i had such positive response to my last piece that i published ("an infinite nuclear summer") that i was inspired to continue musing on that idea. i had been experimenting with mapping my original fiction writing style (prose poetry/hybrid fiction) onto a fic like this. i decided to do another piece in the same style, just to have some fun. i also listened to fineshrine by purity ring over and over while writing this i'm sure that's extremely healthy.

I.

If his life was a wound, then you are the scar tissue splitting over and over again like the so many hearts you have had, patched up and broken without knowing why.

Once, there was one of you, in the way that there is one of everyone. One of everyone in the universe who is born, who lives, who dies.

The day you took his hand you should've known your life would've never been like that. Never ever.

The stars were going out, one by one. He was being forgotten, destroyed, the entire course of his life poisoned by death and destruction and loneliness. You watched his face as his past crumbled behind him and he could only scream in terror at the realization that he was ending. A new universe was unraveling in his eyes, one where he had died every moment and failed each and every time. A universe where he could never quite save them all in time, no matter how hard he tried. And he looks up at you and you realize: how could you not give everything for this?

You tell him to think of you once in a while, just to be romantic. Maybe he will, just to be romantic himself. You know he's an old sap with a cuddly streak. The thought makes you smile before you step into your death.

It feels like confetti and you're falling around him, all over him, past him, through him, towards him. Until, over and over, it's finished.

II.

After he finds you, impossibly, it's quiet between the two of you. You know you had fully intended to die, in that moment and in all the other moments. He knows it, too. You've seen him scream at monsters and laugh with anxious joy at your cleverness but the shroud of death silences him. He seems unable to reconcile that he is the cause of all of this.

You find him giving you a bath, after it's all over.

He sits with you quietly and you hold your knees to your chest and let him squeeze warm water out of a sponge down your bare back. Bravely, he traces your vertebrae. With your chin on your shoulder, you watch them.

You had been his impossible girl. Now, for different reasons, you realize you still are.

Before, you had been impossible in death. Now you are impossible in life.

Life in the universe where he is, too, alive. He is all those stars that had gone dark at his absence. Something else blossoms in your mind as he's kissing the spot where your neck and shoulder meet: You are all those stars as well.

You are every star he saved. You are love in two hearts. Three, if you count your own. You are all of that. Once, he spread his hand over your palm and told you the story of yourself, all your atoms waiting at the kick-bang-whiz of the universe. The stuff of stars and galaxies and black holes until one day they decided to be you.

You were all those stars he had saved. And so was he.

Almost unknowingly (almost), you begin to hum "Habanera" to yourself, to that death. Water rushes over your bare shoulders, followed by his hands and without realizing it, he joins in. Soon you're giggling and grabbing his hands and you know that this is special, this is something no one else will have.

A thousand lives you lived just to see him for one sparkling moment. Worth it.

The water is cold now but his hands are warm as he wraps you up in them and whispers how happy he is that you're alive.

And he thanks you.

II.

To really show he's thankful, really and truly incredibly thankful to the point that it still makes him quiet at the thought of what you've done, he takes you to see The Beatles perform in Paris in 1965.

You try to act nonchalantly chuffed but inside you scream your guts out.

He knows you're faking and covers his ears like a good sport while you allow yourself one truly loud and guttural scream of excitement. He grins the whole time.

He says he has something you can wear to the concert, something of the times, because of course he does.

He holds your hand as you jump up and down and he lets you scream all you want. A few times you catch him screaming too. This man beside you has held whole galaxies, races, constellations in his fist and still he has the widest of smiles on his face and turns to you and says This is my favorite song.

And in the middle of the crowd, as a girl beside you faints from sheer excitement, he wraps an arm around your waist and takes your hand and the two of you dance. He sways with you as you hold his shoulder, your faces impossibly close before you can't stand it another second and put your head on his chest (because you can't reach his shoulder) and dance with him through the rest of the set.

During the encore you think you feel him whispering something into your hair but you don't say anything.

Back in your room on a spaceship in the middle of the night sky over Paris, you open 101 Places to See and put a small red check next to where your mother at 7-years-old had scribbled "see The Beatles play live" on a fresh new page and punctuated the statement with a heart.