Tʜᴇ Pᴀᴛʜ Tᴏ Hɪɢʜɢᴀᴛᴇs

Jᴜɴᴏ Iɴ Tʜᴇ Rᴀɪɴ

Cʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 48

Rain trickled down the windowpane like fingertips across glass. The wind tickling the clouds above, sending them to tears, the sound of which drowned the foreign silence that prevailed, right before German Empire chuckled— swirling his bottle in his fingers. "Ja zat happens zometimes."

The rain rumbled after him. The small gushes of wind quivering down tree trunks and shivering the browning leaves, gently rustling in the distance. You caught your breath again, eyes wide. "You're bleeding, do you need any help?"

Mosaic drops of icy water dripped to the ground below from the windowsill, slicking the ground quietly. Tiny droplets buzzed and shimmered, soundlessly gliding around the wet pane, idyllically. German Empire shook his head slowly. "It's fine."

Lypophrenia blew through the Empire's head as he let it fall lower, the faint rain growing louder. "Everyzing vill be fine." He hiccuped in between breaths, it was obvious he was drunk again.

"Are you okay?" You called back out to him. Through the cascade of rain knelling at the turn of the day, under the clouds dripping in despair. He looked up, the rain rumbled in the distance, blood slicked and loose dripped from his chin, leaking to the ground as the rain followed.

He nodded his head before he took a sip of his whisky.

With the little wooden straw he carried, he brought the pipe up to the opening where the blood was dripping from, pushed it into his sticky flesh— his throat clenching as he drank.

Your eyes widened.

His throat clamped as he drank some of it quietly before he brought it back down, the straw now laced with blood clots, not that German Empire seemed to mind.

"Are you sure you're okay? You're bleeding." You reiterated. But he just laughed, over the deluge of water, through the pitter patter of wilds beyond. The elegy for mágoa— sang by the wind and howls of the trees, lamentation of time afoot, pouring from Heaven above. He laughed through it, the sound of his voice dripping down the walls around him. "Vu've menzioned zat."

It went silent. At least the room was. The small enclosed space that shielded you from the elements darkened with impassible silence, sounds everywhere around yet somehow out of reach. A song for the wounded billowed outside yet refused entry to your homestead. Your head lowered, the clouds poured.

"It doesn't hurt anymore."

You drew your head back up. You could see him playing with his bottle, swinging it around and around in his fingers. The liquid splashing and flailing, twisting as the waves crashed, an embryonic rumination of morose ripples trapped within a glass cage. Always swaying and swaying, falling through itself then finding its feet again, always swaying.

"What doesn't hurt any more?"

The Empire made a gesture, waving a hand in front of his face, as if to emphasise the blood dripping. "Zis." You assume he meant the blood. What else would be referring to?

The Empire leant back, resting his head on the seat of his chair. Under his boxy chin, there was a slit over his throat. It oozed and writhed with hot bubbling blood, stringy clots dangled down and traced his neck. You could smell it from where you sat, that musty stench of expired blood. It poured over the petrichor seeping through the window, entangling in itself and the other. A pretty mix of red and blue that smelled like brownies in an odd way.

His eyes kept on yours, his hands twitching, shaking the entrapped liquid as it shuddered in its cage. "Are vu ein angel?"

You swallowed a heavy breath at that. How could you not have, it was the last thing you had expected him to ask. "No." You found yourself hating that question anyway. After those young eyes, wide and watery, quivered and wailed to you as he screamed in the back of a truck. What before was simple curiosity, had then become his lifeline, if not with you then he was with St. Peter. Alone and afraid, standing outside the gates of where he thought you had fallen from. Without comfort, without joy— his mortal body stacked with hundreds of others six feet under, emaciated and bruised, eyes forever wide and glossy, snug against worms and dirt. But his spirit— it was high above the clouds by now, abandoned by earthly pains and sufferings, unbuckled unto the dear of the day, alienated by all. Including, in his mind, the guardian angel he met in the back of a cart. He sought comfort as he marched to his death, yet you abandoned him, you couldn't have been there to lift him into your arms. You were never an angel, you brought bad luck to everywhere you visited. All you had given that man was false hope, and now— you had given German Empire the same. "No, I'm not."