He tries to forget.
He is not his father, he cannot exist with great, ruined loves in his heart without falling to pieces. He is inherently a fragile man, and he cannot take the burden – his bones, already hollowed and creaking, cannot bear the leaden weight that has been affixed to their names, to the memories that exist of her – of them.
(A true dichotomy of loves, glass and steel, and of course when they collided, something broke – he’s just glad it was him.)
He tries to forget.
He focusing on existing, instead, of surviving on this second-chance life he got. He still doesn’t know what happened, exactly, only that in one moment he was dying with her name on his lips and the next he was waking, alone in the meadow, pieced back together as if nothing had ever transpired there in the falls, as if it had been some fever-strewn memory.
And it works, mostly. He does not delve too deep into anything. He inches along on the legs that were never meant to support his weight, translucent skin stretching thin over muscles, a walking anatomy lesson, a map of every vital piece to him made visible to all the predators in his midst.
But they had shared the same dead womb of their mother, they had shared secrets, they have saved one another’s lives. So all the forgetting in the world can’t erase the fact that she is his blood, that there is a tie forged from birth, and when she enters the meadow he feels it like a hand wrapped around his heart, fingers sunk in the meat of it, forcing a heartbeat.
He feels her.
He gasps aloud, like a fool, and a whirlwind of terror and nerves and hope spins around his bones. He moves, frantic, looking for her, for the ghost-like form of her, and oh, there she is, there with her papery wings and body like his own, twin forms, glass and fragile, but ever so much stronger together.
“Adaline.”
He says her name like a prayer.
contagion be careful making wishes in the dark
 I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
The second that she sees him, time becomes meaningless.
It is liquid, suspended in air; it is lava, molten in her belly. She had spent days (weeks, months) praying for this moment, praying for when the fluttering of eyelashes would reveal him on her peripheral. She had pressed her mouth to the cold ground of morning, tears mixing with the dust and the soot, and whispered her promises. She had slept racked with guilt and memories. Each moment had been marked with the beat of war drums—each moment had been tattooed with the pulse of yesterday. She could not close her eyes without thinking of the moment he had splintered on the ground; she could not draw air into her lungs without remembering that his lungs no longer could.
She had run to the meadow. She had raced, impervious to the danger, until she had found her. She had spluttered and pleaded and begged for a miracle. She had promised her life, but it had not been enough. The slashing of her jugular and the spilling of her blood did not have enough weight to balance the scales that now tipped from the gore and the despair of his own death. So she had offered more. Blind with pain, desperate in anguish, she had offered everything that was not hers to offer. She had sobbed, the very thought of it pulling her veins apart like faded seams, but she had done it regardless. She had laid it like forbidden fruit on the altar and fallen to her knees in worship.
In the end, she had been turned away.
She had been left to free fall in possibilities—neither given a yes or a no. She had been left to cling to the shred of hope that it would be accepted all while praying for another way.
If it were accepted, it would make her a monster.
It would make her a coward.
It would make her a demon.
But, when she sees him, her heart thrills, and the guilt falls away.
When she sees him, she drowns in her love.
She embraces her fate. She becomes the monster. She does not care.
She does not think about the guillotine that now stands above her neck; instead, she cries out—the sound as ancient and primal as the time that now dances without meaning around them. She reels toward him and collides into his side, wave crashing into wave, her mouth cresting his neck to taste the familiar flesh. The salt of her tears falls down her cheeks and press into her lips, glass and ocean mixing on her tongue until her sobs form a single word:
“Contagion.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
He knows, of course, that they should leave one another be.
Them together can only be a weakness, glass stacked upon glass only means more pieces to pick up. Never mind the more obvious sin of it, that he loves her in ways he should not – mind that he’s died for her once and he would do it again in a heartbeat and anyone could see it, anyone could use it against them.
(And what has she given up? What did she promise, to bring him back?)
But the knowledge is ash in the wind when he beholds her, and reason ceases to matter as she crashes into him, a dangerous move (their bodies are made to mince and touch softly, not to collide). He feels the reverb in his thin bones but he doesn’t mind, because she is here pressed against him, her lips on his skin and his on hers, she is here and she is saying his name.
A moment of joy, carved in stark relief against everything else they have endured.
“What…” be begins but cannot finish, because the desire to kiss her again is there and his lips are muffled in her skin. But while his desire for her is always there, a living, raging beast inside him, his desire to know is there too, insistent.
“What happened, Adaline? After…”
After I died.
contagion be careful making wishes in the dark
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice crackles in her throat—splintering with desperation, choked out in the moments when her mouth is not preoccupied with the curve of his neck and the sweet saltiness of his flesh. “It doesn’t matter,” because maybe if she says it more than once, she will believe it. She will believe it did not matter when she stood there, looking down on his lifeless eyes, the blood having left his body to puddle next to him.
It did not matter how she had screamed until her vessels almost burst; it did not matter how she had gone blind to the wolf girl who had done this. It did not matter how she had not seen anything but the broken, awkward angles of her brother on the ground and how, although she had expected tears to come, none had.
(It didn't matter.)
It didn't matter that when the screams had ended, she had fallen to the ground, wrapping herself around him, dry eyes closing as she took in the fading scent of his body, cheek resting against his cold, papery skin, grief twisting her heart.
(It didn't matter.)
It didn't matter how she had not been sure how long she had lain there next to him (hours, days, weeks perhaps) but how, when she rose, the desperation and disbelief had flooded over her again—and how she, steeled with whispers of those with powers—had left. She had known the stories. Stories of those who could do impossible things, dancing between the lines of life and death and the beyond and here. She knew the stories, and she knew that there had to be truth in them.
(It didn't matter)
It didn't matter how she had left. How she had left and, with each step, how she had found herself consumed with it. How she had run, how she had hunted—eventually how she had found. How she found someone with answers and then someone with solutions, but not free ones. It didn't matter how those answers, those solutions had come with a heavy price that she would eventually have to pay…but not today.
(It didn't matter. It did not.)
It doesn't matter that someday she will have to tell him the exchange she made for his life.
It doesn't matter.
Today, she focuses on him and the lack of space between them, this gift they had been given, and she said the words that had been so fatal before, the words that had killed him and almost killed her. The words that are poison and words they both know are as true—words she cannot fight, cannot deny any longer. “I love you.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
For the record, he never felt dead.
He remembers dying well enough, but in the same, dulled way that we have come to remember pain – there is no sharpness to the memory. He remembers the dry, almost twig-like sound of his bones breaking, remembers the air swirling with screams. But he can’t recall the pain, though it must have hurt, surely.
But truth is, he went quickly, it hadn’t taken long before his mangled body had given out.
Then, nothing.
He almost wishes he could recall it, but there’s nothing. Like a movie with a spliced scene, he remembers falling to the ground and then he remembers waking up in the meadow, whole but alone. He feels almost guilty, that he can’t recall the pain, that he can’t at least come with some knowledge of what lies beyond.
Truth is, he thinks he does matter – if not now, then someday – but it’s not an issue he needs to push with her body against his.
“Okay,” he says. It will matter. Someday, it will matter.
Right now, though, only she matters. Only they matter.
“I love you, too.”
That matters. And he says it so simply, like it hadn’t been a thing deep and treacherous within him, like it hadn’t been something he maybe died for. Instead, it’s casual, easy, as if they’re normal, as if they weren’t born with glass in their bones and doom in their hearts, as if there was a chance for them, for this.
contagion be careful making wishes in the dark
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Would she die for him?
She feels him pressed against her—she tastes his flesh on her tongue—and she asks herself: Would she die for him? She reaches over and presses her forehead against him, feeling the surprisingly solid feeling of his delicate body. There is no space between them—not now. There is the absence of it, and she can only think about the way that they mesh together. There is something poetic about it. Something beautiful. (If the gods did not want them together, why would they carve them two pieces from one whole?)
…but would she die for him?
She thinks about the months after she had first told him she had loved him; the months after he had died because of it. She thinks about the sleepless nights wandering. The hours screaming in the forest. The weeks spent staring at nothing, gaze going blurry and disconnected. She thinks about the emptiness that had become of her life—the way she had been a gourd with all of the innards scooped out and spilled onto the ground. Empty. She had become so empty in his absence, shelled out and left to survive without him.
Would she die for him?
She would argue that she had.
“I love you,” she says again, eyes closing as she leans against him, her laugh so soft that it could almost not be heard. “I do not think that I will ever tire of telling you that.” She knows that the world would still work against them—would not understand the precious nature of the love carved between them, but she thinks that she knows two who would. “You know what I like to think?” She breaks apart from him just slightly, eyes brighter than they’ve been perhaps ever. “I like to think mom and dad are happy for us.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
He had lived so long expecting death yet it had surprised him when it came, in that terrible moment slathered in screams and bloodshed. He can still recall with dreadful accuracy the way Tyrna’s eyes had turned steely as her body changed, shifted, warped into a wolf with snarling lips and spittle frothing.
(He’d die for her, did die for her, and would do it again and again should it be asked of him.)
Waking up alive had been a blessing, with the rich draw of air into his lungs. Until he had looked around and realized he was along, weighted with the mystery of not-knowing: not knowing what had happened to him, not knowing where she was, not knowing if she was even alive. From that moment, anxiety had scrabbled at his chest, his heart beating out the questions, the statements: where is she? and is she alive and you should be dead.
The questions are rendered moot, now, her body the answer as it fits tight against him in all the spaces he’d carved out for her.
He smiles, because it’s all he can do when he looks upon her.
“Me too,” he says, and though he wonders sometimes – what their parents might think seeing them like this – he knows their own foundation is shaky, and that both have made questionable choices before.
(Truth is, he doesn’t know the half of it. The sins of his father are a secret he took to the grave.)
“I want to keep you safe,” he says, as if he were a wall and not glass, as if he could fight, “but I don’t know where to go. Where we belong.”
He’d thought the falls, once, had envisioned a life for them there (one he’d deluded himself on, to be fair). But now the thundering of water causes his heart to quicken and his mouth to sour, and he will not return there, ever.
contagion be careful making wishes in the dark
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Adaline’s heart is a wicked, wicked thing.
It is selfish and all-consuming and demanding. It wants things it has no right in wanting. It wants things to be kept all to itself, wants to hoard them, clawing at their chest until she can taste their love on her tongue. She wants to bathe in it. She wants to be reminded of it. She wants to curl into the warmth of it and never leave. She wants Contagion’s heart in the way that she wants light and air. She needs it, she thinks.
But, then, Adaline does not consider herself tethered. She is flighty and enamored with the idea of love, an idea of love she had learned from a butterfly-mother who crawled from the ocean to claim her lover and pull him back under with her. It was a warped view of love: a one-sided view. It was a love that would fill all of the holes in her life without demanding too much. It was a love she could feast on unhindered.
She was a glutton for it.
Not that she thinks of it now, curled into his side, lips playing along his shoulder and occasionally pulling at his mane. She does not think of everyone else she may love or come to love—everyone else that she may claim as her own, pulling at their heart because it was the only way she knew. Instead she thinks of the way he smells of seagulls and salt and home. She thinks of the way her body hums when she is next to him and the pleasure that causes her eyes to go heavy, her smile dreamy and soft and far away.
She tilts her head back to look at him through her gauzy lashes, studying him, memorizing the lines of his face. “I belong here—with you.” She lipped at his jaw, a shiver running down the length of her spine and then spreading outward. “I don’t care where we go. I will follow you anywhere.” And she believes it. She truly does.
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
|
