mm_j (mm_j) wrote in morningstar_mnr, @ 2010-06-05 23:43:00 |
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Entry tags: | au, jude |
AU Jude; Another time, another place...
There had been a wife. A wife and a child and forgiveness and...
Love.
Lillian, with her green eyes and caramel skin hadn't cared about what he'd mistakenly done, leading all those people to death. She said she could look into his eyes and see a good man. And a good man he'd tried to be - for her. Her and that baby, a little boy with dark eyes that wanted to hold Jude's fingers as he fell asleep. He'd come out of that hell hole a villian. A murderer. And she'd loved him anyway.
It had been perfect. It had been everything he'd ever wanted.
It hadn't lasted longer than a year and a half.
He'd been holding Alex tight against him, one chubby fist wrapped around his finger when these - things had come for him. He'd fought, but in the end these, whatever they were, were too strong.
Bastard.
Abomination.
They hadn't hurt him, not physically and not at first. What they had done was hold his head up and his eyes open as his wife and child were ripped apart in front of him. They plucked the baby's legs off first like the wings of a fly while Jude had screamed and screamed and screamed and begged for mercy. And his wife, they had held her by her feet and let her claw at the floor until her fingernails were gone. The tenor of her screams, the haunted, frantic look in her eye as she screamed for him to do something, to save her baby, then pleaded with these albino creatures to take her instead while sobbing so hard she could hardly be understood, was like a knife twisting in an already festering wound. She fought like a wild creature to save their son, and Jude could only sit there, frozen because of whatever these things were.
They tore his baby apart, turning Alex so Jude could watch the confusion on his face, then the pain, and then the light slowly leaving Alex's dark eyes. The child's screams, cut short by shock, were still unlike anything he'd ever heard. The loud, shrill, wail of a child that doesn't understand all the extreme pain it was being dealt. It was at the sound of those screams that Lillian had stopped fighting and instead curled into a tight ball, weeping and begging to die next. They'd burned each tiny piece in a large, black furnace while Jude watched, spitting on the fire and muttering a chant that sounded suspiciously like Latin, then they'd moved onto Lillian for the same treatment.
Abomination.
Demon whore.
Jude had screamed and no matter how raw his throat was, he never lost his voice. He could feel his vocal chords shredding, his throat raw and bleeding, and still he screamed as they ripped his life away from him piece by piece. He'd watched his wife and his son die in the most painful way that he could imagine, so when they reached for him with milky white hands that seemed to repel blood like water on a raincoat, he'd let them take him.
Death, he would welcome.
Death would be a mercy. A mercy, apparently, they weren't going to allow.
Instead those hands with their suspiciously neat human fingernails dug into his stomach, plucking his ribs back, each sharp snap sending a wave of pain through his body that was overwhelming, but still nothing compared to what he'd just gone through. They picked and they stabbed and they broke and they sliced, but they never allowed him to die. Somehow, his damned heart kept beating. Somehow, whenever they drained him of his blood there was always more. He was alive, but only in a world of pain, as they slowly broke him apart piece by piece and made him watch himself be burned. This time around, he didn't bother screaming.
The last thought he knew was fire. The feel of his skin bubbling and charring from the bone, his mind going dark but never quite stopping recognizing the pain. Not until he was nothing but ash.
Demon. Devil. Die.
Jude snapped awake in his office, his eyes and cheeks embarassingly wet and the anguish of what he'd just seen still stealing his breath. He took a gasping, sobbing breath, and one of his girls, still in her sleek human form turned to look at him but didn't move. He felt the earth rumble a bit with his father's power, though nothing noticeably changed.
His father wasn't there and for that he was thankful, though he could still smell the sweet tang of his cigars. Jude knew he'd never stand for this sort of weakness. He shakily took a drink of water as he contemplated everything he'd just seen.
That was what his life would've been without his father's salvation. His father had, quite apparently, shown him a mercy beyond anything Jude could understand. It had been a painful lesson, but one his father must've felt he needed to learn. Running a hand over his face, he leaned back and looked at the digital clock and calendar on his desk.
11:59 on... June 5?
He'd lost a whole week somewhere. A whole life somewhere before that.
Standing and stretching aching limbs from sitting in one position for too long, he took the suit jacket when his girl offered it to him. This was his life and he should be grateful for it.
OOC: This marks the end of AU week! From here on out, any and all threads will take place in real time.