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It’s a dreary room, the place his mother killed herself in. There’s only a thin bed, and a rickety writing table with a lonely chair facing the narrow window that looked out to the folding waves. The light overhead doesn’t switch on, anymore. But the noose still dangles, and still resists when Shaddiq tugs it.
He kicks the bones on the concrete floor, quilted by a dress of some pattern already unknown. Is it a kindness that he was kept away so long that his beloved birth-giver no longer dangled by her neck?
I should probably get rid of her in some respectful way, he thinks, crouching to gather up the bones into the rotten dress.
—
The wind is whipping when he comes to the shore, and he laughs at himself several times because it keeps blowing the sand he unearths. By and by, he manages to make something that resembles a hole to stuff his mother’s bones in.
—
He spends his next few days this way, then: he sleeps in his mother’s bed, wakes up in his mother’s bed. He figures out breakfast with his meager stocks, then he takes a walk around the beach, heads back to the tower that has grown out of the cliff side like a mushroom to take some form of lunch. Then walks again, takes some form of dinner, then goes to sleep.
As far as liberty goes, Shaddiq makes a sad excuse of it. He laughs, he smiles, but everything is still the same. He’s still stuck somewhere, and the light is still missing.
—
I’ll only be here until the food runs out, he says.
And then it does.
It’s a gray morning, the gale stronger than yesterday, when he lines up his shoes next to the old stool. It wobbles slightly when he tests it, but it should hold his weight long enough for him to slip his head through the noose.
Shaddiq faces the rough seas that isolate him from the world. He smiles, thinking of something nice to say before he departs his homeland for good. He comes up with nothing, though.
Oh well. He closes his eyes. I had a good run.
“Shaddiq!”
The noose pulls on his chin, then snaps. Shaddiq knocks his head on the floor, hands falling in shock upon the strong arms wrapped around his hips.
“Shaddiq,” his rescuer shoves him to his belly, “have you gone mad? Why would you kill yourself?!”
Shaddiq brings himself to sit on the floor, studying his interlocutor.
Guel Jeturk stares wildly at him, pink bangs splattered onto his forehead. Otherwise, he looks as beautiful as their innocent days together.
Shaddiq throws his head back, and laughs at the universe’s joke.
—
The coffee is warm, at least.
“How did you find me?”
“A lot of friends, a lot of questions, a lot of money,” Guel grumbles, taking the chair while Shaddiq takes the bed.
The stool still stands proudly in the middle of the room.
Guel Jeturk is glaring at it.
Shaddiq keeps his smile to himself. “How did you find out I’ve been released?”
“I’ve kept my ears to the ground, Shaddiq.” Guel sets his mug onto the table. “When you didn’t even leave a note with Miorine, I knew something was up. I didn’t think you’d go this far, though.”
“That makes two of us,” Shaddiq pipes up. “Of all the people who’d come to my rescue, it had to be the man who would never forgive me.”
“It’s been years, Shaddiq,” Guel grumbles. “A lot of things have happened in-between. Besides, remember what I said?” He shifts his eyes to the window. “I’m not going to let you die.”
—
Guel actually stays to make sure of this. He looks at Shaddiq’s living situation with disgust, but he tries his best to live with it. Sweeping here and there, wiping surfaces, cooking simple meals in a kitchen that comes alive in his presence.
Days turn to a week, and the winds become a storm.
—
Guel goes missing from his makeshift bed that night.
“Guel?” This is the first time Shaddiq hears the echo of his voice among shadows, and it’s much worse than he expected.
He goes around the tower, one room, one level at a time, a single name the only sound he makes until somehow, he’s made it to the ground where the wind is thrashing and he has to cling to the wall for balance.
“Guel! What the hell are you doing out there?” Shaddiq approaches the man watching the storm through the open doorway. “Get back in here, it’s too dangerous!”
Guel keeps his back turned, though, seemingly mesmerized by the rage of Earth, after thousands of years of being abused by Spacians. There’s a joke to be said about that.
Shaddiq forgets it when the heavy door swings inwards, and it’s all he can do to drag Guel back in and slam him to the wall, just as the door slams shut.
“Sorry,” Guel gasps, wide-eyed at the turn of events. “I’d never seen anything like this storm before…” Once a Spacian, always a Spacian.
Shaddiq should be angry, but instead, he laughs, head and shoulders sinking. The weight of his old feelings for this man resurfaces like a message in a bottle.
—
The storm passes quickly, and by day, only a gentle shower is left in its wake.
They watch from their bedroom, Shaddiq nursing a cup of Guel’s coffee, as fragrant and deep as his memories of him. He thought he’d left it all behind when he took the path to revenge, but looking back now…maybe the reason why he couldn’t see the light is because all the while, it was behind him.
“Guel.” This time when he calls his name, it’s as sweet as the first time he says it after their first kiss.
Guel faces him from the table, white daylight turning his eyes into glittering sapphires.
Once a flame, always a flame. “Let’s go home.”