Please read this warning: I do not own Rio, Jewel, or any character or theme used in the Rio film. They belong solely to Blue Sky Films and 20th Century Fox.

Alright guys, thanks for being patient. I present to you, the ending of Paradise, and effectively the ULTIMATE ending of Love? I guess I won't do anymore sequels, but if I do, please forgive me. I didn't originally plan to write this, either, but eh. What the heck.

There is going to be a gap in NtY's update, though. I must apologise, because there is still a lot of plot buffer before the exciting part comes, so you must bear with me. I seriously have no motivation to carry on, but I WILL finish it. If I don't, I might as well open the gate of flaming [which, by the way, is STILL CLOSED!]

To all my reviewers: I'm actually really tired of doing multiple review replies, so let us condense these things more often. Once again, thank you all for your wonderful criticisms and I think this and its prequel has been one of the most fun things I've had ever written. I don't know whether you all found this depressing, interesting or even comedic (SmartA55…) but I'm glad you all liked it. So thanks for waiting, and prepare for more captivations from this chapter… hopefully I can meet all of your expectations T_T

Anyway, let's get to business, shall we ladies and gentlemen?

P.S. Still no Rio DVD; 'nuff said, fellas.

Can you imagine this situation- in your hands lay a life that you would do anything to save, through any means and by hook or crook would you preserve this life, preventing it from slipping into the gallows of death. Death is supposed to be Heaven or Hell, and anything of those legends that Christians evangelise, and they want humans to choose to accept the existence of Jesus and God – a one-way trip to eternal paradise in Heaven- or not – and you are thrown into Hell. No matter how nice you were, no matter what good deeds you have done, no matter what lengths you would have gone to protect the life of the one you truly loved, so long as you didn't believe in something intangible and invisible, you would be sent to eternal torture. Magnificent, isn't it.

For birds, though, they don't go to Hell. That's because birds don't have the capacity to sin or do anything wrong in God's eyes because they are controlled by humans. I'm pretty sure Tulio would be sent to hell for forcing me to mate with a bird I wasn't married to. I didn't even love him… back then, that was. We can't go Heaven, either, because we also don't have the capacity to go to Church or do any religious rituals- it would seem rather idiotic if humans caught us poring over a Bible.

But then, where the hell do we go, anyway?

I look at my love and I see his eyes would never emerge from the veils of his eyelids, and that he would be incapable to attempting to reciprocate his love for me. The ironic thing is that by being completely shut off by his mission, he had accomplished it. The pain of loss searing through my veins now made my heart melt whenever I thought of him, simply because he had saved my life countless times, giving up his freedom, his interests, and ultimately his life. The way he was so devoted to me and protected me… I loved him for that. He was the only one who made me safe, with a shoulder to cry on that extended to a wing without a knife to stab backs, words that soothed me when I was down and laced with jubilation when I was elated. And who wouldn't want such an individual to commit themselves to the entity that is you.

And yet.

What if you're separated from him? What if he could no longer hear the words "I love you" whispered in his ear by the one he loved, and he could no longer feel your embrace or kiss anymore? What if everything that he's done for you –to whatever length and extent possible to bird- had gone to waste? What if he couldn't even know that what his mission had been accomplished… in a Pyrrhic victory, where by gaining your love, an un-crossable chasm now divided the two of you?

What if all the above was your fault?

I wanted to apologise to Blu, that it wasn't his fault but mine, that I loved him and that he was mine, as I was his. I wanted to cross that chasm, through any means, even, to gain the comfort and security of being with Blu, the veil of protection and love that he provided. I wanted to see him and feel him and taste him and let all my senses be dethroned by the one I loved…

I wanted to join him.

"Jewel!" I cried frantically, shaking her body with more force than intended, but it does not budge an inch. The problem with being in Paradise was that you could feel everything in the real world, seeing and feeling everything in your surroundings, but not truly able to influence anything that goes on. It was if you never existed.

I figured this was the only way that Jewel could die- she was out of breath, completely exhausted, where she couldn't clamber to the top of Christo Redeemo to jump to her death. No, she had to silently suffocate herself with a vast sheet of saltwater that the beach provided, where nobody but me could see her, where nobody would find her until later, where it would have been too late to save either of us.

She didn't deserve that.

"Jewel, get up! GET UP!" I knew that if I was alive right now and she could hear me or at least be aware of my intention to counter hers, she would immediately retract her head in obedience. But the fact was, she couldn't feel my hurt, she was completely oblivious to the fact that I wanted her to live on in this world, and that she should be free to pursue her own happiness rather than be so grief-stricken by my death as to join me here. Here everything is disconnected from the real world, semi-permeable, you could sense everything around you but you could never influence it. You couldn't influence your love from killing herself.

It was as if Paradise had allied with this cruel reality into making the innocent suffer.

"Jewel, please! Get up! Don't do this, Jewel, get up!" I nearly shrieked, while I placed my wings on her and attempted to generate small motions with them, but her body still wouldn't move. The cycle kept repeating itself, and nothing happened. I kept wondering what Jewel would have felt when she realised that I was gone eternally, and when I espied her reaction, there were so many adjectives I could input – despair, grief, indignation, heartbreak, frustration… everything that I had brought about on her. It now boomeranged to strike me in the face, plastering itself like a leech. The fact that your love was going to die and that you had no way to stop it… that was true despair, that you were completely helpless and you couldn't do anything about it. I deserved it all, I figured.

"Don't do this to me Jewel… please… I love… you…" I whimpered, before the sadness in me burst open the floodgates of my heart, and I truly broke down in sobbing. My heart was just too weak to fight the immense sorrow, though, and it completely destroyed me. How could anybody withstand such a tremendous loss, as if your soul was torn apart by intangible and invisible knives and chainsaws, but could still cut you like a cake? It was beyond me… to lose somebody that you loved, even if you were already lost- you wanted your loved one to live on, after all. Can you imagine- you had fallen victim to the cruelty and harshness of life in order to preserve another life and ensure that she could survive and enjoy her residence in the real world… only to have her die for you.

Dying for somebody was, I figured, supposed to be heroic and for the good of the one you loved, a worthy sacrifice. But when you die for somebody not for your intentions but because of the circumstances of the situation, is it heroic? Jewel is going to die because she would not be able to stand the grief of my death- how is this heroic? Wasn't it villainous, rather, that I had brought this upon her?

"JEWEL!" I hollered for one last time, banging on her body with no success in generating any response. What was the use of screaming at the top of your lungs, anyway, in this lonely place where nobody else could hear you?

It must have been midnight where I last found myself still an entity of the real world… now the sky was a brilliant white, light spilling into every inch of the sky and indicating purity in a world where terrorism exists, governments are tainted with any degree of corruption, and where love cannot exist at all before being tainted. It often makes me wonder why some evil people cannot be tracked down, whereas good people can be executed for one small mistake, why loving mothers-to-be have defected babies whereas crack addicts are blessed with healthy children, why true love is always either forbidden or ended cruelly by whatever comes their way.

Jewel was dead. I know that nobody can survive 15 minutes of being underwater. Can you imagine? It must have been at least 8 hours – 1 part of 3 of a full day gone – and nobody has noticed us. If only God has sent a random stranger to wander past us and at least have saved Jewel… but here we were, 2 carcasses on the seashore where a nearby hobo would probably see and eat us. It is only a worse-case scenario, but then again, the whole world functions this way.

Have you wondered what the force of sadness is? It was one thing to have 20 N striking you on the head to death, but if you compare that intensity to the way sorrow smashed your heart into pieces… it was almost immeasurable- infinite, just like life in the ethereal world.

But what is the force of happiness then? It was like healing, I figured, as it countered the anguish of sorrow. The law of momentum states that two opposing forces must equal to zero once they are added together should the body be in equilibrium. If sorrow hit you with a force of infinity, then the force of happiness would then hit you with a force of negative infinity, right? It shouldn't be able to exist, then, since forces are always positive and always do work.

It was as if happiness wouldn't do any work whatsoever, so long as sorrow was kept into play.

I don't honestly know what made me give up on attempting saving her life, but really, what else could I have done? I was physically separated from her… anything that I did would not be seen, heard or felt by her. It was like a slippery slope, a chain reaction that nothing could hamper, nothing could extinguish the spark that trailed closer and closer to the dynamite before exploding. It might have been exhilarating, completely awe-striking to see an explosion, but then it dissipates completely like a candle in the night. What could I have done? What could Jewel have done?

She only wanted to join me in this world of Paradise.

And that's when my mind flicked a switch to let the darkness be filled up with whatever temporal flash of light I could generate. She was here now. She had passed from life to death, a transition from a tangible world to one that wasn't. There was no response from Jewel's body now… but she had acquired a new one here. Like me.

I tried to recover from my sobbing fit (call it melodramatic, but it is justified) and touched Jewel. It was a mere tap, but I could sense something else, as if she had transformed into something else, a nymph into an adult, part of a life cycle so obscure and insignificant it could be completely disregarded. With no hesitation, I flipped her body over – her carcass made no response, but then her spirit obeyed my wing motions and disconnected itself from the earthly body, revealing a sleeping Jewel that now belonged in the surreal, intangible world of Paradise…she was now here with me.

Her body didn't look any different from her earthly one –although I am the worst gauge available for this; she looked beautiful to me still- but I could feel it being different. Here tactility was tinted slightly as now she felt more… real, as if she were definitely part of this world. When I touched her body while she was alive, it was as if we were detached, disconnected by some communication barrier. But now she truly felt like some object of Paradise, transited from the real world to here.

And it was almost as if she hadn't changed one bit.

"Jewel!" I croaked once more, my throat now hoarse from the initial barrage of words fired from my beak when she had died, and I shook her ethereal body, my wings exhausted and sore. Whoever said that pain and suffering was absent into the spiritual worlds must be a blatant liar, especially to the heart, an infinite force enacting on your body. But somehow, some miniscule force was preventing me from breaking; something that could have destroyed was averted by a tiny ray of hope that had been ignited when I saw Jewel's new body…

And something that morphed in a surface area of illumination when Jewel opened her eyes.

I didn't really know how to react. The emotional capacity of the heart is, after all, restricted- it was a strange mixture of the scar of grief and guilt, along with the wave of relief and the halo of elation, rushing joy. How would you feel if the one you loved was alive and well… as well as dead and gone forever? Was it even physically possible for happiness to coexist with sorrow? Was it possible for life and death to coexist without cancelling out each other?

A positive number is always bigger than a negative one, right?

Everything seemed to move in slow-motion: coming to terms with Jewel's death was one thing, but to see her alive again… it was something else. There was a music command that I learnt while rummaging through a music book- fp, which meant the dynamics were f –loud- which was immediately followed by p-soft. It was as if you were shocked out of your wits –one small erratic motion, one brief increase in dynamics- before everything returned back to normal. But of course, it couldn't.

For Jewel, I figured, meeting me was accompanied with the sheer, pure emotion of jubilation. To see me alive would have lifted her spirits up from her initial crushing sadness that had overcome her… her reaction was expected to be happy, that she could finally meet me alive again. But the fact is, I had sacrificed my life to preserve hers- now that she has permanently disconnected herself from the real world, how was I supposed to react? Was I supposed to be elated that my mission had ultimately failed despite all valiant effort?

"Blu," Jewel muttered, a smile –the very same one that had melted my heart on the tram- spreading across her face, as if futilely attempting to lighten the situation but had a reversed effect. It was all so melodramatic, as if it came out from a crappy soap opera or a seriously tragic Shakespearean play. I always attempted to imagine what happened when Romeo and Juliet met in Hell (they had killed each other, hadn't they?), realising the folly of their own deaths and how it shouldn't have meant to be. They had only each other to blame, after all, since they were stupid enough to believe appearance rather than reality, to kill themselves, to fall in love, to attempt to make their relationship work despite the circumstances.

Forbidden love, they realised, never prevails.

"Blu, I'm so happy to see you…" Jewel's voice was hoarse, as if she had grown a century older, as she sat up with considerable energy to embrace me in her wings, while I remained frozen in position. I have never been an eloquent bird –I couldn't even reciprocate something as 'simple' as love- so what was I supposed to say? 'Jewel, I'm happy that you're here with me, now that you're dead?' Was it even ethereally beneficial for one to be dead? You see in funerals that people mourn over dead people –I have had a 20 minute experience of that once, still vivid and etched in my mind- so shouldn't I be doing just that?

My ears are still filled with tears when she looked me in the eyes, a blurred, intangible figure. I could barely make out a confused expression on her face. "What's wrong, Blu?" she asked, like an innocent child asking his widowed father. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

The answer would have been yes and no… but these weren't the words that spilled out of my mouth. "Why?" I asked, before I could retract my words, before I could prevent the past from happening and before I could press the reset button.

"Why what?"

"Why… why did you do that?" Disbelief had leaked in my tone, tainting the halo of joy illuminating Jewel. "Why did you… kill yourself?"

My vision was starting to clarify. "I thought you wanted me to be with you," Jewel stated rather calmly, matter-of-fact. "I thought… you had my interests at heart."

"That's the thing," I muttered, ducking my head. "I thought you wanted to be alive. I thought you wanted to be free and roam this world and-"

"Freedom?" Jewel asked scepticism laced into her tone. "You wanted me to have freedom? But Blu I already have you."

"But I wanted you to live." And suddenly I made the same mistake of blurting out the not-meant-to again- the words emerged harsher than it should have. I could see her face, stung by it, and I wanted to say sorry, that I didn't mean what I said, that every action I made was flawed and filled with contradiction. But you don't have the privilege of stopping the sands of time or rewinding like in TiVo. You have to move on.

"I wanted you to live… and live your life as to how you wanted it to. Do you know why I pushed you out of that cage, Jewel?" -my voice was now in an unstoppable crescendo- "I wanted you to be safe and sound. I wanted to bear the brunt for you and… and… and I did it because I love you." I sniffled, attempting to keep my emotions under control. Then again, emotions were like particles, packed together to form the solid of your heart- when it melted under the heat of love, however, it morphed into something different, and would lose all regularity of arrangement and move erratically, liquid.

Jewel remained silent. I possessed no glance of her expression – I didn't even desire for it- because I knew what she was like. I could picture it. "I wanted you to just carry on with life… and live your dreams out… I wanted you to protect you from any danger and… and I wanted you to be… happy…"

I knew the words that flew out of Jewel's beak before it did. "I wasn't happy, Blu," Jewel said, her voice now torn by sadness. "Not when the only reason to be alive was gone."

She looked me into my eyes. I had expecting her to be enraged, that I should suggest that she would have benefitted from residing in the real world for any more time, that she could ride out the scars that my death had permanently left. But instead she continued to smile at me, as bright and cheery as the sun. "I love you, Blu," she half-whispered, a romanticist look on her face. "I want to be with you wherever you are, and wherever you go through. I can't survive without you, and I… I will never be happy if I continue to live…"

I couldn't respond to that. It had evaded me for a while –which had invariably led to the emotions leaking into my heart- that if Jewel truly loved me… then she would obviously be nowhere close to joyous. It was simple logic – if I was dead, then Jewel would be heart-broken. If Jewel had no reason to exist anymore, then she would not. If p, then q.

Jewel dropped her face, crestfallen. "I know you wanted to save me, Blu, and I know you only wanted to protect me… but… but you died." –on the mention of death, tears sprung to her eyes; how many tears have to be shed on the obscure deaths of two birds?- "I… I felt as if something had been ripped out of me, Blu. I felt completely empty… without you…"

As she lurched forward to whimper softly into my chest, my mind slowly began to wrap around this. Again, the effects of love worked my logic, a simple sequence of chain events. The very emotion of love and its causes, however, still mystify me. How is it that in one day, Jewel suddenly manages to love me? How is it that such a complete transformation had occurred from perceiving me as a burden, to having her heart depend on my existence? How is it that she could even possibly love me in the first place… it was all the same questions I could apply to myself, queries that pounded my head because my mind works by logic. Love, on the other hand, works by emotion, and the answers to all these evade me thus.

"Jewel," I said in a hush. Her eyes linked with mine, glimmering in the light of the sun. The real world could affect Paradise, but not vice versa. The laws of love still functioned in this new realm.

"Jewel, why do you love me?" I blurted out, this time with no regrets.

Her smile re-emerged, and suddenly the unexplainable, illogical elation filled me again, the spirit to move forward rather than mourn over the past. To see the one you loved satisfied and joyous… it gave you the sense of completion. I guess that was why nobody died smiling, but in this place, it was difficult not to, especially in the wings of your love. "Is there a logical reason to love another?" she asked, even with a hint of light-heartedness in her tone. Why should she be serious, anyway, in an ethereal world where anything was possible? "I love you because you've been with me, and comforted me when I needed it… and protected me at every cost, and… I want to be with you."

She laid her head on my chest, such that I was in a sitting position with my wings wrapped around her body, and she lay on me. Her eyes wandered to the golden sunrise that greeted us. "I don't care about the world… or even my own life anymore, Blu." She spoke with no hint of regret, no suggestion that she wanted so badly to retract everything that she did and said. And why should she? "Love like a magnet, a connection between two people. And I don't know how or why and I don't really care" –she turned her head to me now- "but I love you. And that's all I need to know."

She leaned forward and pressed her beak to mine, this time in the full knowledge that she was kissing me, an existing entity that was truly in her presence. I should have expected it- my frown had dissipated and instead started to mirror hers, which was a clear entrance- but I was still nevertheless thrown aback. Discounting the other one a few minutes ago, this was our first… and intangible fireworks and hot emotion pulsed through me…

I pulled away after a quite a while – accuracy is absent as my body clock is never functional. "I love you, too, Jewel." I said, again no regret or desire to retract the past. The present was the only thing on my mind, and that was I have Jewel. I didn't need anything else to calm me down- love could suffice, more than enough. Love… it is an emotion, where even where all else fails and circumstances get in your way, as long as your heart lived on and you had your lover with you, love prevails.

And suddenly I loved this new place called Paradise. It was like a safety net – one that was indestructible and with a permanent residence. The physical world was only temporal, where people came and went, a journey that people fussed about all the time. The destination, I realised, was an eternal, ethereal place where anything was possible. I guess Christianity had been right about life being completely obscure to this place that you resided in forever… a paradisiacal, pleasurable new realm, completely disconnected from the yoke of reality.

And disconnected from all logic, from all foundations that love lay on – it could, after all, fly freely in the air, burden-less.

I don't really know how long we lay there, her in my wings as we stared at the horizon, and flickeringly at each other. A new dawn had begun, a new beginning and with hope that shone above all. We just sat there, swooning over one another, kissing at any apt or inapt point of time, without a care in the world, only the emotion of love and elation levitating in the atmosphere.

We were together now. It took a while for my mind to wrap around this fact, but when it did, contentment lay gently on my weary soul. Nothing else mattered anymore- not that we were dead, not that we had been grieved by death and the loss of life and love, but that Jewel was in love with me, as I was with her. And all you really needed to move forward… was love, being next to the one you loved and protecting and providing joy to her.

At one point I took a glance of our bodies. The tide had swept Jewel's body on top of mine; we were united even in death, always chained-together birds. And that wasn't a bad thing- it wasn't as if Jewel was a burden of any sort.

I knew that some people would be sad. Linda would grieve to no end and Rafael would have his heart smashed by this. But I hoped that they would look at our bodies, next to each other, and be happy that we were unified in death, and it didn't matter if we were permanently disconnected from the real world. Because, in the most beautiful sacrifice I could have ever conceived, it meant that we were permanently connected in this new world, in the ethereal Paradise that would always see us through.

Jewel and I would be together forever, be it now or later, be it here or in the real world- because love managed to prevail on despite the circumstances.

Who needed the laws of love anyway?

"Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears." ~1 Corinthians 13:8-9

~THE PROPER END~

Yeah... actually, Paradise was really just some extra stuff after Love?- it was never really significant. I know I initially wanted to make the ending ambiguous, but it was really just to appease the people who hated the ending of Love? I liked both endings (though I won't write anymore; please don't ask for any), really, but I think I put some people off. I don't think Paradise was one of my greatest works ever, but it was just to get the gool ol' writing gears going again after 5 weeks of intense revision. X|

Also, I must confess something. If you guys noticed any similarity between this and WolfOnFyre's story 'Exit Wounds', well, it is pretty similar in plot. I kind of drew a bit of inspiration from that marvellous story to give a 'what if' situation. If you guys don't like this ending, feel free to disregard it. I don't know what you guys really feel; I can imagine it to be mixed, confused even. X|

I think I might have failed. Did you guys also notice the distinct lack of dialogue in this whole story? The interaction was rather meagre, too, and my friends, I am not proud of this. T_T I am planning to rewrite this and its prequel as well, but when I have the time. Sigh…

Reviews are also welcomed- no, they're WANTED. I really need to know how I did. Stupid exams made my writing skills horrid. D=

So, let's end off with the royal traditional review arrow:

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