Work Text:
الوقت كالسيف إن لم تقطعه قطعك
Translated, time is like a sword; if you don't cut it, it will cut you.
Time. A woman like Ana Amari is permitted to be plenty of things with her allowance of it.
Prolific? A brood is typically expected, but one'll have to do. Spoken for? She'd better hope. Beautiful? Please, for her own sake.
Bathing in the kitchenette sunlight by early morning rise, standing too close to the pan of popping grease with her below freezing hands drawn together over a mug of milk tea, hot and hers? Icing on the cake for the eyes entitled to the kinetic art of her lazy body.
Women must be art. Replicating most art, a woman must be quiet. She must wait, mouth shut, wait for the chance to serve as reinforcement. A cat's-paw for another's legacy, a stepping stone. Support to the person north, east, south, west, above, below, within. Stress notwithstanding, women must age gracefully, or not age at all. Women must fall in line, maintain a ramrod posture, juggle the countless commitments thrusted upon her, and never, ever falter.
Women must. Women must. Women must.
They must be so much all at once, and all of it must be intrinsically merino-soft and easy on the counterparts eyes. Men, in particular. Because certain truths end up a tensing cockroach under the beating drum of time. They become perennial. If nobody is less, then where's the fun in being?
Accordingly, in the fine, finer, finest print, what a woman must not be is a soldier. Because these qualities do not go hand in hand. Because no way in hell she could be both gentle and rough. Because there's not enough space in a lifetime to fit her greed. Because… Because…
Because it is not fair!
Not fair at all, is what those platoon figureheads countered with before change rushed them like the enemy. When they learned women like Ana Amari could be many things that need not be decided for her or made simple. Came to terms with the simple fact when she shot a moving target 2.946 klicks from it with a standard Barrett M82 -- before the cybernetic eye was an option, then tended to a nervous street dog after the fact.
Nothing about this is fair. The younger gentleman's derisive countenance when he said this played in her dreams, a scratched record of hate, replaying, getting old. His thumb twitched over his starless blue light insignia. He went to shield it from her view. Sucked for him. She already caught wind of it in the center of a dim reticle on a hillside vista thousands of meters from his lousy excuse of a sniper's hide. He was the butt of the echelon. Always would be. This was for good reason.
A month previous, the good reason whistled through the air and discharged fractured circuitry from his custom target's perforation. His tech-coated muzzle and conceit never stood a chance, and oh how it still makes her snicker to this day, exhaling that exact seasoned ring before she hissed into the module fitted to her smoking gun, Poor boy, missed his mark AND believes war is fair.
No, she thought, being desirable was never the fastest way to a man's heart.
It was a well-placed bullet.
Like the Kinamura to her hand, "Ana," a gravelly voice calls to her.
She looks up from the uneven cracks in the picnic table. Reinhardt watches her steadily, his face pulled in light concern, his head tilted. Combatting the Black Forest chill, the warmth in Ana's frazzled heart spreads when his hand encloses hers on the table.
"Forgive me," she says, feigning embarrassment. "I was up in the clouds for a moment there, wasn't I?"
"Yes, it seems that way," Reinhardt agrees with mirth. "You must've seen one with a funny shape, laughing like that."
If only. The humor laid in her gall to recollect. Because what made the memory even funnier? It's forty years away from her.
You'll be up there all right. Sooner rather than later, he nags, it nags, she herself nags. Washed up Ana Amari. Gray and heading to the grave. The smug look is wiped clean from her face and replaced by a concrete, red embarrassment, jumbled with fright, weighing her to her spot on the wood bench. Her tailbone begins to ache with its stasis and she efforts to sit motionless rather than ease it.
"That's okay Ana, happens to the best of us," Brigitte cuts in. Because, right, Brigitte is here. Hana Song, too. Both sat here, and watching.
Two years ago, they -- Ana and Reinhardt, that is -- eked out a pipe dream life with what's left of theirs. The home that was never meant to be real, started as some young, foolish notion about what the future would owe them; but they got old, came to the numbing realization they were owed nothing, and that same future gave it to them anyway, smack dab in the bustling middle of Gengenbach, Germany. A traditional half-timbered, tiny enough for easy tidying, big enough to house their tidal wave of adoration for one another, then most of Reinhardt's literal bulk. Just out of his desire to see Ana as carefree as possible, he grew tolerant of the few doorways he had to crouch to get through.
"I suppose that's true," Ana says thoughtfully. She usually never reaches that height -- far from her surroundings, but like the truth, she supposes time brings upon change too.
Because two years later, they were invited out of said home for a couple's luncheon by the most unlikely coupling. Hana Song and Brigitte Lindholm. To say they were baffled would be an understatement. But pondering it through the hour, they agreed it made some odd sense, then agreed to meet the following day. Brigitte is his goddaughter after all. Family approval of a member's romantic prospect is the type of fundamental cliché he would believe in.
So here they are.
Late 2090, sat in one of the last places free from the calamity of the newer crisis, tensions still manage to run high as Brigitte and Reinhardt engage in a high-stakes arm wrestle over who gets first pickings when the food arrives. Magnificently, Brigitte wins. Then again, Reinhardt was hindered, what with his other hand gently occupied, already bested.
"Anyway, I bet it's nice to have somebody to ground you if needed, not many have that luxury, but you two…" Brigitte keeks at where they're joined together.
She flips her own hand over beneath his and slips between his fingers, guiding them down to the seat. What a double date typically entails does not fall short on her, but after more or less a lifetime of limelight and servitude -- possibly unfinished, there are just things about their overdue partnership that are off the record to remain certain that it is only theirs. Hand holding being one of those simple affections that feels almost as intimate as coition.
"It is," Ana says, accidentally terse. She corrects with a deferential smile.
He flits over the expanse, tracing circular shapes into deep ravines of bone. Her skin, thinner than it ever has been, accompanies his movement. It seems like it should hurt. Should hurt. But it feels a lot more akin to relief, like a breeze following the pulse of the summer sun.
Then she senses it. The lull in conversation. The leek-like scent of discomfort.
Fortunately (?) for her, Ana's nose had gone unnoticed by the black hole of aging. While most of everything else was being sucked forward through a vacuum, it remained unparalleled. In her sixties now, half-and-then-some blind, callouses formed over her fingertips, hearing in quadruple-digit hertz; she could still smell the edelweiss underbrush surviving the parasitic weeds corkscrewing around them. Shrub roses in planters on rooftop parapets, dewy and fragrant. A lemon slice squeezed over an oily cutlet three picnic tables over. Old rain at that same table, sinking in the worn folds of the patio umbrella.
And most importantly, their sizzling party platter of bratwurst and steak cut samples and herb-roasted celery root being brought outside. Pointing it out, Reinhardt cheers until his lungs are as flat as paper. She swears she catches a whiff of his adrenaline rising higher.
Reinhardt and Brigitte dig into the golden-brown meats with fervor. Both her and Hana, who has yet to say a single word to either of them outside of the usual pleasantries made at the door, resign to light grazing, distracted for their own private reasons.
Without that superstar retinue, Hana Song is a quiet thing.
Brigitte does most of the talking with an apparent eagerness to do so, her routine beatific charm prevailing over any polite awkwardness. And despite this, her sweetheart does not appear annoyed by her. Even with the visible, over-podgy pout, her nails biting cookie cutter crescents into her palms, Hana does not appear annoyed by much at all.
If Ana had to guess, her mind is leagues away from her body.
Still, as it stands, that's none of her business.
"So. This is a long way from Gibraltar," she remarks. It really isn't that far at all, keeping charter flights at Overwatch's disposal in mind. Hardly three hours, if she remembers. A walk in the park for one of its agents. A leap over a door threshold. "Is that where you two traveled from?"
"Oh, I haven't been to base in ages." Brigitte laboriously chews her food. "We flew in from Nepal. Took a much needed vacation in Gandaki Province."
Ana perks up. "Is that so?"
Brigitte grins wide, strings of chuck in the gaps of her teeth. She tosses a celery root into the sky, catching it with her tongue before speaking around the mouthful, reminiscing, "It's a beautiful place, Pokhara especially. We got to paraglide over Pokhara, didn't we Han?"
"Mhm," Hana hums from a faraway land. A stretch of silence follows where Ana witnesses her plummet back to Earth with an unprovoked flinch. "Yes. Yep! We did that. Super fun, a whole lotta - green."
Ana lightly scratches her head. That reaction interests her more than their trip could.
The older (on account of that) woman could get away with drifting out of reality, without talking. Nowadays she only spoke when there was something she either needed to or desperately wanted to say, and not just for the sake of overseeing the noise.
But Hana is a far cry from that. Mere acquaintances, co-workers by proxy, by history in the same place, they don't have to consider themselves good friends for her to know that Hana is a center stage type. To add, a renowned blabbermouth. And that's okay! More than okay, truly. Having lots to talk about is what a young person should strive for. They should do all the talking they can while life is novel and achieving that spontaneous flow of conversation is not so hard.
Conversely, Ana might even be jealous. So when she takes note of this wasted skill, and her first knee-jerk reaction is to open her mouth and pry, it does not shock her.
She stops herself though. Clams right up. She is old and tired and these days -- prone to being unreasonable. The feeling of concern is a low repertoire she would prefer not to waste the dregs of on something as minor as a child's possible foul mood. She is well past that.
Anyway, it's an incidental plus that stopping allows the reassuring smile tugging at the corners of Hana's mouth to prosper. Deceive. Atta girl. That's how you can convince yourself also.
Reinhardt lets loose an inappropriately loud noise. It's a rejoice as much as it is a cackle. At some point he must have taken a deep breath and she missed it. "I would hope so! Lest you were flying over a desert."
Hana laughs along. Strained, self-conscious. Stepping out of her stupor, she shoots --
"You're so silly, Reinhardt. There was no desert. It was a big fat green valley everywhere. A bird almost tore through my wing. Ha ha, I could've went splat and died just like that, ha ha ha!"
-- she does not score, Hana fumbles.
The end of the game klaxon sounds like the fuzz Ana would get in her ears when the dugouts went deathly quiet during the dead of night, holding her breath instead of chasing sleep between the disorienting periods of bloodshed, nondescript oilshed. No one else seems as fazed to hear this. They laugh awkwardly while a brine, sour taste torrents over her tongue.
When Hana falls silent, her body keeps shaking. "Heh. I got -," she starts, swallowing heavy, eyes darting across the patio deck, "Yep. I can't. I have to go."
Brigitte puts the bratwurst she just picked up back with the rest. "Hana…"
"I'm sorry," Hana directs to Brigitte, as sincere as possible, "but screw this. I have to leave."
She nearly topples over in her rush to escape. Frantic moving as if there's a rigged IED under her feet, beeping, ticking, beeping. She descends the stairs in twos and launches into a clumsy sprint when she botches her landing on wet turf, kicking it up, forcing her desire path, or lack thereof, because when Hana turns around for only a moment, chances that look back, apologetic, written on her face in fine print; the running is against her innermost will.
Ana is good at reading the fine print. Just with that one fleeting, infinitesimal look ingested by ebbing, dying sight, it's undeniable; Hana is sorry for doing it.
It breaks her damn heart.
The last she sees before the world itself impedes her watch-some eye is the girl stomping through a natural arbor in the treeline, disappearing through the skinny archway, enveloped in high opacity fog.
No one dares speak. Reinhardt looks at his goddaughter with wrinkles upon wrinkles. Concern shown in the furrow of his brow. Then it shifts to be a little more expectant.
After a beat, he suggests, "You should go after her, Bärchen."
Brigitte sighs. She scrapes an unused utensil against the basalt tray. Stabs at stray celery root like it told her something barbaric. "I want to follow," she says, voice dripping in defeat. "There is nothing I want more than to follow her, I swear on - on my life. But last time this happened she just about tore my head clean off my shoulders when I tried."
Last time. Ana frowns. This isn't the first. She wonders how many times now Hana has fled in a panic. That's what that sudden outburst was, had to be. It was panic, wasn't it? She recognized it, so it would make sense that it was.
Being in the thick of war, seeing people called to die to it, the black hole stretching and endlessly accommodating, she learned that panicked people are usually sorry for feeling panicked. I'm sorry. Drools of lapping blood. Pools of it. Body stiffening. Please don't let me die. I'm so sorry. Until their delivery is airy, forced, done. Until their lids flutter and they fight the irreparable sleep. Until it becomes hard. Then, impossible. Oh Iris, we can't die yet. Forgive us.
The black hole yawns. Their panic is sucked through a translucent bendy straw, and they stop being sorry. It no longer matters that they were. It never mattered in the first place.
It never mattered.
"May I try?" Ana fires out before she can find her bearings. She comes to, lanced by a tremor, facing her human error when she feels no inclination to "try," but has already made the offer.
Brigitte gnaws on her lip in place of an immediate response. Her eyes have a wire-thin ring of color, pupils blown over the rest of her yellowed encirclement. They flicker from Ana to the tray to Ana to the tray to Ana. To the tray, she impales the heaviest, most tender cube of labeled porterhouse and pointedly ignores Reinhardt's sound of dismay. She wolfs it down. Working her jaw excessively. Blood drooling, erased by the back of her hand.
These may appear as some of the hallmarks for agitation, but, "Knock yourself out," is said as good-natured as ever, maybe even on a lower scale of hope.
"I'll be back in a flash, then."
"Be careful, won't you?" Reinhardt tacks on worriedly.
She stops mobilizing her rigid limbs, levels him with an unamused, blank expression. "Since when have you needed to tell me that?"
Incredulous, "Since dining on the summit of Feldberg my dear."
"I will be fine," she replies firmly. Using his shoulder as a boost, she rises to her feet. "You two have some catching up to do. We'll be back before you know it."
Their ensuing mock-up of a real conversation is a blip in her radar as she's led by those dregs of concern towards the forest floor. Up close, the fog recedes from the arbor. It keeps falling further and further back as she trundles through, almost as if she is in the relenting hallway of a lot of cheap horror flicks. Barring the territory, the ground isn't stamped with fleur-de-lis. It's muck and yuck and leaves a gummy residue on the bottom of her shoes.
She's not in a horror flick, that's only in spirit. This is real life, as real as it can get or feel or be, so Ana remains conscious of where she drops her feet. As Reinhardt said, Feldberg. Just about on the peak of Black Forest Mountain, in the denser, gloomier outskirts of it, walkable ground does not relent. One misstep and it's splat. She imagines this is the same impending feeling Hana must have gotten skimming the heights of Pokhara when that knife's edge beak approached. As if entertaining the thought had made the inevitable -- inevitable.
In a way, the analogy rings true. At any point in time, the inevitable is inevitable.
Her thumping heart soars and becomes the rock in her throat. Ana fights to breathe, subsists by chalking it up to the journey she's put herself on to find a girl who resolutely does not want to be found. It's a good thing a woman like Ana Amari was put on the case. She can smell the fear more than she can hear the equivocal sniveling of it. Metallic, bloody. Familiar. Overfamiliar. She rounds a corner. Lo and behold.
Hana leans on a weathered tire swing like a godsend, roped up to a branch that has not a first or second layer of bark. The tree's skeleton, exposed to the elements, is mildewy and sick.
A porous pith. An even porous-er resolve, withstanding the test of being seen. Even with the fat globs of tears, the look Ana is given is perfectly baleful.
Against her better judgement, she takes a ginger step forward.
Hana groans, wipes her tears, and says, "I'm not in the business of being a biatch to older people, especially my girlfriend's daebu's - whatever you two want to call it. So could you please back the hell off?"
She stops in her tracks. Squinting, sleuthing for clues on whether she should tuck tail and head back, or persist. An extraordinary Nancy Drew, if Nancy Drew had a bad back and malformed scarring. "Do you want me to?" she settles on.
They stare at each other. Hana's lip wobbles the entire ten seconds they do that.
"No, not really," she admits weakly.
"Good," Ana says. "Because I wasn't planning on it. And I'd like to sit down."
"Oh." Hana blinks. She retreats from the swing. Presents it with a curtsy.
The tire sloshes when Ana fits herself through the opening and forces her feet up from where they sunk into the curdled mud. The rope swings out of her control. Weeks of collected rainwater crawls up the sides and rapids back to the bottom, creating a bacterium flash flood in her lap.
From sensation alone, there is no pertinent word to describe the state of ruin the back of her trousers must be in. The front of them are comparatively soaked, yes, but not too badly. Ana schools her expression into remaining unfazed because at the very least the branch holding her didn't snap and come slamming down on her head. Though that might have been a better fate, seeing as this embarrassment completely undermines any wisdom she was ready to bestow.
"We can talk when you're ready," she attempts anyway.
The girl shakes her head, looking mortified, driftwood-pale and drawing saliva back as quick as the nausea puts it in her mouth. "Or we can not talk at all."
"Or we can not talk at all," Ana confirms. "I'm not here to force you to do anything. I'm just here."
"Right. Right, okay."
"Okay."
The branch squeals. Hundreds of roots from hundreds of years splinter under her paltry weight. This tree croaks as if it is dying. This tree is dead. This tree was possibly at the start of its end when somebody young and exhilarated last swung on it, grass stains up the Levi's, crust or no crust on their PB&J being the only dilemma they would have faced thus far.
Ana, not for want of trying, is not young. Hasn't been that type of young for a long, long time. Still, a stork with a blanket, the tree sways her like a baby. An inch forward, an inch back.
"She almost died," Hana blurts out, "last week."
"Who?" And even with the ambiguity, Ana figures, "Brigitte?" because she expects nothing less from a student of Reinhardt's teachings. To obliviously pass the creed from generation to generation like a stubborn cancer gene; honor and glory is almost always found in facing death.
She hesitates nodding. The gesture is short, load bearing. "We were doing recon in Gothenburg. A Titan collapsed right on top of her. It's how she got the time off to go to Nepal, and then some extra to come here. Because of how lucky she is to be alive," she scoffs.
Ana frowns. "You don't think so?"
"Being fed through a straw for a month and having robot shit put in both leg bones is the furthest thing from lucky," she monotones, then swivels with her hands up, providing a less than corroborating look. Panicked. Sorry. Ana knows this well. "Crap, sorry. You went through something like that. I'm sorry. No offense, yeah?"
Therein lies the problem. When were they going to be let in on this big, fatal secret sans the impulsive admission? Was it meant to be before, during or after the nervous break of its (assumed) mediator? If Ana is peeved, it's by the lack of gravitas from Brigitte.
But she won't show it. Ana's response to her own near-death experience was leading everybody to believe it was a death experience, no near. Vantablack pot, meet kettle.
"Please, none taken," she promises with her head turned, her teeth clenched. "Did they give you the time off as well?"
Hana's face hardens. "No, but acting super-duper belligerent about having the same exact workload before and after my girlfriend was in bed with bilateral casts got me it. All I wanted was a day to make her seolleongtang. Got myself administrative leave instead. Hurrah."
The girl kicks a few pebbles around, picks up a bit of mud to bridge the toe box. Her fingers twitch. Going against the grain, the middle taps a rhythm into the hemline of her skirt. Like a riddle, waiting to be solved. Ana wishes she still hauled her gun around most days, or had access to a hammerspace for the myriad of reading glasses on her and Reinhardt's coffee table. She never purchased a single pair of them. She has no idea where they keep coming from. But they come in handy in situations such as this -- where a closer look is essential.
Tap-tap-tap-hold-tap-hold. Di-di-di-dah-di-dah. She can only assume that's what it is. A rock is launched through the dense walls of gray.
"She can be so…" Hana cranes her neck to the sky, possibly looking for a fitting word up there, "stupidly self-sacrificing, sometimes. And, trust me, I get it. Most major news outlets will verify that I've done what I had to at the expense of myself, so absolutely I get it. But I did those things scared, basically peeing myself. Ugh! I'm still scared, always. I'm so scared to die and she just - doesn't seem fazed at all. And I just don't get it, I guess. How can she not be?"
"Don't focus on it. Dying, don't focus on that. You're both so young," Ana notes with no real meaning. They work for Overwatch. Of course death looms tenfold. "You're young."
Hana grumbles. "So I've heard. Not like this is the thousandth time someone's told me."
"And why do you think that is?"
… "Because I am."
"Because you are."
"Whatever, I get it. Still, that won't always be the case, and that's what psyches me out. I'll be thirty in less than a decade. Isn't that freaky?"
"Freaky," she huffs. "There's plenty of experiences that are freakier than aging."
Hana stopped the rhythm a minute ago. Has found herself fiddling with her sleeves, twisting hangnail threads. "How did you deal?" Tremulously tying a long piece into bunny ears. "With not being young?" she clarifies. "With being closer to - to, you know…"
How does anyone? Trick question, you don't. But Hana looks so torn, anticipatory.
"Breathe," Ana tries, phrases it as a command, because Hana needs to take a breather, and because it's the best answer to the age-old that she will ever get. She watches as her shoulders rise and fall carefully. Like if Ana were a doctor telling her to breathe in, breathe out. Good. That's good. "Feel the air going down?"
An unsure, small nod follows.
Continuing, "That's how. I breathe because I can, Hana. Plenty of people no longer have that privilege. And until I lose mine, I get to partake in the universal bond of breathing."
"That's unbelievably cheesy," Hana says archly.
"It's true," she replies, but she suspects Hana is already well aware. "Breathing is what connects us. Everything else varies. Down to our genetic makeup, our fingerprints, how our airways branch. Everything else, everything but this one minute detail, can vary."
"I'm sure we have other stuff in common that isn't as dumb as a normal bodily function."
"Mutually, of course. I know we do."
"Well? Wanna spell it out for me?"
Ana pores with nowhere and everywhere to begin.
It's minutiae. Microscopic things. Names, of course, those rhyme. Mavens, unlikely soldiers. Both harried pawns of war at a young age. Predispositions for never knowing when to quit. Running. Hiding. Not moving, simultaneously. A room in a place in another place, home sweet forever. Only leaving when there's a threat to subdue or a million and one things to undertake, left unattended by somebody else. They make room. They shoulder it. Who else will?
An elevation neither of them can see the end of. Swinging and loose-limbed at the precipice. It retrocedes as the cuckoo clock brandishes its needlepoint hands like akimbo rapiers. And they're scared half to death. And they're there, casing fog with whale eyes, wondering if it drops further, not taking that crucial step back, not taking that stupid step forward, because there's nowhere else to be than where they stand, because it promises a taste of what is to come, because they want to be ready, as ready as anybody could be.
Because they want to matter today, wherein the grand scheme -- little does.
In a nutshell, Ana says owlishly, "We both carry that burden of greatness. I'd say that is what connects us the most."
Hana titters, vicarious. "Okay, Don Quixote. If this talk was one big ploy to appoint me your squire, you might have better chances of getting me to jump to my death."
See, she isn't laughing. This is no laughing matter. Despite earlier half-baked attempts, Ana not once felt disrespected -- until now. She directs Hana to look at her square in the eyes. "Because if we achieve greatness, go above and beyond for it, then maybe it will decorate our deaths, yes? Make them matter in some foolish way?"
"Okay, sure. But just because you frame it like it's far-fetched doesn't mean I'm going to turn over a new realistic leaf and stop having hope." Her arms cross as if Ana had any intention of playing tug of war with the non-tangible feeling protected in her chest.
That is absolutely hers to keep. She wants nothing to do with it. She tells a white lie in a darkening glade, "I never said to stop hoping. I have hope."
"You," she says neutrally, pausing, "hope."
The watch on her wrist reads 18:15. She gleans the dip of branch woven sunlight with that loud number. Time to wrap it up. If whatever it is out there would be so kind as to do it for her, to get her back to her carved out piece of what's left, with its unusual, hourglass shape, well, she would appreciate that. Her feet hurt. Her pants are sopping wet cold. Hana is snivelling, again. From emotion or the weather, she can't be bothered to check. Riveted by the rapier. It lunges to 18:16. She sways. An inch forward, an inch back.
"Is it truly that remarkable?" And Ana isn't quite sure if she means that for the girl, or for herself.
"No," Hana says, chary. "I just - I mean, even now? I'm impressed."
"Especially now." She stands hotfoot. Squigglies erupt vibrantly behind her lids, waning into yellowish-white. "When you get to be this age, Hana, you too will learn it is when you need the most amount of hope."
Expectedly, Hana's lip wobbles again. "Well, here's to hoping," she says on a dangerous, broken line, her voice tight, held together by the low-tack glue of that aforementioned hope.
Unexpectedly, Ana's heart breaks again. "I apologize, dear. I have a feeling none of that was the answer you were looking for." There was never an answer for it. She feels sorry for that. For it being out of her control.
"I have no idea what I'm looking for, Ana," she admits, cracking apart, smushing her skin around in the fragile attempt to rewrite how she reacted, hide it away. And this -- this is the Hana Song that she's heard tales of. When she hides, says with humor, "You just so happen to be old and wise. Obvi that doesn't mean I'm expecting you to have some sort of primordial insight."
Old. She laughs, leaving it short so it doesn't choke her. "Now that's what you think."
"Then tell me, oh wise one," Hana exacts, and that leek-like smell… it returns more potent than ever, "when and how do I die?"
Every possible dialogue option ends up being the same neatly packaged nonsense for how a hero would want that question answered, wrapped in a pink, sparkly bow of falsely advertised individuality. Ana has a feeling it wasn't that serious of a question anyway. She is simply taking her pick of the litter when she says, "With any luck, after greatness and by greatness."
A balm quiet where neither of them have to think or speak or feel indescribably scared presents itself. But it loses its luster when Ana leans on the tire and the branch trundles towards her like an extremely tensile slingshot. She backs away from it at the same time Hana figures out how she feels about that.
"Ugh," is how she feels, the corner of her lip lifted.
"Ugh?" With a sheepish nod in response, Ana throws up her limp hands. "Ugh, she says."
"Yeah! Yeah, ugh! What a drag." Hana spins around, playfully kicks at the tree trunk, and seems not to notice that she desecrates the thing she so desperately fears by doing this, by forcing back its rotting flesh like an overripe orange, adding to the misshapen halo of bark around the trunk. "What about you then?" she adds, stays facing the tree, voice tiny and cautious. "How do you think you'll go? Is it better than mine?"
Ana pats the tree, the tire. Then, she turns around to leave. The path back would be indistinguishable if it weren't for its other types of markings. Leaves with bug holes, deer slots, deep, shining puddles. Some resemble oil scum. She was unable to journeying in, but with the fog abated, she sees the monoculture of spruce, dotted with plain oak here and there, man-made reconcile. Flat. There were no steep drops around, only the threat of one.
Hana ambles behind her. Somehow ends up in front of her and ambles there too, stopping each time she gets too far ahead, balancing on the balls of her feet until Ana overtakes her.
There's a bed of stinging nettles nearby. Smells like toothpaste, notes of an unwashed pet. But then it's gone, and that damned leek scent takes its place, and it emanates from her own pores.
"I," Ana's pulse thunders in her neck, "have this pet theory that I'll already be asleep when I go. So, with any luck, I won't know how, or even that I did."
Hana inches to the side, letting her pass through the arbor. Reinhardt is the first to spot them, waving inordinately, picking up the attention of Brigitte. She doesn't wave. Doesn't need to wave. Her being the picture of relief is objectively enough. At least for Hana, who waves timidly at her and gets the grace of a lopsided, willing-to-forgive-and-forget smile in return.
"So it is."
"What is?"
"Better than mine. Your death is better than mine."
"You can have it," Ana says, noncommittal in tone and in theory, moments before they ascend the stairs. "It's not like I actually want it. It's merely my compromise."
Hana trips herself on the last step and does not respond. Thank whatever force is at play, that is the end of that conversation. They return to the table and learn that a good portion of the platter has been devoured. Stress eating -- that's their "reasonable" excuse, so a slice each of consolation Black Forest gateau has been placed on their respective sides of the picnic table. Little on the nose, but Ana's nothing if not a sucker for chocolate and cherries.
"You'll cover the bill, won't you girls? On account of us being 'old' and 'down on our luck,'" Reinhardt tries, pushing himself to sound tired and frail.
"Reinhardt, you know I didn't mean it that way." Brigitte pouts.
"Well I'll say it that way," Hana butts in. She wraps around Brigitte like a defensive sloth, swaying them back and forth, cheek pressed against Brigitte's shoulder.
"Oh?" he says, lips quirked.
"You two get discounts anyway." Taking her current position into consideration, Hana shrugs the best she can. "Now talk about luck." And she pointedly gazes at Ana when saying this, then tucks into her dessert with an unmistakably wry side profile.
Ana rolls her working eye.
One day the girl will know just how unlucky it is. At the present moment, add a couple extra decades, she gets to breathe without fretting too hard about the quantity of her tank. It escapes her mind now, Ana determines, as Hana prattles on about a temple in Nepal that taught them about rebirth, whipped cream smeared around her mouth, about how she can't wait to go again.
And Ana has never heard something so hopeful in her life.
( . . . )
They take a hyperloop, shortline through the valley. After, they set down the sconced sidestreet to home. Bellies crammed with good food, even fuller on satisfaction. This keeps them blanketed and warm as a gale traverses midtown, endeavors to knock them on their backsides.
A river splits the town in two. It's violent tonight. Currents crash over bedrock, makes it sound as if the streets are flooding. Needled mist is at the tip of her nose. They bounce the series of events off of each other with casual conversation, passing observations, mentally shelving it all: They look happy enough. That girl can eat, must have gotten it from her father. I did not pee myself, Reinhardt. A fond sound, from both, a laugh. How can you be sure? Lamenting for her favorite pair of trousers. Because it's rainwater. Just plain old, stupid rainwater.
Then, they do some actual shelving when they get inside. Last minute groceries picked up from the Marktplatz. Ana flips through a coupon book, "brushing up" on her German, an attempt to say an attempt was made. She knows a sentence already -- ich habe versucht -- for contingency. Reinhardt eats mustard pickles straight from the jar before protesting the heartburn in between bouts of uncouth belching. He tosses back an antacid and shuffles progressive bluegrass on their high fidelity fridge that they're unwaveringly suspicious of.
They dance most nights, trying to replicate that first at Gibraltar. Back then, a friend mentioned how they like bluegrass, roots rock, et cetera. Neil Young, J.J. Cale, Crooked Still. They make you feel poignant, he said, y'all better give it a listen or so help me God programs. And this was around when late night surveillance was Ana and Reinhardt's favorite job as much as it was an excuse to see each other alone. Alone, in headquarters, computers trilling, tabbed in and out of maps, sifting capitals as strategic targets, risk assessment, they listened to "Ecstacy" to dull the buzz, dull her worry -- when Cairo became a big maybe.
A rowdy waltz took over their legs like a horsehair worm. Clowning around at first, not taking it too seriously. Why would the most far removed people from the roots of it enjoy Americana?
On their uncoordinated feet, breaking a sweat, fighting for their handful of shared air, they realize that it's because love doesn't spawn from obligation or proximity. It's that simple, passing recognition that feels like it should be nothing, but burgeons anyway. Because the guys on banjo are doing an, albeit, fantastic job. So they danced, like they do now. The waltz can't be as rowdy as it used to. It's slow. It's methodical. They compromise on box steps that they trip on anyway. The risky contra check targets that annoying knot near Ana's spine.
Worn out, winded, hearts thumping in their ears, they collapse into bed.
Reinhardt immediately sleeps, snoring more than he breathes, channeling a chainsaw with a rusted sprocket. Ana tries to sleep, sort of. Ich habe versucht.
The abyss of a ceiling is keeping her awake, reminding her of skies in cities and wards she's been to in the past, whether from circumstance and/or responsibility, and on the uncommon occasion; fun. Zurich, Rio de Janeiro, Ilios, Venice, Hanamura, Monte Carlo.
Irvine, California. Blizzard World. Her lodestone. Where she most felt comfortable during each transformation or upheaval. The why -- she hasn't figured that out yet. Force of habit? Like it's become such a tradition where not doing it feels like you're disturbing the balance of something.
She first went to Blizzard World during a glacial winter. A bundled babe bouncing on her hip, pawing and snatching Ana's frigid, reddened nose, shriek-crying in her beloved mothers ear when she was given a sip of hot apple cider and not the whole cup of it. Fareeha, she named her, and she adored her more than words, more than the job, despite her heavy-handedness.
Only minutes had passed when she went again, yet Fareeha was too big to sit on her hip. The teenager had a dreadful quiff and a just as dreadful attitude about life that could only be conquered by the girl at the cider stand. Shriek-laughing at what Ana assumed -- from a safe distance -- to be crude jokes. Winking at this girl as if her mother wasn't sharp-sighted and a funhouse attraction away; where her daughter later creeps up on her, cradling a post-it with a poorly drawn heart. The funhouse mirror they stand in front of does not twist them into one. On Ana's side, it makes her small. Fareeha, big. They went home, and Ana was deployed to Poland the next day, and in Poland, she hesitated. In Poland, Ana Amari died.
Maybe an hour passed. The second to last time she went, Fareeha wouldn't find her. And for all that was ruined, Ana prided herself on her ability to evade. She put immense effort towards staying missing, so much so that she couldn't be found in the last place they shared. Yes, she was alone in Blizzard World this time. It was the middle of May. The park was colder than ever. The fruit drinks were bitter. The funhouse was demolished, replaced by a first aid station. That trip introduced weariness to her joints that never subsided.
A millisecond. 2089. Last year. With her daughter's refusal (and though it's troubling to admit, Ana understands why not) she brought along Reinhardt, who should have been there with them when Fareeha was but a child. An unimposing flax blond at that time, the time she hadn't the courage to ask. Now, his hair fades with everything else. They went on the gentler rides and joked about being puzzle pieces. Her right eye gone, his left eye gone, they could fuse if necessary. They massaged each other's resulting aches that night in bed and Ana hid her mourning behind the sounds of faux-alleviated hurt.
2090. Right now, where it feels like no time has passed, she decides that she will never go to Blizzard World again. Because realistically she could. She could again and again and again. With how the world has advanced, she might have another hundred years to go there. But what would be the point? She won't remember being anywhere soon enough. Generally speaking, she won't be anywhere.
Time. It remains inevitable, and the manufactured lifespan may nudge it out of the rearview, but it returns, sprinting, screaming, time has been up, what's left is luck!
Time. Ana has been dying her entire life, and she is already dead, because she blinks and it's still dark up there and time does not relent.
Time. It's a pencil-thin sword that seems as if it should be able to bend and twist and eventually give to your pressure. But at most it wobbles, then seeks you out to cut you anyway. When you least expect it. When you most expect it. When it wants to.
Time. A woman like Ana Amari is permitted to be plenty of things with her allowance of it. But to be evanescent… is the one thing she does not need permission to be. It was there at birth, and it will be there at death.
And that, in a foolish sort of way, might mean something.
She squints the exposed rafters into view.
The black hole yawns.
During the night, Reinhardt gets up twice for the bathroom, maybe. The languid bones of their home settle underfoot, maybe. A dog barks its lungs dry, maybe. Neighboring windows are slammed shut and a nervous car responds with a loud siren song, maybe. This is all a maybe.
Ana does not know any more than what she fell asleep with. Switches in the extramundane are flipped without her knowing. Night turns to day without her knowing. The first thing she knows that morning is the light escaping the blinds is bright and harsh and human.
Ana wakes up.
She counts the seconds before she lets herself expand, she finds that they pass away normally, she breathes.