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More often than not, dreaming instigates itself as a bland affair.
This time, it’s the kind of place featured in those genres of movies shot in sepia, seedy and faded, with paint chipping from the edges of dated walnut furniture and floorboards sagging and warped under decades of footsteps. A jukebox embedded in the far wall mutters away, a rich old tune staggered by the staccato ticker-tape static inherent to age. It’s a more prominent and reliable fixture than any regular patron, practically a keystone of the establishment in its own right.
Not that it matters, in her dreams, the place is always deserted.
Nonetheless, Kafka seats herself at the bar, feet kicking morosely a few inches off the ground - the rickety barstool her gallows. There’s nobody manning the bar, so she reaches behind the counter and plucks a maraschino cherry from the tub, popping it into her mouth.
Tasteless. Sleep robs one of their most basic faculties; the acknowledgement of linear space-time, their senses, any definition of morality and impulse as it relates to the ephemeral world around them - it’s maddening, living in an undefined narrative without any hope of breaking free. Fortunately, Kafka hasn’t made the mistake of betting on losing dogs in years now. Hope is a terrible thing, after all, and it’s a doomed and near unbearable sentiment to invest one’s faith in the soft and sappy things. Comfort. Redemption. Love.
She spits the cherry out onto the floor. Already, the world around her seems to shiver, growing faint, the color bleeding from this half-baked amalgamation of imagination and reminiscence.
Kafka opens her eyes to a stark change in scenery.
A cold, neatly tiled ceiling, the armrest of a small couch digging into her back, a tacky, bitter dryness that coats her tongue, and the warm and inviting haze of sleep not-quite-dispelled that coaxes her eyelids back shut. It would be nice to just lay here - she thinks - another hour, another day. It’s not like there’s anyone around to enforce the conventional boundaries of a circadian timeline, and her current world is one utterly devoid of responsibility and obligation. Here in this shared hell, there is nothing to do but contemplate the abandoned maps and books littering the ship, illustrations of quiet planets and cold expanses of desert, photographs of age-old wreckage strewn over forgotten oceans, old journals full of skeletons left in closets better forgotten than perused. Neither of them have had the heart or will to bother with calibrating the light-dark cycle of the craft’s atmospheric determinant module, and so they’re left beneath a constant deluge of daytime glare. It might have been irritating if Kafka wasn’t already so worn out.
She sits up and peers down the hall. The door to the single bedroom remains shut, an impassable threshold that may as well just be another panel in the wall.
Solitude has grown teeth between them, taut and acrid, emboldened by the prospect of human intimacy that ultimately fails to manifest itself; it stings relentlessly. Loneliness has always cemented itself in her life, an ever-present entity that withers the swell of each day, curling at the edges of each script she’d been handed, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s. Kafka had never really paid it much mind. She’d never been the kind of person to bank her existence on the shortcomings of others, rather much preferring to devote herself as Elio’s best, most flawless actor; dancing on a razor’s edge with pinpoint accuracy, a figure skater boasting an otherworldly kind of balance.
Before she’d met Elio, it had been easy to plunge headlong into a life of borderline reckless momentum, living hard and fast, consuming and discarding, subsuming herself in an endless cycle of self-sabotage and succession. There was never any fun in winning all the time, but there were so few who’d been able to stagger her that she’d quickly come to realize that self-destruction was best taken upon herself, a necessary task to keep life interesting.
But all of that’s gone now.
Kafka rubs at her eyes and breathes a sigh that whistles in her ears like a scream. Her legs tremble as she stands and makes her way to the bathroom, not bothering to lock the door behind her. There’s just no point.
Just like every other day, Kafka washes her face, brushes her teeth, then combs her hair and ties it back neatly. She drags herself to the kitchen and unwraps a ration bar. It is in this suspension of intelligent thought that she stands, eating half of it while staring out into the inky void of space, devoid now of even the glimmer of stars and light. The wrapper rustles as she folds it back on itself and leaves it on the counter for later. With these most immediate needs addressed, she finds her place on the couch again and sits alone to tend to her leg.
The end had not been quiet. It had been heat and energy and destruction, the devastating termination of divinity with all the most catastrophic fixings. A burst of radiation had managed to catch her as the doors to the craft had slammed shut, the sheer energy of the blast scorching her left leg from ankle to thigh. Now the bandaging material pulls away sticky with yellowish plasma, and she can’t help but grimace at the appearance of the limb underneath; bruise-red and shiny, raw flesh gapes unapologetically from beneath sloughing skin as white and flimsy as tissue paper. It’s slow, excruciating work, but she commits herself to it regardless, finding a morbid kind of satisfaction in the cleaning, then in seeing it all disappear beneath swathes of fresh gauze.
Her soiled bandages form an unsightly pile on the tacky lace doily that decorates the top of the stout chest of drawers pushed up against the wall. A clock also occupies the surface - it’s a funny looking thing, adorned with a broad hat, animatedly wide-eyed and stood upon a pair of bowed legs, but its hands are ultimately still. There’s no real way to tell the time, but Kafka reckons it’s been at least two weeks since she’s seen her reticent bedfellow. With only silence to accompany her in her absence, she sits and flicks disinterestedly through the antediluvian spread of a glossy magazine, the pages cut and the whites yellowed, laminated matinee posters and paragraphs water-stained and smudged; all drivel, all dross.
Another day, another stint of boredom. Here, the two of them languish in their own stoic niches with the universe dying all around them, the very fabric of reality coming apart in the retrograde footpace of an old record played at a fraction of its intended speed. This is death, the end of all things, the inevitable futility of life as it stutters, falters and grinds to an unbecoming halt.
The silence is full and overwhelming, so thick as to be tangible, filling her ears and mouth and giving palpable weight to every maddening, suffocating breath. The walls are closing in, the space around her compressing like the air being sucked out from underneath a shrink-wrapped piece of cellophane, and Kafka can do nothing to stop it - can do nothing to retain the small amount of room she has.
She falls mutely onto her side, curling up, watching the vast nothingness beyond the windowpane, beset by a sickening disinclination for anything but sleep.
Oh , what she wouldn’t give for her phonogram.
The inevitable tête-à-tête transpires eventually. As reticent as Himeko is - as determined as she is to raise a figurative bulwark between them and isolate herself from the perpetrator of all which has come to befall her - they are both only human and both equally pregnable to mistakes.
It’s an old track that plays lazily through her head, its chords easy enough to sing for someone who’d once found her home on the stage - a cabaret ballad on a fanciful escapade to a distant moon somewhere. Kafka is left poised on the precipice of a note unsung, momentarily stalled by the full weight of a withering, exacting stare. Himeko looks like a specter, haunting and ephemeral, and may as well have been all but a figment of Kafka’s imagination had the bruises on her own neck yet to fade. That face - youthful but gaunt - that had never looked save with bitterness and hatred upon her, ornaments the poise with which she carries herself, as brilliant as some goddess of victory, her steely composure enough to overshadow the hunch to her shoulders and the cool pallor of her hands.
“Shut up.”
Kafka looks her over, then lets out a low whistle. “You look like shit.”
“How convenient of you,” Himeko says dryly, but her eyes are scathing. “To finally gain some long-awaited semblance of decency.” Her eyes dart across her, and her lips curl with distaste, quick as a sliver of paper put to the torch. “You’re no better. Despair isn't a good look on you, Stellaron Hunter .”
“Hardly that even.” Kafka shrugs, all feigned lament and shallow regret. “What? Was watching every single Stellaron in our known universe simultaneously combust not enough to sear the truth into your memory?”
Himeko the Navigator. Himeko the Scientist. Himeko the Interastral Engineer, diplomat of the Astral Express, representative of the Nameless, renowned figurehead of the Trailblaze. Kafka has found herself musing over this repertoire of titles in her boredom in much the same way she used to peruse her shelves of records.
She doesn't know her, not really. But she knows this much - Himeko is the kind of woman who charges headlong over and through any obstacle in her way if only to fulfill a deep-seated need to feel within her the capacity of change. Even now, her innate vivacity has yet to desert her. Kafka can see the intensity simmering in the depths of her gaze, her mind long since cast away in a storm of grief and mindless fury.
Yet, there is a distinction between the cold and calculating intellect which remains behind the snarl of her teeth and the genuinely insensible, indiscriminate rage of the mara. Himeko’s anger glistens with an entirely novel facet that Blade’s had never known, a kind of premeditation, a wrongness to the bloodthirst; such that the ability to comprehend all the moral implications of killing would surely prevent any ensuing bloodshed. On the contrary, the most paradoxical manifestation is true - her cognizance only exacerbates the violence of it.
Himeko’s face darkens, immediately suffused with rage, her eyes narrow dangerously. Rather than cross the room to once again clench the column of Kafka’s neck between her hands, she turns on her heel and disappears back into the room with the furious air of her indignation blazing behind her, the door slamming shut in her wake with all the condemnation of a gavel upon a guilty decree.
Kafka purses her lips, searching on instinct for the words to fill the space. A futile endeavor, surely, considering the lack of an audience to hear them. The living room lapses into silence yet again. Determined to reciprocate, the emptiness within her only grows more insistent.
For all the ways Kafka is intimate with the abilities of people to change under duress, it is remarkably difficult to reconcile the image of Himeko now - cold as spent ashes - with that fervent and seething figure who’d been beside herself with resentment; who’d come to greet Kafka as she’d limped back into the ship’s quarters with the debilitating pain of her freshly inaugurated injuries shooting up her spine. Kafka had staggered up the ramp and collapsed back against the doors as they slid shut, only half standing with her chest heaving, her expression taut with pain.
It’s a vivid enough recollection. In her mind’s eye, she sees Himeko whipping around to face her, shouting with a voice hoarse with exertion, her face bloodied and wrought with equal parts rage and disbelief. The emergency exit is battered and dented, and the Navigator’s heavy case lays on the ground beside it amidst a sea of metal chips, one of its robust corners shattered.
“Why - damn you! Why did you do it?”
Whether the intention had been borne of kindness or cruelty makes no difference in the face of this wild-eyed, near-animalistic rage. Kafka knows it immediately. It is the kind that takes and consumes you, immolates reason and blinds you to all but the most immediate present. Himeko is a scientist first, and a martyr second - and Kafka sees her searching, scouring her for an answer, seeking to liberate any rationale behind their most dreadful circumstances such that she might set herself upon it and dissect from it some measure of comfort.
Himeko is drawing closer, her voice resonating with naked pain, palpable hurt and acrid loathing. Her words come muffled through Kafka’s ringing ears. It’s like she’s underwater, being tossed about on violent currents, barely able to discern up from and down as the ground sweeps away from underneath her.
“Tell me - was it in your script?” She’s close enough to touch, she can see the tremble in her hands. “Was it some sick joke for you to swoop in and steal away my life? Everyone I cared about? My purpose? My autonomy? What made you do it? Answer me!”
Himeko may be searching for answers. Alas, Kafka fails to give her even this meager satisfaction.
“A whim.” She breathes, and immediately feels her palm her carotids, her fingers clenching down and throttling her airway. Kafka’s lungs spasm on instinct with a beleaguered wheeze as she finally topples, her legs giving out, clawing feebly at her forearms, chin jutting upwards as she hangs herself in the grasp of a woman who would surely rather see her lifeless and broken for her efforts.
Himeko chokes her. There’s no grace or elegance to any of it. Her thumbs dig relentlessly into the hollow of her throat, her fingers shift, her palms compress and shudder. It doesn’t make a difference, Kafka grows lightheaded quickly, arms falling to her sides as her eyes go dim and unfocused. She struggles to breathe on instinct, heat and terrible pressure building behind her eyes, spit dribbling from the corners of her mouth, teeth clicking together as her heels slide uselessly across the floor.
“Why?” Her voice shakes with the shudder of an exhale, as she bears down on Kafka with all the intention in the world to kill her. The Astral Express is gone, the train vapourized and its inhabitants deader than dead; the Stellaron Hunters haven’t fared much better, and all for what? There are black spots dancing in her vision, and all the world is spinning in a dizzying rush of vertigo. Her chest and lungs scream, the floor is frigid against her back. Why indeed.
Himeko leaves her there, crumpled on the floor and gasping weakly, cocooned in her impuissance, the command over her limbs is limited, every airway and nerve aflame, her neck rapidly purpling in ugly splotches of plum and olive.
Over the span of an hour, Kafka drags herself to the couch across the room and allows oblivion to claim her as she lays - coughing and retching - over the tacky craquelure of the fake leather seat.
It’s two weeks before she sees her again.
Kafka sits, beset with something that is not quite guilt.
Rather, there is a paralyzing and ultimately paradoxical vacancy of loss that she herself has yet to quite come to terms with. Even in the wake of unimaginable tragedy, she feels so very little. She has lost all that she ever had - Elio’s promise, all any relations, a purpose, anything material she’d once pretended to value - and yet, the plain acknowledgement of this fact fails to inspire dismay of any comparable degree within her. She has always been keenly sagacious, but this is an odd feeling. Nonetheless, she is left turning over the ambiguity of this figurative object in the grasp of her mind and puzzling over it for hours and days on end.
When Himeko appears again, there is a sullen downturn to her mouth and a hooded, mulish quality to her gaze. “I haven’t forgiven you.” She enunciates sharply, her jaw set and seething, her eyes cold and gazing dispassionately elsewhere, anywhere but the object of her abject disgust, Kafka herself the very menace to this unwanted peace. Her lips are thin and blanched with hate. “I can’t and I won’t.”
It sounds like a justification, the antithesis to an apology that Kafka had never sought. Certainly, she cannot speak to Himeko’s intentions, but what Kafka harbors is just the same indifference. Kafka has not resented her, she has not made any unsolicited endeavor towards her, she has not thought to prostrate herself and beg for forgiveness. But in the same vein, she has also been, likewise yet to discover within her even a thread of sympathy to offer. Comfort has no place here except as an additional incendiary, a saddening corbeille to heap upon the blaze of her temper.
“As you like.” Kafka’s smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She folds her hands delicately in her lap and gazes into the lightless void, listening only as Himeko moves about the space.
She thinks they are, to some degree, alike. Both of them individuals holding a disproportionate and imprudent amount of ambition within themselves, both of them ardently faithful towards their respective pursuits, their lives steeped in the relentless nature of resolution and tenacity. Dear Elio had approached her with his vision many years ago, and a younger version of her had found herself both fascinated and enraptured with the figurative entourage that such an enterprise might provide her, eagerly taking upon this impossible mission to realize fate with a diffidence like no other.
Himeko, on the other hand, has always embodied the archetype of a scientist with endless hypotheses ever-poised upon her lips. Even now she supposes she is seeking the silhouette of an answer to this predicament amidst the gnarled and spreading branches of the Imaginary tree. Kafka knows better than to assume her idling when she could not be anything other than strenuously opposed to the concept of resignation. Her constitution is an iron one, and any number of individuals might have once considered her stolid optimism an admirable trait.
Perhaps it is the nihilism that has made its home within the cavity of her thorax which condemns it, which decrees hope be cast aside and left to wither in irrelevance. To her surprise, the couch dips to her right. With their proximity, she can feel Himeko’s glower rippling in the air. A lesser woman might have flinched beneath the weight of her presence. Alas, Kafka has never known fear, her wish left unfulfilled even as the loom of destiny itself had fallen into utter disrepair.
Silence perpetuates itself in the space between them, filling the small craft, oozing into every crevice and corner. Neither of them have anything left to say to one another. They are, conceivably, all that remains material in this existential and meaningless void, both of them doomed to become consumed by the isolation that has never failed to drive humanity to the brink of madness.
There’s a poetic irony to it that Kafka can appreciate within all the artistic boundaries allowing. Human intimacy is the construct which defines psychological security. It is also, and has always been the most difficult obstacle to conquer between even those individuals who proclaim an unmatched closeness, the fear of being known an omnipresent and most pervasive impediment, mankind’s sentience and self-awareness the most stringent barrier to a non-negotiable feature of instinct imperative to survival.
Whatever the case, Kafka has never known the true definition of love and closeness. Building bridges with her fellow man has never come so naturally to her as burning them.
Yet, there is something entirely unmatched in the intimacy which this predicament has plunged them both unwittingly into. There had always been a greater degree of nuance to her Spirit Whisper than most could assume - first and foremost being the ability to grasp the machinations of the human psyche and form her demands accordingly. One’s existence is ultimately tied to the external perception of oneself. Just as one defines their shape and appearance by comparing themselves to others, one’s internal thoughts and the material of their very existence are highly influenced by the perceptions of those around them. Indeed, if they - Himeko and Kafka - are truly the only ones left in the universe with each of them acting as the other’s sole witness, then with nobody left to dispute either of their claims, her perception of Himeko must inherently integrate itself into the reality of her being in greater proportions than ever before. The reverse must also then be true.
Kafka cannot help but wonder after the identity of the creature once known as ‘Kafka’, the state in which she will meet her inevitable end, whether she will be at all distinguishable from the loathed and reviled depiction of herself in Himeko’s mind when the time finally comes for her to depart when it is all that defines her. Perhaps - she thinks - gazing at the stoic line of Himeko’s lips, that the very same question renders itself ubiquitous in the mind of her taciturn companion. Is her loathing spurred on at all by the prospect that Kafka’s internal delineation of her may be what ultimately governs and dictates her sense of self and her very identity? Perhaps it’s an assumption gone a stretch too far.
Not that it would matter in any case.
“I hate you.” Himeko hisses abruptly, unexpectedly. There’s the sound of fabric ripping as her fingers clutch at the edges of the seats. “I despise you.”
“I know.” Kafka responds halfheartedly, not really meaning it, saying it only because there’s no further consolation or more appropriate response she can give. She’s out of bullets just the same way the ship is devoid of knives. There won’t be a quick or painless death in store for either of them.
“I could,” She says after a beat, “Make all the pain go away. You’d forget all of this. You’d only have to listen. ”
Himeko strikes her. The blow snaps her head sharply aside and Kafka grits her teeth around a mouthful of her own swollen cheek, fresh blood trickling over her tongue and seeping into the gaps between her molars.
“You've got a lot of nerve.” Her eyes are smoldering and merciless. “Have you not taken enough from me that you should desire to rob me of my mind too? Keep your influence away from me. You’ll not have anything more from me than my presence, and I hope that much is fleeting.”
“Then what do you want from me?” Kafka leans in. “I’ll indulge you, whatever it is. The satisfaction of ending my life with your bare hands? An apology? Sex? What exactly are you holding on to?”
“Stop it.” Himeko snarls, and shoves roughly, violently at her chest with force enough to knock her off balance, lip already curling with aversion. “I don’t want anything from you. Do you know why, Kafka? Could someone like you even possibly know why? It’s because I hate you. Plain and simple. You’re repulsive, abhorrent; surely you could bring yourself to understand that much?”
Had she ever - Kafka wonders - shown this side of herself to the departed members of her faction? Had the Trailblaze ever been fully aware of the incandescence of this fallible, apoplectic potential? It stirs her intrigue but leaves her shame untouched. Himeko’s voice is low and her eyes are cold and unforgiving, rage blossoming over a brumous wasteland encased in ice. “I really should have killed you.”
“Would you kill me? Could you stomach it?” Kafka straightens now, morbid intrigue prickling eagerly at her with the promise of momentary entertainment. She’s pretty sure she’s running a low-grade fever and the delirium only spurs the flank of her audacity. “Could you bear having my corpse as the only thing to keep your despair company?” A laugh bubbles from her chest, low, provocative and wicked. “Hah. Maybe you could eat me. My body might even buy you a few extra weeks before you inevitably switch back to rations and starve to death when those run out. What do you think would win out first? Your hatred of everything that makes up my existence or the physical stipulation of your hunger?”
Would you squander your own life in dedication to the hatred of mine?
Kafka purses her lips. Maybe the solitude has been getting to her. “Could you bear to let me go to waste?”
“Let you go to waste but feed you to the dogs also.” Himeko mutters darkly, wearing a sneer made imperious with her fury; a blaze upon the pyre of desperation, “At least then I might have some amenable company.”
Kafka sits back and laughs, the sound is weak and broken, but it fills the dull air of the room. She laughs until she’s breathless, until her chest aches and her eyes are dry beyond the capacity for tears.
By that time, Himeko is already gone.
Considering the debacle of their last encounter, Kafka wouldn’t have thought it inordinate in the slightest that their acquaintance might have ended then and there. She’d gone a step too far, after all. Maybe Himeko would choose to ignore her and they’d both die in isolation, maybe she would finally bite the damn bullet and decide to finish the job, or maybe Kafka would steal into her room and end her in a fit of boredom.
Instead, she finds her sitting across from her; Himeko regards her with a dull stare.
Kafka isn’t stupid. She knows how it grates at her - this stark juxtaposition between how the very action that has lost everything to her has ultimately meant nothing to Kafka.
The lights have gone dark for the first time in weeks, an indefinite shift with no indication of a planned return to function. In the light of the single, paltry candle they share, Himeko’s hair forms a brilliant, scarlet aureole in the flicker of its dim and uncertain glow. A funeral procession of shadows dance over the walls around them, a misguided parade of misfits embarking on a steady journey towards their origin.
Origin. End. Origin. End. There’s no distinction between the two phases, not here - where the Finality has ceased to exist, where the Destruction had claimed all and left only the speck of their craft to roam the collapsing primordial vacuum of nothingness.
Perhaps the obscurity of the shadows has lent them both courage. Her leg is healing over the layers of ravaged flesh, skin growing back shiny and discolored. Even so, there's a deep ache that’s settled into the muscle and bone, a savage reminder that her nerves have been reduced to kindling. It hurts relentlessly, but even this is a source of comfort, a source of stimulation where none other lavishes itself upon her.
In the unfaltering silence, voices of the dead fill her ears. Silver Wolf’s impugnable assertions, Firefly’s discerning intrigue, Blade’s baritone vigilance, Elio’s enigmatic guidance, all of them reduced to ghostly intangible murmurs in the dark.
Close as they’d been, Kafka had never once truly entertained the notion of advancing her relationship with any of them beyond the strict and superficial intimacy required to maintain camaraderie and some approximation of care. It had been a choice, not out of a lack of know-how, but a lack of desire. She’d lived from moment to moment for so long, never seeing the same person twice, executing the motions of living and moving on without giving herself the painful luxury of contemplation and regret. It became all too easy to distance herself in the name of fortitude and pragmatism. For someone like herself, genuine sincerity and closeness were often the most distasteful alternatives.
Elio had asked her once - taking the form of a black cat settling on the ledge by her shoulder as she’d grimaced at a stain on the hem of a beloved coat - ‘ do you want to be alone because you thrive in solitude, or because you’d rather eschew the inevitable unpleasantry of being abandoned? ’
‘ I don’t feel fear, Elio. ’ She replied in that dry way of hers. ‘ So what do you think? ’
In truth, she doesn’t think she’d ever really understood herself at all. She’d never feared abandonment, per say - but loneliness in itself was an entirely different monster to contend with, isolated from all other emotion, the neutral and stand-alone recognition of the distance between oneself and the rest of the world. Yet, still she’d craved it, coveting the prospect of solitude in just the same way she’d found herself so intrinsically drawn to self-destruction.
A drive unto death. An inherent and infuriatingly subconscious feature of mortality. A desire to eliminate the turmoil of self awareness and settle into release, embracing the tranquil state of blank predictability and nothingness. It had been a relentless comfort. Surely, it would be cruel to deny herself this much now.
“Himeko, oh Himeko.” She whispers, lounging bonelessly across the couch, her voice a melodic refrain into the dark. “Won’t you just kill me?”
“You don’t deserve that mercy.”
So she’s failed to find a solution after all. If she had to guess, the Imaginary Tree is probably long-gone, taking with it all possibility of alternate universes, alternate existences, alternate alternatives unto infinity. In that way, she supposes that there’s a beauty in the impermanence of this - they are all that is left, and they will be all there is to herald that final, inexorable ending. If she could choose, Kafka thinks she’d rather like to die in a nice warm bath - that, or in the explosive carnage of a shootout. Either would be lovely, though both remain firmly out of reach.
Kafka glances up at her, mouth softening into a contemplative moue. “I could tell you to. You wouldn’t be able to refuse.”
To her credit, Himeko doesn’t even flinch. “You would have done so already.”
“I wasn’t this bored before. I’m so bored now that I just can’t stand it.”
“You’re a fucking child.”
The silence returns to fill the gap between them. It’s desolate, so hopelessly desolate, and every passing second forms a nail which drives the truth further home. There is nothing beyond all of this, there is nobody left, no planets remaining, no more scripts, no lingering trails of Finality - even Akivili’s Silver Rail has been wiped from existence. What a blessing to find herself at the end of all things, her wish still unfulfilled, and with Himeko no less.
She wonders whether things could have been different. Maybe in another lifetime, they might have been lovers. Maybe they would have come to this endpoint with more mulish sentiment than hate, with the undertones of fondness and endearment overlying Kafka’s monotone apathy and Himeko’s relentless search for a way to repair this broken timeline; maybe they’d actually be able to come to agree to kill one another; or maybe they’d have wonderful sex until the end invariably saw fit to overcome them.
Sometimes, she dreams of that empty bar. Sometimes she dreams of death. Sometimes, she catches glimpses of lurid myriads of other lifetimes - sickly and breathing in the scent of jackdaw’s feathers, writing her days away in a perpetual gloom. Other times, she stands in an empty gallery with dust motes dancing in the wan sunlight, heels grinding into a polished marble floor as she stands before a painting, staring into her own vacuous eyes. The portrait changes, as does the frame and the lighting - but it is always invariably herself. That image haunts her - her face is too gaunt, too strained - there is something in her expression that she can’t quite put a finger to, something about the way she holds herself that she has no words to describe, the entire canvas is blotted with an air of something that she simply does not understand.
“I could have gone my whole life on Pteruges-V without feeling fear, without understanding the value of life. I could have gone about the same comfortable routines, same-old, same-old.” She hates how apathetic she sounds, but she continues only because the darkness seems to wane just a little, turning fuzzy at the edges as her words permeate the air, like turpentine poured over oil pigments, eroding each layer.
“But do you know what?” She laughs, disbelieving and tired, giggles because nothing else comes even remotely close to feeling right. “When Elio came up to me that day, I listened. Maybe I saw myself in those devils and chose to divert my path from that conclusion, not because I feared becoming one of them, but because I resented the idea of just giving up.”
“Is that what you’re doing now then?” Himeko’s tone is icy. She doesn't even look at her. “Giving up?”
“Maybe. But you’re making it tremendously difficult.” She pauses, ruminating. “Does it really matter? There’s nothing left.”
“You’re pathetic.” Himeko spits with bitter rage renewed, all gritted teeth and narrowed eyes. “Don’t even presume to speak to me about loss. This is easy for you. You’ve never valued anything, have you? How could you ever have when it would immediately impart upon you the most basic definition of fear - that of loss? Have you ever valued anything, Kafka? Have you ever really wanted anything - fucking anything - in your damned life?”
Something flares in her chest, bitter and hot as resentment. It’s sharp, it’s scorching, but moreover, it’s utterly and relentlessly redundant.
Anger. Fury - but for all the most intolerable and impermissible reasons. It’s neither Himeko’s persistent objection, nor the grave inescapability of their circumstances which has given root to this irritating spark. Rather, it’s her sheer inability to answer the question to any degree that might render her response meaningful.
It’s been a long time since she’s truly harbored any faith in her self-autonomy, Elio’s appearance had coincided with a revelation of her own - that there were no actions that she could take that would ever truly matter; that destiny was deceptive in the way it seemed to present endless possibilities, when in reality there were only ever a few predetermined paths and ever fewer endings. It is all void and abyss and emptiness where predetermination has robbed living of a considerable volume of meaning, leaving only a gaping vacancy where pain has long since become the closest relief, a reminder of a continued existence, a gateway drug to the phenomenon that is genuine sensation.
Kafka turns her gaze to the endless void. Here the void bleeds into darkness, and darkness oozes like fluid hopelessness into every chamber and narrow crevice of their craft. It’s hard to pick out where it all starts and where it all draws shut, difficult to place herself when Himeko’s voice has begun to sound like her own between breaths, where the candlelight flickers and casts upon this accursed reality only grim illusion and indecipherable apparition.
‘ Have you ever wanted anything? ’ Her hair is infuriatingly vivid, crimson and every shade of bloodshed all at once. Amaryllis and Hibiscus and rose petals, a velvet spray of color from a bouquet discarded.
She thinks about the sky and all the graves beneath it.
What the hell does she - has she ever wanted?
Freedom.
Freedom . Freedom that had only ever existed in its most theoretical, relative form; an inarticulate guise which mimicked a driving force of unachievable perfection.
How sad.
The silence rings like the discordant shrill of violin strings under a forceful bow, a chorus of disharmony, a dreadful and lonesome shriek that echoes where nobody remains to bear witness. It’s cold, cold in her chest and between her ribs, a chill that seizes and burrows deep, squirming into marrowfat, seeping into her every bone.
What’s left? Just you.
Just you.
“I suppose…” Kafka says softly, drawing taut a strand of hair between her fingers and tugging, tugging and feeling it snap. “I only ever wanted to see it all end.”