match and gasoline
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“Perhaps you are at the end of all things, perhaps the beginning.” A flanged voice lilts in the rhythm with the white noise of chanting in the halls. “Perhaps,” they continued, calm and optimistic; holding up a finger in wise protest of the expression on her face, “to be between two places, to not know if those we love are embraced or waking; it is agonizing on the soul. Perhaps the universe has a plan?” The monk hums for a moment.
“Perhaps the universe is cruel.”
He does not know her; he looks at her like she’s a revenant, in-between his sight and invisible and it is what breaks her. She covers her mouth with her hands, trying to force the sob torn from between her teeth to stay put, hunched over and kneeling in the grass she can’t even feel, that she cant even remember the feel of. Like a black hole opening up in the pit of her stomach she wants to be sick - she had a hand in this. She looked for Rohan, contacted everyone she could think of and it still wasn’t enough; she wasn’t there to help him, she didn’t look hard enough. Accepted him as dead. (Moved from anguish into laughter and she wonders, did he ever get to smile again?)
She wants - knows - she should be collected, stare down the helicopter and annihilate it with the wrath of a rapture. Let Talon find it and piece it back together and feel what it meant to be on the end of destruction; at the mercy of science and nature and anger and hatred.
“You don’t want to be found by them.” He stumbles backward shakily, and she wishes he were right. She wishes, angrily and stubbornly and all things in between, they would take her so she could spread like a disease through Talon; leave a metallic taste all the way through to its centre, leave the string of electricity in their teeth. Rot the thing from the inside out.
(We’re heroes, she was told once.)
“No,” she whispers out, and it’s lost in the chopping above them. “No, no, no, no, no.” It tumbles out of her mouth like the lock was turned, flooding through her teeth in desperation and she presses her palms to her eyes for a moment. There’s a storm within her, thundering around her bones and rattling them lose - a sickness and an anger and a sense of grief. All of them lost in the years to the monks in Nepal first, and then to the overstuffed blanket of cockiness and time.
“I don’t know what to do,” she can barely get the words out, and they sound pathetic and foreign and grating on her. (You can’t leave again.) There’s nothing else she can think of, besides the thing looming above her.
It peels away at her, listening to the steady rhythm of the blades above, thrashing the tops of the trees about with something too violent the way the trees blossom like a flower to let the buzzard in. It matches a heartbeat (matches the waves of electricity, a metal fist on the enemies tiny, important vessels). It matches the chanting in the monastery, it matches breathing, it matches the beats between thunder and lightning.
She feels pinpricks in the centre of her eyes, pulling at the retinas; filing into points with white heat. It needles down her teeth, down through the roots of her jawbone, crawling up her skull like a heavy spider, strikes in the points that connect a body, screaming over the burns that mark her skin: a map to the machine of her core, through the column steps of her spine. Tangling with the fear and the anger and the hatred in the pit of her stomach.
And what if they take him back? A voice in the back of her head wilts there, something hopeful dying where it was born, crumbling under the weight of fear and disgust. The silent thrum in her chest quickens and she wants to rip out the pieces there, leave them to rust in the grass below the watchful gaze of the trees. She wonders if he can see the heartbreak in her; she wonders if he will leave with her.
The universe is cruel, above all things, and once when Zin was young she believed it would never turn her into a warpath. Something closes off in her, lifting the slats in her arms for pressure and routing through her like a current. She feels as if her head will explode with the flux, the twinge of despair and malice under her skin. The lights built into her wrists flicker, the hum they emit consumed by the echoing of the helicopter.
She’s brought back to the first night, when they told her and when she burned Jesse. The second night when she refused to speak to anyone. The third, fourth, fifth.
The next week at the funeral, (a week, they waited a week,) the day she left. When she broke the bones of a man for speaking to her wrong, when she electrocuted another for telling a joke. Nepal, the small altar for her the monks had made so she would feel like a piece of their Iris. (There was a blade at the centre pinning a photograph like a paperweight, with flowers billowing around it; tinting the blade soft, forcing the flowers to be violent accomplices. All to remind her that he lived, once. )
Her breath comes in gasps and her chest is tight and like a salvo, arms outstretched, she strikes everything all at once. The trees that were blanketed in green and dry bark are blue with light and then orange with fire, the forest igniting itself like a dance down a line. It is quiet, in the eye of the lightning, to her. A calming wave in the middle of a hurricane, like a comforting song or the sound of laughter you recognize.
The tower groans and vibrates like a tuning fork, partially collapsing under the distressed rust at contact, threatening to crush everything beneath it. The lightning barely tips the helicopter, dipping out of the way as it did, but around it is nearly all fire, and she’s been shot before.
(How many of them have experienced their heart stopping at the hands of grief? Have they ever faced what nature had to offer? Have they ever angered a god?) A voice inside her tells her to grab Rohan and run, the speed of light and faster, to anywhere but here. She shakes her head slightly, waving her hand through the light smoke building around them now.
“I’m here this time,” she breathes out, cradling her own chest like her ribs might spill out of her at any moment, charred black by voltage, and she looks up at him. Her eyes are red rimmed and she knows she looks a mess but she’s here. She knows she shouldn’t read too deeply into his expression, into his words and his voice; but she does, and it brings her back to a time when they watched each others back, when they ran around eerily pristine streets in search of a makeshift adventure, when they were younger and indestructible and made of something celestial. When she never lost.
“I don’t leave if you don’t.” Time is accustomed to moving slowly around her, under the weight of her steps, but it is not slow enough in a burning tomb with a vulture circling above them.
