Friday, October 14, 2005

   Chapter 12: Black Tears (part 3)
The music still sang on and on as Pen staggered along the stone hallway. All the torches died, leaving everything in utter darkness. He felt weak and disconnected, and still a fire burned inside him as the beautiful, horrible music pushed against his ears. Opening the first door he found, he flung himself into the room and fell to his knees on the rug, Lucaya still in his arms.
“Pen!” he heard Lucifer cry in the dark hallway, but he seemed distant and far away. Pen finally dropped his sword, his body shaking with feelings that he never before knew he had.
Lucifer heard the sword fall, and he used it to find his way through the dark to where Pen was crouching. He laid a comforting hand on his friend’s quivering back and subcontiously barked a command to the candle in angel-magic. It burst into flame, immediately filling the room with its encouraging light.
“Pen, talk to me!” Lucifer urged, kneeling down and gently shaking him to get him to return from wherever he had gone. Pen’s face was burried in his hands; his black tears, like blood, streamed through his fingers. “Pen! Are you okay?! Pen!!”
The song ended.
The music released Pen from its merciless grip, but the new feelings did not. They were feelings that he wished he had never discovered.
He dropped his hands to the floor, where the black tears were absorbed into the rug and disappeared. Slowly, the feelings began to ebb away to the back of his mind, and his body stopped shaking. The light of the candle gave him strength; Lucifer’s anxious breathing gave him comfort. After a moment more, the torches in the hallway came back to life.
Pen sat back upright, and, meeting Lucifer’s worried eyes, he smiled sadly. There was a moment of mutual silence.
“I can cry,” the black-eyed boy said, closing his eyes in a weariness that he had never experienced before. His soul drifted off into the darkness.

Lucifer did not once leave Pen’s side again that night. Only minutes after Pen had fallen asleep, Raine, Yatii, and Ed stopped by the room to ask about what had happened.
“I’m not sure,” Lucifer told them honestly, his voice hardly above a whisper so as not to wake up Pen. “The music seemed to have gotten to him somehow.”
“Is he okay?” Raine asked, concerned.
“Yeah, I think he’s just sleeping,” he answered. He did not tell them that he had no way of knowing whether Pen was sleeping or if he was dead.
Reassured, the boys headed off to bed, closing the door behind them. After hesitating for a second, Lucifer covered Pen with a blanket from the bed. He didn’t know what else to do for his black-eyed friend, so he laid down on his bed and waited, until exhaustion pulled him unwillingly down into a dreamless sleep.
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