Morality

Act 1 Part 2: Milo

December 1877

London, England

There is something haunted about the alleyways of London.

Damien walks briskly, not looking down at his feet. Just remember not to look down. The memory of these alleyways are seared into the soles of his shoes, although they have certainly seen better days. The only earthly sounds are the crunching of his shoes in the snow and the tortured pounding of his heart in his throat. He does not want to think about the other noises.

No one guards this place, and for very good reason. Damien feels something soft and pulpy squelch beneath his foot and fights the urge to vomit. He has tried to delude himself many times into believing that he is the only living thing here, but he knows full well that half of everything he hears are death rattles, and all of what he smells is rotting meat. 

"Help me," a woman sobs. "Help." Damien keeps walking. A few sobs later, she is perfectly still. 

Don'tlookdowntheywillcatchyouandtheywillmakeyoudisappear. 

He forces his eyelids shut and keeps walking, squelch squish crunch snap pop. Don't think too much about it. It's nothing. Nothing at all. Don't worry. 

Stepwalkrundashsprintdon'tlookbehindyoudon'tlookdowndon'tlookjustkeeprunning,youknowthewayout— 

He slams into something, something warm and alive and solid. The Thing falls to the ground, landing firmly in the snow, and Damien whirls, his left leg already off the ground—

"Damien?" 

He stumbles gracelessly to a halt, balancing himself on one leg, thinking that he has never before been so happy to hear that voice. 

"Milo," he laughs, quick and sharp. "I should have figured..."

At a glance, one would find nothing at all gentle about Milo Drakos—6'5 at his full height, he made a midget out of even Damien, who was in no way vertically challenged. It didn't help anyone's case that he was also powerfully built and steely-eyed and murder-faced and generally well-rounded in all respects of wordlessly driving any and all foes to paranoid insanity. 

Did anybody care that he had never fought selfishly in his life? Or that he had endured murderous snowstorms and pouring rain and ruthless hail to see Jules Bellamy in the hospital, and that he had done this every day unfailingly for the past eight months? Or that there was not a soul on Earth who had once suffered his cruelty? Alas, it could not be helped. Damien knew better about the world he lived in. 

"I was just on my way home." Damien grips his umbrella at his side until his knuckles flush bone-white and his nails groove crescent moons into the tender flesh of his palm. He knows that Milo sees this, but all he does is give Damien a desolate look; in the gloom, Damien can make out a bruise swelling over Milo's left eye, so whorishly purple it looks momentarily like a living thing.

"Another one?" He shreds the words to ribbons on his tongue. "How much more? How much longer?" He squints accusingly at that heedless bloody egg yolk of a sun in the sky, wondering how much longer it would take to inevitably draw the earth closer and closer, like flies to a Venus flytrap, until everything humanity has struggled so desperately and vainly over millennia to create implodes on itself and we find ourselves back at the very beginning, as an immense swirling mass of nebulae and forgotten memories that passed through the hands of time for but an insignificant instant.  

Milo's dark, soulful eyes are entirely devoid of life; his burnt umber hair is unkempt and now long enough to fall in his eyes; his former poise has only deteriorated with every year the war has persisted. It is both chilling and fascinating at the same time, knowing that beautiful, green-eyed Jules and a lost friend are the only things left to hold him down to this plane of existence. 

"I know you have asked yourself this hundreds of times already, Dami. What can I do? I have no choice. Would I change anything by giving up now?" He, too, gazes up at the frigid sun, breath escaping his lips in translucent clouds of mist. His eyes swim with some indescribably human emotion, and Damien wonders for a moment how anyone could ever have thought Milo Drakos to be cruel.

Their respective questions go unanswered. 

"Goodbye, Milo." 

"Goodbye, Dami." 

Damien watches Milo go, his wings a cloud of pale blue on his back. He holds fast to himself like a child, lost and wandering in the rain.