The Siren's Code

Remi

Born Remuald Serenetti, Remi to his family and friends, the only child of a French mother and Italian father, quite the combination by anyone's standards, suffice to say it lasted long enough to mess him up and short enough to mess with his ability to settle down – he'd had a couple of marriages. He was a complete romantic but a hopeless soulmate, and blamed his parents for everything. It wasn't that they didn't love him or that they treated him badly, but their personalities just weren't cut out for parenthood. There was much of his parents in him.

His mother, a wild abstract painter who had grown up pushing the boundaries of what her religious fine art tutors considered to be art.

"Pourquoi?" she would always say.

"Why does one have to conform, why can one not solely express?" He smiled at the memory. What made her a very good painter indeed, also made her a haphazard mother. Throughout his school years, the young Remi would never know whether today was a day he would need to get his uniform on and go to school or whether she had other plans for the day. Later on he came to understand that his mother had bipolar disorder.

The ride up to mania was wild and fun, a myriad of realities each lived to the full and lived on the edge. Never a dull moment, but also quite unstable for a child who really benefited from routine. And then the dark days of depression when she couldn't get out of bed, and would rock and moan and hug Remi close. On these days he would get himself up, down to buy bread from the village boulangerie and then to the bus stop for school.

Remi's father ran a large construction company. He was suave, charming and completely unable to cope with his wife, so threw himself into his work, and probably a few other women's beds. He was a man of few words and showed his son little affection, in fact Remi's only really fond memories of his father was sitting with him looking at sketches and plans for new buildings, his father explaining technical details that young Remi could barely grasp.

His half crazed mother and distant father meant that independence and resourcefulness were skills that Remi learnt young. The Serenetti family home was an isolated chalet on the edge of a forest and at weekends Remi was often alone, so would pass his days in the wilderness with the rifle his grandfather had given him, honing his shooting skills on small rodents. On his own in the silent shadows of the endless forest, his mind became quiet. Being with his family, people in general had the opposite effect on him.

When Remi was seventeen his mother went out one morning, the morning of his last Baccalaureate exam, dressed as if she was going to the finest cocktail party... perhaps she did as she never came home. Three months later, on Remi's eighteenth birthday, his present to himself was to knock on the door of the French Foreign Legion (FFL) - an international private army made up of men with nothing to lose. The decision had been brewing for some time. He had few friends at school, no siblings, his father had left five years prior, and now his mother had disappeared from the face of the earth. It was a decision born of anger and loneliness, but Remi was self reliant, damn good with a rifle, and hell - he wanted an adventure and the Legion Étranger was a perfect fit.

Remi met Armel Guzman in basic training, both eighteen and wet behind the ears. Their first deployment was the Bosnian war, and they had each other's backs from day one. Saving each other's lives, literally and mentally on numerous occasions in Bosnia and subsequent horrific wars, and that was part of the problem, why could he not have saved Armi on that last fateful tour?

It was bittersweet to reminisce. Armi was Nicaraguan, his parents killed by a car bomb in the unrest of the time. His father was political, his mother an English teacher of indigenous descent. They had gone out for the evening, leaving baby Armi with his Abuela, who then raised him as her own. Armi was a very bright, very sensitive boy who didn't really fit in. When his grandmother died he gravitated towards petty crime to survive and after several brushes with the law, twelve year old Armi was then taken in and educated and ultimately trained by the 'charity' arm of DynCorp, a private military contractor and training firm.