diversified | My heart is under arrest again. [ closed ]

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My heart is under arrest again. [ closed ]

WHO Jacob Kane (

insertdadjoke), Abel Fletcher (

sociopapathic).
WHAT Twists of fate and turns of chance. Remus remembers everything, yet remains under the thumb of the Reapers. Romulus remembers nothing, and lets his fear control his seemingly-unending life.
WHEN 2012.
WHERE Death Eraser laboratory somewhere in Alabama.

There was no time, only confusion. There was no thought, only pain. Whatever these people had given him, it had sent his mind straight out the window while leaving his nerve endings in tact, making it impossible to try and block it out. What option was left to him other than try to ride through their terrible experiments while hiding in the corner of his mind? It didn't help that they kept murmuring over him, words too soft to hear but loud enough that he couldn't ignore it. It was driving him insane, and he wasn't sure he minded that. Wouldn't that make things easier? Being insane, maybe it would make living so long bearable.

Jacob gritted his teeth for a moment, then let out a soft sigh and sunk into the uncomfortable operating chair beneath him. There was no escape, no hope, no one coming to find him or otherwise free him from the torment. Whoever these people were, they were going to keep him for as long as they wanted and possibly even longer. His only eventuality might be that he would be there for so long that they would forget why they had him and either lock him away in darkness or finally let him go free.

It was an unlikely dream, but it was, at the same time, the best Jacob could fancy up right now.

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There was a time where he was his brother's shadow, watching him from afar to make sure he was taken care of, but that was not the time anymore. Abel had a daughter to take care of now, so he didn't have much time to pop in on his brother and see how he was doing.

It was a quick teleport to where he knew his brother was at, but he wasn't there. Another quick teleport to where he worked showed he wasn't there either and that was worrying. It wasn't time for his brother to move on to a new life and he wouldn't just disappear like this. He teleported somewhere out of the way and summoned Romulus' Reaper. It appeared in usual dramatic Reaper fashion, pulling itself out of an inky black puddle and reforming itself into its usual Reaper form.

cerberus. i was waiting for you to summon me.

Abel crossed his arms and frowned at the Reaper, unhappy about what he said. "You should have contacted me when he vanished instead of waiting," he answered, annoyance clearly visible in his voice. He was not happy. "I need his location."

it is not my job to watch over him in life, cerberus. that is the job you gave yourself. The Reaper wasn't being harsh, but merely stating the truth. Abel sighed and the Reaper looked at him with those bright silver eyes of its. i shall give you his location and as per our agreement, this will not be recorded.

"Thanks for that," he said with a grin as the Reaper read off the coordinates. "You could make my job easier by informing me about things like this."

perhaps. i will think on it. until then, i wish you luck, cerberus.

The Reaper disappeared in a reverse of his entrance, but Abel was already teleporting back home to grab a few things. He got dressed in his standard Enforcer outfit, grabbed a few of his weapons, and then filled an old backpack with supplies. Thankfully, Holly was at school and he'd leave a note explaining that he'd be gone for a bit. She could take care of herself for as long as it took for Abel to free his brother from whoever had grabbed him.

Once he was ready, he teleported to the coordinates the Reaper gave him. It was some kind of building and immediately he thrust his hand into a wall and grabbed the wires located inside. Forcing his Enforcer powers into the electrical writing, he overloaded the entire system and shut it down, plunging the facility into darkness for only a brief moment before the backup generators flickered to life and the lights came on once again.

Done with that, Abel silently moved through the corridors, looking for anybody and once he did, he drew his gun and pressed it up against the back of their head. "You seem like a smart person," he stated calmly, barely hiding the fury in his voice. "So let's not start with threats and instead you just tell me where you're keeping the immortal man and lead me to him. If you don't, I'm sure you can imagine how this is going to end for you."

There was a brief squeak as the man's hands shot into the air, which soon turned to sputtering as he tried to figure out what in the seven hells the man with the gun was talking about. Of course, the threats and the danger and need for information were all obvious, but immortal man? Oh, he was just a simple janitor, how was he supposed to know where all the super secret biological research was going on?

Wait, had he just said all of that out loud?

"Oh please please please don't kill me," he begged. "I... I don't know anything about no immortal man! Nothing, honest!" Something clicked, however. It wasn't quite as earthshaking as the idea of someone immune to death, but it might be enough to save his own life anyway. "W-wait! Um. They... there's this room, see? Sometimes I switch hallways with my buddy, we're only supposed to do certain sections of the building, but when I took his spot last week he told me that one of the usual rooms was off limits all o' a sudden! Now, I'm not no scientist, but they let me clean up the labs all the time. I know better than to go messing with their toys, so they never done barred a room from me ever before."

Taking a long gulp and trying to decide if he had made peace with his life thus far, he asked, "C-can I take you there instead?"

He rolled his eyes at the rambling and the man's hands going up in the air. Of course out of everyone he could run into, he ran into the janitor of all people, but this was a promising lead after all of the obnoxious rambling. Moving the gun away from his head, he sighed and tapped the janitor in the middle of his back gently as if to move him forward.

"Let me put it this way. You take me to the room that may hold the man I'm looking for and I'll let you leave this building with your life still intact. You decide to pull a stupid stunt like inform anyone that I'm here or lead me to somewhere that isn't where he is, I will make you regret everything in your pitifully short existence." His tone changed from serious to cheerful and upbeat. "But as I said before, you seem clever enough! So I doubt there won't be any problems between us. Lead the way, friend. I'm on a tight schedule here."

The man nodded eagerly and began to lead the way, starting a brisk pace to the room where he knew they were doing something they didn't want him to see. His hands remained above his head because he had no idea what his captor really wanted or what would set him off, but the idea of making it out alive had given him quite enough motivation not to try anything that might mess with the instructions.

They arrived a door labeled Music Room and he reached for the keys on his belt to clumsily, but quietly, unlock the door. He didn't open it himself, and didn't dare step around. "C-can I go now?"

It would probably be a good idea. Inside the room, Jacob was strung up to the chair, restraints at several different joints as well as across his check and neck to prevent any real freedom of movement at all. Several people stood over him with a high-powered light, working at the open chest cavity where Jacob was laid out in front of them. Two of the operators had moved to the corner of the room and were whispering furiously about the state of the building once power had been cut, while the rest seemed far too absorbed in their task. One of them paused momentarily, then pulled his hands out carrying a fleshy mass of organ covered in blood; Jacob barely reacted aside from faster breathing and his head twitching in a different direction. They had obviously been at the rodeo for quite a while.

Once they arrived, Abel glanced at the janitor dismissively. There was no need for him to be there anymore. "Run. Run as fast as you can because if you're still in the building once I leave this room, you will die."

He didn't need to open the door, instead walking through it as if it wasn't even there. What he found inside sickened and angered him. They had cut open his brother and were using him as some sort of lab rat. None of them were going to survive this if he had any say in the matter.

He raised his gun and shot the operator who had just pulled something out of his brother. That was definitely as good of an introduction as any. "You took something that doesn't belong to you and right now, you're going to put him back the way you found him. Otherwise, you're going to die in the most painful way I can imagine and I've had a very long time to be creative in how to murder people."

He took the instructions to heart. Only for a moment did he stop at the locker to grab his things, keys and wallet mostly, before he was gone. Something in the demeanor of the armed man made him positive he would follow up on those threats.

Everyone in the room stopped, startled by the gunshot and there was a brief moment of silence while their fellow operator bled out on the floor. The two in the corner reacted first, one moving to a panel at the wall to slam the button down while the other dove down and checked on the dead man on the floor. When it was obvious he was gone, she turned her head up to Abel and simply glared defiantly aside the organ laying unmoving on the ground.

Those who were left around Jacob started to undo the clamps holding his chest open, with one going to stop the IV while in tears. Jacob merely moaned at the unexpected sound and movement, turning his head to try and see the origin. What he actually saw was far too terrifying for his addled mind to comprehend: it was his own face, the face of his Reaper, here to finish the job that these people were too incompetent to complete. His body started to shiver and every part of him was moaning in defiance and regret.

"No, no, no... no, no, no, no, no." It was all Jacob could say, words having left him for his pure denial. He couldn't die like this. How had he managed to avoid the cruel and uncaring grasp of death for so long only to have it hunt him down at the single point where he couldn't run away?

From his spot by the door, he watched them all carefully. None of the operators were going to leave the room alive and he was going to make the remaining ones suffer for what they had done. When he heard his brother speak, absolutely terrified of him, his mask broke for a moment to show that it genuinely hurt him hearing his brother be this way to him. He would fix things with him soon enough.

As he walked over to where the dead operator and the organ that he ripped out of his brother were on the floor, his free hand glowed a dark purple that was nearly black and the door locked so that nobody could escape. Holstering his weapon, he knelt down and picked up the organ, walking over to his brother and waiting for the healing process to start as he looked at the operators.

"Now why exactly were you cutting him open like that? I'm curious to see how you justify this to me."

"Stop it," Jacob pleaded. His eyes had shut tight when his Reaper placed the organ inside of him, unable to piece together the game being played. Obviously, no one would need a man whole in order to kill him. Was this one just mad that Jacob had left it waiting all this time and wanted to get some form of revenge for a circumstance that he couldn't control?

No one else spoke. Finally, the one at the IV broke the silence. His voice was choked up and muffled my the mask over his face. "I thought we were going to end up somewhere that the ends would justify the means," he said.

The one kneeling on the floor, now using her hand to remove the fallen operator's goggles and close his eyes, snapped toward the one at the IV. "They do. We're going to learn so much from this. Humanity as a whole." She turned up to Abel, too foolhardy to show her own fear. "We were going to save the world using his genetics as our foundation."

"No," Abel replied, putting a hand into Jacob's hair. To anybody watching it looked like a rough grab, but it was a surprisingly gentle motion, almost as if he was petting his hair.

He tilted his head slightly as he listened to them and responded with cold, mocking laughter. The idea was preposterous and dangerous, but they wouldn't survive to finish their work. "Save the world? No, what you were going to do was destroy it. To allow everyone to live an almost immortal life would doom all of humanity. The clocks and Reapers exist for a reason and it is to keep balance. Messing with that balance could potentially ruin humanity and then nobody would be alive, foolish girl."

Healing didn't take long at that point. Jacob was exhausted and almost overflowing with the drugs, but his body still knew what it was doing. Skin previously separated now began to seal at the same time the organ was returning to its proper place and reattaching. Jacob's breath stuttered at the hand in his hair, eyes shooting open to stare at the Reaper in fearful confusion. That didn't hurt—and by now, Jacob knew hurt—although it seemed like it was supposed to. It was strangely soothing and Jacob's head swam trying to put it together with everything else.

"Who gets to say what the balance is?" she replied. It seemed no one else was willing to speak, trapped in the silence of their inevitable dooms. She stood, hands clenched into trembling fists at her side. "We could make our own kind of balance if only war and disease were rendered useless."

The comment about war being rendered useless by immortality made a very old part of Abel start laughing almost hysterically. The idea of that was just too funny to even respond to for a long moment before Abel could pull himself back together. This woman was obviously nothing more than a child.

"War is human nature and being immortal would not stop it. Instead it would only make it worse," he answered, looking frighteningly serious. "Humanity as a whole does not deserve the option of making their own balance of life and death. Like many things, they would too destroy that."

She merely tilted her chin up to meet Abel's look. "So you say," she said, practically spitting it out. "Whatever opinions you have are rendered null. You're not human anymore. What could you possibly know about how we could handle such a responsibility? You don't have the right."

"Enough." It was the man at the wall. His hand was still resting on the button, seemingly frozen there in the realization that it would do all of them absolutely no good. "What we say won't make any difference. He's going to kill us all anyway. Aren't you? Get it over with, then."

His bold comments finally inspired a sob from the man at the IV, while the other two huddled at a small distance away from Jacob merely leaned into each other. They all had their relationships, their reasons for doing what they had done, yet it seemed none of them could justify it to their executioner. None of them even had the courage to try. Jacob was far too out of it to understand what precisely was going on around him, but he understood one thing: this man before him, the Reaper, was ready and willing to kill and nothing in the world could stop him.

"Dying doesn't stop me from being human," he replied as he tilted his head in recognition of the man's words. Yes, it was time to deal with them. He pulled away from Jacob and took his time rifling through the medical supplies until he found what he wanted. He filled a syringe with drugs and injected it into his brother's IV so that it would put him to sleep. There was no need to make him suffer through the slaughter, after all.

His first target was the man at the IV. He put his hands on the side of his face and made a shushing sound. "Cerberus is not always cruel, child. You will not suffer." And he was being honest, because not even a moment after he finished talking, he snapped his neck and killed him instantly. The others would not be so lucky.

He went incorporeal and knelt down on the body of the first operator he killed, leaning down and then dropping into the body. Then, the corpse's eyes opened as he pulled himself up off the floor and into a standing position. Abel was possessing him and a smirk appeared on the corpse's face. He pointed at the woman he had been arguing with. "You will suffer, as will the others." The voice wasn't Abel's, but instead the dead man's, the cadence and way he spoke was definitely Abel if they hadn't realized it before. "By experimenting on him, you have merely shortened your own life. I will make sure you never harm him again."

Jacob watched in rapt attention as the Reaper moved away. So many things were going over his head, but those medicines were never good news. "No," he tried. There was no bravery to it, just mere panic. However, before he could even try to say anything more, the sedatives hit his system and he was out. It seemed he had been kept awake past the point of exhaustion and only now had been given the chance of reprieve.

As the man at the IV dropped with tear tracks still staining his face, two nearby took several steps away. It was useless in the end, but anything they could do to distance themselves from the coming slaughter was better than standing and taking it. There was a gasp from the man at the button when their colleague stood again, then a tight expression once he realized what had happened.

The woman nearby Abel's new body would not go down without a fight. She slapped her dead friend straight on the face, obviously seething at the manipulation. "You are not human! All of this just goes to prove it! Do your worst, but at least I'll die knowing I was doing something right if they sent their dog to stop us."

He had to stop and laugh at what she said, not even flinching at the slap. "You think I'm here under orders? Oh no, they're not even aware of your existence and even I would have been unaware of what you were doing if you hadn't done the most suicidal thing possible."

Abel raised a hand and it glowed with Enforcer magic once again. The two huddled together would find it difficult to breathe right about now. He looked at the woman and continued giving her that cruel smirk he had put on her dead friend's face. "You took my brother and to me, that is far more of a crime than your desire for immortality. By the time I'm done with everyone in this building, you will be begging me to put you out of your misery."

Both of the choking operators began to sputter, cough and gasp desperately. One held on to the other while they both fell to their knees and slowly suffocated for their crimes. Nothing to say, no air to breathe, this was simply the end. Death by asphyxiation was not a pleasant way to go.

The man at the button watched in horror as his coworkers slowly died in front of him. One hand raised to his mouth to cover his horror, deepened only by the realization of how their assailant had obviously gone rogue in order to dispatch them. There were no rules anymore; this was a mission of revenge. Something didn't sit right, however, and he was damned if he was going to go to his grave with such a trivial, stupid question spinning in his mind. "Why was he so afraid? If his brother had come to save him..."

The woman spun around in complete indignation. "That's what you care about now?! He's killing us and you want to know about the Thanksgiving family spat?! Go to hell!" She turned back around, facing those who were dying or already dead. "All of you!"

"I'll indulge you with an answer," Abel replied calmly. He still had time and Jacob was going to be out for quite a while. "He doesn't remember."

He dropped out of the corpse and moved on to possess the women. The living were much harder to possess than the dead, but for her he'd try especially hard to keep in control of her body until he was done with her. His movements were almost puppet-like, jerky and uncoordinated thanks to having to fight for control, but he walked over to the man at the button and smiled before he snapped his fingers and the magic started to slowly eat away at the man's body as if it was acid.

That done with, he walked back over to his brother and worked on undoing the restraints. Even though he was going to go through the building and clear it out first so he could carry him out without issue, he wasn't going to leave him locked up. He wouldn't be able to deal with it if he did.

Much as the man wished to remain stoic, such a method was beyond his capabilities to withstand. He screamed and yelled, collapsing to the floor as his body lost all strength to do more than writhe. It only increased the pain, but until the magic could eat at his heart or brain, he was lost in agony for his last moments.

There was a struggle. It was for all she was worth, a useless battle against fate colliding with happenstance and, if nothing else, she certainly had determination to spare. There were no words, just fury and denial and perseverance. It would all be for naught in the end. The restraints holding Jacob down did not appear to have any sort of latch, and their seams were quite thin and well-meshed together. The craftsmanship was quite impressive if one could look past how it was currently being used.

It was easy for Abel to ignore the screaming man and went back to trying to remove the restraints. Annoyed by their impeding nature, he just tore them apart with magic enhanced strength. Once that was take care of, he ruffled his brother's hair and left the room. He brought out his guns and shot anyone in sight that might have been called by the button. Then he systematically went through the building killing anyone unfortunate enough to be there. When he ran out of bullets, he moved on to magic, doing anything from simply choking them to death to violently exploding whoever was stupid enough to fight back.

Once he was sure that everyone in the building was dead, he stopped possessing the woman and walked out of her body. Looking at her, he smiled. "And now it's your turn," he said as his hands glowed and he summoned her Reaper, which grabbed her as he pressed a hand against her forehead and then slowly had her soul pulled inch by inch from her body. He didn't stick around to watch her suffer, instead teleporting to his brother and carrying him off. Before he left the building, he put Jacob into new clothes so that he wouldn't look too out of place.

When he was done cleaning up his brother he found the best hotel in the area and got a room for the week. Thankfully, he easily passed off his sleeping brother as having not enough sleep on the flight in. Upon entering their suite, he placed Jacob in the bed and waited for him to wake up. They had a lot to talk about and hopefully he would listen.

It was a long time before Jacob finally woke. Even after the sedative had worn off, his body ached for sleep and did everything it could to preserve the state of rest it had finally been given. For nearly thirty-six hours, he slept peacefully through many of the aftereffects from such consistent and terrible torture. When he finally opened his eyes, he was quiet and confused. Where was he? How had he ended up here? When had he fallen asleep?

As it began coming back to him in tiny, frustrating fragments, Jacob sat up with a hand over his mouth. He was probably going to be sick, small pieces of his predicament floating by every minute he lingered on the thoughts—until he came to the sudden stop, the end where his Reaper had shown up and then... put him to sleep? Left him in what looked to be a hotel room?

Was this some kind of ethereal waiting lobby for those who died while unconscious and had no time to make their peace? "What the hell is going on?" he muttered, more out of stubbornness than the need to vocalize. His throat was dry as a desert and his tongue was wrapped in cotton.

Abel was waiting the entire time, looking out the window at the city below. At some point he had changed clothes, replacing his Enforcer outfit with a suit. When he hears Jacob waking up, he goes over to the bed and picks up a water bottle from the nightstand.

"You've been asleep for around thirty-six hours," Abel said calmly as he held out the bottle for him. He wasn't sure how Jacob was going to respond to him, so he was going to be calm and polite and hope that he didn't panic too much. "I brought you here after I dealt with the people who grabbed you. How are you feeling now?"

As soon as Abel began drawing attention to himself, Jacob began to scramble away. It was a gut reaction, trying to put distance between himself and the perceived harbinger of death before him. Although he would only go as far as the opposite nightstand, hunger and weariness dragging his body down and making it difficult to stand without the wall's help, at least now there was a bed between them.

"Surprisingly... alive," he answered once the question sunk in. This was beyond surreal. If he had only been asleep and not dead, then he couldn't fathom what was going on. "Which seems to me like you're doing your job wrong."

Edited 2014-02-24 01:13 (UTC)

He let out a soft sigh and rolled his eyes. So he still thought that Abel was going to kill him. Well, he'd need to fix that immediately. "It's not my job to kill you," he replied and wiggled the bottle at him. "And even if it was, you wouldn't be able to escape me in your condition."

Abel sat down on the bed and looked over at him. "What makes you think I'm going to kill you anyway?"

Jacob frowned at the water bottle. It was far too tempting than it had right to be, considering whose hands were holding it. Then again, this man with his face was far too calm. It was almost soothing and Jacob had to fight to keep his wits about him and not give in to the idea of comfort just because it was there. He'd dealt with worst discomforts over the last three thousand years.

"You're my doppelgänger," he said bluntly. It was the legend he had latched onto that made the most sense: someone with your face who would kill you if you ever witnessed them yourself. After having caught glimpses of his Reaper's face centuries before the legend appeared, it seemed easy to make the correlation. "My Reaper."

Edited 2014-02-24 01:14 (UTC)

"Your Reaper? I'm not a Reaper, I'm an Enforcer," he answered with confusion in his voice. Abel was still holding out the bottle for him to take, planning on waiting for Jacob to give in and just take it. "Even if I was a Reaper, I couldn't kill you because your clock hasn't run out yet. I wouldn't kill you anyway because I don't have a reason to."

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