The Ends Ch. 03
Date: 07.02.2010
Keywords: The, Ends, Ch., 03,
*The Ends Ch. 03: Wallflower*
Nemesio had been born with a twin: a female twin. She was found lying with him on a mat they had been laid down in for a nap with her neck broken at the age of 3. No one knew what had happened, it was supposed that Nemesio, himself did it. However, it was never confirmed and given what a mess he turned into for over a decade afterwards, many wondered if it hadn"t been someone random.
Nemesio and his sister Adalia were also illegitimate. Their mother died of an overdose not long after the twins were born, and it was likely she used through her pregnancy. The babies were sickly, upset and difficult. However they had clung to one another for dear life for those first three years and when Adalia had been murdered, then Nemesio was left with nothing or no one to cling to.
He was given any number of pets, but each went the same morbid way, their heads twisted grotesquely askew, their bodies left in a sleeping position. The bodies would decay in his presence, and when they were taken away he was inconsolable. He couldn"t live with their leaving, their ability to leave, and so he killed them and kept them, to be his forever.
Puberty became a problem, as he was sexually mature but still had a desire to keep what he loved. Followers of the Order would go missing to be found dead in his closet. So, after much discussion, Nemesio was sent away for shock therapy. He had returned to the family shortly before his new sister Charlotte had arrived.
He"d been shaky and unsteady with people for the four years he had before her entering his life. Barnabas, his older brother, found that he was useful in torture, that Nemesio had experienced many levels of pain in the institution and knew just how far a body could be pushed. This was helpful to him in having debts repaid and reconverting the wealthy fallen. Nemesio relished the job. He felt strong, powerful and in charge. Then one day Barnabas brought their sister home.
Although Charlotte looked nothing like Adalia did or ever would, somehow when she was introduced as his sister she took that opened void in his heart. Adalia would have looked more like him Nemesio. Tall, olive-skinned and dark haired. Nemesio looked almost like a Brooks Brothers pirate with shoulder-length dark brown hair and a nearly permanent stubble goatee. His new sister was pale, short, thin with red hair and a few stray freckles and a little better than half his age. Still, he nearly immediately took her and stroked her tear-stained and blood-caked scratched face.
He could remember Barnabas" face darkening at his reaction to the girl. Barnabas fancied that they would tear her apart together after he"d had her the first few times. Instead, Nemesio gently picked her up and carried her to his room where for the next month no one was allowed to even see her.
The first night in his room he ran a bath and washed her off gently, softly. She stared at him nearly blankly, her body shaking with fear. She"d found her family only to be yanked to this house and thrown into a room, beaten and raped by her own brother, and now, this other brother was treating her with a fatherly kindness. It was almost more terrifying as she waited for the other shoe to drop.
Barnabas had fully expected every morning of that next month to hear that Nemesio had broken her neck. He expected the foul stench of a rotting body and had wondered, many times in that month if she weren"t just dead. But then he"d hear her voice softly through the door and would be disappointed that she was, indeed, still alive.
Nemesio"s issues aside, Charlotte was adapting well to her new life after her failure at school. He kept her other brothers off of her and she was generally in a good mood except for being a caged bird. That part really did irk her quite a bit, but… it was dangerous out there. Eventually his family got tired of not seeing Nemesio anymore.
So they did what any family would do, they gave him a job, a reason to leave his room. Charlotte was left in his room to be there for when he came back. The first time he had half expected that she would"ve, left, run into another part of the house or to her own room, which she had but never used, but she didn"t. She was sitting in the window seat painting her nails when he got home. He was so pleased. He had never remembered being happier than with her. He wanted to kiss every pour of her skin and to own it.
For her age, that sort of love was almost expected. But… as she got older, it got more troublesome. She had places to go, people to see, as did he. Each time she would leave however, he would become unglued with worry. What if something happened to her? What if she never came back? What if she decided to run away forever? He couldn"t control it, couldn"t stop the tide of emotions that would turn violent each time she left, taking it out on family and staff of the house. So they started to limit where she went and how long she could be gone, but also give him time away from her. It would go well for while and then fail miserably often resulting in someone"s death or a suicide attempt by Nemesio.
She didn"t really want to leave the comfort and protection of Nemesio"s room, and he didn"t want to leave her or for her to be left alone, but Barnabas needed Nemesio"s skills. When their father was released from prison they needed Nemesio even more to torture the fallen and get the wicked to pay. Thomas seemed the perfect solution, the middle child. He never got that much attention, but perhaps he could be their salvation by distracting the girl.
Thomas, however, had other plans, far more sinister. He saw how his brothers, once a united front, were now divided over their sister. So, while Nemesio was gone to work he would sneak to his brother"s room to talk to his sister. At first she refused to even open the door to him and he would whisper to her through the crack at the bottom of the door. After a few days Charlotte finally let Thomas into the room. He would hold her and caress her and tell her how beautiful she was. Things that Nemesio did, however, Thomas also counseled her with things she wanted to hear, that she should leave, should be able to leave. This validation of her feelings made her brighten and soften towards Thomas.
He brought her flowers and candies and jewelry and all of the things that a woman would want, and told her things all women wanted to hear. He would feed her grapes on the lawn reading her poetry and then take her swimming and make love to her on the poolside. Perhaps on some level he did love her in those first few weeks of the heady seduction. But mostly, he wanted to be able to control her, and not through the brute force that Barnabas used, or the strange Stockholm syndrome technique Nemesio used. His plan was far simpler and far more insidious. To worm his way into her life, to make her love him, then she would do what he wanted; tell him what he needed to know.
It was a fatal flaw of the plan for him to actually want to be with her, but one he was willing to overcome. Thomas needed to be able to know what was going on inside of his father"s group in order to take it over. He convinced her that they could get rid of the rest of the family and it could be just him and her. They would live happily ever after if only she could keep him informed. At first his idea of happily ever after was having her killed so that he alone would have the fortune, but she had grown on him. Her frantic phone calls, her almost child-like adoration of him, it made him feel like the center of the world. That she worshipped him like a god appealed to him, being a middle child he had never really had that sort of adoration from anyone. He had always been not as smart as Barnabas and not as brutal as Nemesio. But here, to this girl that was so pivotal, he was the sun moon and the stars to. It was intoxicating.
He needed to know who his father was romancing and why, information that she was easily able to produce. In other calls, she would retell the whole experience of fucking his father"s followers in terrible and gruesome detail. When he could be there, he"d reenact it with her, teenaged boys and their seed in their cars, in bathrooms, closets, other people"s beds. Going back to the scene of the sex and doing it over. That she would share this information with him and suffer the indignity of doing it over again, reliving it with him made him feel powerful over her in a way he"d never had over anyone. He knew that she was his, truly. That he owned her and possessed her in a way the others wouldn"t or didn"t. This was his and his alone, and they never had her, not really.
Thomas had been trying for months to get Nemesio to come to his side, to see how evil and bad their father was if only for the sake of their sister, but Nemesio was having none of it, jealous of Thomas" association with Charlotte. This was starting to become a problem for Thomas on many levels. As much as he loved her, he wasn"t sure if it was to his advantage to have her live, and this was, after all, a war. However, if he did kill her, then Nemesio would never come to his aid, so things had fallen into an impasse. Thomas kept collecting information, talking to lawyers, getting papers drawn up. Nemesio tortured the unwilling, Charlotte seduced the unwitting and Osiris and Barnabas preached on their message, performed tricks to get followers.
Keywords: The, Ends, Ch., 03,