decay

decay

They are looking to you to save them. You have never known how to save yourself.

(Leigh has spent his whole life stretching to reach.)

When the first person fell asleep and wouldn’t wake, your village turned to its doctors. As the plague began to spread, they turned scientists from big cities, to geniuses from the school of magic. To scryers. To the occult. To anything, to everything. Half the village was in a frenzy and the other half was slipping away in a mysterious eternal sleep. 

But the magicians could find no solution and the scientists refused to come so close to the border of death. To a village perched on the very edge of the black veil between worlds, where all you had to do to meet your own death was take too many steps beyond the forest line and disappear. 

So they turned to everything and they turned to anything and finally--

Finally they turned to you. 

#

You. You with your dream research and your room filled with slanting notes. You with publications reaching beyond the capital and across the sea, for all that you’re based in this tiny no-man’s land. 

You, who smiled when your neighbors came to you; you who made no promises but promised to try your best, you who are your people’s last resort--

You, alone in your home long after they leave, studying the disease until your eyes hurt and your head hurts and your chest hurts, hurts, hurts.

#

You’ve always been intelligent. It’s what you’ve been told since you were a child. Smart enough that your parents didn’t need to worry; mature enough that others could lean on you. A good head on your shoulders. Helpful. Cheerful. Reliable. Leigh can look out for himself. 

You have always risen to meet expectations; you have always grown to fit your roles. All that, but some part of you has always felt desperately, impossibly small. 

So you stretched to reach and stretched to reach and stretched to reach and before you knew it there was a hollowness to you, too much space between skin and soul. An emptiness you weren’t enough to fill. But by then you could not shrink away from your roles to fit around that tiny, uncertain core of you, and it was never a choice you could have made anyway. So perhaps it was hopeless from the start. 

You reach to fit this role now. Role of savior, role of only hope. Something so big you have no idea how to fill. You have only ever played supporting cast. You were always supposed to fade out in the end. 

Late nights and too many books. Expectations pressing heavy on your chest. You grow tired. Always, always tired. Hard to lift your head. Hard to think. Something feels sick inside of you, broken in a way you do not know how to fix. 

You keep searching because you have to. Because you must. Saving others is the only way you have ever known to help yourself. Never enough to save you, but enough, perhaps, to keep afloat. 

#

In your dreams there is a man. Long desaturated hair and a quiet expression. You know he’s barely spoken for years, not really, not from the heart--so you don’t know how it is that you know his laugh would come straight from his soul, open and honest and bright; you don’t know how it is that you know his hair is supposed to be all the colors of dusk and starlight and dawn. You don’t know how it is that when you see him you feel full, like you finally fit your skin, like you are finally enough. 

You don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know. So much you don’t know but in your dreams there is this man and there has always been this man. His world is washed-out gray but his eyes are blue blue blue and you know him better than anything else in all the hundred million worlds. 

#

Wake with a hollowness in your chest and a smile on your face. More research. More books. You’re thinking through a fog. Hard to get out of bed so you stop sleeping in bed, work at your desk till you fall asleep with your cheek pressed against the page. When you wake your tongue is heavy and your head throbs. And maybe this is the root of the disease, the core you are trying so desperately to find. 

Coffee and caffeine pills and digging your nails into your skin to stay awake. Wake up, wake up, wake up but the only time you feel awake is when you are living in that dream. 

#

Another magic circle. Another spell. Piecing runes together stumblingly, mechanically, more trial and error than logic, desperation and repetition and something please anything I know I have to but I don’t know how to do this alone--

The world is gray. And you are awake. And there is a man in front of you, and his eyes are blue, and neither of you is alone.

#

Wake up, wake up, wake up. His name is Han and he is laughing and you love him. The gray world floods with color. You finally feel awake.

#

Open your eyes and your chest is hollow. Something in you is shaking like it wants to fall apart. The village doctor says you’ve been asleep for three weeks. You’re on an IV and you should not really be hungry but something in you is gnawing and aching and starving for something you cannot name. 

When you lift your hand your fingers are wet. Touch your face but your eyes, as always, are dry. 

Dry cheeks and wet fingers like the remnants of someone else’s tears. Like someone else was there. Like you were not alone. He was crying and you love him. There was someone--

And the dream is slipping away but you curl your fingers around your pendant and close your eyes and behind them in the dark: a flash of knowing and blue eyes and a laugh straight from a brilliant, starlit soul.

#

Back to the search for a cure. Somehow all the dreams that have always felt like a curse and all the longing that has always felt like a plague--suddenly they feel like pillars, like foundation, like something you can use. Like something in you has spent your whole life calling and calling and calling and suddenly it’s less weakness than strength, the way it has never stopped reaching out, because there has always been something out there it’s reaching to. In your research your spells have always lacked an anchor point. But now you’re certain that there is one there. So you draw your runes and you make your circle and you reach and--

#

You’ve spent your whole life stretching to reach. How strange it is, to finally feel something reaching back. 

#

The villagers hail you as a hero, you with your new spell, waking people up, calling them home. And you: smiling, laughing them off. You go home and you go through your books and you look for the thing that is calling, calling, calling to you in turn.

#

In your dreams there is a man with a weak dawn in his hair. Lately, the sky above him has been a little less gray.

#

A real hero passes through your village. A proper one. Leader of a people once near-decimated, a man who gathered them all together beneath his brilliant, peaceful reign. 

Adonai. Black and white hair. Broad shoulders and broad smile. When he shakes your hand his grip is firm. I hear you saved the village, he says. You laugh: I hear you saved yours.

He’s investigating the border of death. There’s spillover, he explains. It’s reaching beyond its bounds. Your spell is just barely enough to keep people tethered to this place, instead of slipping into the reaching tendrils of the overflow. 

You smile, bright and warm. You’ve noticed too, eh? I’ve been looking into it. Keep me updated on your work!

Laugh and smile and hide, hide, hide the unease in your chest. The way you aren’t a hero. The way you suspect you are a cause. The way you think he maybe suspects it too. 

#

You have always, always dreamed. In your sleep you have always felt like your soul is tangled with another’s, closer than air, closer than breath. You have always awoken feeling like you were reaching for something you could never touch. 

Reach and reach and reach into the hundred million worlds. Call and call and call for your whole life. If you were alone and there was nothing there then surely it wouldn’t have mattered, surely no one would notice, some days you are certain that if you disappeared tomorrow it wouldn’t change a thing so what would the universe care, really, if it was you alone making an empty, lonely call--

--but if there was something there. If there was someone else stretching and reaching and calling back, flinging empty hands and soundless voice out across worlds like longing and hope and prayer, like magic or like spell…

Then maybe some barrier would begin to erode. Maybe something would begin to give. 

#

Down past village grounds. Down to the black veil in the forest. Down beneath the impossibly tall trees, at the bottom of a forest where the canopy is so thick light cannot reach, where they say you can hear the voice of your own death. 

You’ve always thought--

Some part of you has always thought that your death would be voiceless. Soundless. No one calling for you, no one for you to call to. Instead you stand among the trees in a place where no one and nothing lives and you hear the singing of a bird. 

You hear I want to greet you in color and don’t keep me waiting too long and--

His name is Han.

#

Spillover. Death reaching beyond its bounds. You have spent your whole life reaching. He has spent his whole life reaching back. 

Two ways to save your village, you know. You can stop looking for him. Stop calling. Stop reaching back. You can--

You can’t. His name is Han and you love him and you can stop reaching for him and leave him calling alone--or you can go to his side. And it sounds like two options but in every single life where the both of you draw breath there is only ever one.

#

Put your things in order. Clean up the papers you promised to send in. Check your runes, making sure death doesn’t spill beyond its borders so long as nothing remains here to call it. Adonai leaves the village without so much as a farewell and oddly, after he leaves, the overflow seemed to quell. Like two things here were calling to it and now there is only you.

#

This is a choice you’re not supposed to make easily, not a death but something close, stepping out of mortal and into immortal, as close to eternity as this world allows you to get. You don’t know what that means for you, for your future, for anything, but--

But you’ve known him longer than a life. And it is not easy to step through the veil but it is not hard, either, not nearly as hard as it should be, not hard at all when you pass into that place and you see the man who greets you, wide eyes and desaturated hair, his scowl replaced with open, breathless shock. 

“Alexei,” you say laughingly. “It’s been a long time.” 

“Not long enough.” He sounds irritable but relief is washing like a breaking dawn over his face. “You’ve barely aged a day.”

“Maybe I missed you too much to stay away.” You wink. He scoffs. Someone comes up behind him and--

“Funny seeing you here,” you tell Adonai. “I was wondering where you ran off to.”

Suddenly it makes sense. Two things this world was reaching to. One, after Adonai left. None, without you. 

“Nevermind that.” Alexei inclines his head, sharp. “He’s waiting for you.” His colors are still dull and gray. But when he smiles, you swear you can see a flash of light like the sun. “I’ll take you to him.” 

I’ll take you to him. And you’re finally here. And that thing in you is reaching reaching reaching reaching--

#

Han laughs when you see him. You have spent your whole life dreaming of his laugh. And you’re here and he’s here and your empty hands finally, finally find his, fingers tangling together, holding on, holding tight. And you’re both laughing, and you’re kissing him, and--

There is a star-bright horizon in Han’s hair. Above your heads, your shared sky has washed as blue as his eyes.