The X Files | Levi Ackerman

File 8: A Tormented Soul

"My father grew up as a low-class worker boy," Levi started, his eyes trained onto his pale, clamped hands resting tensely in his lap.  "He was raised in the suburbs of Trost, and my grandparents never gave him anything but the food on their table and the roof over his head.  For everything else, my father had to work his ass off, including his own survival.

        "My father was a high school drop out, and he struggled to learn everything he could on the streets and at work, having his days filled with the long hours of his five part-time jobs.  He literally worked from dawn to midnight, only to come home for really a three hour nap until he had to wake back up again to go back to work.  My grandparents never helped him; they couldn't help him, because by the time he was sixteen, they were both in their sixties and couldn't do a single thing except sit on the couch and wait for their next doctor's check-up, paid with the money my father worked so hard to earn.

        "And by the time he was eighteen, both of my grandparents had died.  They left him alone in this world, but they didn't leave him abandoned.  My father was free from the responsibility of taking care of two hopeless elderly people, and he could finally go out and pursue the thing he wanted to do most:  manage his own business."  Levi sighed, his eyelids drooping as he went on.

"So he started a small flower shop in the middle of town, just to get started.  He always had a weird sort of fascination with nature, so a flower shop seemed to suit him just fine, I guess.  He ran the business well, and he became successful enough in a few years to upgrade his shop.  He slowly began to earn more income, and along with his fortune came Olivia Lynn, a striking young woman five years younger than himself, but a beauty nonetheless.  Her long raven hair and glittering cerulean eyes were enough to charm him, and my father initiated his plans.  He made friends with her over a course of a year, finally presenting her a bouquet of fresh lilies from his shop and asking her out on a date.

        "My mother was the daughter of a wealthy businessman, and her father was already everything my father wanted to be.  He looked down upon his daughter dating such a low-class man, but my mother, full of spirit and freewill, denied her father's opinion and went off with him anyways.  After several months of affectionate words and long romantic nature walks, my father had asked permission to marry her.

        "They were married two years later, under a massive oak tree in the middle of the meadows outside of Trost; it was their usual date spot, considering my father wasn't that classy of a man to bring her to fancy dinners and expensive shopping sprees.  However, my mother loved nature as much as my father did, and they ended up getting along fairly well.  And a year after their marriage, they became pregnant with their first child."

There was a pause, a long silence that swallowed up the entire vehicle; and if it weren't for the consistent pounding of the rain outside, the vacuum would have surely deafened them both.  Aria sat there, waiting for the next part of the tale, patiently sitting on her side of the car, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

"My elder sister ended up being a miscarriage," Levi sighed again, taking a breath in, refusing to even glance at Aria, who listened intently.  "The umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, strangling her to death during the thirty-sixth week of pregnancy.  Penelope was her name, after my mother, whose middle name was Penelope; Penelope Olivia "Lyv" Lynn-Ackerman.  It was a long-ass name, but my parents loved her dearly, even though she never really arrived in this world alive."

Levi paused to collect himself, hearing the tapping of the rain upon the roof of his car, the warmth inside the vehicle making him shiver and shudder with distaste.

"It was another year after the miscarriage when my mother was pregnant with me," the man continued grimly, "and to their relief, I was born into this world healthy.  They raised me in a house in the countryside, where my father would go into town every single day to manage his flower shop, and where my mother would stay back and home-school me, teaching me everything there was about life, love, and happiness.