There was no such thing as fate, but this was ours.
Even if we remembered again—and we would—we would only find ourselves back here, caught in the same endless, unsolvable equation.
It would never stop because Vivian would never be satisfied. She had paid the price herself once, for a king’s ambition. She had killed him, but instead of casting his crown into the mud, she had claimed it for herself. And now she wanted what any king wanted: to stay king, no matter the cost.
And it would be you who paid it, who would never stop paying it. Because you loved me, and in loving me, you would never be free.
Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.
Your hand was closing now around your hilt. Your eyes were the dull yellow of dead pine, and your limbs moved as if they had strings affixed at every joint.
I thought suddenly of my father, and of the mother I’d never met. Of Professor Sawbridge and even of Ancel, at the very end.
Vivian had made a mistake in her calculations, I thought. For sometimes—when we could not run any longer, when all our choices had been whittled down to one—love made heroes of us.
I felt my own hands resting placidly on my thighs. They were not shaking at all, because I wasn’t afraid. I was only relieved, hugely and guiltily, that I wouldn’t have to watch you die again—and I was sorry. For the children.
Let me write their names here, just once. They’re only a dream, now, of the future that will never come to pass, but I won’t have them forgotten.
Marro. Our son, named for the river where my mother died.
Thea. Our daughter, named for one of your fathers.
I smiled up at you, my neck arched unnaturally by Vivian’s clawed grip. I smiled at the wild bone-white tangle of your hair—God, I would miss your hair—and at the great grim shape of your shoulders. At the age lines that puckered the corners of your eyes so sweetly, and the scar that bit through your left pupil. You had survived so much. You would survive this, too.
That deep furrow appeared between your brows. It asked, plainly:What the hell are you doing?
I kept my eyes on yours. I neither blinked nor flinched; I was no coward.Setting you free, love.
Then I turned my head, hard and fast, three degrees to the left.
THE
LAST DEATH
OF
UNA
EVERLASTING
25
OF THE TWOof us, I was the lucky one. I hadn’t known that, before I watched you cut your own throat.
In all my many lives and deaths, I had never been the one left behind. I’d never been the one who lingered in the world without you, gruesome and a little absurd, like a severed limb. I’d never been the one who had to grieve and go on.
This—this—is what you endured, over and over?
Fuck every single person who ever called you a coward, Owen Mallory. And fuck you, for making me into one, here at the end.
I couldn’t watch. Your clever black eyes had so often been the last thing I’d seen, looking into mine as if you would follow me to heaven or hell, as if there was nowhere I could go that you would not find me. Now it was my turn, and I couldn’t do it. I saw that first bright spray of blood—arterial, fatal—and then I closed my eyes. I, who had watched a city burn without blinking, could not watch you die.
On the backs of my eyelids, I saw your face. The long arch of your nose, badly bruised by your spectacles. The fine bones of your cheeks, and the short silver hairs in your beard, which hadn’t been there before. How old are we, Owen? How many years have we lived? Our bodies keep track, I think, even if we forget.
When I opened my eyes, all your blood was spent among the laid-over grass, and I was alone once more.
Not anymore,you had told me.Not ever again.Liar.
