Checkmate: Games of War » [Cherik]

Chapter One

"Charles-"

"Please!" He pleaded, raising his head a couple inches to reveal his distraught face. His blue eyes were glazed with tears, his bottom lip was trembling as he attempted to maintain his duplicitous composed façade, but his dignity and mask was crumbling away to reveal the truly broken man that lurked beneath. "Just go..." He begged, his voice a whisper, like a breath of air.

Charles's head wilted like a decaying flower and his shoulder started jerking violently as he cried, the first tears escaping disobediently from his pooled blue eyes, red and bloodshot from sleeplessness and grew ever-heavier.

Hank backed away knowingly, retreating out of the office and giving a respectful tiny nod as he shut the ancient creaky wooden door on its rotten rusty hinges, eaten away by time.

Through the door, there was a distinct rattling then a tremendous crashing shattering sound. Charles had swept everything off the overloaded desk and onto the solid wooden floor. He was seething in his agonised frothing rage as he glared down at the hideous sickening mess that had now covered his office floor. His already trashed office was worsened in its cluttered attire, in a shameful crowded mess.

Books hung off the bookshelves like they were trying to leap off the shelves. The window was filthy and green with withering age. The floor was scattered with shards of glass and porcelain and scattered with a thick carpet of papers. Every book case was stacked with ornaments and too many books to fit, his fireplace had burnt away and was left with only cold embers of the winter months. Every surface was crammed with junk that he cared for no more. Pictures hung askew on the walls, disregarded and no longer admired. Everything was a tyrannous cacophonous mess, the result of Charles's restless crammed mind. The room was nothing more than a reflection of his inner turmoil; strewn and laid to waste.

His red silken dressing gown dangled off his thin weak frame. He had lost yet more weight due to stress and skipping meals because he felt ill.

He fell back against the wall behind him and pressed the back of his head to it and let his eyes fall shut and tilted his head to the heavens, as if to say a silent prayer to a god he didn't believe existed.

Tears seeped out from beneath his shut eyelids, meandering down his pasty cheeks and dripping off his chin onto the varnished wooden floor, coated with dust from days past and covered with clusters of paper thrown about over due course of time.

That's when a shot of pain surged up his back from his coccyx to his nape, making him cry out and arch forwards away from the wall, and a small bout of voices echoed in his mind, rattling around like a sound being blasted into an auditorium.

"Argh!" He shrieked, his face screwing up as he threw himself off the wall and supported his failing body on the desk.

He placed a hand at the base of his spine and two words passed his lips as a whisper. "Oh no..." His eyes expanded and then another shock of pain blasted through him, burning across his skin and exploding from his lower spine discs.

"Hank!" He whined, tears of agony spilling from his eyes. He pushed off from the desk and threw himself across the room, away from the desk and at the door. He grunted as his shoulder bashed into the solid oak.

He reached out a trembling hand, battling with the simmering pain growing in his back and starting to spread to his upper thighs. He rattled at the handle and then managed to summon the strength to yank the door open. He flung it with his hand, throwing it open and hauled himself through.

"Hank!" He screamed into the entrance hall, lugging his failing legs in, forcing himself on as pain ripped through his, raging through the receptors in his mind.