The war is over, but the city is still burning.
From the rooftops she can see smoke, the butter-yellow glow of flame in alleyways. She can see the charred, desiccated remains of churches and houses, singe-marks where the firestorm hit. She can see bodies in the streets, blood in the gutters—she can see devastation, destruction, hatred. From the rooftops she can see the remains of the city; she never loved it, not really, never called it home, but she regrets its loss.
The city is burning.
The war isn't truly over, though. It never is, is it? She walks through the streets and sees scars on faces, etched in fear and regret and pain. This is the kind of hurt that never heals, the kind of wretchedness from which no one ever recovers. She watches mothers bury their children, sees the ash-blackened faces of hungry orphans cowering in storm drains. Help us, their eyes plead, and she walks on.
Her sword is still red with that man's blood, the coppery metallic tang an ache in her teeth and the back of her throat. She can still remember the way the blade slid through flesh, torn like paper—she shivers at the thought, or maybe that's just the cold. It's cold here at night, even in the aftermath of so much bright-burning fire; it's always cold on the underground, even in summer. It's a complicated thought, full of complicated sensations—cold and pain and blood. The scar on her chest aches with remembered agony.
"I'm alive," she observes, and a charcoal-flavored wind steals her words out of her mouth. "We are alive."
There are so many dead, but she is alive.
Later, when they've washed the blood from their skin and hair, when she's hung her sword and he's put away his guns, he pins her against the wall and kisses her like drowning. She hates that, hates that he can do that (he's taller and stronger than she is), but she needs it right now, needs him to take control and push her and make her feel.
(In the aftermath of so much death, how could she ever feel?)
They fuck on his unmade bed, and she drags her fingernails down his chest and tilts her head back. It hurts, sometimes, when he's feeling rough, and she loves that ache of being so filled. He swears, something low and filthy under his breath, and presses the pad of his thumb between her breasts, firm against the ridges of her scar; it burns, sensitive even now, and she hisses her discontent, rocking down against him.
Sex between them is never about love, really. It's about control.
You weren't half bad, he tells her, and it takes a moment for the statement to parse through her fogged mind. Least you're not dead.
"Your faith in me is inspiring," she bites out, tongue pressed firmly to the backs of her teeth. He makes her angry, makes her blood heat in a way that has nothing to do with his fingers between her legs or his grip on her thigh. "Shut up."
He just laughs and, with an expert twist of his fingers, makes her come.
He finds her later, standing on the edge of the roof. She's wearing nothing but a long shirt; he's wearing nothing but a pair of trousers and a cigarette, and when he presses up against her from behind she can feel the heat of his body against her back. Thinking too hard, he says, but his tone knows the feeling.
"The city is still burning," she observes, raising a hand in a brief, controlled gesture towards the glow on the western horizon. "It hasn't gone out all night."
It'll burn for a while, he says, and draws on his cigarette. Leave it.
"I—"
Leave it.
The war is over, but the city is still burning, and from the rooftops she watches it die.