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He drives the knife into the creature’s belly and winces as a fountain of thick black fluid splashes across his face.
“Jesus Christ," Jake mutters to himself, slicing up the hunter’s abdomen to make an opening wide enough to stick his hands through. He breathes with his mouth only, and ignores the nasally echo of his voice bouncing back at him with a mocking candor in the otherwise heavy silence. “Had to be a hero, huh?”
There weren’t many moments that he regretted the path he’d taken all those years ago, but elbows deep in a bioweapon within some forgotten sewer was almost enough to make him miss the streets of Edonia. And he should count himself lucky. If it was an acidic strain, he’d never be able to retrieve what it had stolen from him when it tried to take a bite out of his neck. It’s not much of a consolation, but when he feels the small silver band in a scoopful of guts and bile, he can’t help but smile.
Somewhere on the other side of the world, Sherry Birkin is wearing a ring just like it and as he wipes it off with the only clean patch on his shirt, he can feel the warmth of her smile beside him.
A touchstone.
Jake had initially suggested tattoos, knowing she’d never go for it, but was still hopeful anyway. She had that effect on him.
“Come on,” he teased, sliding his hand over the small of her back. He had found very quickly how well he fit into the crooks of her body. “Right down here. It’d suit you.”
She shoved him away with a gentle bump of her shoulder and rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh. And what about you?”
“Hey, it’d suit me too.”
She laughed and the world was worth saving. Shit, she made him feel like he had wasted his whole life before he met her, searing it into his skin felt like the only rational answer. And he’d do it, too, but Sherry always reigned him in. It wouldn’t stick, she had told him. Her body would push the ink out like it did bullets and shrapnel and she didn’t want him to fade away like that.
So rings were the next choice.
“Don’t laugh,” she said staring into the coin machine they found in the supermarket during a late night run for box wine. He remembered her reflection in the glass painted across the colorful plastic cylinders that housed children’s toys inside–her eyes gleaming, something a little sad within them. She never got to be a child. “It’s just something to hold onto.”
He was pumping quarters into the machine before she could finish her sentence, every clanking coin ringing out like a heartbeat. He watched her smile brighten as she slid the small, plastic ring onto her pinky finger–the only one that it would fit around.
She held it out and admired the artificial sheen of the plastic jewel sparkling beneath the fluorescents.
“You know, in some parts of the world they call this a proposal,” he said as he retrieved his own ring from the machine’s reservoir. “And you haven’t even bought me dinner yet.”
“Well, if you’re a good boy maybe you’ll get lucky tonight,” she joked with a taunting grin that made his fingers curl in anticipation. He’d hold her to that later, but for now he pried the ring out of its plastic home and forced it to a knuckle, where it caught and refused to budge any further.
He held his hand up, showcasing the mismatched size. “Tattoos it is, then.”
Sherry didn’t say a word, she problem solved, he could always see it in the slight flaring of her nostrils. Without missing a beat, she pulled off the chain he wore around his neck and slid the small ring over it before clasping it around him once more. It came to rest right above his heartbeat, and though it weighed nothing at all, it felt like the whole world against him.
He spun it between thumb and forefinger, hiding his affection behind a well practiced scowl. “You don’t think the other kids will make fun of me?”
“If they do, you can beat them up.”
She patted his scarred cheek, the plastic ring on her pinky grazing over marred flesh and leaving blooms of heat in its wake. He smiled.
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was in those small moments of normalcy where they could forget about bioterrorism and bullshit that he had begun to savor the most. He’d never known a reprieve like that. Not when he was a pup watching his mother fade away, and not as a mercenary waiting for the next bullet to be his last.
There were less bullets these days and less money, too. Turns out hero work wasn’t very lucrative. Sherry had assured him she could find him a place in some agency or another, doing the same work he did now but with a healthcare plan. They would be discreet. Fake papers, keep his identity locked tight. It sounded like a hell of a lot of work in order to sell his soul. He turned it down, like she knew he would, and he did what he always did–he just got used to things. It had been an adjustment at first, taking jobs for whatever someone had in their pocket, if anything at all. He had never been one for luxury, but it was nice to know he could drop a grand on a five star room and enjoy the jacuzzi bath after a few weeks of slumming it in the trenches. And now he didn’t even have that.
He had a plastic ring on a rusted chain, and somebody that believed in him. He couldn’t complain. It was different, sure, but it felt more valuable than a Bugatti–an opulence he’d never tasted in his whole wretched life. The kind of wealth that made a briefcase full of stacks look like a pile of peanut shells in comparison.
Sometimes it was the only thing that made the difference between getting up and staying down, and that made him feel like the richest man in the world.
He wanted to do something to pay her back, so he used the last of his cash to buy Sherry a ring proper.
It was some shop in New York City, the kind that rich girls frequent to fawn over diamonds on their beau’s arms. It didn’t feel much like Sherry, but maybe that’s because nobody had ever taken her before. He wanted her to have something nice, to pay her back for what she’d given him.
The man at the counter looked like he was about to slap an alarm bell when Jake walked up to him and he realized that he’d forgotten to clean the blood splatter off his face from the gig he’d left prior to his plane ride. He hadn’t wasted a moment in between and he didn’t want to waste any now.
“I need a ring,” he said, stern-faced and hurried. “A matching set.”
The man before him stammered, choking on his own words as he led him to a glass display case. “W-we have a large selection of engagement rings…”
You know in some parts of the world they call this a proposal.
Jake didn’t correct him. It wasn’t like they’d get married or nothing, but he was surprised at how little pushback he felt about it. He stood over the glass, scanning over tiers of gleaming silver bands and sparkling cut diamonds that were big enough to make those rich girls cream. Flashy, bright and expensive. The clerk tried to explain the nuances between each one like he was five years old, not knowing that he’d hawked stolen rocks before and could tell which ones he was overselling. The words drifted through both ears as he scanned the case and found one with a small round stone that looked humble in its simplicity. Like snowflakes glittering in the sun.
When he pointed it out, the clerk retrieved the matching band to pair with it. “A beautiful choice. I’m certain any lady will love it.”
And then he bobbled off the price tag and cold hard reality came down on him like the gaping jaws of a monster. Worse, even. Jake knew how to deal with monsters, but coming up short on cash was as foreign to him as being a hero.
The clerk seems to understand the situation immediately, and that pisses him off about it even more. He didn’t look surprised. Jake could think of a few things that might wipe the judgement from his face and the longer he stood there staring at him the more alluring they became but Sherry wouldn’t approve when she saw the headline in the papers on the same day he comes home with a ring: NEW YORK JEWELRY BOUTIQUE ROBBED BY BLOOD SOAKED CRIMINAL.
He swallows down the urge and with a breath, decides on a compromise.
The new ring has no diamond. It’s a sleek, silver band which still catches the sun in a way that makes it sparkle. It’s subtle, less assuming, and when slipped on Sherry’s finger it will never steal her light, only just reflect it. He has it sized to the toy ring hanging from his neck so he knows that it will fit her pinky just the same.
He’s never been a romantic. He’s never even been in love. What a load of shit that is–his mother was in love once and she died dreaming of a madman who let her rot alone. Sometimes it was easy to believe he’d be no different, that one could never escape the legacy of their blood–but time and time again, Sherry proved him wrong.
Leaving with those rings in his pocket makes something in his guts twist up like a car crash. He can’t stand sitting with that kid shit fluttering beneath his ribs, so as soon as he finds her in the apartment he pushes the ring into her hand without saying a word and just hopes that she accepts it.
Her brows knit beneath a curtain of blonde fringe as she studies the silver band in her palm, and somehow he thinks he’s already blown it. A stoneless ring? It felt more juvenile than the plastic thing hanging off his necklace.
“Jake…”
She whispers his name like a prayer or a curse, the sound of it curling around his chest and squeezing him until he can’t breathe. His gaze drops to the floor. It’s easier to count the little grey fibers in the carpet than it is to watch the disappointment bloom in her eyes.
“Look, I know it’s not what you had in mind, alright but–”
“It’s perfect.”
“What?”
“Well, it might be a little small.” She holds it up to admire it’s sheen when she realizes the size matches the one on her pinky and then her smile brightens. She pries off the old one with some effort and delicately slides on the silver. It sits in the same carved crevice that the other left behind, a notch in her skin that her body can’t erase. She raises her hand, eyes glittering for a moment before they steel, and fall back to him. To his necklace.
He’s already pulling the matching band from his pocket when she takes the chain from his neck. There are no words spoken between them, just the silent vow of the gesture, the delicate finality of the two of them as she slides the ring onto the chain and clasps it back around him. It sits heavier than the one before, and makes his heartbeat feel sturdier as it thrums in his chest against it.
Sherry purses her lips after a moment, an impish, teasing gleam in her blue eyes. “I guess it doesn’t have the same stopping power as a tattoo...”
“Not quite.”
“But it sure is pretty.”
“Yeah,” Jake says, watching the way the light from the window clips her profile and makes her skin sing. “It sure is.”
She agrees with a smile, and when her fingers curl around his ring and tug him down gently into a kiss, he doesn’t regret it for a moment.
Not even as he fishes it out from a monster’s guts.
He looks back down at the bisected thing piled at his feet. There isn’t much left of it now and he’s glad for that. Good riddance. He kicks it’s husk with boots filled with viscera and slips the necklace back over his head where it bleeds into his shirt.
“Asshole,” he mutters to the corpse like it could still hear him. He took joy in cutting that one down but when it’s over he feels the edge of exhaustion creeping back into his bones and something deeper that he can’t quite name. It’s like the comedown after a high, everything becomes meaner in the aftermath. It leaves room to question. To doubt.
The bitterness after a job felt like ritual.
It didn’t matter where he wound up–he had a talent for finding the shittiest dive in the worst part of town to throw back the stiffest drinks he could buy with pocket change. He worked alone mostly, easier that way. Sherry would throw him a few of the reject jobs on the downlow–nothing towns with problems the higher ups didn’t consider priority. A lone bioweapon here, a few zombie sightings there. He found no shortage in the world’s depravity. Some things never changed, no matter how much you felt like you were making a difference.
He’d sit at a corner table and spin that ring between his fingers and wonder how Sherry kept going all these years. Inherited traits from the old man maybe–and not that Birkin shithead either–she spoke of Leon like a friend, but he knew better and he was afraid she’d end up just like him. Withering away beneath the government’s boot. Sometimes he wanted to run, pack their bags and go somewhere far away. They’d jump trains and fuck on park benches and leave the monsters to people like Leon–people who didn’t have a chance for something different anymore.
But that wasn’t Sherry.
And if he was honest, it wasn’t him either. He had too much fun punching them square in the mouth.
So he sits at that table in the back of the bar like he always does, an untouched glass in front of him as he spins the ring between his fingers, taking comfort in its solidity, knowing that Sherry is on the other end of it waiting for him to come home.
Home.
He never had one before, not a real one. Not one worth hanging onto. He never knew how much you could miss something when you went without it for so long. But here he was. There’s blood still caked in the chain, and tomorrow there’ll be more. Another monster, another fight.
Because Sherry had found him.
Because she had saved him.
He picks up his glass and knocks back the drink in one gulp before dropping some slimy cash down onto the table. The ring nestles against his heart when he moves, lodging into his chest cavity like a key as he makes his way home to her.