Let It Burn: Corruption Ending

“Join me.  After tonight the world will be ripe for the picking.”

“You’re gonna hit me with that tired old cliche?”  I sit up.  “After what we just…God damn you Sin.”

“Oh, He definitely has.”  She says as she grabs my arm before I can pull away from her.  “Angel, this time I’m serious.”

There was something in her tone that give me pause.  I look back down at her laying beside me.  Gazing up at me I see none of her usual deceit and guile in her glimmering blue eyes, if anything she looked…vulnerable.

“Join me.”  She whispers again, pleadingly.

“You really are serious.”

She gives my back a gentle stroke.  “Think about it, the fallen angel, it is almost poetic.”

I ready myself for one of my usual comebacks, some grand statement of honor and justice, but…I falter.

Sensing weakness Sin sits up and puts her arms around me, her soft body pressing into my back as she whispers over my shoulder.  “With villainy comes freedom Angel.  Free to be weak or strong, free to be cowardly or courageous, free to follow your heart and let yourself truly LIVE!  No more rules, no more of their commandments or morals.  I could be Sister Sin again and you my Angel of Corruption.”  She nips at my ear.  “What a team we could make!”

“This is my…city.”

“This is a graveyard.  A graveyard for normies and villains and heroes alike.  Why not let Justice die here too?”  She kisses my shoulder.  “You say it was cowardice that kept you on that roof, but you can’t fool me.  I know you too well Angel.  You aren’t afraid of anything.  I’ve seen you face death more times than I can count.  If you believed in the cause, truly believed, you would have been there.  Something has changed.”

Again I try to summon some grandiose speech of truth and goodness, but the words wouldn’t come.  Eventually I speak not from my mind, but from my heart.

“You’re wrong Sin.  Nothing changed.”  About twenty feet away I could see my mask hung up on a leg of one of the overturned pews.  From the face of that mask I could see my younger self looking back at me, that righteous young man who still believed.  “I’ve given this city my best years…and what do I see?  Crime, greed, selfishness, cruelty.  It is the same city I started out in and, if tonight hadn’t have happened, the same one I will have left behind.  All my good deeds have amounted to exactly…nothing.  What was it all for?  How many of the people I saved lay dead out there tonight?  And the lives they lived until today, did they do anything with them?  Did they actually do good with the time they had?  Very few.  Most were too focused on their own problems to give a second’s thought to the troubles of their neighbors.”

“They did what was good for them.”  She kisses my neck.  “It is the way of people.  It is human nature.  There is no good.  There is no evil.  There is just survival and enjoying what time you have.”

“I’ve been a hero for as long I could drive a car.”  My fists shake with rage.  “I’ve given my life to this city.  I’ve risked my life so many times, for what?  For what Sin?”

“Your life would be yours.”  She switches to the other side to tongue and suckle at my ear.  “For the first time Angel.  Think about it.  Living for yourself first, worrying about YOUR needs.”  Her arms wrap around my chest.  “Let the normies worry about their problems and we will look after ours.”

If it was the devil himself he couldn’t have been more convincing, not because the arguments were strong or the logic unassailable but simply because she was only repeating the words that my heart was already telling me.  That my heart had been telling me for quite some time now.  Sin had been right back there on the roof.  It wasn’t cowardice but a crisis of faith that had me sitting there and watching the city’s downfall.  Somehow, through all of that fire and smoke, I had seen things clearly for the very first time.

And then, true to her nature, Sin starts fighting dirty.

“I would worship you my Angel!”  She nibbles down my neck as she pinches my nipples.  “I would see to your every desire.  Oral, anal, whatever.  Sex, as hard and as nasty and as often as you want it.”  She grabs my pecs hard and licks up my cheek.  “I would bend you over and fuck that sweet ass of yours every…single…fucking…day!”

The angel mask combusts before my eyes, as if lit from Sin’s fiery words and the not flames now engulfing it.  And with that mask burns the man who had worn it.  I spin around and grab her by the shoulders.  Staring her in the eyes I see the swirling chaos and madness that I knew so well…and it is beautiful!  I kiss her so hard that we both have blood in our mouths by the time it was done.

“Yes!”  She hisses.

“I am done wearing masks.”  I say boldly.  “The Angel dies tonight.  Justice is dead.”

“And from the ashes arises a mighty GOD!”

“A fearsome goddess at his side.”

“Yes!  Yes!  Together!”

“We’ll need a new city.”  I say.  “One without a hero or a villain.  In the aftermath of tonight we’ll have our pick.  One fresh for the taking.”

“It shall be OURS.”  She grins.  “Together, nothing can stop us!”

I knew she was wrong.  I knew how these things went.  A hero would come and make us pay for our deeds.  But in the meantime…ohhhh the fun that we’ll have!

Taking her soft body in my arms I launch the pair of us out and into the sky in a hail of shattered stained glass.  Behind us the cathedral burned.  Below us the neighborhood of our first battle burned.  Around us the city I had given my life to burned.  And, brightest and hottest of all, in Sin’s beautiful blue eyes a mixture of madness and passionate lust and dying hate and a fragile fledgling love burned.  And amidst it all only three simple words echoed in my heart…let it burn!

The End