04-05-2014, 07:34 PM
Kalen does not return to the alley.
Not to honor that fallen green-eyed boy with the open smile and the driving curiosity. Not to honor the peryton. What might yet be done for the boy, if his spirit lingers after it released its desire for vengeance, he cannot help it there. Pan took the man responsible off to address penitence and redemption and perhaps forgiveness. Kalen could not begin to articulate how one would accomplish those things.
If he did know what it was like to slide out from the confines of such a crushing weight of guilt he might sleep. Sometimes he is afraid the only thing that keeps the weight of eternity that presses outward from his lungs and his heart and his spine is weight of everything he has done. Or, perhaps more specifically, the things he has failed to do. The people he has failed to save.
Forces caught in opposition. Infinite possibility and infinite sorrow. These things are the things that bind him into to his skin and tear him out of it by turns.
Memorials are things you do when you understand how to grieve. But Kalen doesn't understand that. There is no context for mourning for him, for healing. His mother, like the boy's mother, vanished into spiraling addictions after the death of her child. He was left to figure out some way to understand, to comprehend. To fend for himself.
And he did. He threw himself into action. Into finding ways to bring back food and to be out when the men who tumbled into his mother's bed came into his home. To find ways to beg or steal enough to walk to the building offices for rent when his mother couldn't remember what day or what year it was. Who she was. That one of her children was still alive. Perhaps in a kinder world she'd have died like the boy's mother. Kalen learned by searching for the mother he'd known in her eyes that life is not always a kindness.
He buried himself in solutions then and he does again now. He makes a note on the map of Denver he's building. Adds an entry on the boy and the peryton and on John. He resolves to ask Alexander about the crimes that haven't seen justice. Alexander believes in justice. He will be there, he has to be there, to remind Kalen of what humanity is.
Because he cannot bring Sera.
Because Pan has a congregation and his own battles to fight.
But Alexander and Alyssa and Sid he can bring. And they will not, any of them, hesitate to remind him to cease being a monster.
He is not the peryton, nor will he be. Not because he does not feel the call for blood and for vengeance. Because he does. He could have watched that breathtaking creature tear a man to pieces tonight and walked away with the weight of regret that presses against his skin no greater than it already was.
They are only different in that he has a choice. And there will be times when that distinction is only theoretical. When he will cross the slender thrumming divide between justice and vengeance because in so many ways in so many moments he is only as human as the peryton. Because sometimes the only reminder he has of his humanity is in his ability to fail.
So he will bring them with him. To remember what he would forget.
Not to honor that fallen green-eyed boy with the open smile and the driving curiosity. Not to honor the peryton. What might yet be done for the boy, if his spirit lingers after it released its desire for vengeance, he cannot help it there. Pan took the man responsible off to address penitence and redemption and perhaps forgiveness. Kalen could not begin to articulate how one would accomplish those things.
If he did know what it was like to slide out from the confines of such a crushing weight of guilt he might sleep. Sometimes he is afraid the only thing that keeps the weight of eternity that presses outward from his lungs and his heart and his spine is weight of everything he has done. Or, perhaps more specifically, the things he has failed to do. The people he has failed to save.
Forces caught in opposition. Infinite possibility and infinite sorrow. These things are the things that bind him into to his skin and tear him out of it by turns.
Memorials are things you do when you understand how to grieve. But Kalen doesn't understand that. There is no context for mourning for him, for healing. His mother, like the boy's mother, vanished into spiraling addictions after the death of her child. He was left to figure out some way to understand, to comprehend. To fend for himself.
And he did. He threw himself into action. Into finding ways to bring back food and to be out when the men who tumbled into his mother's bed came into his home. To find ways to beg or steal enough to walk to the building offices for rent when his mother couldn't remember what day or what year it was. Who she was. That one of her children was still alive. Perhaps in a kinder world she'd have died like the boy's mother. Kalen learned by searching for the mother he'd known in her eyes that life is not always a kindness.
He buried himself in solutions then and he does again now. He makes a note on the map of Denver he's building. Adds an entry on the boy and the peryton and on John. He resolves to ask Alexander about the crimes that haven't seen justice. Alexander believes in justice. He will be there, he has to be there, to remind Kalen of what humanity is.
Because he cannot bring Sera.
Because Pan has a congregation and his own battles to fight.
But Alexander and Alyssa and Sid he can bring. And they will not, any of them, hesitate to remind him to cease being a monster.
He is not the peryton, nor will he be. Not because he does not feel the call for blood and for vengeance. Because he does. He could have watched that breathtaking creature tear a man to pieces tonight and walked away with the weight of regret that presses against his skin no greater than it already was.
They are only different in that he has a choice. And there will be times when that distinction is only theoretical. When he will cross the slender thrumming divide between justice and vengeance because in so many ways in so many moments he is only as human as the peryton. Because sometimes the only reminder he has of his humanity is in his ability to fail.
So he will bring them with him. To remember what he would forget.