I WANNA ENTER HEAVEN BLEEDING.
He would be ashamed if He could see her. That is almost worse than anything else.
If Bexley could see herself she knows she would hate it. Possessing her body is bad enough - much less being witness to it - even now, blessedly ignorant of her own visual faults, she drifts in and out of awareness, alternating dimensions with each step, here and gone and back again, stepping without notice, humming without notice, speaking without notice as if she is trying to drown it out. And yet in every dimension the noise follows her: God is dead, God is dead.
(And He would be flattered, if He could hear it, but disappointed too - )
Black and gold again, and then silver, and Bexley’s heart staggers against the inside of her chest, and she tastes her pulse in her mouth and draws to a stop, and it is with an idle kind of observance she notices that she has never really looked at him the way she should have. Not closely enough, and not hatefully enough - everything is a mask, the mercury skin, the twin blue of his eyes, the just there-slat patterning of his ribs, the knife - everything a mask covering the heart of a monster. Though Bexley cannot say she is really any different.
The moon makes him bright. All gauze and hard starshine. It is his kind of light, obviously. Bexley wonders if it beautifies or depresses her, if Raum sees loving sorrow or patheticism. It is hard to tell which she is feeling, or if it is both, if she can hold both, or why she stops in the sand and stares at him in utter silence instead of moving, or screaming, or lunging, or setting the world around them on fire. There are so many wonderful ways to be violent.
Instead everything goes terribly, terribly still.
What did it feel like to kill him? How did you do it? I know you're blessed with that stupid knife, I know God let you have it. I'm sure you used it. Or did you strangle Him? Did you crush his bones just to feel more powerful? Are you still wearing his blood? Did you say anything or did you do it silently? Did you let Him suffer? Were you kind, in the way only an executioner can be? Did you at least afford him that? Did you afford him anything at all when you murdered him? Did he scream? Did He tell you He loved you? Did He tell you he loved me? Sometimes we do things to see how bad we can feel. Is that why you did it? Why did you do it? Did you say goodnight? Are you nuclear? Who watched? Does He look better dead? Did you like it? Do you feel good about it? Do you? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are -
Are you okay?
She glances down at his knife, visible only for the way it drops a shadow on his skin. And then meets his eyes, and is surprised she can do it, and is surprised that she can talk at all, much less to say what she did, but the world is oh-so-full of wild things, themselves included, and Bexley thinks maybe she should just give up her habit of predictions while she's still ahead of the betting curve.
The wind washes them of heat and sand and guilt. It swirls Bexley's bleached hair against her cheek, almost-but-not-quite covering the patent scar that curls her lips, and now she knows, for better or for worse, God is watching.
What else is there to say? The numbness in her chest could be any number of things - anger, guilt, shame, terror. The thought of Seraphina's broken body lurks in the back of her mind as a mirror image of Acton's. And the Day Court, looming behind him, threatens collapse even as she looks at it, as though its bones are already starting to crumble to dust. Even the sand seems dark and moldy. He is cruel to take so much from her so quickly, but of course he knows that.
Her mouth opens like a cave. She shivers a little against the dark and the breeze. And then she thinks of Him and her heart squeezes in her chest and she blinks away salt and sand and says, wavering, tearful, I know you loved Him.
And she could never blame him for it.
