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Suzaka
Author of 14 Stories |
Title: Bitter
Author: Suzaka
Characters: Lae (Axel), Sally, Doctor Finklstein
Rating: PG
Summary: Sally had a big brother once. His name was Lae.
Disclaimer: Maybe, if I ask really, really nicelike, Sandy Claws will gimme the rights to Kingdom Hearts, but I doubt it.
Warnings: Some parts are a little gross.
Notes: Yes, I am aware that there is at least one other Axel-origin-in-Halloween-Town story, but I think the two are very different. I got the idea for this when I was drawing a nightmare-esque character and he sort of...became Lae and I wanted to write his story.
The poor child was as ugly and malformed as she, with a too-small nose and too-big eyes. They resembled no manner of creature before seen in Halloween Town but were rather like the small shrieking flesh-things that fled from them on Halloween Night. They had no fur, nor claws, and their teeth were small and blunt and straight, useless for rending flesh and taking blood.
They were hideously fleshy creatures, tall and thin, with wild red hair, their bodies full of stuffing and sewn at parts and angles that hung and bent impossibly. Doctor Finklestein did not put them together with any care or love and their stitches came loose often, making them pathetic in addition to imperfect. Though Sally became deft with a needle and thread, her poor brother, she often lamented, could not sew himself together very well at all. There was many an occasion when she saw her brother sitting puppetlike in a chair, his hands and arms hanging limply, barely connected to his body.
Sally also remembers how sad Lae looked, despite the ropey grins stitched on the side of their mouths.
“Lae,” Sally whispered one night, a few weeks after her creation, watching her brother gather plants, tugging on his stitches to tighten them enough to complete his task. “Doctor Finklestein told us to clean the tower.” She turned her head sideways, staring at him through her fall of dirt-choked hair, dolly eyes wide in question.
He stares back at her, his rip-stitch face twisted hideously in a scowl, “I don’t want to clean,” Lae replied. “Do you want to, Sally?”
Sally’s body followed her head as she leaned at a strange angle from the waist up, hands clasped in front of the half-hearted stitch work patch that kept her heart from falling out, “We’re supposed to be cleaning Lae.”
Lae shook his head, “I don’t want to.”
Lae began to say that more and more often. He wanted to play with the candles and the moths, watching them catch fire and burn in the light they had so desperately sought, burning until they were nothing but the too-thick crunchy pieces lodged in melted wax. He didn’t want to run to Jack Skellington’s house and pick up this or that device for this or that experiment. He wanted to chase Zero across the gravestones, nimbly hopping from headstone to half exposed coffin, never catching his foot in the rotting something-or-others that populated the graveyard. He did not want to obey Doctor Finklestein.
Sally remembers that Lae wanted to poison Doctor Finklestein instead.
“It won’t kill him!” Lae insisted, pouring the murky juice of deadly nightshade into the teapot. He weaved unsteadily back and forth from cabinet to table, loose hands hanging limply from his wrist. Sally leaned forward and took her brother’s hands, tugging the strings and knotting them expertly. Lae smiled at his sister and assured her, “It’ll make him sleep for hours! We can go all over Halloween Town!”
Sally knew she should put a stop to this right away but the idea of wandering outside the lab was too delightful for the rag-child to turn away. Wanting to explore, Sally consented and presented the tea to the doctor herself. She watched him drink it down greedily until the scientist slumped forward, yellowed saliva leaking out between his cobbled teeth. At first, Sally was terrified, her borrowed heart pounding fearfully until the doctor snored long and loud, like a rusty gate being forced open. Relieved, she wobbled out the door, head at a tilt, too-big eyes locking with Lae’s. “Where should I go?”
Lae’s hideously patchworked face split into a scarily toothy grin, with too-white, too-straight teeth. “Where do you want to go, Sally?”
Her brother wandered to the little store of candles he kept behind the graveyard. Sally stayed with him awhile, watching as Lae touched his dead rag-a-dolly flesh to the flame. The stolen fingers, worn by someone who was not born to them, caught aflame. The acrid smell of burning flesh masked, briefly, their usual stench of rot. Lae marveled as he burned without flame.
A moth landed on one the palm of Lae’s hand, flicking its wings at the fire. Lae curled his fingers in, touching the burning digit to the trapped moth. The little creature struggled uselessly as dust flew off its ruined wings, which flapped in a hopeless panic as the fire spread over the rest of the moth, consuming it as Lae watched. Eventually, the moth was reduced to smelly ashes and unburning crunchy things, its funeral pyre snuffed out in a close of Lae’s fist. Curiously, Lae brought the remnants to his mouth, tasting them experimentally.
“Bitter,” he commented.
Sally remembers how Lae hated bitter things.
When they returned, Doctor Finklstein was furious that his creations, his young and dearling dollies, had dared defy him. As punishment, their first ever acquaintance with the concept of penalty, he locked Lae in the highest tower. Trapped, Lae howled in fury, throwing himself against the walls as his poorly sewn limbs flailed loosely like a grotesque living puppet. Sally watched, terrified, as her big brother threw himself out the highest window in desperation, scattering his limbs on impact.
Before Doctor Finklestein could stop her, Sally gathered the broken parts of her brother and ran away to the Hinterlands to patch him up. As she pieced and stitched him back together, Sally begged Lae to stop taking such risks.
“I’m restless,” Lae moaned. “We can’t stay like this! You feel it too, I know!” Swampy green eyes locked with hers, “You’re restless too.” He jerked his arm out of Sally’s grasp and waved around the Hinterlands, barely stitched fingers swinging with his movement. “There’s more to our world than that lab with that doctor! I won’t stay there forever!” He lifted up his shirt, exposing the sloppily stitched patch of gray flesh that covered the heart carelessly tossed into his stuffing. “My heart can’t take this place anymore!”
Lae’s face, so plain, so mis-made, so un-creaturely, crumpled with sadness. “Let’s go, Sally,” he implored.
“Where, Lae?” Sally asked. “Where do we go?” Halloween Town was not so big that they could hide forever.
“Anywhere!”
They sat in silence a while. Lae thought and planned and dreamed of escaping and Sally thought and planned and sewed Lae’s tangled limbs back together. She knew, in her patchy heart, that she was just as restless as Lae. He was just more ready to admit his restlessness.
Sally remembers strange little black thingsThe black things, the little baby-bits of darkness, poured over the hills and skulked in corners, but the residents of Halloween Town took no notice. The little creatures seemed to want nothing to do with the town’s witches and vampires. Sally and Lae (temporarily returned to the Doctor) were kept under close watch, followed almost every moment by the doctor or some other creatureling of Halloween Town. They deceived their watchers at any moment they could, helping themselves to every sprig of deadly nightshade they could find.
And then, one night, the wandering ragdolls came across trouble. The little black things, so docile and disinterested before, swarmed around Sally and Lae. Sharp claws tore at their legs and stuffing, breaking apart their stitching, clawing at the haphazardly sewn-in lumps Lae and Sally called their hearts.
“Sally! Run!” Lae shoved her aside, breaking the strings in one arm as he did. He fought even as his limbs fell apart like toy pieces, fingers and hands scattered out in ragged confetti, swallowed in a sea of squirming, hungry darkthings.
“Lae!” Sally shouted in panic.
Sally remembers that Lae was always terrible at sewing himself back together.
The stitchless thing stands before her, all strange and symmetrical. He has the same tilt to his head and the same wild red hair, but he is terrible and ugly and strange and not Lae.
“Sally!” he says, voice strange and expressionless. “It’s me!”
Sally had a big brother once. She remembers.The strange not-Lae whose hands burn with fire sits at the edge of the graveyard, watching the moths fly into his grip and die. When the fire extinguishes, he stares at the ashes and unburning crunchy bits. Curiously, the not-Lae brings his hand to his mouth and tastes. After a moment he spits to the side.
“Bitter,” he comments.
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