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Andy was five hours late for her check-in.
Five hours should be insignificant. Twenty four hours to a day. Three hundred sixty five days to a year. Ten years to a decade. One hundred years to a century. One thousand years to a millennium.
How many hours was that? Was there a word for the number of hours that had slipped through her fingers? They were as numerous as grains of sand on a beach. An hour was nothing. Five hours were inconsequential.
Yet Andy felt each passing moment as an eternity. Her life was a weighted scale. The treacherous moments built upon her aching shoulders as the world weighed down on Atlas.
I pre-date him. So the world weighs on Atlas as time weighs on me.
The thought was flippant and drew a laugh from her. She dabbed her chapped lips with her tongue but it is not soothing. Her mouth was dry and she felt parched. She moved her arms and the sting of her wrists forced a hiss from her lips. The pain was hardly unbearable, she had been killed with every weapon invented by mankind. This chafing at her skin should be nothing. Was nothing.
Six hours brought with it the aching.
She has stopped pulling at the ropes, instead focusing on finding a position to lessen the ache in her shoulders. If she pulled her legs under her just so and pressed one foot against the other calf... The moan that escaped her echoed around the empty room. Her naked legs were now removed from the blankets and goose bumps raised along her skin. She shifted again, looking at the clothes strewn about the floor.
She was cold. She was tired. She was stupid, so stupid.
Time was uncaring, pressing down on her.
She was not sure how many hours it is now. Seven? Eight? She was shivering. Andromache the Scythian had lived and died in the heat. In the cold. She had been stabbed, shot, and speared. She had drowned and been burned alive. She flinched from that thought. She had been skirting around it for hours now.
For years. For centuries. What is the point in lying now, Andromache?
She did not cry. She had cried enough for the ocean and there was nothing left for her. She pulled at the ropes, felt the pain that would not heal. She contemplated dislocating a finger, breaking a bone, but dismissed it. It would not heal. She would not heal.
She was going to die. Finally. Properly. She was going to die.
She tugged again, hard. She was angry. She felt the violence, thousands of years of violence, flare in her gut. She pulled and pulled and pulled. Her body was mortal now and it ached. It bruised. It needed rest and she was so tired.
She was so stupid.
It took her a moment to understand the sensation running down her arm. She twisted her face to see. Her whole body convulsed. A shiver of shock. Pain. Revulsion.
She was bleeding. She was bleeding and not stopping. She was not healing. She would not heal. She was going to die. She had pulled so hard she was bleeding, just like…
Just like…
Just you and me. Until the end.
Hands grabbed her and she fought. She wrenched her shoulder, pain flaring down her neck. Her face was wet. Her voice was rough, raw. Had she been screaming? Her face was wet. Was she bleeding? Her arms, her shoulders. Aching.
‘Shh, shh boss. It’s okay. It’s me.’ Warm hands, a warm body. Joe was holding her. He pulled the sheet up over her. Her legs were blue. She tried to collect her thoughts and tried to come back to now. This moment. She needed to be here, in this moment.
It’s not what time takes, it’s what it leaves behind.
And it pressed and pressed and pressed.
And Andromache the Scythian was finally, finally, running out of time.