Chapter Three: Of Governments and God

When Audrey left, I scrambled over to the wall that linked our cells with one another. Each movement sent fire down the center of my back, but I couldn't say that I was bothered that much by it. I had other things to worry about than how much my body hurt.

"Alec," I whispered, voice sharp and desperate. I held my breath, waiting for a response.

"Yes?" He answered after a few moments. His voice trembled, but if he could speak to me, then I felt sure that he was going to be alright.

"Are you alright?" I breathed out, knowing how stupid of a question it was in the back of my head. He couldn't be alright. Alive was not the same thing as okay.

"I'm glad you can't see me, Saoirse." He said. The familiar sound of chain dragging along the floor filled the air. "She's gotten worse. Last time she was…business like. Detached. Today…it was as if she was personally infuriated with me."

"She interrogated me. She wanted to know who else had planned the coup on the castle with me." I murmured. It was strange. Audrey wasn't the type to ask questions while she whipped every ounce of strength out of your body. I wondered if Aro had put her up to it. It made sense. If he needed to get information out of us, Audrey was the best person for the job.

"Is that why you're here?"

I wasn't sure if I should tell him, for a moment, but who else did I have to confide in?

"It wasn't just me at first. I told her that we had a rather large amount of people who wanted to see the Volturi overthrown. But… I think most of them were scared, in the end. They didn't realize the risks involved at first."

"But you did?" He asked.

I nodded on instinct, though I knew that he couldn't see me. "I've been around corrupt governments since I was a little girl. Tyrants have not frightened me for a long time."

"Aro is not exactly frightening on his own." He supplied, and I imagined that he was sitting against the wall in the same spot that I was, our backs separated by a few inches of stone. "But…the people that he has on his side, the things they would do for him…that is horrifying. I know thousands of people who would slaughter anyone he told them to. People who would murder their mothers and siblings just to make him happy."

My stomach churned at his words. I knew some from long ago who did much of the same thing. It was incredible how many people would devote themselves to one person. When that person was as charismatic and cruel as Aro tended to be, it was a very dangerous situation indeed.

"Its funny how abhorrent people tend to have the most allies," I remarked, allowing my eyes to close for less than a second. We couldn't let our guard down in this place, and I was grateful that we didn't have to sleep. I could only imagine how terrible the nightmares would be.

"I think it has to do with charisma. Normally those who are in power have sociopathic tendencies. One of the traits of a true sociopath is overwhelming charm." He said, his tone almost bored. A loud thunk, thunk, thunk came from his cell. I wondered if he had broken a bit of stone off of the wall and had taken to chucking it at the opposite.

"Guess Aro has loads of charisma," I rolled my eyes. Perhaps the guard liked Aro well enough, but he was a snake. He would drop and of them at a moment's notice if he thought it would give him the advantage. "He's been in power for, what, about three millennia

"Something like that,"

"About time for someone else to have a chance at the throne." I mused. I stretched my legs out in front of me, bending my ankle back and forth for a moment. There wasn't much room to move around, and my legs had started to become stiff from sitting for so long.

"Better yet, for there to not be a throne." He countered, and I found my lips curling into a grin.

"How would that work, though?" I asked, for I tried to think about it logically. Everyone was accustomed to the laws and regulations put into place by the Volturi. I couldn't fathom how long it would take for all of our society to adjust to the lack of a ruling class.

"We govern ourselves. Or else we establish smaller governments. It does not work to have one person with all of the power."

"I know. I've seen it in other places," I murmured, scratching my initials into the stone. Now, even when I was gone, they would know that I was here. I wasn't just a ghost.

"Where?"

I hesitated for a moment. There weren't many people who knew of my life before I had been changed.

"When I was a child," I admitted after a few moments, choosing only certain details to divulge. "My mother was in the court of Mary, Queen of Scots. I saw how far monarchs are willing to go in order to gain power. It's never enough."

"Of course not," He laughed. Not a chuckle, or a snort- a true, brilliant laugh that made me feel as if I were glowing for a couple of seconds. "No king or queen has ever been satisfied with what they have been blessed with. They always want more. Why else would Aro constantly seek more powerful vampires?"

"What if we were to establish a new form of government? How would we stop those in charge from seeking the same amount of power that Aro has? Once someone gets the smallest taste of power, it isn't long before they run rampant with it."

"That won't happen," He declared, a note of firmness in his tone. "I won't let it."

I wanted to believe him. To be able to put all of my faith into a person that I had known for only a week, but I couldn't. "You know you can't guarantee that."

All I wanted was for the wall that separated us to crumble down into nothingness. I wanted to see him, to put a face with the voice that had been the only sort of comfort to me. I could will people to do many things, but I couldn't incite stone to break apart just because I wanted it to. If that were the case, this castle would be level to the ground by now, and nothing but a page in some history book.

One day, this castle will be nothing but a memory, but I suspected that it would be a long time before any vampire would be able to forget the horrors the Volturi caused.

"Maybe I can't, but we can try. We can learn from the mistakes of the past." He paused, but only for a couple of seconds. "I used to think that the Volturi had the right idea. In general….maybe it is good to have some regulations for our kind. There methods, though….are too drastic. They slaughter thousands on the smallest infraction."

A bit back a laugh. Funny how many people died in the world because of one person.

"Absolute power corrupts, absolutely- oh, so they say." I murmur, digging my nails into the stone underneath me. "When we get out of here… I'm going to claw his eyes out of his skull."

"Saoirse, I don't think we're going to get out of here," He said, his voice softer than it normally was. "Think about it- how many people do you hear down here?"

"None. Just…Just me and you." I answered. The dungeons were full of cells, but all of them were empty- save from ours.

"Exactly. Aro doesn't keep prisoners. He takes what he wants after them, and then he has them killed. Once he gets bored hearing us scream…or he gets the information he wants, then he'll have us offed. Maybe he'll let Audrey and the lot of them have a final hurrah with us and then…"

My chest felt heavy, tight. I wouldn't die. I had too much to do.

"I don't want you to die." I breathed, voice faltering just a bit. "I don't want to die."

"Sao… I don't believe we have much of a choice. Audrey could kill us whenever she wanted if Aro told her she could. Like we said before, there are hundred of them and two of us…and we aren't exactly in a position to help one another." He sighed. "I wish neither of us had to be here. I pray to God ever-"

"Don't. Don't do that." I told him before I could stop myself. "Don't pray to something that isn't there."

"You don't believe in God, then?" He inquired, and I heard a note of disappointment in his voice. I scoffed, and pushed myself to my feet.

"I haven't believed in a God since I was a child. You pray and pray and pray and nothing helps you. God isn't real. Maybe there is something out there, but it isn't going to help us. The only thing we have to rely on in this world is ourselves." I declared, my voice ringing strong and powerful through the stone walls. My chest rose and fell steadily. I didn't need to breathe, but almost on instinct, my breath tended to increase whenever something got me worked up.

"That's a very sad outlook to have on life," He answered evenly, "If God doesn't exist, then how did we all come from? You and I…animals, plants, everything?"

"There are thousands of other explanations for how the universe came into existence," I countered. I heard all of the religious arguments. There wasn't a God. Nothing could change my mind about that. Certainly not some boy that I just met in a cell.

"Explanations? So you believe that all of this happened by change? That…some cells and atoms just…clashed on their own accord, or by a happy accident and….millions of years later, here we are." He was determined, but so was I. I didn't expect that either of us would give up our world views without a fight.

I took a few steps closer to the wall, arms crossed over my chest. Maybe I should be sitting down, conserving my energy for when one of them came in to have their nightly fun, but I couldn't stand to sit still. I had too much to say.

"From a scientific standpoint, Alec, it makes more sense that all of this happened by chance. Carbon dating puts the world back at a few million years. The universe even long. The Bible only seems to go back a couple thousand years."

"There is no indication of a clear time line in the Bible. For all we know, a thousand years could have passed from Genesis to Exodus and so forth. We can't just take science as a clear sign that the Bible, all the accounts in it, is entirely fiction."

"What about all of the other religions in the world. They have some basis of truth. It's not as though someone just pulled Buddhism out of their ass and was like "oh hey, let's all do this religion"." I countered. I had studied some other popular religions of the world, but nothing ever stuck with me. They all focused on something that no one could see. "How do you know that you're religion is right and theirs is wrong?"

"No one can ever know that for sure, Saoirse, but that is why it is called faith. You put your heart, your soul into something in hopes that things will turn out right in the end. You believe in something bigger than yourself, than anyone." He explained. He sounded passionate, like a preacher, but less annoying. I wanted to tune him out, to ignore everything that came out of his mouth at this moment in time, but I couldn't. Even if I disagreed with him on this more than I could on any other subject, I still wanted to hear his voice.

He believed that something watched over him. He was never truly alone, it he thought that. Me, I was. Without his presence next to me, I was the only one in this stone abyss. I didn't want to be alone. Not entirely.

"You must have had good experiences when you were a human," I supplied, absently taking a bit of my hair and twisting it into a braid, just so that I had something to do with my hands.

"No…no, not really." He said after a few moments, "My sister and I were persecuted when we were children. The townsfolk thought us to be witches, so they burned us. It was a far more superstitious time."

I winced. The imagine of him and some faceless girl on pyre's, screaming for mercy, flooded my head. "I'm sorry…" I murmured, "But then….how are you so sure of your faith, when you were hurt by those who follow it, too?"

Again, his answer came a few moments later. In a way, I appreciated the delay. It made me feel like he was really thinking about what I had asked him.

"I think it's a lot to do with my mother," He admitted, and there was a new note to his voice that I couldn't quite place. "She fought so hard to protect my sister and I while we were being persecuted. She would teach us what she could. I think….learning about God from my mother really helped solidify my faith's."

I resisted the urge to snort, but I knew that that would be rude. You didn't speak against someone's mother, no matter your opinion on mothers and fathers in general.

"It's mostly because of my father that I have so little faith," I said easily, allowing the braid I'd woven earlier to unfurl in the palm of my hands. Funny, how the smallest of things become amusing when you have nothing else to do.

"May I ask why?"

"He…he was a very religious man, but he was not a kind man, either. He was the sort of person who wanted to stone women who spoke out of turn, or beat children if they stepped out of line. He used the Bible as an excuse to hurt my brother and I."

"I'm sorry, Saoirse," He said, softly.

"Don't be," I said, smiling to myself. My father was dead. A hundred years dead, and I was alive. I was beautiful, (aside from the scars that Audrey had so lovingly inflicted.) I was eternal. I hadn't succumbed to illness, or attack, or old age. I would be around to see empires rise and fall, and my father would not be. "It's not as though any of the demons of our past can come back to haunt us."

"You know," He began, pointedly, "If you believe in demons, you have to believe in angels."