My past is not a happy one. My father left when I was a year old, convinced that because I looked so much like my mother I couldn't be his. His abandonment damn near broke her.
I know that things could have been better. Mom could have gotten a better job rather than scrubbing toilets for minimum wage in business we could never afford to set foot in when they opened. I could have been better behaved and given my mom less shit. Her family could have helped rather than turning their back on her and her half-breed son.
Yeah, things could have been better, but they could have been a lot worse. When I was nine, my mom met Uncle Kenny, a lawyer in one of the firms she cleaned and a lot of our problems went away.
Uncle Kenny was the type of Uncle that no one wants but everyone seems to have, and my mother was so tired, so broken, and he never really hurt me and all I really had to do was be quiet.
It was from some of Uncle Kenny's other boys that I learned that my life had been good. Edward was one of his oldest, almost too old, and Uncle Kenny was less careful with him.
Edward taught me how to patch him up when Uncle Kenny was done with him and it was this that led me to want to become a doctor, so that I could help people when they got hurt.
I told Uncle Kenny that I wanted to be a doctor and I remember him laughing quietly about it. He said that if I wanted to be a doctor I had to excel in everything. He told me that my name, Jason, meant healer, and that it suited me.
Throughout middle school I had had plenty of female lovers that Uncle Kenny approved of but it wasn't until high school that found love. A boy named Zakiya that my world revolved around.
Uncle Kenny had never minded the girls and he hadn't touched me since my voice dropped so I assumed that he would have no problem with Zakiya.
I was wrong. He killed Zakiya in front of me and proceeded to remind me of exactly who I belonged to. The brand still hasn't faded.
Afterwards he seemed almost... remorseful to have broken his favorite toy. He left me alone after that, gave me everything I could want, but I had learned who I belonged to. Even after he died I never looked at another man.
I was in my fist year of pre-med when my mom called, happier than she had been in years. She was pregnant. I was going to have a little brother and I was terrified.
I killed Uncle Kenny that night, as I should have all those years ago. All it took was a little syringe filled with air into his jugular. Simple. Easy. I cried afterwards. I sat in my shower with the water pouring down and heaved until I coughed up blood and there was nothing left to do but cry and shake.
Nine months later I held my little brother in my arms as my mothers body cooled. Loosing Uncle Kenny had been too much for her in the end. She had loved him. Damn it all but she had loved the monster.
I looked down at this little creature, lying so contentedly in my bloody hands and I knew I couldn't keep him. I named him Christopher Edward Orcot and gave him to my mother's brother to raise. They were all too happy to take in the son of Kennith Orcot.
I remember the day of my mother's funeral was the only day that month it didn't rain. I stood there under a sky the color of my mothers eye's and looked down at her headstone and couldn't cry.
The words of a priest I had gone to after Zakiya's death filled my head. I had asked him why God would not allow me to die. He told me that each life was precious. I asked him why those around died, why if life was so precious was it allowed to be wasted, and he said that god worked in mysterious ways.
As I stood staring down at my mother's grave, the sound of Chris crying in my Aunt's arms driving the priest's vile words from my my mind that I decided that there was no god. And because there was no god to protect people then I would protect them.
I used the money Uncle Kenny left me, blood money, guilt money to change my name. I broke away from what my mom had wanted of me and became something different.
She had named me Asho after my father, in the hope that he would return. It means pure of heart. Asho Jason, a healer of pure heart. Names really are the first lies a parent tells their child.
I changed my name to Leon Zakiya Orcot, and with it my major. I became a detective in a city of angels forsaken by their god and left to rot in a barren concrete wasteland.
This is my city, all these vibrant, fevered colors writhing together, fighting for dominance before merging into black and disappearing. And no where is that more apparent than in China Town.
Firecrackers and cracked mahjong tiles, fermented roots and Chinese restaurants. Laundry lines used to communicate a desperate message of leaving one China to find another, so different from their home but still abysmally the same. All of it wrapped in red and gold crepe and centuries of tradition. The last remnants of a culture far older than ours could ever hope to be desperately trying to escape the disease of a modern dystopia creeping upon them.
D is the embodiment of China town. He is the chaos of his youth; passion and fire and so much heat, enough to melt away my wings and leave me drowning in the Icarian Sea , all wrapped tightly within his silks and his words and the stringent tradition of his family, a control so cold it threatens to destroy everything, spreads over everything around him like Thananto's mist and threatens to consume as surely as his fire does.
It was this juxtaposition that captivated me. Turned me from a leopard lionne into a moth caught in the flames of his eyes. It was the fire in his eyes that pulled me toward him when the vampire had us cornered.
That infernal light made me press my lips to his in a kiss that was eternal salvation while simultaneously casting me into the deepest hells. His lips on mine threw me into a rapture that only the most sinful of devils are capable of. Soft and sweet one moment fire and steel the next and I knew that he too was named wrong.
He was Belial, Lord of Lies and Lawlessness, the very embodiment of Lust. He was Lucifer come to tempt me with the sweet fruit of his flesh and I was consumed. I was meant to be his, his lover,his lion, his pet, his.
I remember when I watched him die. When I held him in my arms as he bled and felt my heart break. There was this little mob boss, Guy, who thought he was in love with D and decided in his little human mind that if D wouldn't be his than no one would have him. He turned his gun on me as D lay in my lap, blood staining his beautiful clothes, and I welcomed it.
I watched D rise and stop him, watched as flowers bloomed from his wounds and wrapped themselves around the little punk and fed from his blood; beauty from filth. Everything shifted after that. We still fought over small things: my manners will never be more than barbarian and he will always be a sarcastic little shit but I never doubt him anymore. He had become not only lover and my life, but my god.
I dream sometimes, while I lay wrapped in his arms, of what could have happened. Sometime it is of a forest older than human memory, a place of the forgotten and the lost. There is an a sense of age within the forest that settles in the bones and whispers across the mind like a dry wind, heavy and lethal.
I dream pain and smoke and fire. Of holding on to D desperately as we climb higher only to fall once more, alone and lost. A fall that breaks me, leaves empty and longing for D until I am driven to find him and D is forced to flee; my beautiful love turned to a wounded animal running from a relentless animal.
Worse still than the never ending chase are the dreams that drag me forth from Morpheus's realm, a scream of terror and despair dying on my lips. There is a God with eye's like amethyst and hair like ebony and a sorrow so deep it drove him mad. A God who fell in love with a mortal and watched him fade before him, as he slowly rotted away and each breathe came harder than last, more painful and infinitely more poisonous.
My greatest fear is that I will leave D, my heart, my soul, my God, to this. That by daring to love him, by daring to play the games of a God, I have damned him, to fallow the God of my dreams, that beautiful , desperate being, into insanity.
In my dreams the Fallen God tries to destroy everything and D, my precious D, stands by calmly watching the God's antics with his stoic apathy, his little mask in place. As I watch I can't help but cheer him on in this world where I turned away, where D can forget about me and live on with his pets. At the same time as the Detective Orcot in the dream pulls the trigger I realise that even if I had rejected him, it would not have saved him.
The look on the Lost God's face is enough to assure of it. Even as he is thwarted and dies his smile never falters as he presses the releases the plague he had created. He wanted to die, like his human would and as the virus spreads D's face, for the barest of moments, breaks, and I know that the moment I walked into the shop it was too late, we had been caught. He loves me and because of this he will travel through
That is why I am here before you, Wang-Mu-Niang-Niang, in the hope that you can grant my wish that I will never never parted from D. I beg you Weiwobo, to spare D from his fate.
AN: Drabble that got stuck in my head and refused to die.