#vtk dark glow

[kawai-321]

Feliz Navidad con los vasallos de Winterbell

Se que el 24 tambien era cumpleaños de Driver pero perdi la oportunidad de hacerle un dibujo navideño al personaje.

[kuralione]

VtK Snippet

So this bit of writing was inspired and concocted from a conversation/collaborative idea brewey in #idea-sharing on the VTK discord. Vonn proposed the heartbreaking idea of the whole villain reveal going badly and being afraid of Cassian. And that she witnessed him loose control and go on a mini rampage.

People ran with it (myself, Edgar Allen Hoe, Sleep Deprived Viola, and Jormus). I wrote this based on that, and they deserve credit for some of this writing as my Google doc for writing this was a mess of copy pasted and modified copies of what they wrote.

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Every evening like clockwork, Cassian called her at six—the same time Yuri had called him when she was in America. The phone calls had started a week after the Lampas investigation concluded and had continued uninterrupted in the two months since. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to pick up the phone.

Still, Cassian left voicemails.

And Yuri didn’t delete them.

The villain’s messages were reminiscent of their old check-ins. Mostly, Cassian filled her in about his day. He usually spent several hours training in his personal gym—a perk of being the Vilzone boss—though on some days he’d spar with other Gadam villains. He’d thrown Black Hand out a window last week when the other villain had started a bar fight. Occasionally, he was dragged into leadership meetings by Driver, but the former-boss typically handled Vilzone management. Yuri often knew about all the fights and incidents the Gadam Vilzone was involved in before they were reported in the news.

Turning her phone over to Lampas was the right thing to do, Yuri knew. Cassian was the Gadam Vilzone boss and with how free he was with his words, these voicemails were probably an intelligence gold mine. Despite her better judgement and contrary to the promises she had made to the investigators if the villain Cassian was to contact her, Yuri couldn’t bring herself to go to Lampas. Her phone would be taken and her number would be changed to one her brother hadn’t known by heart. Or Cassian could simply stop calling entirely.

Gangu might be gone, but Yuri wasn’t ready to lose the only thing she had left of her brother.

So these voicemails—these calls—were Yuri’s little secret.

Yuri knows she should let Gangu go. Her little brother was lost the moment he awakened as a villain. Although his heart may still beat, the person he was was dead and gone. Cassian was just another villain—another monster who’s only relevance to her life should be the shadow his presence cast over Gadam as an apocalyptic class threat.

Yet, Yuri couldn’t help but see some of her brother in this monster.

She didn’t want to.

Everything would be so much easier and less complicated if Yuri only saw a monster when Cassian was shown on the news. Because she did, she remembered the day the sky was eaten by shadows, buildings burned with black fire, and Gadam shook as the villain boss’s violent power caused localized earthquakes. Cassian, with his creepy creepy mismatched glowing eyes and signature claws which were so often wreathed in shadows in the pictures, was utterly bone chillingly terrifying. Yuri had seen footage of his rampage. A living nightmare—the kind of villain that awakened once in a generation and Gadam had the misfortune to be cursed with.

Cassian was a monster of apocalyptic proportions.

The villain never asked her to contact him or pick up or respond. He carefully sidestepped the topic. Cassian pointly didn’t talk about a lot of things actually. There was never mention of the rampage, the lies, or his existence as a villain in any meaningful detail. Avoidance was always Gangu’s preferred strategy.

Cassian also called her every day to assure he was eating healthy and so not to worry about him. He complained about Driver and Crow calling him ‘dark duckling,’ and told her about his most recent culinary forays. The most recent of which had ended in disaster and a minor house fire. Apparently Black Hand had bet Cassian couldn’t cook using his fire powers and he’d decided to take the other villain up on the bet.

The person on the other end of the line was painfully alien and familiar. Gangu had awakened before she’d gone to America. The one who had seen her off at the airport and called her everyday had been Cassian. It was just that now Yuri knew and the villain had stopped pretending. Well, Yuri still wasn’t sure how much of this was an act and how much was genuine.

The uncertainty was eating her alive.

It was nearly six and Yuri sat alone on the living room couch, waiting. A minute passed and then another. Then…

Her phone rings.

Once.

Twice.

The phone didn’t ring a third time. Yuri didn’t know what possessed her, but she snatched up her phone and picked up. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t do anything to acknowledge the reality that she’s taken the villain’s call. Yuri just held the phone close and listened.

Cassian recovered quickly from any surprise at not being relegated to voicemail, an inhale and barely noticeable delay the only sign of the effect surprise had on the villain. If Yuri could hear relief in Cassian’s voice or excitement in his tone, she pretended not to notice. Instead she listened in silence as Cassian rambled on. He talked and talked about everything and anything, new stories and repeats of tales he’d told in previous calls.

Where the longest voicemail Cassian had left her was fifteen minutes, their one sided conversation went on for over an hour until the villain ran out of words to say. The silence that stretches between them is deafening—filled with countless unspoken words against the unaddressed backdrop of the horror show their lives had become.

“Good night, G—Cassian,” Yuri said—her first words to him in over three months, since everything fell to ruin—and with a click hung up the phone. Then, the tears fell as Yuri resisted the urge to hurl her phone.

(What a fitting choice of name for this villainous version of her brother: Cassian—excessive force, flames, and power. The opposite of the person Gangu used to be.)

She loved him.

Monster as he was, Yuri still couldn’t help but love him—whatever lies her head told her, her heart screamed that he was still her little brother.