A Scholar's Affection

5

The lovers missed each other very much. Hansiel would constantly touch the gifted earrings. He looked at the web for any hint of Slate's current conditions, but nothing. He'd think about every moment they spent together and realized that the other man's eyes were almost always on him, looking, watching. His face would always look wonderfully beautiful no matter how he was. Crying, or smiling in the moonlight. He would write poems of the gap between them for long periods of time, sometimes even refusing to exit his room.

For nights, Slate would watch the progression of Luna across the Earth's sky. He'd then look down at the necklace on his neck of the fluorescently colored crescent moon. But something happened to him.

"Come on, do it." His "father" whispered, eye on the cowering child.

"No! I don't want another one-"

"Do it!"

Slate would fall on his knees and claw at his head. He didn't know how much longer he could take all this. It was too much. The voice in his head was constant. He hated it. It drove him insane.

He stood involuntarily. His arms were raised against his will with the axe in hand. He struggled against it, he really did. But it was pointless, as the weapon rained down and split the young skull in half. Blood and brain matter was left on the axe. Slate ran to a side and heaved, a hand on the wall.

"Good boy, but less hurling."

"Stop this, please..."

"No."

Whenever he looked into the mirror now, he had expected to see himself, but instead, he saw a familiar man with some tan and blue eyes. It hurt. He was in the body of someone else who looked so similar to him.

What kept him going for a while of this was the thought of seeing Hansiel again, to touch his cold-yet-warm body, his serious face twisted into a smile that radiated more power than the local star. Oh, what a joy, he was!

But the thoughts turned nostalgic and it hurt to think of him, and that was all he could ever do. He was angry. He was furious. He was enraged at how he was so weak as to yield to the commands of an outsider. But as the years passed, he found himself calmer. He had been forgetting what he couldn't ever leave behind. Instead, they were replaced by the memories of his past life. The one before he met Hansiel. They were, somehow, clearer than the more recent ones. More forced.

"Macey, are you awake?"

"Yeah." His identical triplet said.

"Do you ever wonder where mom went?"

"Of course I do, Slate, how could I not?" Slate was the nickname that Mason had given him as a child, "For having a clean slate." Mason didn't like nicknames much.

"Do you think she loved us?"

"I don't know, she wouldn't have left us if she loved us."

"Maybe it was for her own good. Maybe she wasn't safe."

"And the other one?" Slate referred to the lost triplet, taken by their mom.

"Just as endangered."

"Then why are we still here?"

"Hmm... I guess it's because of a fight that went down, and she only managed to get away with one of us. But that's unlikely."

"Wouldn't it be great if we both got to stay with her?"

"Maybe she's a jerk to her own kids."