Saviour

Chapter 2
Saviour

Sunday, 10th August
15:14

Freshly showered and led on her bed in clean shorts and a tank top, the blonde stared at the ceiling. She had hijacked an electric fan from one of the sealed, cardboard boxes and ran away with it to her room. Charlie had gone out for her usual run, telling her she was going to have a nosey around the grounds for an hour or two. Rion didn’t honestly couldn't fathom how she did it.

What with the redhead’s breasts being the size they were, and the fact that she could and would demolish foods like corn drowning in butter, potato chips, and a generous portion of carb with every meal every few hours like she was on a clock, it was surprising that the redhead wasn’t over three hundred kilograms. Not only that, Rion prided herself on the amount she could drink. By no means was Charlie a lightweight; in fact, she was the only person Rion knew of that could keep up with the coma-inducing amounts of alcohol she drank - But her junior had always had chronic headaches, even when she hadn’t been drinking. It always worried her, despite the numerous tests she’d taken showing up clear. There could only be one reason for all of it; Charlize couldn’t be human.

Arms and legs spread out across the cool cotton bed linen, Rion murmured to herself as the aches and pains melted into the plush duck down quilt and pillows beneath her. “Rather her than me.” Verdant irises drifted down to the carved wooden pillars of the bed and her mind began to wander.

The bed she was led on right now was the exact replica of the first real bed she had ever had after moving out of her toddler-guarded pine frame. She’d had the same bed throughout Primary School, and even lost her virginity in the original. It was a copy of the bed that her mother had picked out for her years before she’d even be able to use it.

Rion was adopted very early on. From what she was told as soon as she was able to understand - as not to bring about a family destruction of her thinking she’d been lied to, or conned into thinking she was born into that family later on - it was explained at great length that she had been taken in by the Doctor Alexander Wintar and his then wife, Alice.

The couple had been together since they were twenty two and twenty seven respectively. They had played it safe due to them not wanting to flush their successful careers down the toilet, but soon after marrying a several years later, the couple began to try for children. After four years of trying with a carefree ‘if it happens, it happens’ attitude, the couple were growing anxious, and worried. A visit to a friend of Alexander’s whom worked at the county’s best hospital confirmed the worse news: Due to a fatal car accident during Alice’s adolescence which had killed her mother and younger sister on site, and hospitalized Alice for eight months, there was no way they’d ever be able to conceive a child.

The couple had made a decision on what they wanted to do and Alexander set to work on what he was good at: research. A handful of months were spent looking at options and watching lists at hospitals and private institutions, hoping for a newborn: something Alice was craving more with each passing week. And then they found her. She was perfect for them even before they saw her: A healthy 8 pound-6 ounce baby girl at a week old.

The birth mother had staggered in to a church twenty five miles away from the couple's residence at that time and said she couldn’t keep the child even if she wanted to before dying during childbirth. There had obviously been more to the story which the Matron had told the cooing couple than had been put in the affiliated orphanage advertisement, but the couple didn’t pay much notice once they had laid eyes on the bundle staring up at them.

Alice had been a housewife with a substantial part-time job as a private piano tutor, and a good one at that. Meanwhile, her husband was away, busy with his popular seminars and personal research that paid more than either of them could spend. But their happiness was cut short. Only two years after the nameless child had been brought into the home, tragedy hit.

There had been an accident - Alice had fallen down the stairs and by the time Alexander had returned home after a weekend business trip across the country, the body of his wife was cold and the newest addition to the family was half-staved.

In terms of long-standing substance, all Alice had been able to do for the daughter she craved was pass on a knack for the piano, give the name that was constantly remarked upon, and that ridiculous bed which the gir had loved so much.

For Rion, the fact of her adoptive mother’s death and the strange circumstances around her blood mother’s demise brought about a thought that stuck with her for many years.. She was cursed; Rion knew that she was cursed, she felt it from the very centre of her being - or at least from every corner of her mind; she couldn’t escape it. Due to that mindset, she quickly learned that using people up and then cutting them off before the real poison spread was the best way to live. That was until she met Charlie.

Charlie in herself was just as peculiar as Rion, but not in at all the same way at all beside their sense of warped humour. The pair were polar opposites and only surpassed their own boundaries as the years passed. Even in the beginning when they locked horns, they knew deep down that there would be nobody else to handle their childish outbursts or stubborn tantrums, or the darker sides which they tried with everything they had to keep a secret.

A lot of people find another person sick of body, or mind, or soul - or all three, when that target of their interest refuses to submit to the very human need of contact or comfort with another being; Something neither had a grasp on. It was only down to each other that both had learned, or more over, been forced into accepting by the other to open up. As was mentioned, they were chalk and cheese: Charlie had been born into a poor background with both parents and siblings who wouldn’t notice if the youngest was missing for three days straight. Rion had her every whim tended to unconditionally by a single father who watched over her like a hawk after the death of both her blood and adoptive mothers. Despite all of their differences, they were both depraved of the very thing humans crave to make them just that. Neither could make a connection with another person. They both loved their parents, as skewed as their ideals on the subject were, but they loved them all the same. Still, they didn’t have the weightless heart or a clear mind whenever they thought about off-loading even the most mundane of secrets to another person.

Rion had stopped speaking anything but one-word answers to even authority figures from the age of four right up to being fourteen. She was dismayed by everything and everyone, and if it hadn’t started earlier, her father would have pinned it to teenaged angst. So when she returned home from school one evening, a strange vibe pulsing from her as she stopped dead in her tracks and asked, “can my friend stay over tomorrow?”, Alexander was at his road’s end with what was going on in his daughter’s mind.

The request, and even the thought of her having someone she’d call a friend, was phenomenal. Of course, Doctor Wintar wanted to meet the girl that was worthy of his daughter’s praise, which had been non-existent for anyone else until that precise moment. He had even cancelled a handful of seminars - something he hadn’t done since Rion had contracted chicken pox six years prior, and before that, it had been when his wife had died in 1993.

He met Charlie the following day, at the crack of dawn almost. He remembered the exact date: Sunday, July 20th, 2005. Rion had said nothing about her beside that she was her friend. When he had first laid eyes upon her, the towering redhead was as tall as him at eleven years old, wearing a rock shirt knotted at the waist and heeled Timberlands. She had greeted him with a firm nodded and a mature handshake, with gratitude for allowing her into his home. She did not come off as a first year high schooler - but it was what you would conjure up if you had to imagine what a friend of Rion’s would be like. She was openly friendly from their introduction, and even asked if there was any bacon leftover from what she had sniffed out in the hallway.

But really, the outlandish redhead had always been just that - a girl taller than most of her male peers, a head of thick, fiery hair and a flaming mouth to match. If people thought she was brazen from their first meeting, then the girl’s personality would literally knock them off their feet if they happened to be so unlucky to push her.

They had first met at the very end of 2004, but it wasn’t until a few months later that they had actually talked. Charlie had been sent to an older yeargroup as penance for disrupting the class. She had been seated behind Rion and asked for a pen, and when she hadn’t received an answer, she proceeded to prod the older girl in the back with a stolen ruler - She was only in the Year 9 class because she’d been sent out of her own for back-sassing the teacher, but the embarrassment of the punishment which was supposed to have happened was nowhere to be found. Needless to say, an over-turned table, some kicking of furniture, a brief scolding on the ‘rudeness of people in general’, and an injured innocent onlooker later, and Charlie was convinced she’d found herself someone worthy of a decent conversation. Rion, however, had no interests in the pretentious friendships of teen-hood.

Within two months of constant harassment, Charlie had worn down Rion enough to make her agree to a friend date. Both being of similar mindsets, they agreed on meeting somewhere which wasn’t a shopping centre or an under 18’s club. They had met at the bus stop outside of the nature resort in Cheshire County with the half-arsed plans of a pic-nic by the River Bollin with some cheap alchopops and the idea of complaining to each other about the popular kids and other ‘in’ shit which was irrelevant in the long run. And unlike most would have thought, the blonde actually showed up. She may have hated people, but she refused to go back on her word.

When that Saturday came, they had met, as planned. Everything went smoothly. They had their blue WKD’s as they lounged on a small cliff face a few feet above the cool water running high up on the bank due to an over-flood a few weeks before. They bitched about that certain group of girls that every school seems to have - Rion would know, she’d been to at least a dozen throughout the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany already - and about what kind of boys and movies they liked. Everything was fun until a little after noon when they were interrupted.

A group of male seniors from the same school shuffled past the shrubbery, laughing and joking, and swinging their whiskey bottles in drunken jest. Before either girl could collect their belongings, they were spotted. After some brief flattery about their ‘swimsuits’, they were coerced into hard liquor. It didn’t take that much effort on the boys’ part. Despite their hate of ‘those popular bitches’, both girls wanted to be acknowledged by the cool guys. They didn’t know why, they just did.

The jokes and teasing flew fast and before anybody knew it, it was like a small party. The sun was high, yet shaded due to the canopy of trees above, and a small portable radio played the latest tunes.

Rion had forgotten about that nagging feeling that plagued her whenever she was around people and Charlie had shed off the anxiety of that inevitable horrible moment of going home whenever she left the house. The blonde was fully involved with trying to out-drinking a certain football Captain when Charlie groaned a little behind her. Not fully aware until she’d been kicked in the back, Rion was faced with a scrap.

Too drunk to panic, she watched for a moment as the redhead struggled with the man forcing her to lie down. By the time the realization had kicked in, the younger girl had been pushed to the side. As she was falling off the edge of the rock, she had scratched the boy across the face in an attempt to grip onto something. That was when the atmosphere truly went bad. The boys were shouting, some of them about the blood on the blonde’s face, the Captain about what would happen if Charlie was hurt.

At that moment, Rion had lost her mind. She couldn’t remember a sequence of words, but she remembered the feeling pulling her chest tight, her head spinning and her blood boiling.

Not knowing it back then, but people called what happened an eruption. Unknowingly, a fierce surge of anger rang in the blonde’s head. Pulse literally making her tremble, Rion threw the near-empty glass bottle at the teen which had pushed Charlie into the water. With an audible smash, the boy yelped as the glass splintered in his shoulder. She remembered shouting, and the commotion, just not what either party had said. Surprised by the outburst of the usually quiet girl, the boys ran off in the direction from which they came.

Sludging up the bank, laughing her arse off, the redhead waved her hand above her head. She made a joke about whiskey making people crazy and hoisted herself up onto the overlook which she’d been sat on only a few moments before. “At least they left the radio and the booze.” Charlie cackled as she cracked the seal of a new bottle of Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and turned up the volume on the portable device. “One of them left their backpack too.” She went about rooting inside as Rion remained deadly still.

She’d been scared before: of monsters under her bed, and of ghost stories, but none had made her angry before. She had been the most scared she’d ever been before, but her anger had overridden everything else. She had no idea how, or why, or even if it was truly anger; it had physically hurt her body and made her head feel like it was about to split open.

To her, Charlie was loud and still somewhat obnoxious in her way of voicing her opinions outright and making a point; she was outrightly kind to the majority of people she came across, but she didn't seem to mind people disagreeing with her. In other words, she was naive. But this niave girl had taken an interest in her and hadn't been scared off by her bad attitude. Somehow,  she had come to care about her. In the few hours of talking to her one-on-one outside of school, she had began to care about her. It made her mad that she didn't know why. Maybe it was because Rion noticed something that nobody else did. And even if she didn’t want to admit it at that point, despite their differences, they would always come to the same end.

It made her feel weird inside. If someone had tried to do to her what they’d done to Charlie, she would have probably run, or shouted and kicked at the least, she wouldn’t have blew up. Even when she got annoyed, really mad, or at least as angry as she’d ever been before then, there was a mere ‘head irritation’ which she got past with a certain scowl.

But she had not just scowled, she had thrown a glass bottle at someone. Thinking about it logically, she could have killed him. The fact of killing someone didn’t scare her how it should - but the notion of killing someone out of reaction for another person brought about many questions for her.

In a shaded part of her mind, Rion would never forget that day. It was the start of many things for her. The start of knowing she had a high tolerance for booze, the start of her hate for the smell of outdoor water, and the start of knowing that men could not be trusted when you deny them what they want. Most importantly, the start of knowing that there was somebody which she cared about who wouldn’t die by just being around her.

“Ry?” Charlie called her as she rang the water from her hair. “Hey...”

To this day, Rion still can’t remember what Charlie had said to set her off after she’d finished faffing with the dial to ‘find a good station’. What she does remember is that it was the first time she’d ever cried after growing out of being a baby.

If Charlie would have been hurt in any way, that would have meant the real end of her trying to make a connection with anyone. Thankfully, the over-developing redhead had merely floated to shore and made jest about the situation. Truly, Rion was thankful to her for more than being able to drunk text her to pick her up at 4am, borrowing her designer shoes, to eat her cooking made from 45% garlic, 45% spice, and the 10% main ingredient,  and the fact that she was always there. No matter what the younger woman was doing, she would always pay attention, and truly listen to listen to her.

She was grateful to Charlie for proving that people can be more than taking you at face value, for more than thinking you’re a bad person because you took their hard day out them, for more than telling you to your face that the guy you think you love is a cheating arsehole and that she is going to castrate him before feeding his member to him. And most importantly, for proving that people don’t die so easily.

For being living proof that, maybe, she wasn’t really cursed.
 

Updated: 4th Feb 2016 - 16:37