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Twice upon a time, there was a girl.
A sweet girl, one with a family, one with a place. She was never a girl isolated from the rest of the story, whatever her part. She had a home. She was other characters—she was a sister, and a daughter, and a friend. There was a place she belonged.
At least until she gets her gift. One she’d spend long nights lamenting, wishing she could get rid of. A gift that promises a short life, one full of loss, and violence and suffering. And one that she would have, beyond death. A gift that wrenches her out of her place, and makes her Other. A girl who is not the girl she’d been, could not be ever again. A gift she cannot give back, cannot refuse and cannot ignore, not even when it ends—but we’re skipping ahead much too far, there. She knew only that her gift was hers till death do them part, back then.
Before it takes her out of her world, her gift shows her its world. A world of monsters. A world in the shadows of this one, that she is not a part of, that she tries desperately to wrench apart from her place. To keep the shadows from seeping in. When they do there’s punishment—her world does not accept it. Has she tried not having her gift? Is she aware that it’s an affront? Do the people asking—always her mum—understand how hard she’s tried not to?
But she can’t try. Not without others paying for it. But there’s one monster, who wears a face like a man. One so taken with her that he wants to be her place in the world. That for night after night, he watches, obsessed. Eyes like arrows. Because she is not of this world. Because she doesn’t want this gift. Because he does.
Twice upon a time, the same monster. He’s as constant as shadow in the story, he’s what shows her this world, a new place. What choice has she against it? This isn’t some fairytale. She brings out his passion. Dedication. He’s there every step, she gives him meaning. She’s the best he’s done yet, the most. She’s the pinnacle. Masterpiece. Perfect Happiness. He likes to change the words. It never changes what it means for her. She brings out his worst. However he describes, he’s left his mark on her throat. He knows the sound of her tears. And he knows what she feels like, from the inside—but only ever seems to find the same desire to destroy her from it. Is she destroyed? Well, she’s certainly never the same. People don’t see her the same, not once they’ve seen her world. She doesn’t see the same. She knows what souls are for now.
He does not forge her. He did not make her. This isn’t his story. This is about her, the girl.
She learns it from him, before she’s ever heard it. Death is your gift, treacherous voices tell her. Death follows her, is at her heels and surrounds her. Her gift is death—that’s all it can bring. Her day does not come, not yet. Not until she’s lost too much. Lost herself. She wants to be a saviour. She wants her family not to be torn into her gift. She doesn’t get a choice—none of them do. She buries so many. Death is her gift. After the blood, and for the family. For those she protects, she understands. Death is what she can give them. Hers. Death is her gift, the only end to the gift that killed her. It’s rest, finally. Still in the ground and finally free. Hers ought to be the last death. That’s how the story goes.
Eternal torment, am I learning?
The thing about her gift is that it has never been for her. Her gift has taken her from everywhere she belonged, and it has shown her monsters she’d never have dreamed, and it has killed her. It doesn’t end. It owns her past her death. Death is hers to give, but it is never her relief. Let’s not be seditious now, and think the girl isn’t trapped in our story.
The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.
Hell she calls it—one of the old poets called hell where peace and rest can never dwell—the true torture knowing that it is you’ll never have. Heaven. Rest. Respite from her gift. Death, as she’d give, in turn taken from her. Pain eventually blurs—she’d know that by now. You can only feel so much of it before it dims to you. But the loss, that is sharp, that is acute. That finds her the times nothing hurts. The time it hurts enough she can still think. Hell is lying in bed, beside someone and wishing you were dead in the quiet of the night. Hell is not feeling the arms around you because they are not louder than everything you could have had. Everything you were. She comes back wrong. She wanted to be pure. She wanted to be alive. And instead, she is in hell, and hell is her next gift.
Every night I save you.
There’s someone left, a man she finds when she can stand no more—one willing to lay down his life and soul to stop this hell. Sometimes in the beginning and sometimes in the end. A man, this time, cast aside and trying to find his own place, and finding it with her, even if that place is Hell. A man so guided by a heart that doesn’t beat. A man who gets hurt. Who loses and finds and recaptures and writes and decides destiny. A man willing, the closest thing to heaven. The only she tells about hell—at least willingly. And he bears the weight of her gift. Every night, he saves her.
He’s seen all of her, the best and the worst, the eyeballs and the entrails. He understands—it takes a poet, it takes a fighter, it takes a man with a heart he didn’t give up when he gave up its last beat. It takes the man who looked into the shadows and chose them, entered Hell. He is a gift, but he was not given. He chose to give himself—the only reason he enters the story. The hands that writ it wouldn’t have ever give a gift so generous.
But they like to take. Twice upon a time, there was a girl, and there was a man, one who was hers. One who was the only heaven she’d be sent to, the only way to forget her gift, or for a moment accept her gift. And she knew his love, in a handful of ash. He loved, if not wisely. He lost that love (but thanks for saying it!) She lost that love. Once again, death, her gift. His death, to spare the world of Hell. Her gift, that she’s back in it, standing on the edge of Hell. Can’t save him every night. He stopped Hell from swallowing her whole—she ought to thank him if it didn’t sting so much worse.
Every night he saved her, and she has to now. She’s the only remnant of his unbeating heart. And she ought to have known when she took him. She knew what a soul was for. She knew her hell, she knew her gift. Everything she puts in the ground withers and dies. A hell of a woman. Twice upon a time, her gift takes his life—he chooses it, every time he chooses it, same as he chooses her. Death is her last gift to him as well, shame there was nothing more to give.
She closes the book there—doesn’t much care for stories any longer.