"I'm sorry," Helena said, her heels batting against the ledge. "Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?"

"I don't think so," R.D. said quietly. "Not unless you can kill Re-Tuul. I don't think anything short of that will help."

She put a claw on his shoulder. "Well, while we're working on that, is there anything I can do for you now? Do you want to talk?"

"What's there to talk about?" R.D. replied bitterly. He tossed a pebble in his hand down far below to the facility's ground level. "I only contributed to even more of the planet's devastation, I damn near killed my friends, and I found out that my one hope of figuring out who the hell I am is gone."

"You had no control over the first two things. Don't beat yourself up over it."

R.D. shook his head. "It doesn't excuse what I did," he said. "There had to have been more that I could do to fight back. But I couldn't stop them, couldn't stop Daemonus..."

His hands clenched tight, his knuckles going white. "I wasn't even able to stop Re-Tuul back in the Mushroom Kingdom. I never stood a chance in the first place."

This feeling of powerlessness... it disgusted him.

"None of us can really stop Re-Tuul right now," Helena said. "It's not your fault."

"That's not an excuse!" R.D. growled, standing up suddenly. "That monster deserved to die for what he did, and yet I wasn't able to stop him. I was too damn powerless to stop him and too damn powerless to stop what they did to me.

"That won't happen again," he snarled to himself as he walked away. "I'll make damn sure Re-Tuul pays for what he did."

Helena scrambled to her feet, almost stopping him with a claw, but letting him slide away. She shouldn't push the issue. Maybe...maybe he just needed to cool down for a while.

From the corner of the ledge, at the tunnel entrance, the Vortigaunt stood with Alasea, watching R.D. storm off. Alasea frowned, upset at how R.D. had reacted, and the Vortigaunt merely shook his head.

"Some wounds are beyond our power to heal," he said, turning to return inside the facility.

With a sigh, Helena looked in Alasea's direction, and shrugged.

Alasea sighed and hung her head. She had worried about him, had wanted to speak to him, though Helena had beaten her to it. But it was easy to see now that the amount of damage R.D. had suffered had extended well past the physical. She could only imagine how deep the scars went now.

As the Vortigaunt left, she instead approached Helena. "What're we going to do about him?" she asked, quietly.

"Give our support," Helena said, looking in the direction R.D. had left, her tail curling at the tip like an inquisitive cat. "That's the best we can do for guys like him, I think."

"I don't like the idea of just leaving it alone," Alasea said, looking off to the side. "No one walks away from that kind of situation without a problem. I can't even begin to imagine what kind of hell Ziatoch inflicted on him."

"But you know how he likes to keep it to himself. If you know a good way to get him to open up more, I'm all ears."

"I don't... maybe... no, I don't know of a way," Alasea confessed, shaking her head. "I don't like seeing him like this... I've seen how this kind of obsession goes. It won't end well."

"It won't go that far. Not with us around." Helena squeezed Alasea's shoulder. "Come on. Let's get back to the camp site."

Alasea nodded and the two returned inside, headed towards their camp within the facility. Overhead, thunder rumbled through the black and silver clouds in the evening sky, mirroring the storm brewing the companions' troubled hearts.

Night quickly descended and they bunked down to wait out the night. As they slept, they dreamed--and as he dreamed, R.D. soon flew up from his sleeping back, drenched in sweat and eyes wide from some imagined horror. They flickered and blazed with light as he unconsciously seized Lumiya's power, looking about wildly as if after some unseen threat.

Nothing stirred--the makeshift stove was only glowing embers, Hugo was still powered down, and the girls were still sound asleep in their bags. Matt's was empty, still on guard with their Vortigaunt companion.

His breathing slowed as he calmed down, only for him to catch sight of a pulsing glow at the corner of his eye--he quickly looked down at his bare chest, and his eyes widened in shock. Pulsing violet lines of light raced across him below the skin and the scars, racing out of his core and to his extremities and back. His surprise caused him to lose his grip on Lumiya, and as the energies bled away from him, the lights faded.

He grabbed at a t-shirt and slipped it on, bailing from the room and headed back outside, thoughts racing on the phenomenon he had just witnessed, and of the horrors lurking deep within his subconscious.

"Sometimes when I really get bored, I spit for distance." Matt demonstrated by rearing back and attempting to fire a bullet of saliva. "Oh! Oh, shit. All right, it's not supposed to get on your shirt but you know what I mean."

The voice drifted over to R.D. from where he stood just outside the exit to the facility's ledge. The Vortigaunt seemed to be keeping Matt company, not really detracting from Matt's antics nor really encouraging them. Such a bizarre race.

"Do you always slack off this much when you take watch?" R.D. asked, making himself known as he stepped out to the ledge, holding onto the edge of the hole in the fence.

Matt turned around. "The ONE time I want to spit at something and you criticize me." He smirked. "At least it sounds like you're feelin' better, judging from your usual disregard of my genius."

"I... don't know if I'm feeling better," R.D. said weakly after a moment. "Everything that's happened since I fought Re-Tuul... I..."

He trailed off, looking down off the ledge before turning back to Matt. When he looked up at his friend, Matt and the Vortigaunt could both see the faint change in his eyes--in the dark, it seemed like muted gold rays were emanating from his pupils, trapped within the iris. "Whatever happened to Lumiya... whatever happened to me in Shayol Ghul... I'm not the same as I was before."

"I don't like the look of that." Matt glanced at the Vortigaunt. "What do you make of it?"

"Perhaps it is that communion of the Vortessence," the alien offered, clasping two of its hands together. "And that other: a deeper mystery. No deeper than the void itself. For a brief time, you joined with us. You are one. Between the worlds."

R.D. shifted uncomfortably, his eyes downcast. "I don't know how I've changed," he said. "Everything changed when Re-Tuul attacked."

"Yeah, I don't understand him either," Matt said, jabbing a thumb behind him at the Vortigaunt. "Er, no offense intended, of course. But my theory is that Re-Tuul or whoever tinkered with Lumiya to get that to happen."

At the mention of Re-Tuul, and the idea of that monster having experimented on Lumiya, R.D. grit his teeth, his fist clenching tight until it suddenly exploded with the flames of Godhand. Immediately, his eyes flickered again into the deadened look they always had when he grasped Lumiya's power, and with it, the violet lights began to race beneath his skin once more for all to see. Matt would easily recognize them as the same lights that he had seen within R.D. just before his vision in the mine.

"That bastard will die for what he's done," he murmured coldly. "For me, for this world... for Mesia. I will kill that bastard."

Edited by RisingDragon on March 10, 2011 at 16:31:40

It took Matt a moment to recover from R.D.'s sudden outburst before he said, "Oh, well, that doesn't make me worry at all!"

"Your bright face obscures your darker mask," the Vortigaunt spoke cryptically.

R.D. closed his eyes briefly, and let go of Lumiya's power. At once, the lights disappeared, as did the Godhand. All at once, he seemed to lose all his fire, and all his drive. He looked older than a boy of his age should. "Everything changed," he whispered. "I can't let Re-Tuul get away with what he did to her, but I can't stop him. Not like this."

"Well...good thing you've got me on your side, then," Matt said. "I'll see ya through best I can, R.D.. And it's not just me, it's everyone else. We'll all help you out."

Slowly, shakily, R.D. nodded. He looked back up at Matt, his eyes still aglow with the dim light trapped in his eyes. "Thank you, Matt," he said quietly. After everything Matt had struggled to do for him, he didn't need to tell him what for.