@apotheotica ⟶ Onomatopoeia
It begins as a pressure. A resonant, orotund hum, a shiver that travels through the pollution of the alleyway, rattles up the fire escape, and straight into the marrow of his bones. It was a frequency that unraveled the heat behind his eyes, a crisp flood of respite from the echo chamber of his body.
Mmmzz...
The replica escapes his lips on impulse, a dry, staggered sound back out through the ajar window. He never slept, the world too sharp, too much, but he was awake now in a way entirely foreign to him. The ringing was round and heavy, a delicious hook in his mind, drudging him from a shallow, nightmare ridden sleep. He drags himself up from a nest of disarrayed blankets, a marionette moved tendril by tendril.
His head falls to the side, listening. There is the profuse, immense wail of a city in pain. A few blocks over a car alarm eeewaahs in a distressed, looping panic. Further, the hydraulic huussh of a bus braking hard for a pedestrian, pursued by his erratic profanities. A woman laughs, sharp and high. A baby squalls for its mother, and the frayed pulse of a nightclub bleeds out into the night. Each sounds is a dull knife sludging through his skull.
Eeewaah. Huussh. Brumb.
Ono's teeth are numb with the cacophony of it all, each repeated under his breath. Breathing them out was the only way to briefly entrap them, to halt the ricochet inside his skull. Still, it would not last. But, the pressure, the good sound, was still there. Underneath it all, it persisted. Clean, unrelenting. Order.
He slinks down the fire escape, the wet thrack track of his boots ringing against the rungs. He hits the asphalt with a light scuff, and all at once the painful sounds of the city begin to blur into a general welt of discomfort. Still, the frequency is there, a lighthouse in the storm of noise.
He stalked through the valleys of glass and oil logged streets, tasting the hum on his tongue. A siren goes wee-wooing past and he flinches in a fully body spasm, the back of his neck burning in a fever and slaps his hands against the brick wall beside him to steady himself. But the hymn is growing sharper, so he pushes on. It is a bright sound, a green sound, solid. It was—
There. On a rooftop across the street, the silhouette wafting that noise against a neon skyline. Suddenly the air in Ono's lungs felt still and perfect. He could hear the focused creativity vibrating within in, untapped potential, and underneath it the ba-bump of a hero's heart in perfect time. When Kyle took to the air in a stream of emerald, he is already moving, calculating trajectories, using the city's grid like a sonograph.
He follows him for blocks, then miles, from gritty industrial districts to bright and proper suburbs, into quiet, resident streets. Then, a delivery truck idling further down the street backfires, its engine popping in a jarring gunshot to his focus. The sound is a physical blow, spiking agony through his temple. His body moves before his mind can, a violent, involuntary tic seizing him. He knocks himself into a line of trash bins, his foot catching a lid and scrapes loudly against the pavement. The sound was hideous, twisting his stomach in knots, and still he freezes, looming in the shadows.
But he cannot help it. His mind misfires, captures the sound in the back of his throat and plays in back in a desperate whispered reel.
"Sccrrr.....scrape....scra"
It was hardly audible, but on a silent street with the moon bathing clean any real place to conceal himself, and to a man with a power attuned to the energy of will, it was a little too close for comfort.
