The Night They Met

"Sorry, I haven't really been considering you all this time", his mother said, looking dead into his eyes.

He watched her bland face with his mouth hanging open. She'd been drinking again.

"But you're my child, alright."

Why she thought it necessary to drop this confirmation on his head like a boulder taken off her own shoulders, he didn't understand. But he never saw her again.

  *******************

Chopper looked towards the abandoned ruins he'd left behind not too long ago. There indeed was a man dead at the theater. He'd been massacred quite brutally but at the same time, it was a clean job. And he knew it was the same killer. But then, he didn't need to see the body to know who the killer was anymore.

That tall white man, who seemed to be unaware of himself, was still somewhere in those ruins. But Chopper had a feeling he didn't want to be the one to pop his bubble yet. After all, Lady had some plans for the man. Chopper was sure that if he just left him alone, Lady would find him soon enough.

And so it seemed, she had.

A building collapsed somewhere in the abandoned town. And even against the dark night sky, Chopper could see the smoke and dust rising from the collapse. Chopper realized that unlike him, Lady had been deemed a threat by the killer.

But even though he'd left Lady to take care of the man named Wladyslaw, Chopper felt that the city might be destroyed if he didn't do anything. Yet, it took him a while to convince himself to mingle with the two of them.

"It's an earthquake!", was the noise at the theater. 

One by one the buildings collapsed and Chopper waited patiently for it to stop but they kept going down at regular intervals and he finally realized that Lady had forgotten all about keeping it down low.

He sighed, lit a cigarette, spared a last glance at the mangled corpse that had been abandoned after the quakes started, and let out a relaxed puff into the cold air. 

Its hopeless, he thought. So he gathered up the courage and started towards the ruined city.

  **********************

Lady swiftly moved, avoiding his attacks, planting herself on a wall before shooting off directly at him. There'd been enough close calls that night to get her blood pumping. She was already full with excitement, grinning ear to ear.

And as she leapt like a lioness to grab his neck, right after he'd launched a dismantling field that she avoided, Wladyslaw took a step back. He needed a window to form a barrier but she'd got him this time.

She grabbed him by his neck, and he felt her monstrous strength squeezing the life out of him. Just as he glared at the threat with his marvelous eyes open wide, Lady stared back with utter excitement. As a last ditch attack, he pushed his all into deploying an intense dismantling field, the radius of which, covered half the ruined city.

Lady was engulfed in it with no way to escape. And just as the world around them crumbled, he saw Lady dissolve into the air. He could breathe again, having defeated the threat. But he was still catching his breath, before noticing someone behind him.

"Sorry to say, old man", she said, perfectly composed, "I'm not that easy to get rid of."

The dismantling field hadn't even come undone yet before she leapt at him once again and made a clean mark through his eyes. He fell back, writhing in pain. For the first time in his life, he was crying. He'd never felt agony before. And now it seemed all his life came back to him, as he was rolling on the ground, blood smearing his face and utter darkness in his vision.

But he lifted his hand in front of him, instinctively, to deploy another field, or a barrier, anything to get her away from him. Lady was perfectly ready tp counter whatever he had left to throw at her.

"Oi Lady!", Chopper's voice called her from the distance.

She knew what he was here for. She just sighed and dropped the fight.

"I'm not here to fight you, old man", she said before he could do anything.

Chopper walked up to her, seeing the white man in blood.

"We came here to invite you to live with us. Leave this city and this life. You're sick of it too, aren't you?", suddenly Lady sounded much sober.

Wlad was at a loss. The pain was too overwhelming, and he was confused because he couldn't see anymore.

Lady sighed and sat down, facing him.

"It won't be anything like here...or anywhere else. It's a place where even you can exist."

Then Lady took out Chopper's bandana that he used to hide his neck tattoos in certain cities, and tore it into stripes, tying them together to form a bandage. She went over and grabbed Wlad's head, who was too confused and tamed to know what was happening. She tied the bandage around his bleeding eyes. The bandages were immediately soaked crimson.

Chopper saw his bandana getting massacred, all the while wondering when she'd gotten her hand on it. Lady always seemed to get her hands on his stuff.

"We won't lie to you, old man", Chopper shifted his focus on Wlad, "Things may never get good. But at the very least, you won't be standing alone."

Wlad recognized his voice. He relaxed back against a wall, having resigned himself to this fate.

Lady smiled, "Well, how about it, Sight?"

She seemed to have given him a name. She ended up never learning his real name. And Wlad liked this new name. It was a contradiction. And nothing else could define him any better than a contradiction.

"I'll go", he said, a broken smile appearing on his bloodied face.

Chopper sighed, lighting up a new cigarette as he watched the moon hiding once again, behind the clouds that night.