"I'll make you mine, lovers said in old books. They never said, I'll make you me."
Margaret Atwood
I have no idea where the shot came from. I felt my legs go limp and I was shoved forward, fell face first on the ground. Nothing for seconds but silence and numbness. Was it the Government? Matthew? Hunters? Private henchmen? Did it matter?
And then it started to burn like hell; bullet went in my back and out through my front, with a squishy hole in my intestines. Defeaning screams came out of me involuntarily, and it felt like someone had just taken a buzz saw to my brain, so much pain it was receiving. I rolled over to look around, but I could barely process anything I was seeing, and what little I could make out was all just green. Of course they must be wearing camouflage, I should know better by now. Then again, there's no protocol for these things, and if there was, no one had mailed me the checklist. Now I wish they had. I struggled with myself to get my backpack off me, hastily took out a blanket and wrapped it around my waist as tight as my body would allow me, my pain would allow me, without me passing out. It wasn't much but at least I wouldn't bleed like a fire hydrant.
I heard random shouts in the background, call signs, orders, confirmations, and any different versions of military-speak one could pick up from cable TV. Jesus, was I about to be taken out by some fucking amateurs?
No, this wasn't going to happen. If my legs aren't working, fine; let's drag. And so I moved on my side, and started dragging myself with one hand while the other held the blanket together. I just had to get somewhere I could take cover - a bush, a hollow tree, burrow, anything. But I had to get there quick, whoever it was wasn't particularly after me, or they would've caught me by now, they were obviously after Ash, but they if they did come across me they weren't going to be happy to see me alive. No witnesses.
So I dragged as hurriedly as I could, nails digging into the dirt, skin scraping across fallen branches, bark, and rocks. The noise seemed to be moving closer, but then took a sharp turn and veered off to the right and kept moving away until suddenly there was complete silence. Meanwhile, I'd dragged myself to a ficus - it had consumed its host tree completely and now was hollow - and I took shelter inside its thin but sturdy cover.
The blood was still draining out of my body, in gushes, quicker than I'd imagined was possible. Everyone who gets shot in movies gets some buffer time don't they? It's usually more than this, certainly their clothes aren't soaked in blood at minute two. Fuck. My body started feeling heavier and my mind was so light it was trying to float out of my skull. I was flat on my back now, it was getting harder and harder to keep pressure on the hole in my body, I tasted metal and lighter fluid in my mouth. All I could see was the endless ficus twisting upwards, a tiny hole at the end of it filled with light, flooding in at an acute angle.
Oh man, is this it?
Am I dead?
Motherfucker!
"Where am I?"
"You're in the Green." a bright flickering light answered.
As my eyes adjusted to it, I realised it was Ash, in human form. I jumped onto him and clung as hard as I could.
"Woah, hey, easy hon, I'm not 6 feet anymore." he kissed my neck.
I felt his heat, the shock wore off, and I pulled back.
"How am I in the Green?"
"Well, I guess they absorbed your consciousness, sorta downloaded you into their-"
"No, I mean how am I in the Green? I thought the Green was an entity."
"Well they are, but they're kinda like the Borg you know and-"
"Wait so what about my body? Also do you know who shot me? Shit, am I officially dead?"
He looked me dead in the eye. Does it fucking matter?
"We took care of them. You're safe now."
"Well..." I said, uncontrollably tearing up, "safe is really relative at this point isn't it?"
"I'm sorry. But you know, you can be with us now, we can be together now, always and forever."
He hugged me; even in human form, he was bigger than me, and I was enveloped in his arms.
"Yeah." I said weakly. Whatever we had fought about just hours before now seemed pointless. It was depressing really, to think that all that was in the past, and there wouldn't be any more. I never really thought about death in finite terms, the tiniest point in time that ends all movement in my body. No more creation, no more destruction, no more cells merging and dividing, only decay - the universe reclaiming what it had lent to us. I could still be happy, clearly I could be sad, but I'd never touch something knowing I'd never be able to again, I'd never sleep knowing I'd wake up again (I don't even know if I would sleep again), no more anxiety in my fingertips, no more relief in my chest, I'd just be a fixed set of memories slowly dissipating in an infinite elemental sea. I'd be Ash.
"Ash?" I said looking up at him, running my fingers across his face.
"Yes?"
"Do you remember your name?"
"What? You just said it."
"No, do you remember your name?"
"What difference does it make what our name is? It can be anything you want, we want. Don't you like Ash anymore?"
"All that time, all that knowledge, you still couldn't figure it out."
"What are you talking about?"
"I guess we have a lot more to learn about each other. Humans don't understand trees any more than you understand us."
"That's not true. We know everything about you. We provide for you, we care for you, we love you and you love us."
"I do love you, I think. All of you. But I don't think you love me, not yet at least."
"How can you say that?"
"I didn't realize it until today either. Not until I went through what billions had went through before. We humans like to document everything too, millenia of knowledge scrawled onto every piece of paper, our data upon you. So much effort trying to make sense of the chaos."
He stared at me, confused, not by my words, but confusion as to what he was going to do to make me happy again.
"You don't want to stay here." he finally said.
"I want you to be alive, but I can't have that. And I have to cope with that."
"I'm right here..."
"No, you're in my head, like you're in theirs."
He cupped my face in his hands, closed my eyes with his thumbs, and kissed me.
"You'll always be mine, Ash."
"I'll always be you."
I was felt like a child again, my face resting against the dew covered blades of grass, every inch of my body relaxed, connected to the life around me, connected to all natural life, only now I could recognize this feeling, I could word it. It was Ash, he felt like that. In hindsight, he'd always felt like that.
My eyes opened but nothing was visible. I lifted my hand and filled it scrape across a squishy membrane, although in some places it had dried out. Sudden realization of the tightness of my space made me flail my arms about looking to tear a hole in the membrane. Successful, light flooded in along with the smells of the swamp I was familiar with. I kept pulling at the tear until it was big enough for me to poke my head and shoulders out, and then I held out my hand down to the ground and pushed myself out.
I looked around, it was our island, the rays of dawn coming from behind the giant tree in the middle of the island. I looked at the crown, a mosaic of bark and leaves and empty pockets clout with light. My gaze slowly descended along the bark and the bottom, where I emerged, was a collection of husk and vines and moss and branch, all interwoven tightly (except for the giant hole I had just created) in the shape of a humanoid. A humanoid with now a big hole in his chest. I felt my own chest tighten, my hands clenched tighter, only when I realised there was something in my left one. Slowly opening it, I saw a seed resting in my palm, no bigger than a chicken's egg, shaped like a heart. A human heart.
Human? I quickly rushed to the water and stared into it, confirming the face staring back at me still looked human. I certainly didn't feel human. I felt something ablaze in my chest. I looked back at the remains of the humanoid, the hole more noticeable now, the darkness inside increasing in highlight. I slowly went back to look at the water, now more carefully, more patiently. And then I finally saw it again. The light. It was staring back at me. Human.
I couldn't see it, because of the tears in my eyes, and the light, but I could feel a giant grin across my face. His voice echoed in my head, and I held the seed to my heart, letting the light pass off some warmth to it.
The chaos seemed manageable.
In the next few days, I moved out of Louisiana. I was back in DC, looking for a new job. I had a tiny apartment in a sea of other apartments. It was dingy, cold, dusty, and everything had an unabashed decadence about it. The Earth was still getting worse.
Then, one day, I was in the kitchen, and I heard clay shatter in my bedroom window. The clay, which made up a pot, which held nothing but dirt, nothing but dirt and one seed, no bigger than a chicken's egg when it was planted. One life, one seed, one plant, one forest, one eden, one planet, so it went.
