Dr. Manhattan to Ozymandias from Watchmen by Alan Moore. Web Source.
They think it’s out of grief that I’ve been here for two
days.
They think that I can’t stand for someone to take the body
from me, that I don’t want anyone to see him like this, hanging like an
ornament by his own cape, decked out in costume like he hadn’t been for years.
They’re right but for the wrong reasons.
I sighed and looked him right in his glass eyes. “You always said you’d die with a smile on
your face.”
Only my brother would go to his death grinning like an
idiot.
“Oh, Rama, please
save me!” the girl cried as Ravana, the villain we’d been chasing for months,
cackled and dashed
up
the building with her in his arms.
Glancing at my brother, I nodded once and he immediately
sprang up the building.
I cracked my knuckles and smiled at the henchmen surrounding
me.
POW!
In a few short seconds, most of them were unconscious or
begging for mercy. My work here done, I
scanned the top of the tower for my brother, only to spot Ravana waving a red
detonator and laughing as my brother climbed furiously up the building.
“You’ll never catch me alive!” he screamed, pressing the
detonator as my brother made a last leap towards him.
“NO!” I yelled, racing towards the building.
But I was too late, and the tower exploded outwards,
throwing me into a telephone pole.
When I opened my eyes, everything was blanketed in concrete dust and glass shards.
“Rama? Where are
you?” I called, knowing he couldn’t possibly have died.
I fumbled my way towards the center of the explosion, and
suddenly I saw them, two figures intertwined together, my brother and the
mayor’s daughter kissing like they had been searching for each other for years.
That picture haunted
the city hall for years afterward. The
mayor immediately gave his permission for his daughter, Sita, to marry Rama.
They were perfectly beautiful together. Everybody was in favor of the marriage except
for me.
“You hardly even know her!” I argued, even on the day of his
wedding. “You rescued her once, and now
you’re going to marry her?”
“It’s true love,” Rama sighed, fixing his hair. “You wouldn’t understand, Lakshmana. I feel like I’ve known her for ages. She and I have never run out of things to
talk about.”
“That’s because you’ve had a total of two conversations,” I
muttered, but he was dreaming again, smiling about Sita’s dark hair and brown
eyes.
♦ ♦ ♦
I can still see her, shining in her dress, blushing prettily
when I kissed her.
The
wedding was the most perfect moment of my life, when I was drunk off her
instead of bad tequila, and the years that followed were bliss, when I could hold
my sons’ hands instead of cans of beer.
If I could do it all again, would I still marry her? Sometimes in my desperation, stumbling home
at 5 AM, so drunk I walk down the wrong street, I wonder if I would have been
better off.
“You need to stop doing this,” she whispered furiously with
red-rimmed eyes as I fell through the door.
“But the kids love it when I break down the door,” I
slurred, using the counter to steady myself.
“This isn’t a joke!” she hissed. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to go
drink again right after you promised me you would stop. I’m sick of this kind of behavior, Rama. Rama!”
I hauled myself to the couch and threw myself down. “I’m listening. You know I can take care of myself. If you want someone who just does whatever
you ask, why don’t you just go back to him, anyway.”
“This isn’t about him!
This is about you! Your behavior
doesn’t just affect you; it affects me and your sons as well. Think about what people say when they see you
drunk in the bar every night!”
“Think about what they said when they saw you having dinner
with that creep.”
“It was a mistake and it was a long time ago, Rama. Why can’t you just forget about it?!”
It was the same argument every night. I would say, “Because I love you,” and she
would say “I know you do,” through her tears and we would go to bed and make up
and everything would be okay but nothing was ever okay.
I didn’t want to pretend anymore.
“Because I can’t!” I screamed. “I can’t forget any of it! Why do you want to forget? Why can’t we remember?”
“Because it’s over!
It’s in the past and you can’t change it!”
“Then get out! If you
want to forget so bad, then just leave.”
“Rama, you can’t mean—“
“I said, GET OUT!”
She did it. She left
and she took my boys and now only I remained in this cavernous house. I wandered through it until I found myself
where I always ended up, sitting in my closet looking at my superhero costume.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see it all: flying through the clouds with Lakshmana,
blood spraying from a henchman’s face, faces contorted as the building tumbled
down.
If I slipped far enough into my memories, I could feel her
lips on mine, soft even through the dust, could still grip her hands, soft even
with the blood and grime.
The suit was rough when I pulled it on and tight in places I
didn’t remember, but it still fit well enough.
Smiling, I felt the breeze on my face one last time and jumped
towards a twinkling river in the sky with a green bank and a man I didn’t
recognize but knew.
Author's Note: As you can probably tell, the story is very loosely based on the last half of the Ramayana when Rama saves Sita from Ravana and later exiles her. His actions puzzled and angered me so I tried to explain them in this story. The superhero aspect was inspired by the comic I drew the picture from, Watchmen by Alan Moore. I recently watched the movie and loved it, so I just had to incorporate superheroes somewhere in the story. I tried to allude to elements of the Ramayana like them searching for each other for years and Rama's ascendance to heaven although I didn't put a lot of references in.
Bibliography: Public Domain Ramayana. Web Source.
