Bester chewed on his thumb nail.  He’d known this day was coming, hadn’t he? hadn’t really been so conceited, so confident in his own power and worth that he hadn’t bothered to prepare for it?

Revenge was coming.

He’d been right to trust that Garibaldi would never find a way to remove the block that Bester himself had stowed away in his mind over thirty years ago.

But he hadn’t counted on the man finding another who loved him enough to carry out his revenge for him and not count the cost.

For most, the past was left to the past.

Michael Garibaldi had dragged a shattered John Sheridan out of the cell on Mars and saved his life.  The battles had been fought and the wars won.  They’d made Sheridan President, and finally he and his ex-security chief had admitted to the world that whatever fates had brought them together, nothing in the universe would ever separate them.

Five years later, a surrogate mother – a close friend to the both of them – had borne them a child.

And it was from this child – David Stephen Sheridan – that Bester had received the note he held loosely in his clawed fingers.

‘You who wronged a simple man
Bursting into laughter at the crime,
Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You can kill one, but another is born.
The words are written down, the deed, the date.’

Bester knew what it meant.  He’d known though the note had not been signed.

Sheridan had been a victim of Bester’s own personal war.  His horrendous treatment at the hands of Clarke’s men had made even the hardened Psi-Cop cringe.

When the declaration of betrothal had been made between John and Michael, Bester had finally understood the force of Garibaldi’s rage.  It didn’t make him sorry.

Garibaldi had tried several times to take his revenge and blow Bester’s head from his shoulders.  But the block had remained in place.  And still he remained unrepentant.

John Sheridan was dead now, and Garibaldi was also gone.  Bester himself was crippled – physically and mentally – by age and a life lived on the edge of other peoples’ minds.

But David Stephen was a ranger.  Young and trained, he was on his way here now to somehow exact revenge for the pain and damage caused to his fathers.  To the year that was torn from them and the deep wounds that had taken time and love to heal.
 

The door opened, and Bester lifted his heavy, wrinkled head.  His eyes weren’t what they’d once been, but he knew this was his nemesis.  And his nemesis wasn’t alone.

He recognised the mental echo of a powerful telepath, and it wasn’t David Stephen.

“Alfred Bester.”  It wasn’t a question.  There was no chance of a denial.

“David Stephen Sheridan.”  Despite age and the natural decay of his body, Bester’s voice remained strong.

“You know why I’m here.”

“Revenge.”  He strove to remember the first line.  “I wronged a simple man.”

“Two men.  Two men who loved each other, loved their work, their home world.  Who were fighting for that world.”

Bester tried for a laugh that had reduced itself to a rough cough in seconds.  “You really think I care if you kill me?” he asked once he’d regained his composure.  “Look at me – how much longer do you think I have left?”

“Oh, I haven’t come to kill you, Mr Bester.”  David Stephen stepped further into the room, his companion remaining where she stood.

Bester squinted up at the man as he perched on the side of the bed.  He had John Sheridan’s dark, hazel eyes, and Michael Garibaldi’s striking features.

“Whose son are you?” Bester asked boldly.

“John and Michael’s son.”

“And your mother?”

“General Susan Ivanova.”

A smile cracked Bester’s hardened features.  “My old friend.”

“You, Mr Bester, do not have any friends.  You have subordinates, you have proteges, and you have enemies.  More enemies than I could ever count.”

“And you’re here to take their revenge.”

“No.  I’m here to execute my fathers’ one last wish.  They wanted you to know what you’d done.”

The words rushed through Bester’s mind as he tried to pre-empt what Sheridan and Garibaldi had asked for with their last breaths.

“David,” he began, “I did not ‘burst into laughter at the crime’, I assure you.  I was as horrified as everyone else when Garibaldi betrayed Sheridan at Edgars’ behest.”

David Stephen had lived too long with parents with the most explosive tempers, and had, over time, developed a calm about him that baffled close family friends and relations alike.  His grandfather, David Sheridan, had been constantly bemused at how a child of his son’s could find any inner peace.  John had never been one for calm deliberation and Michael certainly didn’t have any such trait.

“No one, Mr Bester, was as horrified as Michael when he found out what he’d done.”

“You sing with the chorus, do you?  What shame.”  Bester let his eyes linger on the handsome face, the short, dark blond hair.

“I know what you did.  And I have no qualms about what I’m about to do.  ‘Do not feel safe.  The poet remembers.’  Michael might not have been able to take his revenge for what you did to them, but I can.”

Another faint cough.  “There is nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done.”

That brought forth a smile.  “Something my father said to you once.”

“You really are proud to call them your fathers, aren’t you?”

“Prouder and happier than you will ever know or ever experience.”

“I didn’t kill either of them,” Bester tried his weak defence.

David Stephen shifted on the bed, folding his hands in his lap.  “I know you didn’t, Mr Bester.  That’s just the way the poem goes.  And nothing was ever written down, was it?  But it was recorded.  In Michael’s memories, in John’s.  They always remembered.  Their pain stretched on and on, pain only understood by the other.”

He glanced up then, and Bester felt as well as saw the second figure draw closer.  The mental shadow grew stronger, darker.

And slowly he realized he should be afraid.

David Stephen stood, straightening his coat.  “John’s imprisonment and torture lasted eleven days.  Michael’s lasted almost eight months.  Yours will last the rest of your life.”

Bester opened his mouth to ask, perhaps, what that meant.  Before he could speak, a film was played into his mind.  A film, with a soundtrack of screams, special effects of blood that looked and felt too real.  And it spooled on and on.

Betrayal.  Heart breaking betrayal that ripped out his soul before they’d even started.

Beatings and kickings…
Rape and torture…
Electrocution.
Pain, fear.

Nothing that could overwhelm the despair that festered inside of him where his heart had once been.

Questions.  Plain and simple questions.

Questions.  Painful questions that had no answer.

He couldn’t answer.  That would be the end.

Darkness and light.

Sickness so painful it twisted the stomach and burned the throat.

Sound that rooted itself in his brain, clawing at his eyeballs, scratching at his eardrums.

Agony.  Searing agony that ran like fire along his nerves until his whole being screamed for release.

But he couldn’t find voice for his pain.

Losing his mind in the labyrinth of games they played.

No pain greater than the loss of love.  Except maybe the loss of freedom,  Again and again.

His body letting go of urine and excrement as the jolts came again and he wished he were dead.

Alfred Bester spent the rest of his life wishing he were dead.