literature

Sweet Death: Into The Black P5

Deviation Actions

KleinerKiller's avatar
Published:
533 Views

Literature Text

Chapter 5: Into the Light

Blackbox wouldn't have to bear that name much longer.
He thought about everything that was about to happen, and he sighed. Then he laughed. It was a hearty, genuine laugh that came from the core of his being, unlike practically every one he'd passed since his project began. There was no sadism in this laugh. There was no wicked glee, no innate satisfaction at another target killed or another phase completed.
He was happy.
The Black Box Project was almost complete. When his last move had depleted its bloody aftershocks and the situation was once again calm, he would be able to explain himself. He could show his face to everyone. He could tell them why he did what he did, and what it meant for the Candy Kingdom, for Princess Bubblegum...
For Marceline.
Marceline.
She lay far below him, her body exposed and crudely constricted into its necessary position by the chains that had been recently installed. She had no clue what was about to happen to her. How could she? If he had approached her before this had all happened and explained what would soon happen to her, she would very likely cave his face in without a second thought, and he had no doubt that she would have been more than capable of doing that if he'd ever chosen to directly confront her.
But he was too good for that.
He tried to suppress the grin that was slowly creeping along his hidden face, but he couldn't. It stretched over his head like the bloodless gash of a great broadsword, showing off his teeth as if anyone could see them. Another laugh bubbled up from somewhere he'd had to keep covered to do everything he had done, but now that the covers were coming off, he couldn't contain himself.
He laughed so hard that he shook, and the wall of Princess Bubblegum's bedroom rushed up at him. In his unstoppable guffawing, he was just barely able to support himself against it. He arms and legs were weak; he was starting to lose the incredible acrobatic ability he'd trained for so many years to get. That was fine. His plans were about to culminate and go off without a hitch. He wouldn't need to fight anyone else ever again.
Slowly, his breath now coming in choked bursts, Blackbox slid down the wall until he was resting against it on the floor. He had to leave soon, to do what he needed to, but the laughter wouldn't stop. He was so goddamn happy.
It would be over soon.
He couldn't stop laughing.
He was finished. After so long, he was done.
He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks, moistening the interior of his hood. He laughed until he told himself that he needed to get himself together. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed until the noises that were escaping his throat were recognizable less as elated laughter and more as pathetic, tearful whimpering.
Everything is fine.
His smile didn't falter as he reached down, drew his legs up to his chest, and cradled himself to make the tears stop. Everything was so good. He was happy. He was fine.
I killed so many people for this.
He laughed, but it no longer sounded like joyousness even to him. Surely he was still laughing? He felt like he was. His body was shaking like a dead leaf caught on a branch, and his lungs were starting to burn. That meant he was laughing.
Then he stopped, and the room fell dead silent with him.
Blackbox was a motionless shadow on the dimly illuminated floor. Swallowing a lump in his throat that he couldn't explain, he rose and started to dust himself off. He'd come this far, and it wouldn't do to lose his sanity now.
Everyone who was dead deserved to be, and everyone who would be dead...
A fraction of another chuckle escaped his lips, but this time he was successful in suppressing it.
Now was the point he'd been waiting for. When he was finished with the project, he could head down to his lab, tinker with the tools he had for memory alteration, and wipe what had just happened from his brain.
Blackbox inhaled deeply, let the breath slip out, and went off to do his business.

***

Something was covering Marceline's face, but she could tell that wherever she was, it was bright. She entertained the idea, however illogical, that the Candy People had chosen to leave her behind; her customized home lights were some of the few in Ooo that wouldn't horribly burn her if she so much as looked at them.
Then she remembered the flames engulfing her cherished home, and the idea slipped fluidly from her mind.
Where exactly was she? Her entire body ached, but she couldn't move to check why. It didn't feel like she was cut up or particularly badly bruised, to her great surprise. They must have been careful where they'd hit her.
The sensation was familiar, though -- she just couldn't place it. It was on the tip of her tongue, but whenever she entertained something close to the idea, it retreated into a place too dark to focus on. She might very well have known exactly what it was, and where she must have been, but it was like she didn't consciously want to accept it.
It was not too long before that luxury left her.
She was in sunlight, but covered by light shadow. Her skin was still exposed to the ultraviolet rays, but not in lethal amounts. It was just a slight discomfort. She hadn't felt the feeling in a while, ever since she'd lost the special hat that had replicated this particular feeling...
Then, equally as quickly as her first realization, the truth smacked her upside the head like a brick.
Nothing was covering her face; it was just her eyes adjusting to a specific wavelength of light and shadow that she hadn't felt in quite some time. She couldn't reach up to confirm her theory, because her joints stung and her arms felt weighted down, but she knew.
When her eyes fully adjusted and the scene became clearer, that was the first thing she verified.
Her hat -- the one that had mysteriously vanished into thin air days before Blackbox had first made his presence known -- was once again where it belonged. She could have flew and flipped around in joy if the sheer shock of everything else before her hadn't drained her of it so quickly.
She was on the stage at the base of Bubblegum's castle, where it seemed that the entire kingdom was gathering to stare and point at her. She was unable to move because there were thick chains binding her in a kneeling position, from which even her superior strength and flight abilities couldn't move her. To her side, she could barely make out Bubblegum in a similar position -- and with a start, Marceline observed that she was clad only in what was either a two-piece swimsuit or a skimpy piece of lingerie. A forced glance downward confirmed the same for herself.
She tried to speak, but found herself too paralyzed in shock to form anything coherent. The most that escaped her lips was a pitifully weak murmur that even she forgot the meaning of the instant it had faded away.
If she had managed to regain any strength, what she saw next would mark the point where it abruptly left her again.
He was striding out between her and Bubblegum, his executioner's hood flapping gently in what she felt was a sickly fitting manner. He had a microphone in one gloved hand, and in the other, he was slowly raising his kukri knife into the air.
Blackbox.
Marceline had never seen him up close until now, but he was more than worthy of the reputation he'd garnered. His appearance was inherently threatening, and she could never catch more than a millisecond's glimpse beneath his hood before it fell back into place.
"Well done, ladies and gentlemen!" Blackbox exclaimed in a voice that edged between a surreally childlike pitch and a gravelly, electronically toned growl. "You managed to bring them back virtually unharmed, just as I requested. Now... what is it that we're going to do now?"
The answer came in the form of thousands of unified shouts. "KILL THE VAMPIRE!"
Marceline's stomach lurched.
The hooded psychopath nodded in approval. "Very good! And I've brought just the thing we're going to use to do the job."
Her vision obscured by his turning silhouette, Marceline couldn't make out the thing Blackbox replaced his blade with. Whatever it was, it prompted everything from confused murmuring to roars of excitement throughout the crowd.
"But first..." Blackbox lowered the maddeningly unseen item, and his voice assumed a softer tone. "I have some things to talk about. I wouldn't want all of this planning to go to waste on simple brutality.
"There is so much that I still have to explain to you fine citizens... and to you, Princess." He strode over to Bubblegum and lowered the microphone to her lips. "Tell me, before we begin: what do you think of me?"
In response, Bubblegum simply spat into the microphone. Despite their predicament, Marceline couldn't help but smirk.
Blackbox didn't seem perturbed by Bubblegum's lack of a concrete answer. "You see? She has made it very, very clear over the past few months that she considers me a monster. But as I proved to you all when I was last on this stage, the only monster in the area is chained up..."
He pointed at her then, and she could finally see that he was holding a syringe filled with murky purple-black liquid. The tip of the needle hovered threateningly in front of her face. "... There."
"Well," he continued, "I've tried in various ways to give these women hints as to my purpose, but all have either fallen flat or been rejected outright. And I've already explained to you what I am doing and why it is necessary, but not entirely why it fell upon me to accomplish this, nor why I felt the desire to."
He sighed -- a guttural, unnatural noise that couldn't possibly have been made without an expensive filter. "Let me be the one to deliver your disappointing news: if you came back here expecting me to answer those questions, you are about to be disappointed. I cannot remove my hood and line up the details of why I had to do everything I did... Not until the vampire is dead and you are starting to recover from the hardships you've faced.
"Now for the better news: you won't have to wait very long for that."
Without warning, he spun and jabbed the syringe into her neck. She tried to fight it, but she was powerless in her position. From the injection site, she felt a chill even deeper than her natural one spread out to the rest of her circulatory system, followed by a feeling like she every muscle in her body was being pulled and healed at once.
As the mob applauded like the bloodthirsty animals they were, Blackbox placed the empty syringe back into the folds of his uniform. "Now, then. While we wait for the full effects of my special little concoction to kick in, I will explain what is to be done with the princess."
The crowd fell silent, and despite her unmatched discomfort, Marceline forced herself to listen in.
"Princess Bubblegum is to be restored to power immediately following the death of her vampire seductress." Blackbox was clearly relishing these words; she could hear it dripping in his voice, no matter how thoroughly distorted. "Until that point, she is to be taken to the dungeons, from which she will be able to rule with limited power, and with myself serving as the executive authority."
Bubblegum shot a look at him with her eyes wide, so he turned to address her directly. "You will be able to request items and services that cannot be used to facilitate an escape. You will be allowed visits from your subjects, with thorough searches of such visitors beforehand. More will be explained to you in greater detail when you are settled in to your temporary home."
"It doesn't sound like I'm any kind of ruler," Bubblegum hissed.
Blackbox shook his head. "Limited rule, I said. And once you are restored to your full authority, if for some reason you still harbor hatred towards me, I will offer myself freely to execution by your chosen means."
That got a wicked, gleeful grin out of Bubblegum, though it was short-lived.
"And now..." Blackbox pantomimed looking at a nonexistent watch. "The serum should have spread and taken root throughout the vampire's entire body. It is quite fast-acting, considering that it was formulated from samples of her DNA and RNA that I... gathered..." He shivered in apparent disgust. "From the bedspread she once shared with the princess.
"Time to explain exactly what you are about to endure, Marceline."
The crowd was silent, enraptured, hanging on Blackbox's every word. Marceline's heart skipped a beat, then two.
"What it is doing, exactly, is strengthening your body's resistance to sunlight from the core of your heart outward. If I were to pull off your hat right now, only the surface of your skin would burst into flames. The pain would be excruciating, yes, but you would be perfectly fine otherwise.
"Over time, this serum will sap from your body, slowly exposing new layers of your skin and muscle to the ultraviolet radiation you find so lethal. It will take, if my calculations have been precise, exactly seven days for it to leave your system entirely. At that point, the light will finally contact your heart... and it will be over."
Even some of the Candy People looked horrified, but they kept their mouths shut. Marceline hated every single damned one of them.
"The week of suffering you will be forced through is nothing compared to what these citizens have gone through, and a fraction of their potential conditions should you have been allowed to stay with the princess. But I hope... I do hope, from the very core of my being... that it hurts as much as it possibly can."
Marceline hadn't noticed, until that moment, that Bubblegum was screaming and ranting in horror. The words she was throwing out were logical and clear, but they simply slid off of Marceline's mind in numb incomprehension. Two Banana Guards undid her chains and grabbed her up, and she vanished over the rapidly blurring edge of the stage.
With that, Blackbox took the brim of her hat between two of his gloved fingers. "Use this time to reflect on the mistakes that led you to this moment."
Then, almost casually, he flipped it up and watched it flutter to the floor.
And then the screaming started.
The spark has been lowered to the fuse.

Stay tuned for the boom.
© 2015 - 2024 KleinerKiller
Comments9
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Novum-Semita's avatar
Th-th-that's the most awful form of execution I've ever heard. But totally fitting for Blackbox's character. I still have no guesses to his identity. I can't wait to see what's to happen next. When he started laughing and got a little out of control, putting it down to nearly losing sanity, was it that or maybe uncertainty he felt for a moment. But either way, everything's being pulled together, reminding readers of things read many chapters ago which now we see the full relevance. It's perfectly constructed. Awesome as always :D