The metallic smell of blood in the air had started to give way to stinging smells of decay and rot and he couldn’t say how long he had been here, in this haze. A danger to himself and his home.
But what was worth protecting about this home anymore?
It had been seventy-six hours since they had trudged back from the hospital. It had been four days since they got the phone call that started everything that ended with the scene in front of him. Slivers of moonlight from between the cracks of disheveled blinds crossed beams with the sickly yellow from a streetlight about to blink into disuse, creating a unique lightshow cast on the heap of flesh he had been staring at.
He didn’t really remember how it got this way. It was hard to puzzle out, exactly, how the heap of tendons and bone, torn skin and bloated internal masses made external, had ever been a human being. Zippeite had always had an easy time dissociating from people, it was what made it so easy to dissociate his victims and use other humans as fuel and chattel. It was even easier to do this when they no longer had an identifiable face or shape, and rather looked like the scraps of a slaughterhouse floor.
He had lost his temper. He made a mistake here, and he acknowledged that. This was not a simple starseed pull, or anything that could be brushed off as a mugging or a terrorist kill. This was an inner city neighborhood, and the figure in front of him had been completely obliterated. He would’ve justified it to himself as energy draining gone wrong. Self-defense, maybe. But he held the starseed that was once housed in this corpse in his fingers. This man was already dead when he started hitting him with his staff. When he punched him until his knuckles were so bloody from his own torn skin and his victim’s he couldn’t tell whose was whose anymore. He had grabbed a knife from the kitchen and stabbed him countless time until the blade broke. Even now, he could see the piece of bent metal sticking out from a mass of flesh that looked like ground meat. This was the result of long, sustained, complete and consuming rage.
He couldn’t imagine the time this must’ve taken to dismantle a body this thoroughly. He could feel the effort in his arms and his shoulder blades. Lingering soreness from a savage exercise.
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Cas remembered that he had been angry, not sad, and that the shame of that selfish reaction would stick with him through the following four days. He would remind himself that the same and self-loathing was a selfish reaction centered around himself and repeat the cycle until he did very little but lay in bed, catatonic for hours at a time.
He did not mourn for the loss of the human being that had been Ramira Bresner. He grieved for the ideal of a woman who had gotten out of their spiraling whirlpool of poverty and abuse and was living a happy existence far off somewhere. Because she had escaped and found something better. He remembered his grandfather saying she worked in an office somewhere. That she was learning computer skills even though new technology was always something she had struggled with. That maybe she was going to do something that was above their little nuclear family of struggling nobodies.
Cas really liked thinking that. He didn’t realize it until it was gone, but he had constructed a weird little fantasy on that hope.
Ramira was not happy. She did not ‘get out’. She was not off among people and beings of greater opportunity wearing posh office clothes and completing difficult tasks with expert keystrokes. As of the phone call, the one his father had relayed seven hours ago, Ramira Bresner was functionally brain dead in a hospital room after attempting suicide, and her whereabouts could no longer be fantasized about in the unknown.
Her crippling depression over the last few months seemed to be an unspoken secret between the other members of his family, but it was a secret Cas never clued in to. All of the signs and obvious revelations that had been solemnly discussed between his grandparents and his father and older brother had been lost on him. Either that, or willfully ignored. Depression and hopelessness was a constant monster that tore through their lives and afflicted more than just Ramira, but was not one he had any desire to identify or understand out of fear of admitting it existed in the first place.
Cas had decided not to visit. His brother had driven in to town from his out of state university and his father had rushed off to the hospital and not returned since.
Cas didn’t want to see her. He felt wronged and then when he analyzed the selfishness of how he was the one who felt wronged when she had clearly been in need of help all this time he felt sick. This usually led in to feelings of self-justification in which he repeated to himself she was his mom and she left him and she was supposed to be there for him. And now she had left again, just in a different way, and that she was a shitty mom who didn’t deserve his grief.
Shame would sink in again after that. And everything felt wrong, and everything felt awful.
More than half a day, at least, had ticked by. Cas hadn’t slept, but he hadn’t moved much, either. He mostly spent the endless hours staring up at the ceiling fan lost in an unpleasant cycle of emotions. Hatred threaded through every one of them. Whether he was hating himself or hating his mom or hating some other person in their familial world it was his one constant.
It was dark outside, but he hadn’t turned on his phone or his computer and he no real idea what time it was.
He got up, stiff from the long hours without movement, and shuffled lethargically into the kitchen. Once there, he realized he wasn’t hungry, and that he had only been prompted to by some routine oriented part of his brain that demanded he visit the kitchen because he had not eaten in so long. It didn’t change the fact he had no appetite. He was beginning the shuffle back to his room when the door opened and he made started, brief eye contact with his father.
Or someone who looked a lot like his father.
Marcel’s eyes were bloodshot. The deep creases and cracks that textured his skin weren’t taught in a frightening or angry way. Instead they seemed to be simple byproducts of gravity, and everything about him just seemed to sag and sink under that gravity. He looked older than he was. Cas would call him broken, but Marcel had been broken for a long time, he just usually attempted to distract from such things with a veneer of violent anger. He just had no energy for that anymore.
Everything in the world seemed to freeze as they looked at each other. They hadn’t exchanged words that weren’t part of a fight in ages, so when Marcel closed the door behind him softly and cleared his throat before he hoarsely asked, “Have you eaten yet?” Cas seemed startled.
And then confused. And then he seemed to sink a little himself. “Not hungry.”
“Me either.”
However, regardless of this exchange Marcel went to the kitchen and when he brushed past Cas he gave a firm order of “Sit” which Cas complied with, going to the little wooden table in the dining area of the open space and obediently sitting down and resting his hands on the table.
The smell of burnt tortilla hit the air and Cas suddenly became aware Marcel was cooking. The man didn’t exactly have an extensive culinary repertoire, and he hadn’t attempted much since Cas’ mom had left but the aroma alone was enough to suddenly conjure up forgotten memories. Marcel used to. Stupid, simple things that were distinct in their own way, that Cas could remember being six and stupid and hanging on his arm when he got home from work begging for his cooking because mom had made something he didn’t like and only daddy could feed him tonight.
And even though Marcel had spent the day doing backbreaking labor and smelled like concrete mix and sweat and earth he would trudge to the kitchen with a smile and listen to Cas ramble and babble about all of the dramatics of kindergarten and the stories he had made up and the fantasies he had indulged in.
Cas was baffled as to how he could’ve forgotten about those times until just now, but when Marcel set the plate in front of him and then sat across from him at the table with a gruff “Eat anyway” Cas decided that the memories of happier times were wholly unwelcome.
Things had changed since then.
He didn’t want this ugly, failure of a man’s offering or any childhood memories of when they had been closer. Marcel was a traitor, and an enemy to his security, he couldn’t reconcile that with the softer version he remembered and honestly, he didn’t want to.
But he could want for ages and it didn’t change the reality that the gesture had softened. No one wanted to admit how badly they still cared about someone who hurt them, but it didn’t change things when Cas felt his hatred for Marcel ebb. How that moment where they sat across the table from each other, suffocated by thick awkwardness, he wanted to apologize to him. And it was a completely shitty feeling all around.
He picked at the meal, gradually feeling more dangerously exposed the entire time.
But as time went on, it started to feel like its own brand of comfort. And just as quickly as it had come on, it was just as quickly ruined.
“You should go see your mom.”
Cas shifted uncomfortably. He had very willfully declined several invitations and prompts to go to the hospital and visit her. He didn’t want to see her. He was afraid seeing the visual in person would further entertain that this was their reality. Besides, if she was really as gone as they said, she would not be present to note his absence, and he had nothing to gain from seeing her mindless and sick body lying in a hospital bed.
If starseeds were really what Hvergelmir had told him they were, if they were really what Painite laughed about them being, he wondered if there was even one left in Ramira Bresner’s chest. Her heart continued beating, she continued fighting. Perhaps there was.
And for some reason, ruminating on that gave a glimmer of hope. Or maybe it was everything combined. The nostalgia childhood comfort, Marcel’s ability to attempt gentleness in his grief. Cas was even startled to realize that tears had begun welling in the corners of the old drunk’s eyes.
Marcel reached across the table and Cas flinched until he realized he was extending a hand. Just reaching out, touching him gently. “I am so sorry… for the way things turned out. For every thing that’s happened…”
Now, Marcel had apologized before. His apologetic nature usually lasted until the next crisis came to crumble them. Although he had never apologized during a crisis so the large man attempting to console him in this manner was new and strange, but not unwelcome. Cas needed someone, he just wasn’t expecting it to be this someone. And if it could be this someone, after all the hate and the hurt they heaped on one another, why not? Maybe it didn’t have to be so hopeless.
He could feel hot tears and warmth rising in his chest. Marcel of the past and Marcel of the present had been two separate people to him. Marcel of the present was not a safe human being to be entrusted to. He was a cruel and bitter old man who would strike if you showed weakness and tear you apart if you let him. But he looked so much like Marcel of the past it was easy to get confused sometimes, because he really needed him, and the temptation to break down and cry, to find comfort in dad, was too great.
He didn’t articulate any words, but he did actually give in, just a bit. Crying happened. Tears fell. Cas just listened and whined and nodded as Marcel spoke soft words he wasn’t comprehending or registering. Hope was here. It was painful and invasive in a place where he felt like he had no room for it, but it was here.
In the way he had come to expect being hurt the worst when he allowed himself the stupid luxury of belief and hope, the way it was ripped away this time felt especially cruel. The moment went on, Marcel was suddenly urging him to go see his mother again. He explained how damaged her heart was, he explained why her health would only decline. Cas began to babble back as the words registered. There wasn’t any ailment listed that couldn’t be treated. IF her heart was damaged, there were transplants.
Even as he said it, he knew there was no feasible way she would get a donor in time. A middle aged, uneducated nobody on the cruelly eternal transplant list when there were children and geniuses and more productive members of society awaiting death alongside her.
Worst of all was when Marcel pointed out that regardless of all these things, her brain had been damaged as well. She showed no activity or awareness. Cas cringed when Marcel got too detailed about the breathing apparatus she needed, or the feeding tube necessary to survival. He didn’t want to hear these things any more than he had wanted to go see them in person.
Cas’ allowance of his vulnerable emotional state seemed to slip further than he meant it too. Marcel had ruined the tenderness of the previous moment and was desperately trying to talk to him about reality again. He didn’t want to go back to reality. In that moment they were family, who loved and hurt together and could lean on each other. Here on the edge of reality they were just ugly, wretched people.
“Cas, I talked it over with your grandparents and—Cassidy,” Cas, fully devolved into childhood at this point, had retaliated to the onslaught by covering his ears and clenching his eyes shut. Marcel had to reach across the table to pull one of his hands away before he continued, his tone changing from its ill fitting attempt to be soft to emphatically trying to impart every word. “I talked it over with your grandparents and we’re taking her off life support tomorrow.”
What was about to follow was another urging to go see his mother, but Cas never heard it. He had powered up in a flash and plunged his free hand into Marcel’s chest with speed he didn’t realize he was capable of, and that old drunk of a man stopped talking forever.
(2624 words)
