A God's Last Death

Healing Wounds

There are consequences of living alone—of being all alone. You learn to take care of yourself, or you learn to live with the pain. You trip, you fall, you hurt, but there's no one here to lift you up, so you have to suck it up and lift your ass up on your own. That's how I've been living for the last couple of years.

"Ow, man! That hurt!"

"Oh, would you relax? My God. You just got grazed," I roll my eyes at him and wrap the gauze around his arm. Well, now it's different; now I have to take care of this insufferable man, because he can't do it on his own.

"I didn't get no grazed. This is a first degree highly professional cut we're talking about here."

Ι roll my eyes at his melodramatic reaction. "You're such a baby."

"Weren't you worried about me. Not even a little?" he asks, bringing his face closer to mine.

I tear the duct tape with my teeth and stick it around his gauze. "So, we're on talking terms now?" Yes, I was worried, but I won't give him the satisfaction and say it out loud.

Kai lifts an eyebrow, as if he can read my mind. "Why can't you admit it? Why do you fight it so much? Would it hurt if, for once, you were honest with yourself?"

"Yes! I am a cold, heartless being with no intent to give a damn about anyone. Why do you care anyway? You'll be freed from me in—let me see—five months. In fact, it's funny you should say that. You sound like you care, when in reality you would rather hide behind a mask and abandon anyone who gets too close to you." I regret letting my mouth run free but it feels nice to finally let it all out for once. At least it's better than tiptoeing over broken glass, struggling to bear the awkwardness between us.

Kai shakes his head in dissent. "It wasn't abandonment, it was survival. Do you think it's safe for us to get attached to someone out there in the streets? I have lived all my life seeing my people die, until there was no one left behind, but at least now I can feel free not to care. I don't care about assholes and selfish people. I have learned well the false mirror of humanity, the phantoms of shadows."

"So, what's different now?" I can't help asking.

His eyes snap to mine, his gaze piercing my soul. "Everything."

I don't know why, but that single word is enough to make my defenses crumble. How does he do it? How does he always manage to break through the walls around me, no matter how many times I raise them up again? Do I pretend to fight him back, to run away from him, when deep down I want him to catch me? Before I even begin questioning what I want, I need to be certain. I need to make sure that I'm not walking into another game of his. 

"Won't it be easier if I'm gone?" I glance down at my hands.

"Maybe, but I trust myself to bear a storm. Besides, it's not like I have a choice. Choice now is a thing of the past," he looks at my hands too, the way they are trembling, and he engulfs them within his own, griping them tight.

"Even if I'm sometimes prickly or harsh?" I look up expectedly.

"You're an imperfect person. I doubt you're the first."

I smile at his words and stare at him. In that small room cast in sunset red, we sit alone with our changing hearts, feeling a new bond chaining us together, too strong to resist its power. I can't deny what I feel for him. Not when even the coldest parts of myself are melting under his warm gaze. Not when he is so sweet and beautiful.

As the night slowly covers us, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods there may be for bringing him to me, my doom and my salvation all at the same time. I know my untimely death is approaching and that I'm deluding myself into believing in a happy ending when my life is a tragedy, but the heart is a tricky thing.

Before him, I thought I shouldn't be looking back to the ones I'm leaving behind, but now I'm starting to doubt if it's really worth it. What if by trying not to get hurt, you hurt the people around you, pushing them away and stealing from them the last memories you get to share with them? In the deadly clutch of fate, I have not winced nor cried aloud, but that's hardly been a life worth living.

And I want to live.

With my mind now set, I look him straight in the eye and decide to let myself live a full life in those five months that I still have. "I was worried about you," I finally admit. "So much that I wanted to kill the man who dared to touch you."

A grin appears on his face, and I take it he likes what he's hearing. "So, you're not that incapable of having human emotions."

That bastard. I want to slap that smile off his face, but before I can do so, he grabs the back of my neck and smashes his lips on mine. I'll show him how incapable I am in bed.