Pure - A Tragic Tale of Romeo & Juliet

Romeo

I'm not absolutely sure when it was we first met, perhaps because it always felt as though we had known each other forever when we were together. No names, no introductions, were necessary; we would just strike up a familiar little conversation straight away.

I suppose, if pressed to name the first recollection of her I have, I would name it to be the day of my mother's funeral. She had been in the process of a very difficult child-birth, and had died seconds after the baby was born. I was seven.

When my father tried to tell me, I was so very angry. What right had she to die and leave me behind? And why should my little brother get to stay here but not her? Not that, of course, I had much of a concept of what it was. Death, I mean. To me, death was like a really long journey overseas, as that was how my father had explained it to me:

"Son, death is... Death is when someone leaves you. Leaves you to go away for a really, really long time. Forever, almost."

Naturally, my father was shattered at her death, and it did not take much for me to crumble that glass into mere dust. As he told me, shaking, face damp with tears, I screamed at him, hitting him repeatedly with my thin arms. He just took it, relaxing into it in such a way that I imagine now he was welcoming it. Maybe it helped distract him from the pain inside. Or maybe it just didn't really hurt that much.

The funeral was a sombre affair, as funerals tend to be. I was dressed up in black, the starched white collar of my shirt rubbing painfully against the tanned skin of my neck. I wanted to complain, but I didn't know who would listen to me.

As it was the funeral of my father's partner, it had to be very formal, and all of my father's business partners had to be there. As a result, I knew only the smallest fraction of those there. The majority of them were either distant relations of mine, or old, crinkled men in musty suits, a good number of them Offices. I stared up at them all, looking for a face I knew, but there was no one. I looked for children my age, but there were none.

None except, as I would shortly find out, her.

It was during the middle of the service, and the seats were rigid and unforgiving. The Cremator upon the stage droned on in drab monotones, and I was as bored as I grieving child can be. I could not see the link between this man and my brightly shining, absent mother.

I shifted around in my seat, trying in vain to get comfortable, but to no avail. I found myself gazing around absently; taking in nothing, until my eyes finally came to rest upon my tiny infant brother. My brother, the cause of my mother's absence. The rage within me flared up, and I stood, silently. I walked quickly away from the congregation, snatching up the swaddled baby as I left. No one seemed to really notice; not even my father.

I made it all the way to the gate of the graveyard before she tapped my shoulder. I turned on her furiously, about to let forth a sea of fire, but my tongue froze up in my mouth.

"Why are you leaving?" she asked. I supposed that she was about my age, and I wondered why I had not noticed her before.

I tried to respond, but I realised that I didn't know what to tell her. What did I intend to do to him? Surely I wasn't going to kill him, was I? Was that really why I had left with him?

She cocked her head to one side, causing her long flaxen hair to spill over her shoulder in a shining wave. She reached forward slowly, as though trying not to startle a wild animal, and moved my brother carefully in my arms, so that his head was cradled in my hand, and his wriggling feet rested at my opposite elbow.

"Here," she said quietly, "You're supposed to hold him like this."

I stared into her warm brown eyes in fascination, and felt all my anger fading away into the dullest of throbs. Without another word, she turned and began to walk back towards the church. Numbly, blindly, I followed her, my feet stumbling in the long grass. We weaved in between the faded grey headstones, and slipped in not through the huge wooden doors at the front of the church, but through the normal-sized ones at its side. There, we parted ways. We said no goodbyes, but somehow it didn't seem necessary. I never hated Nathide again, becoming my brother's protector, instead.