every time i close my eyes, it's like a dark paradise. Who: Ophion Barnard. What: Newspapers. Where: Home. When: Various, until recently. Rating: PG-13. Status: Complete narrative.
They have servants for this, his mother tells him. Ever eager for his father’s approval, Ophion ignores what signs dictate that Lord Barnard would care not. His barefeet patter across the stone paved pathway. Chubby fingers wrap around the day’s newspaper and he scrambles to retrieve it for his father to read the headlines.
The boy holds up this ephemeral present and as the lady expected, Lord Barnard does not say thank you. He never does. (Like father, like son.) Dark eyes fixate on greyed pages and black ink. The pair remains in silence for a few minutes, son watching as father reads the paper with legs propped on an ottoman. The pages crackle as they are turned, held out a distance from the man’s body.
Then Ophion gulps down fear and hesitation, crawls into his father’s lap. He is surprised to see Valendian Standard already open to the Sunday comics. The young Barnard points at his favorite of the set, an episodic story of a grumbling chocobo. His father nods. The lord is one who wields silence as an art, like it is more a legacy than their fortune. But that morning, he reads the comics aloud to his son.
The man’s laughter is a soft rumble that the boy feels shaking the seat as their weight shifts to fit together.
Ophion laughs, too.
♢♢♢
Running through the decrepit halls of his home—their home—an older Ophion calls out to his parents. Mother, are you there? His voice is thickened by tears and smog. A woman screams in pain, response enough to send her son into a quicker pace. The soles of his shoes chafe against ashes. The heat of flames penetrates through a closed door.
Lord Barnard is a man of few words but upon hearing the question, he commands his son to run. And Ophion does not listen.
When he opens the door, he sees a shadow over the crumpled heap he knew as parents. The bodies of Lord and Lady clasp onto one another with what limbs they have left, trying vainly to shield the other from death. So close is their embrace that, were they alive, they could have begun a waltz across down the hall. Their younger son falls to the floor, begging them to live. His hand reaches out to take his brother’s, seeking comfort even from the man he has marked a murder.
But the older Barnard brother escapes through torn curtains.
The massacre makes headlines the next day, Ophion’s own frightened face immortalized in ink, his memories of the night reduced to two-dimensions. Soon enough, Emillion’s populace moves on to the next tragedy and discards the boy who lost everything in a fire along with their coffee-stained newspapers.
♢♢♢
A desk wobbles on an unsteady leg. Ophion props it up with a week-old paper, folded twice over. The walls are adorned with clippings of the murders, wanted posters with the only other man who now shares his name.
You must be stronger if you wish to find your brother. An older red mage pays him heed when the city has long bored of his story, feeding him knowledge when his body turned to little more than a vessel for organs. Ophion hands open and close, grasping someone’s other than his own. In them, his mentor places an aged grimoire.
Deprived of any parent to mirror, Ophion sees himself in the Dark because he has already carved an abyss inside himself. He finds his shadow in his mentor’s the way he once searched for his reflection in his father’s eyes. Mentor and scholar study together by candlelight, accompanied by their solitude and the Dark. He can see nothing clearly by the dim light. Yet still he persists, trading sight for strength.
Ophion’s smile flickers. He thinks he sees the older mage smiling, too.
♢♢♢
His communicator vibrates in the next room, silenced. A second batch of coffee brews in the kitchen.
They call him cold hearted, as though his heart pumps while preserved on ice and it ought to be harvested for one who bothers still to love. Called survivor by the press, his heart was ripped out when his family was plucked from this trodden earth. What subsists him now does not function as well yet haunted by a scowl so extant it ghosts his words even on the network, Ophion could not be mistaken for a corpse—not with such propensity to hate.
He skims through the day’s paper, pieces of life stamped flat into greys and blacks. This week, an illness has taken the life of a son; a student group receives recognition for gathering donations for a charity; two nobles are engaged to be married; someone’s dog has gone missing, someone’s father; the new cleaning company is hiring.
Smoke fills his nostrils, as it did his home that fateful night. The pages snap as he straightens them and takes another drag from his cigar. He sets his mug down beside an old newspaper. His brother’s face stares up at him from within a red circle, a cage of bloody ink, that has long declared him as a target.