The Empty World | The Empty World Sequence [complete | rewriting]

Deleted Scenes: Six (Draft 2.5)

They were sitting in the park with Elle; Morpheus was playing with the knobs of Elle's hair that she was trying to grow into dreads. Opium kept saying that Elle would look so kickin' if they ever grew out, a black girl with crazy blonde dreads. Opium used silly words like kickin' and girlfriend all the time, and Morpheus only knew that it didn't seem affected. No one else used her precise combination of slang.

"Fierce?" Morpheus asked.

"Fierce!" said Opium correcting his inflection.

Elle laughed, "It's one of those words that means that something is very bad, or that it is very good?"

"Yeah, like bad or wicked used to be," Opium said.

Morpheus doubted Elle would have ever heard wicked used in slang, Morpheus had only ever heard Opium use it. And besides that Elle was French, not American. Morpheus saw Joy coming. "Gotta go," he groaned. He picked up his guitar case and moved away.

He spent the afternoon playing in the park, after Opium had taken Joy and Elle away to catch the train out to Brooklyn. It was summer, the park was pretty crowded, with pigeons more than anything. Morpheus wasn't too partial to birds, if he was ever to feed pigeons it would be because he was feeding pigeons to his plants, or his Djinn, they all thrived on blood offerings.

He saw Julien come into the park, felt his wings want to sprout from his back. It was that way with all Angels, if you got very emotional about anything they just showed. It was a completely separate feeling from the lust. No better way to describe it. He wanted Julien badly.

And there he was, laughing and surrounded by friends. Morpheus had picked up their names, of course he knew the green-eyed creature was Athen, the Vampyre. The other two were Human. What bothered Morpheus about the Humans was that they knew Athen, or Louis as he was going by, was a Vampyre-the girl was even giving blood to him-but they never told Julien.

Morpheus could not help but wonder: how could you not know your lover was a Vampyre? He closed his eyes for an instant, saw himself sitting in the park as he was then, saw Julien beside him, pale, not tan, kissing his throat. A shiver moved up Morpheus' spine as he opened his eyes. He saw Athen kissing Julien oblivious to the crowd about them, and Morpheus bit at his lip. He had felt Julien's fangs press against his skin in that second his eyes had been closed.

Julien was sitting very still, the girl, Julia, was drawing his portrait. They all went to the same art school, even Athen. There was a gallery downtown that had shown paintings done by Athen the other year, Morpheus had gone to see them. He remembered standing in that room perfectly, there had been so many Julien's staring at him, those done by Athen and those done by a painter called Cary Merisi. Morpheus only knew who Cary was because he had seen the young man so many times in scrying pools while Julien had been dating him.

Morpheus choked, almost cried, suddenly it had hit him that he would live this way for centuries, one at least. He put his guitar away slowly and then sat with his knees drawn up under his chin. A girl sat down near him and did the very same thing.

He looked at her. She had dark red hair that seemed to come from dye and lain in braids that were held with the sort of barrettes babies wore in their hair. She was wearing a flannel shirt over a tank and jeans, Doc's on her feet like the ones he was wearing. She rolled her head to one side and looked at him for an instant.

She was sad, he felt it. She was one of the desperate ones, but she wasn't like the children who just tried to forget, she was different. She fought. She kept going through the pain, living in The Empty World, knowing more than most around her what was going on because she knew there had to be something better than her world. And she was lonely, like him.