Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”

“I thought you liked us dead.” Her head hurt so much, she wanted to vomit. He gave a barking laugh. “Consider yourself the sole exception to that rule.

I kept thinking that eventually someone would come but—”

“Do I know you?” she asked as her eyes slid closed. “I suppose you do.”

“Why don’t you die?”

His lips curved into an insincere smile. “Prior commitments, I’m afraid.”

Her eyes were dead. There was no fire in them. The spark she’d once regarded as the most intrinsic part of who she was had gone out. She was a vibrant corpse, hardly different from the necrothralls haunting Spirefell.

“Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.

“If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”

“But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.”

“Are you wanting a confession? Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?”

For so long, all she’d seen was his pride and anger. Now she couldn’t help but feel that there was something terribly tragic about him, straining beneath the surface.

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking.

“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”

“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.

“Lila Bayard is not the only person that the Resistance would suffer greatly for losing.

The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero.” He shook his head. “Why does everyone pretend it’s anything like that?”

“Don’t die, Kaine,” she said. The line he walked frightened her. If the array was the punishment for a failure, what would the price of betrayal be? A smirk twisted his mouth as he looked at her. “There are far worse fates than dying, Marino.” She nodded. “I know. But that one you don’t come back from.” He gave a bitter laugh. “All right, then, but only because you asked.”

Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.

Maybe if Helena were at the front, she could believe in all that, too. But she’d spent every day of the last six years watching people die. She lived in the aftermath of every battle, breathed in the devastation until she was drowning in it. Nothing and no one would ever convince her that anything noble or purifying could come from this scale of suffering. That any rewards could ever be worth it.

She stood watching it fall until her hands and feet were numb with cold. She wanted to stay there and freeze to death. She’d read it was a gentle way to go, like falling asleep.

“You always have to come back,” she said. “All right? Don’t die. Promise—”

“All right…” he said, “but only because you asked.”

There was a hunger inside her that she couldn’t explain, a pit of want to taste and feel and hold and not be always, always empty. She wanted to curl up so tight alongside him that she vanished.

But his eyes… She could tell— He was hers. The realisation broke her heart.

“There’s plenty of people to replace me. I’ve always been expendable, remember?”

“You are not expendable. You don’t get to push everyone away so that they’ll feel comfortable using you and letting you die.”

“You are not replaceable,” he said, his hands trembling against her shoulders. “You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people. The reason I’m here—the reason I’m doing any of this—is to keep you alive. To keep you safe. That was the deal.” He searched her face. “They didn’t tell you.”

“I don’t want to always be alone,” she said. It was easier to be honest in the dark. “I want to love someone without feeling like if they know, it’ll end up hurting them. People who love me always die. No matter what I do, it’s never enough to save them. I have to love everyone from a distance, and I’m so lonely.”

When he kissed her, it felt like the beginning of something that could be eternal.

“I think I’ve nearly memorised you,” she said. “Especially your eyes. I think I learned to read them first.” The corner of his mouth twitched, and he caught her hand, capturing it against his chest. “I memorised yours, too,” he said after a moment, and then sighed, looking away. “I should have known—the moment I looked into your eyes, I should have known I would never win against you.”

Her need to love people and her desperate longing for them to love her back—she had given that up, locked it away and buried it, giving its place to the coldness of logic, realism, and the necessary choices of war. This could only lead to ruin.

“You’re mine. You swore yourself to me. Now and after the war. I’m going to take care of you. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you. You don’t have to be lonely. Because you’re mine.”

“Don’t worry. I’m always going to come back to you.”

“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.” She smiled at him. “Doesn’t that make it all a little brighter?”

“Be careful, Kaine. Don’t die.”

“You’re mine. I’ll always come for you.” He always did.

The war was a cage with no escape.

He looked at her, and she could see the whole war in his eyes, the toll that came from struggling with no end in sight, driven by a terror of what might happen if he ever stopped.

“You are so much more than what the war has done to you.”

“I think your scars are prettier than mine,” she finally said. “I have a better healer.”

The Helena of two years ago would not recognise the person she was becoming. Every line she’d once believed herself incapable of crossing, she passed over without hesitation now.

“Everyone who wins says they were good, but they’re the ones who tell the story. They get to choose how we all remember it. What if it’s never that simple?”

The space between them was ice-cold, as though all their ghosts surrounded them. They were both drenched in the dead.

The war was an abyss that took everything and was never satisfied. There was always more required. Another life. An additional measure of blood. Be better. Smarter. More ruthless. Quicker. More cunning. Accept a second portion of pain. It was never enough.

“Don’t die, Kaine. You can’t leave me behind.”

Every day she wondered if she was working towards her own doom and Kaine’s destruction.

Someday, she promised herself, someday I am going to love him in a moment that isn’t stolen.