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In a big city, when the sun started to dim and dip behind the horizon, the sky turned dark and murky. A black void that continued to swallow the moon every month. Biting and biting, until nothing was left and then spitting it out again bit by bit to start all over.
Nighttime was for dark deeds and shadowy scoundrels. Darkness hid all the ugliness that daylight revealed.
Worick looked up at the vast nothingness above him from the balcony of his brothel room. The moon was waning, only a small crescent left up there tonight.
Daniel Monroe had once warned him not to aspire to be like Nic, like a twilight. Had told him he was different, a master to a weapon. In a rare poetic mood, he had likened Nic to the night sky, dark and empty, its only purpose to make the moon shine brighter.
Worick had joked that he considered himself more like the sun, with his bright smile and radiant personality. Monroe’s expression had been gentle and his eyes had held a scathing pity as he humoured the boy’s dishonesty.
Like black ink, the sky did indeed remind Worick of Nic’s shock of hair and deep, dark eyes. And like the night sky, he also knew that Nic’s darkness wasn’t just emptiness.
He remembered his cold and efficient cruelty, of course, saw it every day. Worick also remembered - even through heavy fever bouts – a tranquil, starlit and colourful tapestry of galaxies and universes stretching over their heads as Nic had carried him, carefully, on his back from Worick’s former home, place of abuse and slaughter, all the way to Ergastulum.
Inbetween cities, when the light faded from the sky, it only gave way for the light of billions of stars instead. Worick still believed that in Nic’s darkness worlds were hiding, too. He was sure he had glimpsed a sparkle here and there over their years together. A gentle, silver stream flowed through Nic’s soul like the river across the sky. The Milky Way with the same great rift in its middle.
But Ergastulum would not let such brilliancy shine above its own artificial lights.
The moon was fairly pretty but all alone in that muted darkness it felt out of place and weak. Too pathetic to shine on its own, projecting a brightness that didn’t belong to it and easily succumbing fully to the darkness each month.
Nic and Worick were as different as night and day, as the saying went, or the night sky and the moon, as Monroe had put it. But maybe they had more things in common still, maybe they shouldn’t be compared to such grand concepts.
After all, they were just a normal and a twilight, the two handymen of Ergastulum. Just a pair of humans trying to survive, stubbornly, defiantly. Their lives but a tiny spec in the span of time, but lived to the fullest.
Falling, dying, burning the brightest.