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Words: 1475
Backdated to May 13th


For a little while he just stood in the hall, as near the door as comfortable with his forehead rested against the cool, flat plane of it. His hand had been on the handle for at least twenty minutes, unmoving. The keys were still in the door, not jingling as nothing was moving except the faintest breeze from an open window at the end of the hall.

There is no sound.

It was midday- most of the other apartment tenants were out at their summer jobs or summer classes. Faust must be out the window and on the town. He was a Mauvian. Maybe he was looking for Senshi to awaken. Maybe he was searching for Thraen? A week and a half and he’d been stuck in the hospital as Quenton, his regular cellphone there at the apartment and unable to transform to access his senshi phone. There had been no answer at Stroud’s place, no small kindnesses or rescues for someone to stop by the place to feed the cat, water the plants or bring him a cellphone or change of clothes. In the early haze of surgery painkiller-cocktail he’d used the hospital phone to call his own cellphone, hoping maybe Alois would be up to hear it.

He knew Everything all over again, even through the oxycodone, when it reached voicemail.
Alois wasn't home to call.

“Don't call me twice, Sraen - you won't wake up ze second time.”
He pushed the door open hard without registering the faint echo of the handle on the other side banging as the portal overextended. The room was dark except for the yellow light filtering in on the thirsty plants. Mechanically he shut the door behind himself, then stretched out arms as though balancing a beam as he walked. His left hand touched nothing, the small hall wide enough at least for two people. The right trailed fingertips along the wall until the nook of the kitchenette table opened out like a void. His passing along the resin-drowned pennies was enough a breeze to disturb a paper there. The motion drew his attention more swiftly than the colour or presence alone. The handwriting was daggers-
’I’m Sorry’
Verzeihung

He stared at it, perfectly still as his eyes dilated as though they could discern each individual particle or wave form of light bouncing from the ink stain of note. It was in English, not German. Not the informal “entschuldige” of “excuse me”, like he was asking to reach around for a glass while they were both making use of the kitchenette. It wasn't the Holt Deustche lesson-based "das tut mir leid," like some commiserative empathy. It was specifically apology and pronoun in English without other trappings. No “bitte,” tacked on. No “Ich habe das nicht gewollt”.

You meant it. My hips were bruises from teeth, as your scalp was no doubt sore from hard pulling. Marked each other well before parting company...was that (that was) goodbye, as you swallowed hard for oxygen in our collapse on the floor by the bed? (You could not breathe for lungs or throat later.) You wrote the note deliberately- Sorry for leaving? That I would come back and not find you here again? Sorry for not finishing what you started here- where is your real change? The change of you to something else without some alien intruder carrying your so sorry corpse over the threshold of difference. Sorry for turning the damned city into whatever a ‘Rift’ is? It smacks of an end-game scenario where all of the city dies or is consumed. Sorry for potentially feeding me to youma. Were you just sorry to bring some curse down on everything and expecting I’d live through it.

Slowly the questions, even in his mind, lost their tonal up-lilt of formal query. Bischofite was not there to answer for his reasoning. And (Thraen) Quenton was more certain the answer lay in some muddled, uncertain combination of many reasons more than a crystallized few. Alois had been in midst of change, had been beginning and making progress, but was still mired in the search without a clear goal. His reasons, reasoning, would muddle what he held up as Bischofite. The note was at least some proof of that. You valued what was here. You knew you were going to destroy it and possibly me before all that we’d built in either of us could be hard-set. You didn't know about your own betrayal...that creature crawling in you like a parasite to glue you together again even while that other general bled you and I crushed the last bones of the wings on your throat.

Feathers that spread and moved with each flash of breath they shared. The vision of that tattoo-stroked skin passed over Quenton’s conscious like pleasant fog. The note came up between fingers like a playing card, brought light as petal against lips.

Wings that were always mine, marking you.
It was always me. His feet moved again, slipping out of shoes to bare skin- he was dressed in the hospital scrubs they’d sent him home with as his own clothes had been cut off on admission to the ER. It took nor more thought than a whim to grasp along one of the cheap seams and tear off the pieces with his strong hand. Left hand in free space as usual-unusual in a right-minded world.

We are not in our right-minds. Right hands.
‘Gott hat es dir verraten’.
No, You did. The best you have to say to it, after you've played Charade and left work unfinished, is that you are sorry. I thought better of your resolve. Even as you stood there, Bischofite, your own allies turning on you, you were falling apart. We both fell apart.

I led you to the ground, relying on that sword’s work. Not wholly a failing, it had killed you, but why should I not have made doubly sure? Could the youma have healed no head? No heart? Would it then be less of you? I don’t know how ...how to have done it very different to ensure that your starseed, your soul, was preserved or separate, …..destroyed and no part of that thing that came to be.

I failed in relying on anyone or anything else- But I expect you will not call on me, and you’ll wake up this second time warped but alive.

Bare, he returned to where they spent their late morning- the blankets tangled half on the bed, half off and Alois’ pillow against the bed frame to protect his back from the pressures of their play. There was a circle of black fur on his own pillow, Faust’s claim and bed for the week and a half apparent. The sculptor sank slowly down to the floor, curling against the first pillow and ignoring the shots of pain through his side. Pain was just a point of focus, one to push aside or ponder. He pushed it away in favor of the lingering scent of his lover’s sweat on the pillow.

Tears didn't come, as he’d expected. Prepared for. I told myself I would allow one breakdown. Expected it would come here, to drown in the foreign world of a place changed but familiar. It is alien now as it was when I first moved in. The heart rhythms were different for one month only, but they were fine as filigree. It will grow more foreign, not less. Scent will leave, ghosts of motion and the feel of weight over my legs. The hitch of your breath when my nails drag your shoulder blades is gone. No notes from a piano, she has gone mute and lost her voice. You will not pull a book at random from the shelf and ask ...why it had such a place there and not the garbage- goading a match of one philosophy to another. This place is not mine, it became ours. And now that is gone.

Sleep did not come, too close cousin in grief as the tears he missed, but neither did he move. The sun and moon could make their march, one march, and he would allow that one day. There was no one to call to for help, no one would answer, and he'd well learned the futility of the wish. But enforced strength too long, in the wrong circumstance of brittle weather, had its own madness waiting. One day fallow- of cold wishes for familiar, wheezed laugh and bone-knobbed arms on a floor was one he could pay. One more change to notch.

I would not have accepted this behavior, not understood, it before. I wish you were here, Alois. Or I where you are now.
I've lost the moon while counting the stars.