#and then ritsu rounds the corner with a book about ancient knowledge and byrgenwerth

[spoonie-ritsu]

yall know i cant resist

another bloodborne au fic thing featuring everyone’s favorite telepath based on details from this lovely lil thing

They came for him in the night, unexpected.

He didn’t see his parents in the house before they dragged him away, kicking and screaming, unaware that it was his last chance to ever see them alive again. The remaining villagers stayed put in their huts. No one dared to come outside and help him. He was alone.

The cathedral he found himself in was large, winding and unfamiliar, twisting and turning in ways that made little sense to him, but the followers of the church had no trouble navigating the bleary corridors. He was shaking, both from the immense chill in the air and his own overwhelming fear.

He met the leader of the church that night - the Church of Mensis - a bizarre and terrifying man named Micolash, who erratically recounted to him myths and legends of higher beings and something about stars or cosmos or whatever. He didn’t understand a single word to pass his lips, and frankly, he didn’t want to. The man sounded absolutely, irredeemably insane.

But then he said something about him being “chosen”, “gifted sight by the Great Ones”, and suddenly he felt ill as his situation became apparent.

For whatever reason, these people thought him important to their beliefs. They wanted to use him. And he was powerless to refuse. He had always, always been powerless to refuse.

-*-

Time slipped away, like sand between his fingers, like the little remnants of sanity he had left. It had quickly become apparent that they were right about him after all.

He wasn’t powerless, not completely. In fact, he possessed a peculiar ability, something he had only ever heard if spoken in stories or song. Something the Church of Mensis honored him for, and something he himself could only see as a miserable curse cast upon him by whatever cruel deity that watched over them all.

He hadn’t even noticed before they told him so, but he could see things that nobody else could. Dark, slimy creatures that watched them from the shadows, spider-like beasts that clung to buildings and observed with vacuous eyes. Eyes, eyes, eyes, everywhere he looked there were a dozen more looking back, in the walls and on the floor and on the head of the roasted boar that was served for dinner that night. Watching, watching, he was always being watched, his every move carefully followed, leaving him so jumpy and paranoid that he could hardly sleep a wink at night.

He heard sounds, sometimes. Most common was the strange, disembodied cry of a baby, echoing through the forest and the halls of the church. It disturbed him greatly at first, moreso that none of the church members seemed to even acknowledge the sound, but after a while it simply became another part of his life. Just background noise, like static. On more rare occasions, he could hear music- and that, he actually enjoyed. It was so quiet in the church, deathly quiet, and the gentle plucking of strings and keys would soothe his frazzled mind. Although it was by no means an ordinary song. It stuck to him as he slept, filling his dreams with stars and the silhouettes of horrifying beasts against a blood red moon.

They had him read tomes filled with nonsense, ancient writings, and the words filled his head with cotton. Eventually, it got to him. The words started to make sense, and it didn’t scare him as much as he knew it should.

Micolash would test him, in his own convoluted ways. He said his ability had something to do with Insight; the capacity of a person’s mind to hold the knowledge of the “Great Ones”. The tomes they had him read contained snippets of this knowledge, and as he continued to process the information, his Insight increased. He gained a new power.

He hadn’t meant to do it, he really hadn’t. He had finished his book and something felt wrong, a squirming sensation in his head, the scent of iron in his nose. He closed his eyes to stave off the ache that grew behind them and for an instant he slipped away. Fallen asleep from exhaustion, he thought. He jerked back to attention, shaking the fatigue from his head, and as he looked around, the church members that had been observing him were all lying on the floor, writhing and clawing at their heads, trapped in a horrible nightmare.

A nightmare of his own creation.

Micolash had applauded him, as he collapsed in horror of what he had done. He had grown powerful enough to create his own dreams, the man explained, and he had implanted one such dream into the minds of those around him. He asked, in a feeble, shaky voice, how he could stop it, how he could free them from the dream he’d accidentally forced upon them.

Micolash had looked at him blankly for several moments before erupting in laughter. “Free them? Why free them from such a wonderful gift?!”

He clutched his head in his hands and cried, for the first time in years.

-*-

Not long after his 19th birthday, Micolash came to him with a wide grin, a glint in his eyes, and he was immediately suspicious.

They led him to a room he had never been to before, a hidden room at the very bottom of the cathedral, deep underground. The cold chilled him to the bone, to the point that even his blood felt frozen stiff in his veins, making every step forward a laborious effort. Micolash seemed excited about whatever was behind that inconspicuous door.

Micolash opened the door. He recoiled instantly as a terrible stench hit him, taking a step back in horror as he recognized the scent of rotting flesh.

It was a long room, almost a corridor, lined wall to wall with corpses, all seated in chairs with some sort of strange metal cage on their heads. At the end of the room, a single chair sat empty. Waiting. Watching. The walls had eyes.

Micolash ushered him inside before he could run away. Every inch of him was screaming to get out, to fight his way out of the man’s grip and run far away, away from him and the Church of Mensis and the confines of the village that had previously been his home. But his blood was frozen, and he couldn’t move.

Micolash was rambling on, as usual. His words rang hollow in his ears. Not hollow enough to obscure the meaning behind them, unfortunately.

He wanted him to create a dream. A nightmare. A nightmare he would project onto the entirety of Yharnam. Every living thing for miles would see his dream, the nightmare he would create and maintain from this lonely room full of death and forgotten dreams.

He felt sick to his stomach. This was their plan all along - this was their end goal from the start, the purpose of all of the tests and training they put him through for nearly a decade. This was the pinnacle of their hard work. He felt powerless all over again in the hands of Micolash of the Church of Mensis, who steered him forward and sat him down in the dusty old chair at the end of the room and brandished the cage he had been carrying in a satchel at his side. The look in his eyes was the look of a broken man, a man who had nothing to lose and everything to gain as he lifted the cage up and over his head and placed it down so it rested on his shoulders.

The eyes grew lips to laugh at him as he screamed. It hurt, more than anything he’d ever felt before, it burned his eyes and his ears, he heard the voices of the corpses on the wall shouting at him, telling him to accept his fate, to play the role forced upon him. His frozen blood began to boil over, and he frantically tried to reach for his face, to take the cage off of his head, to wipe the blood out of his eyes, but it was hard to coordinate his movements when all he could see were the cosmos and thousands of eyes and the red moon that loomed over it all.

Beneath it all, he felt it. The few, fleeting pieces of his conscience, his personality. The real him, the real Momozou Takenaka, who was sick and tired of being used by this crazy bastard and his crazy church and he wasn’t going to sit back and let them take his life away. Not anymore. Not ever again.

In a single moment of clarity, he grasped the metal cage in his hands and yanked it off of his head, flinging it directly at Micolash, who was too slow to deflect the object as it flew straight into his forehead, knocking him to the ground. He didn’t stick around to see if the man was unconscious; he bolted from the chair, from the room, messily wiping blood off of his face and ignoring the twinkling lights in his peripheral vision as he made for his escape.

He knew where the exit was. He had always known, known it was there but just out of his reach. Not anymore. Not ever again.

He never slowed down, not even for a second, not as members if the church chased after him, grabbing for his hair or his clothes, never quite reaching him. He was too fast, or perhaps he appeared to them slightly slower than he really was, appearing in their sights a second behind his actual location. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was his freedom from this damned place.

And he made it. It was something he had dreamed of for so long, and it almost made him angry how easy it was to push open those tall double doors and dash out into the outside world, taking in a deep lungful of fresh air, feeling more alive than he had in years. He was close to laughing as he left that world behind, giddy in his escape, almost manic, the freedom so overwhelming that he kept on running and running and running, far into the night.

-*-

“Hang on... don’t go out there yet. There’s someone there.”

“Someone? A person?”

“I think so. But they’re covered in blood. Doesn’t look good. I wouldn’t trust it.”

“What if they’re injured? I could help them.”

“It could just as easily be a trap.”

“I can’t just walk away if there’s someone that might need help.”

“Hah... all right, if you insist. I suppose that’s what I’m here for.”

Shigeo Kageyama nodded to himself before stepping out onto the roof of the old farm building. He didn’t really know what to expect when he rounded the corner, but from what Hanazawa had described, it wouldn’t be pretty.

What he saw, though... what he saw there nearly broke his heart in two.

There was a young boy there - couldn’t be much older than him - dressed in modest clothing that was, indeed, drenched in blood, though whose it was he couldn’t say. There was a worrying amount of dried blood coating the bottom half of his face and neck, smeared as though he had tried to wipe it away but to no avail. He had his legs drawn tight against his chest, backed into a corner, rocking back and forth with a vacant expression on his face. Whatever he had been through must have traumatized him.

Shigeo felt a sharp pang in his chest. This was someone that definitely needed help.

He approached the stranger slowly, not wanting to startle him, aware that Hanazawa was watching closely from behind. “Hello? Are you hurt?” he asked gently, leaning down slightly to get closer to eye level.

For about a minute the boy did not respond, staring into nothingness, but eventually he did turn in his direction, wide eyes struggling to focus. “Huh...?” he mumbled, voice hoarse and strained, overused. “Who... who are you?”

Shigeo smiled softly, pleased to hear him speak. “My name is Shigeo. It’s okay, I only want to help you,” he said, soft and reassuring. He tilted his head. “What is your name?”

The boy stared at him for several seconds, openly suspicious. “Help,” he repeated plainly, like he didn’t believe it. He looked away, out towards the forest. “You have no idea what I am, do you? Your friend back there has the right idea. You should leave.”

Shigeo’s eyes widened slightly, caught off guard. How had he managed to see Hanazawa? Had he heard their exchange earlier?

Well. It didn’t matter. Shigeo didn’t feel threatened in the slightest.

“Whatever you are... I’m sure you’re not as terrible as me.”

The boy’s head whipped back around, surprised, and tensed like he was preparing to be attacked, but Shigeo just sat there, calm as ever, posture relaxed.

Then, as an afterthought, “Oh, and Hanazawa is a good person, once you get to know him.”

Unexpectedly, the boy laughed at that statement. It was a quick chuckle, a reaction more than an expression of humor, but it made Shigeo’s heart swell in his chest. Perhaps... he could save this person after all.

Hanazawa walked up behind them, threaded cane resting on his shoulder, hip cocked in that familiar defiant stance. He said nothing, simply emerging from the shadows as his cover had been blown from the start. Still, he stood protectively at Shigeo’s side, eyes trained on the bloodied boy in front of them.

The boy looked between the two of them carefully. He lowered his head as he spoke up again, dangerously quiet. “Are either of you... associated with the Church of Mensis?”

Shigeo scrunched his nose as he searched his brain for anything that sounded similar, but he came up with nothing. He shot a glance to Hanazawa, who seemed just as confused as he was. “The Church of Mensis? I might’ve heard something like that before... are they related to the Healing Church?” Hanazawa asked for the both of them.

The boy sighed, shaking his head. “So you aren’t, then. That’s... good. That’s good,” he trailed off, and he suddenly seemed very tired as his guard finally began to drop. Shigeo figured he deserved some rest after... whatever he had been through.

“There is a place in Yharnam that is safe from beasts - the Oedon Chapel. It’s where we’ve been staying- oh, and my brother is there, too. A kind man named Reigen looks after the place. We can take you there,” he explained, offering a hand to the boy, silently praying that he would trust them and come along, that he would let him help.

The boy looked to the hand, then up at him, then at Hanazawa, then at the hand again. He brushed a few strands of hair from his eyes, ignoring the blood on his face as he slumped forwards and sighed. “I guess I’ve got nothing to lose,” he mumbled before reaching out and grasping Shigeo’s hand. He was so cold that Shigeo nearly jumped at the contact.

He smiled, regardless, and helped the shaking boy to his feet. He was shocked to find that he towered over both him and Hanazawa, though he looked frail, like a twig that threatened to snap at any moment. He tightened his grip, a silent promise to support him as they began the journey home.

Hanazawa led the way, fighting off whatever beast crossed their path. The walk was quiet, for the most part. The boy wasn’t up for conversation.

As they entered the city, he spoke again, with less bite than before. “Momozou,” he said, looking down at Shigeo from beside him. “That’s my name. Momozou,” he repeated with an awkward little smile of his own.

“Momozou... it’s nice to meet you.”

“Heh... you too, Shigeo.”