Icarus

Burn

Burn

        Blood tainted the water red. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he played with his hand in the filthy bathtub water. A man with a black cloak opened the door and closed it behind him; he pointed his gun at the boy.

 “Kill me; you know I’ll rise from the dead,” said the boy in a playful tone. His big brown eyes were so full of life, youth and innocence that the man had to look away from him a moment and remind himself that the boy was danger, power and death. The man put the gun down and took his cloak away from his face, showing scars and tattoos that wouldn’t make any sense for humans.

 “You should do everyone a favor and kill yourself, Icarus,” the man said. “I’m tired of this.”

 “You have one job, Piero. It’s been thousands of years and you still can’t do it. That makes you a bad guardian.”

 “Not this time, Icarus.”

 “My name is Tate now,” the boy spat.

 “Icarus, you must kill yourself before the girl dies,” said the old man, ignoring his childish and reckless behavior.

 “You’ve been trying to convince me in all of my past lives and still everything I think of when I see you or one of your little guardian friends is ‘fuck it, fuck it, fuck it’ and I don’t care that the girl dies you know? I’ll meet another one seventeen years later.”

 “This girl is different.”

 “You said that with the last one, we both know how that ended… not well”

 “She is one of us.”

 “She is… is she a guardian? Like you?” At first Tate was confused; his dark bushy eyebrows knitted close together and suddenly everything in his mind clicked. He smiled, placing his fingers on his chin, “Oh I see.”

 “That’s why I must protect her.”

 “Let me count how many fucks I give…” He started counting his fingers, “Oh, right, none!”

 “She is the one that will destroy you; her love is one of the greatest things you’ll ever have. I know her, she is like my daughter.” Tate raised an eyebrow and opened his eyes like plates. Piero sighed; maybe he could break Tate’s armor showing his affection to the girl he protected the last sixteen years. But no, Tate laughed and mocked instead.

  “A caring heart of a father watching her daughter fly, oh the time has come! When she grows up to find love in another man,” the old man frowned; he was used to Tate’s mediocre poems. “What a tragedy, what a calamity, to see his beautiful daughter’s agony!” Tate stood up from the bath tub to find himself completely naked; the ends of his mouth curved up forming a perfect arch, “I could do many jokes with this situation.”

 “You better shut your mouth or I’ll shoot you.”

“A man full of hate and melancholy from thousands of years suffering loneli—”

 Piero shot him right in the head. Tate staggered confused and then narrowed his eyes, he dipped his hand into the bleeding wound on his head and took the bullet out of his body. “Nice shot,” he said, looking at the clothes in the corner of the room. “Now if you excuse me, I need to get dressed.”

 “Where are you going?”

 “I’m a cool kid now, I have a band rehearsal,” said Tate putting on his shirt and pants. Piero dedicated him a severe look while Tate, a smile. He walked past the man in the black cloak and stopped next to him. “I have a show tomorrow, you can bring the girl.” He patted the man’s shoulder and winked at him.

 Tate got out of the building with his hands on his jacket’s pockets. As much as he’d like to deny that he wouldn’t fall in love with her, he knows that that was his fate unless he decided to change it around by killing himself and it wasn’t a rational option. It’s been a thousand years, and still every time he turns eighteen he dies, as well as the girl who he had fallen for. A terrible curse caused by his recklessness and negligence. A curse caused by his desire to fly higher.

 Tate remembers that exact moment, when he felt the wax burning his back and he saw all of the feathers being consumed by flames. And then the falling seemed like a thousand years when in reality he only spent a few seconds to crash into the ocean and go down.