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Raw , she thinks when she sees him again, lifetimes later.
He is raw, frayed at the edges as he slouches at the end of her couch, too-sharp elbows resting on his too-sharp knees, hands dangling limply between his legs. He looks up when he sees her, and the coldness she has cultivated begins to crack.
He is ragged. He was always slim, wiry, but now--as it had been at the end--his leanness has wasted to gauntness: green eyes too large in their dark sockets, cheekbones casting sharp shadows over the cut of his jawline. His hair has been unevenly shorn close to his scalp, and he looks like the strung-out, skeletal men in the alleyways downtown.
But his mouth twitches, its needle-thin scars glistening, and the grin alights a hint of the old flame.
“Wouldn’t have pegged you for the apartment type,” he says, but his voice sounds hoarse as if from disuse, its former silkiness all but worn away. “Figured, I dunno...a cottage somewhere. Azaleas and watering cans and...quilts.”
She snorts, dropping her bag on the small table by the door.
“Still full of shit, I see,” she says as she makes her way to the kettle perched neatly on the stove.
The early morning light paints pastel strokes of cool gray on his bare arms, and he holds his hands up as if in surrender. His nails, she notices, are painted chipped black.
Typical.
He flashes her the old familiar grin that seems to boast too many teeth--although she notices several are missing near the back.
“It was an honest assumption,” he says.
She raises her brows and he immediately buckles, letting out a breathless chuckle.
“Poor choice of words,” he concedes.
“Lost your touch, have you?” Her words cut more sharply than she anticipates, but she does not flinch, filling the kettle with water from the filter, placing it on the burner, and switching on the stove. If her movements are slightly clipped, she defies him to say anything about it.
She turns around, hands resting on the counter behind her. Inhales slowly through her nose.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
For a millisecond, she swears he looks genuinely hurt, but the slick mask of self-assurance quickly falls back into place.
“Researching your real estate decisions,” he says with feigned levity. “I checked England, you know. Could have sworn you’d have taken up residence in a nice little place in the Cotswolds. Gardens and cobblestones and all that.”
For the first time, she feels legitimate anger. Her nostrils flare.
“I tried domesticity, if you recall,” she bites out. “Tried my damnedest, but funnily enough, it didn’t seem to work out.”
Her words clip him like shards of ice and he actually flinches, his half-grin sliding away.
“Mmm,” is all he says, rubbing the back of his neck and studying his boots, and she clamps down on a curious mingling of white-hot fury and pity.
Silence reigns for several minutes. His old familiar scent--sweet, rain-soaked wood--wafts faintly across the room and she is unmoored suddenly, the tile beneath her hands a brittle tree trunk, the hiss of the stove a crackling hearth, the warmth of the heated apartment now frigid in the biting northern wind, and a dog barks on the streets below and chalices clink and her slippered feet pad the floor of a great, golden hall, and he is screaming and sobbing and writhing, and her arms burn and the boys are bloodied and gone.
“What do you want me to say?” he finally asks quietly.
“Why are you here?” she shoots back. Poison.
“I’ve been looking for you--”
“ Why?” she demands, pushing away from the counter. “What do you want? What can you possibly--? ”
“Have you been well?”
She blinks, mouth working soundlessly as she shakes her head. He stares at her expectantly, openly, as if they’re only meeting over coffee on a spring day. But his eyes are a bit too wide. Red-rimmed. Sunken.
“What the fuck, ” she stammers out, “is wrong with you?”
“You want an alphabetical list or a categorical breakdown?” he asks with a quirk of one orange brow.
Once, that would have made her laugh. Set something fluttering within her chest.
She huffs out an incredulous breath and rakes a hand through her thick dark hair. He gestures at it with only a trace of his former elegance.
“You look good with short hair,” he says.
She surveys him coolly beneath her lids. “You look like a meth addict.”
His mouth twitches again.
They stare at each other, his dulled green gaze and her steely black one hovering on the precipice of something far too monumental and exhausting to acknowledge when the kettle begins to whistle. They both jump.
“Symbolism?” he asks, cocking his head.
She rolls her eyes and turns around, shutting off the stove and gripping the kettle’s handle.
“I’d offer you tea,” she says, “but I honestly don’t give a shit if you want any.”
“I fucking hate tea,” he replies. In the old days, a laugh would have followed; now, it does not.
She pours the water into her favorite mug: lavender ceramic with little yellow hand-painted daisies dotting the rim. Delicate and climbing and lovely. They remind her of--
“Do you want me to say that I regret it?”
She slams the mug down with a loud thunk, shoulders rising in a slow inhale before she turns to face him. Something feral briefly flits behind his eyes.
“Because I’d be lying,” he continues, spreading his hands in reckless supplication.
“You’re good at that.”
“I was, wasn’t I?”
“‘Was?’” The ice in her voice sounds foreign, merciless. She takes a vicious pleasure in it. “ What’s the matter, you’re out of practice? Peaked too early?”
“Seems like it,” he sighs, drawing a cigarette that she hadn’t noticed before to his lips.
“Put that out,” she demands.
He scowls. “Why? What’s it going to do?”
She marches over, snatches it out of his hand, and takes a long drag of it herself before putting it out on his thigh. It burns through his black jeans and sizzles briefly on his skin before vanishing.
If he feels any pain, he doesn’t show it; he only smirks. Leans in.
“That’ll leave a stain, you know,” he purrs. “Can’t have stains in a tidy apartment.”
Too tired to be ashamed of the tears that sting her eyes, she bites out between her teeth, “Fuck. You.”
He begins to chuckle but she detects a frantic edge to it, nervousness he never would have shown then; his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows the laugh. He stares at her.
“I don’t regret it,” he says again, quietly. “I can’t.”
“You could,” she counters. “But you won’t.”
His expression briefly crumbles, and she catches sight of utter destruction--he is worn and lost, thrashing in the fire, head upon concrete, tears streaking through soot.
“How can I?” he whispers. “I had to--”
“Bullshit. You wanted to. You didn’t have to. You wanted to.”
His breath shudders, and his tongue darts out to lick his lips. He nods once, sharply.
“I wanted to.” Green eyes find hers. “More than anything. ”
She is silent, her cheeks hot and wet and she doesn’t care. She does not break his gaze. Let him burn beneath it.
“The boys?” she asks. Relentless. Her voice is a ragged thing. “Collateral damage? Is that all they were to you? Is that--?”
He suddenly shoots up and seizes her shoulders, fingertips digging painfully into her skin, his face mere inches from hers and now his eyes are brimming, spittle flying from his mouth as he hisses, “Don’t you dare--”
She is angrier than she has ever been, flayed and murderous.
“You never loved them, did you? You couldn’t--all you ever saw was yourself. And your games, your fucking games. And see where they’ve brought us!” Her lower lip trembles but she leans in closer as if to taste his tongue, and hisses, “There are eons between us and our boys. They’re utterly destroyed and I haven’t felt them once. Not once!”
“Sig--”
“And I cannot die now, I know it, and if I could, I know I wouldn’t find them. They’re gone with the others, lost to me, lost forever, and it’s because you couldn’t let me love them alone! You couldn’t let me! You destroy everything and you never loved those boys! You never--!”
His palm collides with her cheek, hard. She sees sparks, spits blood, then knows in an instant the injury is gone.
When she turns back, hatred howls in her every nerve. His gaze is wild, primordial chaos.
And then it dissolves.
He trembles, panting.
And then sinks to his knees, buries his face in the hem of her shirt, clutching at the fabric like a drowning man.
And he sobs.
Wracking sobs that shake his thin shoulders and wrench something dangerous from deep within her.
“ Stop it,” she forces out unsteadily. “ Stop--”
But he cannot. He does not let go of her but bows more deeply into himself, his cries a staccato litany of defeat.
Her own knees buckle, her own shoulders leaden with gaping loss. It seizes her throat and lungs and she crumples with him as if willing the earth to swallow them once and for all. They are tangled, clawing, clutching at each other; she guides his head to the soft spot where her neck meets her collarbone, and his breath is hot and uneven, his tears pooling onto her skin.
With her cheek pressed against his rough hair, ruthless absence and fury and love burning in her breast, she can no longer stem the flood. It devours her whole.
And together, they sink.