Because Reason Says I Should Have Died Three Years Ago
A/N: Three years after, survivors remember and regret Four drabbles, three in an alternate-ending situation.
Disclaimer: I don't own.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
there's only us, there's only this
His memory is the rain.
That day, the rain was less of the icy needles it usually was in Paris, and more angels' tears. Angels' tears making clean streaks on the face of a ragged gamine. Angels' tears in blonde hair as a leader fell for his country. Angels' tears falling reddened from a red flag made redder with wasted blood.
They are the angels, and he is human, so all he has to offer them is human tears rolling down the front of his jacket as he sits at the table in the corner, his eyes seeing everything and nothing. An angel's tears fall on his shoulder as one who cannot be called a survivor stands behind him. Pale hands grasp the black-clad shoulders, disrupting the puddle of angel's tears.
He's sure she's speaking comforting words in his ears, but he's absorbed in the wet streaks down the front of his jacket, and he doesn't hear. Finally, she grabs his shoulders and forces him to look at her.
He sees her eyes brimming with angel's tears and regrets instantly. He should not have made her cry. It is he that bears the weight of a thousand sorrows, not her. He tries to say something comforting, but it comes out awkward and garbled and she stops him.
"Come home," she says, and he stands slowly. She cannot make him forget his grief or the rain like angel's tears, but for her sake, he will let her try.
forget regret, or life is yours to miss
His memory is redness.
Red, the flag he held in his hands, the flag his country, his Patria, had entrusted to him, the flag he realizes now he was unworthy of. Red, the blood that poured from the veins of schoolboys dying for freedom. Red, the blood of angry men—the blood he should have bled, until some cruel god staunched his wounds.
He blinks the smoky eyes that can no longer see redness, or light, or anything at all. His lips twist in a smirk as he considers the irony—he fought to end the night that had hung over Patria, and what is his reward but unending night?
Unending night and the smell of alcohol breath in his ears as the other tries to whisper something, maybe some words of comfort, but they are slurred with drink and anyway, he is not listening. He hates the other for being here. Were it not for the rough hand on his own, the shaggy head on his shoulder, the taste of absinthe transferred from the other's mouth to his own on a far too regular basis, he would be beyond the night by now, where he ought to be.
"Please" says the other's voice, "don't do this."
He knows what he means of course—please, don't waste your life away sitting here wishing you had died with them. Please don't spend hours trying to remember red, and feeling the colors slipping away with every attempt at recall. Please don't waste your life away.
"What life?" he answers the other's unasked question. For he has none. He is living a cursed hell because he did not die when it was his time to die.
There is nothing to live for now. Not warm, reeking body beside him. Not the hand that combs itself roughly through blonde hair like a giant playing with a child's doll. Most certainly not the bursts of brilliant, pure, red that flash through his mind when his senses are overwhelmed and his mouth fills with the taste of sweat and already-imbibed absinthe.
…No. Nothing at all.
no other road, no other way
Her memory is hate.
Most of her memories have hate in them somewhere—if her life was a cake, it would be flavored "hatred"—but this one more than ever. He ruined things. He ruined things good.
She'd been like a princess almost, in one of those romance novels Mother read always. Lying stretched out on the ground with the rain hitting her face and the sun on her just right, she bet she'd looked real damn pretty right then. And he'd been there, her bloodstained prince in his oldest suit and his weird springy hair that she always thought would feel like sheep's wool. And she was going to tell him that maybe, all along, she'd been a little bit in love with him, and he was gonna give her a real good memory. A kiss maybe even. She'd had kisses before and not liked them much, but she bet his kiss would have been something good. Something real special.
But then he had to go and be there, all grease haired and smelling of sick perfume, a dark sorcerer come to take her away from her prince. Now she was in his chair in his room in whatever filthy hideaway he'd shoved her into this week, bent over like a grandma because she still couldn't breathe real well.
When he came in, it was too dark to see much but his black-pebble eyes and the white flower between his too-thin lips and she's never hated him worse. Before she can do anything, he kisses her nothing special, and when he's done she spits at his shiny boots.
"You know it was inevitable," he says in that sickening mockery of upper class speech. "You belong to us. If not me it would have been one of the others. You would have been theirs or mine, but I was fastest and you ended up mine. You would not have gotten your pretty little death scene, mademoiselle, whether or not I had been there."
She doesn't let herself consider how much worse it would be had it been one of the others. She doesn't let herself think that at least his perfume smells better than alcohol, and at least he has some of his teeth.
She also doesn't think about his words slowly, slowly extinguishing the last spark of the foolish hope that once lived in the hole she has instead of a heart, replacing it all with pure hatred.
no day but today
His memory is falling.
All things fall in their time, he knows.
Stars fall, plunging from their fixed place in the sky to disappear beneath the earth. He tells himself that it doesn't make him sad, because he is cold and unfeeling just like the stars he watches.
Barricades fall, scraps of wood and stone pushed helter-skelter by the feet of the conquerors, dirt-smeared boots cracking the delicate faces of foolish young boys who died too early. He tells himself that it doesn't make him sad, because they were simply lawbreakers, and lawbreakers are nothing to him.
He has already fallen, just not all the way.
He fell the moment he didn't pick up a gun from a nearby table, turn around and shoot the fool who thought mercy meant a thing to him.
No, he thinks, he fell long before that.
He fell the moment his eyes met those other eyes, those strange, foreign eyes behind which lie stranger feelings.
He had merely neglected to acknowledge that he had fallen. Now he has, and he can fall literally as well as inside his head.
He is ready for the fall. He has been ready for the fall since the moment he realized that everyone falls in their time. It is his time. He will fall.
As he's falling, he forces himself to think only of falling. He does not allow himself to think of stars, or of eyes, or of barricades. He has been living his life for the moment of falling, and now that the moment has been reached, he lives it with a strange happiness, thinking only of the falling.
For some, falling is seeing someone's face in a chance meeting in a garden. For some, falling is crumpling over a red flag on a lonely barricade. For him, falling is impulsively closing a short distance until he feels a warmth touching his coldness, and he who has lived thinking only of the future lives now for this one moment, for this glorious, beautiful fall.
All things fall in their time, he knows, but he is lucky. He is one of the few who has someone there to catch him.