Post by Kyle Shane on Sept 10, 2018 4:16:48 GMT -5
The blinding streak across the sky lit up the entire field.
At first it had the trajectory and speed of a shooting star, but it gathered momentum and size, it's intensity growing as it approached; a careening, out of control comet with no discernible shape, just light and heat. A star falling. It impacted soundlessly off to the west.
The eighteen year old boy didn't respond. He wrapped his arms around his shivering, emaciated frame underneath the black floor-length goth duster. A mop of curly auburn hair twined over his eyes, and though youthful and softer, the contours echoed a face we know well. Except that the face is broken, one eye swollen nearly shut, the little crack of iris beneath the swelling bruise was a harsh red. His lip was split wide open. He had his knees up to his chest, and he took a few deep breaths.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Over time, he gradually tried to calm himself, and take stock of his situation.
He felt his ruined face, and the shock and pain subsided. To be replaced, as always, by the anger.
He tried to let the air push away his embittered, angry feelings, but they lingered, festering. He stewed as he walked on down the grassy hill. The late summer night, still humid, had turned a bit chilly.
He huddled, cold despite himself, and looked up at the sky, trembling. Something in them made him forget his injuries, if only for a moment in the vast cosmic scheme of things, and stare upward in wonder. This far out from the city, the halogen pollution hadn't quite reached, and he could see the stars. He asked them, wordlessly, what he should do, and got no response back, just a winking, diamonds on velvet cloth void.
But he looked at it all the same, contemplating his own insignificance and importance. At least it was comforting to him... that the halogen pollution hadn't reached out here. And he could sit on this knoll. And see the stars.
He just wished he knew what to do. As always, he shut his eyes and thought as hard he could skyward. The child's simple faith still lingered in him, deep down. He asked his mother what to do. But, heartbreakingly, he felt only a wall of silence in his head. He despaired when he tried to talk to God, or mom. Because he got the distinct impression nobody was listening.
And then he noticed the light off to the west, just over the next hill. It broke him from his reverie. At first he wrote it off as a trick of light, and besides before Eric had took to tuning up on him with his ring hand he'd smoked a hefty spliff behind the trailer. But maybe there was a plane crash, he rationalized, or maybe - hell. A million maybes. Every possibility occurred to him at once, but there was a strange feeling in the back of his head that someone was in trouble.
Breaking into a jog, despite a sick looking burn on a thigh just the size of a cigar butt put out on human skin that was started to get infected, he crested the hill and looked down in disbelief.
A naked man was rising, his body glowing ethereally, from a crater smashed into the ground.
He looked around wildly, trying to find the source of this hallucination. The glowing man, to his credit, did not shy away. In fact, he looked too rocky himself to be aware of his own circumstances. He fell to his knees just as soon as he'd gotten up, and the boy reached him, watching as the glow receded inside of him to leave only a handsome man with dirty blonde hair reaching his shoulders and slender, defined muscles. His voice was a lilting musical composure, and his eyes searched deep into his own. "Too weak- did I make it? Are you the boy?"
"I mean, I'm A boy, sure," he replied without knowing what else to say. The figure groaned and the boy, not knowing what else to do, not even taking time to register the fact that the naked man's piece would be rubbing the inside of his armor, stripped off the black goth coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. The man's ageless, inhuman eyes turned to pierce him, and a hand shot up to stroke his face. The very instant their skin contacted Kyle felt like he was shocked by a car battery; a transfer between them. But nothing seemed taken from him, so much as the man was... reading. "You are not the child... but you are broken. I can undo the damage, if you are of the light."
The boy had no time to ask what that meant before the man's hand glowed, hot as it pressed against his ruined eye and puffy, swollen cheek. The pain receded.
This last act seemed to take a lot out of the naked sky man. Kyle stood, and helped him up by the arm of his coat, saying "who are you?"
"I am a servant of the Lord. And I come with a divine purpose, but I've lost my way. I need to find a child before it's too late."
"Oh, no," he said, a vitriol creeping into his voice upon hearing this. "No way. Nice knowing you, crazy naked dude, you can just wash that coat and give it back to me later. Or... burn it. Anyway, adios."
The self-professed angel looked puzzled, "You will not give me aid in this endeavor? All of heaven turns on the actions within the next few hours."
He whirled on the confused, no longer glowing being, and snapped on him, "No! I refuse any of this. Because if you're not just some weird hobo who woke up naked in a crater, then you're a part of something I want even less to do with. Fuck you, fuck where you came from and get out of my face."
The little man wasn't hurt by the outburst, and in fact, looked on sympathetically, listening with annoying empathy. "You rage against your creator."
"My creator is a drooling idiot! My creator doesn't know a damn thing about what's going on, in fact I've got a sneaking suspicion that my creator just waits until the last possible second to cobble together some absurd scenario to thrust upon me. I never wanted ANY OF THIS."
He was quiet, then, and the boy started to turn away, until the servant whispered, "no one in creation ever does," and the boy gritted his teeth at the world-weary, put upon demeanor of the man. "So tell me," he retorted, "tell me one thing that makes any sense of this. Tell me why my mother had to be taken away, 'cause of his will? Was it his will that left me down here, alone, with this monster I live with? For everything my CREATOR has 'given me', tell me just one reason I should even give him a second thought."
The man with the ancient, inhumanly patient eyes looked deep into the boy's soul and said, "because if I don't have your assistance, one of the most important children of this generation will be murdered by his father."
That stopped the young boy cold, and he eyed the formerly naked angel with something approaching acceptance.
"Come on, I've got my dad's truck," he offered, holding up the pilfered keys. His father was passed out on the bathroom tile last he saw; drunkenly cursing his weak disappointment of a son.
The boy knew the way he was being led, actually. It didn't surprise him that he was being taken into one of the more ghetto parts of Southie, his father's drinking buddies from the brewery lived in this area. And the small little row house they were being brought to was one he remembered from years earlier, being brought when his father was supposed to be watching him to late night poker games where cigars, cheap booze and dirty jokes about women were bandied about freely. "This is Brian Pyle's house," he said, understanding dawning, and a little bit of outrage. Brian Pyle, one of his dad's old poker buddies. He of the uproarious laughter, pot belly. Kyle remembered him well, and he also remembered from those long ago poker days the two young girls, one no more than a toddler, and her sister, tall, stick thin and with huge blue eyes. He remembered Crenshaw taking her in the back one night and...
"No," he shouted, gritting his teeth, and then he turned to his travel companion, "so what do we do about Py-" but his companion was gone. From inside the house, he heard a startled, drunken voice say, "wuzzat? ...How you get in here?" And the boy knew it was time to get into action himself. He sprinted towards the broken old house, and his foot connected solidly with the glass window on the front stoop. He broke his way in through the window and tumbled inside, finding himself in a cluttered, hoarder nightmare of a living room. From the other room, he heard the ranting of a drunken man, "I got my shotgun, now I want you to get out of my house!"
The messenger's voice returned, calm, measured, and intent. Brooking no argument. Recognizing no authority higher than what it served. "You have broken divine law, Brian Pyle. You have turned against your own blood, and you have gone against the will of your creator. And now, I have been empowered to put an end to you."
The entire house began to shake beneath Kyle's feet, and as he searched through to the next room, spilling over a box filled with old Playboy magazines, his eyes found the small figure hiding out. No longer a toddler, she was filled out into a clear, tiny little beauty. She was like a fragile little doll, with her wispy hair and big eyes. She stared at Kyle frightfully.
"Come on, let's get you out of here," he said, and after some hesitation, the injured girl took his hand. The entire house was rocking now, and light came from between the cracks in every board. A loud, unearthly, celestial singing pierced through their ears, and Kyle shouted. It was almost not meant for them to hear. Kyle pushed through, and taking the girl in his arms, busted back out the window, dashing towards the truck, before the throbbing, pulsing sound assaulting his brain could make him pass out.
When he slowly gained consciousness, he noticed he was propped against the truck. The girl lay sleeping in the passenger side. And then, the guardian angel appeared. "It is done."
"What happened to -"
"Do not concern yourself with Brian Pyle," the angel said, with finality, "All that matters now is Ellie. This girl will grow up to be one of the most important prophets of our age. She would rise above the abuse heaped on her by her father, she would grow into a compassionate and charismatic leader, and she would unite many faiths under her wisdom. We saved her life tonight... and so, for that, our father thanks you."
"Cool, cool," he said, uncertainly. He didn't care about any of that, though. He just saw a sleeping girl they'd rescued from a drunken abusive ass. And if she could be saved... then...
"And now, for your reward," the angel said, and again he laid a hand on Kyle's cheek, and again he felt the rush of warmth.
"She says she does hear you, son. And she knows it's been hard. But she also loves you. And that you make her proud." He was breathless as the feelings flooded over him, his heart filling up like a balloon about to burst.
"And that one day you will join her in the light."
"Farewell Kyle Shane."
And when he blinked, they were gone, taking the girl, his father's truck, and his coat.
"Ohh shit," he muttered.
Ten years after that night, a much more haggard figure sits on a knoll overlooking an old trailer park. He could never say why, but when he felt the most questions in his deepest, most secret heart, he came out here, crossed the Mystic River Bridge to the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, and came to the hill, where once upon a time a man fell from the sky.
He didn't have that floor length, Hot Topic bought so-cool duster anymore. He didn't have the emo fringe or eyeliner, or the fuck you-snarl of immortal, never dying youth. He didn't have, the savaged face or the broken orbital bone of the particular night he reminisced about. But as he sat there, feeling the cold September grass wet his jeans and thinking about that night and others on the hills overlooking Roxbury, he thought that this place had a power that couldn't be equalled.
It called to what needed to be there. Be it the ghost of someone he loved, or... well, the man who fell from the sky.
The cherry of his cig lit up in the darkness as he looked into the sky now. So full of questions... but this night, all was calm within him as he looked and watched. He used an empty can as an ashtray.
This far out from the city, the halogen pollution hadn't quite reached, and he could see the stars.
He reflected on what he had said to the man, in his hot headed, impetuous and hurt way. He was a wounded, traumatized boy who had been lashed over and over, and he had come out that night as he did on, well, many nights when he was escaping Eric's rough hands. And he had asked the universe, the stars, the angels, God, anyone and everyone capable of picking up a signal in that vast expanse, asking them why his mother had been taken when he himself was left behind. Why someone so fundamentally good was taken while a miserable piece of shit like Eric not only lived, but thrived, grew stronger and more secure in his meanness. And hell, what kind of world was it that allowed good people to be sentenced to misery or be taken away while bad people continued to reap.
The universe had not answered his prayers by giving her back, no. That black void did not respond by plucking him up and whisking him away from that awful place, no.
But it had sent a being falling who had needed Kyle's help to right a cosmic balance, to tip the scales so that someone else important to the big overall plan could live, and someone wicked could be punished.
He thought about that, and he considered, as he always did, his stance on what, exactly, that said about an intelligent creator who put an order and a plan in motion, that every single person beat to.
It was beautiful, in a way. But it also terrified him. Enough revolt against it in the pit of his soul, because at the very bottom of it that meant that for the good in the plan to eventually win through, and the plan to all make sense, that meant that suffering and torment of the fundamentally innocent had to take the majority of what happened. And that was not right.
But still, he wondered.
He wondered what the man who fell from the stars would think about men like Seromine and Gabriel, pieces of utter and wretched human shit who existed only on this plane to bring misery. Would the man from the sky snarl at him as he had Brian Pyle, wipe them off the face of the earth and eliminate them as blasphemers, perverters of a true doctrine of faith, that twisted what had once been a handy code book to parse questions of morality; or would the damn sky man just beatifically fold his arms, and give him a peaceful smile and tell him that the will of the above would be meted out one day in the future.
He dragged on the cigarette again, and ashed it out in his can.
Therein lay the disparity between his way and Serominism. Just. There it is.
He'd seen miracles in his time, seen unexplainable things, seen the universe opening up to him and pointing him the way his destiny should go. He'd seen harbingers of the universe telling him what path to go on. But he had always maintained that his free will was more important to him. But Seromine was anti-free will. When you boiled it down to it, it wasn't even a cult that God entered into. It was a complete perversion. In effect it was the next step from his own "Be Your Own Deity" shtick taken further, Seromine demanded that he be his own Catholic goddamn church, with Holden Ross, Tyler Scott and who knew who was to be next all paying him tithes. The suddenly very old feeling man shook his head at that.
And he knew that he was going to fight a losing tide against it...
He thought bitterly to those stars, the ones that escaped the masking corona of the halogen pollution from the city; he remarked to those stars now that he had led himself down a path where he had no friends, thanks to his foolish God damn pride and insistence on doing everything for and because of himself.
Can't trust Mr. PURE to show up and give everything. Talked too much shit to Justin Michaels, if given his druthers that dude wasn't going to help him, nor of course would Grimm spit on him if he was on fire.
So in all of this, with all of the universe sprayed around him like a giant tarp laid against the dome of the night sky, he could only sit back and think that maybe, in the final analysis, he's alone, always has been, and there wouldn't be any divine intervention. Maybe that was always part of the plan. Maybe that meant that Seromine's way was right after all.
No. Fuck that. Definitely not thinking that way.
If he was alone, he'd be alone. If there was a plan going, he would fight against it with every fiber of his being. If going into a six-man tag match where it might be very likely that he'd be staring across the ring from five angry faces waiting to beat him down was his fate, he'd defy it with everything he had. He'd denied fate before. He had, as he had indicated, been given the maps to his own fates and turned aside from them and gone on his own path. He didn't need a savior.
He just needed his own determination. And he'd put his own divine plan into play. Strike them down one at a time. Tyler Scott. Broken and down on his own faith, questioning whether he could even be saved by Seromine after all the tutelage, all the new beginning and yes, all the God damn cheating in the world couldn't win him a match when push came to shove. Gabriel, the template that Tyler walked in the footsteps of, the man who after all these years in Pure Class Wrestling could only boast a North American title and a Rumble to his name, and yet continuously and ponderously claimed he was a new man and that Rick Majors was a failure before he'd been reborn. Seromine. The one he had brought down to claim this title. Did it before. Despite his confidence and the fact that he thinks he doesn't need a rematch, do it again. Grimm, Justin... any of them.
He didn't need to ask these stars for the divine plan. He was the plan.
He breathed out. Put his cigarette out in the can, and stood, head craning up, mouth growing firm.
He was the plan. Got that straight.
But still, some impulse made him nod up to those stars, to acknowledge the understanding he and those men in the sky might be coming to in the here and now, what he had in mind before he got to work on Monday and sent some angels fallin'.
He turned and headed back down the knoll to his car.
As he was walking away, a star winked, on and off, beaming proudly from where it had watched for all of the boy's life.
At first it had the trajectory and speed of a shooting star, but it gathered momentum and size, it's intensity growing as it approached; a careening, out of control comet with no discernible shape, just light and heat. A star falling. It impacted soundlessly off to the west.
The eighteen year old boy didn't respond. He wrapped his arms around his shivering, emaciated frame underneath the black floor-length goth duster. A mop of curly auburn hair twined over his eyes, and though youthful and softer, the contours echoed a face we know well. Except that the face is broken, one eye swollen nearly shut, the little crack of iris beneath the swelling bruise was a harsh red. His lip was split wide open. He had his knees up to his chest, and he took a few deep breaths.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Over time, he gradually tried to calm himself, and take stock of his situation.
He felt his ruined face, and the shock and pain subsided. To be replaced, as always, by the anger.
He tried to let the air push away his embittered, angry feelings, but they lingered, festering. He stewed as he walked on down the grassy hill. The late summer night, still humid, had turned a bit chilly.
He huddled, cold despite himself, and looked up at the sky, trembling. Something in them made him forget his injuries, if only for a moment in the vast cosmic scheme of things, and stare upward in wonder. This far out from the city, the halogen pollution hadn't quite reached, and he could see the stars. He asked them, wordlessly, what he should do, and got no response back, just a winking, diamonds on velvet cloth void.
But he looked at it all the same, contemplating his own insignificance and importance. At least it was comforting to him... that the halogen pollution hadn't reached out here. And he could sit on this knoll. And see the stars.
He just wished he knew what to do. As always, he shut his eyes and thought as hard he could skyward. The child's simple faith still lingered in him, deep down. He asked his mother what to do. But, heartbreakingly, he felt only a wall of silence in his head. He despaired when he tried to talk to God, or mom. Because he got the distinct impression nobody was listening.
And then he noticed the light off to the west, just over the next hill. It broke him from his reverie. At first he wrote it off as a trick of light, and besides before Eric had took to tuning up on him with his ring hand he'd smoked a hefty spliff behind the trailer. But maybe there was a plane crash, he rationalized, or maybe - hell. A million maybes. Every possibility occurred to him at once, but there was a strange feeling in the back of his head that someone was in trouble.
Breaking into a jog, despite a sick looking burn on a thigh just the size of a cigar butt put out on human skin that was started to get infected, he crested the hill and looked down in disbelief.
A naked man was rising, his body glowing ethereally, from a crater smashed into the ground.
He looked around wildly, trying to find the source of this hallucination. The glowing man, to his credit, did not shy away. In fact, he looked too rocky himself to be aware of his own circumstances. He fell to his knees just as soon as he'd gotten up, and the boy reached him, watching as the glow receded inside of him to leave only a handsome man with dirty blonde hair reaching his shoulders and slender, defined muscles. His voice was a lilting musical composure, and his eyes searched deep into his own. "Too weak- did I make it? Are you the boy?"
"I mean, I'm A boy, sure," he replied without knowing what else to say. The figure groaned and the boy, not knowing what else to do, not even taking time to register the fact that the naked man's piece would be rubbing the inside of his armor, stripped off the black goth coat and wrapped it around his shoulders. The man's ageless, inhuman eyes turned to pierce him, and a hand shot up to stroke his face. The very instant their skin contacted Kyle felt like he was shocked by a car battery; a transfer between them. But nothing seemed taken from him, so much as the man was... reading. "You are not the child... but you are broken. I can undo the damage, if you are of the light."
The boy had no time to ask what that meant before the man's hand glowed, hot as it pressed against his ruined eye and puffy, swollen cheek. The pain receded.
This last act seemed to take a lot out of the naked sky man. Kyle stood, and helped him up by the arm of his coat, saying "who are you?"
"I am a servant of the Lord. And I come with a divine purpose, but I've lost my way. I need to find a child before it's too late."
"Oh, no," he said, a vitriol creeping into his voice upon hearing this. "No way. Nice knowing you, crazy naked dude, you can just wash that coat and give it back to me later. Or... burn it. Anyway, adios."
The self-professed angel looked puzzled, "You will not give me aid in this endeavor? All of heaven turns on the actions within the next few hours."
He whirled on the confused, no longer glowing being, and snapped on him, "No! I refuse any of this. Because if you're not just some weird hobo who woke up naked in a crater, then you're a part of something I want even less to do with. Fuck you, fuck where you came from and get out of my face."
The little man wasn't hurt by the outburst, and in fact, looked on sympathetically, listening with annoying empathy. "You rage against your creator."
"My creator is a drooling idiot! My creator doesn't know a damn thing about what's going on, in fact I've got a sneaking suspicion that my creator just waits until the last possible second to cobble together some absurd scenario to thrust upon me. I never wanted ANY OF THIS."
He was quiet, then, and the boy started to turn away, until the servant whispered, "no one in creation ever does," and the boy gritted his teeth at the world-weary, put upon demeanor of the man. "So tell me," he retorted, "tell me one thing that makes any sense of this. Tell me why my mother had to be taken away, 'cause of his will? Was it his will that left me down here, alone, with this monster I live with? For everything my CREATOR has 'given me', tell me just one reason I should even give him a second thought."
The man with the ancient, inhumanly patient eyes looked deep into the boy's soul and said, "because if I don't have your assistance, one of the most important children of this generation will be murdered by his father."
That stopped the young boy cold, and he eyed the formerly naked angel with something approaching acceptance.
"Come on, I've got my dad's truck," he offered, holding up the pilfered keys. His father was passed out on the bathroom tile last he saw; drunkenly cursing his weak disappointment of a son.
The boy knew the way he was being led, actually. It didn't surprise him that he was being taken into one of the more ghetto parts of Southie, his father's drinking buddies from the brewery lived in this area. And the small little row house they were being brought to was one he remembered from years earlier, being brought when his father was supposed to be watching him to late night poker games where cigars, cheap booze and dirty jokes about women were bandied about freely. "This is Brian Pyle's house," he said, understanding dawning, and a little bit of outrage. Brian Pyle, one of his dad's old poker buddies. He of the uproarious laughter, pot belly. Kyle remembered him well, and he also remembered from those long ago poker days the two young girls, one no more than a toddler, and her sister, tall, stick thin and with huge blue eyes. He remembered Crenshaw taking her in the back one night and...
"No," he shouted, gritting his teeth, and then he turned to his travel companion, "so what do we do about Py-" but his companion was gone. From inside the house, he heard a startled, drunken voice say, "wuzzat? ...How you get in here?" And the boy knew it was time to get into action himself. He sprinted towards the broken old house, and his foot connected solidly with the glass window on the front stoop. He broke his way in through the window and tumbled inside, finding himself in a cluttered, hoarder nightmare of a living room. From the other room, he heard the ranting of a drunken man, "I got my shotgun, now I want you to get out of my house!"
The messenger's voice returned, calm, measured, and intent. Brooking no argument. Recognizing no authority higher than what it served. "You have broken divine law, Brian Pyle. You have turned against your own blood, and you have gone against the will of your creator. And now, I have been empowered to put an end to you."
The entire house began to shake beneath Kyle's feet, and as he searched through to the next room, spilling over a box filled with old Playboy magazines, his eyes found the small figure hiding out. No longer a toddler, she was filled out into a clear, tiny little beauty. She was like a fragile little doll, with her wispy hair and big eyes. She stared at Kyle frightfully.
"Come on, let's get you out of here," he said, and after some hesitation, the injured girl took his hand. The entire house was rocking now, and light came from between the cracks in every board. A loud, unearthly, celestial singing pierced through their ears, and Kyle shouted. It was almost not meant for them to hear. Kyle pushed through, and taking the girl in his arms, busted back out the window, dashing towards the truck, before the throbbing, pulsing sound assaulting his brain could make him pass out.
When he slowly gained consciousness, he noticed he was propped against the truck. The girl lay sleeping in the passenger side. And then, the guardian angel appeared. "It is done."
"What happened to -"
"Do not concern yourself with Brian Pyle," the angel said, with finality, "All that matters now is Ellie. This girl will grow up to be one of the most important prophets of our age. She would rise above the abuse heaped on her by her father, she would grow into a compassionate and charismatic leader, and she would unite many faiths under her wisdom. We saved her life tonight... and so, for that, our father thanks you."
"Cool, cool," he said, uncertainly. He didn't care about any of that, though. He just saw a sleeping girl they'd rescued from a drunken abusive ass. And if she could be saved... then...
"And now, for your reward," the angel said, and again he laid a hand on Kyle's cheek, and again he felt the rush of warmth.
"She says she does hear you, son. And she knows it's been hard. But she also loves you. And that you make her proud." He was breathless as the feelings flooded over him, his heart filling up like a balloon about to burst.
"And that one day you will join her in the light."
"Farewell Kyle Shane."
And when he blinked, they were gone, taking the girl, his father's truck, and his coat.
"Ohh shit," he muttered.
Ten years after that night, a much more haggard figure sits on a knoll overlooking an old trailer park. He could never say why, but when he felt the most questions in his deepest, most secret heart, he came out here, crossed the Mystic River Bridge to the poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city, and came to the hill, where once upon a time a man fell from the sky.
He didn't have that floor length, Hot Topic bought so-cool duster anymore. He didn't have the emo fringe or eyeliner, or the fuck you-snarl of immortal, never dying youth. He didn't have, the savaged face or the broken orbital bone of the particular night he reminisced about. But as he sat there, feeling the cold September grass wet his jeans and thinking about that night and others on the hills overlooking Roxbury, he thought that this place had a power that couldn't be equalled.
It called to what needed to be there. Be it the ghost of someone he loved, or... well, the man who fell from the sky.
The cherry of his cig lit up in the darkness as he looked into the sky now. So full of questions... but this night, all was calm within him as he looked and watched. He used an empty can as an ashtray.
This far out from the city, the halogen pollution hadn't quite reached, and he could see the stars.
He reflected on what he had said to the man, in his hot headed, impetuous and hurt way. He was a wounded, traumatized boy who had been lashed over and over, and he had come out that night as he did on, well, many nights when he was escaping Eric's rough hands. And he had asked the universe, the stars, the angels, God, anyone and everyone capable of picking up a signal in that vast expanse, asking them why his mother had been taken when he himself was left behind. Why someone so fundamentally good was taken while a miserable piece of shit like Eric not only lived, but thrived, grew stronger and more secure in his meanness. And hell, what kind of world was it that allowed good people to be sentenced to misery or be taken away while bad people continued to reap.
The universe had not answered his prayers by giving her back, no. That black void did not respond by plucking him up and whisking him away from that awful place, no.
But it had sent a being falling who had needed Kyle's help to right a cosmic balance, to tip the scales so that someone else important to the big overall plan could live, and someone wicked could be punished.
He thought about that, and he considered, as he always did, his stance on what, exactly, that said about an intelligent creator who put an order and a plan in motion, that every single person beat to.
It was beautiful, in a way. But it also terrified him. Enough revolt against it in the pit of his soul, because at the very bottom of it that meant that for the good in the plan to eventually win through, and the plan to all make sense, that meant that suffering and torment of the fundamentally innocent had to take the majority of what happened. And that was not right.
But still, he wondered.
He wondered what the man who fell from the stars would think about men like Seromine and Gabriel, pieces of utter and wretched human shit who existed only on this plane to bring misery. Would the man from the sky snarl at him as he had Brian Pyle, wipe them off the face of the earth and eliminate them as blasphemers, perverters of a true doctrine of faith, that twisted what had once been a handy code book to parse questions of morality; or would the damn sky man just beatifically fold his arms, and give him a peaceful smile and tell him that the will of the above would be meted out one day in the future.
He dragged on the cigarette again, and ashed it out in his can.
Therein lay the disparity between his way and Serominism. Just. There it is.
He'd seen miracles in his time, seen unexplainable things, seen the universe opening up to him and pointing him the way his destiny should go. He'd seen harbingers of the universe telling him what path to go on. But he had always maintained that his free will was more important to him. But Seromine was anti-free will. When you boiled it down to it, it wasn't even a cult that God entered into. It was a complete perversion. In effect it was the next step from his own "Be Your Own Deity" shtick taken further, Seromine demanded that he be his own Catholic goddamn church, with Holden Ross, Tyler Scott and who knew who was to be next all paying him tithes. The suddenly very old feeling man shook his head at that.
And he knew that he was going to fight a losing tide against it...
He thought bitterly to those stars, the ones that escaped the masking corona of the halogen pollution from the city; he remarked to those stars now that he had led himself down a path where he had no friends, thanks to his foolish God damn pride and insistence on doing everything for and because of himself.
Can't trust Mr. PURE to show up and give everything. Talked too much shit to Justin Michaels, if given his druthers that dude wasn't going to help him, nor of course would Grimm spit on him if he was on fire.
So in all of this, with all of the universe sprayed around him like a giant tarp laid against the dome of the night sky, he could only sit back and think that maybe, in the final analysis, he's alone, always has been, and there wouldn't be any divine intervention. Maybe that was always part of the plan. Maybe that meant that Seromine's way was right after all.
No. Fuck that. Definitely not thinking that way.
If he was alone, he'd be alone. If there was a plan going, he would fight against it with every fiber of his being. If going into a six-man tag match where it might be very likely that he'd be staring across the ring from five angry faces waiting to beat him down was his fate, he'd defy it with everything he had. He'd denied fate before. He had, as he had indicated, been given the maps to his own fates and turned aside from them and gone on his own path. He didn't need a savior.
He just needed his own determination. And he'd put his own divine plan into play. Strike them down one at a time. Tyler Scott. Broken and down on his own faith, questioning whether he could even be saved by Seromine after all the tutelage, all the new beginning and yes, all the God damn cheating in the world couldn't win him a match when push came to shove. Gabriel, the template that Tyler walked in the footsteps of, the man who after all these years in Pure Class Wrestling could only boast a North American title and a Rumble to his name, and yet continuously and ponderously claimed he was a new man and that Rick Majors was a failure before he'd been reborn. Seromine. The one he had brought down to claim this title. Did it before. Despite his confidence and the fact that he thinks he doesn't need a rematch, do it again. Grimm, Justin... any of them.
He didn't need to ask these stars for the divine plan. He was the plan.
He breathed out. Put his cigarette out in the can, and stood, head craning up, mouth growing firm.
He was the plan. Got that straight.
But still, some impulse made him nod up to those stars, to acknowledge the understanding he and those men in the sky might be coming to in the here and now, what he had in mind before he got to work on Monday and sent some angels fallin'.
He turned and headed back down the knoll to his car.
As he was walking away, a star winked, on and off, beaming proudly from where it had watched for all of the boy's life.
