The Shadows of My Bad Bones

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Only a lad, he's underprivileged and abused -
perhaps a little bit confused.
It's not his fault that he can't behave,
society's made him go astray.
Perhaps if we're nice he'll go away.
- Oingo Boingo, "Only a Lad"

When Ragnar was six and the only son of two poor farm hands, he took to stealing what his meager lot couldn't afford him. And he was a good thief, small and quick-fingered and such a polite young boy, but reputation, he discovered, couldn't save someone from miscalculation. When he was caught stealing an old, shiny dagger from a friend's mother, the adults of the community all busied their hands and murmured that boys would be boys, though Ragnar seemed to be the only boy who did such things. His parents told him that he had been bad, but all Ragnar saw was that adults would not dare meet his eyes, and that was a power that got him and his left alone when the older boys came around with heads big and thick as mountains and steel-booted feet aching for a round young face to kick in.

When Ragnar was ten, he started to fight back. He told himself that he had a little brother too meek to fight his own battles, but there was something to be said for the solidness of clenched fists hitting flesh and bone that made him reconsider his ire for the ones who had thrashed him when he was younger. Some fought him so admirably that friendship became an inevitability, and Ragnar was in and out of trouble so often most assumed the worst and iced their shoulders whenever he walked by. The adults spoke of him rarely, and by name not at all, but they had made up their minds about him. They were civil, however, and remained silent. He was just a boy, after all, young and reckless like they had been.

At fourteen, it was at last a murder which made them speak.

Instrumental
- Wojciech Kilar, "Blood On His Face"

The first thought Ragnar had was that blood tasted better than the beets he'd come down to eat. And there was certainly enough for seconds, if he wished it. There was blood on Ragnar's hands and on his face, smeared on the walls and spilling across the floor creeping toward the hall. In a few more moments, it would be anywhere but inside the burglar's body. What a fool, to come to the one house in town that had nothing for the taking. A bigger fool still, since the burglar was Mr. Wintersto.

Ragnar stood in a parody of watchful vigilance above the body and waited. His parents would want an explication. Here it would be easier to avoid anger and blame, here where the white and red shock of the death which had conquered the sitting room would make itself fresh and inescapable in their minds.

When I'm in my room I love the shadows of my bad bones.
I have thoughts I won't share because
I don't think I could bear to face you with the lights on.
I feel evil creeping in.
My blood is dirty and I like it, I like it that way.
- Islands, "I Feel Evil Creeping In"

The burglar's blood bloomed behind Ragnar's eyes when he closed them. Yurieth insisted it was shock, but shock was not supposed to feel so much like naked, clawing want. He had taken a life when it was unnecessary and Lady Justice would see his sins devour him at the end of his life, but inside him there were legions of sins uncommitted that moved his hand almost unconsciously when his mind was elsewhere. Just a twitch from the hand of a guilty child, but it longed to take gossiping throats and squeeze them free of breath and soul. Nothing looked the same, and he couldn't go back to what he was before that first cut. He didn't want to; there was nothing before that first cut, and the revelation of Mr. Wintersto's shredded throat was too inviting.

He could have skipped town and found work as an assassin. No one would stop him, not even his parents, but Martin loved his big brother and he was too young to take Ragnar leaving as anything but a personal betrayal. He was young and selfish and sickly, but worse than that he was alone. Leaving was unacceptable, and indulging his ghastly desires too risky. So he dreamed red dreams and waited and smiled and spoke using words that weren't his own. No one suspected the happy ones. Some called his smile a merry gash, joking that he must have learned to grin from a shark. They weren't far off.

If I were a leper, or the warts on a toad
would you think well of me when I go?
If I wrote my name with a razor blade
on the palm of your hand, would it still fade?
If I kissed your lips, would you think it wrong?
Or would you come along with me?
- Amanda Palmer ft. Mikelangelo and Lance Horne, "Formidable Marinade"

They were not lovers. It wasn't love that electrified their bodies when they touched. They clashed and clawed and cut and stabbed, and sometimes they were naked and intwined and sometimes they were armored and armed; it all felt the same, violent and savage and needful. Nadya was long and dark, physical and domineering, pulling him around by clothing and limb and heart, and he loved her for it. She had eyes as bright and black as the pond on a night with no moon and a smile that was too wide and too red, but Ragnar preferred it to the tame little grins tacked onto the faces of all the other girls in town. She felt even lovelier, inside and out - so to speak. No, it wasn't love. It was better than that. It was a battle without end, a trial by fire that never stopped burning. It was a fever that kissed and bled and cut, a movable murder with an uncertain victim.

No one understood, and that was fine. Sometimes he forgot it wasn't love, and that was fine, too. Nadya remembered. Nadya knew, Nadya understood. Ragnar wasn't sure if he loved that best of all or hated it bitterly. With her, he was always naked.

I've overheard over a couple of clenched fists,
a few more drinks and it comes to the surface.
What's the matter? What, nothing?
What's the matter? Nothing?
Some people like things left unspoken;
I prefer to have it out in the open.
- Art Brut, "Fight"

Ragnar was a tall man. He was stronger than his lean, white arms often lead others to believe, but his fists held the truth; they were rough and tanned from harsh labor, from training under suns that blistered and baked. He was a physical man, used to towering above those who denied him in power shows that never failed to demonstrate what he would be capable of if the situation called for it. For some reason, people seemed to think that made him dumb, as if nature would balance out his brawn with unremarkable wits to make things fair for the lesser mortals. This spoke more to the intellects of those who judged him, that they thought fairness was more than a human construct.

Martin Merridan was not him. Ragnar could see that, being not dumb. Ragnar's brother was spindly and bookish, and when pricked by something as small as a sewing needle bled for hours unless tended to by runic healers. He was gentler than Ragnar but far louder, and rather miraculously was born human rather than mystic. It was not easy to mistake the boy for his brother, and yet he came home one night with wounds that most certainly did not appear to be inflicted by anyone he could conceivably know. Nothing, he called the deep red wells in his skin. Nothing, in Ragnar's experience, was less capable of harm than a sewing needle, but Ragnar nodded his head and agreed that nothing must have done it, all right. That night, Ragnar began carrying a needle and thread in his pocket wherever he went. A reminder, he would say when asked. It wasn't a lie.

It was an especially empty night when Ragnar and his crew found themselves at the local bar. The last of them was finally legal, and it was intended that they would all have a gas testing the limits of the barkeep. Ragnar's attention was fixed elsewhere. The man sitting in the booth behind him was short enough to maybe have a complex about it, but was well-muscled, and his slim fingers were adorned with hooked golden rings. He spoke loudly and laughed too raucously even though he seemed barely buzzed, as if he felt that was the only way to be heard. He was the sort of man, Ragnar suspected, who'd go after someone harmless and crow about winning a victory over a more formidable person tangentially related to the one he'd truly gone after. Ragnar had known his type before. In the relative quiet, it was easy to hear him. So Ragnar drank, and listened.

"The youth in this town," the man said, "seem to have a real fucking problem comprehending respect for their betters."

"Violence is the only language even animals can understand," the man said later, with a few drinks in him. "Violence and fear. And kids are barely above animals."

"That Ragnar boy is a menace to the community. Thinks he's above propriety, thinks he's got more than two brain cells to rub together for warmth," the man said, several shots later. "Well, it starts at home, friends. That little dry stick of a brother of his is getting quite the mouth. I suspect he won't be disrespectful much longer. Kid's got it coming, and so's the brother."

Ragnar calmly stood up and punched the vile wastrel in his throat. He didn't bother with words. Violence and fear, after all, was the only language even animals could understand. He could not in truth remember how terrible he had been that night; all he could ever remember was the roar of blood in his ears, the greedy fervor with which he spilled that liar's own blood, the blinding white fury, the needle in his pocket burning cold and seething against his heart. The friends stared in horror, proving themselves worse cowards than that lying, comatose sack of shit. Ragnar considered them for a moment, clenching and unclenching his fists, and judged them unworthy.

"Was an honest mistake, fellas," Ragnar said, licking at his bloodied lips. "I thought I heard him begging for someone to beat the shit out of him. Well, it's so loud in here and I'm just such a nice guy, you can hardly blame me for complying, can you?"

He reached into his pocket and threw his needle and thread at the liar's prone form, and smiled his merry gash at the fool's companions. "Perhaps," Ragnar said reasonably, "he ought to sew his lying motherfucking mouth shut. My hearing isn't so good lately. If I hear him speak again, well. Who knows what I might hear? You should take him home and go do that. Be careful, brothers. This town is so far from justice, and the streets are awfully dark."

Instrumental
- Apocalyptica, "Enter Sandman"

When the draft came, while the mothers and fathers of the village began their mourning early, Ragnar grinned a secret smile, a true smile. War was blood and struggle and cunning, it was death for death and pretending it was for life. All around town, his peers gazed at their homes and their loved ones with misty, soft eyes caught in the cobwebs of nostalgia and premature longing. Ragnar looked only forward, heart thumping with anticipation. He had been living in war for years now. Death was his art and his sport, his one true love.

(It was everything and the only thing he had been able to think about for years, the blood and the sound and the fury.)

Demonia would be a nation of ghosts, and they would all curse his name.

Do you remember me?
I killed your family,
and now I am going to kill you, too.
I made your brother bleed,
I made your father scream,
and I made your mother say those things that she said to me.
She said, "Do with me what you want, but please don't hurt my family."
- Andrew Jackson Jihad, "Bad Bad Things"

"I killed someone important to you," Ragnar said. He had learned to recognize avengers as effortlessly as the gods could recognize heretics, but this one was as subtle as an axe to the gut. His assailant moved quick and thoughtless and fitful, too heated to be dispassionate and too predictable to have kept him alive so long. He had likely graduated hastily from the training institution, had likely never held so much as a butter knife before he joined up. He hurled insults every so often with the guttural barrage of syllables spoken by Southern Demonians, and that narrowed down from what ruin he had risen quite nicely if that was the case, but the man had a face made to be forgotten set with eyes like pitch that burned with the anger of the recently wronged. He could have been blood to any of his kills. "Who was it?"

"My father," the man said, utterly flat. The force of his blade could have shaken a mountain. Ragnar, being not inanimate, was neither shaken nor harmed. "My brothers," the man said, and howled as he watched the instrument of his wrath miss its smug mark again and again. "My mother!"

"Ah," Ragnar said. "You must be from Rase Reve! You will forgive me for not remembering you or your family. That was a busy day, and I can't be expected to remember every begging tongue I cut out."

The man snarled prettily. He remained snarling when Ragnar tired of him and stuck him like slaughterhouse hog. If there was an afterlife, he would still be swinging obliviously as he arrived. Perhaps there he might have even hit something.

"Maybe I should send an invoice to your beloved king," Ragnar said to the man's body. "I have inspired more worthy warriors to take up arms in months than his propaganda has in years. And also you, I suppose. A shame."

It waits for the midnight hour to come
to torture me for the wrong I've done.
It just sits there and stares at me
and it won't let me get any sleep.
- Gnarls Barkley, "The Boogie Monster"

There was a face at the end of Ragnar's bed, and he refused to acknowledge it.

It stared with sunken eyes and sniffed at the flesh covering his heart when he closed his eyes. Ragnar imagined a high, rank festering stench when that happened, imagined he could feel the rot pumping through his veins. Whenever he opened his eyes, though, there were those dark eyes returned to the foot of his borrowed bed, unblinkingly observing him like a pinned butterfly, its hands curling around his blankets. It started slipping into his skull, under his skin; Ragnar felt those eyes pinning him on the battlefield, saw them crawl in where the life fled from his victims' eyes, unblinking in death but alive like a nightmare can be alive, stilled heart beating with the force of his own self-loathing and guilt. And perhaps that was it. Maybe he was finally becoming a real boy.

"What. Do. You. Want?" Ragnar said, uncounted restless nights later. It had six rows of horrible teeth, and all of them shone when it smiled. For a moment it seemed that the thing smiled with his face, but a heartbeat later it was Mr. Wintersto's face, clear and ruined even in the dark of a windowless room. It spoke in a ragged, creaking half whine and half sigh, but the words weren't in any language Ragnar could understand. The exorcist came two nights later, and Ragnar considered kissing her with a slightly worrying level of seriousness.

"Funny sort of specter called a fury. It's only harmful to those whose consciences are bogged down," the old exorcist said. A smile cut at the edges of her lips. "So how have you been sleeping, soldiers?"

It makes a man of out me.
You took the fun out of me,
and I've been consistent to the fucking dream.
And I've paid my dues just to get them all back.
- Bloc Party, "Skeleton"

The nobles of Sangre delighted in the war nearly as much as Ragnar did. They openly wore their treasures plundered from Demonia and eagerly told tales of their pet soldiers and the battles they helped them win. Ragnar wasn't above being owned for personal gain. There were times, however, when he was obligated to dine with his patrons, and that was as close to regret as he had ever come.

The Eisenhaagens were either the finest example of a noble couple there was to go by, or they followed the social tenets of their class down to the exquisitely inked serif. Sadly, Ragnar was also their favorite pet soldier.

"The war must be difficult for you to brave as you have," Lady Eisenhaagen said, in the pleasant tones of a woman who did not fathom what difficulties war entailed, and Ragnar did not make the mistake of answering honestly. War to him was like what banquets were to people like the Eisenhaagens; a wide array of excitements that were always new and wonderful, no matter how many times he indulged. But he had seen his comrades fight the war, and for them it was a different and more treacherous foe than the Demonian army in even its most cunning and merciless of onslaughts. Cannons, spears, and swords relented, after all.

"I do what I must to safeguard my friends and family back home," Ragnar said. It was a lie, but the pretty sort that people generally preferred. He could have defended Martin much better back home, and his mother and father as well if the whim struck him. The pretty lies were a necessary evil to earn new and better instruments of destruction; his truths were the kind that lost him patronage every time. He was hardly a stranger to acting a better man; he was thankful for the practice, in fact.

"You smile so strangely," Lord Eisenhaagen said, with an awkward little grin of his own. Unsure, unnerved.

"I have been told so before, but whatever else it may be it is my smile," Ragnar said. Lord Eisenhaagen frowned a bit, perplexed. Ragnar had seen that same frown often enough in all of his patrons at some point.

(Nadya did always say he never smiled with his eyes.

"Your eyes always look like some stranger unconcerned with your life is staring through them," she once went on to say. Ragnar looked away then, in case that stranger revealed that he had not known he was meant to feel anything. Nadya just smiled Manufactured Sexy Smile #3 then, looking up at him from underneath her eyelashes in a pure show of calculation that slew his apprehensions in grand style. "Oh dear, have I stumbled upon some dark secret? Let's have it."

Ragnar had kissed her then, and somewhere along the line dark secrets and inner strangers became the least interesting thing in the world. She was dead now. To hear it said, she died laughing and taking down thirteen enemy soldiers with her. The envy was almost more than he could bear.)

Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
in keeping its humanity repressed.
For once you must try not to shrink the facts:
mankind is kept alive by bestial acts!
- Tom Waits, "What Keeps Mankind Alive?"

When the war came to an end, the nation of Sangre looked at what they had done to win their favorable truce and cringed back from their cruelties, as if peace had transformed their holy patriotism into a funhouse caricature of bloodlust. As if their subconscious mind didn't long for the days every fantastic empire and foundering micronation cried out the name Sangre in the throes of their worst nightmares. As if bloodlust was not always simmering redly beneath the deceptive blue of their fragile veins. Ragnar had seen it there, hiding with the fear and the panic, in the eyes of his fellow soldiers. He had seen it in the studiously cultured nobles, in the civilians who could do nothing but flee from the cannons' seductive war songs, in the sad, hungry eyes of children.

And yet when the war was won and all its things put away, all denied this, and Ragnar, who exulted in his darker heart, who never pretended to righteousness and flaunted his blacks and grays, Ragnar found himself made beloved scapegoat. He was beset by mobs of people who once might have wanted to shake his hand, all angry at him for shedding blood they no longer wished spilled, all ashamed of their past hateful passions and turning all their rancor poker hot on him. Both sides of the diplomatic conference called for Ragnar's execution, the acknowledgement of the need for necessary evils in dark times the only thing which stayed the hangman's eager hand. It didn't stop people from pleading to the shieldmaidens of Justice for alternate means of execution. There were some days Ragnar just couldn't stop laughing. All this time thinking there was something wrong with him, and he was just like everyone else. They dreamed of his blood as he dreamed of theirs, hiding behind the excuses of justice and morality; the only thing different about him was that he knew what he was.

There's nothing believable in being honest
so cover your lies up with another promise.
Blood runs through your veins;
that's where our similarity ends.
- Editors, "Blood (Freelance Hellraiser Editorial)"

Coming home made Ragnar realize that he had no home. Noreg had been greeting him with a wall of flat, angry glares and had spat upon him before it was cool; if Noreg was home, then he had never left. Martin had been happy to see him at first, and it had been a small wonder to see how he had grown. Still bitterly sarcastic, still weak, but at peace and contented in a way Ragnar would never know. Ragnar didn't stay long - there were vampires in Shang, and Ragnar sought amends, or so he claimed. Martin was married now, and a father; it was best for all that his son didn't have an uncle.

'Cause you did what you did, and you did it so well.
Say what you want, but you'll do it again.
If they could not trust you before then they won't trust you now.
So don't repent; don't be sorry now for your sins,
and let's not pretend to be new men.
- Crooked Fingers, "Let's Not Pretend (To Be New Men)"

Shang had recovered nicely, but Ragnar was proud to note that there remained proof of his devastation all around. Shang had been teeming once, a gleaming fairy city gifted to humankind, and the wealth and prosperity it had brought Demonia was far from false or double-edged. It was dull now, the nation too exhausted from war and loss to build it up as impressively as it once stood, and it stood bare of the great masses that had filled it up. And now vampires had mistaken it for a restaurant, and rather hilariously Shang had employed its former movable disaster to eradicate its present misfortune. He wondered what they might think if they knew he planned ways to blamelessly destroy Shang for good for fun. Other times, he caught people looking at him in ways that said plainly they already suspected him of it. Here he walked a fine tightrope between amusement and disappointment, and below that something he didn't dare identify.

Vampires, Ragnar had learned, were worthy foes, perhaps worthier than he was comfortable with admitting. They were fast and powerful and impossible, like battling lightning, and they seldom moved alone. Every night was a challenge. Ragnar had been trying to deny it since the waning days of the war, but the horrible, inescapable fact of it was that this was the best he could do, this was the pinnacle of his strength. He would never be stronger than this, but he would atrophy. It had already begun in tiny, almost unrecognizable ways.

Then, salvation.

He had been catching his breath, ten vampires strewn across the back alley with endearingly fearful expressions across their ashen faces, when there came a voice next to him and a body he had not noticed.

"Ragnar Merridan," the man said, his voice clear even with the strange, birdlike mask he wore. "I have come for you."

Something in the man's voice called to something inside Ragnar. The primal, howling thing that never left, never stopped. It didn't call for blood this time, or at least not the stranger's. Ragnar smiled.

"Well, you've found me. I imagine I made it very easy for you, having made a path with the bodies of your kind. What would you have me do?"

"My kind, you say? And yet they're your kind, too. Your heart beats red and your blood runs hot, but I've seen how war fills you up. You were born in daylight, but you were meant for the shadows. We have waited patiently for you, and you will not deny us. I think you have been waiting as well. You are our brother, and more, if the prophecies be true," the masked man said. Light ignited from within the mask's eye sockets, unnatural and piercing, and they shone into Ragnar's eyes as if they could divine his thoughts there. The man spoke as if that were so, free of doubt, free of shame. "Close your eyes, and you will become in body what you always were in spirit."

"I've been fighting your kind," Ragnar said. Testing. "I'm not who you think I am."

"You lie so poorly," the man said. "Rabbits know a predator when they see one, and they have all been avoiding you. They are afraid. They are dumb with fear, and it is you they fear even more than me. As long as you fight, they will not trust you. You must make a mewling lamb of your inner lion, and still they will wonder what game you're playing with them. Or you can take my hand, and I can give you another war, a more glorious and bloody war than any the world has seen in a thousand years. What do you want, Ragnar Merridan?"

Ragnar had heard tell of universes outside his own, countless and infinite with possibility. In all of them, his choice was the same.

It's not your fault.
It's my own fault.
I'm not human at all,
I have no heart.
- Sleep Party People, "I'm Not Human At All"

Ragnar awoke from death hungry and pissed. That was nothing new. The moon was a bright omen in the sky, redder than blood, bigger than the sun and almost as bright.

"Please," gasped a voice, vibrating in his hands. Ragnar noticed belatedly that he was choking Kei Amano. "I have children."

Ragnar looked down at Kei begging for his children, Kei the baker, Kei the gossip, and his black hole heart was dead in his chest. It was a glorious lacking, and he reveled in it, the luxuriant milk bath of not giving a shit.

He didn't respond, merely drank the baker withered and dry. Violence was the only language he needed.