Work Text:
London burns and she’s in your bed, pretending that your walls aren’t crumbling around you, praying to a God you know doesn’t exist that you can have one more day, one more hour, one more second. The ash burns your back, but you rather it be your back than hers. You wish it weren’t fire. Even though the two of you could flee, everyone else is trying to escape the blaze, so you’ll take the pain here with her, rather than risking losing her in the chaos.
You stopped keeping track of the years long ago. You’ve never once forgotten any of the times you’ve lost her. You know that God doesn’t exist. If a God did exist, you wouldn’t be forced to burn over and over and over, trying to find her over and over and over.
There’s no death records from the fire. You’re sure she’s died, but you need to have some sort of confirmation, rather than the jumbled mess of memories of other fires, of other deaths that play in your mind when you try to sleep. You leave London once you’re sure that she’s dead. You have no idea where she’ll be after London. You’re never sure because the God that doesn’t exist doesn’t give you any signs of where she’ll reincarnate next.
You end up in the Italian countryside, hoping that you find her again. You can’t get rid of the worries that you either won’t find her or she’s not coming back. The language has changed since you were last in Italy.
<>
She’s the daughter of a Danish fisherman this time. She’s not in the blaze this time, but you are. She’s on her father’s boat off the coast of Göteborg and you’re standing on the dock in Copenhagen, watching the old church burn. The winds whip through your hair, the flames rushing through the city. You don’t burn in this one. The king declares the end of the fire as divine intervention. You can’t go find her again because there’s no telling how this version of her will take the news.
You hear the news of Denmark burning again when you’re in Italy again, waiting an appropriate amount of time to seek her out again. The emptiness in your chest signifies to you that she’s burned. You hope that the ash didn’t burn. You hope that when you see the next version of her, there are no marks on her back from the ash and that the smoke didn’t burn her lungs leaving her with the same heaving cough she had in Denmark.
You mourn the woman you never really got to meet. You curse the God that doesn’t exist that you didn’t get to fall in love with this version of your soulmate. You wish you still believed in a God. But it’s been so long since the Renaissance and you last believed that God was real (there was a time when she lived in a tiny shack outside Rome and you believed that God had gifted you her, that you’d finally done something good and you’d be free from this curse that you’d bore for years).
Your cabin stays cold through the Italian winter, too afraid of fire to warm yourself. If you freeze, you’ll just wake up cold in the morning.
<>
You’re on the other side of the city when New York burns. She doesn’t understand why you panic when you first see the smoke. She doesn’t know that the freckles on her back are memories of ash and that the slight wheeze in her breath is a faded remnant of the smoke that killed her last time. You beg her to leave New York, but she doesn’t want to.
New York burns again not long after. You don’t know how many years it's been. You don’t want to count down the days that you have left, so you stopped counting long ago. You live in a terribly tiny apartment in lower Manhattan, still mostly asleep when the financial district went up in flames. At least she’s not a casualty this time, but you’re too close for comfort. She finally agrees to leave the city with you. Selfishly, you want to return to Italy. You want to go back to your tiny cabin in Northern Italy, but asking to leave the country is pushing it.
Maybe a God does exist. Maybe a God exists and wants to burn you to the ground.
Instead of Italy, you move to St. Louis. The city burns four years after you settle down with her. Of the three fatalities, it’s you and Cady, but you hardly die. The smoke burns your lungs and you’re sobbing into her chest, but she doesn’t understand why you’re crying.
You wake up in Italy again. You want to burn the world to find her again.
<>
There’s a whiff of smoke rolling into Chicago. You know that it’s your last day with her. You ought to not live in cities made primarily of wood. You try so hard to not act weird. She doesn’t deserve to know that it’s her last day but you’ll wake up soon enough in Italy and you’ll have to find her all over again.
The fire starts later than you expected. Maybe God does exist because they gave you a sliver of extra time with her. The fire blazes through Chicago, leaving a trail of destruction in its path. You’re just one of the casualties. Somehow, she isn’t. You don’t know how you know, but there’s a horrible feeling in your gut that you’ll have to wait longer to try to find her again.
You go to Tokyo instead of trying to find her again. You’ll know when you can begin your quest again. Tokyo isn’t exactly welcoming, but you’ve gotten better at not letting things other than her stick in your brain. Sometimes you think that you’d be better off living a whole life over and over again rather than be stuck searching for her for years on end. You don’t expect fires in Tokyo, but you’re stupid to forget that fire follows you everywhere.
Of course, you don’t burn in the blaze. You get out of Tokyo before they can start blaming you. The Japanese have never been particularly welcoming.
You end up in New Zealand, waiting for the moment that you know you can begin your mission again. Somehow, fire doesn’t follow you to Wellington. A fire rages through Napier after an earthquake, but you don’t count it because you’re not in the city. You stay in New Zealand until you know that you can find her again.
You pray that she’s not in Europe when the war starts. She has no reason to be in Europe, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no way she’s there. You stay in New Zealand for the duration of the war, hoping that you’re not pulled into it. You don’t want to burn again. Not without her.
<>
You find her in Los Angeles next. She won’t let you love her. She wants to live in secret in the cookie cutter suburb that both of you live in. The thought of this makes your stomach roll because before this, she never cared. The versions of her before this didn’t think about the homophobia, but it’s a product of the times. She doesn’t let you love her and you leave before the two of you can burn. A fire ignites the week after you leave. She doesn’t burn.
You quite like Brazil. The colours are vibrant, the culture breathes life into your veins, and you don’t think that you’ll forget Brazilian Portuguese anytime soon. A part of you misses Italy. You spent so long there that everything Italian is engraved in your bones, is built into your DNA. You sing in Italian in your tiny apartment, missing her. You want to watch her cook, the radio playing softly, as you set the table. You want to run through the streets with her, dance to the buskers, and share smiles across sidewalks when you notice the same things.
Some sort of God must exist. While you aren’t burning, places near you keep burning. A town on the outskirts of the city you live in burns. The moment you see the smoke billowing up behind the city, you get that feeling that you can begin your journey to find her again. You start to crave the fire.
You’re in Upstate New York when the twin towers come crashing down. You still haven’t found her, but you’re struck with loneliness and a sort of pain you’ve never felt before. Somehow you’ve lost her before you could find her.
Somehow, you find her quickly in Chicago. With the fires everywhere else, you don’t leave the city. Not like you want to, either. You want to be with her, even though everything feels weird because she’s so young. You feel considerably less stupid when you’re both adults.
You don’t burn this time. Instead, you get hit by a bus and this is a new sort of pain. You suppose you deserve it. You’ve been quite a bitch, especially to her, but what were you supposed to do? You’ve never had to deal with this situation before.
The scraping of your back against the asphalt is somehow the worst of it all. You can handle burning ash staining your skin, billowing smoke burning your lungs, and flames licking at your skin, but somehow this is worse. People say you died for 15 seconds. You wish you could, sometimes. You’d be free from this curse if you did die, but then you wouldn’t have her. Maybe you asked God to keep you trapped in this existence so you could continue living some sort of life with her.
You wake up in a hospital bed and not in Italy and she’s waiting by your bedside. You’re glad you’re not in Italy, for once.