I.
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In another life, he makes it back.
He’s standing with his (except they are not his) dirtied, yellowed check vans buried in the snow and the entire house is white and broken and burned. Most of it is not the house at all, not even with the excessive size the mansion had always been. Most of it looks like an untouched landscape.
It used to intimidate him, the sheer size of it like a towering beast determined to keep him trapped there forever (he was just a teenager. A scared, cagey, hurt teenager). But here, with his every movement tracked by the crows in the trees and the mouldy broken wood scattered for yards, kilometres, he can’t picture it. The house is not the house, it’s a white expanse of snow and a few reminiscences of palisade and mahogany walls turned ashen. It doesn’t even smell like their corpses, though he knows they remain. His remains.
He’s wearing an old ski shirt that does not belong to him and he feels sick for the first time in twenty years. It never stops hurting, but it hurts now more than ever.
Every integral moment of his life has been plagued and diseased by this, by them, by that man and the white of snow or flames or betrayal. Now there’s no lawn, no house, no one to return to. There is no John Allerdyce and there is no Pyro because he gave his name away and he doesn’t ever want it back. He gave his entire soul and self to someone, and he would rather live or die as a no one forever than remain as either version of himself without his other.
There are no tears in his eyes because there is no him anymore, except for a hollow shell to contain every memory and thought he’d ever had. He’s a shadow now, just that, a spectacle for the watching crows and the white lawn and the skeletons that are far too disfigured to even identify.
He remembers Bobby speaking one of his names, how sweet his voice had sounded that day on Liberty Island, as if a prayer or a mantra or a song. St John, spoken as intended. Bobby had never called him St John before that, and he never called him St John again. He never could, now. But he remembers Bobby’s eyes even through the flames, through the ice, far away until they were in front of each other with a war between them still, tears in his eyes. Using his name, maybe, just to try to bring them back together. But he had been terrified, and he was still a teenager then. Too hurt by every person to ever touch him. The pull of his name hadn’t been enough.
It all feels surreal. Everything he’s done in those years, every person he’s served and every life he’d taken, all of the wars and fights he never truly understood just to finally escape Nova, and now he’s here in the snow of Westchester. He’s back in his life, his own, and everyone else is dead.
How is he the lone survivor? How is this the world that had been left for them all?
How much he had missed for craving too much, for being too afraid, only to miss an eternal peace. To be left here, without the sound of a heart beating beside his and the only chill he’d ever been able to feel?
He cannot weep. The snow is still settled around him, and the shadow beyond him remains, and the crows do not make a sound as they watch his body shake and contort with their shiny bead eyes.