In Between
She is done for.
It is not a fact you can verify. You are not lying to yourself, either — there is no longer need to control your fear of her actions. No, it is something different; it is foreign and present and terrible, and no definition in your knowledge could match such a thing.
If you didn't trust it so little, you would listen to the part of you that seems to be currently in charge. She has such different standards than you used to have. It says yours is just a feeling — as if you couldn't possibly do better than that right now, it gently asks you to wait.
You do not listen.
It is simply there; you cannot chase something like this away. It is a reaction to events without a precedent. It is only natural, you repeat yourself. All is fine, all is working. You never stood a chance against a sight this beyond the limits of possibility.
And yet you are forced to watch, you and the void — the patchwork of bruises and burns, the blood, the eyes like glass. In those unsteady ribs, in this old wish of yours come true, something makes you cringe.
Once more, you can do nothing.
As you watch her slip from your grasp, you remember the way you have seen things die.
You think of how they met their end, and their arrogance followed. You loved seeing them vanish in dozens, swallowed by pits that always had more room ready. You never focused on the carnage — the one thing you remember is the silence, careless and terrible, that filled the place to the brim.
It was so easy for you. All it took was one smooth movement, and the cameras would never see them again.
What mattered was their absence. You took a fierce joy in not seeing them reappear in your field of vision. Picking another one and starting over was a delightful game — you could never lose, yet win in so many ways.
It was so fierce, that twist of joy; yet it was cold, and detached. Such a clean game.
Then, it had been your turn to die. You had regretted it all.
The pain of each of them weighed tenfold on you. So quick their demise, so eternal your torture. You were killed, over and over again — and each pair of minutes that passed was two of their eyes, each blow to your flanks was a bullet to their heart.
For each of them, you had to pay; for her, you paid twice. However, even in that agony, one thing belonged to you alone.
You were another story. To you, each time was part of a process; as long as you could feel, there would be no true end to you. It was long, but it would eventually be done — the long wait to be reborn.
And that still set you apart, you and death, until you saw the spheres.
What you were witnessing opened your eyes once more. Anyone would have known; those places were already dead. What you had never seen, and never dreamt of, was the way their deaths lived on — they happened again every second, slowly dragged through the years.
It was time to tiptoe on their corpses; it was decay to devour them, biting away small chunks as she walked and breathed on their edges. Death was not a finite event — it was still happening, right under your eyes.
The difference, you think bitterly, is that buildings cannot feel.
There is a twisted irony in what you are forced to watch; it is infuriating, how you must always discover things you would have gladly ignored for the rest of time. But she is not going to stop — she never did. You are well aware the way out of this is just one.
You avoid it, and pay attention.
She teaches you a whole universe in that handful of hours. She shows you death the way it is — a something in between, a journey achieved through torture. She lets you see how her breath is fighting to happen, under the marble weight of her flesh; she shares with you the whimpers and the thunder of pain, the silent screams, the plead for everything to finally stop.
That struggle is carved in every inch of her flesh. Taken aback, you do nothing but watch.
You feel a boundary between the two of you. There is something, in that state of suspension, that was never yours to decide. For the first time, she isn't yours to take — and that fragile balance, a veil of dream between wake and sleep, lies way beyond your control.
You let it happen, even after she opens her eyes. You let her rise to her feet with a start; you let her flee, touched by the horror of that imminent defeat.
There is no longer any point in killing her. She is caught in the middle — a Schrödinger cat, nearly alive, nearly dead.
And putting an end to that, with your own hands, is hard.