A/N: So, welcome to the arc II finale. You'll notice the style has slightly changed for this entry, and I have to admit that it's been done 100% on purpose even though my editor nearly killed me for doing so. Hope you like it anyway; this finale is just one big image after all - this is an intrinsically intimate chapter, so the narrative style had to accompany the actions in a more intimate way.
One last thing: My editor and I kinda got into a fight about the perfect song to accompany this chapter – in my opinion, it was Switchfoot's The Blues but according to Rae, it was Dishwalla's Angels or Devils. After a long debate, we finally called a truce and agreed that Islands, by Sara Bareilles is THE song to listen to while reading this chapter – although complete silence also does the trick, I must say.
Thank you all so much for reading, please feel free to leave a review!
Chapter title: Inspired by Charly Garcia's song, Rezo por vos (I pray for you) – from his 1987 album, Parte de la Religión (Part of the Religion)
Title translation: "The untamable light became flesh in me."
See you on the other side!
Elle.
Arc II
Chapter XVI
La Indómita Luz se Hizo Carne en Mí
"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
Haruki Murakami — South of the Border, West of the Sun
They surround him like a million broken parachutes. Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket.
The immensity of the mountains at night, and their capricious trails and paths leading to a lost Eden seem to reach out for him somehow. They stretch their ethereal fingertips to touch the void that's guiding his steps, their desperate efforts are willing to envelop his whole body and, finally, touch the edges of his torn melancholy.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket. As they swirl away their combusted animas they dress in crimson and gold. They rise as they burn; they melt savagely into the thin air. They disappear, as they find each other lost in a celestial ignition, they tell stories about everything that is no more.
As he walks, he follows their silent calling with eyes that have seen it all. He dares to touch them; the fire of a flame that burns no more: those dancing ghosts made of fragments of his own afire existence, they have now become the ashes of his long-lost paradise.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket – they fly around in a perpetual dance of fire and decay; he's already been here before.
The feeling; roaring inside his chest. He knows it all too well. Déjà vu.
The parallelism, too vivid, imprints the marks of his own past on his skin. His eternally wounded skin; secluding the nomad trapped inside that vessel made of flesh and bone. The man marches, alone, as his clumsy feet stumble upon the rocks and stones – mere decoys in a path of desperation, he knows.
He smells the smoke; the disengaging odor of everything that's ending, he knows. He knows the fire – knows all fires and yet, knows no fire.
"When we heard your entire battalion had been erased in that fire, we thought we wouldn't see you again."
"What fire?"
His trembling knees are about to succumb, the cold air whistling around him is gradually lacerating his skin with the might of a god – the wrath of a god, the sin of his abandonment. He should have stayed.
He should have stayed.
"Those northern bastards started a fire that killed everyone in that zone and destroyed every building."
The liquor store is no more. And the cabin is no more. In the shape of burnt wood and twisted metal more ghosts will rise to haunt him, there will be new bones waiting in the torturous hours of his sleep, new regrets shall come to punish him during his lonesome, troubling nights.
The only things that were waiting for him were the ashes of the place that had sheltered them before and her dead body, buried between the still-burning foundations and the collapsing infrastructure. He got on his knees and cried, absorbed and powerless, completely alone for the very first time.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket. They kiss under the starless sky only to die a peaceful agony.
The cabin, that place he had built himself, was his true home. It was the first place he had been able to call his own in Outworld ever since embracing his own eternity. Ever since the saloon. Ever since the portal. But now the cabin is no more and as he crumbles down his knees kiss the dirt. It's the heated ground beneath his feet what's calling him - the warrior, the gun for hire, the peacemaker, the man who lost his own soul – twice.
He breaks down and cries, like a vulnerable child, as his eyes embrace the decadent sight: the cabin is no more. Parts of the floor and the roof have been merged now; their structures have been entangled in a blazing fire and the flames roar like a fiery mouth, its lascivious tongue, mercilessly licking the emptiness of a sky corrupted by a million incandescent fireflies. The mercenary gets up and finally approaches the scene of his own decadence.
Witnessing the dancing flames from afar won't do.
As he steps inside the ruins of his hours, his face mask is no longer enough: he covers his face with his forearm – the smoke, he knows, that intoxicating whirlpool of grey and black; it's despotically taunting him. It calls out their names. It whispers mad tales about his countless twisted sins. As he gets closer to what used to be the main room, the iridescent souvenirs of war gather to offer him a warm welcome. Déjà vu. His hands feel the fire; he knows all fires though he knows no fire.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket.
Little flames, like tiny daring acrobats, slither wildly before him. They dance away their delirium in front of his calloused hands. Their reflection, the mirrored pace of their ritual, finds its root in the hollowness of his coffee-colored eyes. The crunching floor beneath his feet is no longer a foundation for his hopes to evolve - that cabin was home, it was shelter, it was sanctuary.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket. The cabin and the liquor store have kissed it all away.
The crunching, dying floorboards are revealing the unconsecrated treasures he shall collect, patiently, as he ventures his tired bones deeper into the flames. The table and the shelves, completely charred by now, are covered by the ashes of a revenge that stains his troublesome spirit. Aalem's notes, fragmented into a million pieces and barely recognizable, are now floating around in the amber-colored air. Alex's shoes are now dancing in their peaceful lethargy – their motionless rhythm embraces him in a way he cannot remember until he remembers. He remembers those very same incandescent fireflies soaring to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket, lifting Annie and his unborn child, carrying them in their suffocating wings.
As he stands up the last wall falls apart, only a few boards remain standing still like a ruined skeleton summoning the kindred spirit waiting on the other side. He walks towards the apparition, mesmerized by a presence so vivid it screams his name, in the vestiges of what used to be his room – the bed, untouched, is threatened by the flames dancing down the curtains. Outside and all around, incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket but time has once again stopped for the lonely man now reaching for those frightened, distant pupils hiding by the wardrobe – he reaches out for her as his eyes try to find a safe passage to get them through the abyss of relentless flames.
As she takes his hand, he remembers – those very same incandescent fireflies soaring to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket, lifting Annie and his unborn child, carrying them in their suffocating wings. But not tonight. She is there, the blue of her eyes is emanating like a tidal wave that envelops his fragile shape and this shaken silhouette consumes him as she stands up and walks with him towards this embroidered light – his eyes, fatigued and enraptured by the desired vision of life, cannot look away from that face engulfed in sadness and confusion.
Suddenly he sees the seed of his own vengeance, sees the world on fire.
She's barefoot; the auburn of her hair mimics the entangled cobwebs of his own, nearly bicentennial reflection. They walk through the fire, as the dancing flames create a rhythm of their own; she breathes, she exhales, she's alive and so, the mercenary melts in the heat of a bonfire so old it corrupts his instincts.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket.
Safe and sound, the man grabs her by the shoulders with an urgent need that feels alien for the eternal mercenary – he gazes at her, as his fingers run to touch the loose auburn hairs flying carelessly before him. The sight, so cruel and enrapturing, reverberates the echoes of a truth that blinds him - suddenly he sees her for what she truly is: a suppressed Shangri La of devoted loves that are his no more, a painful reconstruction of the man he used to be, but is no more because they are no more. The truth, unbearable and intoxicating, presents itself like an unwanted epiphany forcing him to open his eyes.
She looks exactly like Amanda, but she is not Amanda – She's a healer, just like Annie, but she's not Annie. She's desire, like those torturous cravings once awakened by Jessica's tantalizing ways. But she's not Jessica.
"If you were me, what would you do?"
The kid had asked back then, in all his innocence.
"I'd watch her pass by."
He should have watched her pass by.
Suddenly he understands, he acknowledges his own shortcomings: ever since meeting that woman he had known, deep inside, that he was not supposed to revolve around her. Yet he had tried almost anything to keep her by his side: he had tried to seduce her, to romance her, to protect her, to seclude her inside his little crystal box.
He had tried to murder her.
Because he knew, he had known all along, that having her near was like subjugating his body to a dreadful magnet corrupting his very own essence.
But now, as his eyes swim inside the blue reflecting his puzzled expression, now he knows there is no other way. He has to do the one thing that he should have done right from the start: he has to watch her pass by. His feet are pinned to the ground – he's certain now; he's about to leave her. Yet the tenderness of her gesture damages his senses, it blinds him, it numbs him. She embraces herself; the thin and dirty cache coeur she's wearing is hiding something else and the mercenary focuses his vision until he finds it. There it is, safe and protected against her chest, she holds the treasure with unprecedented love; the cradle of her arms is protecting it.
She looks like a mother. But she's not his mother.
He approaches her. A halo of confusion clouds his eyes as he moves closer – "How?" he mumbles, his avid arms already traveling the distance separating them.
"The wardrobe," she explains. The dirt left by the fire impregnates her skin. The sin of such a pristine image polluted by mundanity itself is enough to make him tremble. Dark ash covers her shoulders, her blue eyes are like beacons in the dark as they summon the little hope that's left in him. Her messy hair is a cascade of auburn – her skin, polluted after the fire and the smoke. He strokes her cheek as he nods in silent desperation. She has never looked so pale.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket – the immensity of the mountains at night and their capricious trails and paths leading to a lost Eden seem to reach out somehow, to touch the edges of his melancholy. Alex removes her arms for her stomach as she lets go of her own embrace. The cradle she had been holding, his eyes cannot believe it, she's saved it. His box.
"I thought this was worth saving," she says, as she tucks her hair behind her ears.
His hand strokes the treasure, his fingers, sliding, the feeling is balsamic: she's none of those women yet she has saved them all. She has rocked them all tenderly, in the blissful cradle of her own arms for him to still have them, someway – for him to still be defined by them. For him to be, intrinsically, the man that he is. The man he has always been.
"Just take me home," she pleads; her weak voice about to break.
With his heart in his mouth, those faces resurface to torment his fragility.
"I'd watch her pass by."
"No," the mercenary whispers as he shakes his head, the thought is too blinding to comply, the feeling is killing his instincts - "that's not who I am, I am not that man."
The hero.
Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket. Their intricate ballet of orange and yellow fades helplessly in the whistling wind. Their mesmerizing magnificence, though nearly extinguished, is making them stand on the verge of an abyss – an imminent, enrapturing leap of faith, already embracing the darkness to come. As they vanish all around them, their agonizing existence begins to shimmer in the hourglass of their goodbye.
The woman looks at him with such tenderness it fractures his skin, for they are as they'll always be: scared.
"I've been having a hard time trying to wrap my head around this. This is where I get off. This is where I let you go. This is where we stop corrupting each other," he says, visibly moved and overwhelmed, his eyes are already gravitating towards a horizon where she is no more. Her shape, in the vision of his mind, is fumbling towards a void so dark, so menacingly final that it devours her; it consumes her: she's casting shadows now, as she approaches the vacuum of his soul. One more step, my dear, and you'll be buried inside my spirit.
The speechless woman reaches out for him but he evades her touch.
He waits, though, as she offers him the box and he finally takes it as he tastes his own past merging with his present. One more step, my dear, and you'll be buried inside my spirit. He lowers his head as his eyes keep gravitating towards a horizon where she is no more. Only she still is and she has become, one more time, the embodiment for his every tribulation. His blind prayers – oh, he knows; the black prison of his spirit could never hold her, it could never contain her, possess her, fragment her into a million pieces only to recreate her later.
His eyes find her again; the supernova exploding all around them is making those fireflies dance a final ballet. The mercenary unclasps his mask only to clasp it back on – her. The leather straps, as he fastens them around her skull, will try to keep her safe through the fire.
One more step, my dear…
He takes off his poncho and places it over her shoulders, wrapping her up in his own incandescence. This is goodbye; they both know. Her hands rest on his chest now, the initial teardrops begin cascading down her cheeks. He leans in closer, his fingertips sliding up and down the sullen softness of that leather covering the lower part of her face. His lips find hers, or at least they try – now that those lips of hers have been imprisoned in the confines of his own face mask. He tastes the leather, as he imagines the flavor awaiting on the other side.
One more step, my dear.
They surround him like a million broken parachutes. Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket.
As he lets go of her imaginary kiss, she grabs him by the shoulder, forcing him to turn around and face her one last time: she offers him the coin, the sight is heartbreaking and yet, intrinsically definitive.
"To remember me by. To remember him by," she says, as he takes the coin and places it inside the box.
One more step, my dear.
"Just out of curiosity, what did I say?" the mercenary asks, his feet already marching, "when you heard me talking in my sleep,"
"Sing it again, mom,"
He nods and walks away, as her thin skirt is dancing around her damaged ankles. Her outline in the distance looks like a flag that represents him no more. She gets on her knees as she watches him go - the cascade emanating from her eyes is blurring her vision. Despair startles her suddenly as the man descends the slope, she suddenly knows: her reddened eyes are about to mistake him for any of the rocks along his dreadful path. As the mercenary walks down the steep corridors leading him to the most personal of infernos, the doctor embraces herself, her weakened fingertips clinging to the red wool of his ancient poncho. His incandescent warmth is slowing fading in the wind; she shall soon be cold - cold as the heart that has just abandoned her.
They surround her like a million broken parachutes. Incandescent fireflies soar to kiss a smoky obsidian blanket.
Like a reverse déjà vu, she cups her own face with her hands feeling absorbed and powerless, completely alone for the very first time.