you do not have to be good — yael

[fox]

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"The Program relocation has been successful. We managed."

"She's been terminated?"

"No known surviving family. No loose ends. Lieutenant General's been informed."

"..."

"..."

"Yael's an ancient name, you know?"

"What?"

"Yea, I looked it up while collecting her file for her release. Studied literature in college before joining special units.

"You studied literature?"

"During a war, there's a story where Yael kills a general. He's worried about men invading his tent, so he asks her to watch over him as he sleeps. She pretends to care for him, like how a mother would."

"..."

"Except she drives a tent peg into his temple. A general delivered by the hand of a woman."

"..."

"Unfortunate. She would've been a good Widow."

"Probably not. She's dead."

"Yea. So that's it."

"That's it."

♦️

When Dyno leaves, it occurs to her that she's very tired.

When was the last time she's slept well, she wonders. The last dreamless night, the last sleep that didn't taste of sugar coating, sucked between her teeth?

Light streams through the trees lazily. A low wind blows, and there's a rainfall of petals from the branches, tangling into her hair. She grows more drowsy. She puts her hand to her chest, and it comes away a brilliant, startling red. Ruby red, belly of a bird red.

Her body slumps down.

She remembers splitting tangerine quarters on her birthday, remembers a tiny cake wrapped in brown paper, and the smell of rosewater. And her cats, the gentle tabby and the fat tuxedo, the silly orange one and the calico who'd bite if she came too close. Her mother, waiting by the door with her warm voice.

She'd like to return there, she wants it so badly.

But the truth is, home is nowhere now. She left that place to become someone else she still isn't. She doesn't belong in that memory, or the Black Room, or in Two or Nine, and maybe it's fitting she dies here, in a place that doesn't really exist.

How unfair.

There isn't enough energy to be angry anymore. There just isn't.

A blue shadow crosses her own. He comes like a cloud in a clear sky and kneels beside her. She'd thought she might die in pieces for what she did – but who would've thought Karl of all people would stand between her and Dyno? There's the tiniest expression of something behind that blankness, the smudge of her own blood across his cheek where Dyno touched him.

It's good that she didn't let the boulder eat him. It's good that he's alive.

Her seelie spins around Johnny, bubbling and humming. It glows like a second sun. She watches his face crease at the blood splattering from her, and thinks of the stitches on her stomach. He cannot fix this.

On the ground, there's the wrinkled little paper crane that fluttered out, its wings limp and folded. Her fingers scrape the earth, and she picks up the crane gently.

Karl's hand is warm when she places the bird there.

It takes so much effort to do the littlest of things now. It's a kind of exhaustion that feels from long ago, warm and deep, born from the soup of time. She's never realized it, truly, fully, during all that time she's spent keeping herself alive. Her hand slips from his, and she thinks she might fall asleep.

Maybe she's just been tired for the last two years.

She does not want to be a girl anymore. Her body feels so unbearably heavy.

If she could choose, she'd be the trees when the wind blows, flames of a funeral pyre, cold water on a spring day. She'd be a million small things, scattered across the seasons. No more fighting and survival. Being good or being strong. There would be no terrors outside her closet, no people with hungry eyes. Not shaped by steel or forged by fire.

She would like it. Both fleeting and permanent. To exist, to want nothing. To be home everywhere, with everything.

To be wild, forever.