Angels Never Arrived
Aaron didn’t know. He didn’t care. Whatever it was, it wasn’t there anymore. There was only
Joseph’s gleeful, crooked, grin
Looking at the black as the void, copper ingot-created burns
On Aaron’s left arm
His right
His back
so far.
Only the fiery agony that existed only to
burn Aaron to a crisp
And to tempt Call.
Only Joseph’s obscure reasons that Aaron didn’t really care much about anymore.
And Call.
Who might have been the entirety of Joseph’s obscure reasons that Aaron didn’t really care much about anymore. His only thought was of relief from the agony. And of Call. The bursts of pain. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. When he COULD think, from a somehow lessening of the fires burning on his skin and the void trying to escape his nerves, it was an overwhelming worry for Call that took precedence, then annoyance at the way Joseph slowly, repetitively, ritualistically, was killing him. Up and down. Up and down.
When there was nothing in Aaron’s head except for his bloodcurdling screams, and Call, he was glad for the movement. Up and down. Up and down. The ritual of it. He relied on the ritual of it. Something to focus on. So later, he didn’t lose focus. Cannot focus on anything but the pain. Cannot focus on anything but the ritual. Up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down.
Up and down…
Joseph didn’t keep him chained anymore. There was no need. The agony the Alkahestized pound of copper was causing Aaron was as an effective shackle as anything else, and maybe even more so. And Joseph knew it. His own body was imprisoning him, even in the real-nightmare, his own chaos torturing his soul and body through the copper. It seemed like death to just lay on the stone plinth, six feet above the ground, because Joseph seemed to be dramatic that way, gasping like a fish out of water. Moving a fraction of an inch… Unbearable. Walther had made sure that the copper bar was almost exactly as painful as how Aaron imagined the Alkahest could be, but almost not able to kill him.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Aaron had always hated that song.
When he could think, when there was more on the Earth than the only thing that seemed to have stayed true with Aaron his entire life, pain, he obsessed on how it didn’t even make sense. That, and Call. How could a leukemia patient, not dead from the disease, but very weak from the chemo, and at least twenty thousand dollars in debt from the treatment costs, be considered stronger? Or a victim in a car crash, completely paralyzed from the neck down? They wouldn’t come out of the hospital two months later in a motorized wheelchair, almost dead, but alive, feeling stronger now than when they had stepped into that car? They wouldn’t be glad they needed to go to the corner store for a bottle of milk, back in five minutes honey, because they were stronger now.
It didn’t work like that.
Not physically.
Definitely not emotionally.
Neither.
Never.
Aaron obsessed on the images of his blond-haired, green-eyed father nearly die in jail because he somehow, somehow, got his hands on a container of rubbing alcohol and try to drink it. He DIDN’T see him the next day in the jail’s gym, benching 260 pounds and swearing to never drink again, not even the weak, crappy version of Coke the prison gave out once every six months for ‘good behavior.’ Aaron only watched, his face smooshed through the cold iron bars, at the age of eight, as his father’s bloodshot green eyes stared up at the mildewed cell ceiling, not flickering, not moving, not recognizing his own son.
Aaron had bar-shaped bruises on his face when he woke up the next morning
in his seventh foster home, having run away from the sixth to the state prison the moment he read the ‘confidential’ email from the state to Chuck, his sixth ‘dad.’
In the few seconds that the world wasn’t just fire and ice and stinging, killing, black hot copper, he only saw his father’s green eyes and blond hair. Exactly like his own. When he could see things. When there was an Aaron, not just the uncontrollable roiling darkness and the terrible crying pain and Call’s face plastered against the transparent facets of the world.
Aaron was determined not to end up as his father, ‘loving’ in a terrible way, in a prison, completely agonized, staring up at the ceiling, completely losing his will to live.
Wait.
That was exactly what he was doing.
The rocky ceiling, completely overgrown with lichen, swam in and out of Aaron’s vision, sometimes being an awful, painful red, tinting it, or the cold, warm darkness washing over him, but now symbolizing Joseph’s preparation to reform and create again the real-nightmare every twenty four hours and bring him and Call to it. It had been maybe- fifty two hours since Aaron had been stolen? Yesterday, or what had counted as it, he had sensed Call being sucked there for a single moment before being forced back- woken up- what- Tamara? But Aaron was absolutely, totally, maybe, sure that Call would be there this time, forced to see Aaron’s agony. Forced to move closer, so much closer, to being Constantine through Aaron’s pain. It would be absolutely Aaron’s fault, then, if Call dissolved, completely stopped being Call, and if the Enemy of Death emerged from whatever mess his soul was in, like a parasitic worm unfurling from a spider. Aaron’s fault, like it was mostly his father’s fault Aaron was who he was today.
Which consisted of a thickly pasted, hard to dissolve crust of apparent ‘niceness’ on the outside, a default smile Aaron slapped on his face because he never wanted to be the jerk who swore at their toddler son at the same time he was teaching him to hotwire a stolen car, the only thing he ever really would, besides all the do-nots Aaron would pick up from context, later, like- don’t strangle your girlfriend to death, especially not while your two year old son watches in a corner, over a darker, harder, thinner layer that was his defensiveness about himself, his past, and his needing to protect and love Call and Tamara. Maybe even Jasper and Celia. All stretched over a core of darkness and pain, and maybe one of Call’s rare smiles, that housed all his dreams and demons and was the perfect complement to Aaron’s chaos magic, which felt sometimes, that when he used it, it fed his dark and let it crack the surface of plastered smiles and a few real laughs, thrusting forward sadness and a deep rage- rage at the world, at his father, the mages of the Magisterium, Master Joseph, and a irrational tiny bit even at Call, Tamara too- and a maybe even deeper exhaustion, that most of the time Aaron didn’t even know he had.
But he did.
And because of Aaron’s pain, Aaron’s agony, Aaron’s weakness, Joseph was going to make sure that Call burned down the world and let Constantine out.
And even through the haze of flashing lightning and memories of bloody, horrible, silences that were merged by terror-stricken thoughts of Verity Torres’ death and all the agonizing deaths of all the other Makars, Aaron had no reason to doubt his resolve.
No reason to doubt Joseph’s ability, definitely no reason to doubt his motives to ensure Constantine would destroy the world, cause almost eight billion people pain that combined was worse than anything Aaron could experience, could comprehend, could imagine, because Call didn’t want him to keep hurting. Like Constantine and Jericho. Call would want to bring Aaron back.
And Joseph had made it easy.
Not bringing your brother back from the dead.
Back from the void.
Abyss.
Bottomless pit.
Nothing and everything.
Chaos wants to devour.
Not that far out of reach.
Just saying “yes”.
A simple hostage trade. Call for Aaron. Not that hard, now, was it?
Joseph had made sure Aaron wasn’t dead yet.
Yet.
Almost. But not yet.
And it might,
WOULD,
be easier for Call to crack in two, if he saw Aaron in the agony he was in right now, lying on the stone. So Call couldn’t be allowed to.
Joseph didn’t even keep him chained anymore. Aaron’s own body was as good a shackle as any.
Just like his father’s addictions, even in prison, was his.
But Aaron would force himself to have some of the self control his father never did.
Maybe he was different.
He didn’t really know.
The pounding in his head and the numbness slithering up the burning in Aaron’s toes and legs made it hard to think.
Even more impossible to move.
He had to try, though.
So slowly, agonizingly, owwwwwaaaaowwwhelpscreamingtillhislungsburstCall, every nerve in Aaron’s body screaming, begging, pleading for him to STOP MOVING, NOW, a quarter of a fraction of an inch at an indefinite time, Aaron jerked off the cold stone platform.
And fell to the ground, curled in a tight ball, trying to hide from the world.
Just try to be like a hedgehog.
But no matter what he wanted to do, other things had to happen.
Aaron had to fall.
Six feet down.
The fall was almost-
nice.
Until the world was colored awful flashes of black and red and white as Aaron hit the gravel on his left side- Joseph’s first unwilling subject of the Alkahest-related ‘experimentation.’ He just wanted to lie there and scream for a long, long time- but somehow, even though every inch of his skin was in whitehot torture, Aaron forced himself to stand up. The agony might’ve made him delirious as he stared slowly, almost not comprehendingly, at the gravel and dirt of the floor, the mossy walls, and up at the high, rocky, cavern ceiling, but even as the corners of Aaron’s vision darkened around him, as Joseph rushed through an naturally formed, bioluminescent doorway, as all his half-realized ideas of escape and saving
Call
were thrown down the void, he really didn’t think so. Even as the Chaos- ridden put manacles on Aaron’s chafing, screaming, bare ankles, even as bitter disappointment, anger, and hopelessness briefly overwhelmed the all-consuming feeling known as pain, some insane instinct of where Aaron was, how Joseph was able to bypass all of the Magisterium’s wards, impenetrable by anything, made that way by a little bit of magic, and for the most part, solid rock, in creating the real-nightmare, and taking Aaron and Call rushed into his brain. Even as he came to that conclusion, planet Earth stopped turning at all, the entire universe turned blacker than the void, and, completely alone in the Milky Way- who was Call again?, the pain overtook Aaron.