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Saparata finds him collapsed under his own weight, that tattered greatcoat concealing the damage like a burial shroud over his thin frame. There’s a privacy afforded to everything he does, dying on the ground included. The thought comes with a slurry of fondness and revulsion, bitter tasting—as if the ash heavy on the breeze wasn’t enough.
Well, it isn’t working. Fluixon spills over. Blood seeps into the gravel, estuaries winding down the slope and pooling in a depression, a little red sea. Or maybe paranoia is a better word than privacy. Saps steps gingerly across the trail of blood, breath caught.
Sorry, the screen in Saps’ hand still reads, Can’t make it. Then there was a set of coordinates leading Saps down the mountain, away from the caldera and its ruined fortress, over the rocky plain.
He was moving before he had made a conscious decision, his body acting for him–looking back on his trial, he had called it survival instinct. Now, he doesn’t know what its name is, the part of his body that had laid a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back from the edge. The instinct doesn’t care whether or not Flux is leading him to his death, a trap or an ambush. He has to know. There is no other option.
He pockets the device, nudging the body with the toe of his boot. No response. There’s a pit in his stomach, a knot tied around his throat. He kneels, touches his hand to Flux's chest. When he’s met with a shallow rise, a fall, another—when the breathing doesn't stutter to a halt beneath his palm, the relief is indistinguishable from the fear. Just a worse kind of panic. He lets out his own deep breath, and lifts the man—Saps doesn't know what else to call him, friend or enemy—out of the dirt.
He can’t justify it. If he brought him back to the army’s camp, they would care for him, yes, they would, if Saps insisted—they would agree to a fair trial, an execution. He would have a better chance at recovery in the hands of a Westhelm nurse. But, for the first time in months, Saps has him. For once, the playing field is level. Saps imagines visiting him at a bedside in a field hospital, meeting his eyes through bars, speaking to him from a witness stand, and feels sick. All the image does is pull the noose around his neck tighter.
The thing he’s choosing doesn’t make any sense. It’s not what’s best for Flux. It's probably, definitely not what anyone would say is best for him. He clambers over the rocks, balance thrown off by Flux’s dead weight, painfully aware of blood dripping down his back like sand in an hour glass. But his tower isn’t so far from the battlefield.
Maybe it’s a little far. Adrenaline carries him as far as he needs to go, the climb passing in a haze—he doesn’t know how long it takes to reach his hiding place, only that Flux is still breathing when he does, shoving the door open with his shoulder and heaving Flux onto the bed. And then he’s starting a fire in the wood stove, rummaging for extra blankets and linen to tear into strips, honey and grease—a mock antibiotic. What else? Water, alcohol. A thin needle, just in case.
Guilt crawls along Saparata’s skin, peeling his coat off while he’s unconscious and unable to protest. He would protest. Golden tassels, pearl buttons, torn wool, singed edges. He’s not sure the coat is salvageable, but he folds it into a neat square and tucks it under the bed as if it were.
He should be angry. He should want Flux dead. He should have left him there.
Beneath the coat, he undoes the clasp at his shirtcollar, undoes the buttons, assesses the damage as clinically as he can. An array of bruises, cuts, scrapes—a shin that must be fractured, twisted at an off angle. Good, a sick part of his mind thinks. A few months, under normal circumstances—less than that, with a healthy golden apple diet. But it means he has time. A deep gash in his side, an arrow wound to the left shoulder; so the needle was a good call. Better to do it before he wakes up—or, was it better to let a puncture wound breath? The bleeding has ceased, he doesn’t know whether or not that’s a good thing. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, the first aid or the murderer-traitor-conspirator in his bed.
He can’t prolong the inevitable forever. Just long enough.
And then there are the burns trailing down his neck to his ribs, to his hips; worse the lower Saps looks. Angry red, blistering, bubbling skin. Observing the damage he imagines it vividly—his whole body on fire, gasping for breath. A golden apple, damage repaired. Process repeating, as he clawed his way out of the fire. He got away, he’s out, the soldiers shouted back to Saps. Leapt from the very top of the fort, down into the pit. Not without a cost.
Just until he can put up a fight, until it’s fair, until…
It’s late into the night, by the time everything is cleaned, bandaged, stitched, the broken leg set as best he can. Saps runs his fingers through Flux’s hair. It’s oily and coarse, unwashed and a little tangled, his image betraying itself again. Speaking quietly, he says, "I don't know what to say to you.” His hand moves down, tracing his cheekbone with his thumb. “I don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know what to do with me.”
If I had to die, I wanted you to come with me. But we’re both still here.
—
The room is small and the walls are white. There’s a door on one side and a cramped staircase on the other. Flux can’t see the floor from where he lies on a small makeshift bed—more like a cot, really. What he presumes must be a stray piece of wood from the frame digs into his left shoulder through the wool. There’s a wood stove on the opposite wall, but that doesn’t afford it much space, and in any other context he’d call the thing a fire hazard. In this particular context, the stove does a pathetic job of warming anything up, let alone drying. There’s a prickling cold in his fingers, his neck, his legs—he tries to move his hair out of his eyes, greasy and irritating the moment he becomes aware of it, and finds his forehead hot to the touch. Oh.
He swallows, mouth dry. So maybe it isn’t the stove’s fault. Where is he? There’s a window next to the door, but all it reveals beyond the wall is a pitch black night.
An empty, black night. There isn’t a single light in the distance, no lit widows or lamps lighting roads, no stray torches, no harbor beacons. The fear that comes over him, staring out that window, is utterly irrational.
Perhaps he crawled out of that caldera only to bleed to death on the rocks, so Death plucked him from the earth and brought him to the halfway house, his body suspended for questioning at the feverish border between life and death. Any second now, someone will walk in that door, or down those stairs, and they will say to him, Fluixon, it’s time. Your body is broken. If you tried to run, your legs wouldn’t carry you further than the doorstep. Your comrades have all crossed, don’t keep them waiting now, everyone is waiting. Everyone on both sides of the border, lined up to watch you cross. You have to surrender. You have to learn how to die.
When Flux was sick as a child, and he was a sickly child, he would spend hours like this, bed-bound and feverish, conversing with God. Fever, blood loss, symptoms; pain, sweating, chills, respiratory failure, organ failure, feeling weak, fear of the dark.
That's not what God sounds like, anyway, he can’t get the voice quite right. Fuck God, the voice in his head and the real one, he’s going to open that door. He shifts his body, chest up against the wall, legs to the left. Pain washes over him, forcing him to stop and breathe for a moment. Every motion continues this way, move, flinch, take a breath, move. Damn God to hell.
At last he swings his legs over the edge of the bed, and his feet meet the floor. When he tries to stand, heaving himself up with the support of the wall, he swiftly collapses to the ground, lets out a startled, frustrated noise as his legs give out beneath him. But he doesn’t land on the floor. Something breaks his fall—something that greets him with a surprised shout, and then a curse, someone who wrestles out from beneath his body and pins him down instead.
Death wears Saparata’s face. He looks worse for wear. Worse than Flux has ever seen him, close-cropped hair grown out long enough to stick up at odd angles, untended. Bags heavy under his eyes, cheeks a little gaunt. Flux watches as the sleepy daze leaves his eyes, as he blinks, and finds himself on top of another body, and eventually, slowly, identifies exactly who that body belongs to.
Flux suspects he couldn’t escape this hold even if he tried to struggle, legs useless, arms weak. Even if he wasn’t lying limp on Death’s doorstep, Saps had the larger frame of the two of them. Flux had never succeeded at gaining muscle or fat, always a little too small and a little too cold, raising his voice and speaking often instead, draped in heavy fabrics. It’s irrational, to be afraid of Saparata—not now, now it only makes sense. But he had been afraid before, too.
“I guess you got my message.” None of the fear comes through in his voice, practiced. Or, he hopes it doesn’t. The best way to sound when someone has you pinned to the floor is as if they don’t have you pinned to the floor. The best way to sound when everything in your body aches is as if nothing does.
“Mhm. I guess you got mine.” Saparata's response is equally casual in tone, though something is betrayed in his face, seeing it this close; the way his brow tenses. It paints an odd scene.
“Where are we? Where did you take me? Is there a doctor here? Are you trying to kill me?” Flux pauses then, losing the theatrical outrage, “Are you trying to kill me?”
“No! Why would I have helped you if—why would you be here right now—-I mean. No. I’m not trying to kill you right now.”
“What do you mean right now?”
Saps furrows his brow again, lets out a frustrated breath. Flux can feel it, the breath. “I gave you an invitation.”
Flux just stares. His grip slowly relaxing, the fight leaving his body, as he realizes. “Okay,” Flux says, slumped on the floor in defeat, “let me get this straight. You found me, dying, and you carried me in your arms, away from your army, and you brought me to some sort of hiding place in the middle of nowhere, away from your army, who are on your side, the side that wants me dead,” he’s getting sidetracked, “and you brought me here, to single-handedly nurse me back to health, so you can kill me.” Because if there’s one thing Flux knows, it’s that Saps must be acting alone, or else he would be in a prison cell.
“You could win.” he says, “The fight. You could win the fight.”
“You’re nursing me back to health so you can kill me or yourself.” he doesn’t say, look at me, Saps. He doesn’t point out the way his breath gets more ragged with every word, the way his chest aches under the weight of Saps’ palm.
Saps doesn’t deny it, he’s just silent. Flux waits.
Flux gives up on waiting. “Can you get off of me.”
Saps darts backwards like Flux’s skin is still molten hot, as if he had crawled right out of the magma and into Saparata’s arms. Flux takes a deep breath that hurts in a way it probably shouldn’t be hurting.
“Are you okay? Sorry. Do you—”
He cuts back another scathing remark, pure reflex, higher thought catching the insult by its tail, just barely. “Water.” Saps moves as soon as he says it, rifling through a bag that was left leaning against the base of the bed, visible now from Flux’s new watchtower, here on a rug that barely clothes the cold basalt tile. ”Do you have gaps?” a second later, "you'd better have gaps.”
A bottle and an apple are placed in his lap unceremoniously, Saps helping him sit up against the bed frame without needing to be asked. He downs the bottle in one go, and finds the apple at his lips sooner than he can grab it, biting before he thinks to question Saps—I'm not a child, you don’t have to…another bite.
He finishes the apple. Saps lifts him back up onto the cot, then sits down next to him. Flux would protest, but there isn’t any other furniture in this room, and he had already taken the floor. He has so many questions, all of them buzzing for attention like flies to his carcass, so loudly he can’t pick one out to ask. He hasn’t spoken to Saps since before—since before. Months of silence, Flux waiting for Saps to confront him, and eventually trying as best he could to put the matter out of his mind. It didn’t work. Reflexively clicking world chat open and closed, scanning every newspaper a second, third time, for headlines relaying his location. Missing, under the Covenant’s protection, missing, taken in by Westhelm.
He means to ask something like, where are we? Or, what are you going to do with me next, dear savior-executioner? But the Flux that is afraid of the dark speaks in his place; “How are you?”
It’s an honest question, is the thing that hurts. He really does want to know.
“What?”
He runs with it, no choice, “How are you? It’s been a while.” Saps looks incredulous. It’s a little funny. He keeps playing the card he’s been dealt, “Do anything interesting lately?”
“Well, I had six counts of murder pinned on me. Escaped from my execution. Fought a war. Almost jumped.”
Flux is smiling a little, “Wow!” he drags out the vowel, “How resilient you must be!”
“Or stubborn, you know, depending on who you ask.” Saps says. Flux had been trying to rile him up, expected frustration at the very least. But Saps just smiles back at him.
“So, stubborn stranger, what do they call you?” The game shifts. He doesn’t notice himself leaning towards Saps, until he’s met with a shoulder to rest on.
“Saparata.” he says, “mostly things like, idiot, pest, lucky bastard, when they’re mad at me.” That gets a genuine laugh out of Flux. ”How about you?”
“Fluixon.”
“Weird name, isn’t it?” Saps says, not facing him anymore, looking intently into that window—into the dark. He must know what’s beyond the door, and the window—maybe he’s mapping the darkness into a landscape.
Is that what you thought when you met me? Flux thinks, idly, Is that what everyone thinks? Flux-ee-on. Flu-ix-on. “Not a very kind thing to say to someone you just met, Saparata.”
“Well, it’s true. So? How are you doing, Flu-ix-on?
He bumps into Flux’s shoulder, a would-be friendly gesture, but it doesn’t sound like an honest question. It sounds like a needle. There it is.
What a difficult question to answer. “I don’t know.” he says, after a long deliberation.
All of his allies are dead. His war was lost, or won—an impossible distinction. Everyone is gone. Everyone except Saps. Death as the white horse.
With that the spell is broken. Saps is glaring into that blackness now, intent, angry. The truth is a deep black pit. Flux doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. Alive and dead, past and present. He knows that, a long time ago, when he met Saparata, he felt warm.
—
The morning brings a brilliant panorama of gleaming white outside the window, and a meager breakfast.
“Do you even know how to take care of injuries?” Flux asks in a mocking tone, apparently grasping any opportunity the day brings him to bitch at Saps with white knuckles, even the ones that obviously aren’t going to land. Saps keeps working, resolutely.
“I cleaned a lot of wounds alone in the jungle, recently” he remarks, as if on the weather.
“Point taken.” Flux grumbles, wincing.
Saps stops himself from pressing harder, but part of him wants to. It’s a confusing impulse. What do you do with someone you want to hurt and help in equal measure? “Clearly one of us is not so well acquainted with pain.”
“Are you making it hurt on purpose?”
“No, Flux. It just does that.”
“I can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”
“No, really, it just does that.” They still haven’t talked about any of it, trapped in a strange play at normalcy, slotting back into place with one another as if on instinct, but their edges don’t fit right. Saps itches to say something, and he’s tired of waiting; “Why did you do it?” if he’s going to ask, he’s going to ask, really going to ask, “did you ever actually care about me?”
“It was supposed to be quick.”
“What?”
“You were meant—I thought, they’d have you in custody the day off, and then the trial, and then you’d be dead.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“No, probably not.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“You know why I did it. You were there.”
“Why did it have to be me?” Saps is quickly losing his patience, digging the nails of his free hand into the meat of his palm.
“Sorry that the world is more important than you are, Saps.” Flux says, still mocking, still commenting as if on something that couldn't matter less.
Saps presses the cloth against the next burn, a bad one snaking up his ribcage, gentle as ever, and lets the subject drop. He’ll seal the wound with honey and linen and he’ll try not to think about it, the same way he spent his days as a fugitive; getting up and lacing his boots and moving in a straight line, trying not to think about it.
—
Days pass this way, some in silence, others in conversation so stilted and circular that silence would be a better effort, and others still with something else.
After Flux spends a solid half-hour of complaining nonstop, Saps relents, and carries him up four flights of stairs to the top of the tower. The view is unreal, pure white. The snow and the sky, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Fine snow falls, settling in Flux’s hair, on his shoulders, as if he was part of the landscape all the same. The rock stands a stark black contrast, visible beneath the snow where the earth slopes up, up into peaks that reach even higher than Saps’ little tower, glacial and resolute. The view puts him ill at ease, gives him a sense of vertigo, looking down into the distant, white nothing.
There were no border-lines, up this high. There was no earth, no dividing sea, no bridge. Nothing to chart a path by. They could be the only two people on earth for all the world mattered, at the top of the tower. Vertigo washes over him, leaving him unsettled, displaced.
He imagines Saps, standing on the edge, looking down. The Saparata next to him doesn’t; he’s watching Flux watch the ground, instead.
“I didn’t want you to suffer,” he repeats. I did care, he doesn’t say. I feel like that makes it worse. His voice is quiet. It could have been carried away on the wind, lost. But it shows on Saps’ face, that he heard—that same frustration clearly visible. The wind at this height, without any sun, carries a bitter kind of chill that hardly registers as cold, rather a different kind of air entirely. They don’t stay long.
—
Saps knows what he’s going to find before he opens the chest, but he does it anyway, scans his dwindling supplies and promptly slams the lid shut again. One more time, for good measure; still not enough to last two people more than a week, and even that would be stretching it thin enough to compromise Flux’s health. He had never expected to stay long, when he built this place.
Better to go sooner rather than later, if he has no choice. He steels himself, and trudges downstairs.
“What’s wrong?” Flux asks, voice is clouded with sleep, eyes on Saps as soon as he hears footsteps.
“I have to go—we’re running out of food.”
“Where?”
“Westhelm is closest.”
“Still, it must be, oh, half a day of walking if you’re realistic about it. You won’t be back before nightfall.”
Saps knew that, but it doesn’t help to hear. He doesn't know exactly how Flux knows that—process of elimination, he supposes. He rubs his temples.
“People will be wondering.” Flux says, not helping his developing headache.
“I know that.”
“What are you going to tell them?”
“To leave me the hell alone.”
“And are they going to listen?” He doesn’t wait for Saps to respond, “Rhetorical question. Okay, so—you vanished the day of the war, chances are good nobody knows for certain if you’re even alive in the first place, so many deaths it would have been easy to miss. Let’s say they’ve been looking for you, if not active search parties than public notice, certainly. The second you make contact with anyone in Westhelm, word will get to Schpood, and then word will get everywhere.”
“We’re so fucked.” Saps sinks down on the bottom step, collapsing in on himself, head on his knees.
Flux just keeps talking, stringing out the problem, and Saps can nearly see the gears turning in his head. “—they’ll know that you’ve come from the vicinity of Westhelm, that you haven’t left Island One since the siege ended. Knowing that, If they wanted to look for you, they would find you. They would find me.”
“Schpood likes me. I mean, I think he does—he didn’t turn me in. He might listen if I asked him not to tell anyone.”
Flux’s train of thought pauses, considering. “Than you have to go to Schpood directly. He would be able to get you into Westhelm’s item distribution center, the back rooms.”
“I—um.” Saps pauses, “I have a key to his bedroom.”
“What?” Flux looks incredulous. “You what? How—you—what?” he stammers. The gears momentarily grind to a halt.
“It was safest for me to stay in his chambers. They’re well guarded. He’s a very cautious man.”
“Okay.” Flux says, then quietly, “What?”
Saps dodges any further questioning—it really wasn’t like that, but he kind of enjoys the idea that Flux thinks it was. “It’s a stupid plan, anyway. I’d have to sneak past all of his guards.”
“You did a commendable job sneaking past half of Luminara’s citizenship on that damn bridge.” Flux mutters. “I don’t know how, dressed all in white—wear something less conspicuous this time, would you?”
“Wow, the guy who wanted me executed, giving me advice on how not to get caught.”
“What is the world coming to?” Flux responds, voice weary.
“And it wasn’t undetected. Being detected was kind of the point. They all just stood there, like idiots.” he says, “We still need a story.”
Flux doesn’t deny the claim, unsurprising—he thought they were all idiots too, after all. He’s back to problem-solving, “You just want some time alone. You’re tired, you need time to recover your spirits. You’re up in the mountains because the air clears your head. I just need some time, don’t tell anyone where I am, or else they’ll turn up on my doorstep and demand I come home—I’ll see you in a month or so, no need to worry about me.”
“I don’t talk like that.”
“I hate you, like what? I wasn’t even—”
“Okay, then I'm Schpood. But Saps, everybody has been asking about you! What am I supposed to tell Cass, or Tricolor? They all think you’re dead!”
“Hmm. What if you just told them that I’m recovering, in Westhelm? I’ll be back soon, but I’m not ready to see anyone yet.” Here, Flux puts on a mocking tone, “It’s close to the truth. You trust me, don’t you, emperor?”
Saps glares at him.
“I suppose you’ll have to spend the night in the emperor’s chambers again, before heading back. What a ridiculously lucky fugitive you were.”
“It really wasn’t like that.” he sighs, “I’ll just camp somewhere. If I leave the same night, it’ll be like I'm not staying far from Westhelm. I’ll leave in the opposite direction, and then loop around.”
Flux nods, “Good.”
Talking with him like this, it’s almost as if… Saps’ voice is quiet now, wistful. “Why didn’t you just let me in on it?”
“What?”
“The conspiracy. Why didn’t you just tell me? You know I would have played along.”
“Do I know that? How am I supposed to know that?” Flux asks, “Really? You would have helped me kill Jophiel? All those innocent people, Saps?
Saps lets out something between a laugh and a sigh, “That’s it, isn’t it? Why frame me? Why kill Jophiel first? Because we know you.”
“Not well enough, clearly.”
“Do you honest to god want me to apologize for trusting you? What, sorry I wasn’t always looking over my shoulder.”
“You know what I think? I think if you were let in on the conspiracy, it would have eaten you alive. I think you would have cracked under the pressure. I think you would have betrayed me.”
“Oh, but I can handle every single citizen across a dozen nations wanting my head on a stick just fine. Wanting me dead in your place. You are such a coward.”
“Pot to kettle.”
“Give me a real answer, dickhead.”
“Maybe I just wanted you to stay innocent? What about that?” He sighs, “Cutting the bullshit—You know why I didn’t tell you.”
“Not that it helped anything. Everyone was still mad. At that point, I should have just broken the rule.”
“For someone acquitted on all six counts of murder, you sure sound like you want to be guilty.” Flux has his head tilted to the side, resting on his palm.
“I feel guilty.”
“Of course you do. You always do. That’s why it worked so well.”
“I’m doing something wrong right now. To be fair. This is probably a crime. Nobody would be happy with me if they found out.”
Flux claps his hands together, “And that’s precisely why they’re not going to find out.”
It’s always like this; they meet on the precipice of an argument, but neither of them will jump. They can’t change the past, and they can’t change the future. Stasis. Saps rises, and begins shuffling around the room making preparations to leave.
When he returns to the first floor, to Flux’s domain, with a bag secured over his shoulder, Flux says, “What, you aren’t going to tie me up before you leave? What if I escape?”
“If you want to freeze to death limping through the snow, be my guest. Go fall off a cliff.” Saps says, slipping his boots on. “Food and water next to the stove. Change your own bandages.”
“Good luck.” Flux says, a little facetious, but Saps thinks he means it.
—
Flux pulls his coat out from under the bed, where he had discovered it folded days ago. He shakes it out and puts it on, ignoring the lingering scent of blood and smoke. He’s grateful for the familiar weight. There isn’t a mirror in the room but he’s sure he must look for all the world like a ghost, a dead man walking.
He walks to the door, carefully, slowly, keeping the weight off his bad foot. It isn’t locked.
The tower has a set of steps leading down, and then the path vanishes into the snow. He can see where Saps tread, disturbing the perfect slate of white, footsteps like wrinkles on a clean bedsheet.
He could walk, slowly, carefully, into the snow, away from the tower. In his imagination, he vanishes; Saps tears the tower apart, spends long hours searching the cliffs for signs, but the snow would have swallowed Flux whole well before he began to look.
He could leave his body for Saps to find. Lie down right there in the path and close his eyes.
Deny him the satisfaction. Save him the pain. Spare him the decision.
He sinks down, coming to rest with his back against the tower’s solid stone wall. He stays there a long time. Long enough that the light starts to dim, long enough that the cold makes his nose run, and his fingers hurt.
By all rights, it should be a powerful feeling; to betray someone so completely, and watch them come crawling back to you anyway. He could be pushing on it harder, stringing Saps along, exploiting the misplaced affection that lingers in his heart like a stubborn weed.
But what would be the point? There’s nothing left to gain. He could have said, go to the emperor of Westhelm and demand he grant me sanctuary, or what? or i’ll jump off the tower? What can he threaten, when all Saps seems to want is him, alive, and all that his life stands to serve is death, inevitable. It makes his head hurt.
It would be easy enough to understand, if all Saps wanted was to kill him; if it had to be by his own hand; if he had to separate it from the slaughter of an animal in his mind with the charade of a fair fight. He can almost imagine it, the argument—berating his cowardice, goading him, until maybe he gets sick of waiting, takes up the knife resting on the stovetop, and ends Flux right there in his sickbed, helpless to struggle—he lets out a long, shaky breath, watches the vapor dissipate in the frigid air, and slumps back against the stone.
Every day that passes, Saps talks about it only with growing reluctance. With a shadow of fear in his voice. Flux doesn’t like uncertainty. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
His feet itch to move, understimulated and tired of the same white walls, the same problems to turn over in his mind, never getting anywhere, going to bed and waking up again in the same place he started. He’s bitten his lips raw, chapped worse in the cold, bleeding from a split in the middle. The skin around his nails fares no better. A paradox is still better than a prison cell. The wait is preferable to the grave.
The sunset over the snow bleeds deep pink.
Flux is done acting, excised from the world like an arrowhead from a wound. Let his death be Saparata’s choice.
—
“I don’t want to kill you. I just wish none of this ever happened.” Saps says as they sit across from each other playing cards, the deck brought back with him from Westhelm, along with a fur blanket that Flux has wrapped around his shoulders, impossible to mask his satisfaction—in the fur, and the admittance. They share a small feast of cheese and candied fruit.
“Do you? Really?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t regret it. You were wrong. You did all that for nothing. You betrayed me for nothing. I know you won’t ever admit that, but—”
“You’re here right now, so I guess it could have been worse.”
“Yeah, because I'm stupid.”
“Why are you here? You could have left me to die. You could have turned me in, and taken your victory, and gone home.”
“I don’t know, Flux.” he says, drawing a card, like he’s daring Flux to give the answer for him.
Flux is too much of a coward to say it, too busy trying to bait Saps into moving first, to save himself the indignity. “Then who does?” he says, voice distant.
Another stalemate. The game goes on, coward to coward. Flux’s hand wins the round.
“Are you cheating?”
“No. Really, I swear.”
“Mhm.” Saps says, unconvinced.
He rolls up his sleeves, makes a show of demonstrating his wrists, turning his palms forward and back. “No tricks. You’ve made me an honest man, Saparata. It gets a little boring, ten games in.”
“So you admit to the other ten—”
“I never said that.”
“Yes you did.” Saps leans forward, leveling him with a pointed stare.
Flux crosses his arms. “You have no evidence.”
“I’ll turn you in. Don't try it. I’ll have Westhelm’s army up here. This is where I draw the line.”
“This is where you draw the line?”
They’ll never say it. Neither of them will fold first, and nothing will ever happen, on top of this god forsaken mountain. They shuffle the deck twice more, two wins for Saps, before Flux’s opponent finally breaks into a grin and slides an ace out of his sleeve. Flux shoves him off the bed.
—
They have this conversation more days than not as time creeps forward, as the world outside of their empire of silence and stillness continues to grow, and change, and resolve. Everything in existence marches in rows towards conclusion, soldiers on parade. The world prepares its own funeral.
Flux can finally walk. It takes a lot of stumbling and a lot of embarrassment, collapsing into the snow or grasping hard at Saps’ outstretched arm. Today they have lunch on the roof, watching birds flit over the peaks in the distance, the only identifiable sign of life aside from the two of them. It isn’t a clear day, not quite, but the fog isn’t so bad. You can see past the peaks, down, across the arid plain, all the way to a distant strip of pale-blue sea.
“If we don’t fight, you’ll be tried, and you’ll be executed. There’s nowhere to run. We climb down off this mountain, there is nowhere to run.” Saps says, handing him a tin of smoked fish.
“We could hide. You were good at that.”
“Nobody can hide forever. I don’t know how long I would have lasted, if Cass hadn’t exposed you. I almost died—”
“We could go somewhere else. Take a boat.”
“There is nowhere else.” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. You turned the whole world against you. There is no more world left to ruin.
Flux can almost feel it, the sun on his face. He stares out at that sliver of sea. “We were somewhere else, once. We’ve been a lot of places.”
“We can’t just go somewhere else. You don’t decide that, I don’t decide that.” And Saps sounds angry again, gesturing at the sky. Well, it is obvious.
But he’s not angry at God. He’s angry at Flux. “We could stay here.”
“For how long?” and that is the question, isn’t it. “It’s ending soon.”
“Well, at least for tonight.”
“Well, that wasn’t in question to begin with! You think I'm gonna drag you down a mountain in the dark?”
“Wouldn’t put anything past you.”
“You say that like I'm the one who did anything to you.”
“Vengeance is a powerful motivational force, clearly.”
“Is that what you call all of this?”
“I don't know. You tell me.
Saps just sighs. It’s a little more irritating every time. Frustration with their circumstances. Frustration with Flux. He knows it’s not fair. “What are you going to do?” Flux asks, instead of answering the question.
“Huh?”
“If you win. When you win.”
“Go back to Island Two, I guess. See what’s changed. Clean up the vacation home. Bury you.”
“Liar.”
Saps doesn’t deny the accusation. It takes one to know one. Coward to coward, cheat to cheat. “I’ll throw a party, or something. A Flux is dead party.” Neither of them laugh. “Tomorrow it is, then.”
It’s inconceivable, what Saparata gives up for his sake. Flux will never understand it. He could have spent the past two months alive. Instead, he walks into hell. He returns to the tower that marks his death. Flux thinks, the fish sitting poorly in his stomach, it worked. I killed you. “I guess so, yeah. Tomorrow.”
“What do you want for a last meal?”
“We only ever have the same three meals.”
“Soup? It sounds like you want soup.”
“If I never had another bowl of mushroom stew in my life, Saparata, it would still be too soon.”
—
It’s a long walk to Westhelm, and night is setting when they finally spot the skyline through the hills; aqueducts and regal pillars silhouetted in the low dusk sky. A hundred lights on the horizon, candles, lanterns, the world alive in Flux’s absence. Proof that it had been, all that time. They stopped to camp somewhere on the edge of the sea for dinner. Saps caught a rabbit, the first fresh meat Flux had tasted since before they had laid siege to Infernus. They ate in silence, before packing up again and marching on.
Saps leads him through the back roads of Westhelm, a city injured by the war, shop fronts and restaurants left vacant in the absence of those who would tend them. They pass the people milling about tense, keeping their heads down and their faces covered, passing themselves off as a pair of nobodies displaced in the war, the kind of people who pass from city to city like ghosts left to roam the earth. He grips Saps’s arm a little tighter every time a stranger glances at them, but they’re never stopped. The Colosseum is deserted when they arrive, no one invited to stand as witness.
“Let’s make this a fair fight, okay?” Saps says, handing him a short sword by the hilt. It feels alien in his hands.
“What would I gain from tricks at this point? Really. Maybe I should be asking you that. Any aces up your sleeve, Saparata?”
“Maybe. You’ll have to fight me to find out.”
They circle each other for a long time, shields up, weapons drawn, each daring the other to strike first. Just as he had set a ball rolling down a hill months ago, Fluixon moves; darting forward, blade missing by an inch, meeting the edge of Saps’ shield with a disgusting noise. Saps’ reaction lands, always the better of the two in combat, always better. It digs into the opening between his chest and his shoulder, hardly cutting through the thick cloth before glancing off.
Flux fights back best he can, but it’s clear from that first blow. With time, Saps’s sword slides between the plates of his armor and begins the long, slow process of taking apart everything he spent the last two months fixing. What a waste of bandages, stitches, golden apples, food, time, Flux thinks as the fight drags on and blood begins to slick the place where he grips the sword, sticking to his palms.
Let his death stand as a monument to stubborn futility. He hopes Saps is happy. Whatever it was he envisioned, that day at the height of the war, when he sent Flux this invitation—whatever he wanted, it can’t have been this. Vengeance gone out in time, coals to embers, waking up to find that the fire had died in the night. A chilly morning spent sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of the stove, sharing bread and barley soaked in chicken broth.
The thing that takes him by surprise, as he parries Saps’ blade and darts back again, as he circles behind his partner, and his sword cuts a line into the flesh of Saps’ cheek, as Saps leverages Flux’s motion to send him to the ground, and pins him there with a boot to the chest—is that he’s having fun. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to him since the war, not a punishment but a relief. A light on the horizon.
It doesn’t matter how ill suited he is for fair, direct combat. It doesn’t matter if they both know how it ends. He won’t lay down and die. He wriggles, kicking until he’s free, pulling Saps down to meet him, laughing. They roll in the dust, Flux’s blood running down his arm and onto Saparata’s chest, staining his white shirt dark. There’s nothing left to say, no argument to make; the fight comes to them at last as a truce, an understanding. Saparata is staring up at him with something like contentment. And then there’s an arm around his throat, pinning him again.
Flux knows he’s going to die, but he doesn’t go afraid. The fear that follows him seeps out with the blood, onto the hard-packed sand, joining the blood and fear of every unlucky Westhelm citizen accused before his own turn in the Colosseum. He dies on soil that never belonged to him, on an Island he tried to destroy, and it doesn’t matter. After that long in the mountains, sick with nothing, Westhelm is the most beautiful place he’s ever seen.
After all of that agonizing uncertainty, Saparata’s blade greets him like a friend.
He doesn’t regret any of it; there simply isn’t time.
—
Flux lies there, finally still. Saps presses his palm to his chest, to be certain, and waits there a long time, like the corpse under him will take a sudden breath, invite life back into his lungs all at once, and laugh. But nobody can will themselves back to life, even him. No more running.
Saparata pulls his sword from its resting place, still dripping with Flux’s blood, and turns the hilt around in his hand.
He positions it carefully.
He counts to three.
“What are you doing, Saps?”
A voice startles him out of the moment, freezes him in place with the sword about to meet his throat. The blade wavers in the air, his grip unsteady. He sees Ish there, floating a foot above Flux’s body, a mismatched ghost.
“You won!”
“Yeah. I Won.”
“So? Why not take a moment to celebrate! Go back to Island Two, make the rounds—I’m sure Cass would love to see you, congratulate you. Everyone has been wondering where you’ve gone off to!”
“I didn’t want to win. I didn’t want to do any of this. You said yourself, I wasn't meant to do anything.” He struggles to get the words out, tone cold.
”And bless Flux for that, huh? I never could have imagined it.”
“I don’t think he imagined it either, to be fair. He was just trying to kill me.”
“And if that’s true, why let him win? You made it so far, Saps. You did good.”
“It’s not about winning, man, none of it was about winning. You heard me. If I have to die, so does he.”
“You went through an awful lot of effort to keep him from dying, for a while there. Did you get what you wanted, Saps?”
“....I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Closure?”
“I don’t think it was about that.”
“Then what was it about?”
“I think I just wanted to spend some time with him.” Saps says, and then the determination Ish found Saparata wearing seems to return to him. “Well, goodbye Ish.”
“Saps, wait—” Ish protests, but it’s too late.
—
God stands over a pair of matching corpses and thinks to himself, I can’t put that in the video.