The two circled each other. Green held his side. What appeared to be green flames, mystical energy, trailed from his eyes. His clothes a tattered mess, stained with blood and a viscous, clear fluid. Michaela spat out blood and a tooth. Snot ran down her face which she wiped with the back of her hand. Her eyes glazed with the resignation that perhaps it was not close enough to winter. Catching a glimpse of her fallen twin, she stood from her crouch, her legs a buckling mess.
They rushed each other one last time. Green's fingers raked across her face even as her meaty fists connected with his already-wounded side. His fingers dug deeper, finding purchase in her eye sockets and nostrils. His fingers extended into those cavities. Michaela's left eye burst, a mix of bone and blood, the eye dangling free from its socket. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as he kept pulling. He drove the talon-like nails into her face and pulled. Her skull cracked, a slow splitting egg, her expression a frozen rictus of – if not terror – with a sense of understanding eternity. Her head exploded in a rain of brain matter and blood.
Green staggered forward, his fingers slowly withdrawing into the approximation of a human shape. Michaela's body collapsed onto her knees and held that position, a headless supplicant in prayer before tumbling over. Slowly, he climbed the hill leading up to Breton Court. The shouts of his boys were a mishmash of sounds. He saw them running toward him, slowing as he came into their eyesight. His alien – the word their minds would scramble to elucidate was ancient, but to them he would simply be alien – elemental form, the disfigured form they knew as Green, horrified them. They raised their guns toward him. The weapons reports echoed, the flight of bullets whirred past him.
"Get down," one yelled.
Green was about to turn when a slug burned into his back. More emerald flames erupted from the wounds. His skin was like aged parchment sewn together by rough cords which now threatened to tear loose in sheets. He needed time to fully heal. Time that Junie – in his harried amble and eyes a mix of terror and frenzy – was not about to give him.
Anger consumed Junie. To compare his anger to cancer did a disservice to the disease. His anger filled his every waking moment, defined his very core, and seeped into every pore of his body. He wore his anger like a life-preserver, clinging to it because not only was it all he knew, but he was desperately afraid to let it go. It was so much a part of him, he didn't know how to function without it. So Junie had no choice. He had to do what men did. Parker was gone, but he didn't know what to do with the anger. He didn't know who to blame. He couldn't blame God because God had long turned his back on the shit stain he called a life. He couldn't blame Parker because sometimes you got got. They all knew how the game would end for them. He couldn't blame himself for contenting, no, consigning both he and Parker to a life without vision or purpose. But he knew in the shriveled remains of the thing he called a heart that this whole mess had to be someone's fault. He wasn't a particularly contemplative man. He felt. He acted. Had he been of the more reflective type, he would have realized that he raged at the futility of his world. A world he accepted and was complicit with. Anger and blame was all he knew and it twisted him up inside. Burning up all that was good and decent in him until there was nothing left but the rage. A rage occasionally assuaged by drugs.
But Parker was still dead. That boy had potential. Potential Junie knew he didn't know how to encourage. All he knew was this life. He didn't know from books or college or a straight life. He didn't have the tools to get him out. He thought by teaching him the game, by being there, he could protect him. Be like a father to him. He failed at both. Damn it all. Men like Junie didn't love. Love fucked with him or he'd fuck it up. Either way, he didn't truck with no love. He did know about respect. And consequences. Rage was the all-consuming consequence. Once men like him figured out this was all there was to their lives, this was all they'd ever be, a calm would overtake them. An existential peace that came with figuring out something most folks hadn't. And was freeing. Junie was ready to die, a samurai ready to fall in honor to his master. For Junie, the master of his life was the game. His hoodie drawn up, a burial shroud, and the gun heavier than usual in his hand. He recalled the first lesson Baylon taught him: "Don't be caught half-stepping with your gun on safety."
Green stumbled up the embankment, each step a struggle. His clothes ripped to tatters, the man appeared to have been used as a retrieval stick for a rabid dog. He lumbered toward Junie, eyes unfocused, as if unaware of Junie's presence. That was how it had been for Junie his entire life. Even when he was present in the classroom, in the meetings, he wasn't there. No one saw him. No one took him seriously.
He squeezed the trigger and didn't quit pulling it.
• • •
Green was officially pissed off.
Green grabbed a stone from the broken concrete of the bridge and charged toward Junie. His muscles flexed like a bound cord of twigs. His flesh threatened to be rent from him with each step. The eldritch fires seethed in spurts, he barely contained them now. The assault by the troll brothers took their toll on him, causing him to expend more power than he expected. Drawing on the green, the force of life, the elder magicks that held even his current form together, taxed him on many levels. He was tired. This age exhausted him. The effrontery of this mortal intruding on the soliloquy of his thoughts, however, elicited a more than commensurate response.
Junie fired wildly, the courage of the gun waning as his target didn't shrivel and cower but rather ran toward him. He all but dropped the gun to turn tail himself, but Green was upon him before he could move.
"Now we play the most ancient of games," Green said, his voice a fatigued whisper, the sound of dead leaves scurrying across cracked pavement. "Only one has ever bested me in it. You and the trolls have tried your best to behead me, but I still stand. Now, we see how well you do."
Green shoved Junie, face down against the sidewalk, pinning his head with his left hand as he straddled the man's body. Junie feared Green was about to rape him, to punk him out in front of his entire crew. Entreating words pleaded for Green to not do what he thought about doing, to leave him with some measure of dignity. Hot tears scalded Junie's cheeks, ashamed at himself for begging, much less being in this position again. The life had its costs and Junie had already paid dearly during his last bid in prison. Memories he thought he had dealt with, blocked out, and moved on from. Yet they haunted part of his soul and further stoked the flames of anger.
Green raised the rock above his head then brought the edge of it down on Junie's neck. The first blow nearly severed his head clean off, silencing Junie's merlings with a single wet thud. The next three were pure rage. Junie's blood splattered on Green. Heedless of the sanguine shower, Green went about his task with grim determination. His fury nearly spent, he roared with the righteous indignation of spring interrupted by a last blast of winter. The wails of sirens quickly drowned out his cry as Five-O screeched to a halt along either side of the bridge.
A dull roar filled Lee's ears. His mind couldn't quite digest the chaos going on around him, not fully process what he was seeing. Through the cacophony of white noise, he heard his partner yell at the man, if indeed he was a man. A disfigured creature, branches protruding from his face like a man who ran his car into a tree with such force he'd become one with it. Not much of his skin or clothes remained. Octavia ordered him to drop whatever it was he had in his hand and lace his fingers behind his head. All Lee could do without having to think about the sight in front of him was parrot his partner, repeating the command of "on your knees, get on your knees" like a mantra hoping its familiarity would somehow center him. The man, locked in his weary stride, carried himself with a laid-back yet incontrol aspect, an ambulatory bush attempting a pimp stroll. Under the mucous, the blood, and torn clothes, he had to be Green. What was wrong with his skin? Lee kept asking himself, his brain not leaping to believe what his eyes took in.