Ruin Maketh Me

58 - Mate

I slip away.
Whump. Whump, Whump. Then silence. Where? My eyes crack open. Yellow, buzzing light from the overhead bulb, the remnants of musky fan air burning up in the night heat, a stained ceiling, and a hard dust covered floor smelling of old booze and cigarette ashes.
"Boy, you're up."
I sit up creakily, back aching from the perpetual press of hard floor, "Who...are you?" I study the man standing in the doorway, short brown hair, brown eyes, a face that could pass both the age of 30 or 40.
He grins, showing pointed yellow teeth and swaggers into the dry hum of the room, "I'm Jenkins, remember, your mom had me over a couple of times."
Jenkins... I shuffle backwards slowly. His face prints into my mind, I've seen him before, yes, that woman had him here a few times before hadn't she? This heavy-set middle-aged man, she had said that he gave good tips and fucked well. A slow tremble travels up my fingers, "Where is she?"
He leans against the wall, fishes out a bent cigarette from his trouser pocket and lights the end with a sharp fwoosh of his plastic lighter. His watery eyes bend, and he takes a long drag of the cigar, spitting out a bursting cloud of heavy, pungent smoke, "Dunno, she could be anywhere right now."
His words ring like a never ending echo within my ears and spark a well-known danger from the slowly stirring panic. Anywhere? She's not here? I shuffle backwards, scan the room for anything I could use, anything. Nothing.
The ash from the end of his cigar falls to the floor without a sound, and the look in his eye shifts into a primal gaze of loss and gain, "You're a clever boy."
My head swings from right to left. No. This is not happening.
Jenkins shrugs, ash quivering everywhere, "She sold you, to me."
I get to my feet slowly, unsteadily, the floor biting into my skin like a cruel reminder, his eyes on me, always, unmoving.
"Don't worry kid," He laughs lightly, letting out puffs of hazy smoke, "I won't do anything bad to you as long as you're good, understand? Your mother," He waves his hand, a strangely thoughtful expression crossing his hard features like a change under the hand of God, "She was at breaking point with you."
"She sold me to you?" My voice drifts out small, inconsequential, minute and hollow in meaning before the sparse light of these paths before me.
He shrugs again, his broad shoulders jutting up and down, ash dribbling to the floor like water from the broken tap, "It's just the way things are, Kid. Martha wasn't a good mother, and I needed someone to run a few errands. That's all."
My feet dance under me in some mysterious, chaotic waltz, up down, down up, left right, right left. She left me here all by myself with this man from who knows where, this devil. Or is he the devil? Is she not the Satan beneath the skins of a desperate woman? She left. She abandoned me. I've been cast away to this barren path when she could've saved me; this is it.
     I fall to the floor, through the hard wood like it's nothing but a puddle of cold water, down and down forever spiralling aw a y y y —
     Agony rips up my spine.
The dark melts away again.
I'm still on the floor, hot liquid pain coursing through my back, my neck, my arm, my nose, every limb and fibre of muscle. What can I do? What should I do? My mind jumbles and fizzes and all thoughts float and scramble with no place to land their feet. He bit me. Bit me like he meant to snap my neck in half. Get out. Run away. Is he still biting me? Red pools into the corner of my vision, blurring in and out like the unshakeable stain of sin, and I'm still going up in flames. Red like the blood seeping away from me under the tires of the car. Red like the twisted flares of a fire. Red, red, red, I might die of blood loss. I need to go to the hospital, yes, otherwise I'll die. Hospital, hospital... there's no hospital for me here, and he's still on me, biting into me.
A low moan bleeds from my mouth, "Let go of me, Lilith. LILITH!"
My left arm struggles forward against the non-existent hold of smooth wood, but before I can fully commence my last fight against the throes of death chiming in my head, a strange touch comes over me. Foreign but well-known and wildly fantastic, a roaring sound that shakes away all despairs and horrors, an enlightening caress, the closest touch to God. Yes, God, that must be it, a divine touch that lights up the blood in my veins and arteries like a burning torch in the deeps.
The sound, that alluring deep toll that licks away at my soul extends, merges then separates into individual booms that resonate with the rushing in my ears. A thump, thump, thump, thump, thump, it becomes a heartbeat. An unsteady, quickened beat that pounds with inconceivable strength and life and hope and despair, the light and darkness clashing and breaking apart in a constant swirl of yin and yang. The thumps become double, and behind each single thump from that mesmerising sound, there's another thump, hidden but equally just as close. They merge, closer and closer until a new, unimaginably beautiful noise is formed from the rubble like an ascending angel.
Something draws out within me like a string or a chain, an extension of self from the spasming flesh that is my body and soul, and it reaches out, uncoils towards that combined thrum. It arrives somewhere, our final destination through blood and the falling sensation in my head, it arrives solid and firm, and it entangles with something alien, again, but yet bizarrely familiar. They dance, they foxtrot through the steps, pre-destined or readily forged, I can't differentiate, by that God's hand and together, together they bind and become one. My heart fills with indescribable joy, an enlightenment I thought I'd never come to, and my vision blooms into a thousand mirrors of wonderful reality, colours so splendid my mind craves for immortality. This is joining of holiness far beyond the mere contact of skin against skin, lips against lips, this is a joining overseen by whatever God there may be, for there surely is, the justice of this moment is proof enough.
And it settles into my skin, deep within me, a bond that will not be broken perhaps even in death. And the colours fade from my dazzled eyes. And the sound breaks away from my dazed ears. And if I reach in and grip that tethering line inside me, I can still feel that stable thump, thump, thump, thump, thump on the other side, and I rejoice. I rejoice.
Tears cleanse my soul in joy.
The pain draws to a close on my back and neck and arm and nose, somehow I am healed once more. The weight pinning me down lightens, and I know, as if I have been told directly by this uncertain, certain God, that I am now connected to that man I know as Lilith by an unbreakable bond. This bond dictates we are forever each other's, in life, in death. If one is to perish, the other is to perish as surely as the other. If one is to be re-born, the other is to be re-born as definitely as the other. This is a binding of life, of emotion, of thought and this is one meant to ignite understanding to unite two into one. It is meant for our two souls to be woven from the same fabric.
Lilith stumbles off me in delirium, back in the form of a man. The explosion of his joy radiates through me like a splash of brilliant colour. I sit slowly upright in my cooling blood, and he stares at me as he usually would but with the addition of overwhelming adoration and appreciation, and regret and apology. The euphoria fades to nothing, and for a minute I am lost in the absolute intensity of his emotions, but the pit squirms back within me and alongside it, the smouldering fires I can't hold back.
The blinding happiness of Lilith's soul dims and sharpens into heavy, dampening guilt and regret. I didn't mean to Cynder, I lost control, I am so sorry, I meant you no harm. Flashes of snippets of images and emotions flood into me. The beauty in the Caravaggio of my face, his love for every subtle shift of my mouth, his reliance on my being, the anger at the sight of Ralphus, tall, strong, unyielding, his hate at the dark blue family crest of a wolf printed in my lower back.
Yes, there indeed is a physical crest printed in your back.
I recoil from the strange string of separate thoughts threading into my mind, and although I can feel the things he's feeling, and although I can, even through all the burning of the flames, understand his course of actions. I draw up as much charring fragments of my mind and hurl it down the line with frightening force: this bond will only be a hell for you, Lilith.
His lithe body shudders backwards, and his light-filled eyes tremble and widen. No, no, no, please no, Cynder, please— Once, twice, thrice rising among the chorus of pain thundering through our link.
You should've known this would happen. My eyes draw towards the red rawness around his sensitive mouth. My blood, all my blood coating his lips like layers of lipstick.
Yes. Yes.
And yet he says, "No." Tears kissing his face, again, "No."
I shan't forgive you. "Fuck you." I spit out, fighting against the persistent softness rising in my heart.
Forcing my eyes onto his forlorn, lone figure standing silent and expectant, I shove the torment of fear and the torment of his desperate need and the torment of the blinding pain at him, pile upon pile. His feet slip, his legs fold under him, and he collapses on the floor in a desolate pile. A torrent of hurt streams into me like a banner of surrender, not only from him and his miserable mind, but also from within the mush of my heart. I've become soft. Towards him, I harbour too much forgiveness.
     We owe each other nothing now. I need time to think through it. Time. And without hesitation, for if I give in to the want for even one second I won't be strong enough to do this, I conjure up steel sheets and reinforcement and bricks upon bricks upon bricks. I build a thick wall, a high wall, a strong wall, and I bury the thread down deep within, that glorious thread of other emotions alien yet delightful in their execution. I build floors and empty rooms and halls and turrets and spiked battlements and layers of walls. So now, now, I cannot hear the beautiful chime of complex desires, the thump of his heartbeat that runs through us both, I am alone again.
Bloody tears wash down his face, down his neck, down his unblemished chest, down his naked body. And he is alone again.
But I must be cruel for now, and I must deny him gentleness for myself. Love, no matter how deep, how natural, how instinctive, how undeniable should not do violence justice. I should not forgive him for hurting me. Yes, I need to do justice for myself otherwise no one will.
He lifts his head towards me, leans forwards, reaches out for me, mouth open to explain or to apologise, but no words come out. And he knows, he knows that I've heard and seen and felt all the explanations that could be given to me, and I still chose not to forgive him.
I read in the flicker of his eyes and from the encounter with his soul, he knew all along this would've happened from the moment he bit into my nape. I read in the twist of his torso and the flash of hardness over his brows, it was no losing control, although it had been disguised as one. It had been no accident. It had been no impulse, though it might've sparked from one. The flames twist and boil and grab me by the mind and by the heart.
My feet slip then walk then run towards him, and I'm grabbing him by the shoulders and punching him. My fists collide with his angelic face again and again and again, bashing his head against the wooden floor. He doesn't struggle, he doesn't fight, he just lies there, a hint of a gentle smile cutting across his blood red lips despite the heart-wrenching sorrow in his eyes. I don't care. I smash into the smile, the godly countenance, the face I had treated with respect and dependence and need and friendship and love. And I hate him. I hate him so much in this moment, there's nothing I can do but punch him and kick him and let mindless words scream from my lips. Why. Why. Why. Why. It would've all been better if there had not been love. It would've all been better if our need for each other had been as simple as staring at the moon and stars.
Something as twisted and impenetrable as love, I can't understand.
I fling him away and run for the gaping doorway. I can't stay here any longer, if I want to stay half-sane, I need to walk away.
"Wait! You can hate me if you want, just open the link just for a moment, there's something you have to know! It's about Declan." Lilith's rises in urgency behind me, but I run on, whip away from the timber of his clear voice. Not now.
Not now.
My feet push against the smooth marble, down the aisles of empty seats, and there's a pounding at the Church door, my final destination.
"Cynder!" Muffed shouts of a pitch I've memorised within my mind.
Groping out, I throw open the door and crash out into the bite of air, and Ralphus folds me in his arms.