Tear Tarnished Angel

(I was too poor to get my girlfriend a valentine’s day gift so I wrote her a drabble instead. I couldn’t get my Marvel muses to work so it’s my OC’s instead. Material is heavy but she understood the significance of this. - Jay/Rene begins to understand and let go of the past.)

“I’m meant to; hate them I mean.”

“For what was done to you? Perhaps, it would be an understood response.”

“I feel as though if I do not hate him I am allowing him to win. I’m expected to hate him, supposed to curse his name and scrape goat them both for what happened to me.”

“Do you believe that Rene? Honestly? There is no winning or losing in this, only a wish to go on living. No one else has to live with this pain but you, it is your choice, and yours alone to embrace the suffering of your past and yet go on living.”

“What is the point of scrape-goating? Emile lost his mind to become James, insanity was his excuse. My mother Nilec was told by her Goddess to do what she did, and it was through her not knowing how to comfort Emile that he shattered. If I am not to blame my parents, the ones who were there, the one who abused me then who do I blame? Fate? The Gods?”

“Gods are Gods, and men are men. Gods are blamed often for the follies of man and elf alike, but they sit away making choices and watching events they do not comprehend. Must there be a scrape goat to lessen your pain?”

“No… But I fear having no one to blame but myself.”

“Yourself? Why would you be at the end of that thought Rene? You were the victim of abuse, of a breaking of trust that should never have been violated. You see with time, we as children love our parents unconditionally, but as we grow, we begin to judge them, our illusions of their perfection lost by reality. But it is those that can rise above the rest that go on in time…to forgive them their inadequacy.”

Rene’s brows furrowed his hands clasped hard beneath the wood table, red from the pressure of his fingers pressing down on bare skin.

Lord Riq’ua’s own hands were settled on his lap on the opposite side of the table from the young vampire, “But forgiveness is a higher calling that I would not expect of you until it is your time. Never do I dare assume I can understand your suffering. I am only an ear, a mouth piece of advice for you Rene Durand. You have already come so far from the man James wished you to be, and that is enough for me. You are reborn, and there should be required no further change in yourself perception.”

“I have tried to become a better man, be who Emile was, not James. The man my father used to be. But I would still like to be me.”

“And what are you then?”

Rene laughed a soft sad laugh and he shook his head, white hair falling before albino pink eyes, “That I do not know. There are titles given to me, titles I have taken. But what do they all mean. I am the son of a tyrant, with a mother who is a murderer, a manipulator. I told myself I would be nothing like them, but what did I become? What I feared, what I loathed. Everyone looks to me and still sees James, and for that reason there is a little hate in my heart for my father. I had no choice in this, to be looked at with loathing and judged for my parentage and the blood that runs through my veins. But for no other reasons then those will I give them to judge me. I’m a prince, a vampire of the clan of the Rose; I am a father and a husband.”

“And what of those are the most important to you? I would think the last two.”

“Yes. I’m a father to Siliv before anything else, and a husband to Joscelin, my love for him is still strong with all he has done for me.”

“Then make yourself from that, no one can expect of you more then what you are willing to give Rene. Hatred or love, forgiveness or scrape goating, it is your pain, your past. You know you are the one who makes your own choices and only they who have not taken chances in life can say they wish to die with no regrets. Everyone has regrets, but just do not allow them to keep you from living.”

“Thank you Riq’ua.”

The High Advisor inclined his head to the prince who stood and bowed to him in respect although Rene’s political position was higher and he watched the young vampire leave the library behind, the large room dead now expect for the sounds of the elder elf meditatively breathing.