Chapter Text
POV Nigel
The start of college years is supposed to be fun, even a bit chaotic, okay… more than a bit. But this… this was never supposed to happen. Yet, I suppose everyone whose life is seized by such forces, so brazenly blindsided and still in such a state of innocence as one is at that time, feels this way. Let alone someone who finds themselves stumbling headlong into a murder scheme, or two, or… possibly more, much more, oh, so much more.
God, none of this should have happened, or so we tell ourselves, before we learn better. Why is it the youth are filled with such an insatiable instability, of the most cynically cyclical currents; these tides which rise and fall in eternal ebb and flow, waning from aimless void to operations of God-complex proportions, of radical overhauling needing to be hurled into the flames to quench the fires of their angst? Why did gore and violence—blood offerings, I supposed—of these ancient ways of living find their resurgence in such sophisticated, reformed, and domesticated communities such as ours?
How could someone who acted, seemed, no—was, at one time so filled with poise, control, and dignity, that demanded respect with such ease, just as effortlessly metamorphosize into what we would call absolutely monstrous; kings among their kind, the furthest reaches of what we are? Ones so good at this game they would say that they hid in plain sight, wouldn't they?
Yes, those 'creatures of the night,' able to somehow stand the light of day. Somehow conditioning themselves to withstand the constraints of the tie, if only to rip that accursed thing off as soon as they passed the threshold of their homes. That's always where the monsters lay, don't they?
The freshman years never compare to any other, brimming with hope of new beginnings and possibilities. The sparkle in one's eyes, still yet to be snatched from the backhand of reality to our insolent, innocent cheeks, sets us tumbling downhill through the rest of the years of life; lucky if we make it out alive.
This being more literal for some than others. For us, of course, well… you know this much. You must have seen the papers, the broadcasters, speculating about the who, what, when, where, why.
Well… I'll tell you, but you can't tell. No, I mean really, you can't, because, well, even if you did, by the time you read it through, catching every detail along the way in this story, we'll all be gone, one way or another. So, I guess it doesn't really matter at all; in that sense, I guess that's what I want you to grasp fully. Life, death—they’re more closely linked than we’re led to think. They're not opposites so much as movements of the same current. All of it is, really.
I’ll start from the beginning then. We—myself and Alex—had been freshmen. The rest weren’t even boys anymore, not really. Well, that’s not all true in the sense that I suppose some part of them were still—even if something of the old world lay dormant in them, aged beyond their years far before they knew it themselves—boys at heart in a way, as much as Alex and I were always men in a way too.
So many lives, collapsing into the one, and then those—as in our individual selves—overflowing out these echoes, swirling, colliding into each other as well. We were the worst—perhaps the best—of car crashes of men seen since those holy wars of days of old, though even that distinction fades when seen clearly.
Destiny, it is said, no man—nor boy, for that matter—can outrun. Homer, I think, comes close in reach, though he still had yet a way to go; even so, he knew that even the gods could not slip the thread—καὶ θεοὶ μοῖραν οὐ δύνανται ἐκφυγεῖν. What we call ‘Divine will’ and what we call our own are not so easily divided, stretching into one another far more than we care to admit.
We were those types of boys that didn't even see it coming, the chaos in store for us, for the world, the sorts of which were sorely needed. And without us… well, if not us, who else then would bear the weight of such a movement as this, when it had already begun anyway?
We accepted what was given as something we were already within, and of. No matter what the three goddesses spun for us, we understood on some level how we did not stand apart from the thread. But we were never the victims the world took us for; we were not ones to turn the other cheek unless, of course, we knew more than you; which is to say, we knew the strike was merely the thread moving through. To surrender to what comes, biting down, but never turning away, unless, that is, we chose to, which is to also say, unless it too was part of it… the full experience. For we knew there was only the All, unfurling, as it must.