Nariko eloped when she was 16 with an 18-year-old boy. Her father (posessive, violent type) tracked her down, killed her then husband and after some er, violent complications, killed his own daughter as well. So if you don't like visual imagery of the bloody kind, read Chapter 4b, Nariko's story as told to Lys.
Now can you tell I'm trying to take up screen space?
Okay, if you say so. I'm not liable to any damage, let's just make that clear. Refer to UN Declaration of Human Rights and you'll see that.
:: dream1050 ::
Chapter 1 - Waiting
Chapter 2 - Inside
Chapter 3 -Evanescence
Chapter 4b - Metaphors
Chapter 5 - Awake
Blood, only half-dry, stained the wood panelling on the walls of the landing. Looking down, he saw that the blood was dripping down the stairs, and he froze. This blood was not real, only an echo from the past made real by Nariko's unwillingness to leave this plane and take all her memories with her. She was re-living her memories over and over again because she could not forget what had happened to her. Gray would have entered the bathroom had he not had a vision which hit him like a bullet-train (and he had been hit once before).
Countryside, with long grass swaying. Two girls, one carrying a baby nearly as big as herself watch a train go by their house.
Three young girls playing on swings as an old lady watches.
Th old lady dying and a man standing over the girls as they weep.
Th man throwing things at the girls and one of them struggling to save herself from rape, but is knocked unconscious by the man, her own father.
The man hitting the youngest girl. She collapses.
A funeral, the girl who struggled runs away from her older sister and father, never to see them again.
Nariko's father winding his belt around a fist. Nariko being hit by her father. Red welts slicing acrodd her face and imploring arms. Blood drips down them.
Nariko outside her home, scars all over her arms illuminated in the sunlight.
Nariko being approached by a young man, her senior in school who notices her absence there.
Nariko sharing an ice-cream with the man. Nariko laughing happily.
Nariko's belly swollen with child, sitting by the heater in an apartment.
A knock on the door, she rises happily, but her smile turns to a scream as she sees her husband in a pool of blood outside her door. His chest, sliced open, reveals broken ribs embedded in his dead heart. His glassy eyes stare at an unimaginable horror no one but the dead can see.
Nariko's father stands over him, a long knife in a bloody hand. Blood, all over his face and hands is smeared as he wipes his bloody forehead.
Her father strides into the room, then there is pain, blinding pain, everything is red-hot and stinging. A knife flashes across her belly and shock consumes her.
Her bloody child lies, blotchy red, purple and white, perfectly formed in miniature, curled on the floor, its umbilical cord, intestines and spine severed. The body is held together only by the skin over its tiny stomach. The little heart beats, and the dying child writhes, but only for a moment, before it goes motionless.
Instinct takes over. Despite her gaping, pumping wound, she deals a blow to her father's face with the force of all the suffering she and her sisters endured. This is the only time she has ever raised her hand against another. He staggers and collapses in a corner, dazed.
Nariko stumbles out of the room, past her husband's lifeless body, past his staring eyes and bloody innards, and down the steps, slipping in the blood, eyes pouring, holding back the urge to throw up.
Her father follows menacingly.
"How dare you! You are mine, you hear me? Mine!" The ghost of the man long dead stumps down the stairs to the second storey, eyes wild with fury. Nariko stumbles down the stairs, leaning heavily against the wall and whimpering in blind, mad fear and pain. Her simple yellow dress is soaked with blood from the waist down. She slips on each step in her own lifeblood.
The older man lifts a knife, hidden to Gray by his body, and Nariko wails, turning as if to escape down the stairs. As she turns to wards Gray, he sees why she bleeds. The child within her has been cut from her womb. Her own father, maddened by his possessiveness of his oldest daughter, ends her life in front of the bathroom door, in a pool of blood.
Gray kneels by Nariko's head and neck, two feet from the rest of her body. The diagonal plunge of the knife took her head from her body. The gentle, suffering eyes flutter and glaze over. The mouth lies open in endless horror.
The vision ended and though it seemed like an eternity, Gray heard two female voices coming from the bathroom. One was the vampire's and the other...a human voice, but yet Nariko's voice. Gray held his breath outside the door trying to make out the conversation, but the voices were too quiet and he didn't dare to open the door. If Nariko didn't kill him the Ancient would.
And so he waited.