Flashes Of Light

Past - Sveta/Jonath

For the first weeks we'd known each other, months even, I had tried to tell myself that I didn't like Logar Iris much. And perhaps I hadn't.

So, I noticed only barely his physical appearance, and that was one of a handsome but sickly, pale and thin young man. The look in his beautiful dark blue eyes was always on edge and his cupid's bow was a sneer.

Still,  one day I noticed how different Logar looked after months of The Anti's madness. If he was thin before, he looked like he could be hospitalized now. His eyes and mouth were distorted, bitter, panicky. Everything we thought true about him was certainly true now, and it was entirely possible that before he'd just been an uptight albeit self-deprecating guy with ridiculous hair.

"I've seen how you behaved as Jonath," The Anti told me. "Good boy. But I see you've all been taking really hard the death of the President. What? When I appointed you Grenade, Sveta, I told you I would take your ideas and make them the reality. And the first day we met, it was you who asked me very naively if we were going to kill the President."

I felt really sick, because that other Sveta wasn't even there anymore. She was the product of ten years of abuse and poverty and other ten years in prison. I wouldn't have been able to reach her if I wanted to. Besides, there was a difference between asking if we would kill the President and really murdering an innocent man.

Logar looked at me with a puzzled expression, and looking vaguely disappointed, or perhaps it was just his normal face those days. Percie couldn't look me in the eyes.

"And the pills? If you are so into it, why didn't you take the medicine they offered you in the Dormitory to leave?"

"Because those make you a different person," I replied. I felt about to vomit.

"Yours give you a masculine voice."

"You know what I mean," I replied. It was the first time my voice was so rough when talking to Michaim Toutatis.

The Anti huffed. "I just realized a major flaw in my plan. A little late, but we can still make up for it. I told you you were going to change society, and you've been to the city maybe twice. You need to build up presence in Silkton, and you have to open your eyes to how things are. You've gotten fat and lazy."

Since it was the first time we had an exhausting all time job and we never got money, or anything to eat, it was hard to understand what he meant.

Still, that day we went into the capital. Perhaps The Anti was right, in a way, because we were not prepared at all for what we saw.

People recognized Jonath, and they cowered away from me, but it was worse for Logar.

"Devil!" an old man yelled, throwing a tin can at him. "Why don't we take him now? We need to finish the witchhunt we started!"

It was hard to tell if they'd started the witchhunt by killing Lix or if there was something else going on.

"They are not real people," someone dressed as a truck driver said. "So we don't have to worry about hurting them! But they're leading our country in ruins!"

"The Anti has crossed a line," another one booed.

Of course, we had fans too, or so we'd always been told. But that day we didn't meet any.

Jonath was called several slurls, and Logar picked on because of his tight pants which apparently many people thought didn't make him much of a man.

Then, a police officer arrived. We couldn't tell whether he was one of The Anti's people. "Logar Iris," she said. "You have to proceed with me, so we make sure you don't cause any uproar."