Just a short fic that was rescued afted the crash on the message board. (Lost... so much... sob).

This character is also not mine. He is in the proud possession of Fanfic writer Wile E. Coyote and I am merely loaning him for the purpose of this drabble. Thanks Wile. :)

The smoke was his cover. His means of escape and sometimes, his means of concealment. His fortification, if you will, allowing him to creep into the places where even that emancipated corpse wouldn’t dare. Places that allowed him to get closer to Kilobyte than others could get, without ending up back in the sixth dimension with the headache of a lifetime. He feathered in and out of walls with no concept of solidity.

That, and his uncanny knack for knowing the very thoughts that raced around her head, was how he learned of her betrayal.

It was not just the love she supposedly felt for that… creature, that idealistic hero, that hurt him. Rather, it was the source of that love: the pitiful emotions of a human. It was this world that had done it to her, this wretched world with all its penetrating textures and ugly colours in a thousand shades that were so more complex and bizarre and bewildering than any of those at the carnival back in the Sixth Dimension. Even the master of delusion himself had taken his time getting used to it. She was becoming more and more like one of these ridiculous mortals with every passing minute.

Lord Fear had been a worse enough prospect. The program’s sick idea of a joke, he imagined, pairing such a beauty with such an incompetent fool who wasn’t fit to be called amongst the living. But this…

A rattling web of bones suddenly collapsed out of a hole in the ceiling, swinging back and forth before him with a mechanical screech from a hidden speaker. The Count started, momentarily alarmed. Then he smiled and reached out to rip down the plastic bones. A ridiculous human prank, but a reasonable one. It almost surprised him.

One thing he DID admire about these humans was their ability for fooling one another and finding it fun, and for seeking out the lies others told them and seeing through the heaviest of facades using nothing but their… what did they call it? Gut instinct? This was an ability that the brat whose body he had just left lying in the corridor to the haunted house, had apparently not yet grasped.

What had surprised him, especially, was that the boy had followed him. The Count had known that the boy hadn’t trusted him; had not believed that he really knew how to free his friends. He had made no secret of that. And yet he had still followed, driven by the longing to find the friends he had lost in this place. Perhaps, the boy had considered the Count to be more like his sister than he was: Susceptible to his… emotions, and more recently, even to pity. Perhaps he had assumed himself strong enough to challenge him. The Count hadn’t bothered to read his thoughts and find out, before he peppered him with more concentrated energy than a supercharger, but both would have been foolish mistakes. The Count now went on through the Haunted House alone. Leaving the boy for the evils to find. He'd been an unfortunate nuisance, that was all, only useful for getting him into the haunted house. Maybe Lord Fear could think of a suitable use for him and his Lightning Knight friends.

That was when he saw her, and her him. Or rather she saw the essence of him, the smoke that covered his form as he crept up beside her and gripped her wrist in his hands.

‘You… really should get away from me…’

He gripped her thin shoulder’s tighter still, laughing, thinking how skinny she was and how much he disliked her, yet still there was…

There was what? Sympathy for her? Pity? Why not pity a woman stuck with that skeletal freak for a companion? Still, the count thought a great deal less of her other choices. While his hatred at her betrayal ordered him to rip the skin from her very bones, years of bondage as her brother kept him wavering hopelessly.

As much as he despised her for betraying him, leaving him to rot all those years ago when they were trapped in the prison of the Sixth Dimension, he… disliked all this. Her being tossed back and forth from freak to freak, between anyone who whimmed her. One’s plaything, another’s curiosity and a third’s Zoar-knows-what… worse still was that the Lightning Knight Hero should be the one to have her heart.

Who would have thought that Count Delusion’s own sister could even have a heart? Much less one so easily shattered.

She is my sister. Mine. He emphasised this by griping her arm tightly in his.

‘Not even a hello for old times sake, my lady? Aren’t you happy to see your dear brother?’

‘I warn you, let go,’ Lady Illusion held up her free hand, a crystal ball of glowing energy materialising in her palm and she held it at arms length with every intention of using it. ‘Don’t think I won’t. If I can do it to him I can do it to you.’

She didn’t have to explain herself, of course, and she knew she didn’t. The count had never needed anything explaining. He had seen her fire at Ace Lightning and rip him apart with the feelings she gave him, and he had watched her take pleasure in bringing this pain to the one whom she loved. At least at that one, single, deluded moment, he had been able to convince himself that she hated Ace Lightning. The Count had never actually been there to witness any of these events, but he had not needed to be. One minute in her company was all he needed to have at least a vague idea about all of her secrets.

If those were the kind of things she would do to Ace Lightning, then he dreaded to think what she might do to those she hated and did not fear. She feared Kilobyte but she did not fear the Count. He was her brother after all.

‘Now is this any way to treat a brother, my lady?’

‘Who needs brothers?’ she snarls at him. Her eyes were as hot and violent as ever they were, but something in them had changed and he couldn’t think what. ‘How did you get here? I have no amulet pieces. You shouldn’t BE here.’ She said it with such malice that he thought she hated him as much as he hated her. Looking into her mind soon confirmed these suspicions. They hovered on the delicate brink between bound siblings and furious, forgotten brother and sister, who failed each other a long time ago and have never come to terms with hating each other for it. Both of them willing to kill the other, if it hadn’t been for the few strands of programming that made them brother and sister. If it hadn’t been for the wretched programming.

The Count knew how entangled she was in that program. How blinded she was by it. How it forced her into doing things she did not wish to do and hurting those she no longer wished to hurt. To him, the program was nothing worth fighting against.

‘You do, you needed me so I came here, no amulet pieces, no nothing… your power was enough to bring me here, sister. You need my protection.’

‘Protection from who?’ she spat the word. She knows protection is not what he had in mind. Spying more like, stalking.

‘You know whom I mean.’

Lady Illusion tensed in his stare for she knew that his mind was penetrating hers. She alone could feel that: the sensation of his mind reading as he probed her thoughts and memories. The thought of him rooting around in her head was disgusting to her, yet she couldn’t prevent it and didn’t bother to try.

He reads her thoughts carefully like the pages of a complicated manual you must read very closely in order to understand everything that it is trying to say to you. The mortal music, the hands at her waist, the grey-blue eyes staring into hers, the soft kiss on a frozen cheek, her hands grasped within his…

Then the shocks of pink electricity and green energy. Another pair of eyes, still blue, but angry this time, and flaming with energy and determination. The screaming pain both inside and out. The sheer programmed hate in his sister's mind, fighting with the love in her heart as she drives one of her powerful explosives of energy into his chest, willing him to break.

And the pain of it… the pain is awful, raging back and forth between beautiful and terrible. It spirals round and round inside of her, eating at her program like a virus. Guilt, anger, guilt, pain, rage and back to pain again. Whatever this love is it is endless and unbreakable and rages against her programming. It could kill her, and yet she’s still alive.

He drew back, close to screaming out with rage. The smoke that made up his body billowed around him. He knew that he had had to touch her, to dig as deep into her mind as it was possible to go to convince himself these were not his own delusions. There was no hiding from the truth now and a sense of betrayal raged within him.

Ace Lightning… of all the damned people in the Sixth dimension!

‘Seen what you wanted to see?’ Lady Illusion asked. Her voice was antagonizing and infuriating, she knew that what he had just seen disgusted him. She knew that he had expected to see it, yet had not wanted to imagine it possible. She knew now that he had seen her truth, felt her truth, and she was glad of it.

So, now what would he do to her?

‘So that’s what you’ve been up to sister,’ he almost smiled, but it was a violent smile, without any kindness. ‘Betraying Fear for your hero, betraying the hero for Kilobyte and then risking death in Kilobyte’s hands when you remember what you feel for the man you tried to hate. Kilobyte would murder you if he had this knowledge.’

Lady Illusion hesitated, her face set deep with anger, and now there was some confusion there too as she tried to work out whether her own brother was daring to blackmail her. No, she wouldn’t take that. Being blackmailed by an ugly, fat toad on a cane she would take, but not her own flesh and data.

Then she stepped back. He allowed her to pull out of his grip and she sneered, then laughed at him loudly a laugh that was truly evil incarnate. And yet it was fake, brittle and empty. The Count wondered why she bothered to pretend some time. Perhaps it was a pretence, to hide her fears from those less sensitive to such things than he was. It didn't work with him.

He reached for her arm again, missed and instead gripped the hem of her shirt, tightly. Almost tight enough to rip it had the material not been un-rippable. ‘Come now sister, you know that you have never had any secrets from me…’ He was barely able to keep up his mask and hide the fury in his voice. Now, it seemed like she was the mind reader and knew all he is feeling.

‘Yet your existence revolves around secrets,’ she said. ‘Secrets and lies and deception. Now that you know mine what will you do about them? Kill me? I’ve already been threatened with that time and again and it’s starting to get old. Perhaps you’ll think too much of me to turn me in. You are my brother, after all.’

He sneered back, yet a part of him knew it was true. Knew that he would keep his Lady’s secret. The secret of Ace Lightning and her and all the feelings she was never supposed to feel. He doesn’t understand it, and yet he will. ‘Both our lives revolve around deception and illusions, it seems my lady… it has always been so. Our names say as much. So, is a secret like this worth keeping?’

She smiled, and this time the smile was a genuine one. Small, thin, but genuine and filled with contempt. As if she knew of things he would never know of and had felt things that no amount of reading her mind would give him.

She nodded her head slowly, deliberately. ‘Yes.’

The count released her, he stepped back. There was still a fury in his eyes that she’d rather not be witness to. The smoke that billowed up around him took on a tinge of furious purple. It was so thick and potent that she could taste it on her tongue, and when she looked again he has gone, taking her secret with him. A few moments later, she started to wonder if perhaps she had imagined him.