Choice

"What is going on here?" said Grey while looking at the strange crimson moon. 'This… this is not normal. All my senses are screaming at me to run away from that moon… This is getting too weird. I'm too vulnerable out here in the open, I better find some enclosed place to hide.' Just as he was standing up and getting ready to find a place to hide, he heard the sound of footsteps approaching.

Instinctively Grey grabbed one branch with a pointy end ready to fight in case the situation escalates. 'I'm not in the best of conditions to confront someone in a battle… my wounds might open if I move too much.' Just as he thought of that he immediately laughed at himself 'I'm an assassin, not a warrior or a soldier I don't fight, I kill… one strike should be enough.'

At that moment a middle-aged man in worker attire was walking by the alley, his eyes devoid of life as if he was a zombie, each step he took seemed as if he would fall due to the drunken state he was in. This past month has been quite literally the worst month of his life, work in the harbor is scarce as the days pass making it difficult for the middle-aged man to gain money, and because of this his landlord threw his family and him to the streets.

A week after barely surviving in the streets thanks to donations from the church. His wife decided to leave him for an old merchant that promise her a place to live for her and her son if she became his mistress. After that his entire life fell apart, the middle-aged man used every penny he gained in alcohol, women, and drugs, wasting his life away just waiting for it to end.

Once he reached the entrance of the alley he immediately stopped, the insufferable stench of iron reached his nostril making him throw up whatever he had left in his stomach, this made him turn his head involuntarily to the alley. There he saw a young man, shirtless with bandages and bruises all over his body. The young man had long platinum hair, blue eyes, and a handsome face with some feminine features, even with the bruises around his face he was still pleasant to look at. 'A street boy?' thought the middle-aged man 'He seems pretty beat up, was it one of the gang's around here?'

"Hey kid what happened to you? Did one of the gangs do this to you? If you come with me, I can take good care of you." said the middle-aged man, a grin rising on his face. 'The street boy might be a man, but he is quite pretty and unlike the other street girls he is free of charge.'

Grey remained silent; he couldn't understand a single word the man was saying but one thing he could understand was his actions. A small smile surfaced on his face before disappearing 'This might be easier than I thought.'

Looking at the unresponsive attitude of the young man, anger started to boil inside the middle-aged man. How dare this good-for-nothing whore refuse him when he was being so nice. "You bastard, you bow down and thank when someone is giving you a helping hand." said the middle-aged man as he walked toward Grey, his right hand raised to push Grey down and make him kneel.

At that moment a small smile and a pair of emotionless eyes appeared on Grey's face stunning the middle-aged man for a second. 'It seems like I don't need this after all.' With a thud the branch that Grey was hiding fell to the ground bringing the middle-aged man back to his senses.

'What is this warm feeling?' thought the middle-aged man before looking down at himself. Crimson blood was gushing out of his neck while the smiling young man was holding a piece of flesh in his right hand, blood flowing down from his bandages. Fear struck the middle-aged man but not long after a smile filled his face; his eyes were still as lifeless as before. 'During the entire ordeal, his eyes didn't change even when he was angry…' thought Grey as he saw the man fall.

Grey was no stranger to such eyes. It was the eyes of someone that has given up on life, someone that has accepted their miserable destiny just waiting for death to take them. "…How boring," said Grey while looking at the dead man. 'Eyes are the windows to a man's soul and emotions. His eyes showed nothing but a complete void, I guess he didn't have anything else to live for…'

'He didn't seem that surprised nor frightened about the appearance of the crimson moon at all. Is it a common occurrence to him? No danger has seemed to have befallen him while in contact with the crimson moon either. But I'm sure if such a moon was that common, I would have known about it by now, and my intuition is still telling me about how dangerous it is to be in this moon's light… His language is really strange as well.'

As a fluent speaker of the most spoken languages of Europe and knowing the accent and punctuation of the rest of them, he was still unable to identify the origins of the dialect the man spoke of. 'It doesn't seem to be from Asia either.'

"My intuition has rarely failed me, so I still better find a place to hide just in case." After saying that Grey looked down at the corpse and said "Mind if I borrow your clothes for a while? Oh, you don't? Great! They are bloody but oh well nothing we can do; I do look good in red so I'll take what I can get."

As Grey was undressing the corpse, he found a folded paper in one of the pockets, curious as to what it was, he unfolded the paper only to find a black-and-white photo, to the left, was the middle-aged man, in the center was a child no older than 3, and to the right a woman, all three of them were happy, smiling and so full of life as if there were no tomorrow. 'So that's what your eyes looked like back then.'

He then put the photo beside the corpse letting it float in the pool of blood before it drowned making the black and white color turn crimson and the lovely smiles of the family distort.

Grey put on the corpse's working attire getting ready to leave this place, he then looked up at the crimson moon and sighed. 'I guess I can be optimistic no more… this place is not my world, at least not the Earth that I know of.' He then touched his cheeks trying to find something.

"No tears?" …HAHAHAHA… 'I guess there is no need for such a thing. It has been a long time since my sense of belonging was lost in that world, I'm still the same outsider I have been since I was a child, the only difference is a change of scenery.'

"It looks a little like that place…" said Grey as an afterthought, he knew very well the chances of that were close to zero. It would have been impossible for him to survive this long if that was the case.

After walking to the entrance of the alley Grey stopped and turned around to look at the corpse.

"I'm sure your life must have been like a terrible nightmare where you hope to wake up, but it was not… your life is what you chose it to be, and those choices carry a responsibility and a burden, your burden however seen to have been more than what you could take."

"I as well made a choice, I made a choice to take your burden from you, I made a choice to take your life from you, I made a choice to take your happiness and sadness from you, I made a choice to take your death from you, and I made a choice to take your choice from you. Those choices are my burden and my burden alone, a burden I will carry until the end of my life."

Grey then turned around and started walking in the same direction the middle-aged man was supposed to go before stopping here. 'This is also my choice.'