28. Solitude Safety
28
SOLITUDE SAFETY
GHOST
Reaper City is in utter chaos, but I can’t focus on it. Mass hysteria breaks out on the street, sirens and announcements about the drinking water not being safe ringing through the downtown core as I shove Riot into the helicopter and cover his body with mine. Bullets hit the exterior and fly through the open doors, and Krypt is barely inside when the pilot lifts off the roof. He rolls into me, helping me cover his brother, and our eyes meet, a silent exchange of truths being admitted. Never out loud.
Yeah, I care about his brother, but I still don’t know what it means. I’m smart enough to know it means something, but I don’t have the energy for introspection right now.
As the adrenaline from the situation fades the further we get from Reaper City, the shakes take over and my fingers tremble, digging into Riot’s hair just for something to hold onto. Ransom throws a blanket over him and grabs my chin.
“Breathe.”
I can’t.
“Menace is getting the antidote. Trust me, Ghost.”
I can’t.
Why isn’t he reassuring Krypt instead of me? I don’t want to know the answer or what my face is revealing, so I bury it against the floor of the helicopter and keep my hands in Riot’s hair as Krypt adjusts the blanket over his naked and broken body.
“Wait.” I shove the blanket aside, wiping away a bit of blood on Riot’s back. He winces in his slumber, and my rage reignites. “They fucking burned his Vile House tattoo!”
Krypt is the one to grab my shoulder this time. “Look at what he fucking did, Ghost. He caused a riot while he was being tortured. You think he needs the tat to prove he’s Vile? He’s fucking Riot.”
Exhaling, I look back towards the city he managed to fuck over. He didn‘t get his name for nothing, and I smile, shaking my head at how smug he’s gonna be about it.
Fucking asshole outdoes me even as he’s dying.
When we get back to Moros, I don’t take a full breath until we meet The Harpy at the asylum and she administers the antidote. I lose my shit when he bubbles from the mouth and has a seizure that won’t stop, and I lash out at everyone who fucking touches him while he’s dying. Death is my thing, and he can’t beat me there!
I hold two blades to The Harpy’s neck, making sure she stays right where she is until the antidote works and he’s in the clear.
“Why is he seizing?” I snarl at her.
“It’s how it works.”
“He’s not fucking breathing.” I press the tip against her carotid.
“Give him a minute.”
“If his heart stops, yours will, too.”
The Harpy doesn’t look away from me.
Not until his heart starts and he breathes again.
And when he is in the clear, no longer dying from the poison he unintentionally ingested, I stare at his busted body while ignoring everything I feel.
I don’t move a muscle until Medic and Psych are working on Killian, and I don’t step aside until they tell me his damages are severe but not life-threatening. I listen to them plan his treatment, talk about dental surgery, and confirm that he’s going to pull through before I even blink. When I know Krypt is fine with Remi in his grasp, I sneak out of Riot’s room, leave the asylum, and don’t come back.
Because feeling my feelings isn’t something I’m good at, and I’m not too narcissistic to know that. Music is my expression, and I never do it while anyone can see me. I shower, change, and grab my violin from my room, leaving Vile House. Time to be alone so I don’t go to The Harpy’s cabin and murder her for inadvertently putting his life at risk. I need to stop trying so hard to hold my pieces together. To let myself break in the safety of solitude. For once, I don’t want to be the star of this broken show.
* * *
It's the second to last day of the music festival, and both the cemetery and Death Row are crowded with tourists and musicians. Creeping through the shadows of buildings, I pause to listen unseen, searching for a sound that reflects how I feel. The musicians are skilled, and the choirs are beautiful, but nothing hits me where it should. The melancholy mood is matched with upbeat voices that are too light for the way I’m feeling.
Because there is a new well of darkness inside me, and I’m not sure where it came from. It’s different from the playful way I felt dark before. I’m not craving a chase that leads me to Death’s door because I’m not sure I want to slam it in her face anymore. I’m craving pain, the emotional kind. The sort of anguish that’s cleansing because it hurts so ferociously. An exorcism of my jagged bits and a rearranging of my jigsaw pieces. I need to become a new mirage, a different illusion that reflects the unwanted changes in me.
I need musical expression and a new foundation.
I need to hide while expressing myself.
Behind the Ambient Raven, I put on my Vile House mask, concealing my face in the safest cover I have. With my hood up and my hands bare, I pick up my violin and make my way down the dead centre of Death Row, drawing attention to the mystery of who I am and what I’m doing. Riot had his dental surgery last night, but I haven’t been to see him. I don’t know how to go see him. What would I say? What would I do? I don’t know, so I’m going to let the instrument find my words for me.
I haven’t been back to Vile House or the asylum in two days. I’ve been staying with Lockan, warning him about what I overheard about a rat in his crew, working through the prospects of who it could be. But all that was just a distraction, a way for me to avoid my own head and evade my emotions. It’s time to face my reality.
Groups of musicians perform along the road, shops and sponsors show off their products, and Moros citizens mingle with tourists to listen and take it all in. We’re a musical town, but the kind of music we create has become the soundtrack of how we live. Morose, melancholy, dark, and deceptive, a community of people who speak better with notes than we do with words. As I walk through them, the locals fist their hands over their hearts, respecting my mask, but the tourists stop to admire me because of how the locals are reacting. To them, I’m someone with power, but they don’t understand why or how yet.
I’m about to show them.
In the centre of Death Row, right in the middle of the closed street, I sit on a wooden chair, bowing my head to my violin and closing my eyes behind my mask. From that new well of darkness within me, I pull forth the true reasoning for it, letting it infiltrate my mind and weave through my limbs until I’m born of it. One with it. A new man hiding behind the same mask.
The fog shrouds me in more comfort and the ravens and crows perch on lamp posts and power lines for a front-row seat to my misery. Misery because of change; change I don’t want to accept but can no longer fight. I always thought it’d be my own life that flashed before my eyes, but it was his. A fear I’ve never felt and a sense of surrender I almost succumbed to.
I’ve always been one to build off the weather, and according to Lock, it’s been a beautiful weekend with clear skies and mild temperatures to make the music festival enjoyable. I didn’t even notice. But as I sit and bring my violin into position, placing the bow across the strings, the skies cloud over and I revel in my ability to influence the weather as much as it influences me.
Here I fucking am. The Ghost of Moros. Hurt with me.
Alone in a crowd but with all eyes on me, I sink and rise at once. My bow moves, and the first note of music is brutally magnificent, tinged with a slow, deep tone that resonates my fragmented anger as the strings vibrate. I let it play out, not rushing the single note, allowing it to cause its harm and set the weather on edge. When the first crack of thunder booms, I become the sentiment of my music.
I become a man who thinks of another man above himself.
I become resentful because of the power he wields over me.
I become irritated at the world for forcing me to live in it, but grateful to Moros for giving me a place to fit.
I lose my mind to feelings that conflict, my narcissistic tendencies mingling with selfless thoughts about a man who wears many masks and doesn’t know how to take them off. I hurt for him because he’s lost himself, and I hurt for myself because I suddenly care. My music picks up tempo, showing my temper, overpowering the thunder. And when lightning strikes to spotlight me on Death Row, I ignore my gathered audience and play for me and only me.
He'll hold my hand.
He’ll kiss me, not for the last time. Just in case…
He’ll chase me towards death and always pull me back because he knows the end is not what I seek.
It’s my undoing, this music. A mile marker of a new kind of here and there. Instead of that one-or-two-second precipice, I’m on the ledge between the me who taunted a curse and the me who now fears that curse. My violin shows how terrified I am—it shows that fear will not undo me. The notes mingle with the atmosphere, the thunder my percussive backup and the lightning my webbed truth. And when our harmony is so well perfected that I’m sick with how sincere it is, I stop playing and breathe in petrichor and fog.
The drizzly mist turns into a steady rain, soothing the heat of my music and cooling it into understanding and admittance.
When I pick up playing again, slower and softer this time, a cello joins me.
I cry.
Hidden and secretive, I cry behind my mask of power and play terrible beauty with my brother, clad in a black mask. For whatever reason, it hurts worse than everything else. It’s been so long, this thing I refused to do because I didn’t know what my music would say if I started playing with Remi again. I should have known not to fear it because Remi is stronger than I’ve ever given him credit for. He gets it. Understands it. Knows what it’s like to break in half and reassemble the pieces. He knows what love feels like, tainted yet pure, and he knows the same fear I know. The curse that has threatened us since birth.
He admitted he feared it.
I refused to fear it.
In the end, we’re in the same place. Mixed with Hallows boys who sew our sanity to theirs in a way neither of us ever asked for but cling so hard to that it’s impossible to talk about. It can’t be explained. He never expected to need Krypt. I never expected to want Riot. So, here we play, two Sauder brothers, living the same lie and turning it into a truth.
His cello adds depth to my violin, the instruments harmonizing like soulmates. Our music awes me, but it awes the town even more. Men weep and women reminisce. Children don’t know what it means but feel it deep in their innocent souls, knowing it’s something, but not what. They build off us as we build off each other, the weather witness to it all, accompanying our melody and adding mood to our sound.
It's all made worse when Selena joins, clad in black with her black-faced mask, playing the violin today. Her mood fits into our stringed instruments, and the three of us mourn together for lives lost and pain unspoken.
We play until there’s nothing left to say. Until the emotions and the pain are bled from our souls. And then we stop. Still. Instruments dropping but positions never moving. Moros takes a breath, and the rumbling thunder plays us out, finalizing our song. Soaked through from the rain, I allow it to blanket me, protect me, until I breathe enough times to look at my siblings. I can’t speak, or talk, or discuss any of it, and they don’t expect me to. We nod at each other, and then we all go our separate ways through the crowd—every person with their hand over their heart. Even those who don’t know what it means.
If any locals recognize us as siblings, they don’t mention it, giving me a reprieve from discovery for now.
Something leaves me as I walk away. I don’t know what it is, but when I look up at where I’m walking, I wonder if it’s resistance. That dark well no longer feels new. It feels like me. The very essence of who I am, and I’m not fighting it as much anymore. The resistance to this new thing is gone.