Day Two: Early Morning

[Belle Hibiki]

Later that night...

Endless stars, pitch black night; silence had again returned to the forest on this side of midnight, only disturbed by the occasional sputtering of the fire as it desperately tried to fan itself back into a blaze. Kid Buu nudged one of the rocks surrounding the campfire with his foot - his only foot - and softly sighed. As the fire died, the ruddy light slowly diminished. Good, he thought. It had been crazy to start a fire in the first place, never mind to let it last so long. In their state they could not afford to make those kinds of mistakes. It was too risky.

Inside Buu's mind, two sides were warring for dominance, two endless snakes that devoured each other's tails. One tried to accept his new weaknesses, the fear, and the other struggled to return to the way he was before, because for now he was tamed. Or was he? Didn't his new abilities and perceptions give him the power to do whatever he wanted? Hell, if he really wanted to he could probably wine and dine his alliance's plum-haired, token woman, and be reasonably sure that he would be making her breakfast the next morning, too. Without Dunhan, he was near powerless to express himself, not quite like a newborn, but close enough.

But did anyone need to express themselves when they could take whatever they wanted? The question preoccupied his mind as he looked down at Violet's slumbering form. For a human woman, he had to admit that she really was a beauty, quite worthy of the flower that was her namesake. She had taken the first watch, and he was taking the second, and she was in a deep sleep, unaware of the majin's appraising eyes. Her pale skin caught the light of the flames, painting her a faintly exotic, dancing color of yellow and orange. Her lips were slightly parted. She was unaware.

The gun felt good in Buu's hand. It felt like taking control. He was a majin, and she was a human. She would never be able to survive what was to come. She would suffer. What he did would be a mercy.

He steadied himself with his lower set of arms as he lowered the gun against the woman's temple.

She was unaware.

He pulled the trigger.

~+~+~+~+~

The corroded metal cell that he had been thrown into was small. Perhaps two meters in height, width and depth, it was one of many that Buu had seen as he was dragged down the hall, before being thrown into the dark recesses of nameless, numberless confinement. That day had been like many others, full of nothing but a few scraps of food shoved through a tantalizing slit of light for a mere moment. Buu could have dissolved and slipped through it. He didn't. He had ceased to care about anything since being sucked into that dark, ragged hole in the universe; before he had been left drifting in space for what felt like an eternity.

He heard the shuffling of shaggy feet in the hall outside. One of those nightmare-riding apes was coming - his jail master, no doubt, dragging with him the burdensome weight of a few more scraps of food for someone other than himself. Buu didn't need the food, he had been henkaing the debris in his cell into legs of mutton for weeks, but he made no effort to correct their routine. The scraps were disgusting, but the look of anguish on the face of the Red Stallion as he fed the food into his cell made the meal sweet.

The lock of his cell slid aside with a heavy, tortuous click. The door slowly swung open, blasting his eyes with light from beyond. He snarled, shielded his eyes, spat like a snake, and screamed cuss words in his mind that he couldn't give voice as the dimly perceived silhouette of a man glided into the doorway and filled the portal.

"Hello, child." A voice, dimly perceived, seemed to come from the shape, although Buu had trouble pinning it down. "My name is Vapor, the leader of the Red Stallions.

"I must confess that I'm surprised to see that you are still alive. Any ordinary creature would be dead having floated in space for as long as you did, not to mention stomaching our cooking. I've had it looked into as to what you are, but nothing has come up. You are nothing, and should not exist." The figure stepped into the cell and kneeled to avoid smacking his head against the ceiling. "And yet here you are, alive for weeks in one of our cells without so much as a whimper. That's when I realized what you were.

"A survivor, just like the rest of us. Nowhere to call home, no one to call your own." The majin's eyes glared up at him and his crimson irises flashed, but he had told all the leader needed to know with that one look. Damaged. "So, why not join us? I promise you nothing, give you nothing, but the ability to take what you want whenever you need it, to spit in the face of those who abandoned you to that cold Hell. To enjoy the spoils of victory."

As if reading Buu's mind, Vapor lowered his head slightly and said, "After all...

"There's nowhere else for you to go."

~+~+~+~+~

The fire coughed and sent up a fresh wave of cinders into the air. They vanished like short-lived fireflies into the darkness, snuffed out by the cold, unforgiving air. The logs gave a final feeble retch before collapsing, buryinf the snubbed flame beneath their weight and collapsing the camp into darkness once again.

The gun's electronic display shone quietly, blue luminous letters glowing against the black.

Please disengage the safety before firing!

Buu slowly eased up the pressure on the trigger and lifted the gun away from Violet's head. He was shaking, shaking! He turned around and, using his stretched lower arms as improvised legs, made his way back over to his seat on a log, the gun's display dancing aqua light across the face of his comrades, safe and sound in their slumber, with not a hair disturbed on their heads. For now.

In the silence, in the darkness, in the black, he continued his watch.