Post by Alexander Raven on Aug 23, 2023 23:15:07 GMT -5
Questions
Scene One
There was this nagging feeling in the back of his mind. He remembered being trapped in that chest. He remembered being trapped in that crate. Yet staring at it, he had no recollection of it being his prison. He heard Leon speaking to Welsh. Letting him know that things were going to plan. The truth had been revealed at that moment. Welsh had taken a deal with the devil and teamed with the man who had spent his life ruining Alex’s. He had seen it, re-watching the broadcast. He had mulled it over in his mind, over and over. He knew what he had seen when Leon… was it Leon? Who pulled him from the sea? Who even knew where to look? Why would Leon have been there?
Leon was dead.
This ship, logic would say the impossible could not happen. But they had witnessed it rise from its very own watery grave. The Triad was summoning the very ghosts of the past from their tombs. The Invisible Hands themselves had tried to pull him to his own watery grave. He had witnessed a woman who should have been broken beneath twenty one shotgun punches to the face, simply smile and shake it off. His foundations of reality had been rattled. The world was not his safe place anymore. The dangers of his father seemed so far away.
This ship was a statement of the impossibility. That ghosts were real. That the past was able to haunt him even still. But questions laid unanswered. He needed to find them. He needed to find all the answers. He couldn’t see Welsh. The lying manipulative little weasel that he is, he would hide behind the faux smiles and the placating attitude. No truth from him. Wolf and Strat, he felt they were at least not likely to stab him in his chest, he doubted they knew any more of his personal demons than he did. Part of him wished to assume some guilt of the former jet pilot Thad. Any reason to rip that man’s flesh from bone would be justifiable. Maybe he’d do it anyway.
No. None of them could help.
All the trials had proven one thing. That the tribalism, the ‘friendships’ and camaraderie fell apart when the egotistical got involved. One thing was certain. Vhodka, Wolf and the Stratfords had always planned to keep it within the family, and he couldn’t slight them for it. It was almost a benefit that he had spent the entire of the Bravery Trials battling his own demons. Battling his own past. He didn’t need the fake friends. He didn’t need to pretend and lie. The irony in the Raven, was he was far more a lone wolf than he was anything else.
So who could he ask?
Maybe it was time to stop running from the past. Maybe it was time to stop escaping the ghosts. Maybe it was time to face himself.
Flames of our Past
Scene Two
“Where we are now, compared to where we started. It’s an interesting schism in the way we see the world. I’ve wanted nothing more than to see you collapse beneath the weight of all of this Lachlan. I’ve wanted nothing more than to validate myself, validate my decisions. Validate everything that I say. Yet, the irony of it all. I’m the one who has consistently been crushed under the weight of it all. Both of us, are close to losing our minds. A dark passenger for you, the screaming ghosts of my past for me.”
On cue, guttural cries. The mixture of a shrieking woman, a deep guttural of a man, the whimpers of a child. The mixture fills the air. Alexander Raven stands in front of a wash basin, long since rusted over. A cracked mirror, covered with algae and other sea growths. A long forgotten washroom of the HMS Atalanta.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is true of everything we do, Lachlan. The parts of ourselves we deny, they become… the truth. The truth that is unavoidable, regrettable as it may be. Actions made but unable to be avoided. You and I run a mirrored path, though our journeys differ. Broken is the man who lays beneath the Sword of Damocles. It hangs and it decides our fate. When the blade drops, Lachlan. Will we join the ghosts of our past?”
The flick of a lighter, he holds the small flame out in front of him. The murky mirror beneath the aquatic growths shimmers slightly. The light struggling to pierce its blackened veil. He reaches into his pocket with the other hand and pulls a small newspaper free. Rolled up, resembling a torch.
“Flames are my escape. Flames are the way I purge the filth. Flames are what guided me to where I am. Humour covers the pain, and they all laugh. It’s easy to laugh, it’s easy to pretend. It’s easy to ignore the ghosts, Lachlan. But here, we cannot avoid the past. Under the watchful gaze of the manipulative masters, will the flames release us?”
He lights the paper, and holds it out in front of him. Returning the lighter to his pocket, he touches the flaming paper to the wet growth. Warming it, attempting to set light to it. The paper burned brightly and slowly.
Recollection
Scene Three
It was interesting how quiet things were here. Maybe, there was truth in it. Truth in the existence of Leon Trucose. Why would there be a ghost, if he was truly alive? Yet that couldn’t be. He knew that it couldn’t. Dead men don’t come back from the grave.
“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How much of this really exists?”
He still held the flaming paper out, the flames beginning to catch, slowly burning onto the wet growths. Slow, but the embers were catching.
“A week of you, and I still don’t believe it.”
“You ever look in the mirror, and wonder who the man looking back is? I did, for a long time, Alex. Why had my friends betrayed me? Why had my friends run me away?”
The flare of flames, the heat beginning to overcome the wet. The murky mirror, cracked and damaged, shimmered beneath the growing embers.
“You don’t need to answer. We’ve already worked it all out, haven’t we, Alex? I’m dead. Always have been, always will be. Truth hurts, but, hey. It’s not so bad being a ghost.”
A piercing pain shot through his skull. His mind is aching. Memories. He wasn’t in the box, but he was. Just not when he should have been.
“Then again, this very ship shouldn’t exist. Yet here it stands, isn’t that right, Alex? Am I real? Are any of us, real?”
The hands on his shoulder. He tensed up and swung, the flames flicking across the room. Nothing there, the paper dropping from his hand. The old ship managed its best to resist the embers, but small spot fires began to pick up. The mirror was now of the greens, having burnt all through. He reached out, and wiped the mirror. Through the cracks, the muck and dirt, a reflection.
The smile.
The hands. The grip.
The smoke was suffocating.
False Gods
Scene Four
“In God we trust. We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which I stand, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Men have started wars for lesser reasons, yet the patriotic will always scream about freedom and God. How has your God repaid you, MERICA? Chet walked out on you. A failure in his eyes, and in that of the greater populace. A failure of a patriot. A failure. We’re all fucking failures here, MERICA.”
Alex has hunched over the rusted basin. Where there was once algae and seaweed, now stood a broken mirror. The room was slowly beginning to be filled with flames. A banging on the door. Panicked cries from beyond. A woman shrieking, a guttural cry of pain from a man. A whimpering child. Smoke filling the room. An unknown person, hands on the shoulders of Alexander Raven. His eyes fixated on the mirror. A reflection only of himself.
“I was born in this country. The child of immigrants. First generation American if you will. I lavished in the freedoms offered to me, yet my eyes would cast back across the sea. I am travelled. I have seen the fucking world, I have lived it, MERICA. I am not a child of liberty, I am a child of true freedom. Unafraid of making my mark, but free of the shackles of oppression that this country truly places upon us. Delusion is the name of the game, and we open this final night with delusions far greater than any other. The freshly snapped Lachlan Kane. The downtrodden and broken MERICA. The collapsed mind of Alexander Raven.”
He swings around violently, the person fading almost instantly. The wafts of black smoke, mixed with clearer silhouettes. Ghosts of the past. In the mirror, a new reflection. Hands holding strings, strings attached to the back of Alexander Raven. To his limps, to his head. One to his very brain itself.
“I was once the messiah for the broken. I left this country in search of something greater. A family, a love. My wife, my friends. A new beginning. Yet the world would not allow me to be happy. A friend… a man by the name of Leon Trucose. A man who spent his life trying to ruin mine. He took advantage of my ailing wife. Took the final moments of her love, and turned them sour. He took my friends and turned them into liars. Made them hide the truth from me, for fear of the man who lay deep in my own mind.”
He went to step forward, the reflected hands pulling back. He was yanked backwards, smacking aggressively against the sink. The banging on the door continuing. The ghosts swirling into the very smoke itself. The shrieking, the guttural cries and the whimpers. The hands themselves extending from an image of the Triad. The words BRAVERY, STRENGHT and WIT carved into the arms of the triangle. Of the Triad.
“Freedom brought me back to oppression. Freedom is oppression for us, MERICA. So in the flames of rebirth, of retribution. I offer you an escape. The same escape I offer Lachlan Kane. Freedom from it all. To be braver than they think we are. To give in to the truth. In God we Trust… no longer.”
“Be free, MERICA.”
Truth
Bravery Finale
He felt the invisible force, holding him in place. The wafting smoke. He could hear the people banging on the door, trying to open it. He wasn’t to be left alone again after the events prior to the SS Triad, but it seemed even the oversight may not have been enough.
“Are you ready to face the truth, Bird boy?”
The swirling smoke. The invisible hands themselves rose from the flames. A mirror image. The man whose face had been obscured. The man who had plotted against him. How could he rise from the ship itself?
“Time to open your eyes.”
The man reached up, and pulled the hood down.
It was like a mirror.
Alexander Raven stared down Alexander Raven. The invisible hands holding the strings. The Triad gods themselves holding him in place. It was like a rush. Memories flooding in. An innocent man placed in the chest, the smile on his own face. No, not his own. Leon’s face. But, it was his. He raised his hands, grabbing at his head. The reflected Alex mirror the movement. Memories of the past few months flashed through his mind.
He remembered borrowing Luna’s phone. Making a call to Marcus Welsh. Instructing him to call Alexander Raven. To tell him Leon Trucose was dead. The burning of his own luggage, leaving nothing but the all white outfit of Peru. He watched his own hands set fire to it, but.. it wasn’t him.
The gifted shorts, the needle and thread. Standing there sewing his own pockets shut. The tweet from himself saying he would sew his pockets shut. They were his hands, these were his fucking memories. But they weren’t him. It couldn’t be him.
“Time to face the truth, Alexander.”
The reflected one stepped forward, gripping him around the throat. Pushing him forward and turning him. Turning him to the mirror. Making him face his own reflection. Here on the ship of ghosts, in a burning room of his own making. The screams of his mother, the agonising cries of his own father, and his own whimpers of fear filled the air. The mirror showed only him. Only Alexander Raven.
Leon Trucose was dead.
The nameless had become the dead.
The door burst open, the rush of fresh air causing an inrush of oxygen to the flames. It was almost like a bomb, the flames exploded outwards, throwing Alex from the washroom. He could hear the whoosh of fire extinguishers. Hands on him, dragging him to safety. A hand on his shoulder, familiar.
“Close call, bird boy.”
He looked but the person was already gone. His eyes rolling backwards.
And then he was unconscious.
Taken by darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
Scene One
There was this nagging feeling in the back of his mind. He remembered being trapped in that chest. He remembered being trapped in that crate. Yet staring at it, he had no recollection of it being his prison. He heard Leon speaking to Welsh. Letting him know that things were going to plan. The truth had been revealed at that moment. Welsh had taken a deal with the devil and teamed with the man who had spent his life ruining Alex’s. He had seen it, re-watching the broadcast. He had mulled it over in his mind, over and over. He knew what he had seen when Leon… was it Leon? Who pulled him from the sea? Who even knew where to look? Why would Leon have been there?
Leon was dead.
This ship, logic would say the impossible could not happen. But they had witnessed it rise from its very own watery grave. The Triad was summoning the very ghosts of the past from their tombs. The Invisible Hands themselves had tried to pull him to his own watery grave. He had witnessed a woman who should have been broken beneath twenty one shotgun punches to the face, simply smile and shake it off. His foundations of reality had been rattled. The world was not his safe place anymore. The dangers of his father seemed so far away.
This ship was a statement of the impossibility. That ghosts were real. That the past was able to haunt him even still. But questions laid unanswered. He needed to find them. He needed to find all the answers. He couldn’t see Welsh. The lying manipulative little weasel that he is, he would hide behind the faux smiles and the placating attitude. No truth from him. Wolf and Strat, he felt they were at least not likely to stab him in his chest, he doubted they knew any more of his personal demons than he did. Part of him wished to assume some guilt of the former jet pilot Thad. Any reason to rip that man’s flesh from bone would be justifiable. Maybe he’d do it anyway.
No. None of them could help.
All the trials had proven one thing. That the tribalism, the ‘friendships’ and camaraderie fell apart when the egotistical got involved. One thing was certain. Vhodka, Wolf and the Stratfords had always planned to keep it within the family, and he couldn’t slight them for it. It was almost a benefit that he had spent the entire of the Bravery Trials battling his own demons. Battling his own past. He didn’t need the fake friends. He didn’t need to pretend and lie. The irony in the Raven, was he was far more a lone wolf than he was anything else.
So who could he ask?
Maybe it was time to stop running from the past. Maybe it was time to stop escaping the ghosts. Maybe it was time to face himself.
Flames of our Past
Scene Two
“Where we are now, compared to where we started. It’s an interesting schism in the way we see the world. I’ve wanted nothing more than to see you collapse beneath the weight of all of this Lachlan. I’ve wanted nothing more than to validate myself, validate my decisions. Validate everything that I say. Yet, the irony of it all. I’m the one who has consistently been crushed under the weight of it all. Both of us, are close to losing our minds. A dark passenger for you, the screaming ghosts of my past for me.”
On cue, guttural cries. The mixture of a shrieking woman, a deep guttural of a man, the whimpers of a child. The mixture fills the air. Alexander Raven stands in front of a wash basin, long since rusted over. A cracked mirror, covered with algae and other sea growths. A long forgotten washroom of the HMS Atalanta.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is true of everything we do, Lachlan. The parts of ourselves we deny, they become… the truth. The truth that is unavoidable, regrettable as it may be. Actions made but unable to be avoided. You and I run a mirrored path, though our journeys differ. Broken is the man who lays beneath the Sword of Damocles. It hangs and it decides our fate. When the blade drops, Lachlan. Will we join the ghosts of our past?”
The flick of a lighter, he holds the small flame out in front of him. The murky mirror beneath the aquatic growths shimmers slightly. The light struggling to pierce its blackened veil. He reaches into his pocket with the other hand and pulls a small newspaper free. Rolled up, resembling a torch.
“Flames are my escape. Flames are the way I purge the filth. Flames are what guided me to where I am. Humour covers the pain, and they all laugh. It’s easy to laugh, it’s easy to pretend. It’s easy to ignore the ghosts, Lachlan. But here, we cannot avoid the past. Under the watchful gaze of the manipulative masters, will the flames release us?”
He lights the paper, and holds it out in front of him. Returning the lighter to his pocket, he touches the flaming paper to the wet growth. Warming it, attempting to set light to it. The paper burned brightly and slowly.
Recollection
Scene Three
It was interesting how quiet things were here. Maybe, there was truth in it. Truth in the existence of Leon Trucose. Why would there be a ghost, if he was truly alive? Yet that couldn’t be. He knew that it couldn’t. Dead men don’t come back from the grave.
“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How much of this really exists?”
He still held the flaming paper out, the flames beginning to catch, slowly burning onto the wet growths. Slow, but the embers were catching.
“A week of you, and I still don’t believe it.”
“You ever look in the mirror, and wonder who the man looking back is? I did, for a long time, Alex. Why had my friends betrayed me? Why had my friends run me away?”
The flare of flames, the heat beginning to overcome the wet. The murky mirror, cracked and damaged, shimmered beneath the growing embers.
“You don’t need to answer. We’ve already worked it all out, haven’t we, Alex? I’m dead. Always have been, always will be. Truth hurts, but, hey. It’s not so bad being a ghost.”
A piercing pain shot through his skull. His mind is aching. Memories. He wasn’t in the box, but he was. Just not when he should have been.
“Then again, this very ship shouldn’t exist. Yet here it stands, isn’t that right, Alex? Am I real? Are any of us, real?”
The hands on his shoulder. He tensed up and swung, the flames flicking across the room. Nothing there, the paper dropping from his hand. The old ship managed its best to resist the embers, but small spot fires began to pick up. The mirror was now of the greens, having burnt all through. He reached out, and wiped the mirror. Through the cracks, the muck and dirt, a reflection.
The smile.
The hands. The grip.
The smoke was suffocating.
False Gods
Scene Four
“In God we trust. We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which I stand, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. Men have started wars for lesser reasons, yet the patriotic will always scream about freedom and God. How has your God repaid you, MERICA? Chet walked out on you. A failure in his eyes, and in that of the greater populace. A failure of a patriot. A failure. We’re all fucking failures here, MERICA.”
Alex has hunched over the rusted basin. Where there was once algae and seaweed, now stood a broken mirror. The room was slowly beginning to be filled with flames. A banging on the door. Panicked cries from beyond. A woman shrieking, a guttural cry of pain from a man. A whimpering child. Smoke filling the room. An unknown person, hands on the shoulders of Alexander Raven. His eyes fixated on the mirror. A reflection only of himself.
“I was born in this country. The child of immigrants. First generation American if you will. I lavished in the freedoms offered to me, yet my eyes would cast back across the sea. I am travelled. I have seen the fucking world, I have lived it, MERICA. I am not a child of liberty, I am a child of true freedom. Unafraid of making my mark, but free of the shackles of oppression that this country truly places upon us. Delusion is the name of the game, and we open this final night with delusions far greater than any other. The freshly snapped Lachlan Kane. The downtrodden and broken MERICA. The collapsed mind of Alexander Raven.”
He swings around violently, the person fading almost instantly. The wafts of black smoke, mixed with clearer silhouettes. Ghosts of the past. In the mirror, a new reflection. Hands holding strings, strings attached to the back of Alexander Raven. To his limps, to his head. One to his very brain itself.
“I was once the messiah for the broken. I left this country in search of something greater. A family, a love. My wife, my friends. A new beginning. Yet the world would not allow me to be happy. A friend… a man by the name of Leon Trucose. A man who spent his life trying to ruin mine. He took advantage of my ailing wife. Took the final moments of her love, and turned them sour. He took my friends and turned them into liars. Made them hide the truth from me, for fear of the man who lay deep in my own mind.”
He went to step forward, the reflected hands pulling back. He was yanked backwards, smacking aggressively against the sink. The banging on the door continuing. The ghosts swirling into the very smoke itself. The shrieking, the guttural cries and the whimpers. The hands themselves extending from an image of the Triad. The words BRAVERY, STRENGHT and WIT carved into the arms of the triangle. Of the Triad.
“Freedom brought me back to oppression. Freedom is oppression for us, MERICA. So in the flames of rebirth, of retribution. I offer you an escape. The same escape I offer Lachlan Kane. Freedom from it all. To be braver than they think we are. To give in to the truth. In God we Trust… no longer.”
“Be free, MERICA.”
Truth
Bravery Finale
He felt the invisible force, holding him in place. The wafting smoke. He could hear the people banging on the door, trying to open it. He wasn’t to be left alone again after the events prior to the SS Triad, but it seemed even the oversight may not have been enough.
“Are you ready to face the truth, Bird boy?”
The swirling smoke. The invisible hands themselves rose from the flames. A mirror image. The man whose face had been obscured. The man who had plotted against him. How could he rise from the ship itself?
“Time to open your eyes.”
The man reached up, and pulled the hood down.
It was like a mirror.
Alexander Raven stared down Alexander Raven. The invisible hands holding the strings. The Triad gods themselves holding him in place. It was like a rush. Memories flooding in. An innocent man placed in the chest, the smile on his own face. No, not his own. Leon’s face. But, it was his. He raised his hands, grabbing at his head. The reflected Alex mirror the movement. Memories of the past few months flashed through his mind.
He remembered borrowing Luna’s phone. Making a call to Marcus Welsh. Instructing him to call Alexander Raven. To tell him Leon Trucose was dead. The burning of his own luggage, leaving nothing but the all white outfit of Peru. He watched his own hands set fire to it, but.. it wasn’t him.
The gifted shorts, the needle and thread. Standing there sewing his own pockets shut. The tweet from himself saying he would sew his pockets shut. They were his hands, these were his fucking memories. But they weren’t him. It couldn’t be him.
“Time to face the truth, Alexander.”
The reflected one stepped forward, gripping him around the throat. Pushing him forward and turning him. Turning him to the mirror. Making him face his own reflection. Here on the ship of ghosts, in a burning room of his own making. The screams of his mother, the agonising cries of his own father, and his own whimpers of fear filled the air. The mirror showed only him. Only Alexander Raven.
Leon Trucose was dead.
The nameless had become the dead.
The door burst open, the rush of fresh air causing an inrush of oxygen to the flames. It was almost like a bomb, the flames exploded outwards, throwing Alex from the washroom. He could hear the whoosh of fire extinguishers. Hands on him, dragging him to safety. A hand on his shoulder, familiar.
“Close call, bird boy.”
He looked but the person was already gone. His eyes rolling backwards.
And then he was unconscious.
Taken by darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
