Fanfiction-Angst WITH Prose!??! NO WAY

It’s happening again. He freefalls to his unlikely death, and he thinks it is for the first time.
The last feeling Chrno has as he plunges solidly is a detached fascination with everything around him. He sees the ground that is rising so indiscriminately, that swells like earthen waves, like some small thing that grows larger and larger, pregnant with bruising clarity and –

the promise of eternity.

He can smell daisies, and newborn leaves, and children playing, even as the world forces itself on him, he can smell it, and he can see it. His vision is like some burning thing, so clear that phantom flames lick at the front of his skull seeping into his mind. The smells that intrude his nostrils are poignant, they strike some chord within him and make him want to live, damn it, live and not die like this, and make him want to claw his way out of this nightmare. Chrno thinks that this must be a nightmare, no, it is a nightmare, and he smells the underlying decay of leaves, and infernal maggots crawling through some once-living thing and –

he breathes it in.

“There was only ever one way to end it,” Says Rosette, and he can see her too, superfluous blue eyes and all. But she smells different too, like musty dust and cigarettes. And Chrno looks down –still falling, (will it ever end?) sees a blue lake with wavering reflection of what is happening, and it is o’erneath him, and he thinks that and laughs manically, and he can hear his laughs clearly through the roar of living wind that threatens to swallow up even his thoughts.

Things look different in the lake: There is no Rosette, only some dead thing, mottled with decay, that is clinging lovingly to him. And the thing's eyes are not blue like crystals, they’ve been red all along: strangely compelling, sadly large, and unfortunately very dead.

He laughs like screaming: he always laughs when it comes to this part, more from habit than anything else, (when in doubt, laugh) though Chrno will wake up soon, and what happens here will disappear, like ether, like a head rush. And it is always, always, the first time for him. Later, Chrno will remember something about “vertigo”, and the living wind will blow through the holes in his memory. Now though, he swears silently that he’s felt something like this before, but not in life. And he –

screams like laughing, and it is hysterical, frantic; he screams for the first/eighth time as the ground finally stops rising with a solemn thud.

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A clawed hand broke through the filmy, inky blackness, and a small boy woke with a start. More from habit than anything else, he added a little wail when he realized that he had had a nightmare, the shallow sheet of sweat that glanced his body was proof enough. Without thinking, he automatically thrashed off his thin blanket, balled it up like a piece of paper, and chucked it across the room, where it made an intimate whoosh of protest. He hurriedly looked around. Where…? He –he didn’t know where he was! An irrational sort of fear gripped him when he glanced up, and saw no stars, no moon, only –oh. The boy, brain still mush from sleep, propped himself against the bedpost, and suddenly he was Chrno. Suddenly he was the one-hundred-year old devil, purified and pacified, incarnate; Suddenly he was the fourteen-year-old boy, mind in turmoil from a simple nightmare. Suddenly he was the Magdalene Order’s steely burden, Rosette Christopher’s shy friend, and the world’s sheepish savior. Chrno’s heart was beating little protesting sounds: rapid buh-thumps, and bum-bumps.

He sighed a fatalistic sigh, and squinted his eyes and tried to squeeze back his previous nightmare’s contents. He thought he could remember flashes of something, like a tape rewinding, yes he could see a–

What the hell! His head suddenly felt like a balloon that was about to pop, over-inflated and bloated from hydrogen and oxygen, and whatever they pumped in balloons. Chrno’s hands clamped over both temples, tendons and a few veins streaking up from his hands like inside-out lacerations.

"I’m acting like some over-zealous movie audition…person," he thought out loud, the last words coming out lamely. And he was: clutching at his head like some acting-fanatic that has seen too many shabby movies. Except the pain was real, very real, and suddenly it was like a flame, like the flames inside a hot air balloon that inflated and rose.

Chrno disliked flames: they reminded him of his ancestry. And in his head, he could suddenly see the vivid picture –as if someone had chucked it out, and it had landed by chance in his brain, he could see a strangely proportioned Chrno (he was already strangely proportioned, his head was larger than it would have seemed on an adult’s body) with a balloon for a head. And the balloon was painted childishly, with his features drawn not-to-scale. The concept was bizzare, and Chrno snorted in spite of the pain, and began to chortle good-naturedly.

Unconsciously, he skirted away from remembering his dream. Later, he would wonder why he couldn’t remember. And it wouldn’t be for the first time.

After a… minute/hour, his eyes lolled back to their normal position, (they had rolled into the back of his head when he was dramatizing, as well) and he could breathe normally again. He sat up straighter against the bedpost, and sighed.

Soon, the sun would rise like waves, like forever, and the light would lance through the land and pierce most careless lurking shadows. The day would rise from night’s ashes, and the Order would no doubt send Chrno’s enduring partner and him off on some crackpot mission. Chrno could only laugh humorlessly at that, and hebegan to massage the knots and aches out of his head; his claws making little reptilian clicks as they occasionally hit the wooden bedpost.

Already, he could begin to distinguish the colors of things: his daylight-shadowed cloak/jacket lay lifeless, draped over a chair that was near his bed. Abruptly, as if to spite his last thoughts, it billowed up a little as some unseen breeze gave it animation, as it to say, "Look at me, I’m not dead at all!" He shook his head, always the grateful guest, and shrugged off his rueful discontent with their way of life, like it was something he could wear, like it was a jacket or coat. Light peeked in from closed curtains, their swaths and paths through his room cut little lighter-shaded shadows that illuminated drifting dust, almost like a flashlight. He was sitting cross-legged, bare feet tucked under his legs, trying to preserve some warmth. His feet had since turned clammy and damp, so Chrno got up, stretched routinely, found a pair of socks (they looked like stockings, actually) and slipped them on slowly, contemplating some insignificant thing.

And delved back into his previous thoughts.

The Order is necessary, he thought firmly, as if trying to convince someone other than himself. Chrno knew the Order of Magdalene had not been created in vain. Without it, mankind would probably have fallen to its knees keeping the constant stream of demons at bay. The Order preserved their way of life; it seemingly sprawled across the entire globe, reaching out its righteous fingers that were attached to righteous arms, and righteously smiting whatever demons there were in China, or India, or Europe. The Order preserved order, indeed, and it gave the world time to breathe.

It gave the world time, but not Chrno, and definitely not Rosette. The demon scowled bitterly, some of the early-morning-acrid-taste slipping into his mouth.

Chrno shivered, suddenly cold. He customarily slept in his undershirt, suspenders and all sorts of buckles loosened, and the part of his upper body that had been outside the sheets were a little numb. The day was deceptively chilly, as it was actually summer, and soon the scorching sun would rise anew. He braced himself, braced himself for the day, and for the future. He knew that, come daytime, summer’s heat would kick into action, and start burning them all.

Chrno didn’t mind the burning, having felt it all his life, so much as the running out of time. -Whole of Chapter 1, Fall With Me.

It's just not the same without italics. Turbulency dissapears when you can't emphasise certain words.