Pain sat at a corner table. His back to the wall, he made sure that the door remained within his field of vision. He could simply keep his awareness on the door with his level of perception, but there was something more precise about having the world in his field of view rather just within the reach of his senses. The chair he sat on, black as the world under a child’s bed, was made of simple wood. The scuffs beneath the chair had not escaped him when he’d chosen to sit here. It was evidence that for all the high class the restaurant tried to be, it still had people who dragged their chairs across the floor.
Then again, it was always possible that the people responsible for it were the customers and not the employees.
His table, small and round, was covered in a white cloth. It had clearly been ironed but not quite properly. It was almost as if it had not been ironed for any greater reason than it was supposed to be ironed. Pain could understand this, before becoming an Oath, he had been forced to do a lot of things because they had to be done. And by forced, he had forced himself to do them. For all his relationship with his father, the one thing that he learnt and never forgot was that it was a man’s duty to do what had to be done, especially when it had to be done by the man specifically.
A frown touched Pain’s lips as he thought of how there were more things that he had to do. In a few days, Madness and Inevitable would face each other in combat. Whether it was mortal or not was anyone’s guess. The problem was that he did not know what day exactly. And while the potential outcome worried him. He still had his own duty to uphold.
Melmarc Lockwood, he thought. [August Intruder].
He still couldn’t believe that the [August Intruder] had ended up being a child. He’d always thought it would be some seasoned veteran whose struggles and failures and accomplishments would push them over to the other side of evolution and make him or her the [August Intruder]. And even if the person wasn’t seasoned, he had at least expected it to be a Delver.
But a child?
It complicated a lot of things. By all accounts, the child was supposed to be his superior as far as the interface was concerned. Talking to the child with respect was not going to be difficult. Teaching the child was going to be easier than teaching a grown man. The problem was treating the child as an adult. Having the conversations that were necessary in the ways that were necessary to convey the information that had to be conveyed.
He placed his hands on the table and interlaced his fingers, waiting and wondering.
A lot of people liked to claim that bluntness was just the way that they were, but a person who claimed that they were simply blunt had no business communicating. The problem was that a person who claimed that there was no place for bluntness in communication also had no place communicating.
Sometimes, a person needed to understand the full weight of what was happening. In instances like that, they could only appreciate the gravity of what they were being told if told in the harshest way possible. It was unkind, but it was necessary.
But did a child understand this? Would a child understand if he got a little too rough with him? Would he understand that some things can only ever truly be communicated in the harshest ways possible?
Pain could expect an adult to understand it. In fact, he could go along not caring if an adult understood it.
But a child…
He liked it just as much as he did not like it.
Then there was the problem of childish decisions. A child did not know enough to understand the sacrifices that had to be made. They did not possess the experience to help them make the sacrifices even when said sacrifices were understood.
He took a deep breath and let it out.
He’s a good kid, he reminded himself.
Pain was not so proud that he did not know that the only reason he was alive right now was because the boy had willed it. Had Melmarc Lockwood not interfered, Madness would’ve killed him. At the time, he had not known that dying was a fact, only that it was a possibility. But after that fight…
He pressed his lips in a thin line.
The Oaths are growing, he told himself, looking down at his interlocked fingers. He freed his hands and balled one into a fist and opened it. I’ve grown too.
But Madness was a different breed of growth. Madness was… madness. There was really no other way to put it.
And the other Oaths didn’t even understand just how bad that was. To have someone that you could not risk making an enemy of was a thing of terror.
Life knew, Pain thought. The Oath had tried to warn them at the meeting before disappearing into wherever he’d come from, leaving nobody aware of anything.
Inevitability was searching for the man. Pain knew this as cleanly as he knew that he sat on a table. Somehow, for all the Oaths inevitability, Pain doubted the man would find Life. There was just something about Life that told you that he was a far greater amalgamation of secrets than a single person could possess in one life time.
And yet, War and Madness knew.
He could still remember the way they treated the Oath of Life and the way the Oath of Life had reacted to them. It wasn’t just his fear of Madness, there had also been caution towards knowledge. He’d tried not to do too much.
Eyes panning the restaurant, he waited.
The restaurant was narrow, longer than it was wide. Exposed brick ran along one wall. It was painted over in dark red. Pain could not put a finger to how old it could’ve been—the wall and building, not the restaurant—all he could be certain of was that it was old because the paint of dark red had been left to chip for a little too long. The opposite wall was nothing but a mirror from wall to ceiling. It was so fashionably done that it doubled everything. When he looked at it, he stared at another world where there were the exact same people doing the exact same thing, but the left handed became the right handed and the right handed became the left.
It doubled the restaurant. Doubled the world.
He could see the back of his head if he leaned just slightly to the left. But he was not curious enough, he was not interested enough. He did not lean.
A waiter walked past him with a tray balanced high on three fingers. There were four plates balanced on it. Steam rose from each plate. The man was young, maybe twenty-two, if Pain still knew how to match ages with looks—these days people no longer looked their age. Life was either too favorable or too antagonistic. The man moved without looking at Pain, and Pain felt the cramp in the man’s abs. It was interesting to know that people often walked around the world carrying one pain or the other of their own. The world forced them to wear a mask, to hide their pain.
It was always one reason or the other.
The world did not punish pain, not really. But it did not truly have a place for it. Society was not cruel to it; society was numb to it. Pain existed everywhere. There was no pain that a person was experiencing that someone else had not experienced before. Pain was not unique to anyone. And society inherited this knowledge.
In its countless years of existence, there was no bone a person wanted to break that another had not broken at some point in time and carried on. There was no heart attack that another had not experienced before.
He watched the passing waiter and felt a touch of empathy for him. Your pain is not new. It is not unique.
And there in was the sadness in pain.
For all a person thought of their pain, society could not care because society had been shown its very own history that pain was not an excuse, that it was not supposed to stop even if society itself was in pain.
It saddened him a little to know that this was his Oath, to know that this was who he was. Because the one thing he had realized about the Oaths from his brief meeting with Inevitability a few days back was that he differed from some of the Oaths in one way.
They were still understanding their Oaths.
They became Oaths because they embodied their Oaths.
He became an Oath because he understood his. He knew pain before he became Pain.
An odd melancholy settled on him. He picked his glass up from the table and took a sip of his water. It was cool, not necessarily cold, but cool. It was the only way he could describe the temperature.
The waiter stopped at the table of his choice and placed two plates from the tray on it. One belonged to a middle-aged man, the other to a young girl, perhaps the waiter’s age. He lingered for a while, hesitant. Pain guessed he was waiting for his cramp to subside.
The people at the table thanked him, forcing him to move on from them.
Pain felt the slight touch of pain that came with discomfort from the girl at the table. It was a pain he was all too familiar with, a human pain. It was something a lot of people never understood. Pain was not simply the pain that people knew. Pain was the body interpreting discomfort. Humans simply grew to accommodate it. When a child was in discomfort, it cried. When an adult was in discomfort they learned to make expressions or hide it. In truth, that discomfort was pain. Adults just learnt to ignore the discomfort.
The girl sitting with the older man was experiencing the pain of shame, embarrassment.
Pain cocked his head to the side, curious. She did not look like the man. Then again, between the age of twenty and fifty, it wasn’t the easiest thing to recognize resemblances. It was like when people looked at a newborn child and said something along the lines of how they looked like their father or had their mother’s eyes.
He’d never understood it. To him, a newborn child always just looked like some variation of a potato. It was either a fine potato or a not too fine potato.
In the same way, he could not recognize the resemblance. Then the man helped him out without even knowing it. He reached across the table and touched the woman’s arms. The woman did not draw back, but her pain of shame spiked a little.
It made Pain slightly sad to know that in this world, people often needed to go through pain to survive. And they needed to most often than not.
The girl was ashamed because her relationship with the man was the kind that society had told her was wrong. But the man had no such shame in his eyes. In fact, Pain could see the pride in the man’s eyes.
Displeased, he turned his gaze away and settled it on the reason he had been waiting. He’d felt her before she’d even opened the door.
Clad in combat boots and cargo pants, finished with a black tee shirt, Aurora walked in looking like the kind of military badass woman movies always liked to portray. The kind that was no doubt going to hand three men their asses within the next five minutes of the movie.
Her pain hit him like a sledgehammer. It was not the physical pain but the one that she continued to use to mold herself every day. The one she held in her heart yet refused to acknowledge even as her entire life was shaped by it.
He gritted his teeth and pressed his lips in a thin line as she walked straight to his table. This was no time for hostilities, and he wanted to keep it that way.
She stopped when she arrived at the table and looked around.
“All that pain can’t be good for you,” she said in a level of voice that only the both of them would hear.
Pain shrugged. “Sometimes, it is good to understand people.”
She cocked her brow in that way she and Madness knew how to. “And yet you feel no empathy for them.”
It was not a question.
Still, Pain tilted his head to the side, gave her an inquisitive look. “Did you feel empathy for them when you were War?”
Her countenance fell a little. It was so slight that he could’ve believed it if he was told that he had merely imagined it.
“I cannot say that I miss that,” she answered.
“Understandable.” Pain gestured at the seat opposite him. “Please, have a seat. You have shot up the discomfort in the room by countless folds. Sitting would bring it down even if by a little.”
Aurora listened, taking a seat.
Pain raised his hand and looked at his watch. “You made me wait.”
“It is not beyond you to wait,” she replied.
There was something else Pain found interesting ever since Aurora lost her Oath-hood. He did not hold her at the same level he held the rest of humanity. Yes, he did not see her as an equal to the Oaths, but he did not see her as less than him, like the other Gifted and non-Gifted.
It was interesting. And he was sure he was not the only one that noticed it.
“How goes the hunt for Humanity?” she asked, arms folded over her chest, seated like a soldier. It made him wonder if she’d served in the military at some point.
“I am not privy to the things that Inevitability does,” he answered. “What Inevitability does is knowledge that exists only between him and Shield. If you want an answer, ask him or Shield.”
Aurora tapped a thoughtful finger against the table. “Maybe I should, seeing as we may lose the Oath in a few days.”
Pain had nothing to say to that. Her unwavering belief in Madness had always been there, unquestioned.
He sighed, someone was going into a cardiac arrest outside, and he doubted they recognized the pain. Then again, they still had time, maybe ten minutes before it hit. “This is not why we are here.”
“True.” Aurora moved her lips as if the purpose of their meeting displeased her. Pain felt it in her pain, the discomfort of displeasure. “We are here for arrangements.”
“We are.”
“And while I don’t like your Oath, perhaps you are not a bad choice.”
“Oh.” Pain was genuinely surprised. “Why is that?”
She looked at him as if he was dense. “Nobody likes pain.”
“Not that.” He waved her statement aside with a simple gesture. “I meant why do you believe I am not a bad choice, seeing as, you know, nobody likes pain.”
“Something my husband said to me once,” she answered, her eyes wandering in the way a person remembering tended to do. “Pain is the most human trait there is. It is the only real thing that humans know and share.” She looked at him begrudgingly. “Yes, my husband thinks that you are the most human of us all.”
“I don’t know if to feel complimented or insulted,” Pain said, honest.
Aurora sighed. “Complimented.”
“And care to share why?”
“Because my husband believes that humans are the truest things alive. The rest of us,” she made a nonchalant gesture that somehow seemed to encompass the entire restaurant, “Gifted and Oaths alike, we are the ones with the problem.” She sighed. “So, Pain is the best of us.”
“Sounds hard to believe coming from someone who’s tried to kil me twice.”
Aurora sighed. “In his explanation, you were in his way.”
Pain could make sense of that. He had in fact opposed Aurora before Madness had gotten up at the meeting.
“What about when I found out about the [August Intruder]? He wanted to kill me too.”
“What can I say? Just because he believes that you are the best of us, it doesn’t mean that he has to like you.”
That, too, was a reasonable argument.
It was interesting to learn that Madness thought that he was human. It made him think and think deeply.
Pain was indeed the one thing that all humans shared, the one real thing that all humans shared. Things like love and the likes were intangible emotions, fickle and subjective.
Madness was right. Pain was what bonded everyone. It was proof that they were human.
Proof that we are alive.
It was not that he did not already know this. It was just that he did not truly know this. He did not know the true gravity of it. Pain was not the only thing that bound humans. But it was the one real unmistakable thing that bound them.
He wasn’t sure how he felt knowing that even absent, Madness was teaching him about his own Oath that he thought he already understood.
Shaking the knowledge of so as to drive off the incoming melancholy, he leaned forward on the table and looked at Aurora.
“I,” he said, beginning the purpose of their meeting, “have no interest in having supervised visits with the [August Intruder].”
Aurora cocked a brow, looked at him as if he was stupid.
“I see.”
That said, she got up and walked out on him.
The message was clear.
This was not a negotiation.