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When all things worth living for are ended, the cruelest thing, Red discovers, is being made to carry on.
All things worth living for ended with Blue, yet here is Red, stalking the strands of a thousand histories with blood-wet hands and a pain inside her so much greater than any suffering she can deal. She watches a hundred people fall at her blades and envies them the ease of their end. If only, if only she could slip out so simply.
Instead, she bleeds endlessly, but never bleeds her life away. She bleeds without the satisfaction of physicality, the certainty of metallic, salt, ruby-red destruction. There is a visceral hunger in the thought of it, an experience of physical pain and weakness so intrinsic to existence, the reckoning of fingers pressed to fatal wounds, of holding your life in with your hands.
Red has no physical proof. She leaves no stain on the world other than the blood of others. There is no rust-red left behind to prove she loved Blue, to prove she bled for loving her.
And yet it bleeds all the same.
Death is the one place in all of time and space her letters cannot reach, and yet she finds herself crafting them anyway, words in every inch of enhanced skin. She writes a letter in her head, etches it between cells, makes an alphabet of enzymes, a language of viscera, scores Blue's name as deep as her own bones, because there is no use in hiding it, now.
(How perverse, that her love can be almost open now it's hopeless, now Blue's gone.)
Dear Blue,
I have spilled enough to know blood is supposed to be finite, endings begotten by losing too much. I have killed enough to know survival is alleged to be a kindness. I have heard voice after voice plead for it, for one more moment, one more day.
Tell me, then, why this still bleeds, infinite, and why despite it, I still survive. Tell me then why surviving in any strand without you is a cruelty I can find no delight in.
We were never built for gentleness, you and I. I would have fought you till the many ends of time and delighted in the pain you gave, revelled in every shared hurt, in the intimacy of our lives cupped in each other's hands. And yet, given the intimacy of being your death, I find all of me wishes to unmake you back into being, even if it means a distance I was never strong enough to keep between us. The distance I offered you, poisoned leaf by poisoned leaf, and yet you took the sting in the tail willingly for one last closeness.
My sapphire, my cyan, all of me wishes you had not done it. But set our positions in reverse, and I know now, with the surety of having lived without you, that I would have done the same a thousand times, just to hear your last words for me.
This is supposed to be where I regret you, I think. Where I wish love had not bloomed into something that destroyed us both. But I knew you before I knew myself, I knew you before I knew of you, and regretting you would be like regretting something so fundamental I cannot imagine life having never had it.
And yet I still bleed, Blue, for having lost you, and there is nothing left in me to cherish the closeness of my words being your end. If I could, I would unravel time itself to stop that ending.
Yours with my blood, my soul, my heart in your grave,
Red
This letter will never be sent. Never find its way free of her own body. It will never find Blue, weave its words into her mind, prompt responses Red will love deliriously, imprinting in herself their hidden cadences. It will never fall into the hands of the mysterious figure who follows, the Seeker who may have been the architect of their destruction, a danger Red can no longer find it in herself to wonder about.
All her wondering has ended with Blue, plans tapered down to the distance between her blade and the next target's throat, imagination spent on the final letter that lingers in her cells, weeping the name she can think, now it's gone.
All that is left is survival she does not want, and invisible blood, a wound so secret and mortal that it will never heal, but no one else save her can see it.
For blood is red (is Red) but Red is bleeding Blue.