Sand hardens..
The sun was high, casting long waves of heat over the pale sand. Their hand-built residence stood quietly in the distance, a white structure perched on the border between Yellow's warmth and Blue's calm.. a strange but perfect middle ground for two people who didn't quite belong anywhere else.
Black crouched in the sand, smacking his palms together with a smirk. "Alright, Firestarter. Hands up. Hit me like you mean it this time."
Rose stood a few feet away, fists clenched and arms slightly too stiff. Her shorts were dusted with sand accompanied with a few stray strands from her messy red-tipped buns stuck to her forehead, making her scowl deepen.
"I am hitting you like I mean it," she snapped.
"Then clearly you don't mean it enough," he grinned, holding up his hands again. "Come on."
She stepped forward and slammed a punch into his palm.
Slap.
He didn't even budge.
"Again," he said, the tone still annoyingly cheerful.
Slap.
"Harder."
Slap.
"Still not hard enough."
Her jaw tightened. "I'm not a machine, you know."
"Nope. Machines usually have better rhythm."
Rose's next hit came with a grunt, faster, angrier.
Black caught it with ease, then gave her a nod. "There we go. That's a start."
She stepped back, arms lowering slightly. "You know.. sometimes I think I'd be better off if they just went through with it."
Black blinked. "What?"
She looked down at the sand, voice quieter now. "Back in the lab. That guy. I remember- He said something about how I wasn't growing fast enough. Like he was just waiting for me to be more useful." Her fists clenched again. "Maybe if I had been, all this training wouldn't be necessary."
Black lowered his hands slowly, his face turning serious.
He approached her and flicked her forehead in a not gentle manner.
"Ow!"
"Snap out of it," he said. "You're not in that place anymore. You're not someone's experiment. You're you. That's the whole point."
She looked up, glaring through half-closed eyes. "That hurt."
"Good," he said with a shrug. "Now hit me harder, so we're even."
She sighed, but raised her fists again. He held his palms up, waiting.
"Whatever," she muttered.
Slap.
He grinned.
"See? Already stronger than before."
Slap.
"Again."
Slap.
The rhythm returned, not from obligation or fear, but because she wanted to get better. Because she had someone who believed in her enough to demand it.
Even if he was the most annoying brother alive.
The sun dipped low, dragging the horizon into shades of red and gold, then finally drowning the coast in purple. Waves whispered in the distance, calm and rhythmic, like a sleeping heart.
Rose was still outside.
The training area they'd carved into the sand was now littered with footprints, broken shells, and a few scorched patches where her temper had gotten the better of her. But now, there was focus in her fists. Sweat rolled down her brow, but her strikes were sharper, more deliberate.
In front of her stood three solid black sandbags, tall and wide, packed with compressed sand, Black's custom creations. Each one was carved from the same pitch-dark material he could make at will, shaped like silent sentinels daring her to keep going.
And she did.
Thwack.
Her knuckles sparked faintly with red as her fire flared just enough to boost the hit.
Thwack.
Again.
She exhaled hard, sweat dripping from her jaw. Her clothes were soaked, and her arms trembled slightly, but she didn't stop. Not yet.
From inside the structure, warm light spilled through the open windows. Black was in the kitchen, humming some cheesy old tune as his tendrils worked like a multi-limbed octopus.
One wrapped noodles into neat spirals on two plates.
Another stirred a bubbling red sauce.
One chopped vegetables with rhythmic speed, while another wiped the counter.
And one tendril cracked open a soda can just as he peeked through the window at Rose.
"She's still at it?" he said aloud to no one in particular.
He squinted at her form how she gritted her teeth before each strike, how the fire around her fists glowed brighter when she got frustrated.
"She's gonna break her hands," he muttered, reaching out to set the plates on the small dining table.
Then, with a sigh and a crooked smile, he called out toward the beach, "Dinner's up, Heatwave! Unless you prefer sand in your teeth!"
No answer- just another thwack.
Black rolled his eyes and let a few tendrils stretch outside to flick the lights on along the edge of the porch.
"If only you would listen." He sighed, one of the many tendrils extended towards the door and down to the gasping girl where it wrapped around her torso effortlessly, pulling her up just in time for a punch to miss.
Thankfully, she didn't fall flat on her face as she found herself levitating back up to the building.
Honestly, she was too tired to fight it, her body stayed dead, unable to raise a muscle until she was back on her feet.
"You are not sitting here with that smell. Bathroom, now." He instructed, watching as she weakly left his view, heading where he told her to go.
Black was done placing the food for his little rose.. as for herself? He can't rely on such food for much longer. His tendrils retracted as he crouched down to the drawer beneath him, pulling out an empty pinkish jar of sorts with a torn piece of paper, displaying a message: 'Don't finish it all in one sitting.'
It's been months now yet he didn't receive what barely sustained him, his own biology is harmed, hindered and weakened by the constant use of his capabilities yet he couldn't show that to her, not now, she can't see him in a vulnerable state.
Stretching back up, he found himself on the couch, his eyes strangely tired from simple labor. Strange, this didn't happen to him before..
He closed his eyes momentarily, his consciousness drifting between states until he finally slept, for the first time in years.
Darkness churned behind his closed eyes, oily, slow, and endless.
His body could only rest in fragments, his mind partitioned like shifting servers. But sometimes.. sometimes something slipped through the cracks. Something raw.
Tonight was one of those times.
The dream began with cold metal. The sound of chains dragging over grated floors. Then a high, pulsing beep. Steady. Medical. Alarming in how normal it sounded.
Then came the smell. Bleach barely covering rust. Burning rubber. Hair.
His vision was fractured. Like static on an old screen, only pieces came through.
A white room- Too bright. Unnatural. Almost sterile in its cruelty.
Two figures stood at the center. Girls.
One was older.. maybe sixteen, though the wide, hollow stare made her seem much older. Her arms were pinned to a metal table, skin pale and bruised, eyes not there, mouth slightly open. She didn't scream anymore. Her body jerked, not from resistance, but from something inside.. like something was growing, or being pulled out, or perhaps flowed inside, it wasn't clear.
Beside her, a younger girl. Barely ten. Curled in the corner of the same room. Her hair tall, covering one eye while the other was left traumatised. She was still screaming. Her voice echoed through the sterile walls like a broken fire alarm, shrill and terrified.
Black's point of view twisted, he wasn't in the room. He was watching. Through a small, round glass. A window in a door.
He tried to move, tried to tear the door open.. but his limbs were unresponsive. He wasn't there, not really.
The older girl's body twitches violently. Dark dense blood ran down from her side. Tubes. Needles. Scalpels. Machines clicked and hissed in rhythm with her heartbeat.
And then.. something turned toward the door.
Not one of the girls.
Not a human.
Its shape was blurry, like a smudge on film, but its eyes.. white pinpricks, locked onto Black's view like it knew he was watching.
Suddenly, the girl stopped screaming. Everything fell still.
Then came the sound of whispering. Not in words. Just a voice. Soft. Like it was crawling into his ear, behind his eyes. Tunneling into his brain as his eyes separated, each targeting a different view to watch.
"We're not done with you."
Black jolted upright in bed, chest rising fast.
The room was dark again. Real darkness. Stillness.
Only the sound of waves in the distance and the gentle whir of the ceiling fan above.
He sat still, hand covering his mouth, as if trying to hold the dream in.. or keep something else out.
Black sat there for a while, breath slowly evening out, fingers still pressed to his lips. The remnants of the dream clung to him like smoke.. no scent, just weight. But the silence now was real. And soft.
He shifted slightly.
Beside him, curled under a loose blanket, was Rose. Her back rose and fell in a steady rhythm, her face half-buried in the pillow, black and red hair tousled across her cheek. Her arms were tucked close to her chest, knees drawn in. She looked peaceful at that moment. Untouched by fire or fury.
She always found her way here, didn't she?
Even when she pretended to hate the world, she slept closest to the thing she knew wouldn't let it harm her.
He watched her for a moment, something unreadable passing over his face before quietly slipping from where he sat.
The door creaked softly as he stepped out into the humid night air. The porch was warm with the memory of sunlight, the sand stretching out in pale shadows beneath the starlit sky. Out there, the ocean whispered softly, neither blue nor yellow, but black.
He raised his eyes to the moon.
White. Cold. Watching.
His hand found its way to his chest, fingers brushing against the skin just over the gem embedded beneath it. The pressure had returned, a tightening, low and pulsing. It wasn't painful, exactly. Not physical. It felt like the dream had lodged something deep inside him.
A warning, maybe.
Or a memory. One he hadn't known was still there.
The morning sun bled gold across the sky, warm and lazy over the beach. The waves whispered soft encouragement as Rose crouched by the shore, feet buried in the hot sand. Her hands moved with focus, molding towers and bridges from wet sand. Then, with a little spark from her fingers, she let fire pulse through her palm, quick and controlled.
The sand hissed. Hardened. Glimmered.
Tiny glass castles shimmered where simple piles once stood.
She grinned, proud of her crooked kingdom. "Black! Come look!"
There was no answer at first, only the soft blow of wind.
"Black!" she called again, louder this time, waving her arms, flames flickering around her fingertips.
And then she heard it, low, distant at first. A whine in the air.
She squinted up toward the sky.
Something was descending. Fast.
A purple airship, sleek and sharp-edged, trailed thick coils of black smoke from one of its side engines, descending from a long distance.
It shuddered as it dropped altitude, sparking as it forced a landing in the sand just beyond the beach. The engines howled, then fizzled out with a final sputter, sinking into silence.
Rose kept her face covered with her arms, defending ger eyes from the flying sand and once she opened them- Black was already there, his pose ready and his eyes confused. Rose's fists clenched, little puffs of flame bursting around them.
The brother placed one foot slightly ahead on the sand. His arms lengthened, the tendrils of his limbs twisting and hardening. Blade-like shapes extended from his forearms, obsidian black, humming faintly with heat.
His tone was quiet but firm.
"Stay behind me, sis."
The airship let out a loud hiss as a hatch began to open.
Smoke poured out. Something was coming.
The hatch groaned as it fell open, smoke hissing out into the sea breeze. Out of the swirling gray stepped a figure.. tall, ragged, and swaying as if each step took effort. He was a man, no older than 20, dressed in worn military-style purple with mismatched armor clinging to his limbs. One eye glowed faintly with the color of his kingdom.. the other was consumed in writhing, black veins.
The virus clung to half his face like a second skin, creeping down his jaw and neck, pulsing with corruption.
But his smile? That was unbroken.
"Ugh," he coughed, leaning on the hatch. "Do you know how hard it is to land one of these things while half of you's rotting inside out?"
Black's blades didn't lower. "Name. Now."
The boy chuckled and straightened, though his frame wobbled. "You don't remember me? That stings."
He spread his arms as if presenting himself for applause, then jabbed a thumb into his own chest.
"I'm Vain. The son of your old Purple friend.. the one you murdered in cold blood." His voice twisted with bitter amusement. "Dad always said you'd be the end of us. Guess he got that one right."
Black's stance didn't shift, but something in his form tensed.
Vain's smirk widened. The veins on his face pulsed.
"And now, I'm going to finish what he started. Get that white diamond. Destroy the virus using the virus. No fuss, no war- just evolution."
He pulled a small device from his coat, sleek, oval, laced in wires and crystal. "See.. we all have the same sickness, Black. That little shard in your chest? The same shard that keeps you from becoming the monster you're meant to be? That instinct to consume? I just figured out how to let your other friends take control."
"Don't," Black warned lowly.
"For my father.." But Vain just tapped the device.
Rose's eyes widened, confused at what was happening yet terrified.
A sharp sound cracked through the air like a wire snapping in his core. Black staggered. His hands twitched. One blade recoiled as the gem gave off a faint glow from beneath his skin and through his sweater.
He dropped to one knee, clutching his chest as faint lines of black spread from beneath his eyes. His eyes widened, slowly consumed by the corruption, darkening in color. Inky goo began to leak from them, flowing like tears.
"Black?" Rose stepped forward, flames dancing from her hands in warning.
Black looked up but not with the same warmth as before.
His eyes were hollow voids, dark and unreadable. An emotionless mask took over his face, unnatural. Wrong.
"Brother..?"
But the voice that responded was empty. Quiet.
"..The hive- Commands me once more."
The blades shifted again with a screeching metal twist, rising slowly as he stood upright, body trembling, glitching.
"Whites must be purged.." He threatened.
And behind them, Vain laughed through his coughing, leaning back against the hatch with pride and madness in his one glowing eye.
"Oh, this is gonna be fun." He spoke as his body betrayed him, his wounds forcing him on the ground, slowly losing breath as pride remained glued on his face.
The waves crashed louder.
The sand beneath Rose's feet began to heat.
Does she even stand a chance?
Her brother- the one who cooked for her, trained her, protected her- was now stepping toward her.
Not as her shield.
But her enemy.