If you think 4x8 could work, read on. If you think 4x8 would never work, read on. My Secret Santa pal asked for a 4x8, and if you've seen the wonderful picture on DeviantArt, you'll see why.
I love that picture, so I was more than ready to go along.
So whatever your reasons for being here…
…..Read on.
In this time of war, in this place of death, love is a winter seed, dormant in the ground.
Waiting for anything, even a drop of hope-giving water, to help it begin to sprout.
They could not feel love. Love was overpowered by anger and fear and courage and amazement and wonder.
But it is still there.
Waiting.
Patiently waiting for the right time.
God has a funny way of bringing soul mates together.
It is half a millennia after the Great Decimation, the Communist war that nearly brought the world to a premature end.
Humans now walk the earth. The gases have cleared and bodies have long been buried away. The world is in a somewhat stable harmony. Communism is a thing of history, and ten museums stand in honor of the Nameless Scientist and his efforts for his attempt to improve the world, as well as the Rebels and the Innocents that eased his final days.
One of those museums stand in what was once known as Canada.
And here our story begins.
A wealthy old judge (and a former war veteran), embittered by the death of his wife, keeps himself shielded from the world in his mansion, high in the mountains, with one sole man for companionship.
His brother-in-arms lives in a peaceful suburban village in the valley, working at a repairs shop creating and tinkering with his grandson, the last surviving member of his family.
The grandson shuts himself away from interacting with others, locking pieces of his heart in his chest, like a once-trusting bird in a cage. His useless left eye, damaged and melted over with flesh, and his lashing behavior, keeps help away from his grandfather's shop.
Yet their recent employee, a young, hazel-eyed Italian, the same age as the grandson, hasn't been driven away. He claims the bills of his former home require that he work, yet he cannot deny that something, deep within his psyche, ties him to the one-eyed grandson with his sensitivity and his snippy, angry mask.
The grandson usually warns his grandfather's employee about an eighteen-year-old man that bothers him by jumping upon him and claiming that he is his friend, and that they must 'warn the others'. Visions plague the man's mind, some of them happy, wonderful dreams; however, the majority of these visions torment him as he sees a much older man, popular to the public, reassembling…something…he feels endangers everyone.
Ever since his grandmother died, around the age of ten, his parents have given him medicine in the hopes that he will improve and become 'normal'. There is no money for inks, or even paints, so the young man uses his own warm, crimson life essence to materialize the visions in the hope someone believes.
Many will not heed his warnings.
But there are those that see the signs and believe.
One of them is a beautiful, free-spirited woman, and an old friend of the Italian's. The two friends, from the ages of six, wrote pen pal letters from their respective homes in Canada and Italy until family complications with the Italian took a great emotional toll, and her letters to him were answered by wordless flowers. She's kept every flower, pressed and kept in a velvet-lined metal box, and demanded no answers from him because she understood. She left her family in order to make their lives easier, as she is an albino with very special, very expensive, needs that nearly drained her family's savings. The law now allows people with learning disabilities to attend school, but the reprieve came too late for her.
But not for her siblings.
A pair of fraternal boy-girl twins were once human test subjects in a morally corrupt think tank. Kidnapped as infants (the mother was told her babies were stillborn) because of their intelligence and genetic makeup, they were injected, pricked, tazed, tortured, forced to run and move like guinea pigs to test the creations of the think tank.
An employee there, a hulking, massive guard, collected enough information to turn in his employers into the government. Law enforcement officers surrounded the area and dragged out the scientists of the think tank, and the test subjects (all children) were escorted to safer places. The twins were the 'favorites' of the scientists', but when the police tried to find the man to thank, he, his official records, and his bulk were long gone.
The traumatized children had to be placed into families all over the world that would be given money to care for them, and the twins were taken to Canada. Upon a social outing, the pair was mobbed and their escorts disarmed; they had intentions to dump the twins into a sex trafficking ring. The albino, according to eyewitness accounts, came out of "freakin' nowhere and beat the shit out of the dumbasses".
After a week of getting to know each other, the twins warmed up to her and requested that she become their legal guardian. The woman was nineteen upon adopting the twins as her siblings, and for three years' worth, they have been secretly living in a library abandoned before night on the beliefs that a woman of great importance died there and haunts the library at night.
This story, however, does not concern the old judge.
The old inventor.
His one-eyed grandson.
Their Italian employee.
The psychologically disturbed young man.
The fierce albino.
Or her silent, studious little brother.
There are truths in this world even the cruelest of humans cannot deny.
One: Love is patient.
This is my Secret Santa gift for SayaMoonShadow of the 9 Forum.
And what better gift than the gift that keeps on giving? This started out as a one-shot, but my mind went crazy and the other human-punks got into the equation and, quite suddenly, this simple little one-shot became a dive into the souls of these two characters, and how this dive places them together.
Hope you like, my dearest Saya.
~The Chancellor