Chapter Text
For a brief instant, lightning illuminated the wet walls of the manor, the marble balustrades surrounding them both like a cage, and the beautiful stained glass windows above, casting multicoloured motes of light across both fur and armour alike. Not a word could be understood over the din of the driving rainstorm, so they both remained silent. Her back was turned to him.
“I said, go.”
Wyatt remained speechless as he stared into a puddle beneath his feet. The tumultuous water reflected to him the sight of a deeply hurt man, years and years of regret etched into his wrinkles, and the once-vivid glow of his irises dimmed to the color of a dying ember. Even through all his pain, Wyatt grit his teeth, clenching his fist around the textured grip of the pistol in his hand. He trembled, filled with emotion, desperate for just one to come out, to grant him succor.
He felt no sorrow for what had to be done.
Quickly, he lifted the pistol, aimed right at the sizable notch of the vertebra right beneath her skull. With the white evening gown she wore, dipped down low to the small of the back, the finer details of her body lay bare to him.
“I…”
He stuttered, watching her. She made no movements, hardly even breathing, it seemed. Her hesitation allowed him to take once more a good look at the woman with whom he’d fallen in love, the woman who had seemingly out of nowhere cast him aside, scratching his very name from the written record of her heart.
Those yellow eyes of Wyatt’s flickered in the rain, flashing from gold to crimson and back again. He struggled to pull the trigger. Every synapse in his brain fired desperately, sending signals to hinder him, but…
“I have business to attend to, Ekaterina. I’m sorry.”
During the last second before the blast, rage-induced imagery of their time together flashed through Wyatt’s mind, clouding his very vision with visualisations of their first meeting, the way she knelt to him and not the way around; their first kiss and the prayerful apology she gave him afterward; and the day she showed him the wedding vows she’d begun to draft up in preparation for their engagement. Those sweet memories then ignited the fire in his heart. A raging pyre that roared through him. He’d made his choice.
~
Everyone within earshot heard it. The crack of the round leaving the pistol’s barrel was quicker than the speed of sound. Reflected in the wet ground beneath their feet, the muzzle flash briefly illuminated a wisp of smoke rising from the tip of the gun. Then, that smell… that smell of spent gunpowder, it reached Wyatt’s nose.
The smell of war.
That rain continued to fall long after the report of the bullet faded into nothingness. Every single drop on his arm fell with the weight of an anvil and the heat of the sun. His eyes were closed, shut forever to the undoubtedly grisly sight laid out before him. He wondered if she went quickly. If she had time to form even a single thought before her life came to a close. He wondered if, when it all came down to it, she would forgive him after all. When their souls met in the next world.
Yet… he didn’t hear the spatter of blood dripping onto the floor. He didn’t hear the sound of her lifeless body striking the marble. Nothing.
Wyatt’s eyes flew open in a panic, contracting to twin pinpoints as they were hardly able to process what stood before him. Instead of the expected image of death—the viscera, the shattered bone, the pooling blood—he found her standing there, holding his bullet between her fingers, pondering over it as if it were the most interesting artefact in the world.
Ekaterina’s eyes glowed bright gold, and her hair, having grown into a lengthy mane all her life, unfurled like a ship’s sail in a tailwind. Her jet-black locks framed her lithe, cream-clothed body like some extraplanar entity of judgment. Of wrath. Of unbridled pain. Deep furrows were etched into her brow as she sneered at him, fangs bared.
“You should have left us, husband. Marian would never have known about your numerous transgressions. I would have told her to remember you as a good father. A good father who simply found his calling among the stars, and not here with me. She would have accepted that.”
Wyatt again brought his weapon to bear, fueled by a fear so powerful that he hardly registered the repeated click of his empty firearm. Rookie mistake.
“It is truly unfortunate that it has come down to this. Please, go to your dark fate with this in mind, though. For all the solace it can bring, this act is not my will, but the will of my God. As sure as my heart does beat, I still hold love for you. But… you are condemned as a sinner, and to the depths of the Forgotten I hereby cast you.”
With a flick of her wrist, an effortless motion in its entirety, Ekaterina’s very spirit flowed out through her fingers and found purchase against Wyatt’s flesh, binding itself to him inseparably. He went flying with such force that his body pulverised the marble balustrade protecting the balcony. His android chassis, many hundreds of pounds in weight, stood no chance of surviving the hundred-metre fall into the yawning abyss below Mariya’s Manse.
Into the greedy, lapping, hungry ocean waves, Wyatt fell. At last, a sinner is forever put to sleep.