He opens his eyes to darkness and for a moment he thinks he has won. But--no. That would be too easy. There is always an epilogue. There is always a coda.
The darkness is different here. It is different in the infinitesimal and infinite ways that everything here is different: strange and wrong and off-kilter, strange in a beautiful way that creeps up inside of you and burns the light from your eyes until seeing through darkness is second nature. If the light doesn't scatter quite right, the darkness falls on him all off-kilter. It weighs heavily on his limbs when he tries to move and tickles him in neurotic bursts from the inside out when he endeavors to be still.
"It's all a bit apocalyptic, isn't it?" That is Charlotte's voice, warm and sharp through the fuzziness of the night, and he means it, or he would mean it if it weren't medically impossible: his blood swishes to a dead stop and then runs twice as fast, all of it rushing straight to his heart in cataclysmic floods as she speaks. "I mean--this place? These people?" She is smiling, holding a flashlight--a torch, he corrects himself, she would call it a torch, and this is just something else that he will forget--in one hand. It makes the big edgeless shadows in his tent look like monsters, and he hears his mother's voice in his head, firm and uncompromising. There is no such thing. He starts against the unexpected shine, stutters, and then smiles back, smiles at her; silently begs her not to stop.
"Apocalyptic--you mean--ahhh--an end of the world sort of thing? That's, well, it's kind of silly, isn't it. I mean--what do you mean?" His heart rate is high enough to be that of a mouse. (The end of the maze is that way, silly.) You weren't supposed to remember. He is speaking far too quickly and his mind is blocked up and cluttered with too many things remembered and too few forgotten, big outlandish silhouettes in the corners of his cranium, roadblocks, slowing him down, her body limp and crumpled on the green sinking ground and the blood on her crackled lips mingling with his tears, red like that red, red dress, and his mind can't keep up with the pace of his quick breathing and his darting eyes and his fluttering hands. This time around everything is worse because this time a slip of the tongue could be fatal. This time, he could give it all away. One corner of her mouth goes down but the other tilts higher. They are balancing each other out, he thinks in a desperate urge to anchor himself to something. Equilibrium.
"It was a joke, Daniel." She looks at him sideways. The corners of her eyes go dark. "Are you all right?"
"Dan," he says softly. Dan. He doesn't want to waste time on extraneous syllables. She raises one eyebrow and tilts her head and the flashlight (the torch) in her hand makes them both look like ghouls. He feels a phantom pain in his stomach, where a bullet should be. I'm sorry. He nods, two, three times, who cares how many times, why does it even matter, and she touches his hand; heat crawls up his arm in a rose-colored swell.
"Dan, then," she says, and when she kisses him he feels his heart crack beneath her lips.
(Look straight ahead
There's nothing left to see
What's done is done
This life has got its hold on me
Just let it go
What now can never be
-Beautiful Things by Andain)