Ruin Maketh Me

70 - Delia

Red blooms like a splendid rose within my vision, and in the space of a single breath, the black tarmac becomes a sea of crimson. Silence rings numbly across the bleak stage, and even though the road-side trees sway ferociously and litter the impeccable colour with leaves, no wind whistles in my ears. All is absolutely still.
Another source of red sways into sight. Leonard saunters forward, sweeps his gaze across the corpses of the fallen men and lowers the assault rifle to his side.
"Fucking weaklings." He mutters, eyes raised to the darkened sky, "You, who are you?" He shouts towards the girl in front of the carriage.
She ruffles her long white hair and sweeps it to one side, walking leisurely through the blood towards us, seemingly not minding the red seeping through her white heels. But before she can utter a single word, Leonard raises the black metal gun steadily.
"Stop right there, demon."
The word 'demon' ripples through the paused time of my heart, and the howl of wind, the rough draw of breath, the bitter tang of blood and violent wilderness expands like a brilliant sun into all my senses. I tear my eyes away from the broken piles of blown-apart bodies and take a closer look at the girl. Familiar, the white hair, the firm, confident gait, the lips, the nose, the colour of her eyes, everything rings painfully familiar.
"What in all hell is she doing here?" Hoplin whispers under their breath.
The girl clicks to a stop more than ten metres away, eyes drifting absent-mindedly over us, "An LK-05," She whistles, "very, very nice. Very expensive. But even combined with that, your magic's no match for mine."
"I can put up a good fight." Leonard growls.
The girl crosses her arms, "No, not at all."
I squint at her countenance and turn towards Hoplin, "She's..."
Hoplin fires me a look of exasperation and nudges Leonard's shoulder with a finger, "You can lower that thing, Cynder here will protect us from her."
A small furrow creases between the girl's graceful brows, and her violet eyes dance between Hoplin's blue head and mine, "The boy's even weaker than the Fox."
I take another step forward, pushing past Leonard's warning hand, "You," I draw in the dazzle of purple and blue shining even in the gloom, "Are you Ralphus's sister, Delia?"
Her brilliant eyes widen and piercing every inch of my body with her wondrous gaze, she stalks towards me, dainty feet clinking against the red and black faster and faster with each step. First walking then running, she flies towards me with a hurriedness I've rarely seen in Ralphus. Leonard's hand tightens around my shoulder, but Delia does nothing but stare.
She runs her eyes down each strand of my hair to the exposed skin of my forehead, down the bridge of my nose, to the bow of my lip and back to my eyes like she's both examining a piece of art and trying to glean the painter's soul behind each brush stroke at the same time. And without a word, quicker than I can see with my mortal gaze, she rips me from Leonard's hold, spins me around and tears my shirt upwards to the cold rush of air.
The silence that descends over us this time is humid and stifling in nature. She's seen it, I know she has, but still, she does not let go of the thin cloth. Leonard and Hoplin move around to the sight on my back. And again, no one says nothing, there's only a hitch of breath that cannot escape my ears in the vacuum of sound.
"Holy shit." Leonard comments finally, tone dead and yet surely with that cool smile tipping his lip.
Warmth descends feather soft on the skin of my back. She traces the swirls and lines of their family crest on the small of my back, and with a sharp exhale of breath, she drops the cloth back over my skin.
"Ah," Hoplin laughs with a wry smile, "so your romance isn't dead."
I turn towards the three. Delia, his sister, what does she think of it? This crest, this supposed vow of all eternity, what does she think of me? My heart hammers heatedly within my chest, and for once, for once I can relish in the nervousness of meeting parents.
Not that you've sealed your relationship with Ralphus, the Pit sighs in its serpentine lilt.
Delia's gaze enters into view, and dryness scratches the back of my throat bloodily. Thundering darkness storms through her eyes and not a fraction of her wrathful helplessness is hidden away from the drowning depths of the deepening indigo. Nothing is clearer at this moment, she doesn't like me. She hates me. The look in her eyes, how many times have I seen it before? Tens, hundreds, thousands of times in the fleeting glances of passerbys and druggies smoking joints between bars. At least I'm not like him; their embarrassed glances speak louder than a thousand words. She sees no good in me.
Leonard's booted feet shift over the red dyed concrete, and he tips his red head down. Fumbling in his back pocket, he slides out a thin cigarette and lights it with a click of his fingers.
"You're a Caesluphius?" He asks, head still tipped downwards at the immovable, solid presence of the road.
Delia makes no comment, eyes still fixed on me with a disappointment I can't understand in the slightest.
"I'll sell him to you at a 5% discount, only 85 million, how about that?"
I whip my head away and even though I know she'll never buy me, my heart still increases in its frantic yearning like a shameless beggar. Fuck. Why do I have to be like this always?
"I won't buy him." Her smooth voice announces without an ounce of emotion.
"But that crest..." Leonard trails off.
"I won't buy him." She repeats again, "But I'm coming with you."
My head twists back to her interrogative gaze, and even Leonard with all his cool uncare for the world has his face scrunched up and his cigar abandoned between his fingers.
"The fuck?" He curses with a shaky twist upwards at the end.
"I think it's perfectly acceptable." She argues, eyes cooling into passive pools of impartiality, "I have to be completely sure of his condition before buying him. Even if I'm not satisfied, you can still sell him to whoever you want. It's in everyone's favour."
Leonard's fingers shake, and a ball of ash spirals to the ground. All sound drowns out into a single, numbing crackle of static, and before anymore of their words twist through the cold barrier of my ears, I walk away. The eye-burning red sticks to the black leather of my shoes, but I carry on through the heartless seeping sea of blood mingling slowly into the dark earth.
"You didn't make a very good impression on her." Hoplin's laugh rises into the air behind me.
I lean down and step through the open door of the car. Pressing my heels into the cream carpet, I watch the soft fibres slowly distort into a sopping mess of darkening iron red.
I really, really want to kill someone.