Blackbird [Closed/Solo/R]

The eyes.

Icy, blue, heinously unnatural. Ezekiel had seen them before, but he had never expected that he would see them again, not truly. In his dreams, perhaps. In the deepest nightmares that his psyche could throw at him, Ezekiel imagined that those eyes waited, those eyes that had torn him apart from the inside without so much as a lifted finger or a strained neuron. And while the reaper was fairly certain that he was indeed dreaming, those eyes were not a part of it. They were there, inside of him, beaming from a dusty corner of his broken prison cell.

Splintered concrete and torn rebar held the monsters at bay all the night through, their fingers writhing through the gaps, trying to snag just a piece of Ezekiel so that they might have their sway, so that they might have their release. They were the rock, but the hard place was the demon that had awoken into the rubble-filled corner of Ezekiel’s inner-sanctum, the only part of it where he had considered himself safe, the place where he had hidden while Aya Lunita, had tended to his wounds.

The wretch was croutched, gripping his knees, looking about in a confused manner as Ezekiel reflexively scrambled away, almost into the clutches of the mob.

Aron Cruz.

The Mad Arrancar.

His skin was sallow, his clothes nothing more than a collection of tattered rags wrapped in filth and dust. His long, unkempt black hair bore signs of balding in sporadic patches. He was a sick being, and sickness incarnate. He was the hellish telepathic figurehead of a hive-mind that Ezekiel wasn’t even sure that he controlled.

And he was in Ezekiel’s head.

The reaper’s skin began to crawl. His stomach lurched. The creature seemed as confused as Ezekiel was, scanning everything with those glowing blue (familiar?) eyes. The young reaper would have taken the opportunity to strike if he’d had the strength, if he’d had any idea what he could do to thwart what he knew was about to come. But he could not fathom, was too taken aback.

“What did you –yes –you do?” The words were barely a whisper on the blistered and barren lips of the Arrancar. “Where is she?”

The light flared, everything took on that icy pale shade, bordering on white with its intensity. Ezekiel was blinded, but he felt claws at his throat, rotten brittle dirty nails digging at his windpipe. He was thrown back against the bars. His head rung.

“I loved her! What did sorry –you –where is she!?” His words were coming out in a tirade. Ezekiel’s innards writhed in disgust at his breath. He was referring to his Zanpakuto Spirit, he could only assume. The woman who had once haunted him, who had inhabited this cell the first time that Aron had broken the delicate membrane between the material world and Ezekiel’s mind. He had sic’d her upon him, nearly killed him, but Ezekiel had found the strength to hold the woman back.

Ezekiel had been whole then. Now, he was only a fragment of himself. And what was that little shard to do?

As the light faded back down and Ezekiel’s spotty vision returned, so did the vision of the mass behind him. Hands latched onto him, tore at his clothing, broke his bones. They pulled at him as Cruz pushed and choked until finally the bars –themselves representations of Ezekiel’s last shreds of control and willpower –gave way, and he fall back into them.

The crowd staggered backwards, and for a weightless moment, Ezekiel felt himself tumbling without gravity, only the force of tooth and claw. They impacted with the ground en masse, some falling away as they took the brunt of the fall from the second story catwalk of the prison. The personalities were overwhelming him, both of them. Their mass and density was so great that they formed a sort of cage over them, a pile of writhing desperation and anger.

Cruz panicked, and Ezekiel felt, at long last, the hands release his throat. He gasped for air, straining for oxygen beneath the heat of the mob that piled down on top of him, crushing his lungs and obscuring his airways. The Arrancar was gone, disappeared like smoke, like he had never been there. There were only the voices now, the estranged spirits that lived in Ezekiel’s mind.

And they were ravenous.

Ezekiel found himself rapidly descending into the darkness their bodies created, he felt his mind slipping away, reality warping as a cascade of powers that he had never felt before erupted from his soul.

But he couldn’t go out that way, he couldn’t allow them to take him.

A pale blue glow erupted from Ezekiel’s eyes as it had many times before in the months prior. Energy rippled from his being. Voices tumbled away, falling to the wayside. Ezekiel stood in the midst of them, a circle of anger, practically frothing at the chance for freedom. Out of the corner of a pupil-less eye, Ezekiel saw several of the more timid personalities standing off, several familiar faces.

He caught something by surprise, locking eyes with it. Less than a man, but a creature. A small rodent, brimming with energy and shining colors that would appall nature. Its eyes rolled into its head as it rushed to Ezekiel, and as it lept, transformed. Ezekiel snagged the dagger out of the air as a man in armor, a smith if the reaper were to guess, charged in. Lightning erupted from the blade, scouring along the plate and sending smoke billowing from its seams. The smith staggered, his knees colliding with the floor heavily with a “clang.”

A hand clutched Ezekiel from behind. He wheeled, coming face to face with Artix von Creg, his former mentor. He stabbed at him with the dagger, but the control slipped in the moment of shock at seeing the ghost of his master once more. The Technicolor vermin bit into Ezekiel’s hand, snapping bone and sending jolts writhing up his right arm. But the reaper did not feel it, and if he did, he was undeterred. A left hand snapped shut around Artix’s neck, and the gruff man disappeared into a cascade of black flames.

Ezekiel swung the Katana in a wide arc, slicing the torsos of several who had dared inch closer, bathing them in the fires and leaving them sluggish if not outright paralyzed. At the apex, the blade was released, launched across the room into a cracked wall, reverting to its full form along the way.

Something had begun to bore down on Ezekiel that had no shape or face, something ooze-like and fetid. The smith was before Ezekiel, still kneeling on the ground. The reaper grabbed the helmet and lifted the heavy-set man, staring into his eyes until the fell back into his ruddy skull and a hammer was all that remained.

One after another, angry aspects rushed Ezekiel, and one after another, he took them and used them like the tools that they were. Few stood back, avoiding the mob. Some seemed saddened, some frightened, some amused. Ezekiel continued on until he could no longer stand, until none of them could stand, until a sea of broken and bruised pieces of an irreparable mind laid before him.

He felt as though he might be sick. His head thrummed painfully. He was falling apart. He had to get out before they woke up. He had to leave before they overpowered him again. He had to…

He had to open his eyes.

Words: 1,966

GP: 26

((Change of plans with this one. Solo rate.))