Epilogue: Ace of Spades

Epilogue

Epilogue

"I love you."
Brows raised.
(Ace of Spades)

***

And maybe he did love me. Out on that building overlooking his city, glistening, perfect, his arm around me, my arm around the dog. He'd said it like he meant it, like it was obvious. A given, a reward for all my arduous suffering. And I thought I'd spring to my feet and twirl and cry, and ask him to do something silly like- like marry me- but the emptiness coiling inside me only grows by the moment, each time I imagine what he said that night to be true.

The love of a killer. A supposedly glorious thing. Me, the exception to the blind, unflinching, unscrupulous eye of Death- special. Special. Could I be, then? If I win the love of an evil man; if he can love, is he even evil at all?

(Does any of it matter?)

And oh, things... things, just- just silly little things... that's all my world was ever made of. Things. Silly little pretty little things, all glittering and frayed like glass in the wake of the ruin he'd wrought. The mess he'd made of me, of everything. My life, my world, reduced to nothing but a mere casualty in the wake of his chaotic illusions, to destroy anything and everything that I could possibly ever love- so I'm left, alone, with him.

And I look at him now, sat next to me. Half-drunk. On the edge of that scaffolded, unfinished, dilapidated building.  It feels, to me, more complete and whole than I myself have ever been.

The rottweiler- Daisy- whines in my arm. It's as if she cries in place of the tears I can no longer shed, exhausted, excited, terrified all at once. I look at him again, my madman lover, and wonder about all the things I'd sacrificed on the road to his seemingly holy confession, the affection I'd coveted from him these long, infinite months. My studies. My art. Mom, Cassidy. And the... the bodies... how much blood had I stood back and allowed him to shed, so that he would witness my indifference and praise me for it? How hard I'd bit back my tongue and held my stomach, willing myself to be as numb to the violence as he was; for how long had I watched him dirty his own hands, so that I might lick the filth clean from his fingers? And thank him for it? It seemed to me that the price of love- whatever shape it took in his deluded brain- required a sacrifice I might not ever be ready to make, and so I let others die in my cowardly stead. A life for a life- and it's a life that I'm starting to doubt I'm even fit for. Hungry gods must be fed, after all. And oh, how he starves for the chaos it's all wrought.

And it's strange, watching him so still now, how earlier he had walked in languid circles over cold SWAT corpses, waiting as each worried, repressed thought slowly dawns on me as though his final admission- of a love that may not even be real- had been what they were waiting for. Fears that require some love to suck dry. Mites that feast on the bones of my blind, abject joy. This feeling will eat me alive. Such is the price for happiness.

Though, it suddenly strikes me... that this- is an epilogue. The culmination of dreams, restless nightmares baring shades on every wall that casts a shadow; and the future looms like the interminable, uncertain mouth of some odd, unnameable oblivion, but I already know of one such oblivion, of an unknown so infinite, and it does bare a name, and he chose it himself. It is the scarred mouth that engulfs me beneath its tremulous weight, his words to which I cling, wear like a second skin, tread like the fresh, unmarked earth buried beneath snow.

I try to picture the future when I see his face. I can't.

This future terrifies me, but to know that it might all begin and end with him- it's difficult to discern the fear from trembling, frantic, delirious glee- when he touches me, when he careens around the back of my neck with bared teeth and says my name like it's his, there's little difference between life and death, comfort and pain- between him and a god. So unmoving in his cruelty, so just in his chaos. Is dying even death? Wouldn't my blood lavish his fingers all the same? (Would he still let me taste them?)