Work Text:
i.
I will love you as the match loves the strip where it's struck, as gasoline loves the flame and as flame loved the windows of the house where you breathed your last. I will love you as the ancients loved the stars who lied to them, as black holes love to eat all in their wake and as brightly as the ends of universes burn. I will love you as the bullet loves the gun and as the shotgun loves the pellet, as the knife loves its sheath and as you always loved the scent gunpowder left in its wake. I will love you although they asked me not to, and then they told, I will love you because I don't know how to stop the burn, and, for once, the fire that consumed you and I have something in common. I will love you although I am cold and you are colder, and I will love you cold although you always hated the first sparkling of frost. I will love you because someone must, and because you never did. I will love you until I am as cold as you are now, and I will even love you after, which is very lucky indeed, as I suspect that will not take very long.
ii.
I received an Incomplete in lockpicking, do you remember? Of course you don’t, for you were not there and now there is nothing left of you to remember. I learnt to handle snakes and to breathe fire, to swim in ice-cold water and to gut a fish and a bear and a pig (and a man) in twenty minutes or less, but I have never quite mastered the art of making a lock sing. I was not there in your soundly locked house, nor outside, no matter what the papers say, and it ought to help the ache that even if I had been, the locks would have stayed fast, all the same. My friends would have told me so with kind frankness, if I could afford honesty, or friends, but I have nobody to tell my secrets to, save for the paper which I must pretend is you. There is ink on my fingers, as there was, once, smudged in your hair, when my heart clicked in clockwork time with your smile, and I may have never mastered the art of picking a lock and taking something that did not belong to me, but the same cannot be said of you, my dear departed thief.
iii.
I love you as your namesake never loved Dante, as your other namesake loved the Seine. I love you although I have forbidden myself to speak either of your names aloud, and thus I love you as a secret only I am permitted to keep, the most cherished of my midnight whispers. I love you although you have been dead a year, and because of it, for nothing you could ever do could make me love you less. I love you as the fish loves the fish-hook and the worm loves to be bait, as the bells love to toll for a funeral and lilies love to make the mourners sneeze. I love you as the minister loves performing the service and to dream of how he once trod the boards. I love you as an actor hates being the understudy and as stage managers everywhere hate actors, I’m as mad for you as Hamlet and devoted to you, my lady, as Macbeth. I love you although I could not keep you, and for it. I love you, the agony I alone must carry and the scar I alone must wear, but there are whispers in the shadows and shadowy whispers and I do not think I shall be alone for long.
iv.
Now you are not the only dead one, my darling, although thus far you are the only one of us who has begun to rot. Sometimes I look at my arms in the dead of night and I wonder, is the night the only thing that’s dead? I shed my name like a snake and ran as far as the transcontinental railway would carry me and I live in a quiet seaside town with menace on every corner and behind every white picket fence and beneath every sidewalk, and all I can think is of how I could suffer even suburbia if you were with me. Things go bump in the night and I clutch for a hand that is not there, which is silly of me, because it was never there to begin with. I miss something I never had and I love someone who was never here. I almost want them to find me, but then I remember the things we saw and the things we ran from, and, above all, the things I did with my own hands, and then I don’t want anything at all except a stiff drink and a very big stick.
v.
I love you although you did not love me, and I am not certain that you ever did, for love is not an equation to be solved or a code to be broken or a ransom to be paid, but merely is, like the smoking of a gun and the clink of ice in a glass. I love you because I do not know how to stop and I cannot remember when I started, the Before Beatrice as obscured as the whited-out records of the V.F.D. roster and your last will and testament and the pages, I am sure, of the yet-to-be-written police report on my brutal murder. I love you because I would not take it back, and because I would not ask you to, even if your path still ended in that house and I still did the Thing We Promised Not To Name, because some things should not be up to me and some things were never up to me at all. I love you and I will always love you, and if I wonder if you ever felt the same, I worry about it no longer, because I am running out of safe houses and snake-venom and disguises, and I am sure I will be able to ask you about it soon enough.