Turn 11
November 30, 2009
6:00 A. M.
White’s Vault, Portland, Oregon
(Anthony: We now return to the writings of Seth Sears)
(Flow: Because after you’re done with it, there’s such a massive difference between your styles)
(A: Because after you’re done with it, there’s such a massive difference between these stories)
(F: Touché, or should I say check?)
I never slept well in the light. I could pass out, force myself to pass the night away even while a dozen lamps lit up my world, but it just never felt relaxing to do so. While I’ve never had the displeasure of knowing what it’s like to be drunk, I can only imagine the grogginess and back pain associated with a terrible night’s sleep. This must be what a hangover is like.
Which explains the bad taste in my mouth as the lights snapped on, a soft buzz alerting my ears and forcing me awake. While my previous returns to reality were brought about with a certain degree of disparity, an inability to fully process the greater world about me, I found myself able to see everything and anything exactly for what it was this fine morning.
Not that there was much to see. My vault, this prisoner’s sanctuary that Alucard probably built just for me, was mostly devoid of any and all objects. Outside of my cell, the only thing to note was the checkerboard titles beneath and the security camera to the north, glowing red as it hung next to the staircase that would be my exit. The lamp might be worth mentioning, though it had been crushed as if gripped by a titan or some other mythical beast.
Inside the cell was what concerned me now. Seated upon a chair that Alucard had used to monitor me was a dark suit, folded to remain its fresh press and warm, inviting feeling. It couldn’t have been there for more than five or ten minutes as I felt the material, happy to have a fresh change of clothes in over a month. When I had begun to stink Alucard had simply doused me head to toe with a hose, forcing me to deal with the damp dragon trench coat that would be several thousand dollars to replace. Little did I know I’d never wear anything like it, or white in general, for the rest of my days.
Once I was fully dressed and, having smoothed out my now longer set of brown hair past my ears, I was ready to face my captor and whatever dark plan he had for me now. Having grown in power, my red eyes now a fruity orange that made me lust for real food, I was able to walk across the floor and up the stairs perfectly fine with a vitality I had never known, even before I had become sick. An intoxicating mood, one that almost made me wish to extend my days upon the planet.
Unless Alucard had something to say to convince me otherwise, then my plan was set. I had no more reason to live, and a monster like me had no right to either. Since I had already died, suicide didn’t seem like that damning as a sin. In fact, it was me simply fixing the natural order; I had robbed death, and now I would come to turn myself in.
Of course, that’s not how things proceeded. Why is it none of my plans ever work out how I hope?
“So, Black has come to challenge White. Perhaps we can have our game after all.”
It wouldn’t be Alucard I would have to face as I came onto the player’s mat but that of the professor himself, the first time I ever saw the true face of the consulting criminal James Moriarty. He sat in the center of the long hall, wearing a white suit that seemed to be the same brand as mine, clean shaven and hair well cut to contrast my unkempt face and long, shaggy comb over. Now that I could see him for what he was, and with a little bit of help of this hall’s checkered floor, it was finally beginning to become clear the last and final lesson that Moriarty was trying to share.
“Would you take a seat? We have one game left to play, Seth.”
Walking ahead, the white panels turning dark as my dress shoes pressed against them, it was the lighting that gave away the first trick as I approached. My exit was not as secured as I had hoped; a thin, glass panel existed as a sort of barrier between us, the line through the board that kept his throne and mine a good ten feet apart. I’d be forced to converse, or play as he so called it if I hoped to break free, assuming my new found vampiric strength wasn’t enough to destroy this last and final obstacle.
Yet curiosity won out, my body taking a seat even as my mind and soul ticked away and sought the reason for this play. They would have to adhere to the rules of the game though, going second, as Moriarty the White made the opening move.
“It’s grand, isn’t it? This feeling, this body that you now have. Even if it was centuries ago I can still remember how it felt the first morning after I had become a Level Two Mutant, waking up in the blistering cold of Transylvania and finding that I was as warm or cold as I wanted to be. You have a whole new world to enjoy, Seth. It’d be a shame to throw it all away now from simple regret.”
“Yet it’s the price I must pay to make things right. Molly is dead by my hands. Gary faked his suicide to make my appointment look better. Sylvester couldn’t have an heir because of my faulty genetics. My entire life has been one of me screwing up the happiness of others; it’s time for me to pay for my mistakes.”
I always disliked Alucard’s laugh. It was this oddly jovial, demonic sound that a hyena makes right after an easy kill. The only reason I could tolerate it before though was because I thought it to be a scar of his injuries, a side effect of his enhanced healing scabbing over burnt lungs.
Now that the truth had come out though, that the man had merely faked his long term pain, it became all the worst as Moriarty giggled. His sly smile, thin peach colored lips that belonged to an innocent face that would serve as the perfect alibi to any criminal, held no comfort for me as it gave way to the man’s signature laughter, even healthier now that the charade was over. This was the sound that would fill my nightmares, the calling card of ill and the reason for all of my suffering.
“Then let’s examine your life, shall we? Let’s go back and review everything; is the life of Seth Sears the fault of his own, or perhaps it was the plan of someone else. Who is to blame for your tragedies? Yourself, Gary, Jack, Adrian… or perhaps it was someone else?
“We shall go to the beginning. You and Molly are from the East, but came to Oregon for vacation. At least, that’s what the story was, isn’t it? Have you ever wondered why a family from New Jersey decided to come to Oregon?
“It’s because Daddy was given a business offer he couldn’t refuse. A certain man called him up and told him about how he was retiring and offered to give him his supply of materials to make a hundred x-ray machines for the price of one, and wanted to give your father the first chance to buy them given how he was an expert in the field. Since he didn’t want to explain such complicated matters to his kids, he drove them across the country on the pretense of vacation, all the while securing their futures with a business deal that would make him millions. The mysterious benefactor even set them up in the Hilton, located in the heart of his hometown of Portland.”
This was already too specific for me to like the tale, too intimate for me to feel distant. I clutched the handles of my chair, no pain felt in my fingers as I began to scrape against the artistry. Moriarty crossed a leg over another and continued on, all the while narrating the tale as if it was for children.
“While Mommy and Daddy are sleeping though, the mysterious man came to the parking lot and worked on their car in the dead of night, adjusting the brakes so they would fall out if the car went over fifty miles an hour. Then, just to make sure they’d have their little accident, the gremlin configured the acceleration to lock up and increase without driver input once that speed was met.
“All it took was for your parents to get on the highway and join the flow of traffic… and the next thing you know” Moriarty began to raise his hand, arcing it through the air “They’re flying through the railing, choosing to drive off the overpass they were on rather than hurt anyone else, making a perfect bloody sandwich!”
The point was made as the man clapped his hands,
all it took for me to shatter the handles of my expensive chair. Moving forward, enraged and orange eyes glowing brightly and inhumanly, I threw a punch at the glass as he laughed once more… only to bounce back, the shatterproof material so strong as to resist even me, a stage 2 vampire.
Yet Moriarty kept talking, ignoring my little burst of rage as he leaned further back into his seat. “So you figured it out then? Shame, it takes away a bit of my thunder… but you’re right. I was the businessman who tricked your parents, Seth. I’m the one who sabotaged their car and sent them to Heaven. In fact, you should be thanking me; they’re so happy their little boy and girl got to grow up with my replacement for them.’
Replacement? But that meant-
“That was harder. Gary Sears couldn’t have known that I needed him to take you and your sister in specifically, which is why you and Molly were at the orphanage so long… but at the same time I needed there to be a connection, a reason for him to take you two in specifically. So I had his board of directors call for the annual review take place out of town as a sort of vacation for him, leaving his wife and son home to live out their lives. Then, using the same trick to sabotage their car that I used to get your parents killed, I made a void in Gary’s life that was just asking to get filled up by two adorable, heaven sent angles who could relate to the pain that had cost him his joy.
“It was even my idea to test you guys out, convincing him to do a sort of Thanksgiving celebration similar to what Mr. Warbucks did in Annie. Taking an orphan in on the pretense of giving them a life away from such cruelty, leading to their full adoption as he warms up to them; it just reeks of the theater, doesn’t it?”
So shall we review what this monster has done to me? My mother gave birth to Pierre Belmont’s seed in order to create me and Molly on his orders; our parents died because of his intervention, and now my placement into Products for Patriots was schemed by him as well? There’s no way he could have been involved with anything else now, could there?
Of course he could, the man practically counting on his hands the ways he manipulated me.
“You did throw me for a bit of a loop though. It didn’t take long for Gary to start beating you, which wasn’t a part of the memo at all. I couldn’t confront Mr. Sears about it without giving myself away, and my deductions only led to two credible theories, that either Gary was a much more violent man than I had realized or that you yourself was a masochist.
“That you proved them both wrong is rather irksome, but your father paid the price anyway. Gary would have lived a long and happy life if he hadn’t indulged in your Christ Complex; beating a child, for whatever reason though, is grounds for immediate dismissal. So, when you turned eighteen and demonstrated being capable of leading the company yourself, I began to expose your father with the radiation that would give him cancer a short while after. It wasn’t a weapons leak, or at least not an accidental one; it was me, Professor Moriarty, once again.
“Credit where it’s do, I must say Bravo on your part. That plan you two came up with to have Gary hide his cancer and instead tell the media he committed suicide from humiliation as the reason for his death after he lost the company to you? That made you quite the fearsome businessman, Seth. I may be a criminal mastermind, but I would have never come up with anything as maniacal as that.”
Except he had. Everything he said was evidence he not only had thought such things up but had put them into effect. How could I be so blind; how could I have not had known from the moment Alucard told me of Jack commissioning my birth that he was responsible for everything that had occurred? How? How? HOW?
“Of course, this is where things really get interesting. Want to talk about Sylvester Jayden for a moment?”
“No! Shut up! I don’t want to hear it! I don’t want to know!”
“Do you know how much fun it is to play Cupid? That must have been my most enjoyable role since playing the Bishop Myriel to my dear Jean Valjean. I supposed I played him just as well as I played you.”
Another revelation I could do without, red smoke gathering about the man as his good eye began to flow. With one blink of my own James Moriarty had been replaced by an elder, kind hearted face of a man who seemed to be incapable of evil, dressed as a Bishop and fitting the role so perfectly that it must have been Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel himself standing on the other side of the mirror. The resemblance to Moriarty was uncanny, if one could imagine the Englishman aged a few dozen years; the brown hair turned white yet vibrant and abundant thanks to his secret vitality, the sunken eyes glinting with an uncanny knowledge, the white suit now the frock of a good priest.
Good priest. How terrible that Moriarty, of all people, would be the best priest to be known to man save the venerated saints themselves.
“… Change… change back! This is sacrilegious-”
“This is sacrilegious?” The Frenchman asked, his accent so perfect I would have never been convinced otherwise that it wasn’t authentic if I had not known the truth. A certain false feebleness was about it as well, though this was easier to detect given my history with the schemer. “You claim that I’m the one guilty of blasphemy here, Seth?
“You don’t understand anything about humanity then. You don’t understand anything about history, the nature of power, the role of man, or anything if you think I’m in the wrong here!”
“You killed my parents! You killed Gary! You’ve manipulated me every step of the way and you think you’re holy for it?”
“Yes.”
“What a load of bull shit! How the hell can you justify your actions, James? Even now you wear the face of a liar; how on earth can you tell me you’re in the right?”
“Because everything I’ve done, I’ve done for the betterment of everyone; whenever you play your hand, you’re thinking of no one but yourself!”
Pride then. Selfishness. Greed. These vices have been attributed to me so many times they would have fallen on deaf ears had it not come from a man who bore the white mark of a priest. Silent now, arms folded, I let the accuser prattle on with growing uneasiness, the seed of condemnation just beginning to grow now that I had put the emotional priest on edge.
“Bishop Myriel started out as a disguise, a role I used in my travels to France back in the original timeline. During my second timeline, one that I lived out from the beginning, I decided to integrate myself as a priest to the French kingdom once Catholicism became its prominent force of power, already intimate with the past of the English.
“It was me, working on a guide to history for future use for our Heaven group, that caused the legend your Victor Hugo would publish as Les Miserables to occur as Jean Valjean stumbled upon my door. He would take my candlesticks and I would forgive him, just as the story tells…
“But I heard his confession first. I heard him tell me his story, from how he stole bread to feed his starving family to the time he spent in prison. Even if he was tired, beaten, a cruel man trying to make his way in a crueler world I saw, in his eyes, the makings of a hero. I saw someone who would truly care about the needs of others if circumstance could enable him to do so.
“Circumstance has given you the same, but your eyes do not resemble his. No, you have no love for anything that doesn’t belong to you, Seth Sears; that is why I feel no guilt or harm for my actions.”
The red smoke swirled about, the man changing back to his proper image once more as it practically suffocated him. The French Priest gave way to the White suited king, this time anger plain as he went to take a seat, joviality of the game lost now that I had poked too hard. No, this was no longer a game; this was a trial, judge and jury acting against the defendant with sheer bias.
So who would be my executioner?
“I, Moriarty, do not regret a single thing I did to you, Seth, because it was done in the hope to make you a better person. You, lad, had no concern or cause for sorrow every time you decided to screw someone over.
“We don’t need to
look any further than Sylvester Jayden. You relished making those cybernetic bodies for her, throwing in little tweaks here and there in order to satisfy your personal tastes. You never told her, but you manipulated the technology not only to make sure she was naked more often but that she would more easily break; you could have made a bullet proof cyborg back as soon as you were given the Robber Baron data, and never did because you liked being depended upon by your so called wife.”
“And is that so horrible?” I asked, pounding myself in the chest with a fist. “Am I such an animal for doing that? Everyone does it; everyone tries to change others to fit their world view. I’m no different than anyone e… dam it.”
I caught myself in my own trap. My own superiority, my own exalted view, my own pride… had just been thrown away the second it was pressed. No longer could I justify myself as being better; now I was trying to defend my actions because I was like everyone else. Moriarty was already beating me, the judge having heard the defendant himself confess to the crime upon the stand.
Yet still the process drew on.
“Sylvester knew it as well. She loved you, figured out you were a bit of a dick in the end, but loved you nonetheless. Do you want to know how she died? How she really died?”
I took a seat, hands clenching the damaged handles as I did, manning up if only to regain some of my lost status. “You killed her, didn’t you?”
“Indirectly, though the vote would have passed without my support anyway. Jack, myself, Lufaine... even Adrian decided for her execution once she began to harbor those criminal Ete sisters. So you could say I did or didn’t; doesn’t make a difference to me.”
“It should. Good men don’t just sign off on deaths like a Godfather; even if I’m going to hell, I’m pretty sure you’ll go there with me?”
“For sending a mercenary to her death? That’s what mercenaries do, Seth! You pay them, you send them to fight over and over again, and when they run out of steam you let them die in the heat of battle; a mercenary is a pawn, Seth. If you’ve never sacrificed a pawn in a game of chess, then you have the right to cast the first stone.”
I gritted my teeth, scooting about my damaged throne. “Fine. What do you need to tell me about my wife then?”
“She was shot. A bounty hunter, named Zarcon Fett, put a hole through her chest. That gave me enough time to come to her side and take her confession, her dying thoughts lingering on you as she passed on.
“She told me to help you, Seth. Sylvester wanted me to change you, hone your edge until it was perfect. She suspected me of influencing your life, so she begged me to go the full monty and do whatever I could to save your soul, even at the expense of your life.
“So I did. The next day Sherry injected you with a strain of WOLFDIE attuned to your genetic code. Your heart condition has nothing to do with the FTV, Seth; anyone who told you otherwise was lying under my command. You will die this year, Seth, no matter how powerful you grow.
“You will die, a snake and a cipher in the snow. What you do until then is up to you.”
Just like that, the trial concluded, the glass panel shaking as gears caused it to retract into the ceiling, the man in front standing along with it. While I forced myself to sit, afraid I’d attack the man out of anger, Alucard James whatever his name was already began to bid his last and final farewell.
“I’ve loved you like a son, and I’ve hated you like a dirty little pig. I would have had so much pleasure to kill you myself… but you’ve never been holy or hated enough for me to get the order. Consulting criminals never do anything for free; not if there’s money or fame to be had.
“Which is why I have to bid farewell, Seth. Even if I’ve been writing most of your story, this is where I put my pen down. It’s been a pleasure; you turned out to be much more fearsome than me.”
With that he turned, Professor James Moriarty giving a wink as he did. As the vampire moved up the stairs, true to his word, out of my life forward. The bouncing flap of his white suit coat, already growing pink as red smoke rose from the ground to take him away, was the last thing I ever saw or heard of the Englishman with such a huge impact on my life when the clang of military boots began to sound, echoing through the hall.
“Oh no.”
A peacock feathered hat came into view, the fake French priest replaced by a real Frenchman as Pierre Belmont, wearing an olive shirt and khaki Dockers slightly stained from the cigarette he smoked.
“How do the English say it? ‘Ello, gov. Miss me?”
One devil father for another.
Times of Peace: Volume 1 of the side adventures to The Mercenary's Salvation Page 52