Sins of the Reaper - Finale

As I hold El's hand, my eyes mist with tears of relief, love and shame together. "I'm a monster," I whisper, but I do not turn away from her still gaze.

I cannot turn away, not now, not ever.

"Do not blame yourself for the deeds of others, Jon. You are free. Free to reinvent yourself. Free to be who you were always intended to be."

"But all those men ... dead because of me."

"Dante led them to their deaths and the Reaper was there waiting for them."

"Reaper? He killed them?" I ask in astonishment.

"Yes, my love. He followed you because he knew that they would come to either turn or kill you."

"And you and Dr. Portinari knew all along?"

"I knew, and that was enough. I found the Reaper before I found you. He was the one that told me you still lived. Save for that, we would never have found you. We would never have even looked."

Ever since I remembered fully what had happened and why, I had ached for revenge. The suddenness of her revelation stunned me to silence.

I remembered the day prior when I faced Dante and his thugs in that meadow. I remembered how it felt as the dragon awakened within me, twisting and coursing from my balls to my bowels, my stomach shivering with long, forgotten hunger, my throat raw with the desire for vengeance against Reaper above all others.

I saw the terror of the storm in my opponents' eyes as the lightning flashed in the distance and I grinned savagely with anticipation.

You reap what you sow. The Reaper is nothing compared to me.

“And if we leave?" Dante had asked me. But I knew he'd never back down from the hellish beast only now beginning to rouse itself like a Jove.

“Then leave and the eight of us will live," I answered angrily. "But not the Reaper. You tell him for me his time is up. He's had thirty years and seven days to finish the job. But somehow," I thunder, "that was still not enough time!’

After a bolt of lightning and crash of thunder sounded together, terrible darkness engulfed them with the terror of the ghosts that had haunted me for thirty years.

Even though nothing could be heard above the fury of the dead's echoing thunder, I shrieked within the darkness with terrible oaths, condemning them to my reawakening savagery. Even though nothing could be seen, I danced with demonic glee as invisible bullets plowed through their feeble ranks, men crying out in terror and pain that not even God could hear over the sound of my wrath.

I ripped off my shirt in that glorious darkness, baring my chest to their snipers and damnation, howling unheard amidst the roaring thunder of the storm, "Who is like unto the beast?”

The dragon writhing to free itself from my flesh, I felt an eternal hatred boiling within my bones.

I am born of the flames and they of the dust – I am better than them.

"Who is like unto the beast," I roared, "who is able to make war with him?"

But when a pair of gentle arms reached around my chest and gripped me with tender mercy, my cries of rage died within my throat, my body trembling with emotion and hope that I had not indulged for half a lifetime.

And then sweeping me off my feet, El soared into the darkened skies like Brünnhilde carrying Siegfried to Valhalla, her love piercing the surrounding darkness. I gazed with unexpected sadness at the carnage below from such heights that I could not discern the prostrate living from the dead.

When we finally landed, her wings still lifted with power and grace, she held me so tightly that I wept in shame. And when she slowly pulled away and gazed unblinking into my eyes, I gazed back without turning away.

Before she spoke, I knew her to be both my lost Lilly and the eternal El who emerged from the chrysalis I witnessed Lilly create as she liquified her flesh in that hospital long, long ago.

"Jon," El speaks softly in the present, her voice and gaze breaking my short revery and returning me to the glade with her. Our glade. Our little slice of Heaven.

"Je t’aime jolie El," I whisper as I stare unblinking into her China blues. "I'm so sorry, El Ur Lilly, that I abandoned you."

But she looks confused, as if she has no comprehension of my meaning. "Did you?" she finally asks.

But I am the one who still does not understand.

"Don't you remember? I left you. I thought you were dying, and I was afraid."

"When did you think I was dying, Jon?"

"Before you became El. Before this," I gesture at her folded wings, even graceful in rest.

"There is no before. There is only El."

"I don't understand."

"There's nothing to understand. Does the butterfly remember the caterpillar? Does the infant remember the zygote?"

"Lilly died that I might live. And Shaytan must die so that Shaddai might live."

"Kiss me, Jon, and live forever," Lilly and El impossibly speaking together.

"Will it hurt," I ask fearfully, the memory of her torment freshly remembered even as I gaze longingly at her pursed and waiting lips.

"Of course, it will, silly. Do you think living forever is easy? Do you believe after all the pain and suffering you have endured that you are owed a short and pain free life? Take what you have suffered for; take what you have earned. I give of it freely.

"Take it now. Kiss, me Jon.

"Kiss me and live."