❝
As she consumed him with a kiss, Callan felt an unbearable chill of existence - a joyless, passionless merging of their lips. His vitality drained, like the lifeblood sucked out by a leech, his existence plunged into the darkened pit of despair.
It was a stranglehold, a merciless force. As he directed his hatred and blame to everything around him.
Life, from his birth to his meteoric rise to stardom, mocked him in its injustice. Successes, achievements, all turned to ashes in his mouth as he watched others stumble through life, untouched by repercussions.
His mind lingered on the antics of the Elite Four, each one parading their follies unscathed:
MATIAS SILPH,
Katherine Fairburne,
Melody Miro. Why couldn't he, Callan Young, stumble without condemnation? From some whore in a bar, no less.
He watched as
Laurence Anderson's insults of the commissioner turn a meeting into a clown festival.
He bore witness to
FERNANDO SILPH’s ruthless maneuvering, sinking the hooks of the Silph Corporation deeper into the League's skin. He watched as others stood by, uncaring that this occurred.
He observed
PENELOPE LIVY's flagrant inconsistencies, talking out both ends of her digestive system while somehow doing things that contradicted both. And at the same time damaging both herself and the League she represented.
He watched
dahlia goode's clinical discarding of people under a veneer of order. His frustration smoldered like coals, burning into his skin.
Why couldn't his interests take precedence? Why couldn't he blunder and avoid the aftermath?
Why had he discarded his band for an organization that scarcely valued its own loyal members?
Excuses dripped from him like an uncorked flask, a masquerade for his inadequacies.
Resentment did not feel terrible, the more he sank, the more he wanted to sink.
Callan was adrift in a sea of self-loathing, cursing the world for his miseries. His humbling beginnings, his aspirations of being a husband, father, musician, citizen - all shattered when he realised they were shams to the very core.
Then, the resentment then directed him. Towards himself, and his deepest regrets.
Memories of
Elinor Anderson, real and conjured, washed over him, each wave infusing new vigor into his ripe regrets. Ordinary days spent on a beach, in snow-laden walks, and inside his music studio. Her voice drowned in the roaring crowds, echoes of which still haunt his phone. Normalcy, traded away out of fear of commitment, a single text dissolving their connection.
A maelstrom of self-pity sucked him in, pulling him down into its vortex. Its winds whispered the script of his life in gusts — a narrative born of chance, moulded by his inherent fallibility, created by Arceus. It wasn't his doing, the tempest insisted, it was the cruel hand of his destiny at play.
And as his resentment endeavoured to blame his daughter and Jen for his misfortunes, a force halted its course.
At the base of his spine, pressure builds, holds, and something inside of him snaps. Like a bone reset into position. A fissure mending itself, resonated with a single counteracting thought.
It's not about you.Elisabeth's teeth tore into his lip, jolting him from his self-induced stupor.
Blood welled up from his lip, the sharp sting clearing the haze of alcohol. Time, it seemed, demanded he pay heed to the present. In a way, he thanked her, for waking him up to what was needed.
As her fingers clamped onto his chin, his body didn't resist.
"You wear the face of a friend. You can sink hooks into my mind and toy with my emotions. Who are you?" Callan's voice carried a ghostly echo in the room's sombre lighting, simmering with fury. But more than that, growing anticipation, and urgency. Fear intermingled there, as a silent backdrop.
"And how could you possibly pass a message to Elinor?" And beneath that question, a more pressing concern roiled - had she been successful in breaching his defenses?