My Sacha

Prologue

Clutched to the breast of a boy, an animal. A tom whose whiskers were far too long, awkwardly catching the light and reflecting it with the intensity of shaved diamond; bones that jutted unnaturally, a catlike jaunt reduced to an anorexic crawl. Sacha held him with a look of utmost ferocity painted upon his young face, and for a moment I lamented seeing him in a state of youthful urgency. Sacha is my partner, my king. Never did I expect to see him in such a vulnerable state reflecting both his own tenuous adolescence and the fragility in the kingdom I have built for him.

I beckoned to him with index and middle fingers, but he met my glance with the sorest of expressions and idly looked to both my own soldiers and the soldiers of enemy camp. He knew the cavalry had come; I was at the front of the line and surely he knew me to be both Captain of the Guard and his fiancé. His rejection stung, and as I made a fist the fingerless-leather of my gloves clenched with an almost-human sort of crunch that reflected my mood with admirable integrity.

He began to vomit blood, and blushed, strings of meaty ichor hanging from his canines. He had been taking acetaminophen, he admitted, quelling the cries of both friend and foe medic. Eight-thousand milligrams a day, he wanted to damage his liver and die a slow and labourious death. Rotting on the inside and unmistakably pretty on the outside, he was the picture-perfect embodiment of contradiction and looked to me with something akin to alacrity upon his handsome face. Below him, his spew collected in the formation of an unblinking eye.

He heaved once, and everything changed; his expression was wiped, replaced with prurient urgency. His thick, boyish brows began to knit, and his heavy lids eclipsed bright golden eyes. Looking at him, one got the unshakable mental image of a child reaching to parent with spread fingers and blissfully stapled lip, the epitome of desperation – and as he lurched forward I ran to catch him, sheathing my scythe at my hip and ultimately holding his small and trembling frame in my experienced, weathered protector-arms.

I heard my men enter modest combat with the other soldiers in the room, but no one except us existed as I held my boy with a double-handed grip that melded his body against mine with an almost artful efficiency. I knew I had been created to fulfill his romantic, spiritual needs – or, in this scenario, as my birth prefaced his perhaps vice versa – and yet our overwhelming compatibility did little to quell the aching dry sobs racking my body. His fingertips scrambled to find a tender crevice upon the broad expanse of my back, something my leather armouring did not cover, and when he found a scrap of meat, something raw and innately me, he dug so deeply that he drew blood, then quelled in my arms with a soft shudder and an almost feminine flutter of the lids.

At some point in the evening the small barrel of a low calibre handgun had been pointed at the tom, and it left this world with more than one similarity to its nascent assailant; the bullet, not unlike the tom, had been birthed from a small hole with alarming force with little to no bystanders to celebrate its existence. The difference, however, was the unconditional love Sacha had bestowed upon one of these beings.

We left, my second-hand man, Ryder, holding my boy in his arms while I gave the cat, my darling’s saving grace, in a shallow grave atop the hill overlooking his captive bedroom window. It was a shoddy job, and at one point I had to jab one protruding paw underneath the soil with the brunt of my scythe (a disgrace to a heavenly weapon) and ultimately left the whole affair feeling like a well-meaning failure.

Sacha was “more or less, a mess” as evaluated by my medic. Suffering from a herpes viral infection of the eye (latent) and mouth (flared, as proved by the scab upon his lower lip) and elevated TSA levels due to his self-inflicted liver-damage, he was in pains both superficial and deep. He suffered from hand, foot and mouth disease due to poor living situations, although it appeared the virus had just about run its course and would soon wave white flags over the tender red crown of his head. He had a nasty case of tinea pedis (ringworm of the foot, more commonly known as athlete’s foot) that had him scratching even during spells of deep sleep. It shocked and disturbed me to see the physical manifestations of the squalid living conditions under which my love had been forced to suffer (mentally, physically, emotionally, sexually) but there was nothing I could do other than oversee the various dosages of his medications and hope he would wake eventually in considerably less discomfort.

When Sacha did awaken, he was coxsackie and fungus free, and the unwelcomed cold sore gracing the lower left portion of his bottom lip had faded to a rather endearing pink swelling that gave his face a lopsided pout.

I smiled at him from his bedside, and he reddened and refused to look me in the eye.

“They gave me herpes,” he said, violently wringing his hands together. I watched his face; he nervously chewed upon the unafflicted side of his lip, his nostrils flit nervously in a childish display of distracting spasms. I leaned forward, clasping my hands together and attempting to catch his eye. Once again, I failed.

“I know,” I offered softly. A pause, in which the only audible noise was the soft masticating upon the gentle tissues of his lip. “That doesn’t change anything, you know. Between us.”

I had expected some variant of relief from him, perhaps even graciousness; but the only thing he saw appropriate and relevant was to shoot me one of the most venomous expressions I had seen in my life. After four hundred years of destroying the evilest of criminals who would kill my men, rape my country’s children, impregnate my country’s women, I had never seen such a foul look – he seemed to have swallowed a lemon – and my smile was bittersweet. Those pursed lips and glassy-child eyes did nothing to contribute to the look of absolute ire painted across his face with almost laughable impertinence.

“Who says there’s anything between us?!”

I’ve always enjoyed a challenge.