Begin, always as new, the unattainable praising: think, the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
Y
ou will live,” Bondike says, playfully. His tone mocks the severity of my expression; but I cannot change the furrow of my brow, or the bitterness I feel. He stands besides my hospital bed, bright-eyed and charming. Where the Battle of the Cliff left me wounded, he seems stronger than before, more sure of himself. And yet beneath his cheerful, nonchalant expression lays something more severe, something—heavy, and profound, and too soft for words. “Go on. I’m sure Dagda and the others are offering you hero worship right now. There’s no reason you have to stay and tend to me.”
He rolls his eyes. “Stop. You and I—were were in it. They only wish they were. They don’t understand—they don’t know what it felt like to—“
He doesn’t finish, but I know what he was going to say. To drag your limp body from the sea. To be the first to bind the wounds on your mangled leg. To shackle the Last Prince and subdue him into reinforcements came. All alone.
All three of them had leapt from the cliff.
How had he made it so unscathed?
I notice, absentmindedly, his mane had just been shorn again. The lack of hair accentuates the handsome angles of his face and spiraling horns. He is smiling, as he tosses an apple in the gray morning light.
He stayed by my bedside for weeks. He stayed by my bedside until I took my first ambling steps; and was the shoulder I leaned on when I could not stand. He stayed.
He stayed.
You will live, Elena says, and her voice is the voice of a ghost. I open my eyes and she is blue and gold where before I had seen red, and only red.
Fight, Torix she demands. I remember her skill as an Empath; and the feeling she forces upon me is not one I receive readily. My lips draw back into a jagged-toothed grimace.
See, I think, but cannot find words for. See what I am?
Let me die.
Because if I live through this—
If I am this thing I hate—
What does that leave?
I am too weak to protest as she begins to order the medics. I cannot help the way I groan in pain at the following treatment; and that groan becomes a scream. Torix. Tell me something, talk to me. IT’s Elena. Talk to me.
Clipped. Methodical.
Does she sound that way because she recognizes what I have become?
Tell her something? What could I tell her—
“The last time I thought I would die,” I say through clenched teeth. My words come haltingly. The feeling of the needle through my jagged flesh sends fire through the wound. “The land time I thought I would die,” I repeat, weakly, but stronger than before. “It’s because I fell off a cliff capturing our enemy—it’s because I was going to die a hero.”
A hero.
I do not realize my eyes are pinched shut; but when I do, I snap them open, not to a world above water but to Terrastella’s hospital. Elena remains the only familiar person. I am unmoored.
“The last time—the last time, I had opened my eyes to the light through the water, and then to darkness, and then to red hair spilling out over the top of waves. ‘Stay with me,’ he’d said, not ‘talk to me.’ He’d said, ‘Stay with me.’ And I did. All the way—all the way to the sand, where I first looked at my leg, and he’d groaned, ’No, no keep your eyes up. Keep your eyes up, look at the sky—look at the sun breaking through the clouds.’ Except—except there wasn't any sunlight. Do you know that?” Somewhere, my voice becomes trancelike; somewhere it seems disconnected from myself. “I said to him, ‘But—Bondike. It’s raining.’ And then I realized those were his tears.”
I cannot help the way that my eyes flick from her to everything else; to the swinging lanterns and the busy bodies in the background. To the needle in her telekinetic grasp. To the lanterns again. My life becomes these fragments. My life becomes one painful inhalation and then the next and for a moment, brief, I remind myself that he had nearly died to save me; that he had jumped from a cliff as if it were nothing to do so, as if it were second nature. As if he had wings.
And yet--
How easily I had betrayed him.
"He should have let me fall." And this is another groan of pain, another tattered exhalation. Did Icarus wish this? Did he think, without me, my father might go further? And without him, I might touch the sun?
Did he question his destiny at all, or simply let it be?
