Reverse Rivalry

Sneak Peek: Into The Prequel, Forward Rivalry

There was always a demon lurking in his shadow.

There was always an eerie feeling crawling down his nape, whispering and haunting him since he could remember. An unexplainable feeling persisted silently throughout his life. He always felt as if something sinister was waiting and lurking behind his shoulders. It was an unexplainable situation—not something anyone would believe if he ever told them, but it's been the same since he was a child.

His grandmother would say he was born under an unlucky star. She was a highly superstitious woman, claiming she could sense a bad aura or predict fate as if she were some kind of witch. Linole used to laugh at her ridiculousness, chalking it up to her mind going wary from overworking, age and stress.

But it had been very real. The night his grandmother died from overworking had been truly a night of real horror, especially for a 15-year-old teenager. The moment had been grotesque since he had discovered her himself, deceased and unresponsive.

He was born unlucky indeed.  It was as if the joke wanted to continue ravishing his soul, with full intent to make him kneel to his fate. It brought the semantics of every single bad omen his grandmother had ever spoken and manifested into him.

It was on the evening of her funeral that it all coiled into one single being. It was at that moment, he met the personification of all his horrors in human form.

He had been standing, fully clothed in black at his grandmother's grave, soulless and depleted emotionally from losing the only person who loved him in the world when, without hesitation, he turned his head and his eyes met his. The day had been gloomy and swirled with a dark, melancholic atmosphere he felt in his bones. The clouds were dense, and packed together signaling it was about to rain. It was as if the sky shared his plight.

The boy had been standing in front of a freshly made grave too. The headstone had been glistening glass. It was large, a stark comparison to his grandmother's small one. They were two headstones apart in distance. They both stood silently as if they were just staring into a mirror. Both, a reflection of the other. Every bone in his body, with the deadly intuition his grandmother had passed down, told him to run.  It was as if, fate knew this boy, was the catalyst of hell to come but still, against his judgement, he didn't move a single muscle.

The boy had been captivating. In truth, the expression of nonchalance and lack of sadness on his face, which was strikingly handsome, was breathtaking. It was as if the 3rd movement, "Moonlight Sonata," by Beethoven, started playing in his ears from the beauty before him.

The boy barely blinked, in the singular moment, where they acknowledged each other's existence. The rain started to pour, hard, drenching him immediately but the boy's dark eyes didn't even shift and remained steady.

"How did he die?" Linole found himself asking, initiating a conversation he should have never begun. The boy smiled at his question, a tell-tale sign of psychotic tendencies.

"You are the first to ask me that question, a total stranger," He replied in an accent, Linole couldn't pinpoint where from.

"Were you not told?" Linole continued.

"He died, quite painfully," The boy answered, reaching out to touch the tombstone with his hands. His eyes shifted to the ground and his smile fell.

"I would lie and say it was agonizing to witness but it was not,"

Linole remained quiet. Again, internally, everything was telling him to run and to never look back but the merciless swiftness of the stolen breath the boy took kept him stuck at the spot he shouldn't have remained.

"How did he die?" He found himself repeating. The boy returned his gaze to Linole's face and then answered.

"Poison,"

The rain drenched the both of them to the point their clothes and hair clung to their skin. Lightening and thunder struck through the clouds, yet nothing had been more striking than the boy before him, smiling pleasantly as if, his loved one hadn't just died.

"Regrettably, only you have cared to ask."

Linole stood, no longer finding what words to say. He had been heartbroken, feeling nothing but pain inside him. He glanced at his grandmother's tombstone in a rapidly growing grief. The tears fell against his will but the droplets from the rain covered them seamlessly. His shoulders shook and he trembled.

It took a while for him to realize, he was no longer feeling the drops pelting his skin. He looked up at a hand, wrapped around the handle of an umbrella. His eyes met those majestic dark eyes. The boy's lips were curled in a sophisticated smile. He was wet from head-to-toe but he was only covering Linole with the umbrella.

"Take it,"

Linole stared at him in confusion but he reached out and took it. The boy turned and then walked off a small distance before he was approached by two men in black, who proceeded to fuss over him. They covered him with an umbrella and placed a jacket over his shoulders. Linole watched as they got further away, creating a distance he should have let continue. He shouldn't have shouted,

"Your name! What's your name?"

They came to a halt. The boy didn't turn to acknowledge his question but Linole was sure he heard it. Linole stayed put, not finding the courage to move closer to acquire the boy's name so he screamed louder.

"Please tell me your name!"

The boy turned towards him and handed the umbrella back to one of the men on his right. He walked slowly towards Linole. He stopped a short distance away. The rain soaked him again but it was as if nothing was even touching his skin. The sheer classic beauty of the boy before him, caused a slight pounding in his chest. His hands around the umbrella tightened as the boy smiled at him effortlessly as if it were practised.

"My name is Jules," He replied.

They stood there, maybe for minutes or hours, Linole didn't know, staring at each other in silence. Linole wouldn't have described the moment as tense or awkward but it had a melancholic sense of grievance that was broken too soon.

"Well then," The boy said, then turned.

Linole watched him walk away again without being able to offer his name and it didn't matter. What had been a moment of truth for him, had just been a fleeting moment for the boy. Linole had found him unforgettable. Linole would blame nobody but himself for inviting terror into his own heart, just to get burnt. It was a fault of his own. A fault he had learned to live with. Jules Scott had been that demon in his shadow. A cruel manifestation of his fucked up luck.

But it was truly astounding,

how the devil could be so beautiful.

Author's Note

AHHH! The prequel to Reverse Rivalry is in the works, I'm sharing the prologue here you know before I start uploading the chapters. Just a sneak peek for you all. I hope you enjoy it and I'm enjoying writing Linole and Jules's story so much. I hope y'all are having a wonderful Sunday! This is Mr Pell and Skylar's Dad story for those confused 😂😂