Work Text:
His face was strange in a coffin of feathers, in wings swept low across his body. His features were too sharp, too alive to be at peace with the world. Yet his eyes were dulled black, his hands cold, and his body limp. He wasn’t supposed to die tangled in the metal strands of a Morpho’s wings, the war was ending, and he needed to come back to her… why now, if it all?
The war was ending, he thought, and he would be the last. Death comes for the reaper, in the end, but at least the life taken would be his own.
One last time, he promised her. He raised the handgun to his head, held it steady.
Lena sat on the bed, wrapped in the covers, spring’s midnight rain knocking at the window. The feeling of his lips from earlier in the evening still lingered on her own. Moonlight dappled by the rain was falling through the glass as his pen glossed effortlessly over paper.
“Say, what are you writing for?”
“Keeping a journal of sorts,” he said. She paced over to him and sat in his lap.
“Let me read it,” she said. When a sullen look befell his face, she added: “Please?”
He hesitated and showed her.
“You write down your birthday wishes?”
“They never come true,” he said, “They’re more to put myself at ease, to remind myself to be… practical.” She frowned at the fine, messy lines of his handwriting, and a strange sense of pride filled her chest.
“The war is ending soon, you know, you have more to look forward to,” she said, smiling at the faint blush of his cheeks and the downcast gaze of his eyes; I never should have shown her, they said.
“I don't… I can't think of the future that way. I don’t want to leave you behind.” He thought for a moment of what he was meant to say: I don’t want to lose you.
While he was reminiscing, she took the pen from his hand, exclaiming, and wrote another line.
When the war ends, for us to be together, forever and ever.
Lena, pleased with herself, kissed him on the cheek and stretched out across his bed with a heady sigh. Glancing at her in the lamplight, as he had allowed her to distract him and had lost his train of thought, Shin wrote down one last wish.
He should have seen it coming. He should have wanted to live.
At first the rumors about his death were more pitiful than polemic — the officers bemoaned the loss of a valuable weapon — but the war was close to its end, they said, and so nothing was done and nothing more could be done.
Lena was crying in his room. Anju, footsteps light like she was treading upon a grave, entered with a quiet malevolence.
“People want to see you, Lena,” she pleaded, a grinning terror of shadow sketched in her voice. For a moment, in the lack of light, her figure appeared masculine, and afterwards Lena only thought of Shin, eyes wide open and a hole blown through the side of his skull: the same voice, the same twisted smile and the same regrets. She turned away.
“They want you there,” she said. “We want to help you; you’re not the only one hurting.” Lena wiped her tears on her sleeve. In the darkness the ceiling was a reflection of her tears.
“I just. . . didn’t realize how much I loved him… and then… he—he was gone.”
Lena could not bear to look at Anju, and it was hard to tell if she was speaking, or if it was only a shadow of him.
“So you can’t leave him like this! You have to tell them what he meant to you! You have to tell them the truth, for his sake.”
“I can’t,” she said, and there was no finality in her answer, though she was certain it was true. Her hesitation came from a feeling in her chest. It wanted her to let go. It felt like she was drifting away into an endless sea, as the world was moving behind her and the starlight was gleaming on her skin beneath a darkening sky.
“You have to. You can’t leave him—you promised!”
But she couldn’t hear the words no matter how hard she could have tried, because the stars were disappearing. They were falling out of the sky, they were landing in the water and fading away, and darkness was becoming impossibly dark.
“He deserved better than you, coward.” The voice was the voice of her own conscience, she assured herself. Not the rebuke of a sister but a fault of her own.
She entertained the idea of falling. The feeling of the windrushing past her, the reasons he had to die fluttering away; feeling the world throttling up to her as she became limp, stilled before she hit the ground. How it would feel to hold that freedom in her heart.
Her body would sink to the bottom of the sea, she would splash beneath her tears and the world would spin around like a spool of thread into a drop of water on her fingertips, and then it would be the end.
Seeing Lena’s slumped figure on the floor, hands twitching and limbs sprawled about, Anju lifted her in her arms like a bride, and laid her to bed. She looked like a child scared of the dark, dried tears running down her face. Anju had the urge to kiss her on the cheek, but she decided to side with her better judgment not to.
She returned to the wake, passing by a group of Eighty-Six at the door. They were talking about her, in whispers, guilt-ridden eyes coming up to stare at her exposed back.
“Did you see…”
“Her tattoo is gone.”
“Yeah… there was hardly any time… she has no reason not to.”
“Still, it’s… never been there at all.”
She tried to ignore them, the night was still long and the wake was certain to last until dawn. She settled in at a table, taking a long draft from a cocktail. Officials and the occasional Bleacher (kicked out for making a fuss), milled about the room. She talked to whoever acquiesced to the delight of alcohol as best she could, as time whittled away and the sun began to rise.
The sun was peeking out from the gaps in the curtains when Lena awoke. Her breath was urgent and vicious, like she’d been drowning and heaved to shore. She got up from the floor and clutched the bedpost and laid down on the bed. The throbbing headache in her temples wasn’t helping.
She held her arm up to the light, noticing a patch of blackness that she thought little of. Part of her was happy to lie blissfully in the dark. I’m waiting for the sun, she thought, cracking an eye as if laughing at her own impatience.
I miss you.
She blinked. The ink faded, and panic overtook her and pushed her into consciousness, a clarity from her distorted thoughts.
“Shin? Are you there?” she said, gasping a little, just as she had those distant mornings when he roused her with a kiss.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Lena would have cried then but there were no tears left and there were no words to say either. She sat on the floor for a while, staring into the blinding light in the gap between the curtains. As she sat agape, flowers bloomed across her shoulder, following the sun, stopping at her wrist. Shin drew a faded visage on her shoulder. She fought the urge to speak to him and found the thought of talking silly, and over a dead man, for god’s sake, what had gotten into her?
“What is it like down there?” she said, a bit embarrassed, and not all too seriously.
I only need you
When she saw the words appear, her reluctance broke in place of her tears, and suddenly she was free to speak. “Do you ever think that… I'm holding you back?”
I'm happy I can still be with you, he wrote. promised to stay with you. That doesn't change if I'm dead
A need controlled her to move, the need to tell someone he was alive. Lena dressed in her clothes on the floor and went out hurriedly to where the wake was being taken down for the funeral. She was hungover from the drunkenness induced by his words.
Most of the guests had gone and there were a few stragglers left, Anju and Raiden among them, lighting incense and making small talk.
Lena stumbled over to the lone table Raiden and Anju were seated at. She didn’t want to interrupt them in a tear-stained nightgown covered with one of Shin’s old shirts, but it had to be done.
“Look,” she said abruptly. They stopped to stare at her. She showed them her arm.
It’s nice to see you all again
“Don't you see the words?”
“What words?” Raiden said.
“Words written out of ink, like a tattoo.” Her hands were clenched.
“Are you alright, Lena? There's nothing there.” He rubbed his nose, in frustration, or sympathy; she couldn’t tell.
They can't see me.
Lena stared blankly at them for a few more seconds. They seemed shocked at her condition. But how could they be? After what they had said to her, how could they act like there was nothing? Raiden smiled at her.
“I think you should get back to bed, Lena,” he said. “Something’s not right,” he muttered under his breath but she heard him.
Raiden took Lena back to her room. She fell down into a fitful sleep with him by her side.
The curtains had been taken down. Light streamed in. He was sitting in Shin’s chair by the window. She had slept well, a rare occasion since you-know-what, and she had slept through his funeral, not that she had planned on going. Raiden watched her toss about in an attempt to struggle out of the bed.
“Come on, let’s take you to the doctor,” he said. His voice comforted her, reminiscent of morning cuddles with a lover. Maybe it was because she had only ever paid attention to Shin — since when had Raiden been so caring and affectionate — but how had she never noticed him? Maybe it was because he had taken Shin’s place without her noticing. It must be that, she concluded. She felt a pang of shame for considering the thought of being with someone other than Shin.
Then they were walking down the street, him standing awkwardly at her side, and at her prodding, held her hand gently as he would with a child. As she would with a lover.
Something about him felt real, solid.
She was too busy caught up in the sensation of his hand that she did not notice when he stopped in front of an old imperial-styled building. The door was a solid mahogany. She opened it and he did not follow her in. She sat down in a cushy leather chair, watching the doctor drink water from a glass, and the painting above him of the Sankt Jeder skyline.
He wore an oversized white coat draped around his shoulders. She could tell it was expensive from the silhouette.
“Hi, I’m Dr. Haberkorn. Or just Haber, if you prefer that.”
“Hello.”
Haber had a sickly sweet smile, one that came off as a bit paternalistic, and his poise exuded an assurance that only a therapist could have. She looked down into her palms, not knowing how to continue. He cleared his throat.
“I understand that you've been seeing hallucinations?” he said. She looked up; for a moment she hadn’t understood what Haber had said.
“They're not hallucinations. Shin, my. . . friend, he’s still alive. He… tells me things.”
“Tell me more about Shin.”
“He died about a month ago,” she said. “But I know he's not dead, because he talks to me.”
Haber scribbled notes on a legal pad as she continued. As he was thinking he was speaking, writing as he maintained eye contact with her. She told him of the war, of that night when he kissed her, of what he promised her. Haber did nothing but smile and nod, as if he were pretending to listen.
When she had nothing left to say her throat was parched and her eyes had long dried up.
He gathered his thoughts and spoke like she was a case in a medical textbook. “We see this a lot in patients who have lost a loved one,” he said. “What you see might feel real to you, and maybe it is, in the way of a memory or a dream, but they don't exist.“
He paused for a moment, to take another sip of water, to scrawl down another line.
“The words you see are just a normal part of what we tell ourselves,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with you, but someday you will have to recognize what it means for him to be gone.”
“He's not gone. He’s right here, with me,” she cried. “He’s right here. He’s not dead, not really.”
Haber nodded and stopped writing. He looked at her with a kind of scornful pity, but his tone didn’t change.
“Grief is like a knife,” he said. “If you bend it enough, you’ll find the blade in your body, and you won’t feel it—because of how numb you are. The real question is this: how far are you willing to go for someone that doesn’t exist?”
Lena felt the ink writhing beneath her skin, He covered the page in sheets of darkness. Haber's voice seemed to be coming from behind a paper screen, the glass of an interrogation booth…
The painting, the white coat, they were staring at her, the towers and shredded columns of the Republic Plaza were telling her to give in, to be done with her nonsense. He was dead, he would always be dead and she couldn’t do anything to change him.
Haber was smiling, like he was taking comfort in her pain, like he wanted her to crumble.
“When it all comes crashing down, give me a call, okay? Losing a loved one is always hard.”
“Have you thought about what would’ve happened if I listened to you instead?”
“Have you thought about what would have happened if, for once in my life, I stayed when you said not to go?”
She still loves me.
She didn’t, and he knew it. Shin was thinking about how many people never met their soulmates.
He wasn't allowed to say that word.
If he was so lucky to have met her, why did he feel like the world was slipping from his hands?
How far are you willing to go for someone that doesn’t exist?
“When I promised you I would stay with you forever… I should’ve told you that it was only fiction, only a dream… now you don’t look at me anymore,” he thought.
He held a knife in his hands, to carve her words into his skin.
Cutting into his flesh he felt a flash of recognition, a feeling that even in death he was still alive and that would be enough. It would be enough for her. He cut deeper until he heard the sound of metal scraping against bone.
He knew he was writing something, drawing something, but he couldn’t tell what they were. He could not stop carving them out. They were both his gods and also a shackle to tie him to her for as long as he refused to die. That morning, light in the curtains, holding onto each other for a second longer. He saw Raiden and the way she looked at him.
I miss you
Out of the knife’s edge, no blood spurted out and an endless reflection was out of reach beneath the floor. Shin thought if he could reach out and hold her hand it would be fine. Was it some kind of torment, a descent into death? He knew he would never reach it either way. The world was a formless black void with her name etched into it in a place he could not reach alone.
I’m happy I can still be with you
No, no, no no no, he wanted to get out. Death was coming closer, and he felt his words holding him on its blade, impaled on its hilt. He was bleeding out but the world refused to die. The darkness could not turn to sleep, no matter how hard he tried.
He stared at the ceiling and he saw a light in the center of the room, plunging further and further downwards, an image of his soul disintegrating.
That doesn’t change if I’m dead.
"Ten years… time sure goes by fast, doesn’t it?" They were standing on a stage, background props for Ernst’s annual end-of-the-war anniversary speech.
"I wish it went by faster," Lena whispered. "I wonder—when I’m on my deathbed, will it all still revolve around him?"
"Don’t ruin the mood,” Theo said, frowning. “We've been through this already. No one knew and no one could do anything. Don’t beat yourself up over it. There are other Juggernauts to pilot, so to speak."
"Lena, try to enjoy it, won't you? Let them pamper you for a while," Anju said.
In the evening, she was sitting in a sedan chair and the crowds caught an eyeful of her silver hair; some of them scoffed, it was hard to tell from the paper in the air. Fighting the Bleachers and their new Republic had taken years off her life, thankfully, one of the perks of being a Celena was the masking of gray hairs. And despair over the passing of time reminded her of how little she had achieved in the years since he had gone. Yet she was still being treated like a queen, a figure to be carted around by brute manpower.
The display was an affront to everything she stood for. Everything he died for.
She rubbed her wrists, the pale skin that should’ve had countless scars, the shadows of words. Sometimes she drew a flower on her arm or carefully traced out the “I love you” that wasn’t there, the one that she should’ve remembered. Her legacy. . . her life, would it ever escape the war? Would it ever escape him — the promise he made — and the life he lived?
Who was she, next to him? A pig with sympathy for the rats. The blade of a Phonix through his side. She was nothing. She was nothing but a whore clinging onto him. She was nothing but a girl with a silly sense of righteousness.
They were still out there, the family that fought in the war and moved on, sitting on a porch and sharing stories, as wildflowers and grasses carpeted the continent and waved, once, twice in the wind. His love was only in her memory. Maybe that was a fitting topic for a memoir.
The parade bustled and went about. She thought he saw him and reminded herself it was just a trick of her mind.
Out of the darkness and exhausted, he climbed into a bed that shouldn’t have been there. His wounds were closed, much quicker than they would have in reality—whatever that was to him now.
Shin liked lying on his side when he was alone. The duvet around him let him pretend that she was in his arms. If he had a pillow to squish, he would, but Lena preferred to have more than one. As he was falling asleep he felt a body molded into his chest, and a set of legs against his own. She snuggled in closer to him and the rhythm of his breathing. Shin knew it was going to be one of those nights when he covered his eyes and found them filling with tears.
He knew that all the comfort she had was in his arms, a comfort where they understood each other fully.
"I'm scared of being lonely," he said.
"I know," she said.
Shin embraced her in turn, straddling her thighs, their legs tangling together.
"I was… scared that I didn’t deserve you. I thought I changed, but you, you were always this goddess out of my reach." He blushed how a boy would — he had never really grown up, he thought — and he was unaware of the effect of making a confession that might as well have been a proposal. Then he cried how a boy would, with sadness, grieving for the future, and with joy, laughing for the present. Lena was still, and maybe it was the closeness of their hearts, the telepathy of their souls, but he heard her silent tears and grieved for them too.
"Do you ever wonder if soulmates exist?" She asked the question earnestly, not expecting an answer. Shin was silent.
"I think they do,” she said. “Because nothing else will ever feel this real. They have to exist, and it has to be us. It's not love, it's more, it has to be more. My heart feels like it's tearing itself apart, and I couldn't be happier. This can't. . ." She faltered and felt heir breath come together, felt the rise of his chest meet her back. “. . . it can't be a coincidence. Even if we never—I–"
Shin ran his hand across her body to comfort her, picking off tears tenderly with his fingers.
"I love you," she said. "I just wish there was a way to say it that was more real."
He bent his head down to kiss her ear, her lips, his heartbeat sending shivers through her body.
"Does it matter if soulmates exist?” he said, waving at the darkness. “If you believe they are, then we're soulmates.”
“We could only be talking now if we were soulmates," he added. “Why else would we be sharing a dream?”
"That only happens in the stories, Shin, it isn't real. No one else. . . no one else sees them, no one else believes..."
"Then we'll be the ones that make it real." He inhaled the scent of her skin and the faded perfume on her neck.
"I want to say I love you," she said. "But it doesn't feel right."
He held her tight until her breathing slowed and the impression of the three words left unsaid fled from her lips. He got up from the bed, from the dream that didn’t exist in either reality, kissed her on the cheek and went away to the place he should’ve gone a long time ago.
I love you
Begging for the words to return to her skin, begging for him to say something, begging for him to stay with her forever. One more time, he promised, but not one of high-frequency blades, cut into her skin by virtue of ink. The words were fading. The ones he had placed underneath her stockings. The secret that no one had to believe except them. They had all faded into smudges of ink, all except the one.
Stay with me, even for one moment longer. Stay with me for one more second.
She still felt his arms around her, her head against his chest. She still felt his breath on her neck and his warmth, that beautiful, fleeting warmth. It couldn’t be the end. He promised. He promised .
Lena had begun to realize that she hadn’t grieved for him at all. In reality she was torn over what she would be without him, without a part of her soul. It took until everything was shattering apart when she realized death ended somewhere, that Shin had faced some unassailable part of life and given up.
So why should she struggle any longer? Why should she worry over the ink in her skin and words that others couldn’t see and silent tears at midnight? He wasn’t there anymore, and his dreams would dissipate, his death was like a chip in the glass of her heart and his disappearance was its complete destruction, and grief—she had never known grief at all.
He had given up. Because of her.
And she had given up a long time ago and she had never noticed it. She reached for her phone and dialed the number on the back of the business card Haber had given her.
In the dark, she was lying on her side, soft light from the windowsill falling between her fingers. In her mind’s eye she saw Shin sitting at the vacant desk, writing in his journal, reading a book, kissing her at midnight and making wishes.
Anju knocked on the door, slipping a notebook on the bed. They were like reflections of one another, part of an eternal dance of grief and pain and dead boyfriends.
“For you, Lena. It's from Shin. And happy birthday,” she said, as if she couldn’t find the words, even though she knew them exactly. The door teetered shut.
Lena opened the notebook to the last empty page, her hands shaking from the effort.
When the war ends, for us to be together, forever and ever, she read, and there was nothing else below.