CONTAINS CONTENT:
Brief mild language (comical)
{{Unedited}}
Austin rolled over and flicked the light on. Below the lamp was the picture of the Queen of Hearts card stained with blood… his blood… her blood… the blood of their enemies… it didn’t matter. What he knew right now was that he was shivering and it wasn’t that cold in his house. And why was he shivering? He didn’t get cold… ever…
He staggered to the heater and turned it up again. It was already working at around eighty degrees. No matter how much he wanted sleep, he couldn’t find it, and when he did, he’d open his eyes two minutes later with his heart pounding and his stomach threatening to make him relive his last meal.
What was my last meal? Did I even eat dinner? Did I eat lunch? He went from the heater on the wall outside his bedroom to the kitchen, but the very thought of food made him want to vomit. The only thing that he could bring himself to eat was what was left of the chocolate ice cream in the fridge and the moment that he finished it, his eyes widened in horror as he looked down into an empty carton realizing what he’d done. That was important… and he’d eaten it. It was gone now. He dropped the spoon as he put his shaking hands to his face.
He crumpled against the bed and punched the pillow a few times before he forced himself on his back. “Okay…” He said aloud. “Can I appreciate that it happened and just be grateful for that? Someone loved me. I loved someone.”
You’re going to die alone! Marielle’s voice echoed in his head.
Another wave of tears threatened to tear him from himself and his insides twisted so hard that it took everything in him not to wretch.
After a good forty-five seconds to a minute of trying not to vomit, he turned to look at card again. Then he dug in his pocket, and fished out a small trinket… her ring. He put it in front of the picture and stared at the two before looking at the computer in the darkness as it flicked pictures of her.
Why had she done this? She knew that they were destined. So why did she do this? Did she do it because she knew that they were destined? So, she had to defy it? His head hurt thinking about it.
The clock said nine fifteen, and it was early, but he had to be up early to run and he’d wanted nothing more than to just drift off to sleep. He was exhausted; he had been for weeks. But all he could think about now was how empty and cold he felt as he pulled the blankets up around his neck one more time.
Apparently, he’d drifted to sleep because he looked down at the foot of his bed to see a familiar face… it was a little girl. Sophia. “Monster,” she whispered, and again, he was awake with his heart pounding.
It was the bed. It didn’t feel right without her. It had never felt wrong before but now, it didn’t feel right without her.
He stumbled to the living room. Maybe the couch would be better. It was only slightly less anxiety inducing than the bed. It was better because he hadn’t rested with her in it the way he’d rested in his bed, but it was becoming apparent that absolutely nothing was going to make him feel comfortable, satiated, or sane.
He absently signed into chat and scrolled for her name, deleting about fifty different women as he went, several of them from adult websites where you had to pay for the subscriptions to see them do things.
She was online. He wanted so badly to message her, his fingers itched to do so. “Hello, darling. I love you so, so, so much. Even now. I want you here, wrapped in this blanket with me. Do you remember when we talked about wanting to be wrapped up in bed together when we were in Italy? Ha. I think about that a lot. Because it’s what I want. I don’t know if you’ve ever realized it, but almost more than I want you in my bed, I want you in my arms. The first time that I ever held you when you were pacing anxiously where they were torturing Vincent, I felt a strange sort of completion that I’d never felt before with a woman. It felt like it became one of my biggest addictions at that point; the continual need to feel you pressed against my body. Because it was soothing in a way that I could never fathom. You…felt…like…home… And I’ve never felt like I’ve had a home.” He wiped a tear away. “I love you, Marielle Jeanne Chaenes, and in time that might temper, but I do not believe that it will change. I know that in time we will probably both be okay, but I’m not ready to let go. I just…ache for you.” He deleted it all, and scrolled until he saw Han online. Opening a chat window to her, he typed, “Hey. I really need a friend, can you come be with me tonight?”
There was a pause after she saw the message for a good two minutes. “I’ll be right over.”
When Han pranced through his front door, she had a Starbucks cup holder in her left hand and there were four coffees sitting in it. One looked like something blended and covered in whipped cream, one looked like a latte, the other looked like an ice coffee with mocha drizzle, and the last was orange, he guessed Pumpkin spice. She was also carrying a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies.
“Do you expect me to eat all of that?” Austin asked, glaring.
“Listen, beyotch… we’re going to sit here and eat every last potato chip and every last cookie until our stomachs hurt and we hurl. I’m going to guess that you haven’t eaten a single meal since breakfast…”
He was stroking his chin. “I’m not even actually sure that I ate breakfast.”
“Yeah, yeah… you probably sucked down your eggs or whatever.”
He thought for a moment, she was right. He’d had his raw eggs early that morning before his run. Then he’d eaten about a cup and a half of ice cream about an hour ago; hardly what anyone would call a nutritious day for sustenance. Although, none of what was in her hands was exactly good for you, either. “I remembered that you liked sour cream and onion potato chips, but I wasn’t sure on the coffee… so we’ll just have to drink them all,” Han explained setting all of it down on the coffee table and throwing herself back against the couch. She met eyes with him and patted the spot next to her. He staggered over to her, flopped, and buried his face against her shoulder. After a moment, tears came, unbidden and he cried as she wrapped an arm around him, holding him against her with her hooded sweatshirt. He was shaking, and the look on her face seemed to imply that she felt genuinely concerned for him. She didn’t really know him to get cold, but he seemed to be freezing. “Okay, okay… what happened?”
He couldn’t even say it for several minutes. “She’s engaged.”
“She chose Vincent?”
He nodded against her shoulder, squeezing the blanket around himself.
“I’m so sorry, Austin,” she peeped as he continued to cry against her. “Love is such a weird thing… sometimes when we have it, we don’t know what to do with it. Then when it’s gone all we can do is think of all of the things we want to do with it,” she murmured.
“I know what I want to do with love,” he cried. “I want to take her, marry her, call her mine for the rest of our lives, grow old, and die together.”
“That’s about right,” Han said with a nod. She gently rubbed his back, “Oh, Austin…” she hushed. “I don’t know why some people fall in love and some people don’t. I don’t know why some people find a person and live a happy, wonderful life til death and some people don’t. I don’t know why some people find the one, and some people don’t… but I wish I could give you something to make it feel any better at all.”
“I found the one,” Austin sighed finally ceasing his tears. “She was it. She’s it for me.” He said lifting his head and looking up into her blue eyes.
She nodded, tearfully. “I know,” she whispered. There was a pause as she embraced him again, and held him for several moments. “Now…” she began, “iced coffee, chai latte, coffee Frappuccino, or pumpkin spiced latte? Although, I’ll be honest with you? I want to be all over that pumpkin spiced latte, because I’m a basic white bitch,” Han said.
Austin chuckled through his drying tears. “Uh… I’ll take iced mocha,” he said.
She handed it to him and pointed exaggeratedly. “Now, you best be drinking that whole thing, Rancor. Do you understand? I don’t know how much actual food you’ve had today, but food is not nearly as important as hydration, you got that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said putting the straw into his mouth and drinking. There was silence as Han started to quaff the Pumkin spiced latte, then reached for the chips and broke the bag open, stuffing several in her mouth as she put her foot up on the coffee table.
“I’ll be okay,” he eventually whispered between sips.
She cocked her head at him, downing several more chips, and passing him the bag. She glared at him in a way that said, eat them or you’re dead. And he obeyed and ate a few. “Will you?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said distantly. “I mean, I have to be, right?”
“You know that it’s okay not to be okay, right?”
He paused, and drank a little more. “I guess?”
“Have you ever been okay…Austin Rancor?”
He swallowed some of the warm sweet, spicy tea and milk down and twisted the cup between his hands. “I don’t think so,” he offered. Then he set the cup on the coffee table. “I don’t think I’ve ever been okay. I think that I’ve always leaned on my addiction to be okay. I mean, look, after my uh-” he gesticulated for a moment, “-early childhood- things were okay. My mom and dad were actually really good to me, I never felt like I deserved them. But so much of that stuff from before it just-…” his voice trailed off as he fought for words. “It sticks, you know?”
“You have a dark past,” Han said with a nod as if realizing.
“Really dark,” he said, glancing away.
She took a deep breath in and shoved several more chips into her mouth after she yanked the bag back from him. “If you’re like… Italian, how come you sound so American?” She mused, trying to change the subject.
“Oh, I have my dad to blame for that… He taught me English, but the guy sounds like a mobster. I was put into speech classes early on, several times a week. I’m not exactly stupid – something that I wouldn’t have even known if I’d stayed in Italy – I had most of the English language; nuances, colloquialisms, sarcasm and so on down within about-” he bobbed his head, “-two years?”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, and call me hoity toity, but I didn’t want to sound anything like an Italian after a certain point; no accent, wide vocabulary. There was a point in high school where I promised myself that I wouldn’t say a single word in Italian for at least a few months, and I didn’t.” Han chuckled silently as she tore the cookies open and began to dunk them into the Frappuccino. He watched her for a moment and his heart welled with love for her. It scared him a bit because love – any kind of love outside parental love – was a foreign concept to him. What did this love mean? He wasn’t in love with her. He loved her. “Will you stay with me tonight? Friends only, I’m not asking for anything from you. I just need someone to be here with me, ya know?”
Han nodded emphatically. “Yes, yes, I will.”
“Good, thank you. She just…” He looked off distantly as he reached for a cookie, and held it without taking a bite. “She just needed more time. She said it to me, you know? Of course, she would have chosen the person that who she knew would be faithful and true,” he told himself. “I didn’t have the time to prove that. So, I understand it.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah, I do. I don’t like it… I hate it.” He wiped tears from his eyes. “But I don’t blame her for it… I get it. It was a lot.”
“You’ve been with a lot of people,” Han said but there was a question in there somewhere.
“Oh yeah. She asked… I told her. It’s something like two thousand or more.”
“Wow,” Han said, her blue eyes wide as she lifted the back of her head from the couch.
“Yeah… I get it. It was a lot.” He twisted the ring on his finger.
She looked down at it. “Why are you still wearing the ring?”
“That’s not coming off for a while. I want to remind myself why I’m staying clean, here.”
She took a bite out of one of the cookies, creating a crescent moon, lifted it, and looked at him through the shape with one eye closed. It made him feel like he could write something later. “Why are you?”
“So, the next time that someone comes along I can fully promise them that I’m theirs.”
“You think there’ll be someone else?”
He gave her a sad smile. “No.”
“Or you know, you could just like…date me…” They both knew it was a joke; she was casually dating Jamie.
“I don’t like you like that.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll be honest with you; I think that the fact that you’re not just going to go ahead and use my body tonight to quell some temporary desire is testament to how much you’ve changed. You’re not the same person…and it really shows.”
He paused, processing. “Thank you.”
She nodded. They watched television shortly after for a while until he was comfortable enough to sleep for a bit. He still woke fitfully… and in between the waking he wrote in his journal.
Sometimes I think about the moon…
and how the very lines that are carved into it
by God
are like the lines in your face. – Austin Rancor.
He sighed, thinking about the way that his life was swaying… how he constantly thought of Marielle as the sea, and him merely a sailor. Her name, after all meant star of the sea…
I was having nightmares
about a vast, torrential sea.
Deep water, overtaking.
I started to taste metal
And I knew
that I was drowning…
In you.
Because that’s how love is.
Sometimes, it hurts
with the same ferocity
that it heals. – Austin Rancor.
He went back to the couch, sat next to Han who was lightly drooling, dabbed the corner of her mouth with his blanket, and tearfully rested his head against her shoulder before she shifted, looked at him, urged his cheek into her lap, and combed through his head until he fell back asleep. “You’ll be okay, Austin Rancor,” she hummed.
He tucked his knees up into his chest under his blanket and dreamt of Marielle. She was molded against the inside of his body, and all that he wanted to do was stay there until the year was over, and the nightmares – all of them – ended.
***
Thud…thud…thud… thud…thud… echoed in the open space, as the boots crossed the floor, and Liam stopped and looked down at the black, triangular device in the middle of the training room as it whirred and shifted; a glowing blue center lighting up the space around it. The room was dark, and the blue was lighting up the man standing next to it in shadows.
He stroked his chin, and looked up at the lone man staring down at it. “So, what are we looking at?” he asked, and he sniffled.
Vincent turned his face from the thing and met concerned eyes with Liam. “Are you sick?”
“Caught my sister’s flu over the holiday. Stay back,” he growled, raising his hands. There was a good eight feet between them. “I wanted to push through this but even big guys like you and me have our limits, right?”
Vincent chuckled in his throat and looked down again. He was a little taller than Liam, but he certainly wasn’t bigger than him. “This is a means to an end.” Then he ran his fingers through his hair a few times. “Are you not coming with us?”
“I wanted to… but based on how the symptoms progressed, I’m fairly certain that I’ll be laying on my back with body aches, fever, blurred vision, and chills that which Robitussin will not be curing in about twenty-four hours.”
“Mon Dieu… I understand.”
Liam looked down at the Spike. “Th-this thing isn’t dangerous, is it?” Liam gestured.
Vincent chuckled, “Oh, no. There’s nothing in it, yet.”
“I heard something about a black hole?”
“Oui… the idea is to take out Valorant. We have to destroy the entire area. This thing must go off.”
Liam breathed in deeply, and out shakily. The Spike whirred and gently pulsed. “Let me ask you a question, soldier… Do you think you’ll be able to handle this?”
“I do. I think we’ll go in, get this done, and come home.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to handle it without losing any more of my team?” Liam narrowed his eyes at Vincent.
Vincent sighed, and looked away. “What would you do?”
“Most of the people who haunt this building are like family to me… some even like my own kids. I think you know what I’d do if I had to. The question I’m asking is, could you?”
“I think so.”
“Good, then I’m putting you and Rancor in charge with the permission of his handler.” He coughed, and raised a hand as if telling Vincent to wait for him to stop coughing before he added. “Meeting in the morning.” Then he turned and left.
Vincent watched the Spike for another few minutes, making sure that everything was in order.
It was beautiful. It was terrible. He wanted to pick it up and hold it. He wanted to get as far away from it as possible.
Sabine cleared her throat and approached from the darkness. “I’m sorry that I failed.”
Vincent shook his head from side to side, and crossed his arms again. “It’s not your fault.”
“It’s all my fault,” she scoffed.
“No, it was Jeanine’s,” he corrected, flatly. “She made her own decisions.”
They both stood, staring at the triangular, blue thing as it whirred like waves crashing in and going out. “Are you ready for this?” Sabine asked.
He nodded. “I am.” He turned to her. “I want to be done. I’m tired of being in limbo; of wishing for things that I know will never happen. I want to spend the rest of my life with the woman that I love.”
“Is it too cruel of me to point out that the woman that you love is dead?”
There was silence for a moment as their eyes skittered away from each other. “No. But she is also alive.” There was silence except the hollow Spike. “You’ll never approve of me, will you?”
She shook her head.
“That’s fine, so long as you can do your job.”
“That I can do,” she insisted, turning and heading out.
His phone buzzed, and he opened it. “Come home, love. I miss you.” He smiled softly, bent down, shut everything off, and after carrying the spike back up to the labs, went home to his love.