by intodust
Disclaimer: Dark Angel is the property of 20th Century Fox and Cameron/Eglee Productions; that is, it's not mine.
A sort-of sequel to "Driftwood." Surviving is the hardest part.
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It is winter. Snow has fallen, gray and gritty on the streets. Clouds covered the boiling sky, she remembers, pale and deep as forever, and she'd watched some of the others gather below her, staring up at the sky as if they thought it was the end, that they'd made it. They were breaking curfew, she'd thought, and she'd felt him next to her, watched his breath freeze on the windowpane. He'd flinched at the warning shot, but not at the barrage that followed. Her own memory is soundless, the images silent and strangely serene. Black, red, and white.
He says it used to be pristine, that poems were written about the serenity, about the way ice formed along the ridges of a single leaf. He doesn't remember the words, but he describes the beauty for her anyway, the jagged curves along the edges and the faded rust color, glimmering where crystals lay, and she doesn't mind that he repeats himself. He tells her stories, but only about the world. Only about what will remain afterward. He tells her about unchanging things, wind and water and the sky over the ocean at dusk. He has been so many places, she thinks, seen so many things. And it is only now, when he has to share them with her, that he remembers.
No one moves on the street outside. She does not doubt that they are out there, that the watch is alert, because if she listens past his breath, past his heartbeat, she can hear theirs, a faint echo from so far away, muffled by layers of stone and cloth. They do not stand outside in this weather; no one does. A deadness has fallen over the earth, fimbulwinter. Frost laces the edges of the windows and cold air seeps in the gaps. According to legend, it's only supposed to get colder. Colder and colder until there's nothing left.
Sometimes she thinks that it won't be long. There are not many of them left now. The numbers have fallen since the first weeks, the first months. The cold has taken some, of course, and the soldiers have taken more. Others have let themselves die, and sometimes, she doesn't blame them. After all, she survived on an obsession, and even now, she's clinging to the remnants, the reality.
She sits by the window, untouched by the cold, and she watches him sleep, one arm outstretched as if to grasp a dream. In his sleep he is searching; in his sleep he is alive. There's an old story, something about butterflies and dreaming and transformation. In her mind, she equates it with escape and she wants to ask him if it's true, but the words always die on her lips.
It's for the best, she knows. He might say yes. She can look away from the answers in his eyes, but if he said the words, she could not outrun their truth.
He lives within these walls. He is a fugitive and a prisoner, and he is hers.
She wonders if he hates her. He does not speak her name, but she doesn't speak his, either. She closes her eyes or traces lines on the ceiling, draws maps in her mind. Here and there, the world before and the hereafter. None of it matters; only now is real. Only now, and here, and she does not need to remind herself that soldiers don't cry. She leaves crescents of blood on his arms and he doesn't complain. She can see them from where she waits now, dark scars healing slowly, black lines on the skin of ghosts. She imagines they watch her like half-closed eyes.
She would run, she thinks, if she had somewhere to go. Or maybe she wouldn't. She watches him breathe, the rise and fall of his chest, and matches the rhythm with her own. When she feels her heart start to slow, she uses a fingernail to write in the frost, watches as letters take shape.
Max. Logan. Love.
She stares at the words, unfamiliar as runes, and strains to hear the echoes, ephemeral and vanishing as voices from a stream. She draws a heart around the three and stares at the graffiti, remembering fairytales and when the next day could just as easily have been forever, because all that mattered was his hand on the ebony queen and the silver lines of rain outside.
She presses her hand to the window and holds it there, pulls it away only when she knows her words will be gone. Someday, she thinks, this will be over. The flames have gone out, faded with age and with storm, but an ember burns, burns. When this is over, she thinks, they will find the others, count stars in a brilliant dark sky and he will tell her what they used to mean, Cassiopeia and Orion and Pleiades.
When this is over, she thinks, she will love him again, or she will die trying. She knows that she will make it that long. She just wonders if he will, too.