Is this how she felt?
Like every time she breathed, her heart was ripped over and over again from her chest, like every step she took the ocean drowned her lungs; could she see how the abyss swallowed her whole in one fell swoop, or did her fingers corrode slowly, decay crawling from her nail down her arms, until she was swept up by the wind in specks of dust?
His hands trembled fiercely, and no matter how hard he gripped his own forearms in pain, or gripped his closest — only — friend for dear life, he couldn’t stop them this time. They had always trembled, in small quaking measures, sometimes up until his own lungs had felt like fire was burning him inside out. But they had never trembled this desperately in search of a tether in a long time.
His anchor was gone; and he wondered.
Was this how she felt when she had to kill her own lover, when she’d watched her own children being torn away from her?
He thought, this whole time, he was different to her, but Stephen had already lost a sister, he’d lost his parents, and the one time he found himself loving again — America had died before his eyes.
Because of him.
He was the constant in the laughing stock that is his life — he’d failed his family, the world, and the only one who had stopped him from going straight to batshit insane.
Except Wanda could rest, knowing that somewhere out there, her children lived.
He knew that when he inevitably dreamed, the America he would see would just be a figment of his own making.
There was no universe he could turn to to mourn, no place he could run to for reprieve, not even a mirror or fragment to bring him peace. There was no one he could fight for, and no one he could fight.
He knows now how she felt, because if America were out there somewhere, he doesn’t think he’d have the self control to not do everything he could to have her back in his life.
But she wasn’t.
It was just him.
It was just him, back in that mid-Winter years ago, where the snow falls in silent grace to build and build a terrain in its image, where it turns the lake cold and frigid on the surface of its existence.
It’s just him, alone again, where he drowns and watches them drown.