Soundless Imaginings | One-Shots

Blind Faith | NextGen

He'd been everything to her.

An idol, a hero, a teacher, a friend. Her first love, her last thought. He was more than just a man to her, more than just a pirate. He was her father, and she'd loved him more than anything.

And now he was cradling her mother's frozen corpse.

"D-Dad...?" She nearly choked on the word, clutching at her throat, her heart. Everything was numb but somehow the pain blossoming in her chest was experienced in its full, blistering agony. "What... what are you...?"

She would have preferred it if he'd smiled, or laughed, or done something to paint him as the merciless villain she'd remembered from nightly fairytales. Hatred came easily when one seemed deserving of it; not so when the perpetrator of one's torment looked wholly unchanged from the experience.

He cocked his head in that familiar way he had, a gesture she found unique to him, something she could identify at a moment's notice. And he looked at her, blue eyes dull, disturbed, like the shattered reflection of a rippling pond. There was nothing remotely apologetic in his gaze, nor was there anger or sadness or grief. No hint of any redeeming emotion stared back at her as she searched his vacant face.

It killed her, honestly, to see him the same as he'd always portrayed himself. As though this death meant as little to him as the lives he himself had taken so long ago as a pawn of the World Government.

"Cora."

His voice lanced through her thoughts, snapping her back to reality. Her recollections were for another time. Now she had far more terrifying ordeals to traverse.

"I'm sorry."

She drew a sharp intake of breath. Not once in her fifteen years had she heard her father utter those words - he'd hardly done anything worth apologizing over, as far as she could recall. For him to offer such considerations...

"Did... did you..." She stopped, took a breath, swallowed thickly. Tried again. "Dad... Mother, did you... kill her?"

For a moment, he said nothing, and the only sign that her questions had reached his ears was the slight downward curling of his lips as his eyes flickered away from her face.

Timor knelt on one knee, gently laying Aoi's limp body on the soft earth, a feat which Cora found extraordinary when the earth had tilted so severely beneath their unsteady feet. She was still in this enteral slumber of hers, with no movement from her chest, no habitual rose and fall, no rapid movement under her closed kids. As Timor removed his arm from her back, sliding out the other from below her knees, the motion jostled Aoi, turning her head so that her cheek caressed the earth.

Cora felt herself crying. She couldn't stop.

Aoi was bloodlessly pale, her lips leeched of color until they'd flooded with blue. She'd been dead for hours, at least, perhaps a day, and it was no mystery as to how she'd met her end. A single, pin-straight cut curled over her collarbone, stretched over her chest and down to her abdomen, spilling its precious contents like the undone seam of a child's stuffed bear. Her entire front was a demonic red; Timor's own chest bore similar stains but lacked the telltale wound.

Cora tore her eyes away, rubbing furiously at her cheeks, mortified she'd lost tears in front of her father. Then she jolted, awash with the realization that it mattered not if he was her father. A killer was a killer, and a leopard did not so easily change its spots.

"Cora."

She flinched.

"...I'm sorry."

Was that all he could say? Was that really it? Perhaps he thought the rarity of the statement compensated for his lack of creativity. If so, she had words for him.

"You're sorry?" she said, her voice caught between a shout and a sob, made into a horrible, wet gasp despite her best efforts to steady it on her lips. "Tell me what you're sorry for, Dad! Did you kill her?! Did you kill Mom?! Tell me what happened out there!"

But her outcry was met with stark, ringing silence, and her knees hit the ground, robbed of their strength. Her hands reached for her daggers before she registered the action, and by then she was moments away from letting them fly for her father's throat.

She had the horrible thought that, if she hadn't caught herself, if she'd gone ahead and aimed to kill... he wouldn't have moved.

...aaaaand that's where the inspiration stops right now. Fun to write though!