"I'm taking a break," Akainu stated, and the room fell silent in the same fashion that cannon fire and earthquakes never did. Hanging in the air was the obscenity of the words, the ridiculousness of them from a man who had forgotten that his was not a name to be taken in jest. Sitting behind his desk that creaked in protest beneath his enormous bulk, he did not move, save the glint in his eye--no, not a glint, it was something cold and reptilian, the glint of long-used amusement poorly suppressed. "A break? Where?" Tsuru asked bluntly, though larded in suspicion, prodded to the surface of things like some hook.
He didn't even blink. "Anywhere but here."
He shifted beside her, his enormous coat rustling against the arm of the chair and the noise having the resonance of chains over stone scraping. "You've never taken a break," Sengoku snarled. "Not once. Not even when your lungs were half ruined in that gas field outside Rokakaka. Not even when half of Kizaru's face was melted in Brat's Wake. Why now?" His weary eyes traveled over the Admiral in front of him and didn't catch even a hint of fatigue—no, something else. Something immobile. "You're not burnt out," Sengoku snarled, "you're... entertained."
Akainu smiled and it was not a pleasant smile. His demon face had studied smiles the way a scholar studies entrails. "I tire of duty," he slurred his words, letting them languish upon his lips. "The paper and conferences and kabuki dance of power. I crave action,"
Fujitora in the back raised his brow but never turned away from the gentle clinking of his teacup. "And what do you intend to do with that acyion, Sakazuki?" he asked softly, the tremble of righteousness behind the question keen enough to cut. "Will it be of use to the people?"
A laugh—dry and hollow, creeping through the ribs like a spider through a coffin. "They're not human beings, Admiral. Opportunities. Sheep." His fingers were latched together on the desk, fingers so completely motionless that you almost thought they'd been carved in stone. "The human beings will be aided when I am no longer amused."
A vein pulsed in Sengoku's temple. "If that is a test—some twisted morality play—do not mistake your power for omniscience. There are some things even an Admiral must answer for."
Akainu's head leaned to one side. "What do you suppose I should be answering to?" He was speaking in his deeper voice now, almost languid-sounding, and his words curled through the room in threads of smoke from burnt scripture. "My absence? Or the fact that I am what I am?"
It was Kizaru who now stepped forward to speak in that room where darkness was beginning to coagulate at the corners and adhere to the bulk behind the desk. "You've changed," was his dry comment, lips curled half-way in the dozy drawl fashion, but tired eyes betrayed wariness. "You're not one to prate on about dullness. You used to shovel ennui down the gullet with relish. What is this, really?"
Akainu rose.
His gait was unencumbered, but the room closed in over him with its bulk, as if his frame was heavier than it should be. His coats flapped at his back in a sheet-like fashion and in his glancing towards the window the light ran low—not from the sky above, but from the glass itself. "I plan to go walking," he stated, "and see what stirs when a hunter departs his den. Perhaps I shall speak to a man who believes that he is great. Perhaps I shall remind a somebody that hell is not a place, but a nearness to me."
"You're not joking," breathed Tsuru. She had known him longer than the rest of them—watched the iron-jawed boy spill his convictions onto stone—but the man in front of her was not him. This was somebody else with his transgressions draped over his chest in medals.
Akainu turned to them once more, his eyes blazing hot as embers on heated earth. "You believe me mad. You believe me broken. I tell you," he took a step closer and the air was thick and oppressive with all the air molecules now in their proper lordship under his will, "I am awake." Sengoku stepped forward, arms tense at his sides, teeth set in a determined snarl. "You think you can play god with the humans. You think you can hide behind that uniform and do whatever has crawled into your heart. Let me tell you, Sakazuki—"
"Don't call me that."
It was whispered but it shook the air like thunder shook the air. Tsuru stepped back from it. Kizaru shut his eyes tight. Something in the room stirred—behind Akainu's chair the wall squirmed in the shadow of something winged and large and unrighteous. Sengoku's breathing was stuck in his windpipe. Fujitora rose up from his chair slowly.
Akainu smiled once more, and his smile did not touch his eyes because his eyes did not exist—only ashes now, twin craters that caused one to think of a fire deeper than the center of any world. "I will return," we heard him speak in a voice devoid and full of wonder, as if speaking of the end of the world, "when I am no longer entertained."
He strode in ahead of his own feet, the boots slapping against tile in a rhythm that was too deliberate, too ritualistic, that of an executioner speaking verse in each step. The door creaked open—not being pushed, not being yanked, but opening, bowing to its owner.
And with his walking past them, the room exhaled. Sengoku's fists unclenched. Tsuru slumped in unobserved defeat. Kizaru exhaled through his nose, his fingers following the edge of his jacket. Only Fujitora did not shift, his head tilted slightly to hear steps that none of the others detected.
"Where will he go to?" Tsuru whispered softly in case mentioning it out loud would summon the thing back here.
Sengoku shook his head and perspiration dripped down his neck. "Someplace with light," he muttered, "where he can watch it disappear."
###
The universe was bent—not shattered, not splintered, but bent, with space itself rolled up in conscientious fingers of spite. Where his boots clanged on Marineford's cold floors in advance, his tread squelched in dewy grass now, hissing with each step as his soles exhaled misty plumes of vapor. He emerged from a gash that closed behind with the sound of something caught in a throat and swallowed, the ripple of air congealing with a groan. Above his was a sky which jeered at his perceptions—unreasonably blue and garishly dazzling, a painted ceiling in some child's crypt. His soles felt the beat of the foolish warmth of the sun and laughed in foolish glory, radiating beams that never did penetrate to the unnatural cold which clung to his body. He took a deep breath and tasted frosting and mirth on his lips. His mouth curled in revulsion.
The castle soared up before him, pink and perfect, its sweeping spires of frosted frosting jutting towards the sky. Walls glimmered with the gloss of sugared glass and the song of the birds was so perfect it cut the edge of his perceptions slanted. He strode with deliberate intention through gates that did not halt him, did not even recognize him. Twin mushroom-pointed creatures with staves collapsed to salt the moment his shadow crossed them, crunching in softly upon themselves, their little faces contorted in idiot bliss. His vision did not waver; he had seen worse things seared to less. His objective was just before him.
She was watering flowers.
Pink tulips, their colors wide and untrained and smiling-mouthed, swayed in the nonexistent wind. In their center was a woman dressed in white gloves and in a gossamer dress and in a look of peacefulness so unbroken that it was almost constructed. Her blonde hair was lustrous with the radiance of cornfields under a moon of harvest and her face, turning to look at him, wore the peaceful emptiness of a person who never actually ever did suffer. It was then she saw him.
Her hand dropped the watering can.
The metal clanged once against a cobblestone path, and she did not recoil from it. Her blue eyes stretched wide—not with fright, not yet—but with a shaking wonder spreading in them like bruises on tender flesh. Her lips parted. "Who…?" She exhaled on a thread of sound that caught on the thorns of voice.
He did not reply.
He stepped closer and the blooms darkened in his footsteps, withering to brittle paper-like things. Her eyes opened wide. Her fingers trembled in the silk of the skirt. "You're not from around here," she whispered in shocked and delighted wonder, as if discovering her very first secret. "You're... so strong. So mighty." Her breathing struggled again and her cheeks flushed with un-natural pink.
"You're not suppose to be here," she trailed on, though the words lacked conviction. "You're dangerous."
"Yes," was his answer finally, his voice the low creak of a tomb door opening
She breathed in sharply and quietly, as though what was being said was thrilling her. She moved closer to him, her high heels cracking, her hands clasped together in front of her chest in a pleading manner. "Say your name," she whispered, her breathing now labored, her eyes glassy, "I want to hear it. I need to hear it."
"I've have many names," he replied. "But as of am now. I am Akainu."
Her lips trembled over the name in the way that a candy did in her mouth. "Akainu," she whispered once more, and her body shook with a hunger that was not of fear, some savage madness taking form in her breast. "You're so different," her voice barely whispered. "All of them here, they're so gentle. But you..." She inched closer, close enough to be touched now, her white-gloved hand rising to touch the hem of his jacket. "You could crush me."
"I could," he admitted, his eyes on her with half-lidded eyes full of embers. "You'd die."
"I wouldn't want to survive," she whispered, voice a mere whisper of powdered sugar, but the look on her face—wild and desperate—spoilt the sweetness of it. "Hurt me. Break me," she begged. "I'd thank you. Just—notice me."
The demon inside awakened.
It did not laugh because its own sense of humor was so esoteric. But it watched her, that fragile thing unravel into obsession in its presence and it understood something unshakable: that even in pastel, light and a saccharine of a world—it was all only flesh to mold, minds to distort. Even that princess, so mindlessly adored by her kingdom, was vulnerable to falling into darkness so long as she was in contact with it alone.
"So come," he commanded—not a request, exactly, so much as a fiat cut from the marrow of worlds. His hand hung in front of her, fingers curled, beckoning and commanding her hardly at all, just simply was. In that was the entire possibility of escaping her claustrophobic life into one darker and blacker and older. Most importantly fun.
She accepted it.
The moment that her gloved fingers touched his palm, the touch crackled softly, a blasphemous union consummated in silence between heartbeats. Her eyes glistened with blissful tears. "I'll come with you," she whispered, as if it was a confidence shared with herself alone. "Anywhere. I don't need a reason."
His thumb stroked the back of her hand with deliberate thoughtfulness, almost to leave his imprint on her. "You will be given one," he whispered, his voice being made of hot coals. "I am from a place built not of happiness, but of judgment. Where power is what decides what is and is not truth and as for mercy is mistaken with decay. You will be exposed to it. You will inhale it. You will wonder why you ever really existed here to begin with."
Her lips parted--not with horror, but with hunger. "Tell me," she implored in a voice that trembled on the edge of madness. "Tell me what you see behind your closed eyes."
He stepped closer, his hot breath a wave of warmth. "I see bone-consuming lava. I see order maintained not in equilibrium, but in blood. I see men who call themselves gods and gods that still bow to flame. I see a world where innocents do not defend themselves, but burn so that justice may rise from embers. That is my world."
Her own voice caught in her throat. Her irises now almost completely filled with her pupils, her body shaking not with fright, but with amazement. "I want to see it," she whispered. "I want to touch it. I want to be with you. No, beneath you. Yours."
"You are mine," he stated bluntly. "The instant your voice shook in my presence, the decision was made."
She hugged his arm like she was afraid that he might vanish from sight. "WIll I be able to return here?" she asked, though there was no desperation within the words.
"If you ask it," he replied, with just the right inflection. "I'll bring you back."
He never had any intention to.
Deceit concealed in his candor like poison in a glass of wine—harmless and pleasant until it has settled in the stomach. She nodded vehemently, her mind also inebriated with intimacy, in love with the odor of sulfur that clung to his jacket. Her hand closed on his lapel and drew him in so that her breathing brushed against his neck. "Then take me," she whispered. "Take me from this dream. I want to be awake."
"No," he replied stroking her face, "you're ready to sleep. I'll show you the nightmare."
And with it, the earth under them was warped, not with sound but perception—the sickening curl of corrupted gravity. Her vision warped. Sky and air shimmered like painted cloth. Grass crunched beneath foot, shattering with tiny bursts of sound. Flowers screamed—actual words, ear-piercing and otherworldly—as they collapsed in upon themselves and died. Somewhere, a castle bell tolled and vanished. And blackness—it was not for her but that of the world itself, eaten away in folds of burning shadow that clung to his heels like dogs.
She clung to his chest tightly and whimpered almost in a state of ecstasy. "This is what I've been waiting for," she whispered against his chest with her warm breath against his skin. "Someone real."
He did not reply. He did not need to.
Because it was never about her. It was never about her. She was a pawn—a symbol of purity soiled now. She was a linchpin to the illusion of peace here in pastel world. She was what held it together and without her here the threads fell apart. He would unravel them, yes, slowly and painstakingly so that desperation seeped into pastel world earth the way ink seeps into paper.
He would let him.
Let Mario stumble blindly and in desperation through the ruins of his pilfered fairytale, pursue phantom shadows from universe to universe in search of a princess who was never his in the first place. Let him cling to hope almost to the very moment that it was broken like fragile china in his palm.
"Do you miss home yet?" Akainu asked of her not unkindly, as the remains of Peach's world was falling apart.
"No," she replied in a gentle whisper of silk. "Where you're at is where I'm home."
He smiled. Not Akainu's smile, nor that of the man, nor the Admiral's nor that of the mask that once commanded with searing discipline. But that of the Demon. He who had seen kingdoms crumble with a mere whisper, that wore flesh like clothes, that heard the scream of angel throats ripped apart. His smile was not wide. It did not need to be so. It was simply there.
She would not live long, not really—not as herself. It did not matter, however. She was taken. She had surrendered.