Renatos blood froze and a bitter chill ran down his spine as he watched his sole backup ship veering towards the enemy formation. He clenched fists and muffled a scream as he noticed alpha group, supposed to be standing by and hidden in the next system, one by one disappear as contacts on his long range sensors.
Bloody hatred ran through his veins. He saw Mani's Sabre forming up with the Titans and cursed the day he said that was the man he would trust the most. Traitor! He shook his head as if trying to wake up from a bad dream. He did feel numb, but was well awake. He remembered his wife and the scent of her hair.
The Corsairs didn't engage, as to allow him to fully understand his defeat before making their move. Still startled, he re-checked his long range sensors. His brothers were gone. He had no long range communications. All jammed. A fully escorted Osiris popped in from the other system. He heard the laughter through comms and couldn't bear it any longer.
He charged, knowing of his nearing death. He promised himself he would take Mani to the grave with him. One by one, the various Titans covered the traitorous Sabre, not letting Renato get close to it. They did shoot him, but doing only shield damage. They were toying with him. His rage increased and the next Titan to put itself between him and Mani was chased down and destroyed, as well as the next one.
"I'll pile up a thousand Corsair corpses if I have to, Mani, even if I have to come back from the dead to find you."
Titan after Titan blasted to debris. The Corsairs entertainment was costly, and they started shooting to kill. Outnumbered as he was, he wouldn't last long. He saw Manis Sabre docking at the Osiris. He had failed. He thought of his funeral, of his brothers arranging him for his final flight. His wife, gorgeous in a black dress, mourning her loss on the arms of Ma...
"Ah, son. Your mission was a long and demanding one, but now it's at an end."
Disgusted, Mani lingered inside the Sabre's cockpit. The old man. That voice. He recognized it from memories of hatred, loneliness and suffering.
"Come, come. You are a hero. The effort we have put into raising you has finally paid off. All the information youve managed to pass on to us... A whole flight group of theirs caught unaware."
Mani lowered his head to remove the helmet and as he looked back up, a gun was pointed to his face.
"Unfortunately, we did too good a job turning you into an Outcast. You look too much like one of them to be a Corsair hero. I'm sure you will be properly rewarded in the afterlife."
The city mourned the loss of the pilots. Annabela Bianchi wavered through flower decorated alleyways. There was no hiding her despair. Two of her cousins followed from a distance, not daring to approach her. She cried so loud, so profoundly, it was painful to hear. She clenched a golden heart-shaped locket against her chest – her favorite gift. Renato had given her the memento many years ago and always insisted that she wore it. Within it, a small photograph of them and a lock of her hair.
***
“Dear friends. We are gathered here to pay our last homage to our cherished brothers. Sadly, their time to leave us and be remembered in history has come. It is with great grief that we see them leaving for their last flight. Rest well, brothers, you took good care of us and made us proud. May you watch over us still, from the far reaches of the afterlife.”
Annabela reached for the cockpit of the empty fighter. All fourteen Sabres were devoid of their pilots’ remains. She lingered at the top of the stairs admiring the vessel and smiled wryly and sobbed when she remembered her husband’s passion for those ships. She looked at the interior of the brand new fighter and noticed his name written in silver between the instruments and his decorations carefully placed. The fighter was fully outfitted. It wasn't a mere burial casket, but a true warrior’s vessel. Annabela stepped back down the stairs and kissed the ship’s hull. She then opened her hands and looked at the locket, wishing all her love would fit in there. She kissed the pendant and placed it among Renato’s medals on the pilot’s seat.
***
For ten nights straight Annabela was tormented by nightmares of Renato being captured, tortured and killed. On the eleventh night she succumbed to suffering and committed suicide.
Space didn't really matter to him. Not in any way that we can understand. We take space for granted. Something we can alter and shape by the simple act of moving. He couldn't do it. In fact, stranded in his emotions of hatred, fear and despair, he couldn't even want to move. A soul trapped in oblivion, consumed fully by its darkest desires of vengeance and death.
He was nothing more but the persistence of his feelings. How many eons has he been there... like that? Only someone else could inquire. His identification with whomever he had one day been was now practically gone. He had no understanding of anything, anymore. He was made of hate, anger and fear.
Eventually, though, something robbed him of his torment. A different perception still a feeling a very strong one and quite different from what he had been experiencing. Love, longing, sadness. He let himself learn to become that as well, and gained a further perception. One that told him there was something else beyond his own feelings. He drifted towards it, like a stranded ship caught in a maelstrom.
He regained the notion of times passing, for he perceived movement. He regained sight, even though all he saw was a spiraling blur. Other senses came back as he moved through space.
Siniestre Cloud, Omicron Alpha
He found their source. As he approached it, an overlaying form struck him with intense familiarity. He hesitated for a moment, soon realizing that what he had been seeking laid within that form. He moved on and phased through the object to find his beacon, warm to him like a miniature sun. The lure and radiance of those new feelings overwhelmed him, and he was trapped again.
Vincenzo recoiled from the link, and was astonished to see another glowing blue apparition in the cockpit with him. The other one, apparently Renato Bianchi, looked startled. The man, now a ghost, had suffered one of the worst betrayals possible. And now he wanted revenge. Renato tried to talk, but because of the lack of a voicebox, only static was forthcoming. Vince had long-since learned that he couldn't talk, but with a great effort, he could communicate telepathically. It was much easier to talk to Renato, as they were both in the same state. Namely, dead.
Hello my friend, my name is Vincenzo.
And I am Renato... what is this? Where am I?
You, my friend, are quite dead. And this is your grave, where you were trapped in some sort of locket.
And on the word locket, Renato looked down to see the golden heart-shaped pendant that had imprisoned him. And his eyes turned to a shade of the lightest green possible, as he took it in his hands and opened it. Had he still had a body, he would have shed tears for the love that was coming off of him like heat comes off a furnace.
Ah, I see. Well, I will teach you what I have learned, Renato. We should stick together... I think we will find that our goals are very similar.
Renato nodded, too distracted by the locket to care about anything else but seeing his Annabela again.
Vincenzo taught Renato everything he had learned in the previous weeks. How he could control the ship by becoming one with the ship, which made it have a blue glow, but also allowed it to phase through such obstacles as asteroids, mines, and even planets, how to kill humans, and much more.
They returned to Malta, each flying his own Sabre. Vincenzo had also told Renato that they could communicate telepathically with humans, but that it was very difficult. Nonetheless, once they set down on a landing pad reserved specifically for Vincenzo, he couldn't help but ask the first guard he saw where his dear Annabela was.
Have you heard of Annabela Bianchi? he asked to a lean young man standing by the pad. He was a bit surprised to see not one, but two ghosts, but said that he had not.
Renato hurried back to where he had used to live, Vincenzo telling him to wait, that it may be a bit too soon. What he meant was too much of a shock. Renato found the building and flew through the walls, only to see with a surprise that there was no furniture, and that no one was home. He was puzzled, and went to the next-door neighbor to ask what had happened. The neighbor was a bit spooked at finding two ghosts just appear in his living room, but he managed to stammer out that she had killed herself a few days previous. Renato looked taken aback, and indeed took a step back. Then his eyes flashed to purple, and lightning started flying from him. Pure, poltergeist rage. Renato had no control, but he was feeling the most powerful emotions possible... to find you had had a second chance, only to find that the person you loved most was dead. It lasted for a few minutes, and at the end, once Renato finally regained control, the poor man was charred black and on his back, his living room a mess. The ghosts made a hasty exit.
Vince was fifteen years old. He went to a regular grade "B" high school, was a regular "B" student, and was altogether unremarkable. Like most other adolescent boys his age, he had hormones that sometimes made him feel like he would die, but he had uncanny self-control. However... there was this one girl that happened to share all six of his classes. She was pale, small, and had light brown hair. Green eyes that seemed to know more of the world that she let on gazed out from below brunette bangs.
For some reason, she always seemed to be crying, or at least as if she had just stopped crying. She went to the bathroom at least once a day, and often when she came back, she would look like she had been crying. Her name was Cassandra. And to Vince, she was beautiful. He didn't know why, as all the other boys didn't pay any mind to her, but to him, she was special.
He would wonder why she cried, and would always think how beautiful she would look if she smiled.
He had never seen her smile.
* * * *
Vince had lived in the same house for his entire life. So had Cassandra. They lived on the same street, him somewhere in the middle, and hers down about five houses, on the corner. Vince wasn't the most sociable person, some might label him anti-social. He also wasn't interested in exercise; he stayed lean by metabolism alone. He did love walking at night to clear his mind, however. Late, when everyone else in the house was asleep. He lived with his mom and two brothers. He didn't love them, he tolerated them.
It was a little past midnight. He walked down to the corner, and was about to round the corner, when he saw a light in a window. It was Cassandra's house. He looked around. Timidly, he walked up the lawn and peeked into the window. It was a spartanly furnished room, with a queen-size bed that had a green cover, a shelf, a table with a few papers, and a chair. And Cassandra, sitting on the bed, back against the headboard, knees tucked under he chin, hands wrapped around her legs, crying. Sobbing into her knees.
Vince had trouble deciding what to do. There was the girl that he had secretly admired since he could remember, crying. Would tapping on the window be wrong? Could he do it? No. His mind said to tap on the window, but his body didn't listen. He stood there, looking. Again, he tried. He thought to his arm move! do something! but nothing happened. The other part of his mind was second-guessing, telling him what trouble he'd get into.
The sobbing stopped. Or at least it slowed. He held his breath, hoping that she wouldn't come out and demand him to explain himself, tell him to get lost, call the police. Silence greeted his nervous mind, almost to the point where he left. But through some great struggle, he stayed, and waited. And then the window opened.
He looked in again, and said, "Hi."
She looked back with those big, green, wet eyes. And said 'hi' back.
"Umm... I saw you crying, and... can I come in?" Vince didn't know where those last four words came from. She nodded.
He climbed up the window, onto the bed that was up against the wall that had the window. She went back to her original spot, knees tucked under her chin, arms around her legs. Now, she didn't cry, but looked at Vince with those green eyes, expectantly.
"So... why do you cry all the time?"
She kept staring.
"OK then.... then why did you let me in?"
She cocked her head to the side, as if thinking, then said, "I don't know. You're... different. In a good way, I guess."
"Thanks, I guess. I'm not sure why I knocked on the window..."
"Fate."
"What?"
"It was... fate. I can feel it," she said. She left out how she knew, though.
It was Vince's turn to stare at her. She was an enigma wrapped in a quandary shrouded behind a mystery. He knew nothing of love. He didn't want to. He didn't consider this love, and it wasn't. It was the innate feeling that he should help and protect here, that it would give him a good, warm feeling in his gut. That it would be a symbiotic relationship.
He tentatively decided to repeat the first inquiry as the awkward silence continued. "Why do you cry so much?"
She unfolded a tale of sorrow and pain. Suffering and humiliation beyond all points of decency. The tale of her childhood started with her drunk mother and hateful father. The mother didn't give a damn what happened to her daughter, and the father would often come home from work in a rage, and more than once would beat and rape his wife. Only, she was too drunk to care. When she wasn't, she actually seemed to enjoy it, beating and all.
And there was little Cassandra, so delicate, so beautiful... such an easy target. It was inevitable, it was. Daddy got bored with Mommy and noticed just how good looking his daughter was. Vince could hardly imagine it, but through the horror of the unfolding of the story, he got one thing. His eyes. They were like the eyes of a shark... doll's eyes. Emotionless. The man was what all societies would consider a monster.
And so at the tender age of two, Cassandra lost her virginity. Along with that came the beatings. There were several hospitals in the area, as it was Malta's capital city of Sicily. They would go to different ones, and if anyone ever noticed that she had a habit for breaking bones, and had a few scars, it was wrote off as the numerous slave-related injuries that were incurred on the plantations, which covered most of Malta, and encroached the outer suburbs of Sicily.
According to her, it had been that way since. There had been down-periods, where he had gone off to elsewhere, leaving young Cassandra with her useless mom, who has since moved out, leaving her daughter to the mercies of her abusive dad. That was a year ago. And now... now there were no down-times. The only peace she had was the peace of sleep, and even then nightmares plagued her. She had thought of suicide several times, and even tried it once. Her dad had caught her.
Outraged that she would think of depriving him of his entertainment, he had tripled the usual perverted punishment.
She finished talking, chest racked with sobs. She fell forward onto Vince shoulder, tears leaking on his shirt. He did the only thing he could think of. Moved by the story, with nothing else on his mind, he kissed her.
And to his surprise, and to her surprise, too, she kissed back. Before either knew what was happening, they were under the covers, and their clothes pealed off smooth as silk. Vince's hands ran over her back... and felt knobby scars that ran from side to side, horizontally. His mind cried out as if he himself had been hurt.
* * *
Vince regained consciousness a while later. He remembered, though, what had happened in the bed he still lay in. He looked to his right to see Cassandra, snuggled under the covers against his side. He had never felt better, nor more alive. He kissed her nose, and she murmured something in her sleep. He slipped out of bed, donned his clothes, and went back out the window, leaving a note that told her which window on his house to come to the next night.
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