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Lily was only seventeen when she died. The same age Nastya had been, if she remembered correctly. Her memories from that planet and that cold night, so many thousands of years ago weren’t faded into the wind like most of Jonny’s, but they weren’t sharp enough to bleed on like Ivy’s. Her recall was average, just expanded.
“No,” Jonny said. He wasn’t angry in his normal, heated way. There was no gun in his hand, ready to cut down whatever it was that’d pushed him. Instead, he held her weak form. She wasn’t gone yet, Nastya knew, but it was only a matter of time. Even if they’d gotten her back to the Aurora immediately, had Raphaella at the ready with her more experimental treatments, she wasn’t sure if it would’ve been enough.
“Please,” Lily mumbled, her voice so weak she was sure he couldn’t have heard it. But he understood what she meant when she weakly raised a finger towards his chest. She almost managed to push against his skin but she fell limp before she could reach him. Tim could tell the exact moment her breathing stilled, and the rest of them understood less than a moment later. The scene sunk into Ivy’s memory, perfect pieces of tragedy.
“No,” he said, though even he knew he was talking to a hollow shell.
“We don’t need Doctor Carmilla, I can do it, I’ve improved on her technique—“ Raphaella said, and Jonny’s gun was in her face before she could finish. He left it in the air when he’d normally just pull the trigger and be done with it. His hands were sweating, and his face was flushed, makeup smudged. Nastya’s silver blood mingled with Lily’s red. They were the only two who’d died this trip. For Nastya, death was an every day occurrence, nothing more than a moment of paused existence before she flickered back, no matter how sharp her pain ran. For Lily, it was an ending. A story closed.
“No,” he said again, this time harsh and cold.
“Why not?” she demanded; her wings flared back wildly in a fury. She reached her hands up on the pistol, pushing the cold metal against her skin. It would be a more dramatic gesture if they hadn’t just been blowing each other’s heads off for fun the other night, when Lily had gone to bed, but maybe that familiarity made it more sickening. They fought with a twisted pleasure, and now there was none of that. It was cold anger, cold defensiveness. “We always knew she was mortal; we always knew this was inevitable. She asked to be one of us! When I told her about what I did, she said she wanted it too!”
“She didn’t know what she was talking about. You didn’t know what you were talking about. Don’t tell me you’ve never regretted it, because I know that's bullshit.”
“I told you about that in confidence, you fuckwad,” she replied, her normally cold expression split with barely suppressed rage. “You don’t get to decide what’s good for someone, mortality wise— that’s what she did.”
“Don’t you dare compare us. You’re the ones who meddled with forces you couldn’t control.”
“I can control them, better than she ever could.”
“You can’t control shit!”
Her wings adjusted, knife points raising to the surface. Her scalpels, her syringes, her tools that she could use to take Lily apart, put her back together as one of them for real.
“Shoot me, and I’ll show you what I can control.”
“If you could, then you would’ve killed me already. For good. Either that or you’re as much of a monster as her, knowing how to kill us for good and refusing when you know.“
Ashes played with a lighter, turning the heat on and off. Every couple of centuries or so, they’d try to take a break from the heat. Go cold turkey. The resistance made caving into the lure of the fire so much more of a relief. They’d lit a bonfire the likes of which this world had never known only days ago, let it sweep across vast swathes of forests, but the feeling in their chest made them think of the time they’d gone a whole decade without a single fire, without breathing in the heat. Their skin was waterlogged, pulling them down towards the ground of a planet they’d scoured.
Nastya pushed Lily’s hair out of her face. Her eyes weren’t closed, but the light wouldn’t come back. Not in a second. Not in a minute. Not in an hour. Nastya had spent so many long hours begged for the release of death, slitting every vein she could find and sobbing as the cuts healed over faster than her blood could drain. It was sickening to her, that excess when she’d spent so long terrified of losing a single drop for fear that everything else would follow.
She’d last lost herself in that pitiful state in the City of Labyrinth. It’d been Ashes’s plaything and Raphaella’s pet project, but it was Nastya who’d watched the fragments of memories who’d been dragged into the Acheron for days on end, letting her body weaken till it collapsed from starvation, restore itself to the exact condition she’d been in the night she’d woken strapped to Doctor Carmilla’s operating table. Again. And again. She didn’t explain it, when she’d dragged herself home to the Aurora’s loving embrace halfway through the cycle. She’d never even articulated why.
Even the oldest souls in that tortured existence were children to her. Their centuries of turmoil were immature, practically scratching the surface. The depth of eternity was incalculable. She’d always been tall for her age, even as the traces of her old blood condition left her wraithlike beneath her dark coat. She pushed her glasses up her nose. She healed perfectly, within parameters. She’d torn her eyes from her skull, crushed them into a pulp, but they always returned with the same flaws.
Would she sentence the girl they’d all seen as their child to that? Nastya wasn’t the only one who’d hidden her more self destructive tendencies and outbursts from her. They told stories of the hard times, yes, but with a smile. Even reliving their loss was cathartic, when sung. Their prose was left beneath floor boards, concealed beneath locks and burnt in pyres to grief that didn’t fit a neat narrative. Through performance, they lied to each other and to themselves.
The only times they even alluded to Doctor Carmilla were when they were on stage, with the gravity of their performance to push them forwards or in the darkness. In moments like this. She’d never told Lily that she was always cold, that her body trembled like a leaf in the wind at the slightest hint of provocation if she let it. When Lily leaned her head against Jonny’s chest, she never heard how loud it was, how the beat followed him forever and how dying was the only way to still the fury in his skull. Nobody told Lily why Ivy resisted sleep. They joked about Brian’s switch to her, and they kept his more brutally honest persona away from her with an unending dedication. Lying was wrong, even when it meant she wasn’t horrified by what they were.
Unending life. Raphaella was the only one of them who’d chosen this, and it showed in the beauty of her wings, fluttering delicately and ready to strike with ruthless precision the moment Jonny shot. She was faster to drag the rest of them down into their memories, the youngest and the only one who’d never felt her hands, one running through their hair and the other digging through their flesh. Her and Lily played with the Toy Soldier, not in ignorance of how it’d held them down through their screams of protest, of pleases and no more, but in innocence of the visceral reality.
It stood now.
“Lily Is Family!” it added, “It Is Not Fun To Lose Her, Very Much Not Fun At All!”
Raph and Jonny gave the order for it to “stay the fuck out of this” at about the same time, with only slight variations in tone. They both were on the ground; Lily’s too-small body spread across the two of them. She was still small for her age, isolated and starved for weeks as a child. The Mechanisms had done their best to feed her as she grew up, but their skill distribution was, to understate the issue, rather lopsided. Doctor Carmilla would’ve known how to better protect her, even if she would’ve ripped Lily’s soul out and put it back in wrong.
“I’ll kill you if you so much as try,” Jonny said. “I’ll cut you to pieces and scattered them across space so it takes years to recover. Years where she’ll have rested in peace. Years for us to have gotten as far away from this damned planet. Years where she’ll have decomposed enough that you can’t touch her, got it?”
“She asked for it,” Marius argued, though his heart wasn’t in it. He was older than Raphaella by about eight hundred years, if Nastya was keeping track right, and she probably wasn’t. His messes were more contained than Jonny’s, Tim’s, and Ashes’s, but larger than hers, not as neat as Ivy’s. Brian, it was always hard to tell with, and the Toy Soldier didn’t fall to pieces. It wasn’t one of them. It would never be.
“Well, I was sure excited at the idea of eternal life too, back when I was an idiot!” Jonny spat. "When I didn't know what it meant!"
“I won’t break her,” Raphaella promised. “I wouldn’t try to bioprogram her. I’m not like that— she already loves us.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to wake up with barely any idea of what happened to you, your body completely exposed, someone else’s hands toying around with your insides. So what if we have good intentions? She said she loved us too!”
“We’re better than that,” Marius tried to cut in, but he felt sick to his stomach too. It wasn’t real nausea. He could barely feel that anymore, even when he spun around for hours trying to make himself dizzy for the heck of it. Mechanisms needed to drink harder, faster, and more to get even tipsy, but he’d seen Jonny black out drunk more times than he could count.
“In what way?” Nastya said, quietly. “How are we any better than her?”
“We have each other?” he suggested weakly.
“She had us too, and it didn’t stop her. It just made her want more,” she continued. “Raph… do you really want to bring her back because it’s her?”
“How dare you!” She spun her wings on Nastya, sharp points out, and scalpel less than a centimeter away from her jugular. Ancient instinct made her flinch, but she met Raphaella’s eyes.
“Look me in the eye and say there’s no part of you that just wants to see if you can do it again.”
Raphaella held her gaze for almost a minute before she dropped her head and her wings. Tim’s eyes refocused from where they’d drifted away, looking directly at Lily’s fallen form. The last time he’d lost someone, he’d gone mad. But everyone responsible for this was already dead. He regretted making it so quick now, because now he was left with his grief, an emotion he’d spent so long turning into rage.
“If I’d known what you were attempting back then,” Jonny said. “I’d have killed you on the spot. If there’s never, ever another one of us, it’ll be too soon.”
“Ninety nine point ninety nine percent chance she would’ve grown to hate us for it,” Ivy said. The numbers came with ease. She was distant from them, distant from the reality it suggested. She fell back into the rows of memories, shelving her current presence like an unpleasant book. Marius nodded, painfully slowly.
“We should go,” Brian said, on ends justify the means. The ends of sparing Lily the agony of an eternity as worth the pain that leaving her caused all of them.
Jonny loosened his grip on the pistol, lowering it. Tears ran down his face, and he stalwartly refused to acknowledge them.
"We should go," Tim repeated, but they all sat there for a long time, curled around her.
-
They left the planet behind, in an unspoken agreement not to talk about her that lasted for all of five days before everyone started breaking down. They delayed their next gig a month. Then a year, as they went on spree after spree, trying to push the memory of the young girl who'd found her way into their broken, scarred, and, in one particularly hard hitting case, mechanical hearts.
When they came back, they made it a grand event. A huge stadium, packed with hundreds of thousands of people, and they all pretended they didn't see her face on the body of everyone with a slightly similar build or hair color. Ashes burned faster and hotter than ever before, and Nastya's frost left her with a ruthless precision on the, but their strengths made them brittle.
When they saw her again, really saw her, all those fronts collapsed.
After the performance was over, they retired to a smaller venue, but only by their standards. The bar was huge, filled with adoring fans and clueless idiots alike. The warning not to show up if you feared death didn't put many off, especially not when they'd been drinking. They signed posters and answered a handful of fan questions, stabbing only a handful of them. Nastya tried out some morbid nerd's specially made poison and it'd kept her down for about eleven seconds, which was rather impressive and she'd thrown the guy a good chunk of the change they'd made for showing up as thanks for the addition to her extensive list, which meant the rest of the gang wanted to try it too but he'd only had enough for three. Raphaella and Ashes got the other doses.
All of them drank long and hard, but when it was late, the planet's three moons in the sky, the alcohol had almost entirely burned out of their systems. So when Jonny saw the two walking hand in hand, he was reasonably sure he wasn't completely losing his shit. If he could hallucinate for real, he would've started doing it by now.
Jonny was used to greeting the rush of panic in his chest when he thought he saw a flash of that particular shade of blue with a bullet, either to his own head or whoever it was that'd reminded him of the Doc, but this time, when that stranger gave him a smile, her teeth were sharp. The Toy Soldier gave a little wave, and she bounced over, a different but almost as familiar girl holding her hand.
Jonny was in the middle of raising his glass when he processed both of them. Alive. Uninjured. Here. Horror rose up in his chest, sharp and acidic, but for very different reasons for each of them.
Lily's smile was so clearly forced. He remembered how her eyes would go distant, like Ivy's would, and he remembered how she'd tighten her fists like he did. That was when she was at her darkest. When she was terrified. He'd thought of her as a daughter since he'd admitted to himself he cared for her, but now, the need to protect her surged up in him more like it had when he'd met Nastya.
Maybe that was because of how she smiled.
When he'd been alone, she could make him crumple to the floor with just that smile and a sharp word. That old compulsion still threatened to overpower him, did even when he saw her in dreams, but it was matched with something fierce. Now, for the first time, he wondered... was that kinship with the others just something else she'd forced on him?
Before he could process that wholly unsettling concern, he felt a sharp stab of guilt. If he hadn't said no to Raphaella then, if he'd let Ashes burn her like they'd want to, if they'd done anything other than run away from their fears, they could've stopped this. She might've hated them for it, like Ivy had prophesied, but it wouldn't have been her.