The Bresner household was unique in its dysfunction and at the same time, painfully similar to the average broken home. Parents worked out custodial disputes, dad stressed about money. They were disgustingly standard even down to their variables.

Cas wasn’t sure he missed the days when his father boarded him at Hillworth or was glad they were over. He had traded one mundane routine for another. He often compared Marcel Bresner to the bullies at school in his mind, the way they functioned on a*****e intimidation over words and reason to get their way. People who learned early on that explosive leveraging in a conversation usually lent to people to agreeing with you.

In the end, Cas had become that person too. He vaguely recalled his interactions with a lower ranked Nega named Erythrite who tried to flirt with him, and he had reacted to his discomfort by gearing towards an extreme threat in the conversation by pulling rank. He had done the same in a very clear pattern, with Sailor Irene, Babylon knight. Although Babylon failed to surrender to the very mundane mechanism of being such an insufferably hostile human being that the uncomfortable interaction was abandoned. Really, most people did.

It was kind of a disgusting envy, as he watched his barrel chested father grouse his way through life, undeterred and undisturbed by human words. His weakness was different. Hi enemy was the past due bills printed on the varying colored papers that littered the kitchen table. Every day, Marcel trudged through the front door, caked in cement and god knows what else. Abrasive, rough industrial material that clung to his skin, bleached it and burned it. His hands were permanently etched with rough markings and scars of daily, manual labor and stains deeply seared into his flesh that would never leave him after he stopped.

If he stopped.

He had lost his pension ages ago, he had no hope of advancement or retirement. If Marcel had ever been a dreamer, if his eyes had ever been bright or hopeful, that person was gone now. He was tired, stumbling through mediocrity and finding no joy. He was constantly leveraging the alimony he owed his ex-wife against drinking himself to death. He would work his manual labor job until he was either fired to remove the liability from their work force, or the work dried up, or his eroding physical capabilities exacerbated by repetitive, hard labor left him unable to even grip a trowel to complete the basic duties of the only thing in functioning society he felt qualified and capable of doing.

Marcel was a beaten man.

He was not unique, or spectacular, and never had the means to rebel against the system that kept him constantly scraping by in an endless cycle with no hope of retirement or relief.

Cas usually gave the man a wide berth, especially on nights when his drinking worsened his temper and their fights escalated. But sometimes he watched. He used to despair he was his caretaker, someone who controlled his existence. His poor substitute where other kids had friendly advice givers who helped with science experiments or played ball with them. Unwanted anecdotes from their washed up father was a common source of comedy on the typical subpar sitcom, but he never got that from Marcel. In fact, he didn’t really know him at all.

Through Cas’ early childhood, this man was a stranger. He worked from two in the morning until two in the afternoon. He came home thoroughly coated in everything from sawdust to mud to dried concrete, and he hobbled to bed. When mom left, his role had graduated, but only marginally.

There were screaming lectures when the boys acted out, punishment was issued. He had been learning to cook dinner, but they always ate so early it could’ve been considered a late lunch. He was not talkative or gentle. He didn’t tell stories or reminisce about his childhood.

When Ramira was home, and when they were a family, sometimes there was laughter.

Now there were passive grunts, groans, sighs, pass the salt. And that was preferable to the curses and degrading insults that came when he was angry. Marcel had a short fuse, and both of his boys learned early on that when in his care, they weren’t supposed to touch it.

They used to anticipate the days they lived with their mom, but slowly she didn’t have time. She had to work, she had things to do. It wasn’t a sudden change, but as the months rolled by, time with her gradually tapered off. There wasn’t any animosity harbored towards her for her absence. If anything, she had becomes almost idealized, and the slightly less hopeless times they had when she was here was regarded through nostalgia tinted fondness as halcyon days of yore.

In reality, Ramira saw her sons, one of them officially eighteen, the other nineteen, and recognized them as adults. It wasn’t totally right to completely abandon time with them, but she had her own motivations too. She had worked inconsistent hours and always had, taking various temp jobs with a dubious pedigree in office programs, but she was never kept on permanently and usually found herself embarrassed as technology surpassed her understanding and she was left feeling ignorant and useless in an environment where she used to thrive.

She was often thrown into situations where her discomfort left her feeling inadequate and stupid in front of coworkers, and since she was well into her middle aged years she felt out matched by younger and more educated competition. Even her looks that she had taken so much pride in faded, and faster than anticipated spurred on by stress and nicotine and other occasional ways she tried to ease the crushing futility. She wanted to move on with her life, she wanted to move up. Unlike Marcel who had accepted his niche and would painfully bore away at it until the cartilage wore away in his joints and he fell apart at the seams, Ramira clawed her way towards better things, and found herself constantly falling down into deep depressions when she failed to succeed. No matter how high she climbed she would fall twice as far, and then linger as she wallowed in her own self loathing, often falling into debt and losing opportunities thanks to the long stints of time when she would find herself barely able to motivate herself out of bed.

She barely spoke to her sons, because she barely spoke to anyone these days.

Cas was ignorant to most of these things. He thought of his mother as someone who had gotten out of this life. Someone who had an opening and took it. He thought she was someone to aspire to as the reality was something very carefully hidden from him from separation. The Ramira in his mind was worlds away from who she really was. He often thought about, and once even confessed to his brother, going to visit her. But luckily for carefully built ideals of hope, he had never followed through on this plan.


Instead he was here, forcing himself to observe Marcel’s stiff shamble across the living room of the small, one story home that use to house their entire family. Now it was just the two of them. Normally Cas did his best to avoid eye contact, ignore the presence.

But not tonight. He was reading a book in the threadbare and worn armchair, something that had been used to the point it was ideal to comfortably sink into. But he glanced over his book and watched. He watched as Marcel moved with mild acknowledgment of the increasing pain that throbbed through his used up physical form. He watched him brush off the dirt and grime at the door but still manage to track it in. He watched him strain to bend over for a beer and managing not to make a sound. He watched him sit down at the table and open the mail, and take his constant reminder that for all of his pain, for all of his work, for the price he had paid with damage to his very physical being that would never heal, he still ran on a deficit. He had nothing and no legacy, besides the two sons he fed with ritual responsibility and trained to hate the world as badly as he did.

Because Marcel did so hate the world around him. This world that drained him to his bones and relegated him to an unimportant background. A fading anachronism of a different society, unimportant in the modern world and in the modern economy.

He looked older than his years as he opened each envelope and read each past due notice. The despair intermingled with contempt in the lines permanently carved into his face by a combination of gravity and abrasive wear.

The bottles accumulated with time. Tonight was a rare anomaly as Marcel continued his routine longer than normal, and when he was through, he held his face in his hands and just sat there in silence. And Cas watched, peering over his book and the page that hadn’t been turned in hours. Just watching, as the mundane tone of the night seemed to slowly tide in to suffocating levels.

This is why Cas had no animosity for Ramira. In his idealized and fantasy mental version of events, she had been part of the audience with him and escaped, rather than a fellow creature of complete misery like Marcel. Her absolution for her abandonment was contingent on the fact her boys saw her as a comrade to them, rather than Marcel’s partner. The truth was, they had had a small sliver of happiness with each other. They used to suffer together, and the boys were an audience contained on their own. Now they suffered apart, but only Marcel kept the audience, and the hatred never ebbed away.

Normally Cas didn’t stick around to watch, at least not very long. Any observing he did, he did passively due to the fact they just plain lived together and had to at least tolerate the other being in the same room. It wasn’t a large home, after all. But he didn’t like Marcel, not one bit.

Originally it had been because from the boys’ half fabricated story of the divorce, he drove mom away. She ran away. She had to escape. And then it was because as Marcel’s depression worsened, his outbursts became more frequent. Fights often escalated to being physical, especially between himself and Cas who was more hardheaded since his promotion.

His older brother used to be the rebel, the outspoken troublemaker who ignited tensions. It had been as his accomplice that got Cas sent to Hillworth. But he had grown up. He was about to start his sophomore year in college out of state and he was putting himself in a metric ton of debt to do it without any contact or help from Marcel, even if Marcel could offer such things.

Everyone else had gotten out. Now it was just the two of them. And Cas, watching with morbid curiosity he couldn’t source, wondered why. Why had he been abandoned by everyone, to coexist with this amalgamation of disgust and resentment and failure in human form?

Why did Marcel even let him sleep here and eat here if all he served to be was a punching bag and vice versa?

The first time Marcel escalated to physical retaliation was in the form of lifting up Cas by the collar of his shirt and shoving him out of the way, and Cas had reacted to being manhandled and slammed against walls with total humiliation and defeat. He still found it humiliating. He was a boy, and he wasn’t small any more. He wasn’t young, and now he wasn’t even a minor. It was embarrassing he let himself be treated that way because basic society had taught him that at this point, he had reached all point of being able to stop it, and to take care of himself. But Marcel had long ago given up on respecting physical barrier with his son, and as of recently, Cas had learned to shove back.

The first time he did it, he froze. He had expected an explosion of more overt violence that never came. Instead, Marcel had ended the night utterly defeated and went to bed.

Now it was normal for the two of them to gradually escalate their fights from screaming, to shoving, to worse.

Tonight, in the silence, Cas had been wondering why he-- out of everyone else in their family-- had been left to wallow in toxicity with him. Why didn’t any of them come back and get him once they were out?

Because he already knew the answer but rejected it.

He was an adult, and no one was coming to save him; He had to get out on his own and so far he hadn’t. Cas had grown to be exactly as toxic and hateful and violent as Marcel. He took after him in the worst ways, and they stuck together because everyone else had ‘gotten out’ and moved on to ‘better things’. When Cas looked at this broken and broke man, who had gone through life ignorant and uneducated, who had gone from poor to poorer, who had done hard, occasionally life threatening work to support a family who had to separate themselves from him for their own health, who would die broke and alone and unremembered by everyone except for those who inherited his debts, he saw his very potential future.

People weren’t bad for abandoning Marcel. They weren’t wrong. Marcel did not grow into the man he was without help, either. But Cas would never know who or how or why. He only knew that he needed out too. He would not let this be his future.

Unfortunately, as he considered this, he was reminded with new motivation what the Negaverse was for him. It was a way out of this cycle. He would not die from hard work with nothing to show for it, everyone he ever loved being worse off for knowing him.

Sure, Chaos made the traits that caused these things worse, but it was easy. It was right in front of him. Purification and becoming a knight sounded like far off fairytales and seemed as likely as Marcel somehow landing a job that warranted wearing a suit and managing to get a paycheck that both covered his living expenses and didn't require backbreaking work. As in, not very likely. It wasn’t easy. At least it didn’t sound easy. Nothing he had heard about it made it sound easy, at least.

Chaos made him so much worse, though.

But Chaos also made him wonder, would he really end up so broken and alone like his dad? Brutality was no longer prized in the Negaverse ranks, and they were supposed to keep things under wraps. They were supposed to collect secrets now, not starseeds.

With the next political shift in powers that be, would he have a reliable and safe environment where his traits were even tolerated as they were now? He knew his activities thrilled o one, but he didn’t show off. He kept his head down and only indulged a little. So far he had eschewed any punishment, but how long could that last?

Knights were their own boss. Knights weren’t slaves to a system, and he had seen firsthand what a system could do to someone. But being a knight wasn’t an option. It was a story his enemies told him to make him compliant. He couldn’t become one of them, not without more risks.

No, he was stuck, and from where he was sitting Chaos was the clearest and most realistic option to get out.

He was pulled forcibly from his ruminations and his fake book reading by a snarl. “You gonna get the ******** out of my chair or what?”

(2678 words)