Blackest of Hearts

While Flug is Away

With Flug gone I got reckless. Staying in the lab for so long looking for something to distract me, I began to feel like an animal pacing its cage. I couldn't force myself to stay cooped up in there, and now there was no one to stop me.

It was actually pretty easy to wander the mansion and stay away from Blackhat. He didn't move around too much and his routine was predictable. At first I was extremely cautious, sneaking everywhere I went, but soon I began to wander normally, realizing that as long as I knew where Blackhat was, I was fine. And if I ever didn't know where he was, and therefore where to avoid, Demencia could easily answer that question for me.

The first day Flug was gone I was barely in the lab. I began to feel pretty confident in my abilities to avoid Blackhat. Maybe a little too confident.

Most of the time I would hang around with Demencia. She showed me a bunch of old inventions Flug had made, like a device that sucked the gravity out of a room; that one was my favorite. The sensation of being absolutely weightless, of merely floating around in the air, was amazing to me. I was so used to constantly having some part of me in contact with something,the floor, a chair, a bed, and so used to feeling every single detail of anything I touched, it was almost exhausting. With such heightened senses it was incredibly difficult to not constantly be distracted or irritated. Demencia grew bored of the anti-gravity device long before I did. After she left I still spent hours messing around with the device just floating listlessly, enjoying the sensory deprivation.

When I was done I didn't put it back on the abandoned shelf where Demencia had found it. I slinked back to the lab and tucked the orb under my pillow instead, convincing myself that no one would notice it was missing. I didn't let myself think too much about it.

Afterwards I went to find Demencia again to see what other fun things she could show me. There weren't a lot more inventions that we could mess around with; apparently Flug and Blackhat kept most of them somewhere Demencia couldn't access. I didn't blame them. I could only wonder how much damage had been caused by Demencia's sporadic recklessness in the past. Demencia suggested opening the demon hole again. I opposed it profusely as my mind flooded with memories of what had happened last time we'd done that. We were searching for something else to do when we stumbled upon an organ.

"Oh that's Blackhat's" Demencia said, noting my interest. "It's not that cool."

She may have thought little of it, but seeing the grand instrument was a welcome sight to me. I used to play piano. Before the accident happened, that is. Thinking about my days before everything changed almost felt like thinking about a whole other life that I'd lived, a life that was simpler and shinier and full of wondrous possibility. My hands itched to press the keys on the organ, yearning for the comforting connection to easier times. Of course, playing an organ was different than playing piano, but I felt like I could figure it out. I reached out a finger to brush against one of the white keys. Then I stopped myself, realizing how foolish it would be to play, how it would surely alert Blackhat to my presence.

"You can play it." Demencia said. She smashed her hands down on as many keys as she could, causing a cocoughanous sound to reverberate through the room. "Blackhat will just think it's me."

I smiled at her and hovered my hands above the keyboard, then pressed them down lightly in the pattern of a chord. The chilled feeling of the smooth keys was welcoming to my fingertips.

"There you go!" Demencia jumped up and down excitedly.

At first I just messed around, trying to remember anything I'd ever learned about music. With my right hand I pitifully plunked the tunes to songs I could remember, then eventually I started bringing my left hand in. The process was clumsy at best, as I tried to both to remember my previous piano skills and figure out how an organ compared. Demencia seemed to like it at least. As soon as I would pick up a tune she would start dancing wildly to it. 5.0.5. joined her after wandering in, attracted to the music, and Demencia pulled him into a partner dance that seemed to be a mix between a swing and an over exaggerated waltz.