Alchemised

by SenLinYu

She looked up at him. “You’re a monster.” He raised an eyebrow. “Noticed that, have you?”

He wasn’t even looking at his wife anymore. His gaze passed over Aurelia’s head, staring at a mirror that reflected himself and Helena.

Had it just been her, hiding herself all this time? Was that all it was in the end? Surely there was something, but nothing she remembered, none of her glimmers of returning memory, hinted at anything of importance.

She’d thought sometimes that someday, when she’d repaid her debts, accomplished all that was expected, and reached her own goals, she would like to be loved. To know what it was to feel wanted. Now this sick shame was all she knew.

“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”

“Stay…please…stay.”

“No,” she said again. “I’m a healer, I’ve taken oaths—” “No, you’re not,” Crowther cut in, a susurration in his voice like the snap of scissors. “Not in this room, not on this assignment.

“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.”

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

But worse still was knowing all that and still craving those rare moments in which he was gentle. Because that was all she had left.

“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.”

She was almost asleep when she heard the faint whisper of his voice. “I’m going to take care of you. I swear, I’m always going to take care of you.”

“You are. It doesn’t matter what happens to you, you will still be mine.”

“What if it’s not that simple, though?” she said. “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.

“I want to build a bomb,”

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

“I’m never going to forgive you for this,” she finally managed. The words came out slurred, giving them an irregular lilt. Kaine’s lips tightened into a flat line, but then he nodded. “I know you won’t, but you’ll be alive and away from the war. Those were always my terms.”

“Do you have a better solution for us this time, too?” he asked quietly. “After all, not every single horror that I’ve ever imagined has happened to you yet. Losing you and spending fourteen months trying and failing to find you. Finally getting you back, tortured and broken. Keeping you prisoner—the transference—raping you—” His voice was growing raw with grief and rage.

He had gone white, that scalding gleaming white. “Is this not enough? There are, undoubtedly, still unexplored depths to the potential misery between us. Shall we endeavour to achieve all of it?”

This was his attempt at giving her what she wanted. For him, acknowledging that he would have a child, a daughter, meant acknowledging that he wouldn’t live to meet her. He was telling the stories so Helena could tell their daughter about him, about what he’d been like, before the Institute and the war.

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, 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.”

“I think I always saw running away as the destination. I never actually thought about what would be left of me by the time I got here.”

He didn’t have any dreams about what he’d do or be after the war. He had never even allowed for the possibility. He had no idea how to do anything but be a soldier.

“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.