She remembers walking into the ocean with him and sinking like a stone. It had been freeing, to give into the water like that. To not command it or request of it or anything. She had simply let it become their end—simply let it wash over them both, let it sink into her lungs until there was nothing but it.

And the children.

Oh, the children!

She had left them curled together (so precious, made of glass—so nearly always glass with their coupling!) and walked to the end with him. Blood on her lips.

The end had seemed so unyielding.

But they had been together—and isn’t that what it was meant to be?

For a while, they had been together on that other side. Always him. Always her. But even in the end, it was not meant to be final and she felt him slip away. Felt him pull between the spaces between her fingers until he was no longer and it was just her. She found Charity, eventually. Her beautiful, darling girl. The first one and in this world, her glass heart was not so fragile. Not so vulnerable to the world’s cruelty.

But Charity left too.

So she watched and waited. Wandered the darkness in search of things that she could not name.

Until the darkness lifted. Until she found a split in the veil and her greedy heart clutched in her chest. She followed that tendril of light until it spilled out more and more. Until it was blinding and, suddenly, she was in that ocean again. But this time, the ocean was not pulling her down but pulling her in. She felt the tide wash her up on the shore and, even though she called to her gift, it did not answer.

She was alive, but left hollow.

Her body felt strange—bloated, empty, thin—but it was a marvelous thing to pull in cold air into her lungs. It felt marvelous to walk and find the beach still led to the meadow. She closed her eyes and smiled into the wind as it pulled her damp hair back and it felt right when she opened her eyes to find him there.

“Garbage,” she whispers—and that his name is the first word she says in this life is right too.

They are so new standing here, apart and yet together. They look so young, washed clean of the sins that had permeated their every breath in the previous life (and in this one too, because had she not hungered for him in such an unholy way from the very first?). She is not the young girl who had met him back then—not the one so desperately, greedily in love with Cancer—and he is not the same man.

But they are the same—always the same, always the same.

Even now, her heart so fresh and new already curls inward on the edges, swallowing itself whole on the promise of its greedy nature. She wants and wants already, ready to consume whatever would lay before her like a feast, and it is him—always him now. The image of that gray stallion from so long ago washed away in the years of him. The way her heart had consumed him so wholly. Turned to him so completely.

“Garbage,” she whispers again, because it never sounded like a curse to her. It was him and she lets herself savor the syllables because they are so dear to her. Because she loves the way that the sound anew on her tongue. Because she would drown in the way she feels with his eyes on her once more.

She does not deny the simmering hunger in her heart. She leans into him, closes the distance until she can feel the heat of him. Until her strawberry lips can trace the muscle of his neck. Find the clean way that his flesh stretches across him, washed clean of scars and age. So handsome once more. Always handsome.

“I found you,” she says, as though there was any chance that she would not. As though there was anything for her but this finding of him. As though she had not been pulled back for this very moment.

There are other things that come to the tip of her tongue.

I have waited for you. I have waited for this moment. I would have walked until I found you.

But she swallows them.

She presses kisses into his neck, below his jaw, across his cheek, next to his mouth.

She presses herself into him.

She imagines that they are infinite in this moment—imagines there is nothing else.

This feels like a dream, but she has long ago lost her ability to discern dream from reality, death from life. She passes through the veil and the colors are more vibrant but it does not feel wholly different. She does not feel completely anew—and perhaps he does not either. Because did he not keep her company in those years? Did she not conjure some version of him? Was she not always surrounded by him?

So this feels like a dream and she gladly continues dreaming.

She presses into him greedily, hungrily, and demands more. She does not know how to be gentle when she is with him—does not know how to quell the aching in her belly, the neediness in her touch. She would devour him whole. She would sacrifice herself completely. She would give and give and give—

“I have missed you too,” she whispers quickly, the words flowing out of her immediately. “I thought of you every day.” Were there days in the afterlife? Did she count them? “You were never so real though,” she says in a way of saying that he was better now—it was better with the heat of him, the feel of him beneath her lips. It was always so much better in this reality, as skewed as it may be for her. 

It doesn’t matter though.

The skewed reality doesn’t matter when he is here with her and she is with him and the rest of the world is melting away around them both. She presses into him more. “Garbage,” she whispers, because she can. Because there is air in her lungs to push the word out, to form it on the edge of her lips.

“I don’t care how much time we have,” she whispers. “It’s enough.”

It won’t be, she knows, (it is never enough) but she will lie because she can.

She has never had accomplishments to speak of. She lived in the time of legends—of Kings and Queens like her mother. Of those who had writ themselves into the history of this land. The history that had not faded away with time, that had not been washed away with the passing of centuries or even when the lands themselves had dissolved into oblivion. But she herself had not risen to such heights. She had never desired titles or power. Had never desired that her name be passed down from generation to generation.

She had just wanted love.

Just wanted this.

He is everything, she thinks. The beginning and the end of her. The entirety of it. She had walked into the ocean at his side to cement it—to die doing that which was the only thing that mattered to her.

More than her children.

More than their children.

More than their children’s children.

She could have been a mother, could have found the love she so deeply desired in raising them, but she had never wanted that either. It had been him. (And Cancer before him, although that was such a weak and feeble love when compared to Garbage.) She would give herself entirely to him in this moment again.

“I love you too,” she whispers into the sleek curve of his neck, made young again. She explores the muscle underneath it, the way that it feels so soft and sweet. So unlike the aged man she had faced death with before—but rather the man she had first met so long ago. “I will always love you.”

Forever, she thinks.

Until death. Through death. In death.