Things I cannot change
By Christanan
5:26
Port Charles &endash; Lila Quartermaine passed away yesterday evening in her sleep. Although troubled by various ailments that left her confined to a wheelchair for the past few decades, Mrs. Quartermaine devoted her considerable energies to charitable works in the community and was a much esteemed patron of the arts and theater in Port Charles. …. She is survived by her husband and two children and grandchildren.
Serenity
He sent flowers.
Others came to the church, circling round the grieving family and the man who wore his brother’s face.
He understood they had always loved him best. He could not remember a time when his brother was not the golden child &endash; the one who excelled in every field. They loved him for it and piled all their hopes and dreams upon his head. The weight of so much expectation would have crushed lesser men. But his brother took it in his stride, somehow immune to the pressure that dogged his every step.
They said he was jealous. And he was. But he had loved him too. He resented the way he always did everything right, when all he did went wrong, but he didn’t blame him. Some people were born to shine. Jason was. He wasn’t. But he still loved him. Even as he killed him, he loved him for being the one who cared enough to save him, even as the others washed their hands.
His family’s need to love him was stronger than death. They loved him desperately, so desperately they repelled him. And it wasn’t this stranger’s fault, for he was born into the world anew, with the mind of a child. It was his fault. The sin was his burden to bear.
The only expiation of that sin they would allow was his child, untainted by his crimes. But even there he failed them, as they always knew he would. Jason kept him. Which was what they really wanted, wasn’t it?
Courage
He still didn’t know why he stayed. Why he couldn’t bring himself to walk away, to someplace where all the eyes upon him were only strangers’ eyes, without the power to judge and wound.
He was cursed by that incurable malady of hope. And so he kept hoping that one day, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would see him as who he was, but instead of sighing and turning away, it would be enough. He would be enough.
Then the day came where he realized, they would never think him good enough. Never strong enough. Never ruthless enough, although he tried. He made himself sick with what he did to try. He stopped looking in the mirror, afraid of what he might see. He had tried to shed all traces of the man he had been in order to be the man his grandfather could love.
And when he walked away, he did not leave empty-handed. He told himself it was only a just revenge for all the years of torment that he’d born at their hands. But in his heart he knew the truth.
He wanted them to notice he was gone. He wanted them to care. So he took the money he knew they valued more than flesh.
They did not come for him. He spent hundreds of hours figuring out how to elude them. He had thought himself so clever. It was only when he began to relax his precautions, one after the other, that he realized he had left expecting this move to be one more maneuver in the never-ending game they played. He had thrown down a gauntlet. He never expected no one would care enough to pick it up.
And so he constructed a life for himself in his tropical exile, brick by brick, and waited for it all to come tumbling down. Waiting for the day when he would stop looking around the corner, for the ghosts from his past. Wishing for the day when he would no longer care.
Wisdom
He had tried to love the man who wore his brother’s face. They all wanted to twist him back into the shape of the son they loved, the brother they missed. For if he lived, there was no need to mourn. If he were reborn, then nothing need change.
No one wanted more than him to be able to wake up in the middle of the night and know he was not Cain.
He accepted he was a drunk. But alcohol was a vice. Murder was something different, a sin that could not be washed away.
The universe loved irony. He had more in common with the man who wore his brother’s face than the brother he’d loved.
His brother had wanted to save people, not destroy them.
His brother had tried to help him, not steal away his son.
His brother had protected him, not left him at the mercy of his enemy.
This new man was a killer, as he had killed.
This new man was indifferent to the pain he left in his wake, as he had been indifferent to the impact of his drunken rampage.
Both their hands were stained.
The difference came in the morning.
In the morning, he would sober up, remember where he was and what he had done and feel ashamed.
In the cold light of dawn, he would sit, curled up in his room, weeping from the agony of all his pain.
Did this new man, his newfound brother, ever weep for his victims? Or did their faces simply fade into whatever broken, twisted neural pathway swallowed his brother’s soul?
Only his father seemed to notice or care that his brother would have felt nothing but contempt for the man who took his face.
The others still tried so hard to make him one of them, molding themselves and him into the form that suited them. They shoved themselves at the people who softened him &endash; Robin, Emily, Michael.
They willingly sacrificed his child on the altar of their need.
Because Jason loved Michael, and so might one day love them.
And Jason was a brother to Emily, because he threatened to kill those who hurt her. And what was that if not love?
And his mother kept any speck of kindness he showed her clutched tightly to her heart.
And Jason was a good grandson, because he would visit Lila and bring her flowers.
In this kingdom of the blind, they threw rocks at the one-eyed man who dared call him liar, murderer and thief.
He had loved Lila. Yet any treasure he sought to lay her feet was never worthy. But when Jason brought her flowers, she smiled as if the whole world had been born anew.
He could see them now.
He would bring her flowers, cradled in his blood-spattered hands.
And she would smile.
6:46