A/N: Fair warning. I wrote this piece quite a while back, when I was still in shock over Wesley's death and desperately searching for some means of mentally resurrecting the man, however baroque or improbable. Also, there was meant to be more to the story than is posted here, but I never exactly got around to writing it, and at this point I doubt I ever will. So don't be surprised if the conclusion doesn't exactly resolve everything it should.
That being said, though, I'm actually quite pleased with this piece of writing, and I think it stands pretty well on its own. No really, give it a try. It's not that bad. And if you think it is, well, feel free to drop all the vicious flames in my comment-box you like.
Ahem. Now that I've officially scared everyone off, let's begin.
He ran his fingers down the dark pane of the window, furtively tracing the unfamiliar lines of his reflection with light, calloused fingers. A long face. Short, tousled hair. Pale, empty eyes. Was that what he looked like? He felt no connection to the image, no sense of recognition. He ran a thumb across the flat, featureless expanse of skin between his nose and chin. His reflection mirrored the image, brows knitting in consternation. Shouldn't there be something there? A mouth? He looked human. Didn't humans have mouths?
Heavy footsteps and heavy breathing alerted him to the presence of a patrolling guard. He hastily slopped a damp, soapy cloth over his reflection and started scrubbing. The guards had mouths. Great slavering mouths with tusks and teeth and breath that smelled of carrion and decay. He'd never actually seen them eat a servant, but he had no doubt they were capable of it.
Once he finished with the windows he moved on to the floors. Vast expanses of marble tile, washed and polished, an endless, flawless chessboard of red and white. Chessboard. He pursued the thought. Chess, a game of strategy played on a checkered board between two players. Sixteen pieces each. King. Queen. Knight. Pawn. Pins, forks, skewers. Sacrifices. Endgame, checkmate. Interesting. But there was no personal connection to the subject. He remembered the rules precisely, but he couldn't recall ever being taught. Couldn't remember ever playing a game. Another dead end. He scrubbed harder.
Across the room another servant was working, meticulously dusting the statuary. She did not look human. Her skin was white as chalk, her eyes a deep burgundy colour, and her fingers curved into dark, serrated claws. Xiaopei demon, he recalled abstractly, native to north-eastern China, although there have been reported sightings throughout mainland China, Korea, Japan, and even the western United States and Canada in recent years. Fearsome fighters, they can often be found working as mercenaries or assassins for more ambitious demons. This one didn't look like much of a mercenary. She was bent with age and her hands shook arthritically as she ran her dust cloth under the edge of the statue's pedestal. The Xiaopei are renowned for their needle-sharp teeth and deadly poisonous saliva. He couldn't seen any signs of needle-sharp teeth or saliva, poisonous or otherwise. She didn't have a mouth either.
He wondered how long she'd been here. How long he'd been here. To the Master time was just another servant to be commanded and bent to his will. As was thought. As was memory. The question was academic, anyway. There was no way to know. No way for him to ask, no way for her to respond.
Once he had finished in the hall he moved on to his favorite task, the library. Towering shelves of books in dozens of languages, achingly familiar but utterly inscrutable, set between elegant hard-wood cabinets and more dark, shrouded windows. He liked to take the books out, run his fingers down their spines, flip through their pages. They had a good weight to them. A good smell. And sometimes they even had pictures.
When no one else was around he used to sit at the Master's desk and arrange the books around him into aesthetically pleasing piles. He'd flip through them, admiring the feel of the parchment and the look of the dense, intricate markings that filled each page. There was something oddly comforting about having all that knowledge spread out in front of him, even if he couldn't understand a word.
Once the Master had walked in on him looking through the books. He'd been furious, choking and clutching at his stand, mad yellow eyes rolling in their sockets. And under the anger he'd been strangely... frightened. What are you doing? he had rasped. Stand up. Get away from there. And he'd done just that, of course, because you couldn't disobey the Master.
The Master had shuffled up to him, cautiously, and planted a craggy red hand on his forehead. Aegashsthet algireir, he'd hissed, 'Open mind' in the Demon tongue of Draal. Then there had been a horrible feeling, like something scaly and burning hot tearing through his head. He'd screamed, an unsatisfying, muffled sound without a mouth. And then it was over just as suddenly, and his mind was his own again, such as it was. The Master had removed his hand and was surveying him with a look of smug annoyance. Just an echo, he muttered to himself, You don't remember a thing, and as an afterthought, Don't touch my books again.
After that he'd still come to the library whenever he could, still leafed through the books, but he had to cover his hands with his sleeves or work gloves. He couldn't touch the books, the Master had told him not to. He missed the feel of the pages and age-worn leather bindings, but sight and smell and sound were still far better than nothing at all.
Today the Master was in the library. Which meant he had to be quiet and had to stay away from the books. The Master was working on a new spell. He alternated between consulting his books and scribbling furiously in an ornately bound notebook of his own. Occasionally he'd mutter bits of incantation under his breath, letting the energy of the spell fragment spark between his fingers.
What did he remember about magic? Not much. If he'd ever known anything specific or practical on the subject it had been cut out with written language and identity. But there were still general, impersonal fragments scattered through the musty corners of his mind.
Spellcasters can be dangerous enemies, he recalled, haltingly, they can strike from a distance without revealing their identity, and their spells can blind you, prevent you from moving, even alter your memory or remove your will. Not exactly an earthshaking revelation, that. The magical arts rely on the manipulation of powerful primal forces, focused and given form through ritual and incantation. The invocation of such formidable, dark powers invariably warps the caster, strips him of his humanity and exacts a terrible price on his immortal soul. Being neither human nor particularly soulful, the Master probably didn't bother much about those last points.
So. He knew about magic. Knew it was dangerous and corrupting, which he probably could have figured out just looking at the Master. He knew about chess. Knew the pieces, the rules, some basic strategy. He knew about books, even if he couldn't read them. He could understand English, Latin, Greek, Draal, and a handful of other demonic languages he'd heard the Master use. He knew about humans and demons and China, Japan, Korea, the United States and Canada. It wasn't much, but it was a start. He was always trying to remember things. Little things. Because maybe if he could figure out what exactly he knew he might be able to piece together what sort of a man he'd been before, and how he might have come to be in this place.
The library completed his shift. He was trudging back down towards the servants' quarters when a cold, clawed hand grabbed his arm. It was the Xiaopei demon from the main foyer. She released his arm, but held his gaze, gesturing for him to follow her. She ducked down a side passage and into one of the many unassuming storage closets lining the hall. Curious, he followed.
Inside it looked like just another storage closet. He had a brief moment of panic as she shut and bolted the door behind her, terrified that she was going to kill and eat him in the seclusion of the closet -- the Xiaopei consider the human liver and eyeballs to be particularly succulent delicacies, the useless encyclopedia that was his brain informed him -- but of course without a mouth that was out of the question. The eating bit anyway. Being a demon, she still might kill him just for the scream and the crunch.
She pushed aside some boxes and shelving units, revealing a narrow tunnel chipped out of the wall. She ducked inside and beckoned him onwards. If she hadn't killed him yet, she probably wasn't going to, he decided. He climbed through behind her.
At the end of the passage was a cramped little alcove, hollowed out of the walls themselves. The tiny artificial cave was covered in crude but expressive pictures, like a cave-man's scrawlings, but instead of buffalo and mammoths, these walls depicted a wizened, red-skinned sorcerer with yellow eyes, his tusked guards, and ranks of crawling servants. He was looking at the secret histories of a people with no language. His gaze darted from image to image, hopelessly trying to take it all in at once, his breath shaky with awe.
The floor was littered with personal effects. Clothes, books, and even weapons were piled from one end of the dark alcove to the other. The Xiaopei threaded her way through the mess and after a moment's thought selected a dark brown leather coat from the top of a nearby pile and threw it at him. He caught it, gave her a puzzled look, and examined the garment. It was a little battered, but of good quality. The front lining was stained with dried blood.
The Xiaopei was getting impatient. She mimed going through the pockets. He gladly obliged. His fingers closed around a thin wallet. He pulled it out and flipped it open. Credit cards, cash, a driver's-- he froze. The picture must be years old, but the likeness was unmistakable. It was him. Sporting wire-rimmed glasses, a button-up shirt buttoned up to its very last button, and foolishly wide grin, but definitely the same face reflected in the windows and floors of the Master's halls. He turned the card over in his hands, searching for a name, but the text refused to resolve itself into anything approaching meaning. The neat little rows of symbols remained as frustratingly opaque as the words in the Master's tomes.
He tore the wallet apart looking for more clues. There was another piece of ID. It looked like a security pass of some sort. In this picture he was unshaven and glasses-free, and wearing a sort of dazed expression, as though he wasn't quite sure how or why he'd stumbled into the photographer's studio. There were some miscellaneous discount cards in a side pocket, and a signed American dollar bill carefully folded in the back. He pressed the bill flat out against the ground. Was that his signature on the bill? A a forgotten friend's? A brother or sister? A lover? A wife? What did it signify? He was adrift in a sea of symbols he couldn't begin to interpret.
He emptied the rest of the pockets. Found a few crumpled notes in the same untidy hand, presumably his own, unreadable to him now. A chunk of cloudy grey crystal. A ring of keys. His heart leapt as he is hand closed around a slim black mobile. He punched the buttons experimentally, but got nothing but unhelpful beeps, trills, and an insufferably upbeat voice telling him he was out of range of the nearest base station, no service available at this location.
The Xiaopei laid a clawed hand on his shoulder and ushered him towards the wall, watching him with dark, unreadable eyes. She pointed up at a series of pictures, still bright and new, squeezed between older sagas.
In the first image a human man in a dark brown jacket sat across a table from a hunched, red figure clearly meant to be the Master. The man, presumably meant to be himself, was talking. There was a little speech bubble hanging above his head with a picture of him and the Master shaking hands and smiling.
The next frame was harder to make out. The master was sprawled on the floor, the ground around him scattered with shards of smashed metal and glass. The man in the jacket stood above him, smirking. Floating above his outstretched hand a was a spiky orange ball. He squinted. What was that supposed to be? He pointed at the ball and gave the Xiaoping a questioning look.
She exhaled long-sufferingly, and went hunting through the stacks of personal belongings. She came up a moment later with a tarnished steel lighter. She flicked it open, lit it, and pointed first at the flame, and then at the picture.
A hovering ball of fire? That sounded suspiciously like... magic. Had he been a magician? A strange, queasy excitement rippled through him at the thought. A powerful magician, if he'd hurt the Master as badly as the picture implied.
He moved on to the next picture. He liked this one less. The Master was sticking a big, wicked-looking knife into the magic jacket man's stomach. The artist had been more enthusiastic than was strictly necessary with the blood-spatter. The man had another ball of fire in his hand, but it didn't seem to be doing him any good.
In the next frame the little him was sprawled on the ground, lying in what looked to be an improbably copious pool of his own blood. He twisted the bloodstained jacket in his hands thoughtfully, a relic of a forgotten age. There was a third player introduced in this frame, as well. A woman with long blue and brown hair and startlingly bright blue eyes. She knelt beside the blood gushing man. Was that a tear on her cheek? He liked this girl already.
If he liked her in her first frame, he was in love by the second. It was a simple but lovingly rendered image of her punching straight through the Master's head in a shower of gore. The artist had spared no grizzly detail of the maneuver. However she was gone again next frame, alas, and the Master was back, getting his head sewed back on. The man was getting his stomach sewed up too.
The last frame was more stylized than the rest. It was repeated with minor variations all around the room. The master stood above the man again. The Master was flanked by two of his tusked guards, and his hands were raised and glowing with magical energy. The man was dressed in the dark, drab clothes of a servant, his eyes were closed, and his mouth was gone.
He stood, eyes locked on the last picture. Such vague details, so devoid of context or meaning, but so inexpressibly important. To know that he'd had a life before this place, before now. That he'd had power. That he'd had strength. That he'd had love. The Master curled, broken, at his feet. The girl crying over his prone form, so beautiful and strong. It was like a flame inside him. It was joy. It was hope. He'd forgotten what hope felt like. He realized with a jolt that he was crying.
He pressed his hand to the rough surface of the wall, framing that last, horrible image. That wasn't going to be the end. There was going to be another frame. A better ending.
He wiped his face on his sleeve self consciously, and turned to face the Xiaopei. She was impassive, almost smug. Did everyone react this way? The walls were so full of stories. Some only a couple of frames, some wrapped all the way around the room. Every one ended the same. It was unbearable.
He trailed his fingers back across the painted story, stopping at the image of little him standing over the Master, flame in hand. What if he still had that power? The Master had taken away his memory, but he could learn again. The Master had taken away his voice, but words were only an arbitrary handle on the primal powers that he could call. He could find another way. He would. He had to.