They lived. That was one way of putting it. In a truer sense, it was better to say that they endured. Or survived. Balalaika did not care to spend time judging which word best captured the grim truth of it because none of them were adequate, not in any of the seven languages she spoke.
They outlasted Boris and Biu, and their successors, and their successors' successors. They watched the city empty of familiar faces, old friends and enemies alike, and refill with a new generation. The Lagoon Company disbanded with Dutch chugging off in his rusting PT boat like a spagetti western cowboy toward the sun-stained horizon. Saw Two Hands succumb to her one virtue and Rock to his favorite vice, the Rip-Off Church shuttered and overgrown, Colombians supplanted by Mexicans, Italians replaced by Armenians, the Yellow Flag burned to the earth again and left in ash, its phoenix spirit finally stamped out by the ruthless boot of Roanapur. Even the Buddha changed. His nose rubbed off, leaving only his smile on an otherwise blank face. The years erased great swaths of Roanapur herself, and new crooked lanes of shops sprung up to replace what had been lost with slimy owners and rat-trap upper apartments to play home to the world's population of human refuse, the alleys filling slowly with filth and bullet casings.
Only they remained, heavenly king and resurrection queen of the hangman's noose city, forever waiting for the final showdown that would end them both and impervious to another death.
She was counting on that finality, even as time sucked the shine from her yellow hair and stamped creases along her eyes. She depended on him, alone, to endure with her until their mutual end, and so when Chang turned to her on that bright, blue New Years Day and said, "This is my stop. I'm getting off this shit-stream," Balalaika felt like someone had yanked away her sleep sack in the middle of an Afghan desert night. The rush of unforgiving cold took her breath away.
They were on the dock. He faced the sea; she looked back to land. It was tradition, but he turned to her when he said it.
"I'm already gone. By tomorrow, I'll be just another bad memory for this city to forget."
She wanted to stop his traitorous words by crushing his throat in her hands, but the cold had frozen more than her words. She couldn't be sure that her heart was still beating.
"Did you hear me, Fry Face? As of tomorrow, I'm kissing this gorgeous cesspool of a city good-bye," said Chang.
"Tomorrow," she echoed, as if the sudden hollow in her gut had bounced the word back to him.
Chang looked down.
A gull screamed overhead.
"This is not the ending I would have chosen for us," he said at last, and before she could summon a response, he closed the distance between them, slid a cool hand against her burned cheek and kissed her, hot and sweet, on the mouth.
He tossed his last words to her over his shoulder as he was leaving, carelessly as if they were the remains of a spent cigarette.
"When you're ready, you know how to find me. See you, sweetheart."
In the months that followed, she wanted to find him just to punch as many liquid holes into his head as it took to appease her rage over that kiss, but the intel came back empty every time. Dead or alive, Chang's fate was a void, as if he had stepped off that dock and disappeared from the earth. As if he never was.
She blew away the man who replaced him instead. Onetwothree shots to the chest. Before his body could cool, she had her long-delayed war. She cratered the city center, smashed the dock to splinters, cut down the Triad high-rise, blew the bridges. She burned Roanapur and, with it, everything that he had tried to preserve for all of those many years. Status quo, fuck you.
At the end of her fighting, she lay there beside the last of her men, her comrades even in death, and watched the circle of fires lick at their boots while the pool's edge of their flag-red blood crept forward to greet the flames, and Balalaika knew she could close her eyes at last. It wasn't him, not even close, but it was everything her dark heart had desired. Death and destruction. A battalion of ghosts. Her glorious finale.
Instead, she heaved onto her side, bones giving way with a snap, and crawled arm over arm from the burning building until the stars winked over her. She saw them for a second before her eyes ceased to work. It was fine. She didn't need them. Her hand found her cell and remembered how to dial his number on its own.
She supposed that meant she was ready, sweetheart.
It rang and rang, went to voicemail.
"You called the number. You know who this is. Leave a message, but I have to warn you that the person you want doesn't live here anymore."
She ground her teeth, holding off blood loss long enough to hear a beep. "Chang, you bastard, where are you?" she managed before her body mutinied against her cast-iron determination and silenced her.
The stars blinked on once more, brighter than ever, and then black.
Balalaika woke up in a foreign room that was quiet and clean like a hospital, soft and comfortable like a resort. Her wounds has been closed and sealed with rounds of white gauze and medical tape. After some time, a woman with a white dress and a pretty face slipped in holding pills and water on a tray.
"Would you like to sit up?" the woman asked in Cantonese.
"Yes," Balalaika replied in kind.
Through her window she could see Roanapur smouldering in the distance. Throughout the next days, she watched the smoke plumes rise, unspool, and shrink into grey ghost wisps.
When she had healed enough, she asked for clothes. The pretty nurse returned with a packed suitcase on wheels, her familiar old cell phone, a plane ticket, and a forged passport. The name next to her picture read "Countenance Frier".
Fry Face.
His humor was always somewhat lacking.
She went.
Balalaika found Chang 2,700 miles later in a lounge chair facing a pool whose blue waters seemed to blend into the edge of the blue sea. Waves of white had crept into his hair, the sunglasses had changed, but it was him. When he did not rise to meet her, she dearly wished to shoot him in the neck for that offense alone. Her coat pocket weighed heavy with a snub-nosed revolver; she could do it. She had every right after what he had done.
Then, she saw the color in his cheeks, the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the quirk of an arterial vessel in his throat giving away his pounding heart.
The coat filled with the wind as she slipped it from her shoulders and draped it over the empty chair next to his.
When she had settled in next to the pool and sent one of the wait staff scurrying away for a bottle of water and a vodka tonic, Chang reached out and took her hand.
They stayed until the sun tilted into the water, nothing spoken between them. In the gathering twilight, he turned to her with that too-charming smile and said, "Let's get dinner. You must be hungry. I know I am."
His quarters were not what she expected, not grandeur and glass, just a few small rooms that opened to a private deck facing the sea. Someone had already placed her bags inside the door.
She went to the open window. In the distance, there was laughter and music over the whispers of the sea.
"What do you want to eat? I have fish and-" He stopped when she turned to face him. Without his customary shades, he looked older and she caught herself reading the lines of his face in the fading light. It was a mistake to look him in the eye like that. He noticed. Well, he would notice sooner or later. She could not hide from him the clouds that filled her right eye and started to bloom in her left. She was sure that he had already seen the slight limp and the way one fist refused to unclench completely.
"What happened back in Roanapur?" he asked in a low voice.
"Did not your nurse send a full report?" she replied.
"I didn't ask for one. I wanted to hear it from you. What happened?"
She wanted to laugh but did not trust the right sound to come out, so she simply said the truth. "I survived."
His jaw went tight and fury roiled from him in near-palpable waves. It was all she had wanted for so long, to meet him face-to-face and finally unlock such passion as seemed impossible from such a cool man. This was the end that she was meant to have. Her gun rested in that pocket across the room. She could have it in three strides. She could...
She did not.
Instead, she watched as Chang reeled in his emotions and rearranged his face into a tight smile.
"I don't suppose my apologies are worth a damn, but you have them just the same. It was my war to finish with you. I'm sorry." He turned back to his tiny kitchen. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll cook. Bathroom is in the back, if you need it."
For lack of anything else to do, Balalaika went to wash her face and hands in the bathroom's pedestal sink. Although she had no reason to be ashamed, she fished her twice-daily array of pills, the vitamins and the prescriptions, from her pocket and swallowed them with the help of a palmful of water. Behind the mirror, she found Chang's own collection of medicine bottles, neatly lined up on the twin shelves with their long strange names wrapping across their front and snaking out of sight. If she needed to know why he had left Roanapur, the answer was staring her in the face.
Balalaika closed the cabinet and looked into her own failing eyes.
This was not why she came.
Back in the kitchen, Chang was working a paring knife through the belly of a whole fish next to a pile of sliced summer squash.
"There's wine in the fridge if you want any," he was saying when she caught the wrist of the hand holding the knife, turned him around, and kissed him.
It was all wrong, too hard and misaligned. Balalaika knew it right away. She let go and pushed back, furious at her mistake. How had he done it so smoothly, so right, when he had surprised her back on the dock?
She started to go for the wine when he said, "Wait."
Miraculously, she did. She waited, breathing fast, while Chang set down the knife and washed his hands. He tossed the towel aside.
"Now," he said. taking her by the waist. "Let's try that again."
It was the dock all over again, just as she remembered right down to the salty tang in the air. Only now his mouth did not hurry away. His hand found her hair, and her lips parted for him. She kissed back and back until she had him pinned against the counter and kept kissing until he broke away, gasping, "Not here. Not with you," and then she dragged him, all too willing, through the door of the one room she had not yet visited and pushed him down on the bed.
For once, she overestimated herself. The twist of her shirt coming down hard over her shoulder yanked on her bandages and made her curse. Chang sat up and reached for her, easing her out of her clothes and kissing her until the pain melted into the background of her hungry senses.
Afterwards, in the dark, he asked, "How long are you planning on staying?"
"I have no more plans," she said. "And you?"
He sighed and closed his eyes. "I'm too far gone to play any way but straight with you, Balalaika. I want you to stay, and when you need to go, do me a favor and put a bullet in my head first."
"That can be arranged," she smiled.
"Well, that is truly terrifying coming from you. Enough of this talk or I'll never be able to sleep again," he said and pulled her down, gently for her wounds, beside him.
She slept. She slept so much in those first weeks. She slept as if she had been deprived of it for years and desperately needed to catch up. Perhaps she had. For a while, it was enough to sleep and stare out at the ocean and be with him. When she grew restless, there were doctors and follow-up appointments for both of them. She did not ask for what he sought from his physicians. There was no change in the way he moved that she could discern. The beat of his heart under the open palm of her hand on his bare chest felt strong and regular. Whatever he fought with all of those pills must have been kept at bay, she reasoned.
There was planning, arranging, scheming. Not as much as in the old days, of course, but if Chang had stepped off the dock and into a void, then she had followed, and it was work to stay so hidden. They did not stay in one place for long. Balalaika learned that their long beginning by the ocean was not usual, although she did not mind the moving. In truth, she hardly noticed anything but the man by her side until she realized that horrible morning that she had also failed to notice what mattered.
She had slept until late in the morning, as was her new habit, but when she met him in the kitchen, there was no half-pot of coffee waiting for her. The lights weren't even on. Instead, Chang sat at the table with his phone in hand, its bright display lighting up the frown on his face.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
Chang leapt from his chair, his hands reaching for guns that were no longer at his back. Without his shades, his eyes read frantic.
"Why are you here?" he asked, nearly failing to sound collected and Chang-like.
She stared at him, easily seeing the fear and confusion scrawled on the handsome face that she has learned so well. After a long minute, Balalaika realized that she needed to do something, say something.
"You invited me here," she tried. She found a light switch and flipped it.
Chang looked at her, clad only in a robe, and blinked. And blinked again. Something changed around his eyes, and then he sat down again.
She waited, unsure of what to do.
"You know, I was hoping you wouldn't find out," he said at last. "I'm one of the lucky ones. Early onset responds best to the latest drugs, and I respond better than average on top of that. I was hoping... Well, that doesn't matter now."
She took the chair seat across from him. He picked up his phone and slid it back into his pocket.
"Who were you trying to call?" she asked.
Chang looked miserable. "Biu."
"Biu is dead."
"Yeah, I know. I just..." He paused to breathe. In and out. "I forgot."
"You forgot," she repeated, again feeling that awful, echoing hollow that only he seemed to be able to carve out of her. The truth was so unspeakably obvious and horrible that Balalaika did not want to say it, not even with its name burning on her tongue.
"What time is it?" he asked, blinking hard again.
"After ten."
"In the morning?"
"Yes."
"I'll make coffee." Chang stood and left her alone at the table.
Whatever lucky combination of drugs had kept his ugly disease suppressed until then failed spectacularly. Every day, he forgot more, lost more. It chewed his memories into tatters. The names of people, of places, slipped away. Then, more horribly, the names of things, verbs, whole languages disappeared. He lost so fast that she marvelled at it. The sum total of a great man's mind slipping away like a sinking ship into dark waters.
There were more mornings when he awoke and did not understand why she was in his bed.
"How am I to be sure that you will not kill me in my sleep?" she asked once, after he had come back to himself.
He looked at her meaningfully. "I have never wanted to kill you."
"Oh?"
He dropped his head into her shoulder. "Fight with you, sure. You are gorgeous when you are angry, and every man craves a challenge. But murder? No."
"Hm."
She started to sleep with a gun under her pillow and waking up earlier than he did, just in case.
It finally happened one day, just as Balalaika had known it would happen from the moment she realized the whole vile truth about what had driven Chang from Roanapur. He awoke, turned to her, and nothing. No sleepy, sexy smile. No jolt of fear and surprise. Nothing but confusion and cow-like stupidity showed in his expression.
She supposed it was something of a compliment that he had held onto her for so long. So much had gone before her. He had forgotten her, yes, but Chang had also forgotten himself. The man beside her was no one she cared to recognize.
Balalaika eased the gun out from under her head and used her other hand to push him gently onto his back. He followed, dumbly, and stayed where she put him. She raised the sheet like a shield between them.
When you need to go, do me a favor and...
The gun kissed his temple.
He closed his eyes.
She pulled the trigger. Twice, to be sure.
The sheet had protected her from the worst of the splatter, so she was able to dress quickly, taking only the minimum of what she needed: her gun, a few papers, a phone. By the time that she closed the door to their room and took to the hall of the hotel, alarms were blaring but the other guests were just stumbling out of rooms to gossip.
"What was that sound?"
"It sounded like gunshots."
"It could be thunder, right? It's raining. I mean..."
They swarmed the hall. Balalaika breezed past them, one hand extended like a battering ram to crash into the emergency exit door. It gave way before her. Her long legs took her down the stairs two at a time and out to the lobby where the staff was frantic, running to and fro like senseless beasts. She skirted along the wall and walked out through the main door. The hand that could still open fully raised up, and the first in the line of taxis bustled forward through the pounding rain to serve her.
"Any luggage, ma'am?" the driver asked.
"No."
"Where to?"
"The airport."
As the car pulled away, Balalaika reached into the coat pocket and realized too late that it wasn't hers. Instead of her cigars, the pocket produced a gold-plated lighter and a crumpled pack of his cigarettes, the ones that she detested.
She held one in each hand and tried to decide what she would do.
A/N: This story has been in my head for a long, long time. It feels good to finally have it on paper, even though RadiantRedWrath totes beat me to the topic. (Curse you, RRW! And thanks for the much-needed kick in the butt!) As you might have guessed, I'm still clawing my way back from that vicious bout of postpartum depression, so feel free to shower me with friendly reviews and PMs. It honestly makes me feel better just to write, but a little encouragement and/or tough love is pretty sweet, too. Please and thank you!