Weekly Drabble #353: To the Last, I Grapple with Thee (Patreon)

This week's prompts are from Tyronne with 'final embrace' and EBB with 'unexpected explosion'. Enjoy!

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To the Last, I Grapple with Thee:

The end of the world was a good time to settle grudges, and Octolio had many grudges to settle. He marched through the streets with purpose, ignoring the milling, confused and frightened crowds that scurried here and there or stood fast, staring at the mountain in the horizon that, only minutes prior, had begun billowing steam and smoke.

The ground shook again. Octolio caught himself against the side of a building, but a woman – a prostitute judging by her clothes and makeup – fell and cried out as she gashed her head against the wall. He knelt to pick her up.

“The gods are angry,” she whispered to him fearfully as the man tore a strip from his sleeves, pressing it to her bleeding head.

“Then you’d best be off, hadn’t you?” he asked.

Her eyes widened as if she’d never considered the possibility until now, too shocked by the sudden change in the city’s situation to think of anything else. She nodded mutely, hurriedly staggering on her way. Octolio wished her good fortune. He himself had one last score to settle before he’d leave.

At first he feared Septal’s home abandoned, but as he approached, the door opened and the big man stepped into the doorway. “I knew you’d be coming.”

Octolio tried to look past the larger man into his house. “Your family around?”

“No. I sent Aussia and the girls out of the city at the first earthquake.” Punctuating his words, the ground rumbled once again. Septal braced himself in the doorframe, Octolio also stayed on his feet. “It felt different to me.” Septal craned his neck towards the smouldering mountain. “I think I was right.”

The younger man nodded in approval. “I always knew you were a smart man. But... maybe not that smart if you’re still here.”

“We have unfinished business, don’t we?”

“Aye,” Octolio stroked his chin. “We do.”

“Then come in. Have a cup of wine with me and we can settle our affairs.”

Octolio followed Septal into his home. The other man uncorked an amphora of wine and poured himself and his visitor a glass, offering his guest the choice of cup. Octolio didn’t fear poison. Septal wasn’t that kind of man. Octolio offered a toast to his host’s family, and they both drank to it.

That done, Septal rose from his seat. Octolio did the same. They faced each other across the long kitchen table. “There still might be time, you know,” he said as he drew his dagger. The blade was mostly clean, but there remained a few flecks of blood on the hilt from his other settled accounts. “You can go join your family.”

“And you could not have come here,” the other man responded.

Octolio smirked. “Aye, I could not have.” He looked out at the window. There was a sliver of a view of the mountain’s smoke-spewing peak. “‘Unfinished business’, was it?”

Septal’s fingers curled around the handle of a butcher knife he’d left on the counter. “Surely is.”

“Then let’s finish it, and the gods can decide the rest.”

Septal smiled. It was cold and cruel and it matched the expression on Octolio’s face. Both men had been looking forward to a day like today for a very long time. Despite his size, Septal was fast, but Octolio had greater experience in a fight. The men slashed at each other, overturning furniture, hurling whatever they could lay their hands upon at one another. The ground rumbled and trembled beneath their feet. Screams from outside rose as uncertainty became full-blown panic. Neither noticed.

Blood dripped from limbs and faces, mingling with sweat. Chests heaved with exertion. Hard, hateful eyes stared into one another.

Septal lunged, but he overextended and Octolio took advantage, driving his dagger deep into the other man’s guts. Before he could pull back, another earthquake hit and he lost his balance. Septal fell on top of him, the force of the causing him to drop his dagger. Septal’s hands closed around Octolio’s neck. “You know,” he hissed. “I hated you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”

With those hands squeezing his throat, Octolio didn’t have the breath to muster words. He shoved his right hand deep into the open wound, spreading it wider. Despite the pain, Septal refused to loosen his grip, putting all his remaining strength into choking his adversary as the life poured out of his body. Octolio’s vision was turning grey and he felt that hellish grip crushing his windpipe. Octolio couldn’t speak, but he spat into his enemy’s face, refusing to accept oblivion without one last expression of contempt for his hated foe.

~

“And here,” the tour guide said as he led the museum group through the unearthed city’s ruins. “We have one of the most compelling sets of human remains, dubbed ‘the lovers’.” He stopped just in front of a display case, showing the casts of a pair of men, bodies pressed close and arms positioned as if embracing one another. “In the instant before their world turned to fire and the thermal shock killed everyone within the city, they held one another close, the moment preserved by the speed and ferocity of the volcano’s pyroclastic flow, speaking across time and space of an ancient love that survived death itself.”