The Devil Doesn't Bargain (MatD part 2)

Chapter SEVENTEEN - Family Life

(Please make sure you have read the full trigger warnings list on the Story Details page.)

(The Secret History - The Chamber Orchestra of London, Andrew Skeet)

As the world seeped back to the room of black, I was innately aware of our eternal trepidation. Words kept in, breaths pressed out.

Sebastian watched Ominis through the flickering flame, eyes steady and lost in memory.

Anne watched Ominis as well, eyes brimming with years of realized understanding.

I watched them all, heart bursting and bleeding.

Perhaps feeling the weight of our gazes, Ominis straightened his spine. "Suppose we all know what will be of my pain now then... Anne darling, I'd like to get this over with. Can you-"

His hand held out, we all tried to ignore the steady shake.

Anne, with merciful speed and uneasy precision ran her fingers along his palm and down to his wrist, allowing herself easy mobility while offering him the freedom of independence from her grasp.

Softly, she tilted his fingertips towards the small blaze, his fingers flexing to the warmth before hesitantly dipping one below the surface.

The flame now split in two around him.

As quick and painless as a held breath, the smoke whipped around us again and again. It's tethers slipping beneath our lips and winding over our eyes until it consumed our perception of the world around us.

No longer could I see my friends.

Panic surged below my skin, burning up my spine and wrapping around my ears.

"CRUCIO." A sprightly male voice laughed from within.

Ominis' protests drowned out by the screams of strangers.

The pounding of dark magic nipped at my skin, residual of a terror I couldn't see.

"Your turn brother."

"Marvolo, please." Ominis begged. His voice far more strained than I'd ever heard it before - the edges of it frayed and exhausted.

"Gaunts never beg Ominis." A woman, voice cracked with age, sneered somewhere further in the dark. The sound of his name on her lips impure, a toxin laced breath.

"No. I- I will not harm them." Though they wavered, there was no denying the strength tied around each word.

Something brushed against my hand and I yelped, a momentary panic until the familiar size and warmth of Sebastian's hand enveloped mine. Even in the dark, his blazing heart clung to mine.

Ever so gently, the smoke begun to drift back, revealing slivers of the memory. A young man with hair slicked back, proper and impeccably polished. His suit buttoned high over his neck, his white sleeves rolled and stained with something dark around the edges. His cheeks a similar chiseled cut, the curve of his lips an undeniable parallel to our Ominis'. A woman, wrapped in delicate black silks, hair pulled high atop her head and eyes piercing. They lacked the glaze of Ominis' but in all other ways, she was a spiting image of her son. Or more accurately, vise versa. A twisted sort of familiar.

The two forbidding figures towered over heaps of darkened bodies.

Some breathing

Some crumbled around themselves