[Requiem] Grief

[http://users.livejournal.com/_crimsonearth/]

The world is darker than I remember it.

Grief is… a strange beast, is it not? I always had a turbulent relationship with my mother, but I did love her. When I found her in the bathroom, drowned on her own wretchedness, I remember feeling… nothing. I looked at her, cold and filthy and humiliated and… and I knew she was no longer in there. That it was just a shell.

I was so angry at Davies and Kraken when their petty scheming brought that poor girl to my door. I should have helped her. Instead I took her, no, dragged her, back to her Sire. Not my problem. When she struggled, I tied her down, when she lashed out, I sank a knife into her gut. Again and again.

And again.

Because she was making it more difficult for me. Because I had somewhere to be.

That… terror in her eyes. What have I become?

Now both Davies and Kraken are gone. I have seen to it. I think I thought it would make it better somehow.

And then Kearney. I thought I would never find him, that I was following a trail of breadcrumbs across continents only to find a spiteful crow sitting at the other end. But he was here. He’s always been here, in my lands, out of my sight. Like a sickness seeping into the earth under my feet, he was here all along.

The sickness, it seems, has touched me too; it has crept into my blood, poisoned my beautiful unlife, clouded my vision. This was not part of the Plan. I was not permitted this but I have chased it like it was the last high.

When I came to him the second time, bloodied and torn, he gazed upon me and mistook me for an angel. I think, in his delirium, he could no longer see the spoiling he had laid upon me.

I suppose it is fitting that a man gone so wrong, a man of God long fallen from His grace, might look upon a thing of death and see a saviour. I sat with him and heard his last confession. I told him if there was a God, he would never meet Him. I laid the scalpel by his bed.

But I did not expect to grieve.

All that… all that hatred, all that blame. The sickness in my gut, the rage at anyone who ever showed a symptom of being like him, the repulsion at the smell of that particular scent, those splashes of white wax, that figure draped upon his cross. All that time I had been carrying him with me and he dared to die with a smile on his face when the pain became too much to feel and the blood clogged his throat and stained his skin.

I did not expect to grieve.

A loss… as tangible as that of my mother, as gut-wrenching as the betrayal of my father, as choking, disbelieving, reeling as the death of my brother.

I thought I would feel free.

I thought I could… be fixed.

I gazed at the blade lying loose in his soiled hands and I wanted to take it. To keep it. To prize it. To wrap it in cloth and place it beside my own in the box where I keep everything that has ever been precious to me.

To have to remember him by.

But then, I supposed I already had a scar for that.

As I walked back out into the night, refusing to let tears fall, my hands shaking, I thought of Kevin. I thought of the promise I had made to let him help me; let him heal me. I knew within an hour I could be upon his doorstep and he would sit gently with me, my hand in his, and tell me it would be alright. And then I thought how I would look up into his eyes and see the fear behind them; the… disappointment. The revulsion at the things I might have done. I might see the very moment where I lost him, right there.

Rex would understand as only we can understand.

But as my car raced through the starless black, I could not help the nagging thought that… I could just do it. Right now. Right now, this feeling could be over. I could be free and all it might take would be a flick of my hand. What is one more life, now? And it would all just… go away. The world could stop.

The world would just… stop.