Hi, this is the first story of The Mood Series. It's about Adrian, who is a member of Death's mortal assassins, I guess. They're all insane, and he's lonely. He needs somebody. He's been alone for a long, long time. Maybe he can find something inside his insanity. Who knows?

Well, you will if you read on.

Thanks.

0000

I don’t know how I became part of Death’s little band. Who knew the Mighty Grim Reaper needed help from mere mortals? And juvenile delinquents, at that.

It’s a little disturbing working with the very thing most humans fear the most. Most of us just wing it and go with the flow. I guess we’re the best people for the job – we don’t care. About Life. About humans.

We’re all insane, you see.

The problem is, some of us don’t actually admit we’re insane. I can admit I’m not right in the head – I’ve known since I was pushed into a mental institute when I was six. I have multiple personalities – one is an ASBO, one is a hypersexual, another is a paranoid kleptomaniac and another is a claustrophobic insomniac.

Me? The fourth personality? I’m not much in comparison to my ‘twin brothers’. I’m just insane. I can only remember clumps of my life – we share this body in a roughly equal order – but I know at least that they must all be pretty bored. Death doesn’t let them work for him, and he has special rooms for each of them to stay in when they’re in control of this overused body. The claustrophobic insomniac is always the last to be in control before me, so I’m always given an extra three days to get over the fatigue and the sleeping pills Soko gives us.

Soko is the mildest of Death’s band. He has split personalities too, but his original personality – ‘Soko’ – is in control most of the time. He only becomes his other personality – ‘Okos’ (it’s corny to have an opposite name, but ‘Okos’ called himself that by his own choice. Okos isn’t too bright) – when he’s in the field, reaping souls and tearing whatever Perfection stands at the time.

Our Perfection (1) is Life.

Right now, Soko is holding my hair back as I puke up my guts into the less-than-sanitary toilet. I’m dealing with sleeping pills withdrawals. I guess I forgot to mention that. My insomniac brother (Mark) takes way more pills than he should (Soko is too soft to give him a normal dose) so I’m always wracked with sickness whenever it’s my turn.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs in my ear, rubbing my back with a heavenly cool hand. He’s the closest thing I have to a friend here. I don’t think anyone can count as a friend when you’re a servant of Death. We’re all, essentially, selfish. Even Soko. When it comes down to it, we’d rather save our own skins than risk it to save another’s.

“No it isn’t,” I manage to choke through the bile in my throat and the heaviness of my tongue. I retch repeatedly. It feels worse to dry retch than to actually throw something up. My body tries to offer something to the toilet but it can’t. My stomach, throat and head hurt like a bitch. My hands have gone numb from clutching the toilet seat so hard.

Does this count as Living?

“SOKO!” A deep, stiletto-sharp voice booms, making me shake. I’m too weak to even bear the noise. “ADRIAN!” I shiver again, but not from the weakness. I always get chills when my name is called. I can hear my ‘brothers’’ names without batting an eyelash – they’re fundamentally ‘me’ – but when I hear the individual name that is ‘me’, I can’t stand to hear it. I don’t want to be ‘Adrian’. I’m scared of myself, when it’s obviously my ‘brothers’ I should be more worried about.

“We’re here, Rain!” Soko calls. Even when shouting, his voice seems quiet. It’s soft-edged. It bounces off walls and leaves no scars where it has been. Unlike Rain’s, which rends holes in every ear it reaches. It’s bitter and rough. It leaves marks no one can whitewash over. Rain is the vice-leader of Death’s band. He is the evil that has coated our job in black and misery. But we can’t blame him. We have all contributed to it. None of us have tried to make it better. Not even Soko. Not even me.

Rain is also one of the people who can’t admit he’s insane.

Rain has… well, we call it Fatal, because we’ve never seen it before and it’s the only thing that can really describe it. He can make everything a weapon. He can create an Apocalypse from the 6 days of Creation. He makes Death. He is the king of corpses. The lord of destruction. The crusher of Life. Everything he touches falls apart.

Rain kicks the bathroom door viciously – all three of us know a simple tap would have it crashing to the ground – and orders us out. Samanie and Jacob have returned with stories to tell and information to share. We all share the same look; We’re not going to hear everything. They’re going to keep some of the info for themselves. We all do it. There’s no hatred towards them when we think about it. That would be hypocritical. We’re all nuts, but we won’t lower ourselves to such feelings. We have our pride.

I laugh to call it that.

Despite Soko’s protests, “you should stay, you’re too sick. Don’t try to stand”; I walk anyway. I near collapse at the door, but Rain silently catches me by the arm and hoists me up.

I can almost feel the skin where he touched me turning black and dying.

I walk as carefully as I can through the shabby, depressingly dark hall into the main room, where Samanie and Jacob are seated, Death standing behind them like some ominous shadow, or a twisted guardian angel.

Samanie and Jacob are drinking tea and clutching their weapons with tight hands to their chests without conscious thought. Those two suffer paranoia.

Samanie also suffers aggressive depression. Whenever she’s upset she goes on a rampage – so she’s on the field most of the time to vent out her energy and misery.

Jacob is a masochistic pyromaniac, but he won’t admit it. He says he just likes the warmth of flames. It reminds him of Life.

I could accept it if he meant standing near a fire, just close enough to keep yourself warm, but not actually placing yourself inside the flames. His hands and arms are riddled with burn scars. He can still move his hands, but sometimes when he wakes in the morning (or night. Our schedules aren’t solid) sometimes his half-melted skin will stick his fingers together and he will have to go and cut the skin in the bathroom. He relishes the blood. That also ‘reminds him he’s Alive’.

“Hey,” I call monotonously, fetching myself a glass of water (the only clean thing you can get in this god forsaken house) to wash away the sting acrid taste of acid in my mouth.

Samanie nods in acknowledgement, but Jacob does nothing, save look at me. He never says much, if you compare him to Samanie. They’re almost always together. But he’s louder when she’s not there. I wonder why…

“What’ve you got for us, then?” Rain asks gruffly. He brushes past me for water too, and I shudder. He has the same – if not worse – effect on me as Death. I think he knows he puts me on edge, because he places a hand on the small of my back, standing beside me. He keeps it there. I will myself not to shiver under his touch, but it’s difficult. I can hear the blood pumping in my veins. Please keeps pumping, I plead to my heart. I don’t want to die under his hand.

I don’t mind dying, though.

“Not much,” Samanie answers. “The Russians seem to be dying off pretty quickly lately. The averages of deaths per month have been rising a little too dramatically to be explained away as just some plague or super-bug.”

Soko looks surprised. “That bad?”

“About seven-percent worse, on average, than your run-of-the-mill plague,” she says. She likes numbers. They’re her world. The only thing that can make her truly happy is pi. She says it’s her personal Perfection.

“Do you think it might be a rogue Shinigami?” I ask.

Shinigami translates from Japanese as Death God, but in reality they are the demi-Deaths. The Death we work for is the manifestation of all the suffering and the seconds that lead to the physical Death of bodies. The demi-Deaths are just shards from the edges of our Death. The Shinigami. They used to work for Death, like us, but they had hyperactive personalities and couldn’t take orders. Most rebelled and went on their own paths. Some Shinigami depend on their source – Death – to stay sane. They overwork and become rogue. Berserk. Part of our job is to kill of the Shinigami that become berserk.

Well, when I say ‘kill’, I mean obliterate the physical manifestation – the shell of the Shinigami – and return the essence – I suppose you’d call it the soul – to Death.

“No,” Samanie murmurs. She reaches to the side-table between hers and Jacob’s chairs for a pink box. She pulls out the stick-thin sweet and sticks it into her mouth. It’s strawberry pocky. I wonder where she got it.

She offers Jacob one. He silently takes it with his twisted fingers and a nod of thanks. He doesn’t eat it, just holds it like a cigarette. He seems to be observing it.

“I think it might be a group of organised killers.”

“Is there any evidence to back up your theory?” Rain asks in his cutting voice. His fingers move across my skin. I can’t resist the shiver that rattles my bones. He smirks to himself, and I know he’s doing it on purpose. The bastard.

“Yes.”

We wait for Samanie to explain the evidence, but she doesn’t continue. She just gets to work on steadily eating through her supply of pocky. Jacob still hasn’t eaten his, so when she’s done she plucks it from his unresisting hand and eats it, ignoring the skin that’s sickly split from his hand and stuck to the confection. In fact, she seems to relish it more.

We’ve always worried that Samanie could be a closet cannibal.

“What’s the evidence, Samanie?” Soko asks, breaking the wary silence. “Won’t you tell us?”

Despite our so-called selfish detachments from each other, Samanie’s weakness seems to be Soko. She nods sullenly, as if in defeat, and tells us that out of the current thirteen-hundred bodies found in the last month (a shocking rate of deaths, even for the current Shinigami-riddled Russia) more than thirty percent of the seven-hundred autopsies (how could that many autopsies be performed in one month? It would have to be around the clock) observed found traces of Zero C in their bloodstream. It was good that most of these autopsies were performed this month, because when the blood has congealed it’s a lot, lot easier to find Zero C. It collects in dense balls in thick substances, you see. Only the steady flow of liquid can keep it spread out in the body.

Zero C is a roughly old substance in the underground trading centres (2), but very new on the black market for some reason. We don’t know exactly how it works, but since it’s an agent that induces Death, our Death knows exactly what it does. He won’t tell us. Samanie and Soko have done research and think it might affect the vital organs slowly, working like a quicker form of the aging process. A lot of people victimised by Zero C have had brittle – old – bones, but their calcium levels are perfectly fine. Not all people have this though, so we can’t exactly say this is a sign of Zero C. It’s a very smart substance. Not even Milo – our underground trading centre spy – or Shiono – our black market spy – have any information to clue us in to what Zero C specifically does.

All the same, thirty-percent isn’t enough to determine if this is really a group of killers. Usually when killers work together they pick a significant, unique way to murder, but all work with that same method. They don’t work together and stay separate at the same time. That’s not organised.

Or these killers could be stupid. It’s happened before.

“Hey,” Rain begins, “Does this mean we’re going to be spending most of our time on this Russian fiasco? That’s more research. I want field work.”

“We know you want field work,” Samanie sighs, as if troubled, “But I think it would be better if we had you working on this case too. All of us.” She looks at me with her lightless black eyes. “With the exception of you, of course. I have a feeling this will take a long time, and it’s Gin’s ‘turn’ soon.”

Gin is the ASBO. We share this body on a cycle of about three to six days each. It sucks thinking ‘my go is almost over’ when it’s only just started.

“…Yeah…”

Rain rubs my back. I fear he’s actually trying his hand at comfort. He used to suffer split personalities – the other personality was a female suicidal with GAD (3) – until he turned thirteen, when he told the personality to ‘shove off and leave him and his body alone’. (I don’t know if he really got rid of her, but I think that somehow part of her personality has made him suffer gender identity disorder sometimes.)

So, in other words, I think he might know how I feel and empathises with me. He hates having memory gaps from when his ‘sister’ was in control.

Even while I feel strangely thankful that Rain, of all people, is offering me comfort, I’m disgusted. A) Because I shouldn’t be emotionally vulnerable in this line of work, especially around Rain, who could slit my throat whenever he chooses, and b) It’s Rain. Like I said, he could slit my throat at any time. Of all the people to be empathised with, it’s the one with Fatal?

Samanie excuses herself to the bathroom. I shout an apology to her down the hall. Soko had flushed the toilet but the stench of vomit most likely still hung heavily in the air. She doesn’t answer me, just closes the door behind her. The small squeak of the old door rings through the house like a million mice dying under traps.

“Hey,” Jacob murmurs. I had expected him to talk, since Samanie wasn’t there, but it’s always a bit of a shock for me to hear his smooth, monotonous voice. I’m not used to it.

“Yeah?” Me, Soko and Rain ask at the same time.

“Rain; get your hand off Adrian. He’s fucking scared witless, if you hadn’t noticed.”

I blush. I’m not that scared.

Rain doesn’t remove his hand. He just grins manically. (Ha. Manically.) “I have noticed. I most definitely have noticed.” He leans into me and whispers something obscene in my ear that I’d rather not repeat. Sometimes I think he’s the hypersexual, not my ‘brother’ Mori.

Jacob growls softly. Or maybe it’s my imagination. But Jacob looks sour.

“Stop that, Rain.”

“Why?” Rain asks innocently, but I can see the flare of a challenge in his eyes. He can’t resist picking a fight whenever he can. Sensing this, Soko excuses himself to his room.

Death stays put. I’m surprised he hasn’t said anything yet, even though he’s less talkative than Jacob. As much as he likes to say that he isn’t human, so has no selfish or vain feelings, we all know he thinks he’s way smarter than everyone and likes to tell us all the theories and deductions he’s made as soon as possible. The Grim Reaper is egotistic. I’m really surprised when he drifts out of the room.

So me, Rain and Jacob are on out own.

“Because.”

Huh? I always figured Jacob was pretty sharp. He has a good sense of humour and is very witty. ‘Because’ hardly qualifies as wit.

“And what if I didn’t let him go?” Rain’s arms moves from my back to around my waist, pulling me flush against him. My whole body tenses. My eyes widen. I can feel every hair on my body standing on end. I break out in a light sweat. I feel like I’m dying in his arms.

I’m absolutely fucking petrified.

Jacob definitely growls now. He gets out of his chair. He’s really tall – taller than Rain by at least two or three inches, and skinny as a rake. His ratty clothes hang off his thin frame.

And he’s holding his 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistol straight towards Rain.

“Shit!” I cry. “Jacob; put that down!”

Jacob doesn’t look at me. A frightening frown slashes his brow and his eyes are dark, concentrating completely on the angle of his pistol. I’m pretty sure it’s aimed exactly for the centre of Rain’s forehead.

“Let Adrian go.”

“Holy crap,” Rain says, deadpan. “What’s wrong with you, dude? Since when did you care about the kid?”

I groan to myself, despite the fear. Rain often calls me ‘kid’, ‘cause I’m only 5”7 and he’s 6”0.

“Like you care.” Jacob’s fingers twitch on the trigger. “Just let him go.”

I’m not sure if I’m more scared of Rain or him. But Rain lets me go with a mock-disappointed sigh, and tells Jacob not to ‘wave that bloody thing around at the slightest threat to your lover-boy’. I opt to ignore the ‘lover-boy’ part. I have enough problems as it is. As much as I could deal with being gay – or assumed gay – I don’t want my ever-growing list of oddities to becomes consciously bigger. That just makes it more depressing.

As soon as Rain is out the room, waving sarcastically behind him at us, Jacob’s body suddenly slumps forward, the tension visibly evaporating away. His hand drops to his side, and he dangles the pistol on one twisted finger. He rubs his eyes wearily with the heel of his other hand, sighing gently.

“…Sorry, Adrian.”

A weird feeling snaps in my head. I’ve never heard him use that tone before. It’s sad, tired and quiet. At least, quieter than usual. It doesn’t sound right in my ears. Like it grates against my expectations, or something… I don’t understand it.

“I-it’s okay,” I answer. “Thanks.” I pause. “But you didn’t need to point your gun at Rain, you know. It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t like he was going to –“ I stop. I was about to say ‘it wasn’t like he was going to kill me’. That would feel like lying, even though he probably hadn’t intended to kill me. ‘Fatal’ feels like that. I had felt like he was going to kill me.

Jacob nods silently.

“We’re going out,” Soko and Samanie suddenly come into the room. “We’ll be back in an hour, maybe. See you guys later.”

I turn to them. “Um… yeah. Bye Samanie. Soko.”

“Bye,” I hear them both call as they walk away and through the front door.

When I turn back around, I have to suppress a shocked cry. Jacob is standing a bare inch away from me. I hadn’t heard him come closer. I have to tilt my head back to see his face.

“Do you know why Rain couldn’t keep his hands off you?” he asks.

I frown. Why ask me that?

“I don’t know. To unnerve me, maybe?”

Jacob walks towards me, and I continuously step back until there’s a wall behind me and I can’t keep away from him any more. He’s too close for comfort.

“Because he likes you.”

I laugh, but it’s a hollow laugh, and Jacob can probably see right through it. “’Likes’ me? Yeah right. Rain can’t like me.”

“Why not?”

Shit. He’s got me.

Jacob leans his arm against the wall and tilts his head down, so if I was on tiptoes, we’d probably be face-to-face. He doesn’t say anything, just stares at me. I can’t read his eyes so I don’t know what he’s trying to do. It’s scary.

…Hang on a sec.

“Hey,” I ask, “How come you only speak to any of us when Samanie isn’t there? If Samanie’s with you, you never say a word.”

Jacob smirks lightly. “You haven’t worked it out yet?”

I’m puzzled. “Worked what out?”

Jacob laughs. Laughs! This isn’t funny. He’s acting like I’m some sort of idiot. “Even Soko and Rain have worked it out.” He leans a little closer to me. “You’re funny, Adrian.”

He says it plainly, but my heart suddenly jumps and goes a hundred-miles a minute. Oh my God, what’s he just done to me?

Jacob smirks again. “I’m a selective mute, Adrian. I can’t even speak to other people when Samanie’s there. I hate her.”

…Whoa. That’s a shock and a half right there. “Why?” I ask. “And why are you telling me this now?”

Jacob shrugs. It seems to be his answer to both questions.

“Do you hate Samanie because of who she is? Or what she is?”

“…What she is.”

“A girl?”

“Got it in one.”

“Why?” I’m feeling really hot as he slowly edges closer to me. I’m not sure if I’m scared or not. I’m usually used to feeling things or experiencing things I don’t understand, but my heart aches in my chest and there’s a panic deep inside me that isn’t quite there. I don’t understand. And this time, it’s scaring the hell out of me.

“Because girls disgust me.”

“Were you hurt by one?” I ask, treading lightly. I could be offending him.

His gaze drops to the floor, and for a moment I think my fear has been realised, but his eyes return to my face and he answer. “…Yes.”

I don’t ask more. He’s so damn close.

Shit.

“I want to heal you,” I say. My brain kicks in about a millisecond later and screams a storm at me. I have to resist putting my hands over my ears, even though the noise is internal.

Jacob smiles slightly, and I’m worried it’s because of my unease. But he tells me something that makes a part f me snap. Either into or out of place. I’m not sure.

“You have to heal yourself first.”

“But I can’t,” I murmur. My cheeks become hot. “So how can I heal you?”

He’s a hair’s breadth away now. I can feel his warm breath on my skin. I’m pressed flush against the wall and have nowhere to go. I can just stare at him helplessly. But I’m not entirely sure if I want to pull away. Another strange feeling. Though this one doesn’t scare me so much.

“You can’t.”

At any other time, I would have tried to insist that I would try my best to help, despite my selfish morals. Now, I find myself calmly accepting his statement, It hurts, but I can go with it.

“Are you going to kiss me?” I ask, realising that his lips almost touch mine when he talks. It’s a weird feeling, like the ghost of a touch.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel like it.”

“Why do you feel like it?”

“Because I’ve been watching you for a long, long time. And my heart’s telling me to kiss you even though my brain’s yelling at me to stop before I make a fool of myself.”

My heart jumps. He’s been watching me? And…

“You pick your heart over your head?”

“Yes.”

Impossibly, he moves closer still without our lips touching. And I think I’m actually restraining myself from closing the gap between us.

“So do I.”

I can feel his smile. It’s small, and a little sad. He smells like the peaches he loves, and burnt flesh and hair. I love it.

This is really, really strange. This is too sudden. I’ve never fallen in love, and I know for sure that this isn’t love, or even lust. I just want to kiss him. There’s no particular feeling behind. Or, at least, I don’t think there is. I’ve never really paid that much attention to Jacob before. I’ve just assumed he was quiet and detached and left him to his mysterious ways. I’ve always thought about what he could be thinking, but I’ve thought about what everyone could be thinking.

“I want to crack your puzzle,” Jacob says, almost to himself. “I want to find out all about you. You’re my reason for being here.” He pauses for a second. “I would have left a long time ago if it weren’t for you.”

To think of it, I can remember him asking Death if he could leave the group. I had come into the room and when I asked why he wanted to go, he told Death and I that he’d changed his mind. I thought he was just trying to cover up the fact that he’d wanted to leave, for fear I’d think he was a coward. I guess it was a different reason, after all…

“Do you want or think anything because of me?” he asks.

I have to think about it. It’s hard to concentrate with the fog Jacob seems to have encased my mind in. When I finally struggle through the last tendrils of the fog, that same part of me snaps. I’m sure, this time; that it’s snapped into place, not out of it.

I don’t answer his question, because I feel this really strong urge – a desperation – to ask him something myself.

“Let’s fall together, okay?” I ask quietly. Now the question is out in the open, my brain closes down and my body’s reactions take over. My eyes fall half-lidded and I can’t keep them off his mouth. It’s so close, but it feels too far away.

I don’t know what Jacob thinks of my question. I’m not even entirely sure myself what it meant. I just need so badly to hear his answer that my heart feels ready to explode in my chest.

“…Okay.”

And, finally, he kisses me. I’ve never been kissed before (or maybe I have. I wouldn’t know if my ‘brothers’ had) and it sends electric shocks through my body. I’ve been missing this for nearly seventeen years?

The kiss is amazing. There’s no fireworks or petals raining from the sky. There’s no love behind it. I just think we both need this. He needs it for his own reasons, and I need it because I need to feel someone. I need to touch someone. I’ve been lonely and not even realised it. I want Jacob to fall into the darkness with me. We can be mad and live in this Death-filled world together.

When we finally part, with me panting for breath because I haven’t mastered the technique of breathing through my nose like Jacob has, I find that the loneliness hasn’t been filled. I hadn’t exactly expected it to go away just like that, but it’s saddening. The constant fear is still there. I’ve just shared my first kiss with a pyromaniac who I don’t even know the last name of. I’m still lonely.

But there’s the potential not to be any more. Do you see what I mean?

“We’re all insane, you know,” Jacob says, pressing out foreheads together and holding my hands in his. I don’t mind that his flesh is sticky and flaky.

“Yeah,” I agree, smiling slightly. I won’t be lonely if Jacob is there. I hope. “And why did you decide to tell me all this now?” I won’t take a shrug for an answer this time.

Jacob’s hands tighten a little around mine. “Because I was jealous of Rain for touching you like that.” He stops, and smiles a little. “This is a revelation for you, huh? I can see it in your eyes.”

“Yeah,” I answer. No normal feelings pop out of the blue like this. But since when could I be considered normal?

“We’ll fall together.”

I close my eyes. So he understood my question after all.

“Endlessly,” I agree.

“If we can’t heal, let’s break together. When our fall finally ends and we hit the floor.”

I’m silent. I’m contemplating it. It’s a strange question, but I understand what he means. I quite like the idea of breaking with him. Breaking so badly our pieces can’t be separated as one or the other. I’ll never be lonely.

I think he can see I like it, because he smiles and kisses my lips. Once. Twice.

“You’re my Perfection, Adrian.”

“I think you could become mine,” I answer.

“I can wait.”

0000

Well, this is the end of my (second or third) completed original (as in not fanfiction) story ever! And the first that I’ve ever put onto the net for complete strangers to read. R&R if you can.

First, here is a list of Adrian’s ‘brothers’.

MARK – the insomniac.

GIN – the ASBO.

MORI – the hypersexual.

RAOUL – the kleptomaniac.

1. Perfection is my word for ‘what I live for’.

2. I did research in the shadier parts of the Internet. God knows how I manage to access these things. (I’ve hacked into email addresses for fun before, but… Oh. And I swear on my life and manga collection that I haven’t kept any of the info I’ve found, btw) There are underground trading centres all over the place. It’s creepy.

3. General Anxiety Disorder or Generalised Anxiety Disorder – which pretty much means someone who excessively worries about everyday things.

4. Every time you press the little button over in the corner, a fairy comes to life. PLEASE HELP SAVE THE FAIRIES.

Xx the Berserker xX