Chapter Text
Paxton woke up with a snarl bursting from his lips before his eyes were even fully open. Something was missing. Something was wrong. It felt like someone had ripped his skin off of his body, leaving his internal organs exposed to the world. Blinking in confusion, he mentally checked that he had all body parts attached. Hands, curled into bloody fists on his lap, check. Legs, check. Feet, bare and filthy, check. He didn't know what was missing. Perhaps there wasn't even anything gone. Except that his blood was moving sluggishly through his veins and his skin felt tired. Paxton didn't even realize that he could be aware of his own blood. Then it hit him like a freight train.
His power was gone.
His heart started to beat faster- though his blood did little other than ooze through his body. His power, which had been like singing notes in his head and veins, was just gone. He’d earned that power, when he’d died at the hands of his fool brother. Even the bond at the back of his mind connecting him to said brother felt weak, unstable. His limbs moved clumsily as he pushed himself off the ground, marveling that he actually had to do so. He felt the urge to cry, which he hadn't done since he was seven and he’d been going through armacham tests. He felt weak. Normal. He hated himself for it and he hated whoever had done it to him with so a fierce passion that it pulsed at the back of his eyeballs. Before, his power would have been lifting things from where they sat and tossing them against the wall but now the only things he could move would be the things he could grab and lift with his hands. He clenched his fists at his sides, steeled himself for the walk ahead, and strode out of the blood spotted cell he’d woken in, daring anything that inhabited the jail to attack him.
Like Paxton had actually asked for it out loud, something leaped at him out of the shadows, screeching bloody murder, hands bent to grasp at him. It looked almost human. Paxton swung to the left, letting it sail by. Before it leapt out of arms reach, he shot out a hand, clutched at the back of its tattered shirt and slammed his other fist into its skull with a crunch. Blood spilled over his knuckles but he had no desire to taste it. The blood smelt wrong somehow. He let the human-like thing crumple to the concrete; its body folding like it had no bones. He’d learned that move from watching his brother. Paxton knew how to fight, of course. He had to back in the beginning, when his powers were barely developed and he had controlled a small army of mindless soldiers. They didn't always listen to what he told them. The enemy would fly at him, weapon swinging towards him and he would have to fight to save his life. But that was a long time ago, and Paxton had grown used to simply flinging his foes into the air, feeling them wriggle in his grip, before crushing them. Jumping into their bodies, pressing their spirit down with the sheer ferocity of his own. Now he had to relearn all his old moves, in the time it would take him to get to his brother, or whoever had done this to him. Whichever came first.
How tedious.