Alone Chapter 18 - 2

Cesare found Elizabeth beneath the willow tree. She'd brought a deep green blanket to spread across the ground, the color of old moss, it bridged the gap between grass and tree. Elizabeth loved the earth, everything she did was with that one love in mind. She patterned her life after it, drawing her lessons from the living world that loved her so much.

She'd chosen the blanket because it reminded her of the world she was devoted to. Sitting, with the ravens hopping around them in a squabbling cloud of feathers and impatience, he realized how different they were.

She had a realness he didn't, they all did, but with Elizabeth it towered so high he was left shamed in its shadow. As alone as her life had been, she'd lived it, carving out her joys from the carcass of disappointment. She cared for animals more than people, treating them with a love saved for children. Books called to her in a voice ancient with wisdom, speaking to a mind eager to know. Full bodied and rich, her life was like a good wine, complex and ever evolving with each taste.

Cesare loved books; they were the friends when he was alone. Comfort on lonely nights, someone to cry too, and the father you always wanted. Books had been the only thing that hadn't betrayed him. He liked a good meal and a nice bed, enjoyed a hard fight, lusted after hurting others more than he liked to admit. But so much of what he liked, what he loved, revolved around the women. He was their shadow, as empty and useless without them as that patch of shade. When a man had no desires, is he really living? Our desires make us who we are, they pull us into life, without them, we're shades without color. But all his colors seemed to be gray's and black.

Silently, he threw nuggets to the ravens, his mind lost in darkness as he watched the grim birds scramble for the bits of chicken. "What do you want?" Elizabeth asked, concern tightening her face.

"You know, I was just thinking about that," Cesare said, setting his tray aside as he laid back on the blanket. "This place was supposed to be a way forward, a diploma to get me into a shit job. The only way off the streets is education. You can sell drugs or pimp girls, but you're not off the streets, all your doing is standing on the corpses so your own feet don't touch the sidewalk."

Cesare closed his eyes, enjoying the cool breeze that washed over him. This was nice, to be out in the world feeling the earth against his back, the sun on his face, and life around him. Elizabeth laid down next to him the weight of her eyes steady and sure.

"You said that in the past tense, have your feelings changed?" The whisper caressed across his soul, a soothing balm turning cold darkness to velvet.

"I still think education's the only out of the gutter. If you want to be part of society, you need to know the language, you're not going to learn that scrambling for food or peddling meth. A man without an education's trapped in his own mind, chained to his ignorance. His mutterings nothing more than the ravings of a rabid animal to the educated."

People who were homeless, broken, insane, and forgotten, didn't have the language to make their pain known. They didn't have the words to make others understand, didn't know how to get the help they needed, or find a way out of drowning in their shit. That's what education was, it was the power to change your life.

"Then what's changed?" she asked quietly, the squabbling of the ravens settling as they took flight into the branches of the willow.

"I looked at this school as a place where I could learn the skills to join society. Somewhere along the way, I lost myself, became a bit player in other people's stories instead of writing my own. I have more options than I've ever had but the only one I want is the one I thought I'd give anything to escape."

She was silent for long minutes. "You've changed so much since you came here. Sometimes I wonder what you'll be at the end."

Cesare smiled tightly, hateful currents boiling and twisting in his mind. "I'm meaner than I've ever been. More in tune with the darkness of my soul, more accepting of the evil in my heart. I enjoy hurting people, controlling their lives, and commanding their actions. I used to hate who I was because I knew I wasn't good. That hate is now just one among many, a small serpent lost in the coils of all the others."

Silently, they enjoyed the sun in the dappled shade, each falling into their inner landscapes. He'd changed, he knew that better than anyone ever could. Only he felt the dark ocean of his soul. He'd been changed by the Sephirothic, warped by the Holy Blade, empowered by the Old Ones blessing, and hardened by training and blood. The changes had come to him whether he wanted them or not, some he'd enjoyed, others had butchered his soul, transforming Cesare on such a fundamental level he'd felt born again.

He was no longer human, and yet he didn't feel any more the monster for that fact. He was what others could only call evil, hateful, sadistic, possessive, spiteful, and mean. For all that, he didn't feel evil. Was his evil only in the minds of the ignorant? Or was he truly a blight on the earth? In the darkest of nights, he played that question over and over.

Did evil know it was evil? Or did it just do what it liked, thinking it was only different? How different did you have to be before you were nothing but a black hole of spite, tendrils of hate threading through the world in a roving thing of violation? Cesare didn't know, even scarier, were the times when he didn't care.

They didn't linger long, the shadows of his words and thoughts had dimmed the joy of the day. Standing, he reached for the belt with the garbage bags and spike when Elizabeth's words stopped him. "I think you've done enough of that for one day. There's some tender loving care that needs to happen at the flower beds."

Looking across at her, his smile turned up at the edges. "And you thought of me?" he asked, eyebrows raising at the ludicrous statement. Cesare was many things, most of them violent, but no one had ever called him loving.

Smiling gently, Elizabeth pulled the belt and spike from him." Maybe I want them to take care of you." She reached out, caressing her hand down his long dark hair with its glints of scarlet. It was an incredible break of her rules. "You're the way life has made you, Cesare. The water creates the cracks in the mountains and the fire burns the forests to ash. We're creatures of scars, deformed things that have weathered the storms of our lives." Her hand withdrew just as he felt the creeping spread of warm.

"Being a teenager is about getting your feet under you. It's not about figuring it out, it's about putting one bloody foot in front of the other." Cesare had said the same words to himself more than once. It was the far side of strange to hear them from someone else.

She led the way back to where she'd been working. She didn't say anything, and Cesare had run out of words. Elizabeth being with him was enough, her bubble of sacred space welcoming him into her private sanctuary with a shy smile. She couldn't save him from the world or himself, but she could offer him a place under her wing for a time, a small place to huddle and catch his breath.

Elizabeth had been working on one of her more ambitious projects. Coming up on it, his eyes ran over the delicate yellow and gold flowers that spiraled around a towering holly tree. A labyrinth's different from a maze. A maze is a tool of the clever, meant to confuse and confound designed to separate failures from diamonds. A labyrinth is about the inner journey of the soul, possessed of only one way in and out, no tricks, no fancy turnings, it was as true and pure as the blade of a samurai. Each step embodied the birth of a person, because no matter how lost you thought you were, every step you take leads to your truth.

Staring at the pale flowers in their shades of sunlight that formed the walls of the labyrinth, a weight slid off his shoulders. The meaning of the labyrinth poured through his soul in a cleansing rush, taking some of the excrement of his life with it. The flowers were bent and broken by the wayward and careless feet of the students. Few had cared about the deeper meaning, and none had cared for the work that had gone into the living work of art.

Getting down on his knees, he worked on restoring the labyrinth, helping the flowers where a little care could restore them to health, pulling the ones beyond saving. The flowers here would come up next year, and the years to come after that. Each birthing their deeper meaning to the labyrinth, one that only the artist knew.

There was no rush, not here. Cesare's mind settled into the flowers and the hard lives they'd lived. A plant had no choice in where it was chained, the uncaring wind or the hand of the gardener made not difference, they had to make the best of it. Growing in concrete cracks, poor soil, and dark shadows, they struggled in silence without a hand to help or shelter.

The lucky ones were gifted a back handed kind of love, given water and good soil they're left to fend for themselves. A plants dramas and sorrows were played out in the shadows of the uncaring, no less real for their invisibility. They live and die in the silence of the world, forgotten in their commonness. Born in obscurity and discarded by the world. For the first time, the small green things called out to him, echoes of his own life in their story.

Cesare swept his hands over the fragile petals of pale gold. They were such breakable things to depend on for life, so beautiful and yet so easily torn. Flowers worked for months to grow their petals and people spent less than a second tearing them off. It was an easy cruelty, a casual evil we did for nothing more than something to do with our hands.

Carefully placing his hands and feet, Cesare moved from plant to plant. Some were beyond his help, too broken to be saved, but others could be helped with a little stick and a piece of string. He entered the center as the sunset ran crimson fingers across the sky.

They walked silently back to the cabin, Elizabeth eyeing him curiously. Concern tightened her mouth, small wrinkles fanning out from her lips. Something had shifted inside Cesare while he'd crawled the corridors of the labyrinth.

Sitting at the table, Cesare set the chess board. A single candle on the table the sole illumination in the room. Darkness pressed in on the weak light, darker shadows playing along the corners of the room among plants and tools. The blessed silence was enhanced by Elizabeth's quiet movements as she made tea.

Elizabeth handed over his snake cup. Warming his hands along the sides of the cup, its rough scales rasped against his callouses. Tracing the serpent's coils, his mind quieted as thoughts crystalized.

Looking up, he met the dark eyes of his love. She'd taken her seat without him noticing, leaving him to his thoughts, ready to listen, play chess, or sit quietly. She'd never feel the same way about him as he did her. She'd never need his touch, burn to kiss him, or want him in the dark night when she slept alone, but that didn't mean she didn't love him.

"They're like us." The words were quiet, a whisper of shadow in a dark place. Unlike the darkness of his soul which was all jagged angles and broken glass, this place was dark in the way of the womb. Close, comfortable, alive with a base beat felt in the bones, the beating heart of a mother whose love knew no bounds.

Cesare met Elizabeth's dark eyes. "I never paid attention to them, I noticed the trees and the sticker bushes but never the forgotten ones that grew in the cracks of the world." Shaking his head, Cesare sipped his tea with a pleased sound. "I never thought of how alike we were. Alone, cast into the wind to make their life wherever they land, hoping no one comes along and destroys their small triumphs."

Looking up from his tea, he noted the shocked understanding in her eyes. "That's why you love them, you see yourself in them. Innocent and beautiful, they're left alone to suffer and die by the giants that pass them by. All it takes is a giant to stop and lend a helping hand, but they keep walking. They don't hear the screams of agony you utter as they pull off your petals or the whimper when you're squashed to the ground. No one cared about you, just like no one cares about them. People take from the small things what they want, uncaring that they're taking their life."

Staring into her black tea, she hid her eyes. "All my life, no one's wanted me. Some wanted my body, everyone wanted my power, but no one wanted me." She kept her eyes down. "I'm not good at small talk, and I don't make friends like others do. I don't shine like your two friends. I'm like the plant you pass on your way through the city. A little bit of nothing to look at."

Reaching across the table, he left his hand open, ready and willing to take hers. Elizabeth avoided looking at it, hands tightening on her cup, But the offering was as much about what he wanted as it was about comforting her.

"I can feel the pain of the plants. While they might be invisible to others, they're my friends." Her smile was sad, sorrow draping over her in a tattered cloak. "Those people who came into my life, never stayed long when they found out I wouldn't support their dreams for power. But my green friends were always there. My best and truest friends."

Cesare nodded, pulling his hand slowly back, her words settling into his heart. He remembered how upset she'd been when the wolves had attacked her plants. That had been a different time even if it had been only a few months ago. Back then, she'd been starving for affection, desperate for attention, she'd tolerated his fantasy to get what she needed. Suffering through his fumbling desires to buy his friendship.

Elizabeth believed friendship was a give and take, cutting off little bits of herself to buy a kind smile and a few words. She'd been willing to put up with his advances so she could have his friendship. How many times had she walked that road only to find the price going up step by step?

Was there a sharper knife than loneliness? Was any surgeon as exact, or cruel, as the great mangler of children? He'd faced the malevolent thing too many times to discount its horror. Shattering your dream, it left you alone in the wreckage of might have beens. They'd both learned that no one wanted them, learned it so well they looked at every friendship as a service to pay for.

Loneliness turned your own heart against itself. While others basked in the easy friendships of family and friends, people like them spent hours wondering what was wrong with them. Too ugly, inept, and crass, they were the cast offs that no one wanted. Their kind had to pay for love, if not in coin than in flesh. Woman knew men viewed them as a commodity, a trophy for winners, flesh they fucked and threw away when it got old. Some didn't even have that, so reviled and poor, they couldn't afford a kind word.

Elizabeth had walked a different road, but they'd both been on the same mountain. She had people around her, some held her in contempt, most wanted to use her, a few might have been genuine but none of them had wanted to be her friend. No one had ever loved her for who she was only for what she could do for them, she'd fought for as long as she could against that tide. But someday in the mists of time, she'd quit fighting and drowned. Elizabeth believed she had nothing worth loving, because it had been pounded into her by everyone she cared about.

"I love you," Cesare said, shattering the taboo that existed between them. Willingly shouldering the weight of shame her astonished anger birthed in him. "Your glorious in your sorrows and exalted in your suffering, wholly of the earth, and holy in the way of the earth mother. Those who turned away from you, weren't worthy of you."

Elizabeth held his eyes, pain, anger, fear, and unnamable emotions swirling into a mystery. She would never believe him, any more than he'd believe her. People who've learned to be nothing can never unlearn that lesson, because being nothing hurts less.

Setting his tea aside, he walked out under Elizabeth's angry eyes. She'd never forgive him for breaking the unspoken rule between them, he kept his feelings to himself and she didn't have to break his heart. Even if he'd done it because he wouldn't see her spew hate on herself, even if he had to take that acidic hateful brew on his own face.

Hate didn't care who it hurt, its parent or its enemy. Rabid with rage, it sought only pain, uncaring who it inflicted its hunger on. Give it another target and the hate was more than willing to savage it. Tonight, Elizabeth would rail against his obstinate need to push his affections on her, curse his childish crush and his unwillingness to let it go. She'd forget that she'd been slipping into the familiar paths of tormented memory.

It wasn't like Cesare wasn't used to be being a punching bag. The mind didn't care if it was physical or emotional, it registered pain the same. Shame and guilt, the twin tongued scourges of life, whipped their way through the darkness, shaping men and woman into bloody sculptures of its twisted needs. He could give Elizabeth a night without its savage company.

A tingle along his neck stilled his steps as he studied the dark, the feeling of being watched familiar and yet out of place on a night like this. Sliding from the darkness, the three students stepped forward in perfect synchronicity. Pale blonde hair pulled the moonlight in, fouling and stripping the night of its gentle illusion. Their uniforms of pristine blue, dress shirts of cancerous white, seared the night of its unhallowed grace.

A stray beam of gentle light gave the lie to their mendacium, faceted eyes trapping the light in honeycomb depths. He'd wondered when they'd appear, with the queens coming it had been only a matter of time before the Brain Trust tried their hand. What he didn't know was whether it would be threats or gifts.

Lady Luck never misses a fight, flashing a little leg, a wanton, eager smile curving blood red lips, you never knew whose side she was on until you were walking away. You can't bet on her favor; your life depends on control not hope. No matter how good the queens were, they could lose. If the Brain Trust could shave the odds in their favor, they'd be fools not to try.

"Back out of the fight. Stop training the Furies and the wolf." It was the middle one, her voice a strange mix of highs that disappeared beyond hearing, an eerie screeching undercurrent dancing along the syllables.

He wondered how he'd missed their wrongness. They resembled dolls more than people, without a muscle moving under perfect alabaster skin, dark eyes glittering in the stray moonlight. Hair as straight as a razor brushed their shoulders. It's as if they'd skinned a little girl and crawled into her body.

"No." Quiet as a lover's betrayal, the word whispered through the night, the moon pulling back from the blackness as fathomlessly dark shadows crept from the depths of the night.

The three held his eyes without a twitch as tendrils of shadows stretched across the ground, an inky spread of hate, a sin against the beauty of the night. Like a cancerous growth, the ebony flowed over the light, devouring its beauty with the hunger of the ugly.

"We're prepared to offer your life." Discordant and strange, the words were the stretching of an alien mind by concepts beyond its understanding.

It came to him in a flash. The Hive didn't understand people any more than people understood it. Poles to far apart for the distance to be spanned by mind or imagination. Cesare could never understand a being that didn't feel love or hate, that looked at itself as only part of a whole. And the Hive could never understand a fleshy beings need to strive, to stand out, to be something special in a world that punished the ordinary.

For the Hive, gifting him with his life was the finest thing they could offer. They'd seen thousands throw away honor, families, and loves, for one more day. The need to survive was threaded through history, we betray, kill, devour, and fight to continue, no matter the cost to our souls. The Umbrae Lunae weren't any different. It was hard wired into everything that walked, crawled, shit, or fucked, to do what had to be done to get through the day.

The abominations watched with faceted eyes for a long second as the shadows of his malice stole the light from their hair. There was no argument, no negotiation. They'd come with an offer, and he'd turned them down. Bargaining, persuasion, manipulation, and lies, weren't for them.

Turning as one, they walked back into the night and out of the closing circle of evil. They'd been fools to confront him in his element. He'd thought of killing them, cutting them down and stashing their bodies in the forest. Cut out the eyes of the queens before they were briefed by their agents. The night was his time, he could have blinded them in a sea of ebony, swam through its dark currents and torn them apart.

But he'd let them go. Not out of altruism, he'd long ago let naïve thoughts die in the wasteland of his heart. No, he'd let them go because they'd come here tonight to get him to back off. That they'd thought he'd betray the girls or that they were safe making the offer, let him know just how off the queen's information would be. He'd rather the queens depend on lies then force them to look for the truth. For the first time, he could see a glimmer of success.