your encore. (ninety-seventh finale)

[Cait]

🎕

I’m not as prepared as I think I am for Jupiter’s advance. He might hit me; he might not. I’m a bit numb to anything painful these days, a girl of fire and misery and adrenaline almost dried up, struggling to summon the last dregs of it to attempt to duck out of the way.

Fighting Jupiter feels a bit like fighting Artemis. Both larger than life, beasts once so sure of their selves, now uncertain in what they pray won’t be their final swings. But I’m not naïve enough to take it at face value. For all I know, Jupiter stumbling over his own feet is merely an act to lull me into a sense of security before he slices me in half and slits my throat, not necessarily in that order.

Dunno though. Doesn’t really seem like his style.

Maybe it’s the smoke fucking with my head, reaching its thick talons down into the darkest crevices of my body and wreaking havoc in the shape of an anxiety I’ve never quite known. Maybe it’s the innate sense of a looming fork in the road, knowing there’s only so long I can stall the end.

“Still think you can change your mind?”

A thin sliver of blood escapes from between Jupiter’s teeth as he speaks, staining his lips with cherry wine. He’s slow to his feet, something dark and viscous catching up to him. I watch on in pity, letting him regain his balance, wondering when it will be my turn to sink to my feet and crawl my way back to my pride. But for now, I just offer him a sad smile.

“Oh babe, I thought we were past being sentimental.”

Hitting Jupiter once can be put down to an act of self-defence. He attacked me first. It was instinct that swung my weapon, not the cruelness of my humanity being awoken.

But hitting Jupiter a second time is a choice. An acknowledgement of wanting to live. I’ve spent the last year of my life telling everyone I don’t want it, but it’s funny what truths are uncovered in the dead of the night; against a backdrop of smoke; when fantasy is so close to becoming reality.

I don’t remember shutting my eyes. I don’t remember thrusting my blade towards him – hard, purposeful. The only thing I’m really thinking about is being as far away from this moment as possible, trying to imagine what a place where my chest stops aching might look like.

By the time I realise it’s the very place I’m trying to send Jupiter, it’s already too late to change fate.

sera attacks jupiter; spiked blunt

XYGXQbCKQWspiked blunt

broken left foot – 6.5 + 1

spiked blunt

[Cait]

❦

Even as I’m swinging my blade, I’m still trying to find a reason to keep fighting. Thought I would have figured it out by now, what I actually want, but the fork in the road shows both potential paths are about as fucking bleak as each other.

Two weeks ago, I signed my life away, but reality reminds me that my obituary dates back a year now. Maybe even longer. Jupiter tells me to think about something bigger than us both: a future, a tomorrow. And I want to appease him – to try to find a way to relate to the stranger in front of me who I’m intrinsically linked to now forevermore, for better or worse. But eighteen years of vehemently avoiding thinking about anything difficult and unknown is hard to reprogram. I’m stubborn in my ways. To a fault, it would seem, because it’s only once the damage is done that I realise what terrible new world I’ve exposed myself to.

And I don’t think I want it.

The smoke and flames reach a roaring crescendo, spurred on by Gamemakers twisting dials from a shelter of steel-enforced walls as they build up their perfect finale. I wish the soot was thick enough to obscure my view completely so I have something to blame for my untamed cruelty. But I don’t. I know exactly what I’m doing when I swing my weapon at him the second time.

Don’t know why I’m surprised when the mace caves his chest in, brutal and bloody and splintering. Yet I still wait for his retaliation, because it doesn’t add up that all it takes for someone’s light to die out is a lucky hit, a misplaced footstep, a millisecond’s hesitation.

Don’t know why I’m still shocked when he doesn’t swing back, even as the ground rises to envelope him in its sandy embrace, his body crumpling in on itself. I just stand there gaping for a while, waiting for something to happen.

Don’t know why I’m still expecting the miracle that isn’t coming. It’s only when the music comes blaring out of the speakers on the stage in a garbled, distorted mess that I finally drop to my knees, hands dragging through the sand, shaking as they touch Jupiter’s shoulder to wrestle him awake.

“Wait, you have to– you gotta get up–”

Jupiter, lifeless. Something in the universe shudders to a halt.

“Get up, get up, get UP! Stop fucking around!”

Iz on a television screen, face down in a puddle of melting ice. Planets spin off axis as the past and present combine. It all ends the same way.

“I change my mind!”

A cannon fires.

“I want to be with her!”

I don’t want to live. Have never wanted to live, but tolerated the idea if I got to do it with Iz. But I’m not even sure she would want to know me anymore:

There’s a flashback of a running gag. A back and forth we’d parrot to each other when the shadows circled a little too close for comfort, in the gallows of our illicit affairs. I’d say how wrong it felt to be reanimating the deceased with my hands working over the buttons on their dress shirt. And Iz would shrug at me, wearing a sad little smile, and give the usual quip to make us both feel a little better, a little more human: “Hey, at least we didn’t kill ‘em.”

I don’t cry; I have no tears in my body, the desert air’s dried them up.

I close my eyes.

I open my eyes.

The burning’s all the same.

I close my eyes.

I open my eyes.

I wonder if this is my life now – a constant cycling through choices that don’t matter and being unable to land on a decision, paralysed by the fear that I’ll choose wrong. That by the time I realise I want to change my mind, it will be far too late.

I close my eyes.

I open my eyes.

Don’t see Jupiter’s body anymore. See faces cycling through the sky instead as the numbers on the welcome sign flicker like a cruel practical joke. Junie, Serelis, Carmen. Nori, Safina, Portia.

Artemis.
Jupiter.
Circe.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with them – to hold onto them, or forget them. It’s just another decision I’m destined to fuck up.

“Try both, Seraphina Keoch.” Jupiter’s voice is watery, slipping away from me as fumes tug at the edges of my consciousness. And there’s a moment of hopeful clarity, that I had it wrong all along, and he’s actually still alive and going to be the one that returns home with a heavy skull and heavy chest. Not me, not me.

But even as I lay myself down, eyelids fluttering closed decisively, I can still see Jupiter’s body letting go of one last breath of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

“See which one sticks.”

So. Maybe I’ll learn to let them go. Maybe I’ll learn to live. Maybe I just have to try.

The last thing I see before the world goes dark is Izzy’s face illuminated in the sky. And it’s the unexpected sight of her hazel eyes that’s the nail in my coffin that sends me plummeting over the edge, falling into the grave I dug for myself two weeks ago: at the edge of Six; next to a dead tree stump; in the space where my entire universe once existed.

FOX