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I was never really big on religion or anything mystical. Thinking about stuff like reincarnation and fate left me cold. I guess you could have called me a materialist, if you had to pick a term.
I loved a man named Noah Kingfisher. On our second date, he told me he was the son of the devil. That was my cue to call for the check and block his number. I thought about it, too. But something -- yeah, that ineffable "something" that I just said I wasn't ever big on -- kept me there. And it kept me there until it knit this unlikely pair together in a way that felt like the very soul of rightness.
Along the way, what I learned was that there were three Noahs. There was the disarmingly sweet robotics engineer who laughed at the worst jokes and danced to Motown hits while doing the dishes. There was the bearer of deep and obscure wounds who cried out in his sleep and trembled in my anxious embrace. And there was a third that I can't possibly explain, whose eyes inexplicably changed colour when he spoke of other versions of us in other timelines, or worlds, or dimensions.
They would have locked him away, if people had known. If he had been anyone else, I'd probably have helped them do it. But he was my beloved, and it only happened occasionally, and aren't we all a little bit crazy, anyway? He was a gift, even if a strange one, and I was grateful.
---
We were on a layover after a long trip -- nine hours in a dimly-lit and echoing airport. Exhaustion so complete that even sleeping seemed like too much work. He turned to me, scruffy and tousled and his eyes as blue as the Caribbean sea and twice as fathomless. "The bombs fall," he said, "and I'm frozen underground, years, decades, centuries. The world is unrecognisable when I am finally freed. You're so young when I find you, and I, so cold -- old," he corrects himself, "so old. My father is always near. I have a son, but he is no longer my son. It doesn't matter anymore. I have a brother, and that does matter. He brings with him a... a historian, I think. One who used to be a courier. It is fated that we come together. We are restarting the world."
"That sounds... hard," I said lamely, because I am too exhausted to be amazed or perturbed or anything else. My beloved wants to magically flip eye colours and spout arcane prophecy at me, well, that's just fine.
"It is. Do you regret it?"
"Nah," I replied unthinkingly, my eyelids drooping, my head listing towards his as I dozed.
---
I'm a simple kind of man, like the song goes. I had a good upbringing, I went to college, I drive a dependable and nondescript car that I can never find in a mall parking lot. I go to work, I do my job -- no more and no less -- and I do my grocery shopping and I come home. Once, before I met my beloved, I got so inexplicably depressed that I tried to end it. I spent an hour rummaging through my apartment for proper implements and I came to myself sitting on the floor surrounded by a sorry-looking collection of various household cleaners, over-the-counter painkillers, and vaguely rope-like objects. I laughed, then I sobbed, then my throat went raw. Then I went to bed.
My beloved was the brightest star in my sky. I wasn't ever ashamed to admit that. I would never be a luminary, myself, but him... he shone bright enough to blind. After a while I stopped feeling the need to debate whether he was really the son of the devil. It just stopped mattering, or I had begun to believe him, whichever. But I always had to wonder -- what kind of devil could produce such goodness?
One that knew how much it would hurt to lose it, I guess.
---
We were drunk -- well, he was drunk, anyway. I'd only had a couple beers.
"Montana," is how it started, that time. "We are in Montana. My mind is full of knowing. It takes so long to find you. It feels... almost too late. Why did it take me so long to find you? The cult leader is full of knowing, too, but it overwhelms him. Corrupts him. We have to stop him. My father..."
"Is a real piece of work," I supplied grumpily. And who could blame me? There was a beautiful man in my bed and I couldn't touch him because he was being hijacked by the Oracle at Delphi or whatever. What good was this yarn-spinning? We were together, here, now. What else could possibly matter more than that?
"The bombs fall. We are trapped in a bunker, months, years. But I am with you."
"And that cult leader, too, I bet. A regular ménage à what-the-fuck."
Why'd I say that. He trained those scary blue eyes on me, solemn as the grave, and nods. "Yes. And his flock. It is fated that we come together. We must restart the world.
Do you regret it?"
My traitorous tongue had gotten its fill of uncharitability. There was a beautiful and damnably strange man in my bed and I would have rather died than have it any other way.
"I don't regret it. But can we please fuck now?"
---
All the worlds swirling around in his head, and yet this is the one we actually have to live in. The one where I'm a careworn nobody whose beloved is dying.
The cancer comes on suddenly and is aggressive, vengeful, making short work of his cellular structure. Like... like a mistake being corrected. An Etch-a-Sketch being vigorously shaken, painstaking work of art dispersed in a matter of moments. The very corruption that had created him was swallowing him whole.
He wasn't ever meant for this world, and living in this world was killing him. I can't love him enough for that to cease being true.
He had never said what happened to us in all those other worlds, in the end. Worlds we restored, because we were meant to. Did we live long lives together on post-war Earths, in other galaxies, in realms of might and magic? Were those worlds able to hold him? Was I able to fight, to protect him, to protect us? Did we grow old and gently senile together, surrounded by friends and family, in defiance of the devil himself? Or did it always end like this, with me hollow-eyed and struck dumb by grief, cradling the frail body of my beloved and waiting for his laboured breaths to cease?
Do I regret it?