Love Letters
“And then we’d be at each other’s throats even more.” Oh, petal. You say that like it’s a bad thing.
— Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time WarI love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.
— Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This is How You Lose the Time War
Red,
This war has been raging for longer than either of us have been alive. Or… hm. I’ve often wondered and not yet asked: are you alive, Red? Because I recognize life in your voice, but I’m not sure if your circuitry agrees. Still, I imagine you exquisitely alive.
I’m not always sure I think of myself in the same way. You asked me once what it is that my body is made of. I said meat at the time (I stand by it), and I think you found it endearing, if I am correctly interpreting your reply. But I meant that I’m easily squished—by others, by time, by myself. I was mortal, and so I am mortal, even though I am now immune to the passage of time. Funny how that works, isn’t it? A stuck and placeless thing has no way out except the obvious door labeled death, only the universe no longer pulls me toward it. Instead, I wait for an intruder. I’ve given you the keys, it seems.
You’re curious, Red. I’ve learned this much about you. So I’ll answer before you ask, because I must beat you, always. I became un-human when I was a kid, when a bomb lodged itself in my rickety floorboards and vaporized my family. Clearly, I did not become dust—or, perhaps you thought you were communing with sentient dust. I suppose I must account for all possibilities here. Regardless, my fleshy body was taken by Hydra for the war. They gather anomalies. The alternative is to stay put in a dying timeline, so we comply. For a long time, I didn’t know what I was fighting for, only that the war was consistent enough that I once mistook it for love. (And so I wonder sometimes what it might be like to be loved by you, my bloody, mechanical man, without the eyes of Hydra and the Agency. I wonder how soft you might be. I wonder if you’re even capable of harshness. I think not.)
We don’t talk about our humanness. You’re the first person who’s ever considered asking about me—my body, my history, my desires. It’s not for lack of knowledge. It’s just that we’re less effective heads to a time-encompassing beast if we retain our bodies, our histories, our desires, and so we slice them off.
Being unstuck in time is peculiar. I wish I had more meaningful words to describe it. I’m a witness to everything and a cause of everything and meaningless in everything. Hydra wants to sink its teeth into every timeline. It’s a beast and I’m a tooth. (I want your flesh, if you have it.)
Time isn’t real, yet I feel it weigh me down. I can go anywhere, be anything, know anyone, and yet, I cannot know myself. I can die, but it needs to be a whole ordeal—stabbing, shooting, skinning, whatever. I am as stable as a toothpaste tube of blood and guts.
Right, well, this is getting quite gross, and my aim is still set at seducing you, so I believe my rambling has been counterintuitive. Or maybe I’ve just been seen in my totality for the first time since becoming whatever I am now. Only you can tell me that, though, so I wait.
With love I mistake for combat,
Scarlet
P.S. — I would have taken your name from you if I’d gotten here first, but you started the whole charade and now I’m an entirely different shade of myself.
***
Scarlet,
You are entirely correct that I find your fleshy body endearing. Do you have any idea how brave it is to rage into battle in a vessel so soft and vulnerable? I must imagine you have immense and deadly skill in order to succeed.
I hope I’m alive! I suppose you could come and try to kill me, if we’d like to test the theory for certain. I’m sure I’d be intrigued by the methods you’d select. You’re correct that I have circuitry, though I do also have flesh. (Weird, right?) I can also become immaterial at will, so I suspect that the usual tools like knives and guns would be ineffective. Still, I’d like to see you try.
Hm. Revision: I’m alive insofar as ghosts are alive. Do with that what you will.
Thank you for trusting me with your humanity. I promise not to misuse it. For parity, and because I think you’re curious, too, and because I admittedly enjoy the prospect of you knowing me, I’ll disclose that I was engineered for the war. The Agency built me as a soldier and I am a soldier, yet I despise battle. I don’t understand the point. Even if a timeline is doomed, shouldn’t we let its inhabitants live out the rest of their short lives in peace? Why am I sent to prune whole infinities before their natural end? I’ve been told it’s to prevent some grave threat high above my security clearance, but upon receiving your history, I’m beginning to wonder if the threat is Hydra. I prune the anomaly before Hydra can recruit from it. Is it bad that I often ask myself if there’s a point to war at all? It’s entirely possible that Hydra and the Agency are simply building contradictory arsenals against a larger threat, but my intuition wants to believe it’s all a grand show.
And that, my beloved Scarlet, is why I first wrote to you. I recognized your signature (you leave battlefields burning) and I thought that it may be my chance to build a bridge to the other side. Certainly, a soldier as skilled as you are wouldn’t leave traces accidentally. No, I was confident they were intentional scorch marks and thought that you, too, might be attempting to build a bridge.
So here we are, suspended at the bridge’s midpoint. I’d like to know where to go from here. Do I jump, darling?
Love, certainly,
Red
P.S. — Scarlet suits you better than Red would.
***
To the depths of hell,
I don’t believe in ghosts. (I don’t believe in hell, either, but the ground for teasing was just too fertile, as you seem quite angelic.)
I do believe in hauntings, though. I think that’s what grief is: a lingering specter from another time. I have too many hauntings to count. And yet, strangely, the idea of you being a ghost is comforting. When I see a flash of color in my periphery, is it you? And if so, can I catch you? I’d like to kill you, but only because I’d like to touch you. Once I get close enough, though, I am certain I’ll suggest a handful of things far more exciting to do with your immateriality than murder would be. (Please do respond to my sexual advances sometime. This will otherwise be the last of them, for fear of making you uncomfortable.)
Honestly, I share your analysis of the war. I don’t know that it comes from anything more sinister than the natural decay of time, and the impulse some men have to defy it. Then, of course, once two parties believe they’re each entitled to the command of death, it becomes a war. So, if it’s bad for you to believe that, then at least we’re together in that, too.
And yes, the fires are intentional. You also have a tell. Every time I arrive to a field you’ve already gotten to, none of the foliage is disturbed in the slightest. You fight clean. You kill efficiently and painlessly and instantly. You leave things living where you can, so I began leaving fires to irritate you, since those worlds are doomed anyway. Little did I know what that would become. You’ve softened me, Red. My fires are performative now. I don’t burn anything that feels pain anymore. I think that makes me like myself more, though I also think that makes me fear my captor more.
Regardless, for old times’ sake, I’ve left you a gift.
Oh, and don’t jump. I’m only joking about killing you.
Joining you in hell,
Scarlet
P.S. — Alright. I don’t typically let men name me, though.
***
Distant sun,
Ha! The fires were funny. I’m sure you’ve deduced that “Red” isn’t my real name, but regardless, I appreciate you writing it in your own language and I quite enjoy having a name that only you know. I’ll have to contemplate a similarly blazing reply. Maybe a garden. Hm. Yes. I’ll return shortly.
Until later,
Red
***
Less distant sun,
I’m back, and I’ve left you an entire doomed timeline overflowing with scarlet flowers that only exist once in all of the universes. (This task took quite a while, but time travel helps speed up the genetic modification process. The flowers will certainly die, but I hope whatever happiness they inspire within you stays for a long time.)
And, regretfully, I got far too excited about my little project and forgot to encourage you to continue your sexual advances. I must admit, they make me nervous due to my own beliefs about my physical form, but you excite me. Your proposition about my ability to become immaterial absolutely fascinates me. I’m captivated by the idea of overcoming physical boundaries. Would you like to find out how much of you I can fill? How much of me you can have? I would. (Please continue this line of conversation. I’ll get more adept at it with practice.)
To make a harsh pivot, I admire your perspective on ghosts and grief. And yet, I wonder if it’s trapping you. I’ve never experienced loss in the way you’ve described, but the care with which I imagine you remembering your own history isn’t exclusively one of anguish, but one of fondness and joy.
I often wonder if we can ever recapture the things that were once taken away from us. I sometimes think that longing is a form of reunification; we reconstitute the missing person, thing, time, feeling in our mind and hold it as close as we can. But, of course, memory is an empty promise, and so grief begs the question of what it is that we can fill ourselves with once the original subject of our longing is gone. I am inclined to say that there are lots of ways to transform emptiness into something else. What is grief, if not love persevering?
Do you believe that? I may be wrong. I am not beyond critique, and you seem to constantly linger at the outskirts of my comfort zone.
Speaking of outskirts, I do have a favorite time and place. You didn’t ask, but I am sharing because you also didn’t respond to my question of where we go from here. I have a nonsensical fondness of Edinburgh, Scotland on most (but not all) Earths. I find the year 2017 AD (local time) absolutely phenomenal. It’s such an insignificant time! Marvelously stupid. The humans have silly jobs and rudimentary computers. That portion of history is written about in such peculiar terms, centuries down the line. It’s funny, really. I go there and I laugh, but there’s a warmth to their behavior, too. They believe something good is coming. I have to admire that. (We, of course, are not beholden to their fates. Still, it’s nice to know that hope can persist even in the most impossible places. I want you to stumble into somewhere bursting with hope such that it might, in some shape, take up residence in your fleshy human body.)
We’ve labeled my favorite Edinburgh iteration Earth-199999. It’s a doomed universe past the ideal pruning time, so I suspect the Agency will want very little to do with it. We could likely be safe from my captors. Perhaps, if we’re safe from yours, too, you could find me. I’ll look like a silly human man. (I find those skin suits so entertaining! I am sure I’ll find yours attractive, though.)
Escaping,
Red
P.S. — I’ll tell you my name if you tell me yours.
***
Weeping, the Seeker snubs out a flame with their thumb, digs their body into the soil and all its rotten concrete. Moisture, memory, and papery bits wait beneath their palm, until they grind it to a paste fit for teeth and swallow it whole.
There was a home here.