Persistance of Memory: Prologue

Black. That was all I could see. I couldn’t even feel anything around me, the darkness seemingly paralyzing me. I wondered why I couldn’t hear anything. But maybe that wasn’t so true. The silence was absolutely deafening. It sounded like the loudest noises I had ever heard. Louder than a gunshot, louder than a cannon, louder than the dying screams of the people who had died at my hands, at the hands of my teammates, my friends. Actually, I didn’t know if I could call them friends. For someone my age, who should have been hanging out in a coffeeshop or something, watching the world go by with the usual scorn shown by a man in the cusp of adulthood and adolescence, my companions weren’t what were typical. We were just thrown together. Honestly, if I had been ‘normal’, would I have chosen them as friends? Not likely. However, I would have killed, which wasn’t an idle threat, to hear their voices: The nasal taunts of a mind reader, so easy, so disenchanted, the dementia spilled from a pair of pale lips, sounding like a sweet, cursed lullaby spoken with and Irish accent, the stern commanding tone of an American oracle, ever calm, ever even. I had taken it all for granted, and my reward was silence that couldn’t even be breached by my telekinesis.

I couldn’t see. I couldn’t make myself see, reach out, do anything. I felt like a corpse, eyes unseeing, yet open, the light not touching the retina, which was already glazing over with necrosis. How many times had I seen that sort of reaper’s stare in my short lifetime? I wished my body would react in some way, because the endless, circling ramblings of my mind were almost painful. I would have gasped in relief when I heard an echoing noise, but my voice failed me, as did the rest of my body. The sounds didn’t sound real, more like a persistence of memory, echoing off the walls of the blackness around me, the blackness of my own mind. It was the sound of crunching metal and cries of surprise, shock, regret. That the regret of all our sins going unforgiven could be heard in one gentle movement of air through our windpipes was frightening to me, and I wanted it to stop. It was silenced, but not to my liking. I could hear the gentle drip, drip, drip of blood flowing onto the concrete. What had happened?

Subliminal pricks of light interrupted the black, showing twisted metal and that cursed scarlet, running, running everywhere. My last memories of consciousness. I wanted to be saved from this black prison. I wanted to hear taunts in German, feel the cold presence of a madman, see the stern glare from behind wired glasses, but the fucking black was everywhere. I wanted a guardian angel to show me the proverbial light, to show me anything besides this darkness, which was maddening.

I heard a gentle gasp of surprise shoot across my inky scape of existence. I would have whipped around to find its source, but my body was unresponsive. It wasn’t the echoing memory, but something from elsewhere. And it sounded familiar. My mind worked quickly, which was a surprise considering my state, trying to remember that sound. So much time flew through my brain, and my thoughts were blanketed by white. Pure white. Weiß. God, that seemed like ages ago, but the relic of my memories wasn’t lying.

"Nagi…"

I would have cried out, acknowledging that I heard it, but again, I couldn’t. The voice sounded deeper than I remembered, but that might have been the past handful of years taking its course. Why was he here, in my death-like existence? I could picture his cerulean eyes, clear as a tropical sea. Caring eyes, despite all he had seen, all he had done. Caring, endless sapphire orbs looking down on me, caring despite what I was, what he had been. But it was none other that Omi, and I knew it was more than persistence of memory…..

Part One

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