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You find him in the room that used to be yours, standing by the window with his hands in his pockets. The window overlooks the garden and beyond that, of course, the ocean, glittering and blue and endless. You have to duck to get through the door frame.
“Annabel,” he says.
You don’t say anything. You never know what to say. You think this is something you’re supposed to feel bad about, but you can’t bring yourself to care.
The room is dusty and the door is barely hanging onto its hinges. Otherwise, it looks exactly the same as it always did. You’d be lying if you remembered it entirely– you tried never to spend time there, and besides, you’ve been asleep for so long. The big bed is made. There isn’t a cavalier cot, not for you. You had always preferred to sleep on the hard wooden floor.
You cross the room and stand next to him at the window. You stare at the water like a lover.
“Are you alone?” he asks redundantly. He would know if there was anyone else here.
“Yes,” you say.
“I missed you,” he says, and it’s the truth.
“So did I,” you reply. He never taught you how to lie.
He turns to look at you. You think maybe he’s about to embrace you, but he just smiles and says, “Let’s go down to the kitchen. I need a drink.”
You walk through the house he built for them in silence. He talks plenty– he tells you some things you already know, and some things you don’t. He says, “The Resurrection Beasts are gone. Ianthe got rid of them. She’s good, you know. I mean, she’s terrible, but she’s good. She’d kill me and take my place if she were able, and whatever universe she created would be infinitely worse than mine. I think I’d have to be a little proud, though. Secretly. Outwardly I’d be shaking my head in disapproval.”
You know this, about your siblings. You want to wail and cry and tear him limb from limb, then go and find Ianthe Naberius and tear her cavalier’s mortal soul straight from her chest, scattering her own to the furthest reaches of the River. You don’t. It’s the end of everything, and you don’t have time for a tantrum.
He says, “Harrowhark did a number on me. She did a number on everything. I would say she didn’t do it on purpose, but she’s a smart girl. She had to know that prying open all the thousand mouths of Hell and letting out ten billion devils wouldn’t go over well.”
You know this, too. You didn’t know how to feel pride, but you had told the infant you were proud of her for this. She had cried so hard her facepaint began to run and began babbling about deservedness and her being an abomination and the like. You thought deservedness was nonsense; you did not operate based on deservedness. You told her she was no more an abomination than yourself or John or her own cavalier. Then you took her face in your hands and kissed her between the eyebrows, which made her cry even harder. You weren’t entirely sure why.
His voice begins to quiver when he says, “They’re all gone. Cassy, Cyrus, Ulysses, and Gideon all went with the Resurrection Beasts. Cytherea– oh, Harrowhark got Cytherea, after she defected. Mercy and Augustine–” he exhales, all shaky, and continues quietly– “I did them in myself. My two oldest friends, and I killed them myself. They were all my fault, in some way or another, though.”
“Yes, they were,” you say. He never taught you to lie, and that’s done him more harm than good.
You come to the kitchen then, and his whole demeanor changes. He grins, his shoulders straighten out, and he pushes the swinging doors open with a flourish. He heads straight for the liquor cabinet.
“Ten thousand years old,” he says cheerfully as he picks out a bottle. He doesn’t bother to pour himself a glass. You stand in the doorway with your sword dragging on the ground behind you, stone-faced as ever. You want this to end, but you really did miss him.
“Lighten up, darling,” he says, and you wish you could throw him down on the garden fence. “Do you want some?”
“No.”
“I figured.” He sweeps past you, bottle in hand, and gestures for you to follow him. He leads you on another winding path through the house, into one of the rooms you remember them all getting fabulously drunk several times in the early years. He had passed out on the floor once, and you had to carry him over your shoulder to his bed. You never thought of it as your bed, even though he always asked you to lie there next to him.
He rifles through Augustine’s record collection, finds the one he’s looking for, and carefully places it onto the player. Then he drapes himself dramatically over one of the couches as the music begins to play.
“What are you doing, John?” you ask, in the gentlest voice you know.
He smiles at the ceiling. “I just wanted to see you.”
You walk over and crouch next to him, so that you’re at his eye-level. He turns to look at you with your eyes, and he’s still smiling, but there’s nothing behind it. “You know why I am here,” you say.
“I know,” he replies. Then he repeats: “I just wanted to see you.”
He holds out the bottle to you again, and this time, you take it. It burns terribly going down, and you drink too much at once, but he just laughs. You love his laugh. He takes your free hand in both of his– your other is still dragging the sword behind you. You love his hands. You love his face and his hair and his ratty sweaters. You’d love his eyes so much better if they were back in your face.
You let him talk for a while longer, long enough that you begin to feel the alcohol. You’ve never been drunk before, and it leaves you feeling lighter and very nearly content. When he suddenly stands up and takes your hands and asks you to dance, you laugh your ugly laugh and say yes.
This body isn’t any good for dancing, but you find that being drunk brings back memories from before– from the baby body, from dancing in the kitchen with Pyrrha. It’s not the same, of course, but it’s good. You spin him around until he laughs and pulls himself close to you. You kiss him, and you come away with a piece of his bottom lip between your teeth. He smiles ruefully with bloodied teeth as it grows itself back, and, not knowing what to do with it, you swallow. It tastes more like blood than anything else, and a little like you. He sings along, off-key and overconfident– Jubilation! She loves me again! You dance with him until the record ends and you’re both out of breath.
He asks, “Will you help me cut my hair?”
It has grown out, you’ve noticed. He’d never let it get long before. He finds ancient clippers in a trunk somewhere, sits himself before the mirror, and directs your hands. You don’t know how to wield it– you’ve never been any good with your hands, you weren’t meant to have them and often found them tedious. You shave his head down, shorter than he ever had it before, like the infant. He asks you, “Do you want me to do yours, too?”
You shake your head. You adore your long hair. It’s one of the only parts of the body you like. You do ask, though– “Could you braid it?”
He’s bad at braids. His hands are clumsy. They’re falling apart before he’s even finished. You keep them out of the leftover stubbornness that comes from once being made of rock.
The night wears on. You don’t drink any more, but you feel as if you keep getting drunker. He leads you down the stairs to the kitchen, where he grabs another bottle, and then out into the pretty garden you had always adored. In the beginning, he’d been guilty and tried to give you some of yourself back, but he hadn’t done a particularly good job. He had never been very good at working with life; everything he ever brought to life was a few shades off. He was only ever any good at working with death.
The garden is a wreck. The roses that had grown in such neat little rows ten thousand years ago are half obliterated and half horribly overgrown, buckling under their own weight into the narrow grassy pathways, intertwining with dark green vines. You like it this way. You wish it– you, your old body– could all be like this again. You wish, not for the first time, that he had given you a dog like you asked. You would’ve even settled for one that was strange and undead, with teeth where teeth weren’t supposed to be.
There are three spikes of the fence bent out of shape, and you watch as he reaches out and touches one. He shudders like it had an unpleasant texture, like when Pyrrha and Cam made you eat eggs, then pockets his hand. The lines between you in this body and you in the baby body are getting blurrier, and you can’t tell if it’s because of the alcohol or because your brain and your body know you’re going to die. You were once so afraid to die.
He turns around to look at you. You say, “Is that where your baby died?”
He smiles a little bit. “Hardly a baby. She just celebrated her twenty-first.”
“Twenty-one years is not a very long time.”
“She died when she was eighteen.”
He sounds a little sad, but only a little. You ask, “Do you love her?”
He says wryly, “I’m God. I love everything.”
“Do you love her as a father?”
“Yes,” he says.
He isn’t telling the truth, but it isn’t a full lie. You ask, “If she had been alive when you met her, would you have killed her?”
“Without a doubt.” He paused. “Her mother was planning to kill her as an infant, though, so it’s not like she was any better.”
You walk to him, not caring how the rose thorns open up your bare feet. He doesn’t move until you’re nearly chest to chest– or rather, chest to head. He made your body so very tall. You don’t think of yourself as a body, but if you did, you wouldn’t have made it tall.
He leads you to the edge of the cliff, and you sit down together, legs dangling off of the edge. It’s windy, and the sea is so dark it looks like a drop off into nothing.
He says, “I really do feel bad about Kiriona.”
He says, “I killed all my friends.”
He begins to cry, then. You never know what to do when he cries. You were not a kind mother before, and you are not a kind wife.
He’s not a very kind husband or father, so you think maybe you’re even.
He doesn’t cry for very long. You reach out and wipe one of his tears away with your finger, then stick the finger in your mouth. You like the taste of salt, but his always tastes different from yours. He begins to laugh hysterically.
You say, “You know it’s over.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. “It doesn’t have to be.”
“What do you have left?” you ask, and it’s a genuine question. “What else could you possibly need?”
He looks like he’s about to start sobbing again. He says, “We could start over. Wipe the slate clean. The human race, round three. I could even dig them up again… make them forget, again. I’d get it right this time, I know I would– I’ve had practice. We could just live here, the sixteen of us, no one else. I might even keep Kiriona and her girl around. It’s so messy with everyone else, anyway. Blood of Eden’s practically gone and dealt with itself, I don’t even really care about them– maybe I never did. It’s just a game, Annabel. It’s just a big long game, and I lost this time, but I can dump all the pieces off the board and start again. I’m the only one who can.”
You look at him. He looks dreadful. He’s still beautiful, anyway, but he looks dreadful.
You say calmly, “I don’t believe you.”
“About what?”
“Not caring. You’ve made your whole life into revenge. You’ve made the whole universe into it. I don’t believe that you don’t care anymore.”
He says, “I can’t forgive them. How can you forgive them?”
You look at him, and he stares at you so hopefully it breaks you. You rest a hand on the side of his face, and he grabs frantically at your wrist with the hand that isn’t holding the bottle. You say, “It has been ten thousand years. They are infants. They did not kill me, you did.”
“I didn’t mean to,” he says, a little bit petulant, like a child being chastised for something they very obviously had meant to do.
You smile. You’ve been told you have an awful smile. He doesn’t seem to mind. You tell him what he already knows: “Maybe not. But you did it, anyway.”
He falls apart then, and you hold him to your chest. You stroke his shorn hair and kiss his head. He loses grip on the bottle, and it plummets into the ocean below. You hear him say something under his breath: fuck, that was ten thousand years old, Augustine’s gonna kill me. Then he begins to cry even harder.
You rock him a little bit, and you wonder if you can take him over the edge with you, follow the bottle into the water. You don’t think you’ve ever known him to cry this hard, it’s remarkable.
“We cannot start over,” you say quietly. “The slate cannot be cleaned.”
“I know,” he replies, mouth against your skin. “I know.”
You stay there until he stops crying. It takes a long time, but you can wait. A few minutes is nothing, in the grand scheme of things, especially to you.
He says, “What will we do?”
“We’ll die,” you say.
“I don’t know how. I don’t think you know how, either.”
“We can learn.” You giggle. He looks at you like you just killed a man. You say, “I always enjoyed learning things. So did you. It’s just– just something new for us to learn. Something new for you to be.”
You’ve never stuttered before in this body. You’ve certainly never giggled.
“Something new for me to be?” he asks.
“I’m going back to what I was before,” you reply. “I’m going home. It’s all I really wanted.” You look out into the depthless black expanse of sea. “I thought you might want to come with me.”
He asks– “So you want to undo the Resurrection?”
“I always hated that you called it that,” you say, sighing. “It was not a resurrection; it was a murder. But yes.”
He shakes his head, laughs a bit. He leans back on his elbows. “I had a good run,” he says.
You stare at him, and he laughs again. You had expected to have to drag him kicking and screaming. You had expected him to put up a fight. He had always put up such a fight before.
“Do you think– is there a way for me to get a message out? For Kiriona and Harrowhark and– well, I was going to say Ianthe, but I don’t have anything to say to her, really,” he says, then scoffs and lies back fully on the grass. “No, forget it.”
“What would you say?” you ask.
He shakes his head at the sky. “I’d say… I’m sorry, I suppose. I’d tell them I love them. It’s not like I was any good at showing it.” He seems to scramble for words, then give up. You’ve grown so tired of his self-deprecation, and you're only half-certain his statement that he loves the black-eyed infant and the yellow-eyed infant is true. “That’s it. I love you, I’m sorry. There’s nothing else.”
“They’ll know,” you say, and it’s a half-truth. They’re not far behind you, you know, and by the time they get here, it should be over. They will know you love them, at least. They, and all the rest, will know from the sound of the crickets and the lapping of the waves, from the feeling of the grass under their feet and the sun on their face that you love them. Maybe they will know to take it as a message from him, too. Maybe not.
You lie down in the grass next to him, throwing your arms wide and accidentally whacking him in the nose so hard you hear a crack. He hardly even flinches.
“Why aren’t you fighting?” you ask, curious.
He exhales. He opens his mouth to speak, closes it, opens it again. He ends up just shrugging. There could be a million reasons, and you know in that moment you’ll never know a single one of them.
It doesn’t matter. Neither of you will be around much longer to worry about it.
He looks at you. “I love you,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, and I love you. There’s nothing else.”
You pull him close and kiss him again, this time managing to do it without breaking skin. He’s crying again. He presses his forehead to yours and you say, “You know I cannot ever forgive you.” and then, “I still love you.”
He nods, eyes wet. You pull him closer, close enough for your edges to blur, and you reach into him. You find his heart, red and beating and ten thousand years old– you try to cradle it for a moment, try to be a loving wife, but your hands are clumsy. You never did like having hands. You hold his heart too tight, and he gasps and kicks and struggles a little bit. Only a little bit, though, before he begins to unwind.
He sighs, and then his body stops kicking, and it dies. You hardly feel it– you aren’t the body anymore. As his soul begins to disperse, the whole, disgusting beast of it, so does yours. The body he made for you is falling apart, and you laugh– as much as you can laugh, anyway, when you aren’t anything at all– as it dissolves into saltwater. His doesn’t dissolve, but there’s a hole through his sternum where the body’s hand is, and he looks profoundly dead.
He’s there, with you, in the sky and the dirt and the water. Maybe he is you, maybe you two are one and the same. You reach out with his hand and with yours to make sure the sun is still alight, you leave traces of yourself and of him on each of the cold, empty corpses of your siblings, but you don’t go further than that. You are yourself, you understand yourself. You control yourself and nothing else.
For the first time in over ten thousand years, the First House breathes in.