Page 25 of Against All Odds

Odds.

I glanced up, meeting my own dimly lit eyes in the mirror.

With a painful groan, I uncrossed my legs. Still on hands and knees – not trusting myself to stand up and walk – I made my way to the drawer. I took out the three dice I’d stolen from my roommates two houses ago, the one where we played board games every week. They had so many; I was sure they wouldn’t miss a few. And besides, they’d already made it clear I was no longer welcome in their house after I had thrown up on the toilet on multiple occasions, invited strange men who turned out to be crack dealers into the house for an afterparty, and almost burned down the house once when my drunk self tried to heat up a pizza.

Yeah, I was great at fooling myself. Fooling myself into thinking my roommates were always the problem. I couldn’t blame them – I wouldn’t want to live with me, either.

With a trembling hand, I lifted the first die, its white surface flickering lightly in the candlelight.

“I’m going to throw this die,” I spoke loudly into the fire, eyes locking with my own in the mirror. “If it lands on one, three or five, I won’t kill myself tonight.” I paused, rolling the die in my hand. “If it lands on two, four or six, however, I will walk to the railway crossing right fucking now, and I’ll jump in front of the night train that passes here at four every night.”

Silence.

Pressing my lips together, I threw the die.

It landed on three.

I exhaled slowly. Fifty-fifty.

I cleared my throat as I picked up the die again. “Actually, I changed my mind.” I sniffed, aggressively wiping my nose before loudly blowing it into a tissue. Fucking Ritalin, it was hardly better than speed. “That was too easy. I don’t want to fucking live, I’m sick of it.” I made no effort to stop the tears that started flowing again – just when I thought I’d have none left. “Everything I touch turns to dust. Everyone I love runs the hell away from me, and if they haven’t, it’s a matter of time before I scare them away, too. I fuck up everything I try, and clearly, no one gives a fuck if I die. In fact, I think everyone will be relieved.”

I inhaled loudly once more, grabbing for another tissue as my nose started running again – at this point, I couldn’t tell if it was the emotions or the ungodly number of substances I’d shoved up there tonight. “I don’t contribute anything to this world, only burden it. So why would I try? What the fuck is the point of staying alive if I only bother people with my presence? Who am I still doing it for?” I yelled out the last question. “Clearly, not for myself, because I’m done. I’m doing the world a favor. If it lands on anything but six, I’m ending it tonight.”

I threw the die again, so aggressively, it almost rolled past my circle of candles.

I sucked in a sharp breath.

Six. The number flickered cruelly in the candlelight.

“So you want me to stay alive, hm?” I started to laugh, a cracked, humorless sound. “That’s what they all fucking say. When you’re suicidal, they all tell you to keep fighting, but no one is there to actually help you survive.”

I sniffed, letting my gaze dart to the hypnotic movements of the shadows in the candles’ glow. I grabbed the other two dice and rolled them between my fingers, making sure that whoever was watching couldn’t miss them.

“Well, how about this. I’m ending it tonight if they don’t land in this exact sequence.” I held up the first die in my left hand. “Two.” I lifted my right hand, the second die between my thumb and index finger. “Four.” Without taking my eyes off my reflection in the mirror, I nodded to the third die, between my ring and pinky finger of my right hand. “Six.” The word came out as nothing more than a whisper.

I threw the dice at once.

My breath hitched. I smothered my gasp by pressing my hands against my mouth. Because the dots on the dice grinned back at me, and I couldn’t tell if they were comforting me or mocking me.

Two, four, six.

Seren

I knew using my probmanu on the dice was pushing it. I was taking a huge risk by turning 2.16% into 99%, especially when she was intoxicated and upset and she might not even mean it, she might not even actually go through with it – but what if she did?

I couldn’t read Raya’s mind, only study her actions, but I knew one thing for sure: if I let her walk out of that house to the railway crossing tonight, I had lost her forever. And I couldn’t let that happen. Not for my own chance at getting into the higher realm, and not because watching Raya break down in her room hit me right in the chest, the place where my heart was ripped out when my house burned down in front of me. I didn’t think a heart could get ripped out twice – but apparently, I was wrong. Because watching her talk about her own death so casually, her voice breaking, her body shivering, was like an iron fist breaking open my chest, folding around my most vulnerable organ, and crushing it while still inside me, forcing me to feel how it cut off my veins one by one. This was not someone who decided she wanted to die overnight – this was someone who had it already planned out, like the question was no longer if but when. Fate might as well have split open the earth and swallowed me down to Hell in a black tornado, because its flames couldn’t burn worse than the sudden desire to reach out to my headache assignment and hold her in my arms until she had no tears left, and finally allowed her body to give in to the exhaustion.

Fire was familiar. This was… new. New was the lump in my throat and the urge to sit down on the ground in front of her and cry with her.

And so I did. I zoomed in as far as I could until I floated just above the ground opposite her, mirroring her cross-legged position, our knees almost touching. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her, and she was staring at her own eyes in the mirror so intensely, I swore she was staring right into mine once again.

Raya broke down sobbing when she got no response from me other than those stupid fucking dots on the dice, smiling cruelly as if they relished in confronting both of us with our tragic fate. Tears formed behind my eyelids, but they didn’t make it to my eyes. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever cried since the fire. My body wasn’t wired for release; it was wired to hold it all in and push it down, where I couldn’t see it, so it couldn’t hurt me.

And so, I sat unmoving opposite her, watching her as she cried – and it almost felt like her tears lifted the weight off my shoulders, as if my release came through her. Despite the pain, a part of me was glad she couldn’t see me, because I had never learned to comfort a crying girl. In my mortal life, I’d always tried to end my situationships before the other person got attached, but on the occasion it was too late and they did get emotional, I usually turned around and ran, so I could pretend I had not hurt them. But now, abandoning Raya at her lowest would feel like failing her more than I already had.

The itching started at the base of both my shoulder blades simultaneously. I grimaced, trying to ignore it – I didn’t want anything to distract me from her for even a heartbeat. But before I could decide what to do about it, something shifted. Like the skin around my shoulder blades tore, not painfully – not a break, but an opening. They opened for what came out.

I gasped when I caught a glimpse of myself in the small mirror above Raya’s desk, the one I was facing. My jaw dropped at the sight of two gigantic, near-black, lightly gleaming wings that unfolded out from my back, wrapping all the way around myself and Raya until they touched behind her back, blocking my view in the mirror. They engulfed us both, as if they were protecting her from outside harm – maybe inside harm, too.