northwind_gale | One and Not the Same-Chapter One!

Well, no one seems to have reviewed my last chapter...I think it's because one of three things:

I posted it on the same day as the new 5D's episode, so lack of attention
I haven't figured out how to allow anonymous users to post, since a lot of my friends aren't on LJ
The story is worse than I thought. D:

Anyway, I seem to have gotten a decent response on FF.net, so I'll try posting the story here one more time before putting it there again.

REPOSTED BECAUSE LJ IS BEING A BITCH WITH THE CUTS. IF THEY DON'T WORK AGAIN, I'M GOING TO BED AND THE STORY WILL JUST BE OUT THERE NAKED.

One and Not the Same

A Yu-Gi-Oh!5D’s fanfiction

Chapter One-Guilty Premonition

Day XX, Year 20XX

The event that I wish to record...no...I probably shouldn't start with that. It truly started several months prior, with an announcement from my wife, Yoko.

She was pregnant.

Like any new father, I was overwhelmed. Shock and happiness flowed through me, numb to everything but that news. I was even oblivious to the fact that my left arm, the one that held the mark, was burning.

If you sought out this journal, you most likely know what the mark I refer to is. If you stumbled across this by accident, I shall explain for you, as understanding of this mark is crucial to understand my anxiety over this event.

Long ago, in Peru, during the time of such tribes as the Inca, there was a group called the People of the Stars. They worshipped a red star, which they considered their god. The head priest, the Dragon Star King, was the one who communicated with it. Legends state that when evil threatened to rise and corrupt the world, the Dragon Star King prayed to the Red Star for a solution. The Red Star responded by sending its spirit form down to Earth, the Crimson Dragon. The Crimson Dragon then sealed the evil into the earth, creating the patterns known today as the Nazca Lines.

It was then said that the Crimson Dragon split its power into five marks that were granted to five chosen warriors. These five marks represented body parts of the whole dragon: the head, tail, wings, and two claws. When those five warriors banded together, they would be able to call on the Crimson Dragon's power once more, for the inevitable return of the evil sealed within the Nazca Lines. The marks would pass down, from warrior to warrior, across the expanse of time. These warriors were called Signers, and they would stand on guard for eternity, like sentinels, waiting for the evil to break free. Each warrior was granted a dragon spirit servant of the Crimson Dragon, which would follow the marks through time, changing form to suit the ever-changing styles of battle.

It seems strange for a scientist like me to set so much store by ancient myths. However, the burning mark I refer to is indeed one of the Signer marks-and to make it even odder, it is the head mark, the one that leads and controls the others. As a result of being the said leader, I often received disturbances that correlated to not only events that triggered nearby, but events that happened from afar. It had particularly started burning more frequently ever since I had started the Momentum project- the project that was potently the most important project of my career. I had always dreamed of finding a more efficient form of energy, and I had found it in the energy in the Signer Marks, which appeared to be a more watered down and weakened form of the energy produced by the Crimson Dragon. It was mere innate curiosity at first that drew me towards it...now it's something that I am starting to regret. I feel as if I'm messing with something sacred...something that should have been well left alone. Luckily, it seems that I am one of the last remaining Signers, judging by the way three of the other Dragon Spirit Servants have somehow come to me...It still baffled me the way they had now taken the forms of children's playing cards. It's almost amusing to a point-there were plenty of hi-tech weapons out there, weapons that could decimate a city within seconds, and yet they chose to become pieces of laminated cardboard that were more likely to end up under a child's bed than destroy a town. However, it does make things easier-less people get curious if one carries around a card rather than some sort of laser gun or the like...but back to Momentum. Seeing as I was the remaining Signer, there would be less energy around to draw from...or so I reasoned. Momentum was relatively calm, although it did have some of its wild moments, which would cause my mark to react, even if I wasn't around it. I worried, and still worry, constantly about what would happen once the Signers of the new generation were born...I didn't know how close I was to discovering what.

The first unnerving event happened some months after that. My mark was burning more severely than usual, which was something I had been getting used to-Momentum had started acting up more often the past few months. I only note this seemingly unimportant time because of what happened after that: Yoko claimed she had stopped feeling the baby.

Yoko was someone who's instinct I never questioned. When it came to the emotions of others, she was never wrong. She had been more in tune with that unborn baby than anyone else before, so when she hinted that there might have been a miscarriage happening right at that moment, I took no chances. I took her straight to the hospital.

What happened there was something I never expected.

The unborn babe appeared to be perfectly fine. On top of that, the doctor exclaimed that there must have been something wrong with our first sonogram-for there was not just one baby in Yoko's womb-there were two!

I should have been pleased with the news. We had thought that we had lost our only child, only to find that we had more joy than we expected. And I was happy, I truly was, but...a part of me worried. Sonograms are very reliable tests, it was near impossible to have something gone awry without anyone noticing. And Yoko's instincts, as I said before, were never wrong. For her to get something wrong about that baby...those babies, now...was impossible for me to imagine. Something had happened within the womb, I was sure of it. But what?

The only thing I could associate with the strange occurrence was my mark burning at the time...but Signer marks never caused anything, they only reacted to what happened. The mark could have never caused the one child to become two...

I received a possible answer on the way home from the hospital from the Godwin brothers-two rising scientists in my department. The older, Rudger, was my right-hand man, the younger, Rex, was my intern. I respected both of them, for they had brilliant minds. Rudger called to tell me that Momentum had experienced an odd phenomenon-it had briefly rotated in the opposite direction, a negative rotation. He commented with amusement that his younger brother had been scared witless by it, saying that the energy felt like it was the opposite of Momentum's energy. He said that it felt harsh and destructive, unlike the warm gentle feeling Momentum usually produced. Rudger dismissed that as a childish, unscientific thought. I thought otherwise.

I was particularly worried about how Rudger seemed intrigued with the negative energy. He wanted to investigate it further-for scientific reasons of course. But, I was afraid. I feared that this was evidence that I had indeed been tinkering with things that should have been left alone. I didn't want to have to face that. It was easier to ignore it. I refused to let him study it.

Of course, I denied that I feared facing my mistakes. I instead found a different reason to set myself against discovering the negative rotation. I reasoned that it had been the negative rotation that had caused my mark to burn so severely, and that the negative rotation had something to do with what happened within Yoko's womb.

On the day that Yoko had gone into labor, my mark burned more violently than ever before. I couldn't suppress the suspicion that the events happening to the pregnancy were some sort of premonition of horrible events to come. I was worried that either Yoko or the babies would not make it. I traced the events that happened backwards-the babe's apparent splitting into two, the mark burning, the negative rotation of Momentum, Momentum's wild periods, the creation of Momentum itself, my experimenting with the power of my mark...

It had all started with me.

If either Yoko or the babies died...or, heaven forbid, all three of them...it would be all my fault.

It had been my ambition, my curiosity, my meddling with things that I knew, in the deep recesses of my mind, that I should not have touched...

And then I tried to convince myself that it wasn't my fault. That was the scientist's job, wasn't it? To find out everything about everything, to venture where no one had ventured before? It was all in the name of duty.

And then I became disgusted with myself, trying to run away from my faults. And then I would trace the events backwards once more...it was an endless cycle of guilt, fear, and desperation. It was the most horrifying time of my life, waiting for the babies to come.

I had needed not worry about Yoko. She met my anxious face flushed with exhaustion and joy. The babies had been delivered safely. Two healthy, perfect boys, she said, our two little stars.

I smiled, amused that she had gone along with the star motif I had suggested for the twins' names. She knew that as a Signer, I tended to be a little bit of a star enthusiast.

I let my anxiety melt away at that moment. Everything was fine, perfectly fine...the babies were born safe, Yoko was alive, and my mark had stopped burning. For that one moment in time, I felt like a normal father, happy simply for the fact that the family was growing, that there was someone new to love in my life.

That made it much harder for me when the (literal, of course) bombshell was dropped.

The doctor came in. Our babies were perfectly healthy, he said. However, there was something not quite right about them...

We demanded to see them...they rolled in the bassinet, the two boys sleeping in it side by side.

Both babies were wrapped in a soft blue blanket, their hair hidden under the wrappings. Unwrapping them, I found they had inherited my spiky black hair, with vivid stripes of their mother's golden yellow. They both awakened when I touched them, revealing bright blue cobalt eyes, like the evening sky. My first thought was that they looked breathtakingly alike.

My second thought was that they looked completely different.

Ryuusei, the first-born, seemed to have a fleshier body, which made him look slightly stronger and appear to have a more physical presence than his younger brother. I wasn't surprised-apparently this happened a lot with identical twins; one twin got more nutrients than the other twin and developed more. His eyes were a slightly darker shade of cobalt blue, and they lacked any sort of glow or luster that most eyes had, they almost looked...dead. That didn't mean they had lost any intensity, however, in fact, they seemed almost fixated on me, unwavering. It was eerie and unnerving.

The younger twin, Yuusei, looked smaller and frailer, weighing an entire pound less than his brother. His eyes were a lighter cobalt blue, and unlike his brother's they held little flecks of light, like tiny stars. His eyes seemed to bore right through me, as if they could see all my faults and fears-I felt naked just being seen that way. It was just as unnerving as his brother's stare, except where Ryuusei's had aroused physical fear, Yuusei's had shaken my very core. It seemed that although Ryuusei had the stronger body, Yuusei had the stronger spirit.

I unwrapped Yuusei's blanket fully, and picked him up, examining his body for any sort of sign of illness or injury. I found none. What unnerved me was how Ryuusei's stare seemed to change-his eyes were still fixated on me, but now their intensity had been increased tenfold. It was if I had been caught in some sort of frigid glare...

But babies didn't glare...they were much too innocent to feel hatred...or even know of hatred in the first place...right?

I was brought out of my thoughts with a shuddering gasp from Yoko, who was pointing at the wall behind me. I looked-and I almost dropped Yuusei in shock.

I think Yuusei must have sensed my distress, for at that point he began to cry-and exactly when he did so, I was again trapped by Ryuusei's glare-I call it a glare now, because there was no more doubt at that point that he was glaring. For a baby just born from the womb to feel such hatred towards his father...what was happening?

I gently placed Yuusei back in the bassinet and picked up Ryuusei gingerly, trying to avoid his eyes. I took a quick glance at the wall and paled-it had happened with him too. Placing Ryuusei back down next to his brother, I turned to Yoko, still hearing Yuusei's quiet sobs and feeling Ryuusei's glare at my back. We were both frightened. Something that happened and we didn't know what was going on, what we had gotten pulled into. All we knew was that...

...neither Ryuusei nor Yuusei had a shadow.

Fudo Yuuen-hakase

Momentum Lead Scientist

End

So, critique/bashing anyone?