𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍 𝐒𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆

Chapter 8

Illusions

"I don't understand why I'm not dead.

When your heart breaks, you should die."

~ Harper Pitt, Angels in America

He had once believed that love would save them.

Now, it all seemed foolish. Dead leaves crunched under his feet. His eyes, gazing at the ground, saw nothing but a blur. The world was spinning under him but he - shivering slightly and swallowing down a bout of nausea - felt he was no longer a part of it. Only the strong fingers clutching his arm kept him grounded in reality. And it was, he thought bitterly, a hideous reality.

The unyielding grip forced him forward through the woods, even as his feet dragged and every muscle in his body yearned to break away, to run to freedom, to hide from this impossible nightmare. His mind screamed in silent protest: this could not be happening! It was a mistake, all a terrible confusion! This could not be his fate, for he could not bear it.

He could bear fighting, and capture, and torture, and even death. He certainly did not welcome death, but his life's end was inevitable, and the likelihood of it ending prematurely was high so long as the war raged. He could bear the wrath of his enemies, even if their wands spilled his blood or drove him to insanity or worse, as he imagined they might. He could bear becoming a murderer, to save his own life or those of the people for whom he cared.

But he could not bear this: to face all of these horrors alone, and to know that he had come so impossibly close to being finally, perfectly, happy, only to have that stolen away. It was like ice in his stomach, and his skin crawled with the knowledge of what had come to pass. How could they have done this, without telling him, without warning him?

He stumbled over a branch, and the fingernails of the robed man beside him dug so deeply into his arm that he was sure they had broken skin. He blinked, gave a short hiss of pain, and remembered the scratch of another's fingernails down his back, across his skin, gentle and loving ...

He had once believed that together, they could do anything. They could escape the war and live the lives that young people in love are meant to have - even if they had never uttered that word. He had, out of naivety or misplaced faith or willful blindness, dared to believe that everything really might be all right. That they might make it through. That he, despite it all, could have this one perfect thing in his life, and that it might not be yanked cruelly away.

But now he could see in his mind those eyes staring into his, hateful and angry and like a fucking stranger's, and he knew that he was a fool.

The sting of tears blurred his vision, and he squeezed this eyes shut. He would not let them see this; he would not break the tense silence with the sob that was crawling up his throat. If they would not grant him the luxury of fleeing this ugly truth - "Why?" he croaked - then he would not give them the satisfaction of seeing him break under it. He would not give up the one thing remaining to him: dignity. And he would not, ever, allow them to see the irony of the gravest error he had made in his entire life.

That he would love, and that it would kill him.

He walked on.

~*~*~

"Daddy!"

The small girl's shriek was barely audible over the sounds swirling around her. Sirens blared a few streets away, people were shouting and crying, and the flames that had consumed the row of houses before her were roaring like a monster. Her bare feet were cold against the cobblestone of the street, and she shivered in her night dress. The monster had come while she was sleeping; she had heard the alarms, had felt her father tug her out of bed and push her down the hall, through the kitchen, and out to the street. "Fire!" he had yelled at her, and then, "Stay here while I get your brother!"