“I hate you, Jack Hunter.”

I want to hold her until she can’t stand me anymore, until she runs away to somewhere safer. Somewhere without me.

I nod instead.

“I know.”

“No. You don’t know. You think that immature war was hate. But this – this is –” She squeezes her eyes shut. “You left me. You left me like everyone else, and I can’t forgive you for that.”

“You don’t have to,” I offer. “You don’t owe me anything.”

She laughs, the harsh front breaking for just a moment, her old self spilling through the cracks.

“And you don’t owe me anything, obviously. Not even a call. Not even a single goddamn text saying, oh, I don’t know, ‘I’m not actually decomposing in a river somewhere after throwing myself off a bridge, still breathing, don’t wait up for me’.”

And that’s when I see it. It’s not anger because I’ve hurt her. Sophia’s anger was always because I’d hurt her. This purer, brighter anger is because I made Isis worry. Because she thought I was dead, or rather, because she didn’t know whether or not I was alive. She is too kind, too motherly for this fury to be anything but a protective instinct denied its full course. I held that sort of anger once, too. I took it out on Isis after I’d caught her in my room looking through my letters – in my mind, trying to get to Sophia.

I’ve known Isis long enough (not nearly a year, but it feels like centuries) to know that when she shakes, she is far gone. When she trembles, her past is rearing its head, throwing shadows on her mind. I’d always considerately refrained from touching her, from making it worse, and though I scream at myself to remain that way, I can’t.

I can’t.

I step into her, wrapping my arms around her weakly and resting my head in her neck.

“I can’t do it anymore,” I breathe. “I tried, and tried, god I tried to be the strong one. To do the right thing for everyone.”

Isis goes stiff, and for a split second I realize what I’m doing, and frantically try to pull back. Something desperate and dark is eating away at my core, held back by Gregory’s brutal training and my own dam of denial. And, like the bomb she is, just seeing Isis again blew cracks in that dam, and she’s going to see me through the cracks, the real me, she’s going to see me like no one else has, like I’m pretending not to be, broken and dead inside and I have to leave, have to compose myself, but she doesn’t let me pull away, wrapping her arms tight around my waist and keeping me pressed against her, against her warmth and smell and her understanding silence.

“I t-tried,” I whisper. “I tried to protect her, and you, and everyone. But all I did was kill her. I failed. I failed and I killed her, and hurt you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, hot moisture collecting in them.

“I don’t deserve to live -”

Her arms tighten, squeezing the air from me.

“Stop,” Isis says.

“It’s the truth –”

“Newsflash; not everything that drops from your gorgeous dumb mouth is the truth.” There’s a pause. “Ah, shit. I just called you gorgeous. Now I have to commit seppuku.”

“Don’t you dare,” I mumble into her neck.

“See? That’s how it feels. That’s how it feels when you say you don’t deserve to live. New rule: Nobody gets to talk suicide ever.”

A tear escapes, and I bury it in her shirt collar. She puts a hand on my head, petting it.

“If you really think you’re so bad,” she says. “Then live. Live, and suffer. Live with the memories of all the bad things you’ve done. Don’t take the easy way out.”

There’s a poignant pause. Then she adds;

“- numbnuts.”

The name is a tiny injection of reality, of light. The cracks in me relieve the pressure of the last year, of the year before the last, the water flowing through them slowly as my breath deflates in my lungs. I look up, and cup either side of her face.

“I’ll only say this one time, so listen carefully.”

Her eyes are wide, her lips parted and her cheeks are flushed. Her eyes too, I notice, are more than a little tear-stained.

“You’re right,” I finish. “You’re right for once, Isis Blake.”

And then she smiles, and for the briefest half-second before her friends come barreling out of the hall and shout for her, everything in the world is right, and bright, and better. We part, my arms already missing her warmth, and she looks back at them.

“One sec!” She whips her head around to me. “So you’re here now? You’re living on campus like the rest of us peons?”

I nod. “The Jefferson dorm. 314. For a while.”

Her stare is flinty. “You have a lot of explaining to do. Due. A lot of explaining is extremely overdue. And you should call your mom. She’s been really worried about you.”

“Agreed.”

“You still have my number, right? You didn’t chuck your phone in a lake when you went to join the Empire or the seven samurai or the monastery of lame grossness or whatever?”

“I have it.”

She chews her lip. “I still haven’t forgiven you. But I’ve found, through eighteen years of vigorous experimentation, that I’m much more willing to forgive people if they interact with me on this physical plane. Talk to me. Text me. With cute cat pictures or winky faces –”

“I don’t do winky faces.”

“Aha, but you do cat pictures!”

“No.”

“Yes,” She argues.

“No.”

“Ugh, look at us. Why can’t we just talk like normal people? About, like, concerts and cake and our deep personal beliefs and the color orange and stuff?”

I stare at her blankly. She nudges me.

“Orange. C’mon, try it. A conversation about orange.”

“It’s….orange.”

“Ding ding ding. Give the man a cigar. Orange is orange. Wow. This has been an excellent conversation. Your powers of observation are downright fearsome. Maybe we could work our way up, you know, to purple next time. Except then you might disappear for years again –”

“It wasn’t years.”

“ – and I would be lost and heartbroken, and then you would come back having spent fifty years thinking about purple, thinking; ‘oh yes, now is my chance to impress Isis with my deep and thorough knowledge of the color purple’, and you’d find me in a nursing home in a coma dreaming about Johnny Depp all vegetable-like, and you’d have to hurry to tell me about purple because one of my potential spawn might pull the plug on me. Maybe you’ll pull the plug on me. Note to self: ugh, don’t get old.”

“Too late,” I smirk. She puffs out her cheeks and stands.

“Anyway, I like you but you’re ruining my life. Bye.”

-7-

3 Years

47 Weeks

2 Days

Everything happens all the time forever, and this would be a terrifying concept if I wasn’t so enlightened and in-tune with the natural forces of the universe, which include but aren’t limited to; A. taco salad, B. taco salad, and C. my own glorious ass (glorioass). Which increases in size directly proportionately to how much taco salad is in the area. Science has come so far.