Prologue to Corrosion
She told him things would be different. He told her it felt like a new life. After the disease was gone, they both knew it was a second chance, and when the pain behind their eyes subsided, he could finally speak to her, clearly and uninhibited. She kissed him first and she had never seen him blush before. He entwined his fingers in hers to know that she was real and concrete, an anchor to keep him steady, a heartbeat to keep him warm.
The first time they made love, it was hastened and awkward. He didn't want to hurt her, and in the nights that followed he had nightmares of her cut up, dismembered. But she would hold him whenever he awoke, knowing that it would take a while to seal the proverbial cracks in his head.
Time drew them closer. She kept acting as the cornerstone of his new life and eventually he stopped avoiding intimacy. He began smiling more around her and hugging her tightly when he could, and she would hear him sigh with relief every time as if half-expecting it to be a dream, as if amazed and thankful that she was still there for him. The assurance she gave him helped alleviate the ghosts that stayed in his heart until they were nothing but shadows dissipating in her bright light. Their nights became torn fragments of pleasure, another world beneath the stars, separate from their daytime cordiality. His nightmares stopped. She couldn't have been happier.
A steady future, one neither of them thought possible, had appeared on their horizon. They were inseparable. He no longer came home late or disappeared for hours. He was there whenever she needed him and he needed her. The intensity of their love heightened. Lust became obsession, and he was lost to her beauty, acquiescing to her in every way. The gentleness of his touch succumbed to her frantic demands. She was caught in everything he offered her, and he filled her days and nights, other responsibilities forgotten.
He had never felt the way he did around her ever before, and his childhood fantasies of her romantic pursuit still seemed like they should be unchallenged impossible dreams. It was unreal that she loved him, and he expected to wake up from it all one day. His infatuation turned to desperation – he never wanted to leave her and he let her do whatever she wished with him, inwardly horrified that he would never live up to her expectations. Powerlessness crushed him, yet he didn't dare try to change anything for fear that he would indeed awaken from it. Nights passed and the scratches on his back increased, deeper, their love violent.
She spoke less to him during the day, and soon her eyes stopped matching her smile. Her thoughts were swimming with him at all times and whenever he was gone for the slightest amount of time, she worried incessantly. It frightened her that she had become so dependent on another for strength because she had always been strong alone. She needed him by her and she knew that if something ever happened to him she would be left alone, detached, without anything, and she didn't want that. As time went on and her attachment to him grew unhealthy, she began to loathe the person she saw herself becoming. His smile and his voice did nothing to sate her.
Soon violence was the only means of satisfaction behind a mask of lust. He complied as he always did and she took from him what she wanted. Sweat stuck against their skin, and she felt powerless to the dominating monster she had created both within and without. He continued as instructed though aware of her shifting attitude and wondered what he had done wrong. But gratification overwhelmed him and he never asked her what was the matter. The lack of control he had always felt before now transformed to fit her newly submissive posture, and he found himself enjoying it more than anything because his whole life had been spent at the will of others, enslaved, until then. Her body was something he suddenly had explicit control over. He was lost to her all over again.
The changes in his behavior were mild at first. He was more confident around her, he laughed more, and while she only became more despondent, he seemed to always be elated in her presence. She thought she was going crazy, that their dispositions had somehow switched places over the course of nearly a year, but she still smiled happily at his progress because she knew how broken he had been.
He was changing faster than she could keep up, however. It was unclear whether this new person was his true self or whether it was still an amalgam of the past. Her fear of loving and losing him grew noxious, consuming her daily thoughts and interrupting her routines. She questioned her right to a happy life and wondered how many innocent deaths she had caused while working with Avalanche. She did not deserve him, and he was beginning to put a face on her fear. People change, and she despised the things she saw in herself. Obsessive, submissive, dependent, frightened.
Identify of oneself was far from his mind. Doubt had been expelled for the first time. He felt truly happy because the weight of guilt and fear and uncertainty was gone in her presence. He worshiped her in his own way, in silence, because he knew she had helped him find himself in her. He was convinced this was love. True love. And he made sure everyday to anticipate her needs. Her dissolving strength went unnoticed.
The first time he hurt her, it had been a cold dreary day and they had been sparring together in a section of the old city. The ruins lay across the landscape like a torn membrane, and the air still had a burnt quality to it, like the taste of hot coals and metal with every breath. Amidst the dust and fallen remnants of concrete buildings and steel supports, they stood facing one another in a clearing concealed from plain view, a single unbroken space in a city of architectural horror.
It was a matter of practice, of training. Neither one ever actually fought as though the other was an enemy, or so she believed. But that day his smile never faltered when he deflected her kick, grabbed her arm above the wrist, and threw her hard against a rusted fallen highway sign. And when she winced in pain and held her hands up to stop, it was quite a surprise when he only smiled more and advanced, poised to strike. The strange glint in his eyes made her adrenaline jump. The sword struck exactly where she had been only half a second after she had moved, painstakingly, to one side. Suddenly, he pounced at her, the peculiar smirk never leaving his face, and she could not react in time. The flat side of the sword was pressed hard against her chest, the edge uncomfortably close to her neck, and she held her breath, feeling the true alarm of combat with one's enemy.
He laughed when she yelled to stop and added that he had won that round while his smile lingered for an unfavorably long time. The ferocity of their combat was, she noted, not one of playful companions. He did not realize any error.
An unnatural silence like the forced hush of a graveyard settled between them for days.
It wasn't very long until she confronted him, softly, mildly, like a subordinate against a commander. She told him frankly what she observed in him, the changes, the fact that he had become more violent, had become someone she no longer knew. He defied her accusations, said he was only responding to cues from her, that he had never felt so alive, and that he loved her. She countered that this could not possibly be what he considered love. He objected, saying that the changes he had seen in her were equally upsetting, that he was blameless, that the abuse she felt must stem from herself since he would never hurt her. She showed him the yellowing bruise on her arm, asked why his eyes lit up with violence. He was speechless.
Confusion followed. It was the tepid uncertainty of where the other stood. He was contending with the truth she had illuminated in him, that he was perhaps, at his core, a sadistic monster. She was realizing her relationship with him would never be pure because he was no longer the man she had fallen in love with, and that he was perhaps, at his core, something else entirely. Without the urgency of battle, he felt nothing but the desperation for destruction. Without the requirement to be that pillar of strength, she felt nothing but the disgust of dependency.
It ended in one night. After succumbing to late night desire, he had left her alone once certain she had fallen asleep and paced uncomfortably in the hall outside their bedroom. Everything she had helped him with, from his fragmented identity to his torn past to his guilt, had done nothing but shape the real him. And who was he? It was troubling and yet he enjoyed this new self. He was free for once. And that's what bothered him.
She awoke with the abrupt fear of an abandoned lover, then relaxed upon hearing his soft footsteps outside the door. Collecting her thoughts, she carefully opened the door and was met by a shadow staring silently with surprise. Each felt there was much to be said.
After hushed confessions of unhappiness, he told her that he felt something new inside that he loved and that frightened him. He tried to get her to understand, but all examples were lost. How can one explain the comforts of an indefinable darkness within oneself? She shook her head and asked where he had gone and why he was still lost to her. He did not understand.
Their whispers grew louder with the impatient anxiety of two people losing an argument. She said he was becoming less the man she had known, departing only further from himself, while he contested that he had never been more connected with a true piece of his identity. Their tones escalated. It became clear that their love was not immune to the things that still plagued him.
Gravely, he told her that he loved her deeper than anything, hoping to circumvent whatever disaster lay moments away. She responded that her love was uncertain because that look in his eyes when he had hurt her reminded her of the enemy they had both known and fought. He turned to leave with a sigh of hopeless frustration, stifling the cold anger in his chest that she dare mention his resemblance to someone who had once held him at unequivocal mercy. She blocked his exit path on the stairwell, asking why he leaves when confronted, telling him they could work things out together despite it all. He told her to move, added that his demons were not gone and that furthermore he enjoyed having them.
She asked why he wouldn't want to get better, and he responded that he was better, thanks to her. He took her arm to move her aside so he could leave, just take a walk and clear his head, but she remained adamantly opposed, remaining in his way. She told him she didn't want to lose him again and that she was worried he was growing closer to that uncertain space in his mind where he becomes someone else. Someone who is definitely not him.
The accusations were more than he could bear. He wanted to show her that she was wrong. He was not someone else. Not anymore. Furthermore, he wanted her out of his way.
Muscles tensed, he grabbed her by the shoulders, fiercely, and threw her to one side in a daze of anger and uncontrolled obedience to a secret desire. Caught off guard, she slammed against the side wall then lost her balance and slipped, falling painfully onto the bottom landing. Her head cracked against the base of the window on the first floor, hard enough to shatter the bottom pane. The sound of breaking glass splintered the still air. His expression never wavered.
He strode past her in shame and defiance and left. She remembered the slight smile on his face when he had thrown her and knew he would never recover from the damage of the past. No matter how much she told herself she loved him, she knew it was no longer true, and the blinding pain swallowing her head only confirmed it.
The following morning he returned early with the breaking dawn, eyes full of apology. He had been in a reckless trance and not realized how badly he had hurt her. The bruised shoulder, the cuts on her skin from broken glass, the lump on the back of her head, and the shattered open window. It was all part of someone else's doings, he argued, knowing the awful truth.
She said nothing for a long time, but stared sadly at him, unmoving. He knew he deserved her wrath. He deserved to be hated, punished, expelled. A happy life with her was an impossibility, and he had been foolish to think, to hope, otherwise.
At length, two words punctured the silence. Her mouth opened slightly, and the rest of her face did not betray anything aside from pure finality.
"Get out."