Potere | Book II ✓

xxix | end of an era

xxix | end of an era
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D I A V O L O 

present day –

His hair has grown.  The only indication that time is marching on.  Scolding hot water rushes through every strand, drawing his short hair just half an inch down his forehead.  It threatens to burn his scalp and ignite the pain of every scar that lines his back. But all Gabe can feel is the cold tile that his fingertips press against.

His eyelids flutter closed as water ripples through his hair and rushes down his face.  He flexes his left hand, the same one Veleno drove a knife through, staking the Russian assassin to the floor. Gabriel will never regain full function or feeling.

His eyes open at the thought.  Federico De Santis is one of this decade's best assassins, followed closely by Veleno.  Both offering Diavolo something he rarely sees: a challenge.  But neither intrigued him as much as the boy.  Gravity should not obey someone like it does that kid.

Crixus didn't just intrigue the assassin, but the commander of Valentin's army as well. Kirill. "Who the fuck did this?" He had said, inspecting Gabriel's back.

"The future."

Gabriel steps out the shower and towels off quickly before pulling on a pair of shorts.  It's pitiful to say, but his reflection offers him a sensation he doesn't often feel.  Fright would be an excessive term to use to describe it, but Gabriel's heartbeat hits another gear at the odd movement out the corner of his eye.  His reflection in the mirror. 

He doesn't see himself often and typically when given the chance, he doesn't take it. He never saw his reflection until he was twelve.  Gabriel and self-esteem were never given a chance, because by the time he saw himself, he already believed what Valentin and every other soldier had told him.  He was nothing.  And that is all he would ever be.

As a boy, he clung to the handle of the grimy mirror, blood trickling down his arms in thanks to the cuts inflicted to his hands.  A young Kirill stood above him, glancing away nervously in hopes that nobody had seen him sneak Gabriel the small mirror.  The boy had been asking to see himself for as long as the young soldier could remember. 

He clings now to the edge of the sink, attention just as focused on his reflection now as it was all those years ago.  His hair was long back then.  His loose curls tumbling over his forehead and obscuring his vision with ease.  His hair hasn't been that long since.

As a boy, he was focused on his appearance.  But tonight, he's busy trying to find the same look that he sees in others in himself.  That look.  The one that separates the dead from the living.  The one that is in the eyes of everybody that he passes.  The one that he can never find in the dead.  The same one he can't find in himself.

"You're nothing," Gabriel whispers, just like he did all those years ago.  Repeating the mantra that was repeated to him on what felt like a daily basis.  "You are nothing and that is all you will ever be."

And as Kirill did back then, he listens now.  The same scene that repeats in the assassin's mind repeats for the soldier as he leans against the doorframe, arms folded across one another, silent.

But it was the start of something.  To Kirill it was a friendship, a bond, a trust.  It was safety to Gabriel.  Kirill was the one and only solider who never laid a hand on him.  The only solider that loosened his chains and treated him like he was normal.  The only solider that would march down to the basement during the night and unlock his door and although Gabriel never left the confines of his cage, they would sit there, and they would talk. Like he was normal.  Like he was not nothing.