The Beautiful People

I caught Bellatrix's arm as she started forwards to stop them.

"Ares?"

"Hush now. This is a fight we can't win," I told her softly. "Just watch, learn, and remember."

The officer who was still dripping soaking slushy snow from his clothes, landed the first blow. Then, like men hammering copper bowls, they set to the task of beating the child. I watched, holding onto my sister's arm, my teeth gritted together.

I could see after a moment that they were going lightly. So did the New Man.

"Give me that! You lazy cretins." Taking one of the nightstick batons, the New Man began to wale in blow after blow himself. There was one startled cry and then a silence broken only by thudding blows that continued to rain on a body that could no longer feel pain. Finally, tiring of his game, the New Man thrust the bloody baton into the stomach of one of the Grundels. "There, that's how you take care of vermin in the streets."

He straightened his clothes. Checked his appearance in the mirrored window of his limo and then stopped for only long enough to look over the hate-filled faces that filled the sides of the street. He smirked and turned to look at his driver, holding his door open.

"Driver, just run over that trash in the road and get us on our way. I'm already terribly late for my morning brunch with Capistrano. That fiend will have eaten all the sugar cakes!"

I could have thanked the Grundel that dragged the boy's broken body out the way of the limo's tires, had he not simply dumped the body into the gutter and left it there.

When I turned to look at Bellatrix she was staring a hole in my face.

"Why? Why didn't you stop that? You're supposed to be some kind of resistance fighter. That was monstrous!"

"Yes it was. But answer me this, what would you have done? Walked over there and told them to stop? A 'normal' that stands up to them is the next one in line to die. You would be laying next to the child over there, meat starting to rot in a gutter."

She pulled her hand out of mine angrily and stalked over to where the boy lay, unheeded by a public afraid to show concern lest they be next, and knelt next to him. With a sigh I walked over to stand beside her.

The face of the child was hardly recognizable as having been human, his head fractured till it no longer had the right shape. The sick taste at the back of my throat was a bitter bile. A mixture of desire to flee and a stronger desire to go do something really stupid began to build behind my eyes as I saw my sister crying. Looking up, I saw the pile of matted, bloody fur in the slush.

With anger building like a bonfire, I moved over to the dog and picked him up and carried him to lie beside his owner. Twins now, both broken and shattered by the uncaring.

I looked up when I heard a woman's scream split the air. A mother's cry of loss so anguished that no heart can bear it. Reaching down, I pulled Bellatrix up into my arms as the boy's family came running through the dirty snow to salt the ground with tears of loss.

"Come on. There's nothing we can do here," I whispered to my sister, applying pressure to her shoulders to make her move. She shook her head not, wanting to go, but I made her begin to move. I could hear sirens of approaching Grundels, coming to break up the "riot" no doubt. "We have to leave, now. You...can't be here."

She reluctantly began to stumble along beside me.

The tears of a weeping mother followed us down the street. The sound made me begin to wonder. Would my mother have cried like that for me? Would she cry for me now? Yeah right, that question I knew the answer to, but back when I had been that boy's age, would she have?

** ** ** ** ** ** **

The cold came in that night, as if the earth itself was in frigid mourning. Perhaps it did mourn the loss of that child, but how many more would join the boy in cold death from a bone-chilling night such as this? As I put the last of the dry wood in the stove, I could only hope the cold would break soon. What wood I had gathered today was going to be too wet to burn till tomorrow night at best.

Bellatrix had been quiet all afternoon. Her normal stream of questions silenced by what she had seen today. I could understand, even if it didn't affect me the same way. For her it was life altering. Me? I had seen it before, throughout my childhood, a thousand variations of mindless cruelty against anyone that wasn't Perfect.

"Why did he do that?" she asked in the silence,startling me.

"Who? The boy?"

"No! The New Man. Why did he kill a child like that?" She hugged her elbows. I didn't think it was the cold making her tremble.

"Can't you answer that yourself? You're one of them aren't you? One of the Perfect," I said, my voice carrying everything I felt about the New Men.

She looked up at me, her eyes blazing.

"The Perfect aren't like that!" she screamed.

I shrugged. "You saw for yourself, today, that they can be."

"That was just that one! He's sick, disturbed in the brain. It must be something left over from when he was Pariah! Only the Pariah are like that!"

I shook my head and smiled at her naivety. "Pariah, New Men...we are both still human, and humans are mindless vicious brutes when frightened. The boy made him late. That New Man lashed out in fear and hatred that a mere boy had dared to do anything that affected his greatness. If a filthy child in the street could disturb his meticulously planned day, then obviously he must not be as powerful as he thought, so to make it right in his mind, he had to destroy the boy. He exerted his power to kill things. When the boy was dead, his image of his own power restored to its proper place in his universe, he left."

"Monstrous," she muttered.

"Yes," I said, my voice carrying that I clearly accepted what had happen to the boy as nothing unusual. That resignation seemed to anger my sister.

"How can you just accept this? How can you not fight?"

"Oh, I've been fighting this. I've been fighting it for half my life. You know what I've achieved? I've manged to make the New Men double their security forces. That's it. Oh and I've probably gotten a few dozen people killed that were just in the wrong place. You know what I learned? You can't fight monsters without becoming a monster yourself."

"Then maybe that is what needs to happen! Maybe you do have to become a monster to kill monsters. If that's what it takes, I would gladly be a monster."

I had to bite my lips to keep from telling her that she already had the right look for one. That would have been unforgivable and unwarranted. It was not her fault what had been done to her.

Even now her face was beautiful in its anger...and yet...

As much as I loved her it grated on me to be constantly seeing that flawless skin, unblemished complexion, total lack of any type of scars, and her hair, that when she stood under lights, was the color of new snow. I had never spent any amount of time in the presence of one of the Perfect till these last few months. There was an angelic quality about them when you first saw one, but that quickly faded to an eery kind of inhuman unease that would settle on you when you looked at one of the Beautiful People just sitting, say reading, as she had been doing more and more of. It was like looking at a marble statue in a museum...and then seeing it move.

"Why didn't you stop them? You knew what they were going to do to that boy!" she accused.

"Yes, I knew," I answered back angrily. "Everyone on that street knew! His fate was sealed the moment that dog ran into the street. Oh, yes, I could have rushed over there. I'm strong, I could have pulled off maybe one of two of the Grundels...but then what?"

"Why do you always call the police Grundels? What is a Grundel anyway?" She asked, deflecting a question she didn't have an answer for. I have found, in the time I've known here, that she was very good at doing that.

"A grundel is the skin between a guy's nut sack and his asshole." Her eyes went wide. "And the 'normals' call the police that because that's what they are. Just an inch away from being assholes!"

It began with a twitch. Then a giggle she tried to hide. Then a blushing giggle that overwhelmed her. After a moment I couldn't help but join her in laughing. When she fell over into my bed laughing I laughed all the harder. Seeing the side of her stomach peeking from under the hem of her shirt, I leaned over and tickled her. She jumped two feet.

"No!"

I moved to tickle her again, but she grabbed up a small socket wrench that was lying on the table next to my bed and held it out towards me. "No you don't! Touch me and I'll use this...this...this whatever this is on you! I swear I will."

My eyebrow quirked. "How are you going to use it on me if you don't know what it is?"

"I'll figure it out, now...back. Back!" she threatened.

Laughing, I sat back in my chair. She stretched herself out on my bed, pulling a pillow to her chest. She continued to laugh silently.

But after a moment or so the laughter began to slowly fade, and the events of the day returned to sober the mood in the cistern. It was a few minutes after that when I first saw her shiver.

"Cold? Or scared?" I asked, knowing the answer.

"Yeah." she said softly. "Cold and scared."

Getting up, I grabbed the blanket off the back of the chair, and moving to the bed lay down next to her covering us both. I pulled her back up against my chest holding tight to her to keep the body heat trapped. After a bit she stopped shivering and snuggled back against me. My eyes quickly began to get heavy as her warmth penetrated my chest.

"Does it get much colder in here?"

"A bit. Being underground helps hold in the heat. but yeah. In late December it can be hard to keep it warm in here. Too much concrete," I told her, my words half mumbled as sleep began to take me. "Goodnight, sis."

"Goodnight."

The simple warmth and comfort of her next to me sent me into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Like almost every night of my life my eyes popped open at some point in the middle of the night. It was never any specific thing that awoke me night after night. It was simply my personal tic. Maybe some lay over from when I was a child. Some far distant half-memory maybe, but whatever it was it always woke me, wide eyes and nerves taut. I would listen to the silence of the night and slowly calm myself back into an even deeper sleep. Some nights, when I was especially exhausted, I thought it didn't happen, only to have others tell me I had awoken. Even spoken to them.

This night like the last few months, what I did was listen to the soft breathing of my sister. It would lull me back to sleep more quickly than anything else. With her next to me, I was sure it was going to very quickly do just that.

Then I noticed the tremor in her body under my hand. Reaching over my head, I turned on a single LED light that barely illuminated the two of us. Bellatrix's face was gripped in the most terrifying expression I have ever seen on another human face!

"Sis? Hey, wake up." I laid my hand on her bare arm.

Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at my face, her eyes searching for recognition. "Ares?" she asked, as if unsure of what her eyes were telling her. At my nod, she turned in my arms and buried her face against my bare chest, crying.

"Shuuu. It was just a dream. Let it pass and it will be forgotten. Just let it pass into the shadows. Don't cling to it." I held her against me, gently rocking her. My hand brushing through that too soft hair. Caressing that silk-skinned neck, rubbing the transition of shoulder to neck, and across her shoulder blades. She snuggled in against me and softly cried. "Let it go. Let if pass."

She fell silent in a bit and I thought she was asleep, but then just as my own eyes were drooping, I was snapped back awake by a question from the blue.

"What's it like to be...normal?"

Pushing sleep back, I reached over head and, pushing a button, ramped up the number of LEDS to give me a bit more light. I thought about it for a second then had to ask a question of my own to answer hers.

"How do you mean? Physically? Emotionally? Socially?"

"All of those, I guess," she answered. Her fingers began to absently move over a deeply puckered scar on my chest, just under my right nipple. "What's it like to scar? To have a mark like this stay with you forever?"

"Well, I've never really thought about it, but I guess it's like seeing the title on the spine of a book you read long ago. It brings you back to that point in time, makes you remember details. Scars are also kinda like book markers on the more traumatic parts of your life. That one there, was from when I was a teen. About a month after I left home, a guy jumped me in the park for my backpack. That's where his knife hit. It glanced off my ribs, so it didn't go deep enough to hit anything vital, but it burned like fire."

"How horrible!" she said suddenly pulling back her hand as if afraid she was hurting me. I smiled. And caught her hand and moved it to a second scar near my belly button. A round scar, smaller than a dime.

"Bullet." I smiled at her gasp. "There is one on my back that's much uglier where it came out. I was luck it missed just about everything on its way through. A back-alley doctor did a whiskey shot surgery and I was all good." At her confused look, I laughed and then explained. "He gave me a shot of strong whiskey and went in with the scalpel. Looked around inside, put a suture or two here and there to stop the bleeding then sewed me back up."

"Didn't that hurt?" she asked, horrified.

"Incredibly. I had three guys holding me down, and I was biting on a piece of leather the whole time, crying like a newborn."

She gave my side a light punch. "Why didn't you go to a hospital? You could have died!"

"It was a bullet from a Grundel's gun. There was a detailed police report at every hospital in the area, just waiting for someone to come in with a gut shot wound. I would have not made it past the emergency room before the cuffs went on."

"What were you doing that they shot you?" she asked suddenly.

"Stealing."

"What?" she asked. "Food?"

I slowly shook my head wondering if I should let her know this. The possibility of her getting to her feet and running back to her Perfect world full of Beautiful people was there.

"Explosives. We stole about two hundred pounds of high grade explosives and then blew up the rest of the storage facility.

"What did you want that for?"

I laughed. "To blow things up with it, of course!"

"What did you want to blow up!" she reared back her tiny fist again. "I swear I'm about to hit you again."

Laughing, I got my arms under me and pushed myself up till I put my back against the wall behind the bed. I grabbed my pillow and stuffed it behind me to ward off that cold concrete.

"Well, I was with this group of guys and we had gotten fed up with the Grundels and the New Men and we decided to do something a bit more than just think bad thoughts at them. I had a book from long ago, and it told of this guy who made bombs and used them to attack people he didn't like. So...I copied his designs, and we caused a bit of mayhem for about two years." I shrugged. "Would have kept going, but I ran out of explosives."

She just looked at me for a few minutes. "That was you? You bombed those churches, that school?"

"No!" I vehemently shook my head. "That was not me. In fact, the person that did that was the guy that grabbed you off the street that day. His name is Morgan, and before you judge him for the psychopath he really is just remember this. His mother threw him out the house at four years old. In the middle of winter."

"Why?"

"Because he was too old to undergo the surgeries." I took a deep breath remembering my first days at my school when Morgan was brought in by the Grundels. "She didn't want to have to raise children that weren't Perfect. She said it was a waste of her money, and that he should go die in the snow."

"Wasn't she arrested?" Bellatrix demanded.

"Nope. See she had already had the preliminary surgeries herself. She just couldn't afford both him and herself to be made Perfect. She chose herself."

I saw the understanding as it crossed my sister's eyes. "And any child she had after the surgeries would have been given them for no cost."

"Exactly." I nodded. Absently picking up my knife from the table by the bed. I checked the blade for rust then put it back. "Why waste the money. Just have herself altered and then she could have as many Perfect children as she wanted. Know where she got that idea?"

"The Church of the Perfect Man," she said, nodding her understanding. "I think I would have blown up a few of them myself for that reason."

"Oh, don't judge him too nice either. Morgan is an asshole. He planned to rape you, and knowing him, not just the once." I held up my hands in a silent apology. "I can't say I ever called him a friend once we got out of high school. He was just someone I knew."

"Why would he want to rape me? That doesn't make any sense. I mean surely he wouldn't want to make more of the Beautiful People. Why would he want to have sex with me, then? Any children I have will be automatically New Men." She shook her head in confusion, her lips pursed in this cute frown of hers.

"Well, rape isn't about sex; it's about power and control over those weaker that yourself. But why he would have wanted to have sex with you is a simple answer. Because it would have felt good, for him anyway." Even as I said it, and I saw the confusion grow on her face not fade, I realized that she had no knowledge about sex. None at all. "You do know that sex feels good, right?"

"It does?"

"Yeah," I was watching Bellatrix's face, seeing her thoughts like reading a page. She had never learned to hide her emotions. She would have no poker face at all. "It feels good. Hell, that might be the only reason that humans haven't gone extinct. If sex felt terrible, we would probably be nothing but fossils by now. I mean since birth hurts so much."

"Giving birth hurts?" she asked in total innocence.

What?

I pinched the bridge of my nose, shaking my head. "You're making my spleen hurt. What have they been teaching you? Yeah, birth hurts! From everything I've heard a gun shot is a love tap compared to the pain of childbirth. A fact, given that I have been shot twice now, that makes me damn glad to be male."

From the look on her face, I might have caused her less mental stress if I hit her with a club.

"Why wasn't I told this?" she asked.

I swallowed the bile that thinking about her answer brought to my throat.

"Remember how many children you said you were going to wanted to have? Knowing it would be agony would you agree to having that many? Doubtful. Look, let's just accept that you have been lied to from the get go and move on from there," I said with a shake of my head.

She slowly nodded, then fell silent. It was the sniffle that made me look up in time to see the tear that dropped from her cheek to dampen the sheet.

"Hey, don't cry. Come on don't cry."

"I wish I would just wake up and this was all a bad dream." She said hugging her arms across her breasts. "I was so happy before I learned all these things."

"Where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise," I said into the uncomfortable silence.

"Who said that?" she asked.

"I just did." I smiled at the look she gave me. I did notice she had stopped crying, though. "Tomas Gray, a poet that lived a long time ago. I read some of his writings. Didn't understand all of them, but that part caught me as a very smart observation of the world."

She nodded and then a yawn threatened to split her pretty head. Rearranging my pillows, I slid back down into the bed and held open the blanket for her to get back next to me. When she had curled up next to my chest, I dialed down the light to just one LED and buried my face in her soft, sweet-scented hair.