CW: animal abuse, child abuse
Kyle Fredrickson looked down at his hands.
They were not particularly interesting hands. They were boring, even: lightly calloused from his years of work as a bartender, a few freckles on the backs, and some wispy brown hair on the backs of the knuckles. He clenched both hands into a fist and thought back on his day. It had started out relatively normal. He had woken up in his bed with his girlfriend, Skylar, next to him. He got up, prepared some scrambled eggs and orange juice like he did every morning, and played with his toys for a bit. At about 2:30, he walked to work, as he always did, and got there about an hour early for his 4 o’clock shift, as he always did. He spent the next eight hours preparing drinks for the wayward souls of Dahlonega, Georgia, as he always did, and at midnight he closed up the bar and made his way back home, as he always did. Skylar was waiting for him, as she always was.
It was the cat that fucked it all up for him.
Kyle had always been troubled. When he was 7, his parents died in a car crash, and it was the best day of his life. They had abused him every single day, beating and brutalizing him for the smallest mistake or misstep. After this, Kyle bounced around from foster home to foster home, but never managed to last long before his hosts complained about erratic and violent behavior. It culminated when he was 16 and was found “playing” with a squirrel by tearing its legs off as it was alive, just because he was curious what would happen. After that, he learned to keep his rather abnormal desires a secret, and went on to live a seemingly normal life, all the while continuing his “hobby” in secret.
Kyle unclenched his fists and looked up to the sky. It had started to rain, and he let it fall onto his face and run down his body. Small wisps of inky black gas began to seep from his rather normal hands.
Kyle had a room in his apartment that Skylar – that no one – was ever supposed to go in. He called it his “fortress of solitude,” inspired by the comics he used to read as a teenager. Skylar had accepted this little quirk of Kyle’s, probably thinking that he just needed a place to be alone sometimes. She didn’t fully understand Kyle, but she tried to be understanding and supportive. After all, she loved him, and love is about making sacrifices, right? She would’ve been fully content to never enter Kyle’s fortress unless he invited her, but something had started to smell. Thinking he would never notice if she ducked in and threw out the old sandwich or whatever was making the smell, she had opened the door while Kyle was at work. She was horrified, of course, but she wanted to give her boyfriend the benefit of the doubt, so she waited for him to get home to explain himself.
Kyle had found the cat in an alley on his way home from work one day. It had broken its leg and couldn’t run from people. Kyle brought it home, fed it, cleaned it, and brought it to his fortress to play with it. Stupidly, he didn’t take it out when it had died earlier this morning, hoping to play with it a little more tonight. Skylar found the body sprawled out on his desk, gutted and rotting. Kyle had tried to explain, saying that it wasn’t like he was killing people, and that he couldn’t stop himself. She didn’t understand. Her exact words were, “you’re a monster, Kyle.” It wasn’t the words that hurt Kyle the most, it was the look in her eyes. More than angry, or sad, she looked scared. She fled the apartment, and Kyle knew that he would never see her again.
The blackness at Kyle’s hands fell to the ground and started to swirl around his feet. He opened his eyes and looked at the sun. He remembered something about how you weren’t supposed to look right at the sun, but he didn’t care anymore. He thought about how the only thing that ever made him feel really, truly complete was when he was playing with his toys. Someone had noticed the blackness and was coming towards Kyle, asking him what he thought he was doing. Kyle lifted a hand and a tendril of the blackness leapt towards the man. The man instantly collapsed, his heart, brain functions, and atomic motion brought to an instantaneous halt. Kyle looked back at the sun.
The blackness lifted off the ground and traveled along Kyle’s line of sight directly towards the sun. It started building faster, and before long it was blasting into the sky like a gigantic fire hose. It only took three minutes before the entire city was blocked from the sun. The whole state was covered in twelve, and the planet was completely covered in Kyle’s blackness thirty-six minutes after he started. Kyle sighed. He picked up the man he had killed, walked back into his apartment, and started to play with his new toy.
Eighteen Hours Later
Taurus’s body ached like it never had before.
For hours, he and the rest of the Zodiac had been doing little more than damage control. The Leos were saying that the atmosphere had been filled with some sort of smog that was blotting out the sun. Obviously it was a supe, but it took them hours to figure out where it started. In that time, the world had erupted into absolute chaos. Solar power stopped working, shutting down entire power grids. Even worse, though, people were panicking.
Taurus had long known that one of the most dangerous things in the world was fear. He had built his entire brand, his entire life, on making people feel safe. But this… it doesn’t matter how strong you are, you can’t punch the sun back into existence. So, all he could do was help as many people as he could. He had spent hours rescuing people from fires, collapsed buildings, car crashes; anything that could go wrong seemed to have gone wrong. Never in his life had he wished more for something to punch. Of course, then, when he heard the call from Leo that the event began in Georgia, he jumped at the chance to go and stop whatever it was that was causing this.
He heard a cry for help under a pile of rubble. With barely a thought, he dashed over to the pile, found where the person was trapped, and lifted the huge blocks of concrete rubble to help them escape. He made sure they were okay and then took off running again towards the epicenter. The only light was from the streetlamps and the burning fires.
As he ran, he thought of his family. Taurus’s real name was Al Meriweather. He had a wife and two beautiful daughters, Zoe and Kaija. Zoe was tough and sassy, but she was a good kid at heart, and was fiercely protective of her sister. Kaija was a few years younger, and Al thought she was the sweetest little girl in the world. Not many people disagreed. He couldn’t wait to get home and wrap all three of them up in his arms. He thought of the way Zoe would complain but secretly love it, and how Kaija would tell him that he was stinky and needed to shower. He smiled as he ran.
Taurus realized with a start that it was getting even darker now. He looked at the streetlights, and saw that tendrils of darkness were sliding across them. He turned back towards where the epicenter was supposed to be. It almost looked as though the darkness in front of him was shifting and twisting, like some sort of inky fog. He pushed on, plunging into even greater darkness.
He thought about waiting for backup, but he knew that the rest of the Zodiac weren’t going to be able to make it for hours. He had been lucky enough to be close already when Leo sent the location, but the Zodiac were scattered across the world, doing whatever they could. On top of panic, raging fires, and everything else already going on, villain cells the world over were taking advantage of the chaos. Taurus knew that he could end this. He had never met a foe he couldn’t stop.
His power was a simple one. It made him strong and tough, able to move things that no regular human could and take extreme punishment. Virgo had once quipped that his skin was as tough as his heart was soft. She had meant it as an insult, but he hadn’t taken it that way.
The gimmick behind his power, though, was that it got stronger as he did. The more he honed his body, the stronger and tougher he became. That might not seem that special, but it grew exponentially. When he had been at his prime a few years ago, he could take tank blasts to the face and not even flinch. He had let himself go a little bit in the past few years, but he was still able to take just about anything anyone had ever thrown at him.
And so, Taurus ran on. He couldn’t see more than five feet in front of him, but the sensors and GPS in his suit worked perfectly fine. Before long, he came upon an apartment building. It was small and unremarkable, but Leo’s location ping told him that this was the place. He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and charged in.
Kyle jumped as a bang came from downstairs. Someone had found him? That shouldn’t be possible. His darkness covered the ground for blocks. Nonetheless, he put down his tools and stepped away from his toys. He had amassed a dozen or so of them by now, but they would still be here when he got back.
Kyle slinked out the front door of his apartment and to the top of the staircase. A man, middle-aged, black, and very heavily muscled, was looking in each apartment as he came up the stairs. He hadn’t seen Kyle yet, the darkness serving to obscure his vision. Kyle didn’t know how the man had found him, but didn’t particularly care. All he saw was another toy.
He quietly stepped back into his apartment, waiting for the man to approach. He left the door open on purpose, hoping that it would lure him in. Sure enough, when the man got to Kyle’s apartment, he walked in and began to look around. Kyle stepped around the corner and blasted him with a beam of darkness from his hands.
Before Taurus could react, he was hit with a blast of darkness. At first, nothing happened. It felt like mist landing on his skin. But when he tried to move towards the other man, it felt like he was trying to move his limbs through honey.
And then the pain hit.
It was like nothing he has ever experienced before. The pain was so intense that his vision became a blur of blinding white. Through a haze of agony, he vaguely heard the other man stammer out the words “how are you still alive?” before he was hit with another, even more intense wave of pain. He collapsed to his hands and knees, panting and gasping for air. He looked up at the other man and saw that he was terrified. Taurus knew at once that this man was the cause of everything.
He staggered to his feet.
Kyle cursed and backed away. How could this man be surviving his kill beam? No one, nothing, had ever survived it before. He put both hands together and blasted even more darkness at him, but the man staggered to his feet and began to approach him. Kyle cursed again and kept blasting the man, backing further and further back.
He felt the wall behind him and terror formed a lump in his throat. He had to find a way to stop this man, or he was going to at the very least go to prison. In a panic, he tried to change around what his beams were stopping. He tried motion, electricity, chemical processes, he even tried to stop thought, which he had never done before and didn’t even know if it was possible. Nothing worked. The man just kept approaching.
The man was nearly upon him now. Kyle tried to run to the side, but the man reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder and threw him to the ground. Kyle tried to scream, but he felt a pair of giant hands close around his throat.
Taurus continued, barely even knowing what he was doing. All he could think was that he had to stop the pain. The pain was blinding him, killing him, and it was all he could do to maintain consciousness as his body seemed to act on its own. He felt his hands grabbing something warm and writhing in his grip, and he thought again of his daughters and how they would try to wriggle away from him when they play-wrestled. Then, he always let them escape, but he somehow knew that he couldn’t this time.
After what felt like hours, the writhing stopped. Soon after, the pain began to subside. Taurus looked down and saw with horror that he was choking the man, and that he wasn’t moving. He checked his pulse and felt one, although weak. He pressed the distress button on his armband and tried to stagger to his feet once again.
Instead, he fell.
Taurus tumbled to the ground, gasping for air. The pain was gone, but his body didn’t seem to be working like it should. His arms and legs were weak and numb, his lungs felt like they couldn’t inflate, and he couldn’t feel his own heartbeat. The scariest thing, though, was the quiet.
An animal never truly experiences quiet. Even in the depths of space, one can hear your blood rushing through your skull, your heart pounding against your ribs, the creak of your bones and joints. But Al heard nothing. He crawled towards the open window in the apartment that he hadn’t been able to see before. He dragged himself up by the sill and looked out and up to the sky. As the sun began to peek through the smog for the first time in nearly a day, Al Meriweather thought about hugging his daughters, and looked at the sun before his vision went black.
The Day of Dark Sun was the single greatest tragedy in human history. Beginning on July 17th, Kyle Fredrickson, later codenamed Apophis, used his power to block out the sun for seventeen hours. Nearly ten million people died worldwide in the ensuing chaos, including Albert Meriweather, the first Taurus of the Zodiac. Taurus sacrificed himself to defeat Apophis, ending the Day and saving the world.
The Day of Dark Sun set the stage for the adoption of superhero groups into governments and law enforcement, and was the direct impetus for the founding of ASALEA.
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