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Lately, Julian’s hands were itching for his worn, well loved copy of the Kazlauskas vs Kaplan chess match. He had left it at his small apartment in Pittsburgh years before, but he still felt its absence like a missing limb. He remembered that freezing morning in January when, after another feverish fight with Paul, he had picked up a red pencil from Paul’s collection and circled the first move. Always theatrical, wasn’t he? Always performing for an imaginary audience in his head, who might open the chess book and think: how clever, he circled the first move because it’s where everything went wrong, it’s where they were doomed to become intertwined and impossible to separate.
He would have liked to scoff at his own theatricals, but the truth was that he would’ve circled at least another passage, if he’d had it in his hands. Another instance where everything could’ve happened, really. He could’ve left Paul, or he could’ve bound their lives together once again, made them even more inextricable. Both options had been possible for an instant.
The sharp outline of the ravine was imprinted in his mind. He could recall it from memory as clear as a photograph, feel the cold wind on his skin, see Paul’s calloused hand reaching for his own, his eyes fixed on the point where the ground bent and on the long void beneath. He remembered how his breath had hitched, how the only rational thought in his head had been run run run, and how he had been unable to move.
Before he could shake himself from his horrified stupor, Paul had let go of his hand, tearing his eyes away from the ravine but not quite gathering the courage to point them at Julian.
“Let’s go back,” he had said, his tone stiff, urgent. “That was enough to stretch out our legs, let’s go.”
Julian had taken a long, long moment to answer.
Did I know? He would ask himself in the future, each time he obsessively replayed that brief walk in the woods in his mind. Did I know what he was about to do to me? To himself? He could lie to himself all he wanted, but truly, Julian had always been painfully introspective, a quality that his parents had always despised. Of course he had known. He knew the inside of Paul’s brain more than his own, had spent more than a year carefully breaking it to pieces and stitching it back together to understand its hidden mechanism.
And besides, it wasn’t even that original of an idea, wasn’t it? The ancient Greeks had come up with it first: happiness cannot be eternal. Great pleasure will always be balanced by great pain. The gods were irrational beings, the only way to preserve something good was to immortalise it in death.
A few days after meeting Paul, he had started to read ancient Greek literature, even if he always scoffed when Paul mentioned it and called it “paleontology” rather than proper philosophy.
The myth of Cleobis and Biton had stuck into his memory because it had all the cynicism and pessimism of Paul’s philosophy. It was a story about two Argives men who had yoked themselves to their mother’s wagon and carried her to some sort of religious celebration because their oxes had died. Their mother had been elated at the glory achieved by her sons, and had pleaded with the gods to grant them the best gift a human being could possibly receive. That same night, both men had died in their sleep, their happiness untouched by any inevitable future misery and preserved forever in amber. A stupid myth, in his opinion. But he could tell it was something Paul would’ve loved.
I kill them because they’re beautiful and it’s the only way I can keep them.
Of course Julian had known Paul’s intentions, no way to delude himself into believing he hadn’t. It was so clear, from the beginning, how obsessed with happiness and pain and the balance between the two Paul was.
If Julian had believed in fate, in God, in divine beings weaving the course of his life with their nimble fingers, he would’ve scoffed at the predictability of this moment, at the foreshadowing he had been given from the beginning. But there were no gods, no path already consumed by his feet tracing it over and over and over, and Paul had clearly changed his mind, hadn’t he? There was no predestined decision he was forced to take every time they found themselves there, at the very edge of a ravine, and Paul wanted to get back into the car, wanted to run away as he had promised.
When he hadn’t answered, Paul had grabbed his sleeve. “Julian?” His voice was trembling, he sounded scared. Julian had to repress the urge to kiss his temple. “We have only a few hours left before they notice I’m gone. Can we go?”
His voice was slightly rough, his cheeks reddened by the cold wind, his lips chapped.
Finally he gathered the courage to meet Julian’s eyes. They exchanged a long look. Julian thought of the thump of Stephanek’s body as he hit the water, the long look they had exchanged then, and took hold of Paul's hand without saying a word.
Julian didn’t believe in fate, or God, not like Paul did. It wasn’t fate that had brought them together, that had allowed them to find each other and fit like two halves of the same soul. They weren’t destined to meet each other, there was nothing fateful about the day they talked in that dim-lighted classroom what seemed to be centuries ago.
It was in that fragment of a heartbeat when they had exchanged a glance before Julian had handed the container to Stephanek that they had tied the red string of fate across each other's bodies, tying themselves so tightly to one another that nothing would ever be able to separate them again. They could leave each other, never cross paths again and pretend to forget what had happened in the span of that year, but they would still be forever intertwined by what had happened that Thanksgiving Eve in 1973. That had been the point, really. Mutual assured destruction.
He had killed a man for Paul, for God’s sake. He rarely let himself acknowledge the “endgame” as what it had really been, a cold-blooded murder, but he remembered that the full scope of his depravity had hit him in that moment. He had drugged a man and hunted him across the woods and watched as Paul hit him with a bat and dragged his body in the mud and heard the thump of his body hitting the water— not because of vengeance, or morality or even justice, but because of Paul. To gain his trust, to make sure he would never, ever be able to leave him, to morph them into the same being, two twin hearts circled by the same ribcage.
Bile had crawled up his throat.
Julian couldn’t leave him, he had realized with sudden clarity. If he had, it would’ve been all for nothing. He would’ve been left with the monster that that murder had transformed him into and wouldn’t even have the reward it had granted him: a life where Paul loved him and let himself be loved.
“You’re always so pragmatic, Pablo, and here I am, lost in thought. Thank god you’re here,” he said softly, letting himself be led to the car, to the altar, to his death, it was all the same, really. All deserved.