Damien woke to find himself, oddly enough, on a train.
He opened his groggy eyes and was greeted by three strangers sitting in the booth with him, two in front and one beside him. He was next to the window with a table in front of him. He was trapped in. But even if he wasn't, he couldn't escape. He was tied up with rope. Why the hell was he always getting tied up?
Fear kicked in. He started to panic, but he knew he had to get out somehow. The only way was to draw attention to himself. So he started thrashing around and yelling at the top of his lungs in a frantic frenzy. He kicked at the table and wrestled with his restraints. This alarmed his captors.
"H-Hey, what's wrong?" The girl with four pigtails and steampunk clothing asked him, concerned. Her accent was Eastern European, but she looked Asian, possibly Indian. "Please calm down! Why are you screaming?"
"You fucking kidnapped me!" Damien shouted. "What do you expect me to do?"
"Shut up! You're gonna draw attention!" A young East Asian man with long black plaited hair and princely clothing – he was wearing a tiny fucking crown, too – snapped, glancing around nervously.
"Told you we should have broken his legs." The other guy, an olive-skinned goth in a dark green suit remarked in a bored tone. He was devouring a bucket of chicken wings, swallowing down the meat without even chewing.
Damien recognised this monotonous Italian sounding guy as the one who hypnotised him. He gulped and tried to put on a calm face.
"We're not breaking his legs, Cain! That's horrible!" The girl whined. She turned to Damien with a gentle smile. "We're not going to hurt you. We just wanted to talk to you."
"So you kidnapped me? Why?" Damien frowned. "You could have just, y'know, talked to me."
"You wouldn't have listened to us." She said.
Damien nodded. He was calming down with each passing moment.
"What do you want with me?" He asked. "Who are you?"
The girl's face became sorrowful. "Do you really not know who we are?"
"We did dress up like cultish vampires." The goth man, Cain, said.
"But we had to cover ourselves up." The girl said. "We would have been spotted and executed."
What she said caught Damien's attention. Executed? Why would they be executed? Who the fuck were they? Were they like him? No, it was impossible. Satan would have told him if there were others.
Even so, he couldn't shake the feeling that they were important to him.
"Who are you?" He asked more strongly.
The girl gave him another smile. Then she took off her glove, and the princely boy stuck out his tongue, and Cain stood up and exposed his hip-bone. On each of these places were three sixes going in a circle. Damien's breath caught in his throat.
They were antichrists, just like him – his siblings he didn't even know existed.
"My name is Rasa Šimonis, but you can call me Lilith." The girl, Lilith, said. "We all chose codenames, similar to you. The new us."
Lilith gestured towards the prince. "This is Jian Lau, AKA Judas."
Judas huffed and gave a sarcastic wave. He seemed a bit bitter towards Damien. He had no idea why. They'd only just met.
Then she pointed to Cain. "He's Danilo Cremona, AKA Cain."
Cain nodded once to Damien and continued eating his chicken. He must have had a working digestive system since he could actually consume food. This made Damien a bit envious. He wanted to try food, just for the experience, but he'd violently vomit if he swallowed even a peanut or some milk.
"Dad never told me about you." Damien muttered with a frown. "Why did he lie to me?"
"He didn't tell us either until a few years ago." Lilith said. "Let's face it, the idiot's not the best parent in the world."
They all made sounds of agreement. Damien felt hurt that Satan kept them from him. He'd always wondered why there were four children of God, yet he was the only antichrist. He thought he was alone. But the whole time, he had brothers and a sister.
"But again, why did you kidnap me?" Damien asked. "You could have just told me who you were."
"We were worried you wouldn't believe us." Lilith said with a sad sigh. "I mean, it is a little suspicious, three random people coming up to you and saying 'You're our brother'. Plus, we didn't want to draw attention to ourselves."
Damien didn't understand her reasoning, but he nodded anyway. "So, can you untie me now? It's getting a little uncomfortable."
"Sure."
Instead of getting out of her seat, Lilith shoved her finger down her throat. She regurgitated a hornet, and the insect flew over to Damien and cut the rope with its stinger. It then went back to Lilith and she swallowed it back down.
"You could have just untied me the normal way."
"But you're all the way over there." She said.
Damien shook his head with a smile.
After an hour on the train, they finally arrived at their destination. Where this place was, Damien had no idea.
They left the train station and entered a nature reserve. Damien was confused. Were they on a day trip or something? The whole place was deserted. Not a single person was here, not even staff or monitors of the park.
"Where are we?" Damien asked.
"Aoshima." Lilith said.
Damien blinked. "Couldn't you give me a little more information? Why are we in Aoshima?"
"We're here to see the nature reserve, twatbag." Judas said.
Damien's head snapped around to give him a glare. "But I don't know why we're here! You took me all this way to see a few little plants?"
"It's what's in the nature reserve that's important." Cain said. "Just follow us."
Doing as he was told, Damien followed them into the park.
"Do you know why there's no one here?" Lilith asked, smiling with her hands on her hips. "In 2764, a demonic apparition appeared here. A huge skull with horns made of red smoke. The humans thought it was evil, so they stopped coming. What they didn't know was that this place was a portal to Hell."
Further inside they went, until they stopped at a field of black flowers. Inside the flowers Satan sat, cross-legged and grinning. He patted the ground in front of him and all four of the antichrists sat. Damien couldn't help feeling awkward. They were his siblings, but he knew nothing about them apart from their names.
Satan looked at each of them with a gentle smile. "I'm sorry that I kept you all apart. I just figured that if you weren't together, it would be safer for you. If one got killed, there would still be three more." He put his head down. "I don't want to lose any of you. I don't want to go through the death of another child.
"But I was wrong. You're stronger together. I've seen how much you've all grown, and I believe now is the time to allow you to meet."
Lilith huffed and crossed her arms. She seemed angry about something. Come to think of it, she'd had a pissed-off face the whole time they'd been talking to Satan.
"I've lost many children over the two thousand years God and I have been at war, all bearing the same epithets as you all do: the Child of Love, the Child of Rage, the Child of Fear, and the Child of Sorrow." Satan continued. "They always destroyed each other. They succeeded in killing their enemies, but they lost their own lives. I've had to sacrifice my children so many times, and it killed me every ti-"
"Oh my God, it's always about you!" Lilith snapped. "What about the children – our siblings? They died for you! They were only born to fight for you! That's all you care about!"
All four stared at her, shocked. Pain flashed on Satan's face.
"But I-" Satan said, then stopped and lowered his head. "I had no choice."
"Yes, you did!" Lilith said. "You could have fought God. But instead, you created kids – innocent kids who only wanted to make you happy – and made them fight for you."
"Well, if he didn't do that, we wouldn't have been born." Judas piped up, nervous.
"Maybe that would have been a good thing." Lilith said. She turned to her brothers. "I love you three, you know I do. But we shouldn't have been born condemned to battle and die without being able to choose."
She inhaled with a face full of guilt. "If I hadn't been born, my birth-giver father would still be alive. If he hadn't gotten pregnant with me, he wouldn't have gotten ill and died." She raised her head and glared at Satan. "I blame you for that. I blame you for all the pain we've suffered."
The hurt look on Satan's face intensified. He swallowed and nodded. "That's true." He muttered. "I'm sor-"
His sentence was interrupted by a distressed grunt from Damien. Pain consumed his body, his head throbbed. The voice from before was screaming at him, demanding to take control.
As everyone around him panicked, Damien cried out and fainted.
☽☾
Kitty's anxiety was through the roof. It was getting dark and Damien hadn't come home yet.
Pacing in front of the door, he willed himself to calm down. Damien could look after himself. He was strong and smart. No one could defeat him.
Except Dana.
Kitty sighed and played with his hands. What if she had gotten him again? No, they'd proposed a momentary truce. She wouldn't hurt him until their scheduled battle. But someone else could have, someone who knew how to kill an antichrist. He couldn't carry on if Damien died again. It killed him the last time. He had wanted to die, but he also wanted to carry on Damien's duty, the legacy he fought for.
Tears gathered in Kitty's eyes as he watched the door. He hadn't realised how much losing Damien traumatised him. He watched him die. His blood splattered his clothes, skin and hair. He saw the light go out of his beautiful eyes as his head left his body. The image never left him.
He was about to swing the door open and go search for Damien when a cold chill ran through the air. He turned his head and saw an apparition behind him. Kitty froze when he realised who it was.
Jack, his dead brother, floated in front of him, distorted and covered head to toe in blood.
Before Kitty could react, Jack's mouth dropped open, his eyes went black, and he let out a terrible scream. Kitty fell to the floor in horror. After three seconds, Jack vanished.
Kitty couldn't move for a while after he'd left. He sat there, trembling and silently crying. His mind couldn't comprehend what had just happened. Once it sunk in, he gasped and began sobbing. Jack was haunting him. Something clearly upset him enough to come back. Kitty didn't know what this was, and he was too scared to find out.
He wanted to see him again, but not like this.