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antheap
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Character(s)/Relationship(s): Original Non-Human Character(s)
Words: 2093
Warnings: Deities, Shapeshifting, POV First Person, Present Tense
He ordered marmalade buns. The waitress places two of them in front of him and he promptly digs the tips of his fingers into them, breaking them into two pieces before bringing one peach-marmalade-dripping half to his mouth and biting it while I loathe his manners. His teeth flash white when he bites it — they would be unnaturally bright for a human, but I know he isn’t one.
I can’t help but raise my head to look at him.
His lanky profile briefly occupies the space between me and the entrance to the tea room. He projects a long shadow that touches the edge of my table and disappears in the corner of the room. The lemon pastry in my hand stops midway to my mouth and my eyes follow him spontaneously, for I noticed there is something important he lacks.
The background clinks of the cups that fill the space are suddenly nonexistent to my ears. Instead, I watch him sit, his back kissing the velour of the cushion with a quiet thump. I hear the rustle of his slim fingers caressing the fabric of his overcoat, down to the creased dark hems which he carefully straightens. He crosses his legs, exposing one of his leather boots. My eyes trail up his figure, my gaze dwells on his fingers drumming on the table — tap, tap, tap — right before finally settling on his face.
Only then I realise what he is missing.
I look around the room, just to confirm it. There’s a man sitting at the table across from mine; the cup he’s drinking his tea from is the only spot of white on his otherwise round, red face: he has it. The younger man sitting in front of him, with a suit half as expensive and yet twice as elegant, has it too — if that youngster could see how short the fat man’s is, he probably wouldn’t be fidgeting with his hands under the table anymore. The little girl sitting two tables over, sinking her teeth in a big slice of chocolate cake, has it, and it’s tragically shorter than one would expect. Even his father, busy trying to prevent his daughter from staining her pretty lavender dress, has it longer than hers. My gaze then follows the waitress, who has only just noticed that a new customer has arrived and is walking up to his table; she has it too.
It isn’t a number hovering over a person’s head like some people imagine, it’s more like something about their aura, a feeling all kinds of living beings manage to sense more or less strongly, but that only I can perfectly decipher and interpret.
The waitress is taking the order from the newcomer, but she doesn’t seem to be bothered by him at all. Thinking about it, no one seems to have even noticed him, as if the strange, incomprehensible aura around him only bothers me, and instead makes him invisible to everyone else.
“Anything else?” I hear the waitress ask. If I focus enough I can feel the seconds of her lifespan flow away from her, one by one. She has, right now, 53 years, 5 months, 1 week, 2 days, 3 hours, 12 minutes and 47 seconds left to live, which means roughly 1,680,923,567 seconds. I can already see how, in her last ones, she’ll smile at her grandson.
However, her client, the mysterious man in the dark overcoat, doesn’t give me a clear number. It’s as if his lifespan is some muddled, blurred value I can’t clearly put my finger on. And I can’t accept that.
Everyone has a lifespan. Even angels and demons have a finite existence, even Gods can be killed. Only I know when their end will come, when everyone’s end will come — even my own. If I focus on someone I can see their past and their future, more or less clearly. Sometimes, very rarely, their numbers change, and it’s a split second of pleasant unpredictableness. Only a split second, though, then everything goes back to its grey boredom.
The waitress brings him a teapot and a cup. They’re both white with a pale pink flower motif. She sets them down on the table with a thud that’s too loud to my ears, but no one else seems to notice. I watch him pour the black tea into the cup and then sip it, and he looks like he’s come here just for that, to enjoy the mediocre tea, the vaguely decent-tasting pastries, the cheap porcelain of the tea set and the fake velvet of the chair cushions.
He ordered marmalade buns. The waitress places two of them in front of him and he promptly digs the tips of his fingers into them, breaking them into two pieces before bringing one peach-marmalade-dripping half to his mouth and biting it while I loathe his manners. His teeth flash white when he bites it — they would be unnaturally bright for a human, but I know he isn’t one.
While I swing my feet back and forth, several centimetres from the floor, I muse on what type of entity he could be, but I lack convincing ideas. Might he be a newborn God? But I would know about a newborn God long before his existence began. Might he be a person whose destiny is being redetermined right now? But I’ve never seen that process taking more than a split second.
I look back at him, at his aura: I can’t describe it as anything but a dark fog surrounding him, emanating from him, and I contemplate the idea that maybe he’s just the one exception, the one individual I can never read, the only mystery left for me in the Universe.
His eyes dart around the room but eventually stop on me. Their bright tone of shamrock leaves stands out against the black hair framing them but, under that harmless appearance, I can see he’s hiding something. His gaze pierces into me, or at least it tries to; I doubt even a special entity like him can see past my human shell.
I realise that my lemon pastry is still suspended midway between the periwinkle flowered porcelain of the plate and my thin lips. I lower it: I’m not hungry anymore, not enough to eat a stale pastry in a mediocre tearoom. The task I came here to execute happens in three minutes, but the man is standing up to leave now and I don’t have three minutes.
“The fat man can wait,” I murmur to myself. It’s the first time in my existence that I decide to ignore my duty and the thrill is something I’ve never imagined I could feel. It takes my breath away, and maybe I’m smiling too much when I jump down of the chair to follow the mysterious being out into the street.
When I step out of the door, I’m a grey cat, my yellow eyes dart towards his tall figure and I quicken my pace to avoid losing him in the Sunday crowd. This English town is not very populated but the main street looks more chaotic now: it’s starting to rain and the drizzle makes the air wet and heavy. People take out their umbrellas and open them as if they didn’t know how useless they are against a thin rain like this one. I slalom through their legs, my eyes fixed on the heels of the man’s boots, my ears following their rhythmic tac-tac, as my mind races, trying to answer the question: just who is he?
I am not used to such questions — I always know.
I turn the corner right after him, in a blind alley. I only half expect it when his unnaturally strong fingers grab me by the scruff of the neck to slam me against the wall, but by then I’m in my human form again and he loses his grip. I hit the wall anyway, and my teal blue eyes still have vertical pupils when I see them reflected into his — which are now of an unnatural pitch black. He’s pinning me against the wall — his human form is twice my size, so it’s easy for him to, and I make it easier by not resisting — I’m sure I could break free in any moment, but I’m having fun. His long black hair is starting to get wet and it sticks to his pale face — I feel some locks of my shorter hair doing the same, and one is glued to the corner of my mouth. To my eyes, it’s like his body is steaming invisible vapour, and the fog around him pulsates like a giant smoke heart. He smells like earth and a river older than humanity. If I had a heart — I think to myself — it would be beating out of my chest right now.
“I never imagined you would look like this,” he comments, his eyes sizing up my human appearance. One side of his lips turns upwards while he says that, but his mouth doesn’t open: he talks without breathing, without moving his lips, and the disembodied voice sounds like it’s coming from nowhere.
“A trustworthy appearance makes my work easier,” I explain, imitating his communication method so my sealed lips can clearly feign disinterest.
His body has slowly stabilised: he’s not steaming anymore, and the smell of ancient river is almost gone but, in its place, there’s now a familiar lemony scent — a pastry with that smell would taste better than all the ones I ever tasted. The pulse of the fog around him is now barely perceivable, but his eyes are still completely black and unnaturally still.
“I think it’s humiliating,” he says, actually talking now. “You see Death and she’s nothing but a little boy.”
My lips twitch. “I don’t like that name,” I say, still speaking with my mind.
He lets go of me but doesn’t step back. It's like he's scrutinizing me, and my eyes follow every movement of his hand as it hovers centimetres from my face. Just try and touch me, I think to myself. Instead, he lowers the hand, his eyes slowly returning to a more natural green.
“Why did you follow me? Did my time expire?” he mouths, a pleading, whiny tone leaving his otherwise smiling lips.
“You know that can’t be,” I voice this time, and my lips twitch again. This is exciting, but I don’t like being made fun of, and he keeps teasing me. It's like he's testing my limits. I’ve never met a fool who would play with my patience like this.
“So you figured out who I am?” His unnaturally white teeth flash again when his lips curve upwards. It's like watching a shark smile.
“Yes, Aion,” I say, lips sealed again this time as I stare right into his iridescent eyes, the black of the scleras still slowly turning back to white. “I didn’t think you existed.”
The God of Eternity looks at me and I realise now that I was wrong: he can see past my disguise, maybe better than I can see past his. His hand reaches for my face again, and I raise mine to stop it in its tracks. When our skins touch, our minds do as well.
“I am removed from time,” he answers my unvoiced question. “Not even you can sense me unless I want you to.”
I killed a Goddess of Time once. She hid from me desperately, jumping through centuries and millennia, moving from one place to the other. I didn’t follow her, for I already knew where I would meet her. Her last moments were pitiful: not unlike most Gods, she died without dignity.
Just like I killed her, I bet I can kill him: there's nothing I cannot kill. Just a snap of my fingers and he’d drop dead, right here at my feet. He wouldn’t beg for his life, I can tell. He ’d be convinced Eternity can overcome Death, he’d challenge me.
There's a staring contest, the progressively bigger drops of rain our only audience, flattering us with a thunderous applause even before our performance has started.
“So you wanted me to sense you?” I ask as if I don’t know the answer.
He smiles. He raises his hand again, and I let him touch my face this time. The palm of his hand is soft like that of a baby against my smooth cheek. His warm body now has the sweet and juicy scent of a fruit that went extinct long before humans could give it a name. The fog around him starts pulsating visibly once again, it contracts and expands at a faster and faster pace.
“Yes.”
I bet I can kill him. I bet I’d win. He’ll see that death is just a superior type of eternity.
“Why?”
The answer is natural, obvious even, after it leaves his lips.
“I was bored.”