5. Five o Clock

Though she'd been sent to Asador again to collect another life, she had not seen who she had thought she'd see. The letter he'd left her this morning had made her think otherwise. Two simple sentences on it: Wear your yellow coat and take an umbrella. It will be raining today.

It truly had been raining and the tiniest part of her was thankful for the warning. There was nothing she hated more than being drenched by rain. Sure, she had felt silly showing up with a yellow raincoat to guide a soul to Asphodel, but it had made them laugh.

Just when the weather cleared and Silene thought she might stay and take a peaceful stroll through this pale realm perhaps for the last time, she spun round and pointed her umbrella at him. "You're terrible at this thing." The more she thought about it, the more she realised he'd never really been discreet all the times he'd followed and watched her over the years.

His laughter made her flinch for reasons nothing sane would consider fearful. Of course he noticed, his smile falling entirely. "Really adorable."

"What is?"

"Your umbrella. Of course."

Of course.Straightening her shoulders, she returned to her planned walk, determined to ignore him. "Remind me why am I being stalked?" she shouted over her shoulder, slowing her steps despite the old urges to remain away from him whispering in her ear all sorts of cautionary words.

He appeared right in front of her, blonde hair wet and dripping, and she came to a halt, eyes wide from nearly crashing into the space that usually always stood between them like an isthmus separating two seas. "There is a show being played tonight just across the street. Accompany me."

A play? "As in please or?" she asked, lifting her umbrella between them and pressing the end of it to his chest when he got closer and pushed her raincoat hood down.

"As in you might enjoy it. Could be a few of the last times you can sneak in without paying, or getting noticed," he said, his tumultuous eyes dropping at the umbrella between them. "Or being watched."

"All this comes from the goodness of your heart?"

"So, you do think I have one?"

"Well, it still takes a heart to be evil. You'd be less so without one."

"I will keep that in mind," he said, slowly pushing the umbrella down, and leaning in to add, "Maybe I will rip it out and give it to you."

"Why would I want your heart?" she asked, putting the end of her umbrella on his chest again.

"To eat it out." A serpentine smile rose on his face that Silene did not possess enough words to describe how seraphic it looked even under the shadowed light cast from the streetlamps overhead. "You've always looked at me like you wanted to take a bite out of it."

Despite the chill slowly spreading down her limbs, she remained rooted there, out of words, her umbrella lowering. "What play?"

He didn"t answer her, simply started backing away and crossing the street towards an older building hidden between towering glass ones. Forcing her feet to move, she'd followed after him, her eyes latching on his broad back, the distance between them taunting her.

"Stop glaring at me."

"You have a perfect back," she said, an unusual skip to her words, "to stick a knife in it."

"Don't flirt with me, Silene."

In turn, she glared even harder.

"Silene," he warned, and she jolted straight, quickening her steps and jumping over the puddles of water to follow him. "What about tickets?" she asked as they crossed the lobby towards the theatre rooms.

Throwing her a look over his shoulder, he said, "You know what I am, Silene."

She batted her lashes at him, shedding her raincoat. "A rude, arrogant prick?"

"Besides that."

"We can literally be here all day."

He chuckled, grabbing a door handle and pushing it open, pointing for her to go in. Just when she was about to enter, he put a hand on the other side of the door frame right in front of her face and leaned in her ear to whisper. "Do you just follow anyone anywhere they ask you to follow them to?"

"Not particularly."

"What if I meant harm?"

"What worse can you do to me that you haven't already done?" she asked.

Still, he didn't move from there, their faces merely inches apart. "Tommy says he misses you, and that you should visit again."

Despite the few cold rain drops clinging to her body and the chilly tunnelling breeze in the corridors, Silene felt impeccably warm. "Tommy is such a gentleman. You ought to learn some stuff from him."

"Take that back or it will not be a very good life for Tommy starting now. I will buy him the cheapest kibble and throw out all his toys."

Her tongue pressed against her cheek as she tried really hard not to laugh. "I think you would not do that to the one thing that finds you bearable."

Sarcasm dripped off his tongue when he gave her a smirk and said, "You think too highly of me."

"I assure you, I do not think highly of you at all."

"So, you do think about me?" he asked, flashing her a full row of teeth.

"Often," she admitted, lifting her umbrella and resting the silver tip of it under his chin. "All usually involving some mild form of violence." She winked at him. "Pew."

"What did I tell you about flirting with me?"

She rolled her eyes and ducked under his arm, eyeing the wide space of the theatre with so much relish. She'd never been in one, and they were just as magnificent as the pictures on the human magazines. Silene had rules. Many which she had broken in the very short time of three days of hanging around him. She never stepped in human spaces unless she was there to collect a death.

He pointed to an empty red, velvet seat among the many and then went to sit a seat further from her when she put her umbrella and raincoat between them, a barrier she felt like it needed to be there to remind her of what he was and what she was, something that was starting to blur in her thoughts—in her actions, too. What in the stars was she even doing with him? In a theatre out of all?

"Are we early?" she asked, going on her toes to take a peek at the rows under them. "There is only me and you here."

"That's because it is mine."

She blinked at him. "Like…the entire theatre?"

"Indeed."

"Why do you own a theatre?"

"There was this girl I've always wanted to bring to a theatre."

Her voice dripped with sarcasm, "As there always is, I'm sure. Owning an entire theatre is a bit excessive though."

He raked a hand through his wet hair, pushing it back from his face, and chuckled, but the amusement never quite reached his eyes, and Silene was struck with the realisation that nothing quite reached his eyes—she'd come to realise they were a sole entity, one full of sorrows. "She doesn't like being surrounded by people."

A faint, strange empty sensation settled in her stomach as she studied his strangely dour profile that just reminded her of the terrifying power he beheld—of the powerful God she'd seen from afar. "Did she like this grand gesture of yours?"

"I never really brought her."

"How come?" she asked, not resisting the urge to know.

"There was this one bargain I once made. In exchange for what I wanted, I had to give her up. The only way I could have her at all was if she wanted me to have her. I kept waiting for her to call for me, to ask for me, to want me. It was something unrequited in the end."

Silene did not miss the opportunity to laugh a little at his pain as she always did, but for the first time she felt a sense of unease for doing so. "Who could possibly dare break your heart, Gabriel?"

"She did. Many times. The fault might be mine. I keep offering it to her, but she does not want my heart. Nor to break it, nor to bury it, nor to tear it up to tiny little pieces. She does not want it at all." The muscles in his jaw tightened, and he swallowed. "What am I to do with a heart I cannot use to love her, Silene?"

Her insides squeezed as if they had been pulled into a tight fist, the air turning a little thick, suffocating her lungs that had just started breathing again after hundreds of years.

Silene's attention was dragged away as actors poured on the stage, dancing their way in with spectacular movements, pouring flower petals and glitter in the air as they jumped and waltzed and sang their hearts out. She clapped along, smiling widely and with fascination, utterly enchanted by the spellbinding grandeur of all the costumes and the bejewelled props—she clapped until her arms felt like falling off. But the longer it went on, the more she looked, the louder the music got, the more she noticed the twisted smiles on the actor's faces, what was staining their hands a crimson red, speckled across their colourful clothes, their skin. Silene's hands pressed together one last time in a meek clap, her smile slowly fading as she noticed the strange, drunken craze spinning around one lone table that she'd not noticed at all being there all this time, where one lone soul stood and sat beside. No costume, no mask or paint or drawings, no glitter or colour, dressed in a tattered nightgown, her face vacant. Through the whole first hour of the play she did not move nor blink, just sat there unnoticed—almost unnoticed to Silene's eye as well. It was such an anomaly amongst the stage. It stood out so sorely, so strangely, like a tumour on a healthy heart. It spoiled the entire vibrant play.

Then lights in the theatre suddenly went out entirely, enshrouding them in darkness, and Silene jolted a little, looking around the abyss surrounding her hoping for even a small flash of glow from under a door or a keyhole.

Darkness did not scare her much, but what rested inside it did. Her father had often used it to his advantage. He'd acted as if the darkness would hide his sins. That if no one could see what was happening to her, it would not count. That her screams and cries would be drowned by the abyss, taken away once light would rise in the morning. That the darkness could hide the blood better, and that it would make her bruised, thin body more desirable to the ones who he was selling it to.

"Gabriel?" she asked, feeling a lick of fear on her spine that had her shaking after so long. There, seeking him, she felt so human again.

"I'm here."

A long breath of relief left her lips as his voice wrapped her back in warmth.

A cracking sound came from the stage ahead, as if a glass or a plate had broken, and she waited, suddenly feeling something like a pulse grow under her skin. But it couldn't be. Silene had no heart. She had no need for it.

A gleam widened from the stage. Candlelight began growing brighter, forming a halo of light around the table it was perched on top and the girl sat on a lone chair beside it, her knees pulled to her chest, long dark hair falling around her like a blanket while she stared at the candle without blinking. Everyone else was gone but her.

Silene sat up straight when a heavy feeling settled on her chest at the image before her. An image that struck so familiar to her. The table. The chair. The candle. The girl. Her blood-stained night dress.

There were times she'd spent sat just like that, in front of a flickering flame after the horrors that had been committed to her had ended, confessing every one of her secrets to the light in the pitch of night when everything but her nightmares had gone to sleep. That very same light had eventually started speaking back to her, bringing her comfort nothing had ever given her before.

The flame flickered, growing brighter, showering the girl with light and warmth until she stopped shivering.

"Thank you," she offered.

"Maybe I should thank you," the candle spoke, "for summoning me, for lighting me and letting me burn."

"But you will waste, you will melt and smoulder."

"A victorious end for a candle."

The girl showed a smile, and Silene's heart clutched in a tight grip when that smile reminded her of her own. One that looked more like a scar than a smile. "I want a victorious end, too."

A single tear beaded in Silene's eye at those words. Familiar words. Words she'd heard before.

"You have to burn first," the candle said. "Such lovely light and warmth you will give. Though no one will deserve it, no one can ever earn it from you. You will shine like a miracle."

"There is no one to light me," the girl sighed. "Nothing and no one at all. If I let my brother, I'm afraid I might burn his hands. If I let my father, he will smother me."

A choked sob ripped from Silen's throat, and she put a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry. Her words were just broken syllables as her head slowly turned to Gabriel. "What is this?"

"A play," he answered, his voice like gravel.

The candle flame asked, "Why do you cry?"

And the girl answered, "Because I am an unhappy person."

Silene could almost hear the timekeeper in her pocket stop ticking and time slowly freezing over, the air turning an odd colour tinted with a shade of the past—a past where she'd uttered those very same words back to a strange candle that talked. A mirage of sorts she thought her mind had called to soothe her loneliness, her hopelessness.

Her attention whipped in Gabriel's direction, staring at his stony face as he watched the play ahead with a vacant set of eyes filled almost with depths of stormy, blue water. Silene could almost swear somewhere in there he was drowning, just as she was. No one would be able to survive the depths of loss his eyes had caved into.

"An odd thing to do," he said without looking at her, "talking to candles. You did that a lot. Night after night. It was the closest you've ever let me get to you."

Memories rushed to flood her mind, and chill spread down her spine when she recalled the voice that had talked back to her back then. The familiarity of it. The warmth.

No.

No.

He couldn't know her most vulnerable moments, when she had laid her heart bare to the only thing that would listen to her. It had been her imagination. The candlelight had been only something her mind had made up out of desperation. It couldn't have been real.

"How?" she asked, her voice breaking.

"You called. And I could finally hear you. After so long, Silene. After so damn long wishing I could."

She felt exposed. Stripped even out of her skin, bones bare in front of the one God she'd wished would never see her desperation for the help she could not find to ask because of the spite she'd had for life himself.

"I did not call for you." She did not know what she'd called at those moments, all memories that had been slightly warm had almost vanished from her memories to make space for all the terrifying ones that only kept growing in her mind like a malign tumour. But it had not been for him. She was sure she had not asked for him. She had asked for salvation. And the only salvation Silene ever remembered dreaming had been a kind death.

"My brother cannot hear the living, Silene. Only I can."

"You shouldn't have answered. I didn't want you."

"I know. I knew."

"Was it fun?" she asked, her voice trembling. "Was it fun to hear about how I had bruised at the hands of my father? Did you laugh when I told you he'd sell me out to anyone who gave him enough coin for his next fix? Did you enjoy when I confessed about the first time I had to wash away the blood from between my legs after I'd been raped in my childhood bed. The one I never managed to outgrow because he barely fed me enough to wake. Or sometimes not at all so he could call it mercy and I would be unconscious and wouldn't feel what they would do to me."

His eyes drew shut and he took one deep breath, a tremble permeating his body. The entire earth shook with him, chairs and curtains rattling, the ceiling and chandeliers breaking and falling to the ground in a million pieces of crystals.

Her arms came around her body when the crashing sounds made her flinch. "Look at me!" she screamed, her throat swelling with a cry when he did look at her—when he looked at her with such anguish, such burning pain as tears slid down his face.

"There hasn't been a moment ever since the first time I found you that I've looked away."

She shook her head. "You hurt me!" she sobbed, finally breaking down in front of him just like she'd avoided doing. "Forcing each damned breath in my lungs. What was the purpose of my existence? Was I there just to suffer?"

Another silver tear slid down his face, and it was her turn to look away.

The both of them sat there in the dark silence. Eventually the earth did stop trembling, too.

Her voice was vacant and hoarse when she asked, "Should you not ask for forgiveness? One would ask for forgiveness, at least."

"I don't want you to forgive me, Silene."

Her lips trembled as she breathed out a long exhale. "I never will."

"Good. That's good."

Silene's hand pressed to her brow, and she shook her head. "Why did that not feel good at all? I've been wanting to tell you that for a long time," she confessed, wiping away her eyes. "I wish I could just hit you." Reaching for an empty bottle of water on the seat next to her, she threw it at him, hitting him in the head.

He blinked at her.

She blinked back at him, lips pressed tightly together. She held it in for all ten seconds before snorting into her hand and chuckling, her tear-stained laughter growing the longer he just stared at her stunned.

When her body somewhat settled from the uncontrollable tremble, the mix between a laughter and a cry, she asked, "Why were you there when you knew I did not want you?"

"At first, I hoped that if I waited, I might begin to matter more to you. Only for you to matter more to me in the end."

Silene remained frozen at his confession, unable to look away. She had been nothing. A rock had mattered more than her. A rock would have sold for more than her. She. Had. Been. Nothing. "Why?"

"That day I first saw you." His eyes found hers like a polarised magnet, but drowned in such depths that they looked black entirely. "I learnt more about myself through you that day than I'd ever known about myself. What had I done? How could I have forgotten you? How could I have left you in those hands?"

She wiped a lone tear away. "You said you didn't remember me."

"Fragments is all I have. Fragments fates gave away to spite me. All I saw was you getting hurt. Then you'd vanish in and out of my sight like some mirage. No matter how many times I would rake through your world, I could not find you. Not unless you would let me in. And those moments were brief, so brief, Silene. They were enough though."

"Enough…for what?"

He looked away, lowering his head a little. "I would watch you make things out of nothing." A choked laughter sputtered out of him as if he was recalling some fond memory. "Anything, you could make anything out of nothing. You gave more life to things than I ever could. Simply by touching them. You were magnificent. The rarest thing I'd laid my eyes upon," he said, and the very foundations of her mind shuddered. "You and your brother, neither of you had any hope, the both of you were hurting, but somehow you could give him courage and make him dream. Without them he would have never returned from those mines. It was all that kept him alive in there, do you know that? Do you know how much power you had, Silene?"

Her eyes drew shut as she silently sobbed. She missed her little brother. She missed him so much.

"I wanted," he continued, "I wanted to give it back to you. All that you gave. But you would not let me. You would not let your brother either."

Silene knew. At some point, she had not wanted to be saved. She'd seen no point in seeking him, and hating him had been a comfort—a way for her to justify the end she had been planning. "For so long, I've been wanting someone to blame," Silene finally said, free of the truth. "You were the perfect one to blame. For everything." Her eyes squeezed shut, and she swallowed that ball of glass shards down her throat until it settled in her stomach, tearing her insides instead. "Sometimes I wonder why I couldn't find it in me to blame my father, why couldn't I try to kill him instead, why did I keep justifying him."

"Because he stole something from you. Something I should have helped you find again."

"What?"

"Hope."

"I don't think I wanted hope. It just seemed…easier to let him have it. My brother," she said, smiling at the few happy memories of him she still clung to with all her might, refusing to let them be drowned by the rest. "My sweet brother, he was a dreamer. His dreams used to give him broken bones and bruises. I was never as brave as he was. It's why I chose to be a coward in the end."

"You were not a coward, Silene."

"Don't," she choked. "Do not tell me that what I did was nothing but cowardly."

He simply looked at her, and she'd already heard every word he did not say out loud.

She shook her head. "Don't do that either. Don't give me back my hope. I don't want it."

"I want to give you everything, Silene. Let me give you everything."

"Why?"

"I want to bring you to a theatre full of people and for you not to fear them."

For a moment, Silene remained frozen, letting his words wash over her. She'd never been so scared as when she asked, "Am I the girl?"

"You are."

She walked mindlessly through the dark streets of Asador starting to quiet down with the rising violet dawn tainted by smoke and shielded by the towering buildings, his tall shadow following after her turn after turn, offering her a comfort she could not even begin to fathom—a comfort he'd been offering since long ago, without her even realising.

His jacket was again thrown around her cold shoulders, and somewhat of a twisted smile crossed her face at the chilly wind that blew across her face as she skipped over puddles. She had missed feeling the wind, too. Silene had not realised she could miss such a mundane thing. She wondered when she had ever regarded the wind in her past life. If it had meant so much to her before. Why…why was it filling her heart with so much…so much…cravings—to dance it in, to run her fingers through its chilly strands, to let her hair billow in it, to close her eyes and trust the darkness behind them.

"You can stop following me now," she said into the wind, hoping it would carry her words to the God behind her.

"I want you again. Let me have you another day."

Silene did not like how her heart began racing. Fear or excitement, she did not know. She'd been dead for far too long to remember exactly the difference between the two. "Beg," she said, spinning to him. "Get on your knees and beg for it. Maybe I will consider it."

Instead of the anger and refusal she expected to be flashed, the God was struggling to hold back a smile as he took his hands out of his pockets and went down to his knees before her.

Silene's eyes went wide, and she looked around them as if someone would see and condemn her to many lifetimes of punishment for what she'd done, for bringing a God to his knees.

"Any other request, my great misfortune, my beautiful demise?" he asked, no longer holding back his grin. "Or can I have you for another day?"

He'd lost his godly mind. And she'd lost her voice, maybe her mind, too, staring astound at the God at her feet, looking up at her like she'd never been looked at before.

She took a few steps back, putting distance between them again and praying her heart would go silent and cold as it had been for so many years. Silene could not understand if she entirely loathed the way her existence defrosted in his presence. And that terrified her. "Request denied. You can stand now."

His teeth dug on his bottom lip as he looked up at her. "I quite like it down here. Have come to realise why humans get on their knees to pray. Certain things do look like quite something to behold from down here."

Her chest rose fast with breaths she didn't know she could take, with breaths she shouldn't be able to take in death, but somehow when she was close to him, she could breathe. She wanted to relish into that sensation until she remembered that in his presence she could hurt, too.

Unable to find any of her words, she decided to turn and leave him there.

"Am I picking you up or are you coming to me tomorrow?" he shouted from behind her.

"Neither," she replied over her shoulder. "This has been exhausting."

"Deny me, my ruination," he called as she stepped into the boat over Lethe. "It makes begging all the more enjoyable."

"Shouldn't you be busy with, I don't know, whatever your godly self should be doing?" she shouted back.

His words slipped through the veil between worlds as she entered Asphodel, "I want to be busy with you."

She stomped all the way up the hill to her home, muttering all sorts of cautionary reminders to herself, almost bumping against Azriel on her doorstep. "W-What are you doing here?"

"You were late."

"I went to a…uh, to a theatre," she said, inviting him in as she always did, putting the kettle on the stove.

He arched a dark brow as he took a seat on her dinner table, not filling the space quite like his brother had. "You went to the theatre. And how was that?"

"He knows me," she said, pulling a teacup and saucer. "From before."

"Who does?"

"Gabriel."

"Hm," he hummed, sipping on his tea.

Silene's lips parted. "You knew?"

"How much did he tell you?"

"How much should he be telling me?"

"None of it. I warned him not to."

She gapped. "Warned him? Why would you warn him?"

"It's for the best of both of you to leave behind what was meant to leave behind."

"You've kept him away?"

"Have you wanted him to get close to you?"

Silene might have mulled over that one question many, many, many times over the next few mornings and nights.