The Onus of Fate

I guess he just caught me at a bad moment. Sometimes you've had enough, you know? Sometimes there are these people you're supposed to like, and you try because you know that whatever is wrong with them isn't their fault, but every now and again your tolerance snaps and so do you.

Whatever the reason, Fate picked a bad moment to appear in my kitchen.

"You," I growled. I was covered in billing notices and prescriptions and diagnoses and photos from the past, all things that reminded me of him and his malfeasance. "You...bastard. Why are you here?"

His eyes grew sad, the way they had before, but this time I didn't believe he was secretly on my side.

"You want to know the truth?" I asked. I was ravenous, hungering for a fight. I pushed myself up from the chair to reveal a body covered in red gashes and pale ribs. He grimaced in spite of himself. "I hate you more than any of the others. That's the truth. Because you stand there with that fucking look on your face, like you hate doing this so much--boo, hoo--but the thing is, you still do it. So what difference does it make?"

"BB," he halted. "The choices made for you were not mine. I was merely--"

"What?" I asked. "They were just your fate? Your fate? Fate's fate, now that's funny. No, you can't do a fucking thing. You're just the hopeless victim here, aren't you?"

"BB, we are all, myself included, given our challenges, but in the end even the greatest of those adversities make us into stronger--"

"BULLSHIT!" I screamed. "Bullshit, and you know it! What did any of this do?"

I gestured around at my house, myself, my brain, my life.

"Maybe if it ended, it would have meant something," I said. "But it's just one eternal mindfuck! And you did it. You did all of it! How can you stand here in front of me? You might as well have been the one who...you did all of it. You're my father's fist. I never saw it, but it's always been you, you fucking worm!"

His supernatural face arranged itself into an expression of majestic affront. I didn't care. I so didn't care.

"You are raving and half dead," he noted. He wasn't criticizing. Just assessing. "Decayed. And drunk, always, even when you're not drunk. Drunk on bitterness. Drunk on hatred. Can you not see what you've become?"

I laughed, a long, brutal, trenchant cackle. I'd always been such a radiant boy.

"What I've become?" I smiled and my gums rained purple blood. "I'm not anything."

"No," he sighed, and his eyes shone. "Not anymore."

I hated that I started to cry then.

"I was, once, you know," I said. "I tried to be. I could have made it. But you took care of that."

"I took care of nothing," he said, his face stern. "I only--"

I stepped forward and punched him in the jaw with as much power as I could muster. My hand stung afterward but I wanted to kiss the pain.

He, on the other hand, fell back in total shock. I suppose it's not every day a millennia-old being gets socked in the mouth by a young man who is, all things considered, a specimen of utterly insignificant mortality.

"You did this," I said. "Just remember that."

His face darkened.

"You--"

I hit him again.

"Get out," I whispered. My voice grew louder. "Get out, get out, get out! GET OUT! YOU'RE JUST LIKE THE REST OF THEM! I'M SURROUNDED BY WORTHLESS PIECES OF SHIT!"

I suppose that last bit was too much for his delicate sensibilities, because at that moment he vanished from the room. He wasn't gone for a moment before Cruelty materialized in his place.

"BB," she smiled. "Would you like a glass of wine?"

I smirked my approval at her ever-so-timely Skrillex haircut.

"Why, Cruelty," I said. "I thought you'd never ask."

She raised her vial of Merlot in a demented toast.

"Isn't it marvelous when you stop caring?" she asked with her shark's grin.

"It is marvelous," I agreed. "Absolutely marvelous."