Destiny's End. M/L. CC. Dark. Post-Grad. 1/1. - [COMPLETE]
Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 12:43 pm
Title: Destiny’s End
Author: Cristina
Category: CC. Post-Grad. Dark. Character Death.
Rating: TEEN
Disclaimer: The show is not mine.
Summary: Rewind. Reset. Go.
Author's Note: The line “the things which I have seen I can now see no more” is taken from a Wordsworth poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. This poem is significant because it indicates a shift in Wordsworth’s beliefs from his unconventional younger days as a supporter of the revolution to the traditional beliefs he held as he grew older…not that any of you care.
FB is always a most welcome thing.
Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one’s slightest distraction.
“The South” Jorge Luis Borges
The attacks came suddenly.
Although in retrospect, in truth, perhaps not so suddenly, not suddenly at all.
Sitting amongst the filth of his dark prison cell, he knew that he had been in love, once. He knew that he had been happy, warm and safe, once. He had known the caress of warm sunshine like lemon tang, the caress of a beautiful woman’s hand—body—against his skin, once. He had not spent the entirety of his life here.
He. had. not.
But, it had all gone, melted away like a dream in the harsh light of day.
Where had it gone?
It had all gone for her, everything for her, every dream for her.
I had known it was over for us soon after we’d left our small dusty desert town. We were at a sleazy motel in another small town. This time it was a hot and sticky town weighed down by the unforgiving humidity of a Georgian summer. It was supposed to be merely an unremarkable pit stop on our ceaseless journey across this country to be forgotten as soon as we left. It was supposed to be nothing more than that, but it had been more than that for me.
It had been the beginning of the end.
I was lying next to my wife on a cheap motel mattress. We had been married for little over two weeks and this kind of closeness was new to us. Despite the lack in décor, I can still remember the low hum of excitement that coursed through my body as I lay near her with only a trembling line of space separating us. The knowledge that I could swallow up that space between us and be with her, that she was mine had thrilled me to the depths of my soul.
I can only laugh, harsh and bitterly, at my naiveté now because I also remember how later, much later that joy, like all my joy, had been leeched from my life. After you witness the agonizing death of everyone and everything you ever knew, everything just kind of grates especially the touch of a woman whose endlessly dark eyes were never less than accusing.
I had been about to reach my hand over to touch her, to touch my precious Liz, when it hit me.
Blue eyes, almost obscured by black liner, wide with terror. A scream roughly cut off by large hands. The same hands buried in bubble gum pink and blonde hair. A loud, unnatural crack echoing into the pitch-black night. A petite body sprawled out in an alleyway. A man crouching over the body with a glowing hand. Five marks in the shape of a V, my seal but not mine, burned into her right cheek.
I was never one for premonitions. I left that to Michael and Isabel, but I did not need them to decipher what I had seen in my vision. She did not move. She was dead, like her sister. I saw her die, like her sister.
It seemed that I may have decided to forget Antar, but Antar had not decided to forget me.
The small of his back burned with the pain of holding his body erect. He was grateful for the sensation though for it was the only thing he had which still anchored him to this world. It was the only thing that told him that he still lived however wretchedly.
He was past feeling his knees or his hunger or much of anything. Once, he knew that he would’ve happily murdered a man for the room to sit and rest his body, which had bothered him to know at the time although not enough to make it untrue, but now he found that it did not matter.
Nothing mattered but this concentration of straining nerves.
Everything that had ever matter to him had faded away to dust and he was determined that this would not follow. He would hold his pain. He would have it as his to hold.
Maria was the first to die. Large with child and slow, she could not move fast enough to dodge the deadly blasts of energy that flew between our two factions. She was running from the house that had been her home for the past two peaceful years as best she could with Michael practically carrying her along when suddenly she stumbled and was thrown forward by a blast hitting her from behind. Michael caught her not letting her hit the ground; never letting her hit the ground but it was too late. She was still, too still.
Isabel was at the wheel of the van, which they thought I had kept for nostalgia, and Liz was in front too trying to blast a path clear while Kyle worked on watching our back, but I was at the door. I saw Michael’s face as he watched the only woman he had ever loved die and I knew that he neither would see nor would want to see another dawn.
Then, above the white noise of the scuffle, I heard a jeering laugh emanate from Khivar’s forces. I scanned the crowd and saw it was Nicolas. He had seen Maria fall and had reveled in wounding the Commander through her. Michael did not stray from his position beside his lover, but I knew that he had heard and would make that twisted shadow of a child pay. Gently kissing her lips, Michael turned from us and sent a wave of unbridled energy out to our enemy.
I recognized the uselessness of arguing with him before I even thought to utter the words and instead decided to take the reprieve he had granted us. He was saving us one last time. I silently thanked him for it then, I do not know if I would still be so grateful to him now. Perhaps, it would have been better to die together amongst the purity of the Montana snow than to end as we did. I don’t know. I don’t even know if we had a choice as to that.
I slammed the sliding door firmly shut and ordered Isabel to go.
Isabel balked at my command unwilling to leave Michael and Maria behind but I would not take no for an answer. Using my powers, I made the van accelerate and we fled from our ranch as if all the demons of hell were on our heels, which they were.
As we sped across the flat Montana roads, an explosion rocked the landscape. Michael had destroyed our home along with our enemies and himself. Afterward, the van was silent as a tomb. The only sound that could be heard was rubber running over asphalt. This unnatural hush continued until we reached our safe house, a cave that I had made everyone keep supplies in.
When we reached the cave, Isabel ran out of the van while Kyle chased after her. Liz just sat in the front seat and quietly cried. I reached over to touch her shoulder in a gesture of comfort, but when my hand made contact with her body, she stiffened and turned toward me.
Tears still streaming down her face, I saw utter hatred in her gaze and I was thrown back in time. Suddenly, I was eighteen standing in my mourning clothes in Alex Whitman’s room facing Liz’s accusations, facing the fact that I was responsible for the death of her best friend.
I withdrew my hand and exited the van without a word. She had every right to blame me. I had let this happen. I was the king and I had betrayed my people.
The tenuous line between reality and illusion was receding.
He could no longer tell truth from lie. Had he ever?
Time lost its hold. He lived lifetimes in seconds cataloguing the movements of his breath.
The only constant was the pain in his back. The only reality was pain.
Liz died on a sunny afternoon in September.
By this time the aliens didn’t even bother to hide their presence from the human population anymore and Earth had become an open war zone with human life extinguishing by the thousands every day. Kyle and Isabel had left us to return to Roswell to try to hold back the destruction of our home and our families but I did not see the use in going there. Besides, after Montana, they could no longer look at me without seeing that night and I knew that they needed to escape that memory and me so I let them go.
Liz stayed with me though. I think she might have understood the futility of trying to save that corner of the universe, but I don’t know. She might have felt anything. She might have felt that she had chosen me so she deserved the consequences of that choice. She might have felt she couldn’t face learning the fate of her parents or the people that she had loved as a child. I don’t know. Liz and I didn’t talk about the past or the future or anything not pertaining to the immediate needs of the moment that we inhabited anymore. There had been a deafening silence not just in words but in connection since the night she realized that I had known this would happen and had not done nothing about it.
A bullet killed Liz.
Conscious of conserving energy, when engaging an enemy that could be taken down by earthly means, Khivar’s forces used earthly means. It was a slow death, which was another reason Khivar favored using bullets. She lingered for hours bleeding to death in the ruins of an abandoned church on the outskirts of a nameless town that we’d been passing through when we’d been found and lost by our enemies. I wanted to save her but I had burnt out my powers defending us as we narrowly escaped. There was nothing I could do but watch her grow cold and pale until there was noting left of her but the lifeless shell of her body.
It was in her last moments though that I learned the truth of her love for me.
For hours we had sat in the tiny wooden church, Liz was no fool and pressing the tattered remains of her shirt to her stomach, she knew the extent of her injury. She did not complain or cry but only lay at the foot of the pulpit silently keeping her own thoughts as her life drained away. I positioned myself close to her but not touching unsure if she would want my touch after everything that had transpired. She surprised me though. Near the end, she took my hand into hers and asked me to look at her.
She was tired, dirty, bloody and deathly pale but the dark look of accusation was for once gone from her eyes. I do not know if I have the poetry needed in me to describe love. Any words I could use would undoubtedly fall short of truth so I will only say that in her last moments she looked at me with love, pure and shining, and spoke the contents of her heart.
“If I had it to do over again,” her voice was barely above a whisper but I felt the strength and honesty ringing in her tone “I would still give my life for you…but I would not give the lives of my friends. Not even for you, for this, would I bear witness to the deaths of my friends.”
Those were her last words to me, to anyone in this world.
He no longer slept.
He knew to sleep would be to dream and he had lost all his dreams one by one in the preceding centuries.
He feared a dreamless sleep; a sleep without sensation, without pain.
He knew to lose the pain that had come to dominate his universe would be to lose himself.
He feared the loss of himself. The threat of infinite oblivion was the scathing flames of hell that licked his consciousness and kept him from Morpheus’ domain.
There had always been a piece of me that thought if Liz died then I too would die, but as I had been many times in my life, I was wrong. I went on without her. I walked, I talked, I ran, I commanded without her by my side. It was disconcerting to learn this about myself but it did not make it untrue.
My end came in Arizona.
Disdaining to remember my childhood, I did not go to the southwest often, but Isabel had requested I come. She and Kyle along with their daughter had been stationed in various bases in the southwestern area aiding the human’s against Khivar for the last four years. While I found it strange that my sister would pull me from my work in New England, I did not particularly question it.
Right before they took me, she told me that Khivar had murdered Kyle and was holding her little Maria hostage. There were hardly any tears involved in the scene, which was very unlike Isabel, but only a calm explanation and betrayal. Angry, I slapped her. She stumbled back from the force of the blow but did not make a move to defend herself or retaliate. Eyes cast down to the floor in shame; she merely nodded and apologized.
I said nothing. I had nothing to say to her. It was over.
I had known this moment would come with a certainty that I had known about very little in my life, but I still found room in my heart to be shocked. Hope is wicked and cruel emotion.
The things which I have seen I can now see no more
Then…there was…light?
Light, sharp and piercing like the sting of a knife sliding into flesh. He had forgotten the heat of light.
He fell forward out of the coffin that had been his for a month and a millennia.
With the fall, he lost the strain on the small on his back. He lost his pain.
Panic swelled within him, it was lost. All was lost.
Then he heard a voice. Was it the voice of an angel?
He risked the light and found himself peering into a familiar set of dark eyes full with moisture. He closed his eyes. He did not wish to see her. She wept and her soft cries echoed down the hall until he could no longer ignore them. Yet, he could not focus on them either. It was far too late in the day for him.
The only world he recognized was mercy. What was mercy? What would she know of mercy?
It didn’t matter though, he thought. The only thing that had mattered was the pain and it was gone. He could not even hold on to pain. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.
But then there was that word, again. A word and a movement then pain, rich and wondrous pain. He had regained his truth but it was different. This pain was not low and aching but sharp, burning, in the center of his being. It was taking him. Taking him where? Taking him…
Michael was taking me out of the Crashdown. As we passed through the swinging doors and our feet struck the pavement, the expression on his face was frantic. Michael was never frantic. I was in shock, my ears were still ringing with the impact of that deafening sound, but I allowed myself to be pulled away. A part of me wanted to go back to help her, but a larger part was warning me not to interfere. It was not my place. I needed to mind my promises and leave her to her destiny.
***
THE END.
Author: Cristina
Category: CC. Post-Grad. Dark. Character Death.
Rating: TEEN
Disclaimer: The show is not mine.
Summary: Rewind. Reset. Go.
Author's Note: The line “the things which I have seen I can now see no more” is taken from a Wordsworth poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. This poem is significant because it indicates a shift in Wordsworth’s beliefs from his unconventional younger days as a supporter of the revolution to the traditional beliefs he held as he grew older…not that any of you care.
FB is always a most welcome thing.
Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one’s slightest distraction.
“The South” Jorge Luis Borges
The attacks came suddenly.
Although in retrospect, in truth, perhaps not so suddenly, not suddenly at all.
Sitting amongst the filth of his dark prison cell, he knew that he had been in love, once. He knew that he had been happy, warm and safe, once. He had known the caress of warm sunshine like lemon tang, the caress of a beautiful woman’s hand—body—against his skin, once. He had not spent the entirety of his life here.
He. had. not.
But, it had all gone, melted away like a dream in the harsh light of day.
Where had it gone?
It had all gone for her, everything for her, every dream for her.
I had known it was over for us soon after we’d left our small dusty desert town. We were at a sleazy motel in another small town. This time it was a hot and sticky town weighed down by the unforgiving humidity of a Georgian summer. It was supposed to be merely an unremarkable pit stop on our ceaseless journey across this country to be forgotten as soon as we left. It was supposed to be nothing more than that, but it had been more than that for me.
It had been the beginning of the end.
I was lying next to my wife on a cheap motel mattress. We had been married for little over two weeks and this kind of closeness was new to us. Despite the lack in décor, I can still remember the low hum of excitement that coursed through my body as I lay near her with only a trembling line of space separating us. The knowledge that I could swallow up that space between us and be with her, that she was mine had thrilled me to the depths of my soul.
I can only laugh, harsh and bitterly, at my naiveté now because I also remember how later, much later that joy, like all my joy, had been leeched from my life. After you witness the agonizing death of everyone and everything you ever knew, everything just kind of grates especially the touch of a woman whose endlessly dark eyes were never less than accusing.
I had been about to reach my hand over to touch her, to touch my precious Liz, when it hit me.
Blue eyes, almost obscured by black liner, wide with terror. A scream roughly cut off by large hands. The same hands buried in bubble gum pink and blonde hair. A loud, unnatural crack echoing into the pitch-black night. A petite body sprawled out in an alleyway. A man crouching over the body with a glowing hand. Five marks in the shape of a V, my seal but not mine, burned into her right cheek.
I was never one for premonitions. I left that to Michael and Isabel, but I did not need them to decipher what I had seen in my vision. She did not move. She was dead, like her sister. I saw her die, like her sister.
It seemed that I may have decided to forget Antar, but Antar had not decided to forget me.
The small of his back burned with the pain of holding his body erect. He was grateful for the sensation though for it was the only thing he had which still anchored him to this world. It was the only thing that told him that he still lived however wretchedly.
He was past feeling his knees or his hunger or much of anything. Once, he knew that he would’ve happily murdered a man for the room to sit and rest his body, which had bothered him to know at the time although not enough to make it untrue, but now he found that it did not matter.
Nothing mattered but this concentration of straining nerves.
Everything that had ever matter to him had faded away to dust and he was determined that this would not follow. He would hold his pain. He would have it as his to hold.
Maria was the first to die. Large with child and slow, she could not move fast enough to dodge the deadly blasts of energy that flew between our two factions. She was running from the house that had been her home for the past two peaceful years as best she could with Michael practically carrying her along when suddenly she stumbled and was thrown forward by a blast hitting her from behind. Michael caught her not letting her hit the ground; never letting her hit the ground but it was too late. She was still, too still.
Isabel was at the wheel of the van, which they thought I had kept for nostalgia, and Liz was in front too trying to blast a path clear while Kyle worked on watching our back, but I was at the door. I saw Michael’s face as he watched the only woman he had ever loved die and I knew that he neither would see nor would want to see another dawn.
Then, above the white noise of the scuffle, I heard a jeering laugh emanate from Khivar’s forces. I scanned the crowd and saw it was Nicolas. He had seen Maria fall and had reveled in wounding the Commander through her. Michael did not stray from his position beside his lover, but I knew that he had heard and would make that twisted shadow of a child pay. Gently kissing her lips, Michael turned from us and sent a wave of unbridled energy out to our enemy.
I recognized the uselessness of arguing with him before I even thought to utter the words and instead decided to take the reprieve he had granted us. He was saving us one last time. I silently thanked him for it then, I do not know if I would still be so grateful to him now. Perhaps, it would have been better to die together amongst the purity of the Montana snow than to end as we did. I don’t know. I don’t even know if we had a choice as to that.
I slammed the sliding door firmly shut and ordered Isabel to go.
Isabel balked at my command unwilling to leave Michael and Maria behind but I would not take no for an answer. Using my powers, I made the van accelerate and we fled from our ranch as if all the demons of hell were on our heels, which they were.
As we sped across the flat Montana roads, an explosion rocked the landscape. Michael had destroyed our home along with our enemies and himself. Afterward, the van was silent as a tomb. The only sound that could be heard was rubber running over asphalt. This unnatural hush continued until we reached our safe house, a cave that I had made everyone keep supplies in.
When we reached the cave, Isabel ran out of the van while Kyle chased after her. Liz just sat in the front seat and quietly cried. I reached over to touch her shoulder in a gesture of comfort, but when my hand made contact with her body, she stiffened and turned toward me.
Tears still streaming down her face, I saw utter hatred in her gaze and I was thrown back in time. Suddenly, I was eighteen standing in my mourning clothes in Alex Whitman’s room facing Liz’s accusations, facing the fact that I was responsible for the death of her best friend.
I withdrew my hand and exited the van without a word. She had every right to blame me. I had let this happen. I was the king and I had betrayed my people.
The tenuous line between reality and illusion was receding.
He could no longer tell truth from lie. Had he ever?
Time lost its hold. He lived lifetimes in seconds cataloguing the movements of his breath.
The only constant was the pain in his back. The only reality was pain.
Liz died on a sunny afternoon in September.
By this time the aliens didn’t even bother to hide their presence from the human population anymore and Earth had become an open war zone with human life extinguishing by the thousands every day. Kyle and Isabel had left us to return to Roswell to try to hold back the destruction of our home and our families but I did not see the use in going there. Besides, after Montana, they could no longer look at me without seeing that night and I knew that they needed to escape that memory and me so I let them go.
Liz stayed with me though. I think she might have understood the futility of trying to save that corner of the universe, but I don’t know. She might have felt anything. She might have felt that she had chosen me so she deserved the consequences of that choice. She might have felt she couldn’t face learning the fate of her parents or the people that she had loved as a child. I don’t know. Liz and I didn’t talk about the past or the future or anything not pertaining to the immediate needs of the moment that we inhabited anymore. There had been a deafening silence not just in words but in connection since the night she realized that I had known this would happen and had not done nothing about it.
A bullet killed Liz.
Conscious of conserving energy, when engaging an enemy that could be taken down by earthly means, Khivar’s forces used earthly means. It was a slow death, which was another reason Khivar favored using bullets. She lingered for hours bleeding to death in the ruins of an abandoned church on the outskirts of a nameless town that we’d been passing through when we’d been found and lost by our enemies. I wanted to save her but I had burnt out my powers defending us as we narrowly escaped. There was nothing I could do but watch her grow cold and pale until there was noting left of her but the lifeless shell of her body.
It was in her last moments though that I learned the truth of her love for me.
For hours we had sat in the tiny wooden church, Liz was no fool and pressing the tattered remains of her shirt to her stomach, she knew the extent of her injury. She did not complain or cry but only lay at the foot of the pulpit silently keeping her own thoughts as her life drained away. I positioned myself close to her but not touching unsure if she would want my touch after everything that had transpired. She surprised me though. Near the end, she took my hand into hers and asked me to look at her.
She was tired, dirty, bloody and deathly pale but the dark look of accusation was for once gone from her eyes. I do not know if I have the poetry needed in me to describe love. Any words I could use would undoubtedly fall short of truth so I will only say that in her last moments she looked at me with love, pure and shining, and spoke the contents of her heart.
“If I had it to do over again,” her voice was barely above a whisper but I felt the strength and honesty ringing in her tone “I would still give my life for you…but I would not give the lives of my friends. Not even for you, for this, would I bear witness to the deaths of my friends.”
Those were her last words to me, to anyone in this world.
He no longer slept.
He knew to sleep would be to dream and he had lost all his dreams one by one in the preceding centuries.
He feared a dreamless sleep; a sleep without sensation, without pain.
He knew to lose the pain that had come to dominate his universe would be to lose himself.
He feared the loss of himself. The threat of infinite oblivion was the scathing flames of hell that licked his consciousness and kept him from Morpheus’ domain.
There had always been a piece of me that thought if Liz died then I too would die, but as I had been many times in my life, I was wrong. I went on without her. I walked, I talked, I ran, I commanded without her by my side. It was disconcerting to learn this about myself but it did not make it untrue.
My end came in Arizona.
Disdaining to remember my childhood, I did not go to the southwest often, but Isabel had requested I come. She and Kyle along with their daughter had been stationed in various bases in the southwestern area aiding the human’s against Khivar for the last four years. While I found it strange that my sister would pull me from my work in New England, I did not particularly question it.
Right before they took me, she told me that Khivar had murdered Kyle and was holding her little Maria hostage. There were hardly any tears involved in the scene, which was very unlike Isabel, but only a calm explanation and betrayal. Angry, I slapped her. She stumbled back from the force of the blow but did not make a move to defend herself or retaliate. Eyes cast down to the floor in shame; she merely nodded and apologized.
I said nothing. I had nothing to say to her. It was over.
I had known this moment would come with a certainty that I had known about very little in my life, but I still found room in my heart to be shocked. Hope is wicked and cruel emotion.
The things which I have seen I can now see no more
Then…there was…light?
Light, sharp and piercing like the sting of a knife sliding into flesh. He had forgotten the heat of light.
He fell forward out of the coffin that had been his for a month and a millennia.
With the fall, he lost the strain on the small on his back. He lost his pain.
Panic swelled within him, it was lost. All was lost.
Then he heard a voice. Was it the voice of an angel?
He risked the light and found himself peering into a familiar set of dark eyes full with moisture. He closed his eyes. He did not wish to see her. She wept and her soft cries echoed down the hall until he could no longer ignore them. Yet, he could not focus on them either. It was far too late in the day for him.
The only world he recognized was mercy. What was mercy? What would she know of mercy?
It didn’t matter though, he thought. The only thing that had mattered was the pain and it was gone. He could not even hold on to pain. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.
But then there was that word, again. A word and a movement then pain, rich and wondrous pain. He had regained his truth but it was different. This pain was not low and aching but sharp, burning, in the center of his being. It was taking him. Taking him where? Taking him…
Michael was taking me out of the Crashdown. As we passed through the swinging doors and our feet struck the pavement, the expression on his face was frantic. Michael was never frantic. I was in shock, my ears were still ringing with the impact of that deafening sound, but I allowed myself to be pulled away. A part of me wanted to go back to help her, but a larger part was warning me not to interfere. It was not my place. I needed to mind my promises and leave her to her destiny.
***
THE END.