibility. Keep your boyfriend safe.”

My boyfriend?
Feeling an overwhelming new sense of responsibility Jack nodded. He took Sanguine’s hand and when Sanguine didn’t fight him or dig his feet in he quickly took him towards the door.

Back outside…
Jack’s eyes stung as they both got into the elevator, but he pushed back the tears and stood tall, gripping his boyfriend’s hand so tightly he was afraid he would snap Sanguine’s bones.
Back outside where we just were… I didn’t expect this to go so badly.

“Sami?” Jack whispered as the elevator started to descend. He was half-expecting to hear an explosion above him. He had heard terrifying stories about what sestic radiation could do, and though chimeras were immune to the radiation itself, they weren’t immune to explosions. “Sami, are you okay?”

Sanguine only stared forward, saying nothing back. And though he was in an almost catatonic state, he was suggestible and followed orders. So Jack saved the many questions he had burning his lips and led Sanguine to the car he had just parked beside Alegria.

“I want to go to my basement…” Sanguine said when they were both in the vehicle. “Where my friends are, in Cypress. Take me there.”

Jack’s hands gripped the wheel. He had been heading to Sanguine’s old apartment, now with a fresh coat of paint and new furniture. But though he badly wanted to bring Sanguine there he knew what was more important right now was putting Sanguine some place he mentally felt safe.

So with a nod he turned left at the next intersection, and headed towards the dark shadows in the distance, the low-class district of Cypress.

Following Sanguine’s directions Jack pulled into an old building with broken and boarded up windows and a lean to the structure that made Jack nervous. He parked the car in an alley, fully expecting it to be stripped of any sellable material by daylight and followed his new boyfriend through an echoing, dusty interior that made him sneeze several times.

And then the decent. Jack could hear his pulse pick up when Sanguine turned a corner and directed him towards a flight of stairs leading into darkness. A hole that seemed to come out of nowhere, surrounded by a railing painted with chipping white paint and half-collapsed on the left hand side.

Sanguine stood in front of the stairwell and rested a hand on the railing. In front of him was a wall with a corkboard covered in dust, and a filing cabinet missing two of its sliding doors. To his left was stacks of chairs and to his right, desks and lamps. Everything was coated in grey dust and gravely plaster from the ceilings and the walls. There was also insulation everywhere too and an intense, undesirable smell of dried, rotting wood and must. It was a horrible place for anyone to be.

Then the realization; one that made Jack smile.

“This building reminds you of home doesn’t it?” Jack whispered. His boots crunched against the plaster as he walked up to Sanguine, and throwing caution to the wind, he put a hand on Sanguine’s shoulder. When Sanguine’s heartbeat didn’t pick up or his body tense, Jack rubbed it gently.

Sanguine slowly nodded, then he ran his hand over the railing, paint chips sprang up behind him like a rooster tail following an outboard motor. He then looked at his hand, now streaked with white paint and dirt.

“I miss home,” Sanguine said slowly. He rubbed his fingers together, making dust fall down to the floor below them. “This is kind of home. My friends are here… my friends who… believe me, and love me anyways.”

“Sanguine…” Jack said, a little more sharply than he meant to. He squeezed Sanguine’s hand and walked up to him until they were side by side. “Everyone believes you, even Silas. He’s just ravaged with guilt because he knows he’s responsible. Elish is with him and he’ll probably call Mantis – they’ll both speak with him. Silas listens to those two; they’re his counsel.”

Sanguine stared down the dark stairwell before, without a word spoken, he started to descend to the basement. And though Jack’s heart was beating its anxiety over following Sanguine down these stairs that seemed fitting for a horror movie, he did.

Sanguine stretched a hand out as they walked and let his nails scrape against the rough brick, the sound grating on Jack’s ears like nails on a chalkboard. The further down Sanguine led Jack the more the fine hairs on the back of his neck creeped up.

Then in the distance, down the long hallway, he saw light leaking in from a closed door, and though the temperature was frigid he could feel hints of warmth against his skin.

“Let me go in first,” Sanguine said quietly. “I need to tell them you’re here.”

Jack was confused for a moment before he remembered the conversation he had heard Sanguine have with his imaginary friend Barry. Telling the person to feed the others while he was gone.

Nervously Jack stayed behind as Sanguine let go of his hand and pushed the door open.

“Hello, friends,” Sanguine said, his voice was dead and emotionless. “Did Barry feed you?”

Jack waited behind the closed door, and it was there he started to smell the distinct stench of rot. His heartbeat sped up anticipating just what he was going to see when that door opened.

“Good… I have a friend here. I need privacy with him. You will need to spend the night in the storage room with your bodies. But I will come back and get you, I promise.”

He’s so sweet… even in his madness he’s the sweetest chimera I know
. Jack felt his heart break for Sanguine. The pain he knew Sanguine was going through was so intense it physically hurt his heart. So badly did Jack want to snatch the pain away from him and push it into himself.

Never more than now did he realize he was falling in love with this mad man.

The door opened and Sanguine’s shadowed face appeared. “Okay, you can come in… they’re gone.”

Jack smiled at him, and Sanguine nodded back and stepped away from the door as he opened it for him.

When Jack stepped in though his smile faded.

The basement he had been staying in was… something not even a rat should be allowed to live in. There were stacks of dusty, half-rotten boxes, crates, old blankets, and what looked like decaying bones in the corner giving off a horrible stink. The walls had chunks of brick missing and the mortar was worn to the point where the bricks were sitting bare on top of each other. The place looked like it could fall down at any minute.

And his bed… Sanguine had an old double mattress in the corner with blankets that Jack could smell from where he was standing. Like everything in this place they stunk of stale water and dirt, and Jack could see several stains of multiple colours.

Jack stepped into the open area. The only redeeming thing in the dungeon-like room was the fact that it was warm and lit. There was a heater in the center of the room connected to an extension cord, and two lamps with halogen bulbs. Then behind it beside a metal door was a hot plate with a dirty pot and frying pan on each element.

“It’s a lot better than the basement at Jasper’s,” Sanguine said in a voice full of shame. “And the shanty town too. And it’s safe and… and far away from everyone.”

“It’s your safe spot, it’s wonderful,” Jack whispered. He slipped his hand into Sanguine’s again and squeezed it. “We can stay here until you feel safe enough to come live with me.”

Sanguine looked down at his and Jack’s hands, with the light fully illuminating him Jack realized he looked incredibly worn out and tired. “Live with you?”

Jack nodded slowly and since the room they were in was sweltering hot he started to take off Sanguine’s torn clothes, wincing and chastising himself when he saw the vicious claw marks on Sanguine’s back and neck. Though the reminder of the intense sex they had experienced earlier that evening made Jack’s backside give a painful throb.