Thistledown

This is not to go on record. In fact, if you’re looking at this, you’d better be dying, or already dead. You shouldn’t be looking at this file. It’s one of those “you-should-have-deleted-it-if-you-didn’t-want-anyone-else-reading-it” documents. I naturally assumed that top security clearance would be needed to open this file, but… well, if you’re alive and well and don’t plan on dying anytime soon, you might as well just go ahead and keep reading.

Then kill yourself.

Now to the actual document…

Have you ever loved anyone so much that she made your skin prickle and your breath shorten? Have you ever looked her in the eye and discovered that absolutely everything you need is there? I have, and I shouldn’t have. Our… attraction is forbidden. Her father expressed his desire to keep me away from either one of his daughters. I have no interest in the youngest of the two – skinny, flirty, sleazy, easy.

But her sister…

Now, Kitana is another matter entirely.

Never before have I met a woman who has willingly stood against my wrath for so long, watched as our mutual hatred strengthened and deepened and twisted into… something else. She listened as I explained how the dead, black rose that was once me grow new tendrils of life as it blossomed into… a thistle.

Yes. A thistle.

Why did I choose a thistle instead of a red rose? Well, here’s why:

A red rose has thorns upon the stem, soft petals that hold the morning dew, and a rich fragrance that brings insects and humans alike to its scent. Its colors range from deep red to white, and in special gardens it can achieve unnatural colors like blue and black. You can find roses with no thorns, and undoubtedly, you can avoid the thorns of normal roses without difficulty.

Now a thistle is a different matter.

A thistle is chopped down time and again by rose gardeners, but it always stubbornly pushes its way back up unless its roots are torn from the ground – unlike the delicate rose, which gets cut once and dies, never to return. Its single soft, feathery flower is surrounded by thorns and spikes that guard it like brambles guard the sweetness of blackberries. The flower comes in only two colors: pink and purple. Pink and purple. Hardly a man’s colors. Yet the thistledown is soft and used to line the nests of baby birds. How can something so soft and lovely come from a plant so harsh and spiky, a plant so terrible that it pricks your finger and leaves a drop of blood oozing forth?

Yet I am like that thistle. I have been beaten and kicked around so much that I have hardened my resolve and become hard to handle, always returning despite every attempt at beating me down. I am thorny and spiky and malicious like the thistle, and coming close enough to touch me will often result in a brutal defense that will leave at least one puncture wound. That spiky hatred guards the softness within that has long since gone dormant, my heart hardened and turned cold by the world around me.

Yet Kitana…

Kitana found that thistledown inside of me.

And she shouldn’t have. We shouldn’t have ever even met. Her father, who had the entire city in an iron grip, warned me to stay away from his two daughters. I was only too happy to comply, having no interest in those two hardheaded girls and no desire whatsoever to have a steady, long-lasting relationship. If I wanted, I could have every girl in the city, and I did – renowned as not only the city racing champion, but also a criminal, a murderer, and a rapist.

I didn’t know that I was searching until the day I realized it and stopped. And that very same day, minutes later when I walked into the race garage – I met Kitana.

Although met is hardly the word.

She resembled a coiled Wasteland rattlesnake, tongue lashing with every spoken word, those same words coated in icicles and dripping with venom. I stood up to her, and she surprised me with her ferocity as she fought back, all fangs and claws, shredding my attempts at seducing her. I thought that she was like her sister and would be easy. I was wrong. This woman had never had a sheltered life, spending her entire life in the Krimzon Guard and around battle-hardened soldiers and warriors. She even had her hair cut short and a barbed wire tattoo on her upper left arm to signify her viciousness. And she was vicious – icy, sure, but I sensed a burr in her voice that warned me that if I tried anything, I would regret it.

I did try something. And I regretted it.

Actually, my… reproductive organs regretted it.

Let me just say that I jumped her with a single-minded purpose, and I even held a gun at her head. She didn’t cower and give in like other victims of mine. No, she fought back. She tore her nails through my catsuit and kicked me in my most sensitive spot. I must admit, this sudden turn of events was unfortunate for my raging hormones, but she only intrigued me all the more, especially when she slammed me against the wall and held me there despite my struggles.

And then came the day when the shield walls fell and the Metal Head Wars began again.

She had run into a patrol that forced her toward a gorge. Due to the hurricane, the gorge was full of raging black water, the one thing she feared more than the deep ocean. She fought back, knocking them over the edge, but the mud was slippery, and she fell.

I was standing there.

I remember it as well as if it had happened yesterday. I remember watching, impressed, as she used a stolen Metal Head staff weapon to knock them over the edge of the gorge. I remember as she twisted out of the grip of a falling creature and turned. I remember her sliding, and then…

…falling… to an inevitable death...

I don’t remember thinking about whether or not to go after her. I remember that I thought about watching my mother being dragged away, bloodied and bruised, to be shot while I watched helplessly. I couldn’t just sit back and watch her die when this time, I could change her fate.

I remember leaping, sliding on the mud, and reaching over the edge to grasp her flailing hands. I remember hauling her up.

And looking into her eyes.

And seeing her terror grow when she met my gaze.

I let go and let her catch her breath. She stared into my eyes and asked why I saved her.

I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know myself.

And then I saw the cut on her forearm, to which she replied that it was nothing. I knew better, and stuck the blade of my trusty switchblade into the one remaining source of heat – an impossibly hot engine, too burned-out to be useful, so hot that it steamed like a sauna in the torrential rain. I drew the blade out, and it hissed, for it was cherry red from the heat. I pressed the blade against her wound, cauterizing it, and all she did was flinch. She didn’t cry, didn’t yelp. She was brave, strong, a fighter.

She asked me again why I saved her.

To which I finally gave her the truth: three simple words that have mended relationships and shattered them, that have raised great civilizations and made them crumble – three simple words that had never before passed my lips, never before crossed my mind. I thought that I was incapable of love like this, but I was not, as I discovered. I was brutal and seemingly unable to understand matters of the heart, and believe me, a heartfelt confession is not in my character.

But was it heartfelt? Yes, for I had put every ounce of my affection and compassion for her in those three words and had not led up to them or followed them with any other words. I had simply spoken them and watched momentarily as her jaw had slackened in shock. And then I had smoothed my fingertip over the wound to make sure it had cauterized properly, turned on my heel, and left without a word.

She let me go.

Of course, we had spoken to one another later, but by then, the war was escalating as the few remaining members of the Hive Network fled to the imagined safety of the desert. She told me that the feeling was mutual, to which I gave a single nod.

Kitana understood the gesture.

She understood that it meant that I truly did love her, with all of my withered, shattered heart. Our love isn’t much. It’s not the strong love, the unshakable love that comes when a man and a woman have strong feelings and eventually even decide to merge their lives in holy matrimony. In fact, I even told her that this love wouldn’t last, that after I died – for I had seen the bloodied sunrise and knew that there would be one more death that night – she would forget me and look for another man, a better man, to love her. In under a year, she wouldn’t remember my face and hardly know my name.

She denied it all.

She denied every single word.

Now we have come to the end of this secure document, and I want you to know that I am the thistle among the granite in the hills, and that Kitana is the sturdy pine that knows how to grow amongst the rocks. You shouldn’t know about my… softer side. I only want you to consider the brutality that I have handed to you, the personality that I have offered to the outside world. No one wants to be scrutinized, studied like a Petri dish, and so I will always make you wish that you’d left well enough alone.

But wait – if I’m dead, how did I write this document?

That is why you had better be dying, or dead already, or ready to kill yourself the moment that you finish reading this document. For I am not dead. Not really. Jak killed me on that bloody morning, but my soul still clawed its way up from my very roots to fight back.

Like the thistle.

But I must offer you a parting thought to consider as you writhe in your last stages of death: have you ever truly loved anyone? Are you a man like me? If you are, have you ever loved a woman so much that she stole your breath and made shivers run up your spine, made you look forward to the careful kisses you share, made you wish that you could have more than just the one-night-stands you’re used to?

Kitana did that to me.

And as much as I don’t want to admit it, I really do love her. We should never have been together, never have shared our first kiss, never have even looked at each other. It was a forbidden love all along, forbidden by her father and forbidden by the part of my heart that hated Praxis and anything having to do with him, which included his kin. And yet, for some reason, I don’t care.

The future is cold, and dark, and more terrifying than ever before in my life. Yet now, I face it with a sense of hope – hope, something that I had once called “pathetic”, but now felt within my heart. For if that woman, a woman who had been raised to be tough and have no connections to anyone, could find a way to cradle my black, fragile heart in her hand and warm it, heal it… If she could love a man like me, then perhaps the future doesn’t look so cold and bleak anymore. Somehow, even then, I had known.

I knew that somehow, someway, we would find a way to face the future, side-by-side, as we strode bravely into the darkness as one.

Kitana, I say this for you alone:

I will never stop loving you.