What did you even do, standing on the edge of the apocalypse?

Well, if she was going by those around her: you kept your head down and continued to go about your business, more or less as normal. Which was why she couldn’t quite invest herself in the belief that anything was about to collapse in on itself. She kept an eye on the news - a habit she generally avoided - and saw nothing to alarm or ruffle. Panic didn’t break out in the streets. No one was, as she had observed to the strange Negaverse agent, emptying their retirement accounts and throwing huge, nihilistic orgies - and she’d know, she thought with confidence, if they were.

This was, all in all, more ammunition to her fomenting Grand Unified Theory of Bullshit: that this was all a game, played by something like Gods. Everything from the hyper-local nature of the war to the blunted weapons of her own faction - and Gouvernail had enlightened her, by mistake, that this was a change from how it had once been - felt like players carefully abiding by rules designed to keep the game going for as long as it could, without leaning too far in any given direction. Nice and tidy.

Still, it felt more than a little unfair that she should have to find time to call her mother, arrange her call times, walk her dog, and juggle being some sort of half-useless vigilante superhero - without even mentioning finding downtime to enjoy - and do all of it on what might be the brink of the end of the world. She had, even before awakening, referred to this whole cosmic warfare business as Destiny City Bullshit. It had never felt more like bullshit than it did now.

She needed sleep. She knew it, and she knew that she was starting to rely on caffeine in a way that felt uncomfortably like the word “abuse” might be applied to it. But she’d never wanted to sacrifice anything to any of this, and she definitely wasn’t going to sacrifice everything that made life living on its own merits. She would not - would never - become nothing but a senseless weapon. Not until she had no other option, and world-eating serpents aside, that didn’t yet seem to be the case. So she stubbornly crammed as much living as she could into the hours that were available to her, even if it meant falling asleep with the phone still in her hand and her makeup still on.

Get lunch at that new Greek place. Read a paper about masculinity and knighthood in the 14th century. Pretend you’re not neglecting a world where you might, maybe, stop another murder. Harass Doodlebear after work while you’re still riding the afterglow. Get your hair done. Pretend you didn’t run for your life in a literal sense a week before. Wake up in a bed that smells like someone else’s wife. Swipe right on every bearded man over forty with a little grey at his temples. Pretend you’re not doing that and definitely don’t think too hard about it. Take Petitcru to the dog park. Call your sister, laugh about the latest reality TV celeb drama. Pretend the world isn’t maybe ending.

She sat across from her usual girl, watching her lips move as she bent over her nails, not listening to a word she said.

“Bright or dark?” she always asked her, holding up a bottle of cherry red and a bottle of burgundy. She’d felt the most irrational lump in her throat. The world might be ending and she couldn’t even get her nails done in lavender or neon green, because she had expectations to meet at work, and the work had to keep happening. The world wasn’t ending, though. She had no reason to believe it was ending.

“Can you put some little rhinestones on them?” she’d asked. Stupid request, made for reasons of stupid rebellion - something to get caught on a sleeve at an inconvenient moment, something that would make her have to be gentle with her hands.

At the bowl, getting her roots touched up, she’d almost asked to go back to her natural pale brown, and had swallowed it back. This, too, she needed for work. And it felt, besides, like a cowardly crawling back towards being Misty Lynn, whose life, if it was not glamorous, had at least been uncomplicated.

She leaned back amid the peroxide fumes and she thought of Gouvernail, in his bland and unmoved voice, without bitterness, observing that he would probably have died younger had he not been called up and then observing - with the faintest shade of resentment - that at least he would have died with a simpler idea of the world and God.

She would not be like him, and in some stupid way shunning the bottle blonde would be turning towards exactly that. She needed the blonde, not just for the job that she stubbornly held onto - had to hold onto - but because Elaine Carlisle was a blonde. A blonde with nails that were always red, bright or dark, usually but not always without little rhinestones on them.

And the damnedest thing of it all was that she was not unhappy. It had not yet made her miserable, although it sometimes threatened to, or even did in short and stormy bursts. But she stood on the precipice of an apocalypse she did not believe in, and she found that although it took a violent effort, she could still smile into the serpent's teeth.

Her life, like Gouvernail’s a thousand years before, had suddenly become very complicated, and it became full of questions she had to imagine he had had to ask himself - what exactly was worth violently defending, for one. Their answers were different, she supposed, but that only served to make her more comfortable in hers. She had a lot of things to fight for, now - had been dragged against her will into fighting for them, but obligated to nonetheless. But one of them was the same one it had always been: her life, and the way she chose to live it.

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