Sin & Savior

CHAPTER 8, PART 5

Alexander couldn't help but feel apprehensive in the face of the unknown. He was gearing up to do something he'd never seen himself doing in a million years. Something that he knew, if Seraphina were ever to uncover the secrets he'd hidden from himself, she'd never see him as her innocent little brother again. All that he repressed after all that he'd experienced in the fights, bloodshed, and trauma that was processing his father's life....it all made the trauma of seeing his deceased body feel trivial.  Considering their circumstance: he could forgive himself for what he was about to do, and that—more than anything else—would steel his nerves to necessary bravery. At least he'd be uninjured enough for this.

His father, who never taught him one solitary thing about manhood except how to incite violence, knew that the best he could do for him now was be there with the sole form of legacy he'd left Alexander behind. Alex's psyche fractured and splintered farther and farther until he couldn't coin his subconscious words weapons or war-zone; he knew those men... of shotgun arms, of tombstone smiles. How quickly his father would color his insecurity as an engine of weakness. How quickly Alexander would locomote the shrinking of himself within the fearfulness of his father's fangs. How the fullness of his soul learned to palm closed its stars like a collapsing locket and find more calm in the quell of the unfurling darkness than his own magnificent light. This world, and its inability to engage him with anything other than unnecessary combat, like a forest in the night digesting you in its arms...

He was so... tired. Of questioning himself, and of having no answers. Tired of questioning the events his sister consistently ladled into his lap like an unending pool of psychosis... no matter what, he would end it here, tonight. He would become the man his father molded if necessary, the cresting, virulent demon devoid of existential humanity if he were made to be. Broderick transmogrified the subconscious silhouette of his sister into a vignette of herself within his mind for weeks, and as inexorably perturbed as the reality made him, the loss of his own memory was far worse.

If this man, Broderick, legitimately held  keys to the mysteries that swam throughout the sky of his mind with a spectre's blossom—a mind now intractably lost unto itself—then this man, Broderick...he would answer for his crimes, or reap the executioner's price. Alexander was no violent man;in fact he was hardly a man at all. But he would channel the only man who'd ever shown him masculinity's dark and impertinent expression, for better or for worse.

"Are you ready?" Seraphina asked him.

"Absolutely," he thought, while saying nothing—nodding softly and silently in his sister's direction. Seraphina knocked twice upon the door, then held her breath, uneasy but convicted in her decision. Her stomach flipped somersaults at the thought of lying to Evan, but the comfort she would feel after they'd found what they were looking for—if, in fact, they'd find anything at all—would bear itself as a serviceable comfort in hindsight and retrospect. When the door opened, Evan bore one of the widest smiles she'd ever seen, which made her own countenance fall unceremoniously onto the brick lilting itself beneath her feet. "H... Hi, Evan!" she said in a sing-songy baby voice, helping to veil her dejection.

"Hi, Seraphina!" he returned with the whole of his stomach and chest involved in the engagement. How he'd regarded her—by first name—made her feel even smaller, her character pierced by the unsettling reality of what she was there to do, but Seraphina was on a mission, and she would not fail herself yet again in order to assuage her guilt behind manipulating Evan that day. Her mother had worked for the MRDD board in Chicago for very nearly 30 years, and she had encountered, tutored, and fostered children of his particular proclivities for around as long as she could speak whilst interacting with her mother's clients. She would never forgive herself for what she was about to do, but she hoped that Evan could, or would, forgive her transgressions one day.