Arc VII

Chapter 59

If I Should Fall From Grace

"You have been the last dream of my soul."

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities

The merciless sun of the afternoon was forging mirages in front of their eyes – golden and meandering restlessly across the green like tongues of fire and brimstone. Far away, in the distance, the sounds of violence resonated virulently in their ears: the citadel was under attack once again and their hearts suffered in their silent goodbye, imagining the cruel fate awaiting their loved ones back in the Wise House. Their lives, as they had known them, were officially over.

Their feet kept marching in the jungle for hours until it became nearly impossible to distinguish between shades of green. It all looked the same after a while – the richest tones and the lighter ones, all washed up in the humidity of the zone and the intensity of a nearly endless summer, could no longer pass for milestones in the path of desolation.

The Edenian barrister was the first to stop. His bones were aching; his exaggerated age had made it perfectly clear: this unexpected journey through the wild jungle was already taking its toll on him. Black's legs came to a halt a few meters away from the old man and he retraced his last steps, helping the man down on the ground. The doctor joined them then, seeking refuge in the shadow of a tree – she reached out for her friend and nodded her head in silent comprehension.

"We shouldn't be far from the portal now," Yvo said, nearly breathless. "We should be there in less than two hours if I remember correctly."

"It's okay," Alexandra let out softly as she closed her eyes for a minute: it was painfully hard not to get carried away by the alarming sounds coming from the capital. She still remembered the screams and the bombs, the pleas and the prayers. "Get some rest, Yvo. We're safe now."

Her timid optimism reminded Black of easy mornings and delightful evenings. Together, in the arms of the family they had procured for themselves.

"There's one thing, dear," the barrister began as he took her hand in his, "that has been in the back of my mind ever since we left the Palace. When you told the Emperor that you had lost all hope until the Rebel Seekers brought Erron," the pause was both cruel and endearing but the barrister went on, "does that mean that you were one of them?"

Alex shook her head in silence and stared at her husband: it seemed pointless to keep the secret any longer now. Erron had tried his best to deduce her every enigma but this answer had never seen the light of day – she had kept it close to her heart; the last key of a personal intimacy she had bargained with for as long as she could remember. But Erron's questions subsided once tranquility settled in and suddenly there was no need for interrogations.

The answer then fell asleep in her memories as her husband accepted her for who she was. He didn't need to know who she had been before him.

That version of herself did not exist in the quiet type of life they had created.

"I was part of a team, a research team," she said. "It was a small team, five or six members," she paused, suddenly sad to realize that time had already worked its magic. The memories had vanished, but the pain had prevailed – fractured and disappointing, like a broken piece of glass in the most gorgeous window. "They sent us here to study the soil and the water; mineral components and pollution levels."

"Who sent you?" Erron asked, stunned by the discovery, and his wife grimaced before taking a deep breath.

"The Special Forces," she confessed, matter-of-factly. "Just like the Palace has a portion of its library entirely dedicated to Earthrealm; the Special Forces wanted to expand their knowledge on the realm, they wanted to create their own archive," she smiled quietly to herself, reminiscing the innocence of those days. "Many papers and forms were signed; we could not tell a single soul where they were sending us… I was happy, in a way, because it all seemed like a great opportunity but when I came home, I realized I could not share that happiness. I had to be vague and give little to no detail of my upcoming expedition – and Nate listened, and felt happy for me, even when he didn't have the slightest clue of what was truly going on."

"But what happened?" Erron pressed on. "You were on your own when we first met – what happened to your team?"

A long and heartfelt silence took over her words and her husband squeezed her hand, expressing his tacit support.

"We were supposed to spend one week in this jungle," Alex let out softly as she remembered her first time walking through the white lights of a portal. "But when we were about to leave, the Rebel-Seekers ambushed us near the portal… in retrospect, I don't think the Special Forces were aware of the fact that the portal in the jungle sort of belongs to the Syndicate and their goons." A timid, tender grin appeared on the corners of Yvo's lips as the man listened to the doctor's story. "We didn't know who they were or what they wanted. Most members of my team fought them, and they were killed. A botanist named Harry helped me escape – we ran towards the city, but they found us, eventually."

With his mouth agape, Black remembered.

"They tortured Harry for days until he cracked, and he paid with his sanity," she whispered. "I had no choice but to become their healer – I didn't want to end up like Harry and I certainly didn't want to die like the rest of my colleagues. I was naïve to think that the Special Forces were searching for us – they had sent us here in complete secrecy, why would they care? It's not like they could come over and search for us; that would have demanded all sorts of explanations and excuses," she stared at Black for a moment, then she looked down again, "like I heard you say a million times, Erron, that's just no good for politics." She stood up and turned around, determined to resume her march, but Black stopped her.

"I could have protected you," he said; his eyes were filled with an intrinsic sense of loss she knew too well to ignore.

She smiled fondly at him.

"You have."

"No, you don't understand," Erron retorted childishly. "If you had told me this; if only I had known… I would have protected you."

She smiled again and planted a soft kiss on his lips.

"You have."

As the jungle stretched before their tired eyes, the trio kept on moving relentlessly towards that endless green. But the landscape had now mutated somehow, and both Black and the doctor were left with nothing but ghosts – was it ironic that the jungle that had been the beginning of their journey was now supposed to be their last stop before leaving Outworld? Black saw, dispersed around the green, the broken memories of his fight against Kano, the pain and the uncertainty; captivity and her, in the end. The doctor could recognize the places were her colleagues had died, the exact spot where her first aid kid became a joke.

And there, enveloped in green, the lights of the portal glimmered in their eyes.

But salvation seemed bitter. They had built a new life and now they were forced to abandon it and start over. In the end, it was too high a price.

As the doctor grabbed his hand, the cowboy understood that it was time to let go of the past once again. He stared into her eyes and nodded his head in silence, offering her the chance to be the first to cross. The woman looked over her shoulder and smiled at Yvo, who smiled back at her, knowing in his heart how much they all despised goodbyes. She put her arms around the old man and squeezed his old bones into a tight hug – but no words were spoken. The gratitude of her silence was saying more than enough.

She took a deep breath and readied herself. Her legs, resolute, approached the portal but her eyes were shrouded in doubt. It took her a moment to understand that the figure she was seeing was not a figment of her imagination – that he was there, and that he was real.

He was standing there, behind the portal. How he had gotten there or why, she couldn't understand.

"Nate?"

She wasn't a ghost. She wasn't a mirage or a trick of his mind. She was real, and very much alive, and the encounter became monumental for him, transcendental for the resolution of his entire existence.

Stepping away from the portal, the doctor walked towards her former boyfriend as Black watched, petrified. She traced the outline of his face, of that face she used to know so well, as her eyes absorbed the differences between the boy she had loved and this new man before her.

"You wanted to save the world," she whispered, brokenhearted, "but you make poison now."

Nathan lowered his head, but Kano didn't give him any time to explain his reasons. As the Australian mercenary appeared, Nate understood that he had been used as bait.

"All portals are being registered," Kano said, "if you wanted to escape, you needed to get to this portal… and I knew, the moment she saw you, boy, she would hesitate or at least take her sweet time – with you here, she wouldn't cross immediately. I'm sorry for interrupting this reunion, it was long overdue if you ask me, but I couldn't help a little poetry," he laughed as Black reached for his peacemaker. "They say life is a circle, right? Then it's only natural for things to end in the exact spot where they once started."

He was hurt, broken and bleeding on the ground. Kano had nearly killed him. He could still remember that day – could see the blood traveling down his own skin, could feel the pain and the heat.

"You should have killed me that day, Kano," Erron spat disdainfully. "You won't be getting a second chance."

As Yvo indicated the doctor and Nathan to run for cover, Kano put his hands on both sides of his waist and walked towards Erron.

"I didn't want to kill you that day, Black," he said. "Don't think too highly of yourself."

"Then why didn't you?"

"Because you reminded me of him," Kano smiled and looked over his shoulder only to find Nathan hiding cowardly behind a rock. "The resemblance is truly uncanny, don't cha think?"

If you could only picture this as a garden, boy… a beautiful meadow in bloom that quickly becomes a muddy, broken valley.

Your eyes gave you away.

"So, you married your grand, grand, grand, grand, grand son's girlfriend? How twisted is that, fella?"

The doctor stood up and abandoned her hiding place – she had seen the resemblance, had marveled on the similarities. But could this be possible? Could Black and Nathan be united by blood? The cowboy, taken aback by the revelation, dropped his gun and looked at that other man, that other version of himself – equally corrupted; now irreversibly linked to his own name.

She once said to me that there's no such thing as inherited evil but now that I can finally look at you and see you as you are, I have to admit that she was scandalously wrong. I still am my father's son; I am the flesh of his flesh and the sin of his sins. Just as you are the flesh of my flesh, and the sin of my sins.

"The only reason why I didn't kill you that day, is because I had already met him," Kano went on. "I knew his face reminded me of someone I knew, but I couldn't quite place it… until our fight. When I saw you again, I realized the two of you were connected somehow. So, I investigated Nate's genealogy until I hit a dead-end. "

She once told me there's no such thing as inherited evil, can you believe this woman, kid? So thoughtful, so loving, always taking care of others… how can she love us? Do you ever stop and wonder, boy, 'cause I sure do every night… when I go to bed with her I just look at her while she sleeps right next to me and I know I don't deserve her. And still, she loves me.

"And when I couldn't go on, I started again – with you." He moved closer to the gunman and smiled broadly at him. "I remembered some of the things you told us during your time in the Black Dragon, so I traveled to rural Texas and guess what?" Kano questioned Erron with an impeccable sense of irony. "I hit yet another dead-end."

"Bullshit" Black roared, furious to discover that his story had been unveiled by someone as despicable as Kano.

"Years passed, but I never forgot this connection between the two of you," Kano added. "But then you and the girl took a trip down memory lane but, as usual, I was always one step ahead of you: the last page of the journal you stole back in Earthrealm says you and your girlfriend had a child, but there were no more pages, right? Wrong. There was a final page."

Black closed his eyes and his world faded to black. His blood, contaminated by the ashes of a time long gone, was burning in his veins.

"When Harriet was adopted, they changed her name to Margaret Henderson," Kano revealed, looking into Nathan's horrified eyes: "That's your grand, grand, grand, grand, grandmother, right?"

You and I both know; we are the sons of crime. We are dark men, Nathan. Did you feel it back then, when you were but a little boy? Inside of you, growing and taking hold of you like a parasite choosing its final host. Something dark, something dense… Like a silent sin that grows deep within you that you know, at some point, is gonna scratch until it reaches the surface.

With menacing steps, Kano approached the doctor:

"You see, dear, they are more than ghosts," he said as he pointed at both Black and Nathan. "They share an essence that goes far beyond any physical resemblance: their blood was cursed centuries ago, maybe that's why someone that wanted to make the world a better place for everyone ended up fabricating poison."

"This is too much, Kano," Black yelled, "too much for an old debt, too poetic for a brainless goon like you."

Kano laughed, the sound of his amusement ricocheting through the green around them.

"But it's not my life, Black – it's yours," he offered, "that's what makes it fun." Fingers on his knives, the crimson beam of his artificial eye was clamoring for blood. "I spent over a decade puppeteering the invisible strings of both your lives and you never noticed; you were too busy thinking about political plots and military strategies."

Kano launched himself at Black and the gunslinger dodged his attacker, retrieving his peacemaker. As the battle took form before his eyes, Yvo reached for the doctor and ushered her to cross the portal but she refused: Nathan was still there, standing motionless before them, unable to go on. It was understandable, she thought, for Nate not to be able to comprehend the existence of someone like Black, a being that had been transversal to his own generations, fooling time and space over and over again.

"That's why you wanted all that money," Nate whispered, "American dollars are worth shit this side of the portal, but back home… you wanted a ticket out of here, my family's money is your life insurance." He walked towards Kano, no longer threatened by him. "You ruined my life, you ruined her life – you had fun manipulating our story just because you could!" He threw himself at Kano but the doctor stopped him, using her body as a shield. And the knife found her, certain and merciless. Erron had hurt Kano, but Kano had hurt both meridians of the same bloodline with a single movement.

The end and the beginning were enduring the same pain, the end and the beginning had lost their in-between.

Her last breath had been stolen. Every possible future had been erased.

With an animalistic roar, Black attacked Nathan, understanding in his mind that his impulsiveness had been the reason why the doctor had been hurt. But he was lying to himself. Kano ran away, hurt and covered in his own blood, but Black didn't care. He got on his knees and cried like a helpless child. He could kill Nathan, erase his own seed from every possible world but still, it wouldn't be enough.

You and me, we are vermin, we are mud from the same broken valley.

He could kill Nathan. Could erase his own seed from all worlds.

But she would never forgive him.

Nathan got on his knees, right beside his ancestor. He had searched for her, had dirtied his hands in the dirt of his own shortcomings and he had found her.

Time had never been on their side.

His ancestor looked back at him, the crescendo of questions becoming visible inside his reddened eyes: what is time for a man who cannot age? Her existence was a fragment, a small dot in an exaggerated straight line – but it was already over.

He cannot experience time but right now time has stopped. The pause is unbearably long. It's over. In the blink of an eye, all that magnitude, all that unmeasurable substance doesn't mean a thing.

It is over.

It is irreversibly over.

Already over.

Just like that.

Gone.

Your eyes gave you away.

As Yvo cried for the inevitable, both past and present stared at each other: Alex had chosen to protect Nathan but she would have done the same for Black. Are they the same man? Like Alex and Amanda, or Zar and Annie – it is the same face, the same blood, the same love, unaltered and evergreen?

There was a tomb with her name on Earthrealm, but her body now rested someplace else. From that cold tomb to this green mausoleum, did she really exist between her deaths? Her death is the mother of all deaths: Amanda's death, his mother's death, Annie's death, Zar's death – but the list goes on and the names look like milestones in the path of pain and dissolution.

They buried her body under the silent trees as the Oppressed resisted in the frontlines of yet another battle.

But, without her, their personal wars were already lost.