Ch48

Despite his unspoken promise to keep from Norah Kestrel, the circumstances were inarguable. Her mother was dead. She’d been dead all this time he’d known her, and not once had he thought to poke or prod or clarify. He had been the center of all their energy and efforts and had taken Nor from her own grief in the process.

It seemed something wonderful or catastrophic would always keep them tethered. They were inseparable stars in a constellation, bound, orbiting planets.

They sat upon her roof as she reminisced, recounting childhood tales of her mother, both lovely and horrid. The parentification. The cognitive distortions. The rules to which Norah clung in survival.

Do not grieve Dad. Don’t listen to his records. Don’t speak his name.

Do everything by yourself. Robin’s mental illness and addiction were unwound by the loose thread of Leonard’s death, leaving no remaining motherhood to spare for her child.

Mom’s happiness is your responsibility. The key that weighed Norah’s chest was first her mother’s. It was the family crest of trauma which she’d borne through the throngs of war. The key shuddered through its locking mechanisms and resounded through the halls with the damnation of manacles.

After Leonard died, Robin often crawled into bed with her daughter and clung to the child until she buzzed with neglected circulation. Between her mother’s sobbing spine and the cold brass of bed rails, Norah was talked at like a ghostwriter, a hollow mausoleum built only to bear her mother’s tales. Norah Kestrel didn’t sleep for years. Her head would slip and slump from consciousness at school and everywhere in between until she was riddled with tears.

Mom’s health is your responsibility. Norah came home from school one afternoon to find Robin lolling and incapacitated on the bedroom floor. Drooling and heavy-lidded, eyeballs spinning into white marbles. She’d mixed sleeping meds with liquor again, thus at fifteen, she heaved the slurring woman to the car and drove her to the hospital.

“When you’re a kid with unhealthy parents,” said Norah, “you either lose your authenticity or your attachment. So I gave up who I was and who I wanted to be. And even after she died, I was so scared to think of who I could be without the trauma, the past. I’ve done everything to live by that book of survival, and now I have to write a new one.”

Because it was the caregiving of her mother that had become Norah’s sole purpose and worth. She’d draw pictures, cards, write poems, clean, organize, draw baths, buy gifts, pick flowers, embrace, kiss, brush her hair, cook meals, sing songs, decorate their heads in flower crowns, read stories, share movies, make coffee and tea, and fill her small arms with the weary woman until she had no kindness left even for herself.

“I think mom loved who I was as a kid because I made her feel strong and wise,” Nor muttered. She fidgeted with her cigars, twisting them in her fingers until their papers were frayed and unwinding chocolaty leaves onto the rooftop beside the piles of dead ashes. “She just wanted to feel in control, like we all do. But once I found my own voice, I couldn’t serve that narrative for her anymore.”

As a teen, Norah began running away from home, disappearing into the neighboring fields for whole days at a time, deep into the night. She’d trip into a clearing of purple-capped wheat crop only to collapse into its arms and wait.

For something.

Anything.

Anyone.

She’d sing her father’s favorite songs and scratch in her sketchbook or at herself. And as Norah Kestrel grew old and tall with the pale fields, one final rule to her survival was crystallized:

No one is coming to save you.

“You wanted to be found,” said Dex, eyes hot with salt. He watched her scratch the scar alongside her eye ritualistically. It followed the creek bed of her tears, down her cheek.

Sensing his gaze, she dropped her journeying fingers to her lap.

He extended a hand to her cheek and conformed to its shape without touching.

“May I?” he proposed.

Stumbling clarity fell upon her features, but she nodded.

His touch maintained the gentleness of holding bird’s egg as he ran a thumb along the scar. It was thin and smooth like magnolia petals. He rested his thumb into the valley of it and her eyelids fluttered closed. They stepped into her memories with care.

Thick, grassy roots squeaked and bent undertow with groans. He cast aside tall crops, following a sad, strumming chord he knew too well. Though it was smaller, quieter than its full composition, he could’ve recognized its instruments in the violence of a hurricane.

He found her tiny form rocking against her kneecaps in the overgrown field, humming a tune much older than she. Her fingernail dug at the soft flesh beneath her eye in rhythmic catatonia, vision glassy and distant. And though it was not the burn of a cigar or the breaking of bones on a boxing bag, he intimately knew why she scraped and sought. He understood the brief service, the treasure beneath the wound, and its inflammation. Its essential comfort was often craved by the lost, the tired, and the numb. The message in its depths, deep like a bone bruise. The intimate reminder in its ache:

You. Are. Still. Here.

They fell back into their still bodies. He wiped tears from her low lashes and watched her return to him with soft blinks.

“Why scars?” she asked.

He’d conjured a deduction but couldn’t be entirely certain why scars were most efficient for cosmic conversation and the sharing of memories.

“Scars stay with us longer than anyone else,” he guessed. “I believe they know us most deeply. What we’re made of and what we can survive. Gateways for raw vulnerability.”

She smiled briefly.

Despite her visit to the traumas of her past, he listened to her heart’s once fearful drum now beat with greater, slower, peaceful rhythms until the anxious organ lowered in her chest, slowly, slowly, like a landing swan.

Dexteras yearned to drink as much as she could share. He commanded every detail, each vivid memory, every jagged and soothing corner of her mind she could spare until her cupboard of memories was barren.

Norah Kestrel deserved to be heard in the same way she heard others each and every day.

She wrestled open a bottle of red wine from the depths of a high cabinet. They shared it on her rooftop and leaned back into the stars. Their legs swayed drunkenly above the whispering fields.

“Wine is sun held together by water,” he quoted Galileo between sips. He gazed through his glass at the white coin moon. It shone silver beams through the lacing liquid, thick like blood. When Norah didn’t respond, he turned to her.

Her posture was rounded and heavy like a river stone worn by waves. She also stared into her glass, disgust twisting her lip. He knew her thoughts before they’d left her.

“I’m afraid of being like her,” muttered Norah. “Deteriorating in this fucking house. Slowly killing myself. But even if I leave, wherever I go, they’ll still be within me. I can’t run from it.”

He sat his glass down and faced her.

“You cannot run, but who they were is not who you are,” he said. “There’s a capacity for chaos waiting within all of us, love, genetics or not. But you are aware of who you want to be and who you don’t,” he promised. “You’ll protect future Nor. You’ll make mindful choices so she can be healthy where they weren’t.”

“Being really is hard,” she muttered.

“Cheers to that.”

After one goblet-sized glass of sloshing libation, she fell into a hard sleep. It left her strung about the rooftop in an array of chocolate wrappers, fleece-coated limbs, and cigar butts. Her lips were parted and reddened with wine.

He watched for a moment as her eyes danced beneath drunken lids, praying her headspace cared for her and took her far from the cavity of grief. Though it was a scant serving of meager crumbs, he wished he could share his peace with Norah like breaking bread. But all he could do was tote her to bed, wrap her warm, and place Vincent at her feet.

He cleaned the rooftop of the evening’s wrappings before hopping upon a chimney stack. He stared at Robin Kestrel’s vacant window, massaging his sore jaw with circling thumbs. It reminded him of Norah’s scars. Of her touch on his cheeks. Of her kindness, despite all she’d known.

Despite all he was.

And as quickly as the correlation registered, he was reduced to tears.

He wept for Norah and for Robin. He grieved for all of their lives and suffering until his tears drained him into gentle unconsciousness. A catatonia, inebriated with weeping.

“…do you think if she knew what drove you to such madness, that she could care for you so?”

The sultry voice shook him awake with such a violent chill, he fell from the chimney bricks and dropped onto all-fours. His flayed skin stitched shut whilst he scrambled to his feet.

His gut dropped at the dramatic atmosphere shift.

Spirit-like breath snaked from his lips.

That cold sensation shuddered his senses like a death knell.

Then, a pair of thick lips pressed against the nape of his neck, skating over his flesh like a viper’s tongue.

He spun with disorientation until he was toe-to-toe with the archaic being, Solus.

Amber flashed beneath the smoky eyes. The beguiling skin had healed to its coppery perfection, glimmering and immodest. Their blazer was sharp-shouldered and buttoned at the abdomen, pulled over their bare breast and gold chains. The raven hair had resumed its luster. Their cherry lips were plump and unbroken. The shapely form was grounded on their tall, golden appendages.

“Son,” they said, red irises flashing like dying stars.

Dex interrupted the monologue with a snarl and a fist, boxing with wild, unplanned strikes. He would not have evil here again at her home. This was what he’d fought so hard to avoid.

But the hellhound only grinned with expectation, bending and leaning into ducks and dodges, always a millisecond ahead.

The fizzles and crackles of his electric fingertips sparked against the night, eager to strike.

“You’re returning to yourself, Dexteras,” they chided, a thin cigarette teasing between their teeth. Solus sidestepped one of Dex’s blows with an easy stretch of the golden leg, its mechanisms whirring. The beast leaned in to deliver a mocking slap to one of Dex’s elbows.

“Tighten up. You’ve the composure of a fowl,” they said, hopping like a plucky crow, testing Dex’s footwork. With a grin, the creature spun into a swirl of dark smoke and vanished.

Dex wheeled about on his ready toes, fists high and pressed against his jaw. Once he found the pitying golden irises again in the dark, he charged with drawn fists. However, breaths before contact, he screeched to a halt, nearly a heartbeat too late.

Dex flung his arms out to keep from bowling himself over the ledge. He was at the roof’s rim, having run out of tread. He’d nearly launched himself from it after the tempting figure.

Solus was suspended in the airspace just beyond, held afloat by black swirls of smoke wrapped at their shins. A raspy hum resonated from the tattooed throat in pity.

With a snap of their fingers, they returned behind Dexteras.

Swollen with fury for the childish charade, Dex spun off a grounded boot to strike the old creature’s jaw. His height was impressive. His power was building.

But the beast was fast as polished steel, skating across the roof on gold blades.

The archfiend snatched Dexteras from the air and threw his body down to the rooftop with a force that shook Norah’s home. Shingles cracked and shuddered with a huff of dust.

Dex arched his back in a silent gasp, clawing in pain. Somewhere in his vertebrae, something had snapped with the loudness of a broken cane pole. Something substantial and important. He backpedaled in search of release from the piercing fractures, withholding his screams.

“That was for taking my second in command from me.” A flash of crimson sparkled in the dark skull above him.

Cecil?

“I didn’t touch him,” Dex grimaced.

“But you filled him with doubt, hope,” they snarled, stepping from the shadows. Their jaw was not mocking, but bared. “I heard it in his voice, his hunger. And hungry dogs are never loyal.” A bitter, hurt expression contorted their bright eyes.

Before Dex could place the unnatural want on their face, they blinked the grieving shine from their eyes. “But I don’t have to hear anything in his voice anymore, do I?” they said.

Dex attempted to stand, but fell back with white, hot pain. Crunching, grinding bits of bone shifted beneath him until his eyes clenched shut.

Solus then suddenly grinned with wild eyes and turned towards the window.

It lifted with a soft hiss and out stepped Norah.

An unfitting hatred painted her exhaustion as she beheld Solus on her roof. Her fists clenched, and her heartbeat pounded like a cannon.

Dex’s deducing eyes took in the pair before him: the ancient being that yearned for him to be who he once was, and the beautiful, beloved human who cherished him exactly as he was at present. He felt them pull at his aching insides as though the sinews of his heart were unraveled and clutched in their desperate grips. They were both toe-to-toe in their own ring, and he was the rope.

This is what Solus wanted.

She crouched beside Dex, who clenched at his spine, struck still whilst sinew braided itself inside of him.

“You were nearly dead before you met her, Dexy. You felt as though you’d fade to nothingness. Don’t you wonder why?”

Norah paid the banter no mind, anxious hands wandering the old man’s broken spine.

“Amica mea, I’m fine. I’m healing. But please go back inside,” he begged, surveying his opponent over her shoulder.

“Don’t you wonder why she gives you strength?” whispered Solus, a pink tongue flashing across their teeth.

Norah stood and approached the old Figment like an oncoming storm of a woman, fearless and huffing.

“Norah, don’t!” Dex called.

Solus remained planted, hands in their suit pockets and a cigarette twisting between their teeth. A thin, black brow raised at her approach.

“Why now?” she snarled. “If you cared about him so dearly, why did you wait twenty years to bring him home?” she said, fists bared.

“Because as I’ve said, Norah Kestrel, once I take a Fig’s memories, some give way to The Unbecoming. Washing your brain clean of your purpose and your past, it unhinges you. It’s like taking the oxygen from your heart and being told you don’t need it anymore. You’re lost to senility,” said Solus. The voice was smooth and dangerous between those hungry lips.

“What? So you lost him? How in the hell do you lose a man who doesn’t know who he is?” she spat, pushing herself onto her tiptoes towards them. “I know nurses with full wards of dementia patients, and we’ve never fucking lost one.”

Solus grinned a true, bright smile. “Moments after I took his memories as he so begged me to, he jumped off the roof of your hospital.”

Norah’s heart stopped for a beat, and her shoulders fell.

“A nurse was the first on the scene,” called Solus. “Her Purpose was to heal human bodies, and because he was hungry for survival, a human body he became. But once he left the hospital, he unraveled again and lost himself. We had a hell of time pinning you down after that, Dexteras,” Solus called over Norah to the downed fighter. “When Cecil told me he’d found you, I honestly didn’t believe him. I was certain you’d completely unraveled into dust from The Unbecoming.” A new, fallen expression weighed the elder Figment, eyes wincing with pain.

Dex clutched at his scalp. The world was spinning, and the last twenty years of his life were wafting and lost.

“A lack of Purpose is essentially a lack of love. It can terrify Figs and Corpses alike,” Solus said to Norah. “You’d know something about that, wouldn’t you?”

Dex tested his legs again. They were still numb with paralysis. A stab echoed throughout the rest of him and dropped him to his elbows. He huffed with fear. He wouldn’t be healed in time to help her.

“You were molded by pain, as we were,” said the towering being, medallion eyes darting to the hand clenched at Nor’s side. Surely they heard its silent scars. “Just as your mother was.” Solus lifted their chin with a shark tooth smile. “Dexteras saw to that.”

A fatal stone plunged down into Dex’s intestines. He couldn’t breathe.

“I can show you,” offered the archaic fiend. “You could know everything.”