I actually kind of missed the way the black material cinched over my arms, the same black as stars being born, the same black as the scratches I left on Atom Eve's legs when we first crossed swords.
It felt like an additional skin, as much of itself as a whisper of death as I shifted my weight. Thragg's armor was noble, mine was... mine was something else. No sign of red. It was all black.
Black like the void.
Black like a black hole, absorbing all light. Below me, Earth spun like a ball in the palm of my hand, full and ready to be devoured. From up here it looked so fragile.
The thrill of my first kill washed over me again, cracking ribs with my hands, hearing a neck squish under my heel. The voice in my head suggested ways to prolong the agony, First the schools, it whispered.
Kids shriek real nice when you slice 'em wide. I licked my teeth, thinking about that. It wasn't surprising when Anissa took off as soon as the door opened, flying off into space at a breakneck pace without looking back at Earth for anything.
But Nolan did pause, just for an instant, gazing down from where the light blue ball dangled beneath her. I put a hand around her neck, not tight enough to choke the life out of her, but just tight enough to feel the racing of her heart beneath my fingers. "You're not going to Earth," I said calmly, watching her eyes grow wide. "No going back and joining dear Mark.
No more inspirational speeches about 'doing the right thing.' Am I clear?" Her jaw fell open, ready to either argue, or beg me not to leave, but she snapped it shut at the very last second and nodded stiffly.
Good girl. When I finally loosened my grip, she rubbed her throat, as though it already missed the weight of my hand.
I knew the moment she shot off into space, she wasn't going to go anywhere else. Nolan was still obsessed with authority even after it got too restrictive. Don't forget how she was the one to betray the Guardians of the Globe when it was a blatantly bad idea, killing thousands upon thousands of people!
The rest of the ship was quiet without Anissa or Nolan inside. Only Atom Eve walked about in silence, her bare feet clicking against the metal floor as she adjusted the blanket we were wrapping around our crying infant. The baby had her nose, a cute little nose angled upward, but her tight fists looked like any Viltrumite's would, and her eyes skipped mine, no words coming. That butcher was in my head again, Snap each finger. See whether she holds on.
Again, I ignored it. Her slight hunch over the baby seemed oddly broken like a cracked moon in the night. "Go, if you wish," I said, inspecting my fingernails. It wasn't cruel, but it wasn't kind either. Just something out of breath.
Atom Eve made a sound that sounded almost like a laugh, broken and glassy through padded lips.
Her eyes slowly, painfully met mine. You know those kind of eyes? That hollow look you get after screaming until your throat bleeds out? "Go where, Conquest?" she murmured. Her voice didn't waver; in fact, it sounded almost unnervingly serene.
She jerked her chin to the viewport, where Earth rotated silently in the dark. "Back to him, after you ripped me open and filled me with it?" The baby's scream became piercing, its tiny face growing flushed with rage. She absentmindedly touched her face. "He'd throw up if he ever saw me like this," she murmured. I could have told her Mark Grayson would've accepted her back with no reservations, mangled body and all.
He loved with a reckless abandon only found on a doomed planet, I might have said. But the Butcher's voice like a hacksaw, spoke in a hiss of fraudulence. Of course, she was right.
I had a clear memory of the expression on Invincible's face when I had stolen her away when we first fought. He had been reaching and ripping up the ground with his fingernails. That kind of love was easy to change when surrounded by a sea of terror. This time, spotting her used stomach, and with her strange baby crying from it, there was no chance in hell. I closed the distance without her making any effort to back away, nor did she look anywhere else.
She stared straight into my eyes as I moved in, her legs shifting minutely beneath me, more than tension but not as a cry for help, but more like a promise, which only further accentuated her change in breathing. You can call it insane affection or whatever you want to call it, if you wanted a label.
When I stood in front of her, she looked up. Those eyes widened, gold swallowing green entirely. Pure Viltrumite fire burned there. Long past consent, far beyond instinct, her flesh answered a hunger she never chose.
The voice of The Butcher spoke again while I slid a finger across her pale wrists to trace the marks from last night. "Because of you, she'd take a life," it whispered.
"Test her. See if she follows through." I walked out without a word and the door hissed shut behind me. I always liked the coldness; it had such an appealing silence when there was no atmosphere. It gave me the luxury of a world without noise and no screaming. While I flew back across the moon's surface to aim for its dim horizon, the voice inside my head began to scream like a maniac to take a swing at something in the Earth's atmosphere for fun and call it a warm-up.
I turned it off. The slaughter would come. For now, I had the king to see.
Thragg's stronghold jutted out of the moon dirt, sharp and dark, its black towers flashing in the raw sun. At the door there were guards. They had knelt the instant I landed. I felt the smell of hot body, of steel, a place where people lived for too long inside. Thragg had been in the arena, with his stomach covered in fresh blood.
He held the head of a Ragnar and squeezed till bone cracked beneath his legs. The sound echoed, sharp and hollow, and then Thragg raised his eyes, pupils wide with interest.
He felt my presence, the word rolled slowly like something deep underground.
He threw the body away without even looking at me. Slowly, he ran his arm over his suit.
"Conquest," the word came forth, deep and rough and heavy as stones moving in the earth.
He kicked the body clear, without bothering to look, rubbed his gloved hand free of gore, slowly. "I thought you would have drowned off on some soft world playing human. How sad." The blow struck home, metallic like blood, though Thragg did smile. Or, for Thragg, smirked. I leaned against a broken column, my hands clasped, my gaze drifting to a vein of violet ichor sliding on the floor near my feet.
"Nostalgia is a waste of a warrior's time," I replied, nodding at the hole where one or another version of Ragnar was moaning behind the wall.
"However, children. I understand children." A voice in my head, a killer's, giggled and nudged me to dig my claws into Thragg's chest and see if his insides were as warm, soft and red as he looked. I didn't move.
I just watched as Thragg's jaw shifted. Once.
Twice, as he chewed the words I'd sent flying. He barked and jerked his head toward the Earth visible through the jagged roof above us. "They forget their mission," he said.
"Hemmed in by buildings, they weep for the loss of their tender mates, who expire before we do." The word dripped off his teeth like blood. A Ragnar whimpered as Thragg applied his foot to its spine, the sound like dry branches snapping, but he didn't end it. He just liked to hear it break. "Pathetic." My nostrils flared, tasting the smell of dust and gut on my tongue.
A voice in my head, the Butcher's, whispered: He doesn't reek of death as I do, but of oblivion.
Thragg didn't see my grin. He prowled back and forth, a beast pacing its pen, his shadow sliding down the slick walls.
"They neglect their duties," Thragg continued. "They feast on human food, listening to their music." His hand twisted, fingers creaking. "Soon they will be making patchwork quilts." The Ragnar wailed and I stepped over the twitching tail, my boots staining the rock.
"You are looking at things wrong, my Lord," I said softly, flicking blood from his shoulder. He went rigid, old instincts kicking in. "It's not about why they changed." I left my palm resting on his chest, feeling the heat of a living creature against skin that felt like space-hardened rock. "They changed because that was who we always were." Thragg's nostrils flared and the pulsing vein in the side of his neck beat like a hammer in his thick hide. Inside my head, the Butcher's voice chuckled.
Shove your thumbs into his neck and rip out his spine. "Think, Thragg, Think." I gestured to Earth's fat glow in the blackness. "When was the last time we met a race with red blood, whose infants cried out in words so much like our own? Whose people mourned dead bodies rather than consumed them?" The Ragnar whined another time; too much a pained man for a beast. Thragg dug his heel in a little deeper.
He exhaled through his teeth as if hot stone were rising to his face.
His eyes were drawn to the world below us, and I saw the look I'd seen when Nolan looked upon Mark as she hung in the stars with hands twitching at her sides. That whisper came in, as if caressingly. The fantasy: skin against skin, the pale and thin form bowing beneath his own. "You see changes as corruption but change only reveals our true nature. Our forefathers didn't slaughter star systems for the pleasure of red blood," I said, running a hand through the Ragnar's entrails.
The coils were slimy, slick, like raw meat pulled from a bone. They felt hot. Thragg flinched as I rubbed his ribs with gore, watching it flow down his stomach's deep crevasses. "Our forefathers did it because there was no one that looked like us. This world?
It is an entirely different beast. Their females walk smiling at us, in our own clothes." He backhanded me without warning; air whipped. I stumbled sideways, chin jerking left, my teeth shivered as grit scraped off the floor behind me as my boots skated.
Butcher's laugh was a shrill song in my head that urged me to strike harder, to tear his guts out, to smash a bone in his hand. I tasted blood from the wound in my mouth, grinned. "Hit a sore spot, huh boss?" "You're challenging the chain of command," he said, but he could feel the tremble in his hands not out of an effort to restrain the violence, but from a deeper, a more primordial fear. The Ragnar took advantage of the pause, its teeth clamping into his arm with razor-sharp bites before Thragg shoved its head to the floor, smashing it open with a wet crunch. Blood oozed through his fingers like berry juice.
"Leave now, unless you wish to see the reason why my command isn't purely ceremonial." I spat blood against the corpse and watched steam rise as I laughed, hearing my breath chill in the atmosphere. "Go make love to a human, Thragg." The Ragnar's head tilted to look back at Thragg with eyes that was wide and unblinking.
"Not in a brothel to a whore. Go pick one that is stupid enough to fall in love with you. Have her say darling and then see if you still have the courage to rip her open down the middle." Butcher's voice was screaming in my head, buzzing with the excitement of seeing his neck cords bulge, or to sit here decaying, acting like murder is a source of pleasure.
Then I left him, standing in his pool of blood, panting like a cornered beast. The moon covered my tracks before the door was closed and I vanished. Through the thick glass I saw him still standing, hands bunching and un-bunching as though yearning for something to smash, chunks of Ragnar's skull hanging from his fingers like dripping candy. And I saw him for the first time blink, for an eternity and then a second, Thragg, who had somehow never blinked before, look … lost.
In the original timeline Thragg had never been talked out of his plan. The mix of fear and authority had kept the Viltrumites in place, held tight against his iron fist. But now here I stood, blood seeping down the corner of my mouth from Thragg's blow, and there had been a change. I was being spoken to, the Butcher in my ear, the voice of death and the butchery of worlds. Look. Look, it was saying, look at the beginning of decay.