Chapter Text
The eyes of the corpse on the examination table stared up at him, jaw slack and limbs hanging limp. Another failure. Another bloody and torn body to clean up. Bragi sighed, snapping his gloves off, and tossing them on the corpse. Could they just... stop dying?
All the effort of stalking out subjects, observing people who seemed like they had higher levels of darkness. All for nothing. At this rate people were going to start noticing the disappearances, and it would be the shady guy in the big mansion they'd definitely blame. Sure, he was the one behind it, but come on!
Well, at least this guy had been a prick. He was one of the fathers at daycare, and often yelled at his kid and the other kids in public. Bragi was still...okay actually very annoyed that Luxu had shown up after abandoning him for a decade just to dump a kid on him, but Auralin was pretty okay, and even if she wasn't, it was still shitty to yell at kids. Bragi had done everyone in Twilight Town a service.
Bragi shrugged off his lab coat and tossed it into the laundry bin, glancing at the clock as he did so. He still had a couple more hours before he'd have to pick Aura up from daycare, which was certainly awhile but not enough time to find another test subject. Balancing his mission and taking care of a three year old was tough work but at least since the time he lived in Twilight Town as a child and now, they'd developed the concept of free childcare and he could leave Aura there most days while he worked.
It was yet another thing that reminded him that he'd never truly found home.
Bragi was Twilight Town born and raised; his family had owned this mansion and property when he was a child. But the world must have drifted through some pocket of darkness or light or time because the time between being plucked from here by The Master and Luxu dropping him back here, a century and a half had passed when it shouldn't have. The mansion was a place of desolation and he kept it that way. Family money was gone, relatives died out, only remembered by him and the history books and ghost stories.
He certainly felt like a ghost some days, especially now as he cleaned up. Tools were put away, curses were sworn. The taste, metallic. The scapel clicked on his teeth as he pulled it out of his mouth. Just blood. Maybe darkness didn't even have a taste, or it has disappeared as soon as the subject died.
Yet another failure. The story of his life.