The Poet and The Soldier

One-

The night air is freezing on Isadora's face and arms, having left her coat back in that godforsaken bar room. But she hasn't managed to escape the screaming in her ears, and she'd be begging for Anna to stop if all her breath wasn't being stolen by the tightness in her chest and her greedy lungs as she sprints home.

It's not far, a twenty minute walk, but Isadora is running and running, between the pain and the shrieking she can't concentrate beyond putting one foot in front of the other, vaguely recognising landmarks and moving towards home from there.

She passes a small alleyway, nothing more than a slender fissure in the street facade, but trips over an overflowing bin and collapses in front of the entrance.

Gasping, she's dizzily thrown back to another night when she was lying helpless on the ground, several hulking figures looming over her, silhouetted by the orange light barely filtering in from the street. Paralysed by the drugs, there was nothing she could do, the men's voices turned into growling beasts and multiple sets of hands were touching her, restraining her, tearing at her clothes and there was nothing nothing she could do as the screaming in her ears morphs into a snarl of rage-

And then Anna appears. She rips the men away from her, utilising her military training to dispatch them with cool efficiency. And God, is she glorious. Isadora's blurry vision struggles to focus on Anna's dark form, but she looks like an avenging angel.

Then she's kneeling beside Isadora, checking her pulse, speaking to her gently.

"Isadora. Isadora, that's it, get up honey, everything's fine, we just need to get you to a hospital."

"No," Isadora rasps. Her hands knot in Anna's shirt. "No hospital. Home."

Anna pauses, and when her voice comes out, it's cold. "What home?"

She vanishes and Isadora reels forward in the pitched quiet of the hole she's left behind.

The sudden hush presses in on Isadora's ears, the cars rushing by muted and her own footsteps inaudible as she doggedly continues homeward. The silence has an accusatory weight, expectant and seething like the calm before a storm, and Isadora has to get home. She has to find Anna again. She realises now how wrong the poems are, and she's sorry, but she can fix it, she knows she can.

The spell shatters the second she slumps through the door of 139 Chaser Street. The slamming of the door against the wall and her ragged panting fills the entryway, her heart thundering in her ears.

But then she hears it. Muffled shouting, the vibration of the ceiling as someone moves around and that awful, animalistic screaming.

Isadora's feet drag her down the hall, up the stairs. Her hand forces the key into the lock. Then the door swings open, and everything hits all at once. The hot, dry air of a desert, the metallic tang of blood, the raging noises of a battle that ends in tragedy, that always ends in tragedy.

And there, lying on a metal operation table in a canvas tent with medics rushing around her, is Anna, a piece of shrapnel speared through her chest.

Her screams are tortured, cutting straight to Isadora's core. She arches and twists, the medics shouting at each other to hold her down, one of them cutting away her shirt to reveal the ruins of her chest, blood pouring freely and dripping off the sides of the table, fresh and bright red.

Isadora steps into the nightmare, reaching out and pressing her hands over the horrific wound, trying to stop the blood. Anna's pitch black eyes fix on Isadora's, raw and desperate; she speaks, blood bubbling on her lips.

"Please, Isadora, I don't want to die." Isadora can only press her hands down harder, blinking against the tears.

"I know, Anna," Isadora says.

"Isadora, I'm scared," Anna gasps, as the blood, so much blood, just keeps welling up around Isadora's hands and she feels like screaming and sobbing because-

"I'm sorry, I can't stop it, I can't fix it, I can't." Isadora grips Anna's hand, slippery with blood. "Forgive me, God, please, forgive me Anna."

But Anna only chokes in one more breath, her dark eyes glistening as she returns Isadora's pressure on her hand for one whole second, before it loosens and drops. Her black holes of eyes dim, and even in death, they are captivating.

Isadora lurches back, wiping at her eyes with bloodstained hands. She turns and feels blindly, groping at the books on the third bottom shelf, pulling out the box at the back, fumbling for what she needs. The pain in her chest is back, and when she looks down she can see a dark red stain spreading across the front of her shirt. Her hands slip as she tightens the rubber tubing around her upper arm, and it takes too long to prepare the needle. Her chest is caving in, blood spurting out as the flesh ruins itself into a terrible wound she can't possibly hope to recover from-

Relief. The rush.

Her head falls back as the horrendous injury to her chest begins to heal itself, and after a few minutes, she feels strong enough to stand. When she does, her flat looks normal.

No screaming, no fighting, no blood. But it's still all wrong.

If Isadora fixes the poems, Anna will come back. She'll see, Isadora will make her see, Isadora will make her stay.

Isadora grabs at the pen holder on the table, her uncoordinated efforts resulting in the pens and pencils spilling everywhere. She seizes two thick markers from the pile and careens out of apartment B, clattering down the stairs.

The stench of paint is like a blow, sharpening Isadora's mind to a razor point of focus. She needs space to write. More space than she's ever needed before.

She sideswipes the doorhandle on her way into apartment C, and she stands in the centre of a room with fresh white walls, the painter's tools abandoned in a corner. Isadora strips to her underwear, uncaps the lid to her first marker, goes to a wall and starts writing.

She scrawls and slashes her words, only stopping to rub her cheek up against the wall, pressing her body to it eagerly.

"Is this right Anna? Is this enough? Tell me, talk to me," she whispers, smearing the wet ink with her lips.

There's no response, but Isadora keeps writing, moving from wall to wall, feeling the words pour out of her the same way Anna's lifeblood flooded from her warm, breathing body-

"What are you doing?"

Isadora whirls. Anna. Perfect in cargo pants and worn boots, her forehead wrinkled in confusion.

"It's for you, it's always been for you," Isadora pants. Anna still looks puzzled.

"I'm writing the poems again, I'm doing them right," Isadora begs her.

Slowly, Anna's head starts to shake. Isadora lunges, but her hands close on empty air.

"No, no you're not." Anna's standing on the other side of the room. She's in military battle dress, helmet on head and rifle over one shoulder. Her face is grim.

"But I love you!" Isadora shouts, throwing hands stained red with ink out wide.

Anna's expression shifts to incredulous. "Love me? I'm you. You can't love me. I'm not real, we never met."

"You're real to me," Isadora says. "I know you."

Anna's eyes are hard and dark as flint as she manoeuvres her gun, jamming it beneath her jaw so it points straight up into her head. "No you don't." She fingers the trigger.

"I was never here."