Fair warning: Sensitivity between our two main characters, and lime-like descriptions of sex.

You people should have the sense to stay away if even the thought of 4 and 8 even remotely liking each other induces you to vomit.

Onward with the story. And keep an eye out for *'s.


"C'mon, light, dammit."

A man, like a human boulder, sits alone in a meadow of flowers, trying to light a cigarette.

He does not care that the match may fall in the grass and set the field on fire.

A puff of smoke.

A sigh of satisfaction.

The afternoon sun is blocked by a cloud. Many clouds lazily drift over a violet-tinged sky.

He lays in the grass and watches the clouds, puffing away upon the white cylinder. There is no old man Rogers yelling insults at him. Just an empty meadow and the Tria* air and the fluffy clouds and the cigarette slowly taking its effect on him.

There's a cloud that looks like a Douglas fir. Another one looks like a dog.

The smallest cloud in the sky catches his eye. As he watches it, it uncurls into a little spiral, like a sprout from a seed.

A soft crunch in the grass distracts him. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a blue hood and dirty-blonde hair.

"You can come closer, you know. I'm not gonna bite."

His visitor comes to sit at his right.

One of the Twins. The girl.

"Don't you wanna hang with your brother, Miss Ziamaer? Or Miss Areli? C'mon, even Master One-Eye's a better influence than me."

Her head snaps around to look at him. The hood falls off, and her hair is lit at the ends by the unveiling sun. He finds she looks…untouchable.

Do not insult Milo, she warns with her hands. And my brother is cataloging Noah's work. Areli took Salvatore somewhere, probably apartment jumping if the ducks in the Mata pond weren't hungry.

He gestures to her with the cigarette in a curled finger.

I will not be warded off so easily, Mr. Guarin. I am sixteen, and I've seen seven different kinds of drugs being dealt at school, five different forms of alcohol being consumed outside of school grounds, a loaded gun on my principal's desk, six classmates with knives in their bags, nine classmates with sexual pornography hidden inside of their books and on their laptops, and I've walked in on at least three couples on the verge of having sexual intercourse. Don't think for one minute that your little cigarette will keep me away.

A chuckle escapes on a puff of smoke.

"You must think you're so tough, so smart. Look, I'm not fucking around. When people smoke shit like this, they do stupid things, and----"

Then I will be the one that keeps you from doing anything stupid.

"Notice that I'm a lot bigger and stronger than you? I could kill you in under a minute if I tried."

She responds by slipping a chain from her sleeve and unraveling it for him to see. The chain has a ring, and he hears one solid thump after another as she throws it back and forth in her hands.

The chain is less fragile than it appears.

He glances at her signing hands (since when did she had silver nails?), then at her golden eyes, daring him to test her. For all her smarts and all her silence, she was stubborn.

"You're just like her", he mutters, flopping back onto the grass.

Another foggy puff dissipates into the air.

He now wishes she never came. She looks like someone he loves.

Loved.

Loves.

A puff of smoke clouds his vision for a second. When it cleared, her hands were already above his face.

Like who?

"None of your damn business", he retorts. "Go the hell away."

I won't tell anyone.

"'Course you won't. Your hands will all the talking."

The cigarette is suddenly in one of her hands.

"Dammit! Give it here!"

Despite his size, he's kept away with a leg. She holds the burning cig at arm's length.

You know smoking is deleterious, right?

"The damn cigarettes, the whole pack---it was a gift, and it's mine to do whatever the hell I want with it!"

She glares at him, pressing her lips into the flattest of lines.

You're addicted, she signs harshly, throwing down the cigarette and stubbing it out beneath her shoe. And to think, I thought someone like you was different.

"Hey, it's one of the few privileges Master Rogers will let me have! What, I gotta say 'please' for you to hand it over?! Right now, I'm taking a fucking break!"

You're also addicted, she adds again, tucking his whole pack of clove-tobacco cigarettes in her back pocket.

"…………….I've been addicted to worst shit before."

Such as…?

"…Crack, weed, acid, ecstasy, atrovent; so many different kinds of drugs. Shit like you wouldn't believe."

The toughness is gone. She sees his eyes, she sees his face, and feels sympathy for him.

"What, now I have to give you a rap sheet and a list of the women I slept with?"

The sunlight illuminates dark circles in his face. There are tiny red veins in the whites of his eyes. His skin is a sunken, sallow pale with brown patches scattered all over.

She doesn't remember him being so close.

She sees his stormy gray eyes glance downward. The feel of fingers along her waist is alien; she knows he's looking for his pack of cigarettes.
A strange thought suddenly floods her mind.

His eyes are familiar.

As quickly as he closed in on her, he is now a good meter away, obsessively puffing on another lighted cig.
He looks at her. She is still kneeling in the grass. Her rose-colored lips still hang slightly open.

He had expected her to slap him, or hit him in the face with that chain of hers, or something. For Pete's sakes, he had (unintentionally) touched her ass just to get a pack of cigarettes.
He distinctly remembers Areli mentioning that the twins hadn't grown up normally. Forced to be human guinea pigs for some fucked-up government scientists. Maybe she was taught not to defend herself if people touched her. Maybe those scientists touched her because she couldn't fight back or scream out.

The thought angered him.

"You're sixteen?"

She shakes her head in that familiar trance-breaking way and nods.

"You're pretty…mature…for your age."

He gulps down a puff of smoke. Already he could feel the tobacco gradually taking its effect.

"I'm twenty-five. I was twenty-two when we first met."

I don't remember.

He sighs.

"Remember a think tank, and a freakishly large, quiet guard."

It come backs to her in a rush.

She remembers being thirteen, being lied to that, once again, she couldn't go out because there was a nuclear war outside and that the think tank was a safe bomb shelter for her and her brother.
Guarin's face was familiar because, although he had dressed like a think tank guard, no one could lie to the children about his time in the think tank. They told her and her brother that he was a soldier ordered to be a guard within the think tank, to protect it should anything go bad.
The guard was as silent as they were, but she and brother saw him occasionally sneak documents and flash drives into his clothes. The twins caught him once at a computer, typing something about a violation of human rights in the think tank, but as they were mute, they made no sounds and so avoided being seen.

Three months later, many men in black uniforms with gold badges and hats with rounded tops raided the think tank. They spoke oddly, with a lilt in their voices*, and took the children away into open-trunk trucks. As they were riding away, watching their first real sunrise, Treston told her that he saw Guarin sneaking away in a helicopter.

He watches as she stares into the clouds, the wheat-colored strands blowing in the clean air, lit afire by a four o'clock sun. Her eyes shone like the golden knob on Master Roger's cane.

The color reminded him of fine Canadian whiskey; smooth yet strong.

Her eyes suited her.

"You look so much like her. The woman that got me the job, I mean. My God, she was wonderful. Except her eyes were big, brown doe eyes."

He takes an unsteady puff, looking heavenward. She inches closer to him, crawling on her hands and legs. He notices the chain has vanished in her sleeve, and unlike her furious zipping movements when he tried to make her go away, she signs with slower, gentler hands.

Tell me, if it's not too much trouble.

After a heartbeat, he agrees, and she lies in the grass, tucking her hands behind her head with one leg folded on another.

He unfolds an elaborate story of a young, foolish drug addict from a Skid Row* that tried to rob a woman who showed him kindness by giving him a place to sleep, food to eat, and helping to treat his addictions. Hell, she was the reason he stopped. He used his gunman skills as an international aid officer to raid brothels and sweatshops, and learned seven new languages. He fell in love with her, and she was so excited when he went on his first solo mission, a raid upon a think tank in England. He then came home with the intention to propose to this woman. Her name was Jezabel.

"…I had everything planned out, you know, I mean, nothing flashy or showy….and…and….the ring, it wasn't a fancy ring you know, not something Italian-made or anything like…damn Salvatore with his damn Italian citizenship and damn advantages….I mean, I knew she liked Italian and shit but God she she the ring…"

She sees that the tobacco is twisting his mind. He talks clearly at intervals, but won't stop mumbling. The cigarette is, now, practically glued to his mouth, and one obsessive swallow after another makes her clench her chain protectively.

"…And I don't know how the hell it happened, but…one day I came home, to our apartment, 'cause we were savin' for a nice house in the Hawaiian Islands, but then I came home….and…and…she……good God…she was screwing our landlord. Yeah, naked and riding him up and down and he was grabbing her ass and screaming and then he saw me and screamed and she turned around and tried to cover her breasts and it all went down a fucking hill after that….
I dropped the engagement plans and pawned the ring and I tied myself to a rock and, stupid me, tried to commit suicide. I washed up on the shore of some godforsaken lake, and I was found by none other than Mr. Eamon Rogers himself. He was taking a stroll the morning he found me, and he took me inside his mansion to get warm and get dressed; guess he didn't want any dead guys on his routine morning path. As I got better, he asked me how the hell I ended up on the lakeshore, so I told him every damn detail. That one day turned into a week and that week turned into a month and before you know it, I knew enough to become his butler. I mean, we've both lost the women we loved to something and our lives sucked 'cause of those things, so I guessed he kept me all this time 'cause of that."

She watched him, taking in every emotion that swept over his face, the ones he let her see and the ones he tried to hide. Smoke hovered around his head, the grey in his eyes suddenly looked wider, and he began rambling on about the woman that broke his heart.

And then, quite suddenly, she felt him stroking her cheek.

"God, Jezebel, I've missed you. Just as beautiful as ever; you haven't aged a bit, yeah? And---"

Without thinking, she let the chain slide from her arm, unraveling into its full length. It curves in midair and glints before the weighted end swings down on his forehead with one clean blow. The cigarette flies out of his mouth, and she catches it in her bare hand. She feels a burst of pain and slowly uncurls her fingers to reveal ash and a crumpled cigarette and a small burn; hypnotized by the thin trail of blood, she watches a crimson jewel travel down her wrist until a dull groan brings her back to reality.

He is face down in the slightly waving grass, a fallen boulder. He is not moving.

Oh, no. I just killed him.

She slowly walks over and prods him with a timid foot. Still no movement.

But a small sound of sobbing can be heard. His back shakes a bit. Gathering all her strength in her arms and hands she turns him on his back and finds he's crying now, tears pouring shamelessly down his ruddy cheeks and his clenched teeth as he tries to suck in oxygen and nearly chokes on his salty tears. Two trails of fluid dribble from his nose into his mouth and over his blunt chin and he knows he looks disgusting but doesn't care.

"Even people that look like Jezebel want to hurt me……...except, God, I loved her and everything, I loved her more than anything…I swore I'd apologize to all the girls I slept with, and stop dealing drugs, and give up smoking, and drink only at parties, and all that went to waste, I put my heart and my blood and my tears and my life into her hands and she threw it aside and I didn't want to leave her but God she didn't even want to take me back didn't even beg for a second chance just told me to suck it up and cope like what I did with my addictions.
part of my mind so dark I wouldn't even be able to get addicted even if I tried. But you're right I backslid and fucked up big time and I'm trying to make myself better but sometimes trying gets tiring and God I'm sorry I tried to molest you even if I really wasn't trying to molest you or anything I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry…….."

He begins biting his lip, so as not to suddenly burst out with idiotic sobs, and it bleeds and begins mixing with his salty tears and his runny mucus and the whole mess flows off his face freely.

It's not as if she could (literally) say something to lift his spirits. She takes out his pack of cigarettes and tries to offer him one, but he slaps it out of her hand. She notices a square of fabric in his front pocket, so she pulls it out and dabs at his face with it.

He feels her arms around him. They seem to be long enough to encircle only his neck, but he understands and, gently as possible, wraps his arms around her whole body.

As the sun dips to its five o'clock position, he smells tea leaves and Quarta* rain and the clouds before a rainstorm. Yet rain wouldn't come for another month, and clouds bloom white against a fuschia-orange sky, and there weren't tea leaves for miles.

Then he realizes the smell is coming from the girl that embraces him.

There are truths in this world even the cruelest of humans cannot deny.

Two: Love is kind.


Any of you grossed out yet?

Then why are you people still here?

For any readers that are actually liking the story so far, you may have noticed that certain words or word groups have asterisks (*) next to them. A brief explanation:

*1) The police that wear black uniforms and speak oddly are Britons. The twins were taken away from their family somewhere in England.

*2) 'Quarta' literally means 'four' in Latin, and in the new world, is also the name for the fourth month of the year (April)

Hope I still have some readers out there.

~The Chancellor