Tiredness is something you haven’t felt in three hundred years.
It enters you like a burglar, breaking in between your bones and making your muscles quake and turn to jell-o. It lingers, an unwanted guest long after the party is over and as you trudge up the rough cut stairs that lead out of the Pit it weighs on you like a boulder.
This is what Atlas must have felt like carrying the celestial vault upon his shoulders, you imagine as your back begins to dully ache, so it would not grind the mortals to a gory paste between heaven and earth.
You have started upwards with the intention of offering support to Laura and instead find yourself leaning more and more on her. You begin to think there is no end to the steps and no matter how hard and balefully you glare upwards, you fail to pierce the encroaching gloom and the lip of the crater remains an elusive hope wrapped in myth and lined with legend.
That’s something new, you realize as the sudden glow of a lone torch makes your eyes water - where before you could see in the darkness as well as in daylight, now you are blind like a mole and only God knows what perils are waiting for you in the shadows. Your eyes narrow and phantasmagorical shapes take flight from your imagination and make the blackness around you writhe and run like jet-black ink. The stupid heart you didn’t ask for jolts faster against your ribs and the respect you feel for Laura and the reckless way she throws herself at danger becomes unmeasurable.
You realize your own contempt for danger wasn’t born from courage, but rather the knowledge of one who had the night at their fingertips, the same night that now appears like a strange, bewildering puzzle you cannot solve.
The only thing that has remained the same is Laura’s warm, reassuring presence at your side and you cling to her like a ship at high anchor as a the storm of your newfound nature rages around you.
One would think it is impossible to forget how to be human, that much like riding a bike it cannot be unlearned. You’d introduce one to Mother and the ways she had of turning mortal into timeless and human into cruel and cold detachment.
But Mother is no more and your hateful heart gives another throb that leaves you gulping for air. Salt burns in your eyes and you inhale sharply, swallowing the grief and keeping your eyes wide open until the unwanted tears dry off.
You have always been capable of feeling even when your heart was dead and you start to think Inanna’s gift is more of a curse, one last joke played on you by a bored Goddess pretending to have forsworn cruelty and intrigue.
You tilt your head back about to scream your frustration up at her (you are positive she lingered and is laughing at you now) when you glimpse tiny, paling lights wink down at you. It’s a night sky you’ve seen many times before as night used to be both domain and natural state, but it has never been so beautiful.
You gasp and groan and your free hand claws at your chest.
God, but you hate this bloody heart of yours.
“Ugh.”
The arm Laura has thrown around your waist tightens with both concern and sympathy.
“It’ll take some getting used to, Carm.” Her voice is a gentle whisper tickling your earlobe.
“I don’t want to get used to it,” you sound like a petulant child, but you are beyond caring as you crest the blasted hole’s lip and fall to your hands and knees. How sickeningly prideful of you to think they’d place Hell’s gates a bit closer to the ground’s surface for your convenience.
Unseen pins and needles scratch and pierce your skin as blood that you won’t need to steal anymore rushes along your limbs, pumped by your frantic heart. Your fingers dig into your chest as you grit your teeth, resisting the urge to rip your own ribs wide open and cast the beating occupant out.
It dawns on you that you could not even if you wanted, your strength barely sufficient to hold your head upright so that you can look upon your lover as you die.
Because let’s face it, there is no way in Hell you aren’t. Your limbs seize up with fatigue and your heart is a wild beast, a stallion launched along a shore at full speed. You can practically taste it at the back of your throat.
“I’m dying.” The words rattle out of you in a deflated wheeze.
Laura rolls her eyes. “No you’re not. You’re out of shape.”
You splutter your last breath indignantly, flopping onto your back and closing your eyes, the thumping of your heart a roared funeral dirge inside your skull. Surely it is about to stutter and stop.
ThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThumpThump
Any moment now.
You even stop breathing, that same breathing that came to you as naturally as...well… breathing and you manage to slow it down, but the stubborn thing keeps on ticking, will and death defying.
Laura’s shoe nudges your side carefully and when your eyes snap open, her smile is a blade of brightness cutting the waning night and not half as mocking at you’d expected. She offers a hand and you take it, noting that for the first time your flesh is as warm as hers.
You have been dead for so long, inside and out that being alive is as weird as it is terrifying. You are used to causing terror (and terribly good at it to be honest), and don’t deal well with being in the throes of it.
“Come on,” Laura pulls you up and she is much, much stronger than you and you don’t know how you feel about that, “I think we can both use a bath and a warm bed.”
You follow like a lost puppy, fingers intertwined with hers, afraid she’ll let go and disappear into the night, but she does not, pulling you along like a rushing river would pull flotsam. When you realize where she is going you grimace, but you guess that Mother’s house is the closest and most obvious choice. You don’t think you could deal with the Library’s shenanigans right this minute.
The house is scarred and the walls outside are blackened and gouged, but it remains unmoving much like you always thought Mother to be. You almost expect her to appear on the doorstep whether to greet or obliterate you, you are not sure.
When she doesn’t materialize you sigh and your heart plummets for a moment, empty.
Funny how attached we can grow to our abusers, you think with a wry smile warped by a dollop of sadness. Laura takes the sound for exhaustion and you are glad, because you don’t know if she would understand the attachment you still feel to a being that tortured her and her friends so throughly.
Then again perhaps she would surprise you, as she has done more times than you can count, but before you can even try to formulate an overture in your head, you have stumbled after her almost falling to your knees and she has picked you up effortlessly.
Your mind reels at the sudden change of roles and you want to squirm and protest, but her hold tightens as if she knew what is going through your mind.
She probably does.
“Don’t start.” The warning is an affectionate grumble and so you settle back, head resting against her chest, listening to her heartbeat as yours adapts to mirror it. You always thought that “hearts beating in unison” was a naive and cheesy figure of speech, until the moment it happens to you.
She carries you upstairs and her huffed grunts are indication that it isn’t as effortless as you imagined. You want to tell her you can walk, but you refrain, the quiet descended between you a precious, comfortable thing you are unwilling to break.
You are dumped, rather unceremoniously, on your mother’s ample bed and can do nothing but lay there and exist, taking stock of all your aches as Laura disappears and soft, golden lights switch on around you, bathing everything in a warm hue.
Traces of your recent battle cover you, you see as you struggle to push onto your elbows. Bleeding is something you haven’t done in three hundred years, but if the heart breaking havoc inside your chest was not enough to convince you, the scarlet droplets staining your shirt are proof enough that you’re alive.
Laura is back at your side, hand gently pushing matted hair away from your brow then helping you up, pushing you from the room as she walks behind you. The sound of gurgling water registers in your tired mind and you throw a questioning glance over your shoulder.
“I’ve drawn you a bath,” her nose wrinkles, “you definitely need it.”
You balk, not at the fact she told you that you smell, but at her taking care of you. It should be the other way around or so you feel and you promptly point it out as your feet slow and she has to forcibly push you ahead.
“You were dead.”
“So were you,” she shoots right back, “and much longer than me.”
But you aren’t listening anymore.
She’s managed to prod you into the bathroom and now you are left staring defenceless at your image on the full mirror. You stop dead (ah ah), your feet becoming one with the floor’s marble tiles.
“Come on, Carm! You’re way too old to start behaving like a child because I want you to bathe and, OH-” She peeks over your shoulder and catches a glimpse of your reflection.
Before you realize your body is moving, you’re right in front of the mirror, breath fogging your own features, a hand shakily lifted to splay over your image, the other patterning touches over your face, disbelief evident underneath your fingertips.
You remember that the day you died you looked just like this, albeit in different clothing.
Tears begin to fall, a light rain that soon turns into a deluge, sobs ripping from your chest like thunder. You cry for yourself and the girls you led to the slaughter, for the mortal mother that birthed you and the immortal one that breathed stolen life into you. You cry for Laura and all she has been through because of you.
“I…” you gulp, moan, the words gurgling out among the wetness of your tears, “I had not seen...I...I…”
She understands what you are struggling to say and tenderly turns you towards her, so that you can hold on for dear life and cry yourself out as you bury your face in the crook of her neck.
Laura says nothing, simply humming a soft melody without true rhythm, soothing you as if you were a small child. And in more ways than one you do feel newly born and in need of guidance, which she offers readily and without question.
God, how you love her for it.
Your heart echoes your thoughts and for once you don’t mind that it thumps faster.
You do not oppose her when she begins undressing you and pulls you gently towards the rapidly filling tub, yet you do avert your gaze, feeling the balance between you has shifted. It’s not being naked in front of her that makes you furiously blush, but being painfully conscious of your mortality, from the way the room’s chill pebbles your skin like never before to the trembling exhaustion that seems to sheathe your muscles as she helps you into the bath’s scalding embrace,
Help is something you have not needed in three hundred years.
You lower yourself into the hot liquid with a tooth-clenching hiss, your body assaulted with sensations that you had long forgotten, for heat and cold and what lays in between are things much removed from a cadaver.
You realize that death was a protection, a buffer between you, the world around you and the deeds inside you. The tears keep falling and you know that the three hundred year old dam has crumbled and you cannot stop the flow, so you are grateful for the steam that curls upwards and dampens your skin and the water that Laura pours over your head. The salt is diluted and erased as soon as it falls and her gentle hands washing you are a baptism, cleaning you of your sins as well as the grime that cakes you.
You relax into the bathtub stretching out like the panther you won’t become anymore - and boy if you’ll miss something it’ll be that, and Laura’s fingers massage your scalp, tugging loose the mess of knots and snarls, working out the dried blood and flakes of dirt and soot.
Next comes your body and you relish the feeling of her hands deftly guiding a soapy cloth along your dips and valleys and the look you give her is dreamy and full of longing. The steam has frizzled the ends of her hair, bending the light brown waterfall into a soft mass of curls. You ache to run your pruning fingers through it and on a whim you splash her playfully, a small smile tugging at the corner of your lips.
“Hey!” She crosses her arms in front of her protectively, but she is a second too late and throughly soaked. You smirk as her curves are revealed, the fabric of her blouse made transparent by the water.
“You said we both needed a bath,” you husk softly, fingers lazily trailing the water’s surface.
She gives an exasperated sigh and throws the wet cloth at your head with a roll of her shoulders.
“I was planning to take it after you.” She pouts, as she usually does when things don’t go her way and your smile widens as your tears ebb away. She does not realize how utterly adorable she is, bottom lip sticking slightly out as she glowers, brows knitted in what she believes to be a menacing expression.
You never confessed to her how much it melts you.
“Is the alternative so bad?” You ask wide eyed and faking hurt, even as your eyes brighten with mischief. Laura laughs and shakes her head ruefully, stripping with economic motions and stepping into the bath with you before you have time to reconsider.
It’s not that you never felt her writhe under you, you have defiled that poor desk more than once after all, but that was half clothed and messy and you were an animated corpse. It’s different now as she settles between your legs, her back to your front, pressing into you and stealing your breath away. You feel her like you never felt her before and your heart beats so hard, so fast you think that she must feel it reverberate through her bones.
You reach around her to recover the cloth bobbing just below the water’s soapy surface and begin to wash her gently as she abandons herself to you, sliding downward slightly so that her head tucks under your chin, water grazing her jaw. This position affords you a full view of her, and despite the amount of liquid surrounding you, your mouth runs suddenly dry and you are starved for air.
As your eyes wander her enticing curves you notice the scarring right above her breast and realize she will bear a sign of your struggles for as long as she lives. Your hand abandons the cloth and trembling fingers trace the puckered line that marrs the perfection of her skin and you want to cry anew. Her own hand covers yours, squeezing gently, and she tilts her head back to look at you.
“It’s ok.” What leaves her lips is such a broad statement, enclosing the scar, what happened, but also telling you it’s quite alright to be human. You honestly don’t know what you would do without her and to hide the fear that possibility strikes inside you, you bend down and capture her lips with yours.
It’s a tired, soft kind of kiss and it’s not like you have the energy to do much more than that, despite how appealing the thought is, and when it’s done you rest your chin on the crown of her head and sigh deeply, eyes fluttering closed.
Time crystallizes around you as your heartbeat veers off with hers towards a light slumber and you think that, in hindsight, you were never truly alive even before you crossed paths with Mother.
You fall asleep around your love, mind finally alight with dreams and for the first time in more than three hundred years, you allow yourself to live.