Just a little writing/prompt blog, now with its own discord server that you can find here main blog is @the-only-universe-here ~ header image via @dailyminimal, avatar photo from @dappermouth
aslkjglk omg, that last bit sucker-punched me. I would be an absolute fool if I didn’t run with this - because you all know I’m absolutely weak for angst.
Let’s have a bit of lovers-to-enemies, shall we?
WORDS: 1,725 - I am so sorry everyone lmao
TL;DR - nuclear bombs, time-traveling shenanigans, heartfelt confessions of love in one’s dying moments...and a vaguely implied dichotomy between the 1800s and WWII-Era New Mexico.
“There was so much blood. Too much, Ilhemina knew. Too much on the outside, and not enough on the inside; without a doubt, there was no way Oslo was pulling through this. And it was her fault - her fault, she thought over and over. She’d done this to him, dragging him into this mess. Fear for his waning life chased her guilt round and round as she tore yet another strip from her skirt, pressing it to Oslo’s side.
It had seemed the right thing to do, going after Lord Bane. In the moment, the irony of their shared nemesis’s name hadn’t occurred to Ilhemina; she’d been thinking only of the bomb. What a man like Lord Bane could do with such a thing - a weapon stolen from another time, a weapon he had no right possessing - had paled in comparison to what it might take to stop him. Though she and Oslo had stopped him, the thought brought her little comfort now.
Such was the thing about bombs, and their ilk: so monumental, so obstreperously terrifying in their capacity to destroy, they made it all too easy to forget the smaller weapons, no less deadly for their inferiority. The gunshot had sounded as hollow and far-away as shattering glass, moments ago. Without Ilhemina and her pocket watch to slow its path, the bullet had slid between Oslo’s ribs like steel through fresh-churned butter. She figured he must have screamed - but only now did she realize that’s what it had been: the rush of air from his lungs as she’d brought the cinderblock down on Lord Bane’s hand. Small weapons - a moment’s blindness - and now she was bound to lose her love, along with her enemy.
So shaken, so filled to her brim with shame, Ilhemina barely noticed the blood still seeping through her fingers.
“Mina.” Oslo’s voice jolted her back to reality, weak but no less adamant as it demanded her attention. The hand not gripping her forearm slid to the nape of her neck, drawing her face closer to his as she knelt above him.
“I’m so sorry, Os.” She could hardly contain her tears. “I’m sorry, I’ll fix this. I know it hurts. I’ll fix it; I promise.”
“It’s too late,” he said. “I can see it in your eyes.”
As if there were any chance in the world he hadn’t noticed her bloodstained hands.
“It’s not,” she maintained. She didn’t believe it, and neither did he, but she had to, for both of them. Oslo was fading fast, his face already deathly pale; Ilhemina swore to cling to whatever moments he had left. She pressed the strip of cloth more firmly to his wound.
“Stop--” Oslo coughed, and his face twisted in pain, a sight that made Ilhemina’s gut clench. “I don’t want you to - I don’t want this,” he grunted. Lying his head back on the cool concrete floor, he breathed: “Mina, I have something to tell you.”
“I’m listening,” she said, perhaps a bit too fervently. Since when did she allow her fear to creep so easily into her voice? “I’m here,” she amended. “Take as long as you need.”
He smiled at that - and she immediately felt stupid, as if there were any time or breath to waste. Nevertheless, he began slowly: “Do you remember the Sands?”
Ilhemina remembered. In fact, she remembered more vividly than she cared to admit, the name sending a shiver down her spine. “The lab where we first discovered what Lord Bane was plotting,” she said. A single tear slipped down her cheek and soaked into his torn shirt.
“I first told you I loved you there,” he said.
“And I said it right back.”
“Yes, but--” Another shudder racked Oslo’s body, and this time Ilhemina had the hunch that it was less from the wound than from the chill which had no doubt begun to set into his bones. “But there was something else,” he said. “Something I never told you.”
“You can tell me anything, Os.” Ilhemina’s hand had slipped, and once again, she righted the pressure on his wound.
His hand fell, overlapping hers. “Do you remember when we were separated?” he asked.
Her voice wavered. “I’ve never felt so afraid.”
“I was following you through one of the underground bunkers. I got cornered. Lord Bane’s men held me back while you ran farther ahead.”
“I should have come back for you. I wanted to. I’m sorry for that, Os.”
“I had just confessed my love for you,” Oslo said. “The thought of never seeing you again...I couldn’t bear it. But, Mina...”
His hand was so, so cold now.
“Mina, they never captured me.”
Delirious with grief - they both were - she nearly laughed. “I know, Os. I stole the war plans, and found you outside, waiting for me.”
“Alive,” Oslo agreed, “but only because I agreed.”
Ilhemina frowned at that. Her eyebrows furrowed, and now the corner of her lip did curl into a confused smile. “Agreed to what?”
“I let them do what they wanted.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “They let you go.” She glanced down at their intertwined hands, and grimaced. “Oslo, you’re bleeding far too much. We ought to get you out of here.”
“There’s no time,” he repeated. “I’m going to die, and you know it. But of all the secrets I will take to my grave, on God, let this not be one of them.”
She pursed her lips. “What did Lord Bane’s men want?”
“An experiment,” Oslo said. “Lord Bane was a Time Wizard; they couldn’t have well used him. But I’m not - I wasn’t. I was - am - human, just like them. The scientists, the guards.... they saw in me a chance to test their power further - to see what it would do if they exposed a human to--”
“No, Os.” Ilhemina’s breath caught in her throat. Dread settled itself in her stomach like a stone; her limbs at once froze, her blood icy in her veins.
Oslo closed his eyes. It was a long moment before he continued, panting through flared nostrils. “I let them blow me up,” he said - softly, eyebrows knitted as if the words still haunted him. “Over and over, at Lord Bane’s command, until...”
At last, Ilhemina began to piece the secrets together. “Lord Bane reversed time after each test, didn’t he?” she asked. In the silence of the lord’s lab, in the vacuum of absence of sound without the speakers blaring in her ears, truth rang in her ears, deafening. “Until...”
Suddenly, Oslo’s hand clenched around hers. Instinctively, her fingers flexed, and she was surprised to see his face didn’t react to the gesture. “Until there was nothing of me left,” he finished. Then, impossibly, his hand withdrew and he pushed upright.
The shred of Ilhemina’s skirt fell away, peeling from his bloody ribs as she sat back on her heels. In disbelief, she stared at Oslo’s wound, no longer bleeding - but healing, almost completely closed through his ripped shirt. She gawked at him, shuffling backwards as he continued to rise to his feet.
“I told you I loved you when I was human, Mina,” he said. Fully upright now, Ilhemina was once again starkly aware of how much height he had on her. “But after what Lord Bane and his men did, after all I went through - what was it, an hour or so before I met you outside the bunker? - I had been changed, disassembled and forced back together countless times. A man does not endure that kind of torture and come out on the other side unscathed.”
“Os--” Ilhemina began. Kneeling in his shadow, she suddenly felt very small.
“I tried to ignore it, for the longest time.” Oslo’s dark gaze never broke from hers as his fingers brushed his side, testing his newly-healed flesh. “After all I went through - everything the radiation from the tests had made of me - I still tried to cling to some sense of my humanity. I still loved you - and when I thought about that, it made my breath catch. Still does, sometimes: you, my dearest Mina. When we returned here, to our time, and I was left only with my memories, the sudden impact of what I’d said to you stole my breath away.”
“Stop--” Ilhemina choked on the words. “Stop speaking in pasts, Os. It still means something. You know it does.”
Framed in the dim light of the buzzing bulbs above them, Oslo was all shadows, all edges and hollow, sunken valleys as he spoke. “I had to remind myself how to function. Every day, for months, while we chased a madman.”
“You thought he was mad as much as I did,” Ilhemina protested. “You could have told me anything. I told you as much.”
“Much to my chagrin.” Oslo’s voice was suddenly harsh, no longer the weak strain of a dying man, but with all the vitriol of one fortified against his own mortality. Ilhemina’s heart pounded. “Your words reminded me each day of a comfort I could never hope to indulge in again. Mortal comforts, Ilhemina. Nothing, to a --”
“You are still mortal,” Ilhemina argued. Her eyes flicked to the crimson stain browning across his chest. “Lord Bane shot you, and you - you almost died, and then...”
Oslo, too, inspected his injuries - or at least the ghost of them. “When Bane put me back together, there was no flesh to work with. No bones, no blood, no cells...I am of something else entirely, these days. And I’m afraid too much of my old self has been lost to know properly what that was.”
Paralyzed with fear, acutely aware of the dark, scintillating energy wafting from him, Ilhemina said nothing to contest this. Only: “But you bled, all the same, Os.”
Oslo’s mouth split into a wicked grin. His eyes glinted like shards of dark, broken glass as he stared down at her. “And when I did,” he said, “I believe it took what little of me I had left. Which would have pained me once - but seeing as I have no memories of it, I care not. Just as I -- ”
“OS!” Ilhemina yelped, as Oslo’s hand reached for the revolver holstered at his hip.
“Have no memories of, and therefore care little these days,” he said, “for you.”
It's a physical force in your chest - something crushing, tearing, threatening to cut through to the precious things you hide inside your heart. Nothing but grief hurts in such a way - a loss that you saw coming, unable to stop. It hurts.
Hey guys! So I kind of hinted to this in the tags of my last random post, but… this blog now has a discord server! It’s very much in its infancy but I am looking to create a community for writers and artists of all kinds. This is going to be a place that is safe for all kinds of content, a place where everyone can share what they’ve made comfortably.
So even if you might not decide to stick around, you can check the server out here (this link shouldn’t expire, but if it does let me know): https://discord.gg/TvZ9eA8
