When Snow Falls: Apprenticeship.
Chapter 3.
A Stranger named Alex.
I was adrift in a violent sea, unable to fight against the growing power and ferocity of the stormy waves as they churned and spat angrily, feeling my own strength leave me the more saltwater I drank in, growing sick and weak as the foul tasting liquid took hold of my throat. The most disturbing aspect of this was that when I looked around, I found many shadowed figures gathered in the heavens, none of them extending their hand, as there was a glee in their eyes. I was watching those of my family surround me on all sides, laughing and refusing to help someone they had cast aside, content with being a watcher as I spat at each of them, yelling every nasty curse I could think of. Watching me as I tried to drag their little night out. If my death was going to be their sick entertainment, then it was gonna be a long show.
This was their impossible challenge to me before they'd thrown me into the waters; to drink the entire ocean before I drowned, forced to comply as I was going to die no matter what I did. I could sink and give them the satisfaction, or keep my head above the surface and curse their names to hell as I slowly sank. My struggle nearing its end.
As I looked up through the stinging water, my gaze rested on my father, and strangely enough, he was the only one of them not laughing, no joy of this in his expression. He did nothing still, but I almost thought I could see tears, adding a flood of them to the ocean killing me. He may not have meant it, or wanted it, but he was killing me. I'd known nothing but contempt for this man. So why did I dream this way?
As my eyes closed and I fell into a deeper darkness, everything became a silent slosh as the ocean calmed itself, feeling cold as my breathing relaxed. Then nothing more as I woke, finding myself in a large bed, one or three times too big for me.
Though I'd woke from a nightmare, I did not gasp for air or thrash about in fear as I had done before coming to terms with my life, for I knew no such thing when it came to my family. I was no longer afraid of what had happened, and now I only knew rage because of it. What always perplexed me was the recurring element, to see my father not sharing in the festive celebrating of watching me drown. I only ever saw regret in his eyes, but he never did anything to stop it. The fault was still his to share.
Shaking off my restless sleep, I looked towards a window near the bed, seeing that the sun had just started to rise. Something else on the nightstand caught my eye, grabbing off of it a bottle of the same kind of cinnamon whiskey I'd wasted last night; a replacement for the one I'd smashed into a couple of fucking drunks, making a smile creep across my face as I thought about popping it open for a sip, considering I hadn't really gotten any out of the last one, but decided I wasn't in the mood for it.
As I placed it back down, I finally noticed that I wasn't alone in the room, glancing over to a corner in the room where a face I recognized sat in a chair, silently staring at me, having not wanted to disturb me as I came too. I was a bit angry over being watched during my sleep, as they would have seen me suffer through my nightmare.
"What are you doing here?" I asked her as I looked away, almost not able to meet her gaze directly in a kind of shame over what I'd done in front of her.
I didn't so much regret what I had done to all three of them, I just regretted I'd done it out of uncontrolled rage and that she'd watched it happen. If I was going to go on a killing spree, I didn't want to be lost in a blood rage. Maybe there was some guilt that I'd essentially killed three people in a drunken stupor, but I didn't think much of it. Maybe they didn't necessarily deserve that level of violence, but I wasn't going to cry over it. It was done with, and I couldn't nor would take it back. They certainly couldn't regret what they had done, why should I?
She immediately stood up from her chair, still somewhat timid to be standing there with me as she began to sign. 'I was just checking on your bandages.' She said before her hands went down to her sides, a blush breaking out over her face as she tried not to meet my gaze.
"You patch me up?" I asked her as I grabbed my shoulder and stretched it out, grimacing some as my left arm was still injured; My hand most likely broken, along with my right leg and foot as I still walked with a fair amount of pain, though not enough to hamper me entirely.
'Partway. My aunt did most of it.' She signed as quickly as I could speak before she handed me the clothes I'd worn during the incident, freshly scrubbed clean and free of the blood and dirt that had covered it. "Who's your aunt?" I asked as I dressed, as slow as I could be, pulling them across each of my injured extremities with whatever care my slightly hungover self-was capable of, wondering who'd be selfless enough to take in some random kid off of the streets, especially one that had just finished beating three men to death. I guess it wouldn't be hard to do, if they'd believed I'd been protecting her. But she and I both knew that wasn't the case. I'd passed up my chance to keep her safe when I'd done nothing when I first saw her.
She had turned away some the moment I'd thrown the covers off of me and began to dress, so I'd had to get her attention. She did it not out of embarrassment, as neither of us seemed to care that I was nearly nude, her reasons entirely obvious, but more so because she didn't want to be rude and stare at the various scars that hung along my body like festive ornaments, the disturbing sight of my injuries equal to the beauty they held. 'She own's the bar and the hotel.' She told me only after I was dressed. I took no offense to her having not wanted to look at me in the event she caught a glimpse of the most terrible of scars that I had, as I didn't much enjoy seeing them either.
I understood a little better why I'd been given help now, having promised my help to the woman in the first place. I also understood now why the girl was a prostitute if the same lecherous woman I'd met last night was her caretaker. She already seemed like she'd take every angle she had to make a profit, and this confirmed it even more so. As was my disgust with her.
I felt like it wasn't my place to judge their situations, but that didn't mean I wouldn't, especially if hers in anyway included being outnumbered and beaten by drunks.
I think she saw what thoughts I had of her in my mind and expressed her own. She didn't have a right to judge any more than I did, but like I, she did not care. 'You didn't need to involve yourself like that, and you really shouldn't have done what you did. Two of those men died, and that third is in a coma he's not likely to wake from.' She said with a coldness to her stare, as though she had not cared what they'd done, making me twitch in a slight anger. peering down at the ground as I tried to justify myself. "They got what they deserved after what they did. You should be thanking me." I told her as I finally looked at her, a darkness in mine to match her cold.
'But you weren't doing it to protect me. It was already over and they were walking away. You walked away too, if you remember.' She reminded me, which she was right on. It hadn't been about protecting her anyway. "And now they won't be doing it again, will they?" I said, not as a question, but as a fact. They'd never raise a hand to anyone ever again.
'And what about their families? People that depend on them? What happens to them when they found that husbands or fathers or sons suddenly never come home.' She asked me as she pushed closer, looking at me hard in my eyes, and for a moment, her words cut deep enough for me to consider them. "T-Then they're better off without such trash in their lives," I said unconvincingly, as though I'd done people I didn't know a service. 'Alcohol does terrible things to people, makes good men violent and rash. Who they were that night doesn't reflect who they might have been now,' she said as she looked at me like I was a child, and for an instant, I shrank back. 'We all have our dark moments. Our moments of cruelty, that doesn't mean we deserve to die for them. That just makes us human.'
No other words she had signed had more of an effect on me than these ones now, just not in the way she would have expected as I stood back up, my body suddenly seething with rage. "And that excuses us does it?" I said as I walked forward, pushing her back away from me enough that she nearly fell. "I'm supposed to excuse every moment ever just because we occasionally do something fucked up to each other?"
She suddenly became gripped by fear, so much so that her hands wouldn't move to sign. "There are limits! There's fucking over a friend, and there's murdering a Stranger in cold blood!" I screamed out, unaware of the volume of my voice as it rang throughout the room. "There's having dark thoughts, but the line is acting on them! Raping! Murder! Beating the shit out of a girl in a back alley! These are where you cross the line!"
Maybe it was a double standard that I was preaching about how wrong murder was wrong, but I never said what I did was right. It was wrong no matter who hands it came from. My reasons had just been different. "There's neglecting your child, and then there's abandoning them in a forest! That monster in the dark they were afraid of suddenly becomes their own mother and father!" That was the moment I realized I'd gone over the edge, having let myself get too emotional. I finally saw the fear in her eyes, only now I was seeing a reflection of my younger self in hers, seeing her pressed against the nightstand, gripping it as though she'd expected me to strike her and she was prepared.
I hated how easily this girl made me feel shame, something I didn't normally get about any of my actions, feeling it burn as I pulled back away from her before I did something I'd really regret, hard for breath and looking towards my sword stashed away in the corner of the room as I let my anger and sorrow flow into it, directing everything I felt towards the blade, letting it take away my insanity as a clear mind found its way back to me. It was the only anchor I had to keep me stable. It wasn't the most healthy thing for me to tether myself too, but it finally brought me back as I realized she probably wouldn't understand my anger, and it wasn't fair of me to treat her like she knew my past, as I didn't know hers.
I fell back onto the bed as I turned away from her, gripping my hair tightly to fight back tears as everything came crashing down on me. And here I sat, thinking I'd gotten past it all. I realized I'd just fooled myself into believing I wasn't as affected by it as I'd thought. It was a bigger part of me then I let on, and more than I wanted it to be. There wasn't an escape from it for me. Not yet.
She stared at me strangely as my anger seemed to have faded as easily as it had come, now just seeing how torn I was inside, careful as she approached and sat beside me, not able to find the words to sign to make me feel right. I wouldn't have seen them anyway, too stricken with pent-up guilt and false acceptance to look up, and her too scared to place a hand on my shoulder to get my attention. So we sat in silence for a long while, both left to our own thoughts of what to say and how to say them.
Finally, she worked up the courage to lay a comforting hand on me, and I did not recoil from her touch as I looked up to her, surprising us both. My eyes were red from the strain, still not having cried though. 'I'm sorry. I didn't know.' She signed to me with her right hand, her left on my shoulder still. There was sweetness to her gaze that I'd never known another person to give me. "Why would you? You only have your experience to draw on. I don't know yours either, but I acted like I did." I said before a smile was found where a frown had been, actually feeling my spirit lift.
It was, in a very poor choice of words, infectious enough to give her one as well, sharing it as she turned more to face me. 'I'm Allie Graemoor.' She introduced herself to me as we both warmed up to each other in the small moment of understanding after, despite the rocky start. She seemed to have forgiven me. "Alex," I said after her. "Alex Sinbad." I hadn't forgotten my true name, but I'd long since discarded it. Made it easier to distance myself from who I was before.
"Graemoor huh?" I asked as I looked at her brunette hair, chuckling a bit. "Misleading name." It made her laugh a silent giggle as she ran her fingers through a few locks. 'Dye it.'
We continued to talk from there, finding out more and more of the other as we eventually laid on the bed together, inches apart and talking all the while. For a time, we avoided more personal questions out of respect, not wanting to pry into things that might ruin the moment, but she already had a guess about my own history from my outburst, while I knew nothing of hers. Until I finally started to ease my way into it. "If I can ask, what brought you into your...Line of work?" I said, trying to word it as nicely as possible.
She frowned some and sat up, and immediately I became afraid, as I knew I didn't have any right to ask, about to apologize before she signed. I don't think she was made, just in thought. 'It wasn't so much a choice I made as much as it was the only option I had.' She explained to me, thinking back to everything she'd done. 'My parents were dead. And I only had my aunt. And there wasn't much other work for me. Nobody seemed to want me in anything else. This town has a way of pushing you into what it wants.'
I sat myself up beside her, finding out she was just as helpless every day as she had been the previous night. And it wasn't right. "I don't believe that. That it's your only option I mean," I told as she cast a strange look at me, like no one had ever told her this. "My parents left me for dead, because they didn't think I was worth anything." I finally told her more. "The world told me what it wanted. It wanted me to stop trying and just die. And here I am, years later, still going."
I took her hand into my own, all the better to get my point across. "Sure, the world has a way of beating you down into what it wants. That's not gonna change. But fuck the world and the people in it."
She smiled some at this, as though it was a nice thought, but one she didn't believe in. "You got the shit knocked out of you by a couple of drunks. What kind of life is that?"
'Mine. And it's the only one I have.'
She tried to look away again, but I got my free hand on her chin and kept her looking at me, not allowing her to turn away again. "Then make a better one." Her hand was on mine after I'd whispered this, thinking she was about to tear mine off to get away, but she just held it in hers as we looked at the other, not wanting to let go. I felt her heart quicken some.
All was quiet for just a moment before she moved closer, pressing her lips and her chest against mine in a single, fluid motion, taking me by surprise as I'd had no expectation and been given no warning. As she fell into the kiss, it took me a minute longer before I did as well, lost only in the passion of it. I think we both needed to forget our troubles for a minute or two, and mine seemed to easily melt away from my mind.
She was careful in helping me undress, on account of my still broken arm and leg, and I in turn, was soft with her. Though her injuries weren't as severe as my almost self-inflicted ones, meaning there was no real need to be, I couldn't imagine anyone had ever been gentle with her, and I think she needed that as much as I did. To know it wasn't something that had to be forced on her.
With a quick toss of the covers, we slipped deeper into the bed, finding some needed peace with each other, as there was nothing as in the world but her. Not even my vengence, or the drive for it.