Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“Look at me. I’m going to save you. That’s why I became a healer, remember? So that someday, when you needed me, I could save you.”

The necrothralls kept tailing her. She could tell she was being herded, hunted with persistent predation. She could not out-endure the dead.

There was so much blood on his hands. He cradled her face with them.

But she was so tired. Nothing felt real. It had to be a nightmare. All that time. All those years, everything she’d done, telling herself it would all be worth it in the end. All lies.

She took Helena’s right hand, resetting and healing the broken bones. She would indeed have been an exceptional healer if she hadn’t been a psychopath.

If Morrough interrogated her personally, he’d find Kaine in her thoughts and memories. No amount of evasion could hide him; he was the fabric of her thoughts. Her every action tied to him.

Alone. Everyone dead. Because they always died. She tried to save them, but in the end, they always died. Her life was a graveyard.

In the process of forgetting, she’d flattened herself, forgotten all her anger. Her capacity to be monstrous.

She stood there, watching the space around her disappear into shadows. It was haunted after all. She had been the ghost.

“Every time you asked, I promised I was yours. Always. There aren’t any exemptions or expiration dates on always.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, entwining her arm with his as they sat there in the lengthening dark, amid the ruins of all they’d once been. They just needed more time.

“Helena, I’m tired.” She looked up and saw it in his eyes. The war had eaten him; it had carved him to the bone and not stopped even then. He was scarcely more than a ghost.

Helena was corroding like metal; dissolving, decaying, flecking away into pieces. There was a constant pain in her chest as she felt herself come apart.

“We’ll go out together, won’t we, old girl? Bennet’s last two monsters.”

“My eyes are getting better already,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I can see how disapproving you look.”

It was strange to stand inside a prison, and dread leaving it.

She wrapped her arms around his neck, wanting him nearer, under her skin, beneath her ribs, inside her heart. To hoard him so close nothing separated them and the terror of losing him would finally end.

“Helena, look at you. You have broken yourself into pieces, over and over, because of me, and you don’t seem to understand that it kills me. Living is not worth it to me if you’re the one who keeps paying the price for it. Let me fix what I can.”

“We have to stop hurting ourselves for each other,” she finally said. “Both of us. We’re not going to last if this is the only way we know how to love.”

“Lila, if you hurt him, I will never forgive you,” she said. Lila just shook her head. “You could do so much better.” “No. He’s what I need, and he’s what it took to save you.”

Some wounds would never heal, and sometimes she felt that she and Kaine had a nearly lethal number of that variety.

“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”

She was a non-active member of the Order of the Eternal Flame and did not fight.