Please read this warning: I do not own Rio, Jewel, or any character or theme used in the Rio film. They belong solely to Blue Sky Films and 20th Century Fox.
HEY ALL! xD I'm so sorry I left you guys… I really had to study for exams (which is everything over here in Singapore) so I had to dump FFN somewhere :S Haha. Sorry.
Anyways, I decided to make this new two-shot, set straight after Love? I know you're waiting for NtY to be updated but um… I have no inspiration for it. I completely ran out (the ending of Chapter 12 was supposed to be more dramatic than comedic) of stuff for it… so in order to let my thinking juices out (no TWSS joke intended) I had to write this. Yeah; I've been listening to too much Coldplay as well.
So here you go. Epilogue to Love? I know a lot of you weren't happy with the ending… so I decided to do this.
P.S. Yes, up to today, my mother will not allow me to buy Rio on DVD. So here I am, still confused over the specifics, though I doubt I will need to utilise any over in this story. Maybe.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." ~Revelations 21:1-4
Humans have religion to save them. They often say that Heaven is a place so paradisiacal and blows your mind with the awe and wonder that can be contained by infinity. That's why Christians evangelise and believe in God and Jesus- because it would ultimately end up in this place called Heaven, where everlasting life without earthly troubles and joy –not temporal happiness, but eternal contentment- reigns. And everybody wants to be in a place where no sorrow, death, pain, suffering, tears, mourning or hate exists. Everything is perfect.
Of course, birds aren't humans. Did you ever look at your deceased parakeet and wonder where in the world it would go? Birds don't believe in God. Or Allah or Buddha or any divine entity. Heck, some humans treat us like religious symbols. But we don't ascend to Heaven or Hell or any place like that. It might seem predictable or cliché or call-it-what-you-want, but we roam the earth. After all, we were animals – we are not human whose lives are controlled by themselves and themselves only. For animals, we go wherever nature and humans take us, thus it is only fitting that we are chained here forever. A 3.26464 million pound burden that pulls you to itself at a 10ms^-2 acceleration- you would die near instantly if you try to escape, and thus your only option is to drag your feet across the ground and live with it.
This is my experience of dying- I see a mere wire cuboid, pulled to the earth from a height of merely 10 metres to produce a force of (assuming that a cage is 2kg) 20N, the weight of a kindergartener, crashing onto my head. It is only a flash, a nanosecond image that is quickly erased by darkness. This must be what an executed victim must have felt like- one moment you feel the rope around your neck and your heart beating like a jackhammer, and suddenly, nothing. Just like a computer shut down- gone with the wind.
One must also consider, however, that the spirit and soul of this living entity still prevails on. I am no ghost or paranormal being when I pass from life to death but rather I am reborn. I can catch a glimpse from the feathers from my wing, anyway, but all I can really envision is when I regain consciousness, I see Jewel's body, right next to mine. I am completely relieved to see that Jewel, the one I had been trying to save and preserve her life, the one I felt destined to be with and love with all my heart, was alive – her chest rose and fell, the tide of the ocean. Of course, I couldn't say the same for my carcass. I am physically dead. I used to question this statement as one could not really say it without lying their noses off, but I can say for a fact that I am dead. Gone from this world, the only remnant being my earthly body, an artefact that would decompose overtime as the sands of time blew over and erased it completely from the memory of anybody in the world.
However, the body that is utilised to represent me as an individual in this new world remains the same. The feathers from my wing and the slit stuck to my mouth that is my beak is in field of vision. I cannot use the water surface as a mirror, since I am not in the real world anymore, but I know I am only Tyler Blu Gunderson, having died from saving the love of my life from death, passed into this new world that is neither Heaven or Hell. Birds roam in the very same geographical, astronomical place they came from –the real world- but this is not the same one. It was Paradise, where you had not a single care to drag you down and you could do whatever you wanted.
But honestly, if Paradise was just an ethereal form of Earth, what difference is there?
I looked at Jewel. Her face was that of an angel, divinely beautiful and peaceful in her slumber. She was motionless, but when she woke up, she would be normal once again. She'd be found by some stranger, it would be all over news, and she would fly in this world with new-found freedom- the real world would suddenly be her Paradise. Of course I would be able to see her and follow her and memorise every single word she utters, but she would wander through this world with full knowledge that I was dead.
To be honest, I would not know which emotion would dominate Jewel- would it be elation and relief that the one that loved her so much it hurt had vanished from this world, that any anguish laden on her dissipated, just like that, and she would be able to live to see another day? Or would it be sorrow and fury that her best friend –and the only one of her species-, the one that she platonically loved and promised her that he would always be there to care and protect her, now was gone from this world forever? The mind of Jewel, I figured, was like Greek Scriptures- it's out there for everybody to see and attempt to decipher, but no matter how long you were with her, you could never know her true thoughts or emotions.
This was also the reason; I figured too, that we were never actually meant to be together.
How would Jewel react, I wondered, when she woke up and realised that I was dead. Not that it was some freak show spectacle, but her reaction… I wouldn't know what she would do or how she would do it. My carcass will never come back to life and jump to its talons, the crown of Fe^3+ reddish-brown and the concept of death completely disregarded. Of course, the real world was scientific- once your heart stops pounding and your breathing rate decelerates to a complete stop, you are eliminated from there, forever. Jewel, like me, would not come to terms with such ludicrousness and injustice and have her heart stamped on. Something of which I should be experiencing – after all, I've become used to it.
Alternatively, she would be indifferent – the death of the one you know is always tragic, and this neutralises the fact that I was gone, a burden chained to her talon and a rock laden on her heart now removed. She would be able to roam this world as the last of her kind –unique, and no artificial, forced attraction towards my unsophisticated self to 'save the species'- and fly, tasting the wind in her beak as she streamlined through the air gracefully and magnificently, shearing through everything that came past her. The sky, of course, isn't really matter. The only matter in there is the tiny air particles invisible to bird eye that slide over you like teardrops – you are merely soaring through empty space, freedom found in something so easy, yet something so difficult for ignoramuses... such as myself.
I looked upon Jewel's face. I could see her, touch her (her feathers are still as silky smooth, polka-dotted with silicon dioxide) and smell her (she smelt like the jungle, the aromas various species of flowers emitted with a hint of citrus) – she was alive. To be honest, initially I had thought she would be captured by Nigel, that cocky cock of a cockatoo, since she didn't have the strength to fight him off… but I figured that was a rare moment where fate stepped into the real world and allowed an innocent life to live. That was astounding; and I have whoever it was to thank for it.
But the fact is, I was dead, and she was alive. She would roam this world without me, alone, solitary (the connotation attached here is deliberately vague) but I would know wherever she was, almost as if I were stalking her. It was almost creepy, in that sense, when something follows you for the rest of your life, an omnipresent spirit, watching every single action of her until she breathed her last breath. I mean, where else could I have gone? Going to Linda and Tulio would do me no good –it would only tear me apart even more, another entity with sentimental burden to shred my soul even more than it already was, and she couldn't even see me- and the rest of the world would not even find me. Not even Rafael, who was too busy with a family to take care of, a mate he could depend on and simultaneously protect, a complete entity having survived the tide of the real world.
But for me, I was dead, and it was all because of a stupid cage. And now Jewel would never be able to see me even though I would be right next to her, telling her that I loved her countless times despite the fact that she won't hear it, period.
And when she opened her gorgeous ocean blue eyes she would not see me standing over her, the tears now welling in my eyes for having seen full Jewel's face. Normally, it would make my then-heart race and make me hyperventilate if I had the then-lung capacity to do so, to see it and remind me why I could live another day and be with the love of my life even if she did not reciprocate my feelings. Of course, I couldn't live another day. And it would be unlikely that Jewel ever does love me, now that, you know, I was dead.
She saw only the sky, a bunch of empty space with particles you couldn't see anyway.
She blinked a few times, before she surveyed her surroundings. My body was out of her field of vision, as she surveyed the horizon of the beach. It was a marvellous sight –though it paled in comparison to the bird looking at it- the water glistened so much like glass that you thought you could ice-skate on it, the sand grains beneath the two of us massaging any surface that made contact with it. The sun had begun to peer over the surface, its rays of hope shining on the optimistic and pessimistic whether they wanted it or not. You could do anything on beaches, I supposed, ranging from a family picnic to wild sex to hiding a murder, since the vast sheet of sand and the gigantic sheet of water could supply anything that provided pleasure to you… except for true love, of course.
That was when the inevitable occurred- the ravishing sight of the setting dissipated and immediately, her eyes scanned for another living-being on the beach, who had sacrificed himself for her, who loved her so much he wouldn't mind dying twice if it meant she lived, who had been told that she won't fear as long as she was with him.
How she was going to survive in this harsh world now, however, is beyond me.
"Blu, wake up," Jewel whispers while rocking my body, her voice as sweet as honey, her warm and gleeful smile shattering my heart- she looked as if she were expecting my eyes to open and tell her that we're going to be alright, that I have her and she has me, that nothing will go wrong as long as one of us was not out of the equation. I wanted to shake her and tell her I was right here in spirit, not physically alive but still present. But I wanted to say I was asleep too, and that this was not real but rather a fantasy, a trick of the mind where I would truly open my eyes where it would meet Jewel's for her to see me. The way Jewel acted was if she really wanted me alive –which might be a hint to the fact that this is all just a dream- and all the more the sorrow gnawed at the edges of my soul, as if it were a paper ignited to flames, flames that were fuelled by the first teardrop that slithered down my face. Even in Paradise tears existed; Revelations were blatant lines.
"Blu," she said, a decibel louder and rocking my carcass with a fraction of a Newton more. All it needed was just a hair's-breadth of a unit of force for the body to lose its momentum on the pivot of in-contact-silicon-dioxide, rolling over for my body to come alive-face-to-dead-face with her, not a response generated from my body and the iron-infused blood on my head like a crown of thorns.
The real world crashes on us.
"Blu!" Jewel suddenly yells, her honey-imbued voice now impure. "BLU!" She shrilled, and her wings futilely grab my body's shoulders, as if her divine touch could resurrect my pathetic carcass, and shakes it like a maraca. Maracas were tools used by people to make music- only when shaken could they be utilised to their full extent. You could not say the same for carcasses, as they are dead. Their spirit is now gone, and it is merely a piece of flesh and bones (in fact, they are regardless of life) on the shore, left to rot and return to the environment where some lucky plant uses it for nutrients. But no matter how they are shaken, the sands of time will never reverse- they stay stagnant in their velocity to move forward. And as of any point of time where after the wire cage had crashed on me, I will not come back to life. I will be dead forever.
How in the world could I come to terms with this, let alone Jewel?
My vision is cloudy, but I can see Jewel's face of fury and indignation. "Don't play games with me, Blu," she seethed, trying to pretend herself and me that the entity that represents me is physically alive and merely attempting to fool the love of his life, the one he could always be honest to and slash or never trick her into the unthinkable notion in the intention of leisure.
"You told me you love me, remember? Wake up… don't joke… wake up… WAKE UP!" The last two words snapped me out of whatever trance I was in, but it failed to hamper to twin streams of liquid sourcing from my eyes, hot moisture that irritated my corneas and made my nose runny. What kind of Paradise is this, that the real world can still backstab you and overstuff you with earthly emotions and experiences? What kind of Freedom Kingdom is this, where you can't look at the love of your life mourning over your carcass without bursting into tears? This must be Hell, where all the animals are disposed off, only the torture was subtle –like cyanide- and there were no flames. Only a beach that completely misled you and having subject to seeing your love weep at the loss of you. Of course I could leave and decide not to completely disregard Jewel to save myself the pain of loss… but we're chained-together birds, period. How could I leave her?
"No… you must live, Blu," she pleaded over my lifeless carcass wistfully, as if mere verbal commands could perform the miracle of imbuing a spirit back in his one-pound body. "You must live, Blu. You must live. You mustn't die." I can already see tears veiling her sapphire irises, a mourning gown instantaneously donned, but for me they were already spilling like blood poured out for all. I should have expected her to weep and mourn so hurtfully until her heart bled (after all, what kind of sane bird would not cry over someone you liked… platonically)… such that I would know what to do, how to react, how to keep Jewel from having her heart broken. I wouldn't be here sobbing and wishing this hadn't occurred in the first place, and that Jewel and I would be together in this place called Paradise and live in a metaphorical sense, happy forever after.
But of course, that would've been the ONLY way out. Either way I'd still be dead- Jewel would still be depressed and wailing over me… and/or herself. And either way it would be all my fault.
By the time Jewel smashed her voice in an attempt to revive me ("YOU MUST LIVE! BLU!") she completely lost it, breaking down into tears and joining me as I mourned over the chasm that I had created between us- the real world and Paradise. Part of my sane, unemotional self told me that she was alive and I should feel relieved and overjoyed that she gets to enjoy her life without me. But then my illogical, hopeless romantic of me screamed into my ears, with as much audible intensity as Jewel had ten seconds ago- why didn't you take her along with you? Now she would be eternally separated from you, lonely and solitary and having part of her soul ripped from her body- she would never be able to see you again, look into your eyes, feel your breath against her feathers or even love you.
Freedom was relative – you could be here, in the 'comfort' of the knowledge that your love was alive and well, and you could literally do as your heart pleases to do. But when you're soaring through empty space without any companion, a hollow opening in your heart where someone used to occupy, then how could you be free? The biggest burden that ever existed in this world was not people, but the grief that the person brings about, be it intentional or not.
And the above hypothesis is based on the flimsy assumption that Jewel truly cared and… and loved me. She didn't even tell me that she loved me or hinted any attraction towards me… except that one time ("I won't fear. Not when you're with me."). I claim to know her… yet I don't even know what was best for her. I save her life and here is she, in a crumpled state and weeping over a jerk's body- a jerk who could not grasp the fundamental concepts of love.
"Why? Why? WHY? Why did you have to leave me?" she continued to screech, even though we both knew that if I was alive right now (and even then, my spirit has not been eradicated from this geographical location) I would not be able to answer such a question. Why did I leave her? My hasty, romanticist side of me told me I left her because I wanted to give her a new life, a restart button that allowed her to move on with no 'save-the-species' motif, no burden of canon love, no me.
But then, I had left her in the real world, when she could have been with me in Paradise, in this new place where joy actually exists and mourning is absent. Of course, there were blatant lies. Stupid, stupid, stupid lies that the world laid upon us.
I looked upon her, face buried in the feathers of my carcass and garlanding them with tears and small whimpering voices irritating the stillness of the dawn. Did she really view me with such immense sentimental value? Did she now see me as a lamb, sacrificed for her non-existent sins? Did she truly see me as part of the equation, part of who she was meant to be? Fuck romantic love, I could have remained the best friend who did not let his emotions get the upper hand and tended to her every need, wiping away her tears and providing a shoulder to cry on when she was sad and giving her whatever she needed, twenty four seven and aiming to please her.
I went to my carcass – only to realise that I could literally put myself through it, like a ghost going through walls, but rather the only object I could faze through. And so I laid myself down, still in a constant war with my tear glands, and I felt Jewel's warm tears spill all over me, her face a surface of warmth and sorrow and her feathers ruffling against my body. Being in my carcass did not make it alive, but rather I could feel every sensation that was upon it – a parasitic relationship between ethereal and real. Then she looked upon me, where her eyes locked into my carcass's closed eyelids but her gorgeous twin cerulean gemstones locked with mine. They were veiled with misery of loss, but still sparkled beautifully nevertheless.
"I love you, Blu," she whispered, words that made my non-existent heart burst forth into fireworks and sent shudders down my non-existent spine. It meant the world to me that she loved me now and my mission had succeeded in a Pyrrhic victory, and that she reciprocated my feelings and we would be together forever, and that my fantasies had come true… but of course, the chasm that separated us, Jewel in the real world and me in this so-called 'Paradise', just negated everything. Nothing can come true.
And then the most unexpected thing happened- she reached down and pressed her beak against my carcass's, or rather mine. Her breath tasted like wild berry in the jungle, where she had lived her whole life until she met me, and her beak moved slowly but rhythmically, like a chorus of a death song. I found myself closing my eyes and savouring probably the only chance this would ever happen, moving my beak and synchronising with hers, though I knew that she wouldn't feel it. Love numbed you from feeling anything.
She slumped on my body, almost as if she were dead, and stared at my face. Her face was a melting pot of emotions – the look a lover gives after she donates her virginity to you, the look a lover gives after you've betrayed her, the look a lover gives when you've died, the look anybody gives when she wants to believe that everything was merely a dream, an Inception idiocy and something that isn't truly real. Something that was ethereal and was meant to teach you a lesson, something that required you to acquire something before you were allowed to exit.
Jewel and I have learnt so much about the illogical concepts of love, the cruelty of life and the real world, the war between love and hate, life and death. And yet, everything is real, not merely a fantasy but how the state of world actually and should be. Or rather, if eliminated the choices that were not compatible with life and completely illogical, leaving behind logic- that was, life always ended in death, and love never lasts forever. The only thing that does is the real world.
"Blu…" she croaked, so softly it took me several units of concentration to catch her voice, laced with despair and tainting her beautiful, angelic voice. It was ironic that I would be the angel, I figured, since she was the divinely ravishing one among the both of us. I guess that's why she lived – angels were real, not just ethereal or some dream, and should exist in the world rather than the hopeless, jerk-ass romanticist.
There were so many things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that I was in a better place and that I was with her ethereally even though she couldn't see me. I wanted to tell her that she should not worry about me and continue living as if I didn't exist, do as she wanted to do…only to realise that she didn't want this. She wanted me. She wanted to feel my gaze on her feathers, to taste my breath against her, to cry on my shoulder to let the grief overflow her. I wanted to tell her that I loved her and I wanted all these things as well. I wanted her to feel my kiss and feel me embrace her.
But then, she lifted her head up, and her eyes wandered away from my carcass. She stared at the horizon once more, as the sun had finally revealed itself, a full 1,519,651,984,000 km^2 of light that illuminating the face of the earth, Rio crawling at the edges as morning arrived. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like if the sun disappeared – no light, no hope, no warmth, and no life. Is that what death was like, when the sun's warmth was never felt and light was completely absent, and trapped in an abyss forever?
Jewel took one step towards the coastline. It was subtle at first, but then she took another. And another, and another, until I heard the jangle of metal as she now trudged along the bed of sand to peer into the reflection of herself in the water surface. I followed her, and there I saw her miserable, tear-dried face, in full crystal-clear view for public display. It cut me to the bone that she was hurting… love made you do that. And what really crushed me was that I had caused this.
I don't know what Jewel was thinking. She certainly did not see my reflection, but the way she pondered over her reflection was like she was wondering what she saw in herself. She must have seen a hollow shell of her former self, no longer free but a mere material object left on the road for some heartless person to step on. She must have wondered what life looked like without me – and that, despite the sun gleefully throwing light like free white flowers all over the place, life was completely bleak. She could see write through it, and to be honest, it was only a sheet of silicon dioxide. It was a compound hard to melt, hard to break, hard to even know where the hell it came from, but that was what it was- and it was fact everybody had to accept.
Jewel plunged her head into the water, to refresh herself and blow the air out of her, the sorrow that had been stuck in her windpipe and the emotions she had been bottling. She wanted to wake up from this haunting nightmare, where she would lift her head from the surface and realise that everything was only dream.
There were only two problems with that theory: one, everything wasn't a dream. Spiritual and ethereal, yes, but completely real all the same, the wary net of fantasy broken by the burden of the real world. Two, Jewel's head never emerged from the surface.
Not even after a minute.
And that was what it took me before it dawned on me that she was going to drown herself.
So… erm… review arrow, anybody? No one? Ah heck.
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