I wear the brand of traitor
The shades bend the moonlight and make the smoke from his cigarette look transparently white and glow in swirls towards the ceiling.
They lay completely bare and sheeted with sweat, and Alex asks, "Do you ever miss it?"
He can feel her stretch her arms out beside him and turn on her side to face him. He thinks of lying, but something (he's doesn't quite know what) pulls the truth from his lips.
He says, "No," and watches her sigh and roll onto her back again, the bones of her ribs barely visible as sinking and rising hills beneath her skin. She takes a deep breath (he blocks the thought out that there's a good chance she's crying) and watches the skin of her stomach pull and stretch taut before releasing.
"I feel like I should, but I don't. At all." He thinks maybe he hates it, even, but he doesn't tell her that because he doesn't want to scare her. He looks over at her face, hidden in shadow. "Do you?" he asks for once more out of curiosity than out of need to fill silences.
She doesn't say anything, but she reaches for his cigarette, bringing it to her swollen lips and takes a puff without coughing, and he thinks that somehow that answers his question.
Sigh the little sucked-in breath hiding everywhere beneath your words
It's old and the paint is peeling and all the walls are a strange deep green that reminds them of things they wont admit out loud, and Alex ends up loving it.
And for the same reason that she does, he can't stand it.
He thinks it might have something to do with always being forced to be a guide, a mediator, a recruiter, a business man that makes him accept a job as a sales clerk in a small bookstore a few blocks from the loft. It's the first time in (years? decades? centuries?) a long time that he's not a manager or guardian of something (something special) and even though it makes him feel uneasy at first, he grows used to it.
--
He takes her out like he knows he should have all along. He buys her dinner, he pays for carriage rides, he takes her to the Italian cinema (even though she doesn't understand anything they say save 'yes,' 'no,' and 'excuse me'; he of course understands perfectly).
He takes her to see an orchestra play in a big, old antique opera house. She wears an old blue dress and a large fur coat and red lipstick; he dresses in all black. The music spills out over them and swells and as the strings bring the piece to crescendo, he looks over and she is crying. She feels him, moves her eyes so openly towards his (not hiding, not pretending) and he thinks right then that he might be in love with her.
(He hopes more than anything that that part of him has been salvaged.)
Three nights after the orchestra, he comes home noisily and snow-covered and excited (more excited than Alex has ever seen). He smiles and leaves the door open to the cold and before she can point it out, he makes her close her eyes and hold out her hands.
Through the small slit in her eyes she can manage without being caught, Alex sees him flee out the door in a flurry of black wool and tan skin and hes back a second later, lugging something she can't make out behind him.
She closes her eyes to not get caught and feels something cold, hard, and thin in her hands. He says, "Open," and when she does, she's confused.
But she holds it up to her eyes, turns it over in her hands, and realizes it's a cello bow.
She glances up and sees him, smiling so wide, and a large, old wooden cello next to him.
Her heart swells and she smiles brightly, and as she grips the stick in her hand and he kisses her and she starts to cry, she can't believe it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it, it becomes blood
Three months later, she stares at the cello in the corner collecting dust and feels like she's choking. She doesn't fall to her hands and knees, she doesn't break anything or drink herself calm. She just sits crying silently and stares. She was starting to get good, very good, because all she did was play that damn thing, all she wanted was to make it worth it, make her worth it, to make him proud of her. In the end, none of it mattered.
She thinks maybe she should have burned it or smashed it up into shards, but after it all, after every thing, she doesn't think she could take anymore violence.
She doesn't like to consider that a part of her needed it to know it was there and to know it'd all happened, that it wasn't some long, lucid dream that you wake from groggy and confused and feel like you've been asleep forever (for nine months).
He'd gone back, of course he'd gone back. Of course he'd been contacted, a white-haired woman at their door in the middle of the night speaking of urgency and responsibility and "taking the place that has always been saved for you" and of course he'd responded. Of course he left. She doesn't think it was easy, but she wishes she did think that. It hurts just as much thinking that it was hard for him. (After even this, she doesn't want him hurt.)
He'd packed one suitcase and kissed her for a long time and brushed her hair back and pulled her hand up to kiss her palm and then he was gone. Not because he missed it. Not because he wanted to go. But because it was in him, apart of him, running through his veins and no matter what, you can't run from that. No matter what, you can't run from blood.
She needed the cello as some kind of scrap of happiness, a scarping attempt of a reminder.
(Where was that physical proof for all the other strange occurrences and universal truths that made up the entirety of her life?)
But thinking of it, she's sure she wouldn't want proof of anything but him.
He runs it now, that place. (Her birthplace, her home) He gives the orders (not makes sure they're carried out) and he influences lives and he guides the flowing movement of a struggling civilization that has long been lost to the world. He's what he tried so hard to get away from, scrambled to extract himself from the twisting, enveloping history of it all. He tried so hard. But you can't exorcise what lies sewn into the marrow of your bones.
If Alex has learned anything at all, she has learned that.
No one sees the fuel that feeds you
His (his)(he feels bitter just thinking the word) people have all died off. Murder, sickness, suicide. It doesn't matter what it's seemed or looked like, because he knows he was behind every single thing that happened. In some (most) cases, it was a subconscious thing. A need, a pull to be alone (no, not alone. never alone.) He loved Jacob, respected him more than almost anybody, but he definitely did not envy him this set of abilities, this power that now lies in his hands.
He never wanted anything like this. He was free once. He had gotten away, but when Eloise appeared out of the Italian night and simply spoke the truth, he knew. There was no other path for him but to be damned here, always.
Sometimes he sits close and lets the heat from the fire burn him (like her lips) (like the sun). He lets his hair grow out and stops shaving. He fishes for himself and reads what he can find scattered in remnants of beach camps. There are no more ships and there are no more planes. No more crashes. No more survivors.
He thinks of her constantly. He feels bad, worse than bad, still, after years, that is the one emotion in him that has not dimmed, the one thing that has refused to snuff out. That, the love that belongs to her.
But now he's got power. And he has no one but God to answer to, and he feels it in his bones that God will grant him this one small (hopefully salvageable) thing.
He doesn't know how long it'll take, but he knows it like he knew to come back, like he knew to leave in the first place, he knows it in his bones that it'll happen. Until then, he will sit and he will wait for her to be carried back. To him, and to their home.