Marcus, The night before the battle…
After his lengthy conversation with Ruvick, which had left him rattled and angry, he returned back home and found his home in disarray.
Cole was arguing with Thalia about which movie to watch.
Lyrra was snacking on Marcus’s stash of potato chips that he thought he had hidden on the top shelf in the kitchen.
Rosanne had fallen asleep on recliner that he had put together a few days ago.
Alta and Fayebel were bickering about something while Felkin was trying to mediate, all the while, Selene had opened the door to let him in and sighed with exasperation at the chaos present in his home.
As soon as he walked inside, everyone started to quiet down.
But then Cole looked at him and said, “Hey. I heard you died. What was that like?”
Thalia smacked him on the arm and said, “Don’t be so rude!”
He looked at her and rubbed his arm as if it had actually hurt him and replied, “What? I’m curious.”
Deciding to humor him, Marcus walked into the living room and said, “Apparently my body was dead for only about ten minutes. Camilla rewound my body to before I was hit with fifteen nuclear bombs. My body was fine, but my soul was gone.”
Hearing that, Cole winced as if just hearing it was painful, “That’s good and all, but what was it like being dead from your perspective?”
Marcus sighed dramatically before saying, “From my perspective, I woke up in Hell and spent several thousand years killing demons until I fought my way to a big black castle. Found my mother there too.”
“So your mother’s in-” Cole tried to say but Thalia interrupted her.
“You saw Mom?!” she exclaimed.
“Yeah…seeing her there…,” he didn’t finish the thought as he sat down on the couch and folded his arms.
Feigning sympathy, Cole tried to say, “I guess it, uh…, must have been quite a shock to find out your mother went to Hell too, huh?”
Hearing that irritated Marcus, and he wanted to tell him to shut his mouth, but before he could think of the right response, Thalia spoke up first.
“You’re thinking about it wrong. Our mother didn’t go to Hell. She is Hell,” she explained.
Hearing this, Marcus leaned forward and asked, “Wait, you mean...you saw Mother? Was it that dream you had when your magic awakened?”
She turned around to look at him with a hint of shame as she said, “Y-Yeah…I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about that.”
He wanted to feel angry at the fact that she hadn’t told him about it but he knew he didn’t have any right to talk that way.
He shook his head and sighed as he said, “No...its alright.”
He went silent for a few minutes to the point that the other people in the room became uncomfortable with it.
Marcus then said, “Cole, Selene… I want to have a word with you for a moment. The rest of you, can you give us a moment?”
Cole and Selene looked at each other, confused as to what this was about, and stayed in the room while everyone else left.
Alta, Fayebel, and Thalia left the house as they started talking about eating something at a local restaurant while Cole’s group went upstairs to their rooms to turn in for the night.
Selene sat on the couch next to him while Cole stood in front of him next to the TV.
“What’s up?” he asked impatiently and Selene flashed him a glare to tell him to shut up.
Marcus sighed for a moment as he stood up slowly and said, “Cole, take a seat.”
He then made his way into the kitchen, grabbed three glasses and his bottle of scotch, then returned to the living room.
Seeing the scotch, Cole asked, “What’s all of this for?”
“I’ll explain in a minute, just take a glass,” Marcus ordered and Cole did.
He held out Selene’s glass and she took it before he poured them each some of the scotch.
Once they all had their glasses filled, Marcus leaned back on the couch and started swirling the scotch in his glass lazily.
He did this for so long to the point that Selene looked at him with concern and asked, “Marcus…can you tell us what’s wrong?”
“I will…I’m just having a little trouble with how to go about saying it…,” he said as he didn’t look away from his glass.
He then stopped swirling the scotch and looked at Cole as he said, “There are some things that I’ve learned about recently that sounded absurd when I first heard about it, but I’m going to tell you. Selene as well as she deserves to hear about it, but you especially.”
Cole then puffed his cheeks as he let out a deep breath before taking a drink.
“I’m definitely going to need a drink for this…,” he said, dreading what he was going to hear.
Marcus as well took a small drink of scotch before he said, “While I was in Hell…,I heard someone refer to me as the God of Wrath. Then later, Ruvick and Azazel confirmed what I had heard… Having been born and raised on Terra my whole life, assuming that I was human for most of that time, I had never assumed myself anything other than that. But then, Thalia’s father tried to burn me alive because he found out he had a daughter and thought I was trying to keep her from him. That was the moment I learned about my immunity to fire and I had doubted my humanity ever since.”
Cole and Selene both listened intently to what he had to say, with the latter looking at him sympathetically while the former just stared at him in abject disbelief.
“I bet you might have wondered why I hate Julian so much…, he was the one who sent Thalia’s father, William Diaz, after me. He sent him to kill me and forced me to kill him in self defense,” he said as he waited patiently to see how they would react.
Cole’s eyes dropped slowly to the floor as his hands began to shake.
He then set the glass onto the floor, brought his knees up to his chest, and laced his fingers together as he rested his mouth against them, silently processing what he was hearing.
“This is the kind of man Julian is. The kind of person I wanted to keep away from you, because I know for a fact that he would go after you and your people to get to me,” he said further, to which Cole nodded in horrified understanding.
Marcus then turned to look at Selene as she asked, “Thalia doesn’t know about this, does she?”
“No. In fact, she likely doesn’t know that he was her father or that he had died,” he answered.
“Do you intend to tell her?” she asked.
“Eventually, but...not now. I’ll tell her when she’s old enough and strong enough to protect herself, because just in case she decides to cut me off for good, I want to make sure she can survive on her own if that’s what she chooses,” he answered and she nodded like it was reasonable to her.
“What if she asks you about it on her own before you think she’s ready?” Cole asked, surprising him.
He hesitated to answer but gritted his teeth before he said, “If she asks me, then I will tell her the truth. I will never lie to her. I did that once before and I promised her I would never lie to her again. I intend to make good on that promise.”
Cole laughed without a hint of humor in it as he said, “You have far more integrity than I gave you credit for…”
He started looking down at the glass next to him, picked it up, and took another drink before he asked, “Tonight is our last night here, isn’t it? For me and my group I mean.”
“Yes.”
He nodded as he finished his glass.
Marcus held out the bottle as he offered him more but Cole shook his head no.
Tracing his finger across the rim of the glass, he asked, “What do you intend to do to Julian when you fight him tomorrow?”
Selene looked at Marcus as she wondered the same.
She hadn’t taken a single drink since the conversation started.
He then finished off his own glass before he said, “I’m going to kill him. It is the only thing I can do.”
Selene shook her head dismissively as she said, “I...I can understand if that is what you want to do, but the way that the spatial battlefield works, it won’t allow you to do that. No matter which way you try, it will just bring him-”
“When I died, my soul was dragged to Hell and my body stayed dead in the real world. There are ways around it,” Marcus said, cutting her off.
Frustrated that he had interrupted her, she grit her teeth before she continued saying, “I understand that but…even if you do manage to kill him, you would get punished for doing so. You would be branded a murderer in this world for doing so.”
Marcus scoffed as he said, “What would that matter? You and I are gods.”
Hearing that, her face twisted into a scowl and she smacked him in the face.
Cole flinched as he watched this play out, saying nothing and expecting Marcus to explode in anger.
Yet rather than get angry, he sat there in stunned silence as he had never been slapped by a woman in such a manner.
Much less by a woman he felt affection for.
He turned his head to look at her in bewildered silence, wondering why she had done that to him.
She took in a deep breath as she prepared to give him a piece of her mind.
“You told me that you wanted to move on from your past life. That you wanted to look forward to the future, and build a new life here, with me. You said that your only obstacles were the people who were trying to drag you back to your old life. Julian, the man who followed you into this world for revenge, and Moyako, the one who wants your help to bring her back home. Yet you didn’t seem to consider that becoming a murderer again in this world might be what destroys any hope of you moving on for good. Do you really want to kill a man in front of thousands of people, let them all be witness to it, and have that image stain the path you set in this world forever?”
He stared at her in silence as he took in her words and felt crushed by them.
Her expression softened slightly as she continued, “I can understand that you want to kill him, and by all means, he should die. In fact, I understand full well that its what the Orc King wants for what he did to Lyrra, his own daughter. However, if you kill Julian tomorrow, then you might as well surrender to Moyako the moment you meet her in the final match because I will not accept you. If Julian dies tomorrow because of you, then you would have already lost to her and you will never move on from your old life.”
His eyes widened as he took in everything that she said and...and he realized that she was right.
If he killed Julian, then all the hard work he had put into moving on from his old life would have been for nothing.
He never wanted to be a murderer in the first place, and yet he had been so prepared, so ready to be one again just to get revenge on Julian.
He turned away from her as he held his mouth in his hands, letting out a shuddered breath as he said, “Y-You’re right. I hadn’t even thought of it that way. I was...so fixated on killing him, on finishing him for good so that he never came after us again, that I didn’t think about what it would mean to become a murderer again.”
“Well...if you aren’t going to kill him, then what will you do?” Cole asked.
Marcus shook his head as he answered, “I don’t know anymore. I’ll...have to think about it.”
Cole stood up shakily as he said, “I hope you figure it out soon because I don’t want to see his face again after tomorrow. I’ll be sure to watch your fight and cheer you on.”
Cole snickered as he said, “Listen to me…cheering you on of all people. What are things coming to…”
He then stumbled out of the living room and made his way to the stairs to go back to his room with Lyrra and Rosanne.
It was now just Selene and Marcus in the living room together.
A moment of silence passed before he started laughing and she gave him a confused look.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“I’ve never been slapped by a woman and chastised like that before,” he said with a smile on his face.
A look of shame fell across her face as she held her hand over her mouth as she gasped and said, “Oh...I’m sorry. I just...reacted. I really shouldn’t-”
“No. You did the right thing. I needed some sense slapped into me and you did it in just the right moment before I could screw up so monumentally that I would risk losing you and everything I worked for,” he said as he looked at her gratefully while she looked away from him and a faint smile flashed on her face.
“Well...I’m glad to hear that it helped. I don’t want to have to slap you like that again.”
Marcus then shifted his whole body around so that he was facing her entirely and said, “I’m going to say this to you right now so that its set in stone. I promise that I am not going to kill Julian tomorrow. I’ll figure something else out, but I won’t kill him.”
She nodded as she accepted what he said.
“In the meantime…that slap did hurt a lot more than I thought. Would you mind giving it a little kiss to make it better?” he asked jokingly and her face became flushed red in embarrassment.
“W-What are you, a five year old? Y-You want me to kiss it to make it better, huh?” she asked, fumbling over her words.
“Mmmmaybe,”he said, wanting to mess with her a little bit more.
“You’re drunk!” she exclaimed.
I haven’t had nearly enough to drink for that yet…
She swallowed nervously, as if wanting to shove away her embarrassment, before she looked at the bottle of scotch on the floor next to the couch.
“Give me that!” she demanded, reaching out her hand.
He did as she asked but then remembered that she didn’t take a drink of the glass he had already poured for her.
“What are you…?” he tried to ask but went silent very quickly as she unscrewed the top off the bottle and started chugging the scotch.
Good lord girl...pace yourself a little would ya?
Once she had finished drinking a third of what was left in the bottle, she wiped her mouth clean with her sleeve and screwed the bottle shut.
He laughed and said, “You have terrible manners when you drink.”
“Shut up. Now...I’m going to kiss you,” she said without slurring her words.
What?
She had drank enough of it to ease herself up but not enough to hamper her thinking, yet she leaned forward and put her hands around either side of him, bracing herself against the couch.
I think she may be taking the term ‘liquid courage’ a little too far…, he thought as he leaned back but didn’t push her away.
He wondered if it was right to let her do this right now before he had finished what he had set out to do but he didn’t have time to think about it before her breasts pressed up against his chest and she locked eyes with him.
Her red and white hair fell around her shoulders and onto his chest, seemingly blocking his view of everything around them and making it so he could only focus on her.
He could hear his heart pounding as he took in a deep breath through his nose and held it before she leaned her head forward and pressed her lips against his own.
His eyes widened as he realized that she had kissed him directly and held it there for several seconds before finally pulling away.
He stared at her in stunned silence for a moment before saying, “I...I think you missed. My cheek is here…”
He turned his head slightly as if to emphasize where she had slapped him earlier.
“I didn’t miss,” she said with a smile.
He stared at her, taking in the sight of her beautiful eyes, her smile, her hair, and everything else before thinking, Its a little premature but…I think I’ll just enjoy this moment for today.
He wrapped his left arm around her waist, gently sank his right hand into her hair, and pulled her back in as he kissed her back.
Now…
As he stood over Julian’s decapitated body, he turned around and shouted, “Come on you sack of SHIT! I know that wasn’t enough to kill you. Get up and fight!”
A few seconds passed before Julian’s fingers started to twitch and blood burst out from his neck, swirling around to regenerate his head.
When it had finished healing completely, he gasped as his eyes flew open and looked up at Marcus, who stood above him, blocking out the light that shined down on them as he lay in the shadow cast upon his body.
Marcus waited patiently for him to get back up on his feet, and when he did, he said, “I’m just getting started.”
Tightening his grip on Light Taker, Marcus said, “Bring it on then. I’ll keep tossing you back into the mud where you belong.”