Author's Note: So, I know I probably should have a good excuse for taking almost a month to update, but I don't. I've got an excuse for this past week, though – I've been writing a new story. A House of Wax fic, to be more specific. I haven't posted the first chapter yet, but when I do I'd appreciate it if you all checked that out, and a review is always nice. But no pressure, especially since I've been a lazy non-updating bitch. Next chapter will be up relatively soon, being that I've had it written longer than even this chapter. I've been rearranging the Cradle to the Grave lately (nothing already up has been changed, though), so this'll be a little shorter than originally intended, and next chapter will be a little longer. And, no, nothing about Marcus this chapter, but you'll find out what's to become of him soon. Enjoy, I hope.
There are unexplainable inconsistencies riddled throughout my drift back towards cognizance. I see him; he is there in our house with us, as suddenly and noxiously as a disease. I hear myself screaming shrilly far inside my ears, and its not until many weeks later that I realize it was the cells dying, shrieking and curling in on themselves as a result of the gunshot's harried proximity to me. Once that pitch has dissipated, I'll never hear it again. Perhaps I should have enjoyed it before the reversal of materialization.
I see him! He crouches down to me, grabs hold of my hair, and says, "We even now." The muzzle of Neptune's gun swallows me whole.
Maybe I should feel liberated. There is nothing that can be done to me now, nothing more penetrating.
I see her face a thousand times before I come to. Stony and cold; safe, now, forever. It is all his doing, and I feel, now, that it is mine as well. That I am responsible, and that this knowledge pushes me to the edge of what is bearable.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
When I have come out of it completely, Lizard is waiting there for me. My eyes are still not cooperating, nor the intense pain, the inheritance of loss, or the sense that I have forgiven him, and that he is undeserving.
His face shimmers in the fog, and I sometimes think that I can see it. It is all unfamiliar, the look of complete incomprehension that he communicates.
He takes my hand.
I shake my head, panicking.
"I don't want this," I say.
"Stay," he tells me. "We go slowly." I feel myself losing whatever toehold I've managed to remain hinged to in reality. My head lolls in all its faintness. My fingers and gut are devoid, empty. I hear a honeybee lurch drunkenly, heavy and staggering under the weight of all its botanical density. Lizard's grip tightens, forcing me back to the packed and thorny branches of what is real.
"We go slowly," he repeats.
With an authority more assumed than convincing, he leads me along the austerity of the Test Village. There is an air of atrophy that is stifling, and I find it will not enter my lungs, that it will not let me breathe.
I move reluctantly, a slight resistance in his hand, a shrinking back from each step taken. My hand in his is like that of a child who cannot keep up, or who does not want to keep up, with an adult. He tries to convey confidence in his grasp, holding my hand firmly, not giving way to my resistance. He looks at my face. The too bright light makes his own sharp in its clarity, the scars and deformities finely detailed, the blue-green eyes vivid and uncompromising.
Men with the eyes of beasts, feral and strange. This place is inhabited with such peculiarity.
I have a sense now of how strange this outing is for him, retracing a journey made in boyhood and in manhood, made then with the easy, unselfconscious movements of one who is effortless, and not made without hardship since. Her death has affected him, too. The journey is to me the way a blindfolded walk through a foreign city would be to him, hazard awaiting each tentative step, a sense of complete and frightening helplessness but for the guide.
He takes me to where she can be found.
There is a blanket draped over her, only her hand visible from beneath the covering. The tips of her fingers have slipped into blackness. I struggle to remember exactly, exactly how long it has been since I have spoken to her. The thin blanket traces the shape of her Peter Pan nose.
Oh, the things that break your heart.
I turn and press myself to him, sobbing into his chest. My breath comes short and shallow; there is a beast in my gut. I feel it scraping away at the inside of my ribs.
It's not until days later, when we are in the mine, that I am really thinking again. I stare across the pickaxes and photographs set up like crosses in a graveyard, glancing at the newest addition to this nightshaden plot. I had not thought death had undone so many.
I feel that I am oddly separated, that I am outside myself and set entirely apart. That I don't share this history, though I've moved within its walls. A feeling comes over me, of days stretching after days, of Pauline being so far underneath us. I will feel and smell my baby, if only from what she has left behind. A part of her is inside me, and I will always have that. But I will never see her face.
Six feet below, where the coffin worms go.
I linger long after the others. There is scorched earth here, and coal-black ash that peels away from the walls. I press it to my face, feel it inhabit my skin. Like the sand that is blown across the desert, it will never wash out of me entirely. The mine is deadly and it tells me this.
I will leave this place and not come back, and in my dreams it will turn to dust.
For in that sleep of death, what dreams?
When I have left the mine behind me, I am full of images, not unlike bright bits in a kaleidoscope. Lizard waits for me outside the maw of this cavern, and the ground lurches beneath me when I try to bring him into focus. Soon, all my memories of him Before Pauline will have to be redrawn, recast. And of Ruby, Jupiter, Goggle, the rest of The Family, I think dizzily; all those I knew when Pauline did not quite exist yet.
I am too afraid to form the question, knowing that his answer will be permanent, unshakable. But I have to know.
"Did you see him?" I ask. "Did you see Saturn alive and not tell me? So I wouldn't worry?"
He doesn't answer me directly. He leans his head back and peers at me through half-open eyes. He is alight in a blast of sun, of desert sheen.
"No," he tells me.
There is honesty in this, and it makes me weightless. This means no one knew, only Neptune and Mercury, Saturn and Preach. By this time, I have pieced together what had happened while I was out cold. I know that, when they found Mercury, dead and no longer bleeding from the shot that had come muted to my ears, he had escaped nearly to the entrance of their shelter in the Badlands. They searched the caved-in mine, but there was no others to be found. It was then I knew, with a terrifying clarity, with a certainty that goes beyond certainty, that those who had remained with Neptune when the families split had been dead years before I'd come to know these desert people. That, by disease and starvation, and eventually by the hands of he and his sons and nephew, they'd all met a sour end. And though I cannot say I sympathize, I can admit that this revelation scares me more than I can even conceive. That bending the conditions of exophagy is something that goes beyond barbaric.
Jupiter had told me, in not so many words, that Neptune knew as well as he that no terms would have been considered that day four years prior if we'd known Saturn (or Crypt, had it been he instead) had survived. We would have taken our chances; we would have defended when they came for revenge. But without the agreement, they would have died hungry and deprived and weak. Their home was not as strategic as the Test Village or Hades' mine – there was no highway nearby, and no Fred to lead the unknowing into a trap. Before we assisted them, split half with them, they were well on their way to exhausting all available resources. This is why they hid Saturn. Their decisions, their measures taken, were not difficult to conceive.
I can tell you that Neptune was not unintelligent, and this may be what troubles me most. I was outsmarted, yet I am not the one who has suffered the greatest loss as a result of this. It was Pauline, and that is unforgivable.
"You'll come with me now," Lizard tells me, requesting more than commanding. He tries to say it casually, though he must know I hear his pulse racing beneath his voice.
I don't make him wait. I nod; a small gesture, one that is insubstantial.
I nervously teeth on my knuckles, a habit, tasting the sand on my skin. Visually toxic, this place. I stare at the back of Lizard's head as I trail behind, following him back to the village. Yes, toxic. Him, too.
I am twenty-two years old, I think to myself, folding my arms across my chest, clutching my shoulders. And already the best part of my life is behind me.