A Rainy Night

The last time I saw him was three years ago during a blue evening like this one, exactly one week after I graduated from high school and received my hard-earned diploma. 

After dinner, Mom asked me to go buy some knitting materials for her. As usual, my unending fatigue simply wanted me to lie down and rest forever, but I didn't really have a choice—the consequences of not obliging her request would be worse. I begrudgingly drove out to the local crafts store and bought everything she needed on the crumpled shopping list I kept repeatedly shoving into my pocket. By the time I checked out, I was resisting the urge to set it on fire and merely tossed it into a dingy waste bin on my way out. 

The moment I set foot outside, I yelped as a gale blasted cold rain on my bare arms. A downpour had begun while I was shopping. The smell of wet asphalt mixed with the hot, humid air in my nose. The only thing protecting me was the small overhang jutting over the front door; water was cascading down either side. Through the hazy curtain of rain, I could barely see my car on the other side of the street. This was a problem. These knitting materials absolutely could not get wet, but my umbrella was in the car. My only options were to either wait out the storm, or make a mad dash to my parking spot while hugging the bag of materials like it was my firstborn child.

I started pumping my legs up and down in preparation for my dash across the street when a little bell rang to my left. The door to the bar a building over opened, and someone familiar emerged through the doorway in a stupor. Will was the last person I expected to see coming out of there, and that was besides the fact that we were both underage. He held a briefcase and an umbrella in one hand while blood dripped from the other. Standing beneath an overhang similar to mine, he stuck his bloody hand out. The rain washed it off to reveal an uninjured hand. As if the people who frequented taverns could ever lay a hand on him.

He must have heard me running in place because despite being drunk, he sharply turned his head my way. I stopped, but it was too late. He had seen me looking like an idiot. At first, he acted like he saw nothing. He finished washing his hand and opened the umbrella. But as he turned away from me, I glimpsed a smile forming at his pale lips. The image burned itself into my brain as if I somehow knew, before he walked away into the rain, that that would be the last time I ever saw him.

Thinking back, I was surprised he found it amusing. I lived with the guy for four years, yet I still didn't know what his idea of funny was. Maybe if I had tried harder to engage with him, it would've been more obvious what he liked. He was never privy to conversation and seemingly refused to talk to anyone...except me. I was the only who had a chance at melting through his icy exterior to see what he was really like beneath, and did I want to? Yes, but it didn't seem like he had any intention of letting down his protections, and I felt the need to respect that. So I never pushed further, always hovering around the cusp of attaining a deep understanding of him, and he never came closer to bridge that gap, either. Even when I knew he was leaving for good, the only thing I did was watch as the chance for something more between us slipped away forever, and couldn't have known how much I would come to regret my inaction.

I wondered how he was doing.

. . .

. . .

. . .

A cacophony of gunfire echoed inside the dark warehouse. Hundreds of bullets chipped away at a formidable wall of ice. The lone mage protected behind it pulled on a pair of black gloves, grimacing to himself for what he was about to do. He had already completed his mission, but his sloppy exit accidentally revealed himself to the squad that had been sent after him. 

With a flick of his wrist, he launched the wall at his enemies. Chunks of ice scattered in every direction upon impact. Although the crash stunned them momentarily, that moment proved fatal. In an instant, icicles hard as steel impaled the front row of the squad. 

The ice mage revealed a metal cylinder from the inside of his coat that expanded into a full-length spear capable of repelling magic. He lunged, and before his enemies recuperated, his newest victim fell to the floor gasping as blood gushed from their neck. He was too close for them to shoot now, lest they risk firing at themselves. He spun, and the spear impaled itself through the heart of one soldier, then skewered the one behind them as he rammed the spear into a nearby crate. 

The switch to melee combat triggered the squad's dispersal. Organized chaos took reign: the ground started shaking, a shipping container hurled at him from above, and a spray of acid jetted toward him. 

He threw his arm up. Jagged ice rose to protect him from the acid and continued upward to stab straight through the shipping container. He yanked his spear free and leaped out of the way as a stone hand burst from the ground, grasping at the air where he previously stood. 

Bullets started firing at him again as he charged toward the nearest soldier. Their fingers splayed outward, and a massive blanket of corrosive acid threatened to wash over him. Ice coated the floor—he dropped to the ground and slid under the acid. Before the soldier registered what happened, he stood up and pulled them in front of him. By the time his enemies realized who they were shooting, his meat shield was riddled with bullet holes and heaving blood all over his shoulder. He let go of them, whipped out his pistol, and shot a bullet through the visor of a soldier peeking from behind a stack of crates.

A shadow fell over him. He glanced up to find another shipping container sailing downward. Who was controlling them? He spotted one soldier on the other side of the battlefield posing as though they had just pitched a ball. 

He chucked his gun aside so it wouldn't be taken advantage of by the metal manipulator and exploded into a sprint. Whilst running, he conjured a wall of ice alongside him to block the bullets coming from his side. Screeching metal disrupted the air as the shipping container landed behind him. His target swung their arms in one direction, and a third container barreled into his path. With a mighty leap, he jumped clean over it, and his spearhead found its way into the soldier's skull. 

He landed in front of the soldier and pulled his spear out. The soldier's broken helmet came out with it and clattered against the floor. Suddenly, he was staring into the wide eyes of a young man. Blood ran down his pale, paralyzed face. His body fell to the ground.

Heavy boots thudded against the stone floor. The ice mage found himself surrounded by reinforcements, training their rifles to fire on him if he so much as twitched. Standing in line with them, the captain gave him two options: surrender (and experience a fate worse than death before they kill you anyway) or die.

"Can I at least say my last words?" he asked.

"Make them quick," said the captain.

He slowly exhaled, and puffs of white air escaped from his lips as the temperature plummeted. After charging a spell for an entire day, his father once froze an entire city to death within the span of a few seconds. For better or for worse, he inherited the same ability.

"Absolute Zero."

Everything went still. A layer of frost coated his surroundings.

He nudged his magic a little more. The soldiers shattered, their fragments scattering across the floor.

Finally, it was over. He started hobbling out of the warehouse. His body was freezing stiff, a side effect of casting so much powerful magic at once. He would surely die if he tried to do it again.

He exited into a wet shipyard. It was pouring outside. The color of the dark evening blended with the ocean's blue as waves lapped the hulls of massive ships. The salty sea air whipped through his messy hair.

He was alive. He could feel his heart pounding in his ears as his blood began to unthaw. Cold rain pelting his face washed the blood off his coat. He was alive, yet his mind kept flipping back to the dead man he gazed into the eyes of. Doomed to be another casualty he would forget eventually. Maybe. At least the guilt wasn't nearly as overwhelming as it used to be. He reminded himself that he deserved to live because he had won and his enemies had lost.

But you don't have the right to decide who gets to live and who gets to die.

Already exhausted, he tried not to stagger under the weight of that thought. How much longer did he have to do this for? When were things going to get better? After sacrificing what mattered to him the most, he joined the Belorman Resistance because they promised their cause would help the world. Yet, nothing had changed. He was still doing the same dirty work as before, just under someone else's command. As long as this conflict continued, he would continue ripping out pieces of his soul doing the one thing he was good at.

Maybe Father was right. Violence was all he was meant for. Like his ancestors, he would die with his only legacy being the bodies he buried. For all his power, he couldn't change a thing.

He gazed out into the shipyard again. His heart ached over something nostalgic, and a memory slowly surfaced into his conscious. The day he ran away from home, he tried drinking for the first time and got into a drunken bar fight. He didn't remember the details of the fight very well, but he could only assume he got kicked out for beating their asses too hard. It was raining outside when he left the bar, and when he looked to his right, he found one of his high school suitemates jogging in place like he was warming up for track and field.

They hated each other when they first met during the beginning of freshmen year. However, they realized that between the two of them, they possessed what the other lacked. So they traded their knowledge to help each other pass. It started off as nothing more than a mutual agreement, but as the years went by, he couldn't help but notice how comfortable he got around his presence. How often he started conversations because he actually wanted to talk to him, as opposed to opening complaints or arguments. But when he found himself wanting to get closer to him, he stopped. Violence followed him wherever he went. That was a fact. He could not afford to get close to anyone, or he would risk hurting them. So he closed off his heart, which yearned for embrace, and maintained their distance. He didn't want them to grow closer, and they never did thanks to him. Whenever he thought he was making a bad decision by doing this, he reminded himself that they would part ways once they graduated anyway, and it was true; as soon as he walked off the stage with his diploma, he was ordered to return to his family's estate without the chance to say goodbye. 

So the fact that they got to see each other one last time, it was as if the world had gifted him a final opportunity to show a sliver of his true feelings to the one person outside of his family who might have cared that he existed. The possibility that he might have cared was the warmest love from him he could have ever asked for.

Will wondered how he was doing now.