Cadence of the Spring

-Chapter One-

A/N: Well, I decided to begin yet another series! This one is actually based off of a focus in my English class for the quarter. In my year, we focus on the different types of heroism—epic/classic hero, contemporary hero, tragic hero, and anti-hero. Right now we are in our focus on the contemporary hero, and I began to think of Alfred…and then this idea came about. So yes, this story is based off of the idea of the contemporary hero.

Rating: T, for blood and gore, coarse language, eventual adult situations, and horror in general. I'll try my best to actually show these things, as I'm not entirely good at description just yet. Hopefully this will improve my writing skills as I go along.

Pairing: Eventual UKUS, though that's kind of implied through the characters…

Summary: Society is alive and dead, dying and living. Alfred F. Jones, the last of his kind, is in charge of killing the beasts that roam the lifeless mornings. When he finds Arthur Kirkland, however, everything he knows is turned inside out…

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The pretty lights in the pretty sky shine prettily upon the lit-up city at night. A sea of people flood the streets, dancing wildly to blaring music attached to the sides, limbs flopping, bodies bumping against one another, people wildly grinding on whatever they touch. Gaudy lights match the streamers that float between buildings, bearing too-bright lanterns in different shades, all the colors of the rainbow, casting their shapely shadows onto the chorus of whoops, hollers and loud music below. The people of this city dance with their shadows.

Night is the salvation of their people.

Alfred smiles down at the din of people below his high-rise, lofty apartment building as he stands out on his balcony. Multi-colored signs shimmer his face, his grin, his shining blue eyes and the words, "Slayer Alfred—Savior of the City!" This is true, of course. Alfred has saved the city many times over, has become an idol of sorts. People wear his face on shirts, cheer his name. They always request his presence at parties—he only accepts the invitations from those with the most wealth, the most famous musicians and politicians, the most beautiful heiresses and most certainly those that live in opulence.

His life has always been one of cheerfulness, content and sweet, blissful ignorance. Alfred is happy this way, he reasons, not knowing what's beyond those walls that block out the world outside, that hide the sun. He had only seen it once. A wild place of green and blue and brown, untamed and filled with the sounds of wild creatures and wild things he has never known, filling his brain with so many things he could not process them. As a child cannot understand things so complex, it is no seeing why he was frightened. That day he knew to never risk going out into the wild ever again. It was the land of savages, of people who thought it best to live as they did so many years ago. The land of Survivors.

"Time for bed," he speaks mostly to himself, greeted by the sounds of partying crowds below. Though people surround him, Alfred lives with no one, speaks with no one, for his job is in the morning when the city is asleep, feeding their needs of sleep, waking up when the sun is gone and no beasts trouble the borders.

Slayers take care of the beasts that attack their city. Slayers are the defenders of happy, ignorant mankind that spend their days on material things and shallow ways. Slayers are, unfortunately, few and far between.

No one wants to spend their time slaying beasts all morning when they could be partying the night away with friends, right? But someone had to do it. Alfred did it for the recognition. That and he was good at it.

Slaying beasts was about the only thing he knew how to do, aside from party. With his job, partying was few and far between. Sleep was his number-one priority at night. As many people said, "Slayers are only a step away from how things used to be, after all!"

Alfred grins at the thought, though he's not quite sure why he does.

He is the only Slayer left in this city; this city is the largest in its area, filled with the most people per square foot. As it turns out, the others had either died in the line of duty or tired of living a life of work and quit to dance the night away with the rest of their civilization. But Alfred loves his job. He loves to rip apart the beasts and splatter himself in their toxic blood, avoid the slash of claw and tooth, poisonous liquids flying into the air with saliva. He loves to lop their heads off and take smaller teeth as prizes, adding them to the hemp around his neck with many to show for his heroic deeds and his amazing skill at what he does. He is a mindless murderer of the mindless murderers, a vigilante of the morning to protect the mindless people of society.

As he steps out from the balcony and shuts the din of nightlife away with the slam of the door, he spots a small gift left for him by an admirer, no doubt. He picks it up and looks at it with a smile, removes the string and rips the paper off without thought. There is a tiny box, which encloses a lovely snow globe filled with a wintry forest, and a horse-drawn carriage with a happy, caroling family in the red sleigh. He shakes it to find that glitter and white flecks like snow swirl about to complete the scene, lighting up his face with a smile he doesn't really mean. It conveys his confusion. No one has ever sent him such an ornamental, fragile gift—it is mostly alcohol and stuffed animals: the alcohol he drinks in order to sleep, and the stuffed animals he throws away—in all his years as the hero of his city.

He checks the tag. "From an anonymous fan? Hum," he thinks aloud, looking at the snow globe again. Alfred walks towards his wide kitchen's trash can, opens it to grind up the useless thing like all the other stuffed things he had been given, but his fingers trap tightly around it. He growls and grits his teeth before removing his foot from the grinding button, storms off towards his bedroom, opens the door and slams it hard (knowing it will not break, as it's made of metal), and places the fragile thing carefully atop the nightstand and settles into the red velvet, plush bed, made for dreamless sleeping.

Alfred falls asleep staring at the snowy, glittering forest within the glass orb. He dreams nothing but darkness, nothing but the blank recesses of his mind, shows no understand and no reflection of himself, but of the hollowness he will never grasp on his own, continuing on the way he is now. His mind has nothing but emptiness and lies and more emptiness, no memories to live by and no tragedy to think back at in order to know he's happier now. Alfred is a vacant man.

The oblivion of sleep fades with the loud buzz of his alarm clock. Alfred yawns, presses the large button in the center and sits up in his bed, the lights overhead turning on immediately. "Good morning." Early in the morning. He does not bother to know the time, just as everyone else does not stop to check it. Others are sleeping as he wakes to the morning dew on the nonexistent grass of his urban jungle.

He showers in three minutes, dresses himself in the thick padded leather jumpsuit, straps the sheathed and sharpened blade to his waist along with the hunting knife, while his gun is strapped to his back. In an instant, he heads out the door and into the elevator, down the long tower's belly and into the main lobby. Outside, the sun has just risen. Alfred presses through the door and watches the skyline, hopeful that something, anything will happen today. Lately his job has been dry. The new walls they installed two years back do not allow most beasts into the city.

Despite the fact that it is wrong to endanger the citizens of his city, he wishes for it nonetheless. Without the beasts he feels inadequate.

His motorcycle awaited him in the attached garage. With a press of his finger to the scanning pad, it roared to life. Before turning it about to ride off, Alfred pulls his leather gloves back on. The buzz of his lifeless but lively companion brings a feral grin to his face. In an instant he speeds from the garage and towards the massive city walls, rushes for them and turns sharply with a squeal of the tires so that he follows along its edges, circles the city many times over for hours upon end, until the sun begins its trek down from the sky so that the moon may have its turn to display its beauty. Alfred would say that the moon is far more beautiful than the sun that people rarely see, but the citizens decree that the lights their lanterns emit are the most beautiful of them all.

Alfred stops to look up at the wall as the sun sets behind it. A low glow makes it seem cold and oppressive. He shivers and looks away. What a silly thought, he decided! To think that something so helpful would be such a burden! 'But what about the Survivors? Those that separated?' Alfred pushes the dangerous thought from his mind, shakes his head as if this will help to clear it out. As he begins to bring his motorcycle back to life, a deep growl overhead draws his attention. His head snaps up immediately.

Above the wall looms a shadowy figure armed from head to toe in sharp claws, spines and rusted teeth. A living, breathing weapon. Within its curling, grasping, snake-like tail it holds a limp and likely poisoned body. It causes the road to shake and shatter beneath it as it lands on the black road to match its slightly darker pelt.

"Shit."

Instantly the two jump into action. The beast was faster than it looked, hopping about and avoiding the quick shots Alfred dealt as he followed on his beloved motorcycle. Faster than he had been used to, at least. Alfred sped up to meet with the demands, shot a few rounds that managed to pierce through the dark matted fur that functioned like wispy scales; even perhaps through the thick skin of the beast that invaded his city with the limp thing in its snake-like tail, as it yelped and bucked, halting for a moment before it leapt over towards a nearby building.

The finger he held on his trigger was faster. A shower of bullets assaulted the beast and forced it away, forced the thing to careen off to the side and make a sharp turn—something Alfred mimicked in order to keep up. All the while, Alfred muttered to himself about the difficult case. He had asked for something, but he definitely did not want this!

It was perhaps a few minutes later that he had it cornered, pressed up near one of the walls. As if it knew its fate, the beast gave the Slayer a daring look before tossing the limp thing into its mouth and swallowing whole. Alfred shot the beast to death not even a second later.

And so, with his hunting knife, he quickly sheared away the fur and dug through the skin, into the esophagus and past the rushing blood, reaching into the hot tube he had just cut to find the thing it had swallowed. As he grabbed onto what felt like fabric, he thought, 'Lucky thing. Very close to the stomach. He'll thank me later.' With a grunt, a roar and a massive amount of strength, he managed to overcome the constricting throat and pull the limp person from their fate, sliding them through blood and into a pool of no-doubt poisonous blood, dragging him as far away from it as possible. The people would come to dispose of the carcass with a bonfire that night.

Alfred sighed and looked down at the blood-covered, slimy, limp human in his hands. He would not be attending any party in his honor tonight.

In the end, Alfred was forced to leave his motorcycle there for the others to wheel back for him. There was no way for him to hold the near-lifeless person onto the bike on his way back to his apartment. So he made a mad dash for his home, took the quickest elevator he could remember in his slight panic, 'Calm down, this'll be alright, Elevator Five, that one takes three seconds, that oughta help ya out right now, just keep focusing on your floor, 'Penthouse', remember that, 'Penthouse', not too difficult, just keep thinkin', it,' he repeated this in his head many times, and even began to mutter it under his breath. The person he held in his hands had stopped breathing the instant he kicked open his door.

He put the soon-to-be-corpse on the tiled floor of his kitchen, pulled the anti-venom from a drawer, found an arm, a vein, put the serum in the syringe and shot the life-saving clearness into the saved stranger's blood system. Said stranger gasped in a needy tone, sat up straight so suddenly after given the life-saving clearness that even Alfred was startled (though he would not admit to calling out in surprise like he did). Just as quickly as they had done so, they fell back to the floor and closed their wide-open eyes that Alfred never caught a glimpse of, breathing having returned to normal, relaxed and sleeping off a fearful event and the poisons of the outside world Alfred had counteracted.

Alfred looks the nameless man from head to toe, sighs. "Oh, great," he growls, "now I've gotta take care of him. Stupid government seems to think I have time for myself I'm willing to give up." Because really, how often did he get to live the way he wanted to? Twenty-four hours, seven days a week. That wasn't a selfish thing to say at all, considering how he spent eight to nine of those hours sleeping!

The clothes the strange man wore were difficult to get off and did not look like anything Alfred had ever seen. With disgust he tosses them into the washing machine so that the blood and other grimes might be washed from the tattered fabric. A leather bag filled with this person's belongings is also found, but he set that aside in the laundry room as well, so that it might dry and he might not be tempted to look through someone else's things.

When he does all these, Alfred carries the nude and dirtied man into his bathtub to scrub him clean. Not even then did the stranger wake. Smelling clean and looking fresh, Alfred dresses the nameless man in some spare clothes, dries his hair slightly, and places him in his bed, intending to sleep on the sofa nearby, so that he could watch the man carefully, in case he tried anything to be worried about—like escaping without a proper thank-you for his savior.

The Slayer looks the man from head to toe. Blond hair, fair, smooth skin…he wish he knew what color the man's eyes were. Alfred laughed slightly at the comical size of the stranger's eyebrows. He would be able to tell the man apart from anyone by just that in his city—everyone had fair, plucked eyebrows.

To think that he looked so radically different from the others in his city made him think again. Surely he was not from his city? Perhaps he was from a nearby city? Nonsense. The closest city to his is many thousands of miles away. Or so they have been told.

And Alfred begins to wonder just what's outside those walls. He had seen it once, only once, as a child—such a long time ago that the only thing he can remember are the chilling memories of loud cawing, rustling, a swaying sea of green and brown, people running about in a time period long gone from the one they lived in now.

He shakes these thoughts from his head and snaps back to reality. To think such things would be bad for him. Alfred is oh-so close to the light in his position, and to prefer the natural light of morning to anything but the lights that are turned on with the flip of a switch at night is to commit suicide. Or so his father has told him, as he has told himself, as his mother told him between slaps to the face for dreaming of open sky and flying high, when damn it, her son would do something productive—

Alfred shivers and stands quickly from the spot he had taken at the edge of the sofa. He runs to the bathroom, turns the knob so that cold water cascades from the metal faucet, and splashes it on his face as a wake-up call. It works only slightly, and he finds this more frustrating than he can remember most things being. So he puts his mind on doing something for himself and for his newly-acquired burden. He stems the flow of water from the faucet, wandering into the kitchen afterwards. The clink of glass against glass and the clatter of porcelain plates removed from their neat little stacks and rows in the cupboards reminds him that he hasn't eaten today either. Within an instant he has filled the cups with water and two plates brandish simple sandwiches to fill the belly with. Alfred returns to his room to find the stranger still sleeping peacefully, and is not quite happy to enjoy his meal alone, in utmost silence, like every day of his life. While his belly is full, he feels empty, not at all filled.

His city wakes while the sun goes to sleep. In his bed, it seems, the stranger begins to stir. Alfred's heart flutters with excitement—while he had smiled for just a moment, he frowned just after, startled at his reaction to such an event. No one should get excited about another person! None of his married friends even bothered to speak to one another. Hell, they didn't even share beds. They lived under the same roof, too selfish to think of anyone but themselves. The last time his heart thrummed wildly like it was now was when he had fought off the beast that held the stranger now waking in his bed.

Said stranger's eyes fly open. Bright, brilliant emerald green, like the green sea behind the towering walls around the city, with a clarity Alfred was not aware of. Most people have a filmy layer over their eyes, making them unclear and lifeless, like a doll or someone slowly going blind, unclear cataracts like sins of carnal desires taking form in the eyes. Those green eyes look about, small pupils, fearful of his surroundings. Immediately he shakes and clutches the covers tighter, before he realizes that the covers are not his own. It is through feel at first; his fingers smooth around the red velvet, a peculiar feeling which causes his gaze to meet the thick blankets. He tosses them to the side and lets out a tiny squeak of mortal terror, crawling away from the covers, ready to hop from the bed.

Alfred decides to end the stranger's panic. He chuckles and immediately speaks up, "Calm down there, calm down! You're fine."

The stranger turns to stare with a frightened expression at Alfred, letting out a scream of fear and hopping back immediately, landing on the edge of the bed. The silken sheets beneath him cause him to slip and slide from the bed, landing with a thud on the hardwood floor.

Alfred stands and picks up the flailing stranger; tossing him back onto the bed and pulling the covers back up. The stranger makes this difficult: he must hold him down as he pulls the covers back up, maintaining a smile all the while. "Calm down! Jesus, is this any way to thank your savior?"

This was apparently not the right thing to say, as those brilliant green eyes narrowed into a sharp glare. Alfred flinched away immediately as the stranger moved his hand to shove him back, snarling all the while. With a sharp, darkened voice lilted with a slight accent, the stranger spoke, "Like hell I'll thank you! Tell me where I am and I'll consider forgiving you for…whatever the hell I was doing before this. Bollocks, I can't seem to remember…"

"You were attacked by a beast. You're in my city," Alfred grins at him. "Must've hit your head pretty hard not to remember that."

Those eyes went wide once again. "C-City? Like…oh God, no!" Alfred must push him back down onto the bed again, holds him there with one hand. "Fuck! Let me go, you bloody fool! I must get out of here! Urgh – !"

"Um, no. You really shouldn't be moving around—you were poisoned, you know. It's not good to move around after that." Alfred keeps a straight face.

The stranger glares. "Liar! If you gave me the anti-venom—which I assume you did, as I am alive—then it's good to move around! It moves the anti-venom through the blood and clears the venom!"

So much for that. "Look. Just—just calm down and stay there! Freaking out about whatever the hell you're freaking out about won't help you much right now!" This seems to bring a calm understanding upon the irrational man. He lays back down, reclined against many velvet pillows, arms crossed over his chest.

"Fine." In his voice is the same stubborn tone.

Alfred wanders over towards his dresser and fetches the cup and plate, hands the cup to the green-eyed stranger. "Thirsty?"

A hesitant look is cast his way. Just a few seconds later, he greedily grabs the cup and swallows down liquid life and death, wetting his parched throat, drinking like he hasn't had a thing to drink in many days.

"I guess you're hungry, too." He says this as he hands the sandwich to the stranger and half of it is eaten with the blink of an eye. Alfred chuckles when the sandwich is put down hesitantly, picked apart a little slower than before, as if the stranger was suddenly aware of another person's presence. When everything is gone and he has stopped catering to his mostly-thirsty guest's needs, Alfred sits on the edge of the bed, feels his forehead with the back of his hand. The stranger swats it away immediately.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?!"

Alfred blinks. "Checking to make sure you're not sick. What?"

"…Don't touch me." He receives a reprimanding glare.

"Sorry," Alfred doesn't mean it when he apologizes, and the stranger seems to know. That piercing green gaze bores into his head – makes him squirm uncomfortably, forces him to look away. "So. What's your name?"

"Arthur Kirkland," the stranger replies tersely, glaring at him in a knowing, unnerving way. "Yours?"

"Alfred F. Jones," when Alfred says his own name, he grins. "I'm the last Slayer of this city, you know." Arthur chuckles with cold amusement that makes Alfred's blood boil. Instantly, he snaps, "What's so funny?"

"Oh, nothing," Arthur replies, turns to look directly into Alfred's cloudy blue eyes, "other than that you have the name of an idiot."

He bristles. "And your name makes you sound stuck-up!"

"Better to think freely than in a haze, if I say so myself. You people from the city…you're all foolish." Arthur does not move, but turns his head to look away, releasing Alfred from his pointed stare. "Do you ever stop to think about what you say?"

"Of course I do!" But he frowns and looks down at his feet. He hadn't thought that out before he'd answered. "…No." He revises his statement sulkily. "Why, though? Why does it matter?"

Arthur looks at him like a child, makes Alfred feel foolish and stupid, like he has done something wrong and should be punished for it. "Why is it a happy statement to say you are the last of your kind? You are alone—the last Slayer. How sad for you." He does not sound sympathetic in the slightest.

It is after this very conversation, when Alfred has gone to bed on the sofa and Arthur sleeps on his bed, that Alfred begins to think, peeling away the filmy cover on his oppressed eyes, dreams of green noise and childhood. His empty head at night is filled with dreams. Dreams, which he has not had in so many long, empty, lonely years.

His life of blissful ignorance ended the very day he met Arthur Kirkland.