Go, Come | Multi-Fandom [Harry Potter, Twilight, Community, Lost, Fringe]
Go, Come (Or 5 People who Decided to Stay and That Made All the Difference)
Multi-Fandom [Harry Potter, Twilight, Community, Lost, Fringe], harry/hermione, jacob/bella, jeff/annie, sawyer/juliet, walter & peter
He sees the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t matter now, because he can see clearly the memory of a young boy running past him down a sidewalk laughing, many years ago, all the while the smile on his face saying, Only so far, Dad. I’ll only be far enough away, but you’ll always be able to see me, always able to reach me.
Go, Come
(Or 5 People That Decided To Stay and That Made All the Difference)
One | Harry Potter | Harry Potter & Hermione Granger
He finds that both of their sweaters are covered in red hair, his longer than hers. But the same shade, the same texture, tangling the same way over zippers, knotting over buttons.
They have met here, in the small of his living room, for “drinks, catching up, general mayham,” as she calls it when she calls in on the muggle telephone. In the background, he hears Ron belch loudly and they both laugh loudly until their laughter peters out in the end with a sigh.
The fact is that after the war this is what they are left with – the distance that separates them is strange and uninteresting and full of things that before never seemed large and important, but now they are. Like taxes, and politics, and red hair.
She pulls a rather long strand out of the knit of his sweater and says, with a sardonic smile, “So, you know of the Weasleys as well?” Holding the hair out far away from her, she releases it like it has rather offended her.
He watches her do this, and in the middle of him, he feels a sort of despair so deep it aches like a bruise. Not because she wipes her hands on the leg of her jeans and then frowns up at him before asking, “When did you say that Ginny is coming home, Harry?” but rather because he sees in her face something he can’t erase: this war he dragged her into, the war in every freckle in her face, in the tiny lines around her mouth when she frowns at him, the way her eyes squint at him as if she is studying him. The way she studies everything, it’s the way she has to be because she is a child of the Great War, the war over the boy who lived, the war over Harry James Potter, the war over him.
And the fact is, although everyone paid a price, Hermione Granger paid the highest, because this world was not her own. The thought that she could have walked away at any given moment, could have wiped her hands and gone back to a life of private muggle schools, a life where she had her own bedroom and a computer and normal boyfriend, a world that didn’t involve death or magic or Harry Potter, that thought keeps him awake at night more than any other.
He asks her once is she ever finds her parents, and she says, “Hm. What good would that do? Charms don’t work like that, Harry. I reversed their memory. You can’t be playing with people’s minds like that. They never had a daughter and that’s how it always will be.” She had been braiding her still unruly hair and she was doing it with such mathematical accuracy, he swore that she was doing another homework assignment, trying to figure out another Potions or Charms assignment. “I’m no one’s daughter now.” And when she had looked up at him after saying that, he saw that she was putting on her brave face, the one where she turned the edges of her mouth and lifted her left eyebrow like she was being sarcastic, like she was bulletproof. But right before that, right before the moment she put on that face, he saw in her eyes the moment of breaking. Hermione Granger, he knew, had this part inside of her that was wounded, that part of her he can never heal he is sure, and this fact, that fact that he had something to do with the breaking of the strong, the ineffable, the Hermione Granger who never once faltered when asked, “Will you go?” that Hermione Granger he has wounded and hurt and he can’t heal her – it was all in that one brief millisecond in her face, in her eyes.
And that millisecond, that keeps him awake more at night than the blood that he finds himself drowning in. Keeps him awake longer than: the look of Sirius’s face right before the veil closed behind him, the rumbly bass voice of Albus Dumbledore, the long sweet smile of Dobby. The fact that he broke something in the person who meant the most to him, O God.
He will sit up in the night, tip-toeing to the kitchen quietly so that Ginny cannot hear him and stare out the window into the moon and say to it, “I have made an orphan of you, Hermione Granger.” He had done the very thing that his greatest enemy did. He has made an orphan of the innocent.
But now she is standing there, in his house, and she is holding her coat that is covered in red hair. When she looks at him, she raises an eyebrow, and says, “Do I have something on my face?”
He shakes his head, stares at her long and hard, squinting his eyes. Right now, he wants to say something. Because after the war, this is the thing that keeps him awake: the living things that must carry on rather than the ones that died and now live in a different way than the living have to now. In ways, the dead are luckier. In many ways, he envies them.
And it’s like she can read him, can read every thought in his brain. She has that ability, has always had that ability, even since she strode into his train compartment with her school robes and frizzy head of hair and asked about a frog and repaired his glasses with a snotty swish of her wand. Already, even from that moment, he had that deep feeling inside of him that this girl, this awkward girl with large teeth, knew him. There was no hiding. There’s no hiding right now either, and she reads him and immediately she’s got that other face on, that Hermione face that means serious things, means determination, and no surrender.
“Harry,” she says, holding her head up a little higher. “Are you okay? Are you having those nightmares again?” She moves towards him effortlessly, like they are opposite ends of a magnet and she moves towards him almost instinctively, subconsciously. They have moved towards each other like this for much of their lives though, he thinks, and so he doesn’t even blink as her hands reach his forearms and hold him firmly in place as if she could ground him.
Ground him like she always has. When his world was moving too fast, when he felt like the ground was liquid and his feet would be enveloped in it all, she would reach out and hold him steady. And it hits him all of a sudden that this is it, that without her, all might have been lost. That the boy who lived wouldn’t have lived without the girl who lived. The bravest girl of the war. The girl who orphaned herself for the orphan Harry Potter.
Both of them, orphaned by and for the world they weren’t raised into.
It dawns on him there, as he sees her holding him with that look on her face that says, “I am here, Harry James Potter. I am here. Again,” that family is something you choose and this is his family. Right here, right now, holding her smooth dry palms against the pale skin of his arms, she didn’t have to choose him, that she could have walked away with clean hands at any given moment.
So he can’t help but ask lowly, so quiet that he’s not sure if he said it. Maybe he just thought it, he doesn’t know. So he says it again, “Hermione, why did you...”
“I heard you the first time,” she says snappily, as if she was thoroughly irritated. “I heard you. And I don’t want to hear that ever again, Harry Potter. Not ever. Because the point isn’t why or how but the point is that I came into this with my full mind. And I, I am smart. I am a smart girl, and I knew the second I saw the broken glasses on your face and the lightening scar on your forehead, I knew instantly that there was no turning back.” She shakes her head and part of him shakes too, and he feels it all down to his bones. But he doesn’t know if he can believe her, not really, because Harry Potter has been lied to for most his life and even though he knows that of anyone, he should trust her, there’s a part of him that’s guarded still.
And then she does something that shocks him, but at the same time is like someone has awoke him. She slaps him, right in the face, and when he looks at her in shock, she snaps, “I don’t care if that hurt. Because you, Harry Potter, you hurt me when you doubt.” She moves her hand from her chest to his, “Especially when you doubt this. Because sometimes a person just knows. And I knew every second of my life what I was doing. Even before you came into it. I knew that I would have to choose. I chose to go to Hogwarts. I chose to make friends with you Harry Potter. I chose to stand my stand in the war. And I choose...” she stops, looks him dead in the eye. Her throat is clenched and he knows that she holding his breath, that her lungs are tight in her chest.
For a second, he’s afraid she might finish with, I chose to get away from you, from the nightmares, from the unruly hair of you, Harry Potter.
But then she moves closer to him and her face is next to his and she says, “I chose to stay right here. Next to you. No matter what. I choose you Harry. I choose you.”
And suddenly her slightly parted lips and the bridge of freckles on her nose and her smell of soap and shampoo are all he can contain in this moment.
So he chooses to press him lips to hers, and for a second he forgets about the red hair tangling through his collar, and he forgets about the blood covering his hands from the war, and he forgets that after this moment they will laugh and joke about all of this, but for this second, it’s him and his best choice, his Hermione Granger, who chose him, who chose her.
Two | Twilight | Jacob Black & Isabella Swan
This is the part they will not write about. She knows this, and tells herself that they will write her a different story. She is brushing her hair in the early buttermilk morning light and she has slept the night before. She knows that people will not believe this. They will believe that she cannot die, that she wouldn’t pass on the opportunity to become more than flesh and blood. The world is obsessed with their own demise and she knows that they will not write the stories about how Isabella Swan passed up the chance to be forever beautiful, to be forever a child, to be forever.
But she did, but it will never be what people think it is. Because maybe she will age and maybe her hair will turn gray and course her skin will fall and her health will fail, but she’ll still have something inside her that burns bright and long and it can’t be taken from her even when her body is old and creaky.
She, Isabella Swan, didn’t always feel this way. She remembers cool nights and the press of his even colder skin and amber eyes and whispers of I love you I love you iloveyou.
And of course he meant that. It was never his fault, not for anything. She blames him for nothing, not for the heartbreak or the decisions she was forced to make in the ripeness of youth. The fact is, her mind was different back then. She accepts that she had to go through what she did because it changed her. Forever. It was the greatest thing to happen to her.
She regrets none of her choices. Because they are her choices.
There is one more though, one of those people who come into a life and rearrange things and you need them to, in the beginning, in order to show you back to how you are. Like they know you better than you possibly could ever, and their hand is one to hold at the disaster scene.
And he, he’s the one who did, who sparked the first fire and now it’s deep inside of her. Like wine in the core, burning slow and warm. His voice telling her, “You wouldn’t be Bella anymore. You wouldn’t exist.” She realizes that he’s right when she hears him, because she realizes that in a way she would have to die to become this other thing. She doesn’t know what she would become. It would have been something in a different world. She imagines that things would be split inside her like the space where universes part, like where threads in a seam finally unravel.
It was him though that kept her from unraveling. His golden thick lips against hers, she saw her life, her real life rolling out in front of her like a road unfurling on the horizon. Her hands, strong from work, holding his for years and years and the middle of her aching from the black-haired children running through all of her veins. But the fact is that this is not the choice that she suspects romantics will want to hear: that the real world, the one that hurts and hates and loves, the one that doesn’t show any pity for age and where you are as fragile as a hangnail, anything can take you out, this would be the life she would choose.
But he teaches her something, and this, when she learns it, she knows she can never walk away from it. He teaches her that the greatest romance is the one where you stay where you are. Right there. The world will revolve around the sun and you will go with it and it’s alright, alright to go for the ride. And the greatest romance will be the one who stands with you and lets the world age you, and ages with you and loves you wrinkled and fatter and wiser and sicker and they don’t care because they love you, unchanged. Just you. And that’s who he wants.
“Stay Bella,” he whisper to her the night she came to his door when she had released one part of her story and ran towards the other. He held her to his searing skin and her head rested in the space between his ribs. “Stay Bella. Stay how you are. That’s all I ask. Stay Bella.”
The thing is that he isn’t asking her to stay with him. It was never about him. He holds her tightly in his wide arms and his face is against her forehead and when his eyelashes brush against her skin they are dewy with tears and she knows that when she told him, “He’s gone, Jacob. I mean, we realized what it was. What we were. And it can’t be we anymore when I have this other person inside of me that if I go with him, it will shrivel and fade and disintegrate. So I had to. I had to release him. It’s for the best, for the both of us. And Jacob, I saw us. And the life that is waiting.” She might have be asked too much of him now that she looks back at that moment on his front porch the night after. The night of. In many ways, the first night of her life. Their life. Because suddenly her life and his seemed so intertwined they are the same, so what could she do? She sees no other option. And he wasn’t mad, but she still wonders if she was unfair to throw him into her life so suddenly and so intensely.
He doesn’t complain. Even tonight as the moon is full and bright as cream in the sky, as he rides up to her house in his puttering old truck, he smiles at her through his front windshield. She leans against the frame of her front door. She is wearing a dress that her mother loaned her. The night air is damp and certainly chilly so she holds her sweater closer to her body, and thinks of her mother against her skin. He rolls down his window and says to her across the width of the front lawn, “Hey there, hot stuff. How’d you get better looking since the last time I saw you?”
She rolls her eyes and he winks, laughing. The straight line of his white teeth against the sweet brown of his skin marks her inside, like a notch that marks another moment amongst the living.
Honestly, she’s not sure what they’re doing, going out at night to dances at the La Push Reservation, where the old pack stands around looking again like sweet, awkward seventeen year-olds. She’s not sure what they do every weekend when they go out to the ocean and smoke cigars with Paul, who has started to look fat and is balding around the edges of her scalp. They listen to Alan Toussant and Leon Russell, and Paul tells them, “I’m gonna learn how to play a piano. Damn. I’m gonna do that before I die.” And she thinks, there’s an end. And that’s what makes it worth something, she thinks. That’s what makes his warm hand against the small of her back wonderful and strange. That’s what makes the first time where she takes him to her bedroom and his hands are shaking and his broad shoulders are stooped and he’s just trembling when she presses her pale skin against his, her lips meeting his slow and hotly, that’s what makes it perfect in its clumsiness, in its sweat and pain and almost unbearable bliss that made all of that special. Because at any second it could be taken away completely.
She treads clumsily across the lawn, unsure in her high heels. He laughs, says, “You look like a stomping rhino in them heels.” And she laughs and pouts, and soon both of them are laughing, even when he asks her if she wants him to get the door and she shakes her head and says, “Oh, don’t be stupid. I can get my own door.” And he lets her shove it open before plopping down beside him.
The two of them are laughing, grinning stupidly at each other. Then suddenly their laughter fades, like a note still floating through the air. She looks at him and smiles and he smirks backs.
He reaches out, moves a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’ve cut it,” he murmurs. “You’ve cut your hair.” His voice is low and his eyes move across her face like he is tracing her out of the air.
He’s right, she did cut her hair. Earlier that day, she went down to the kitchen, before her father woke in the early mists of morning, and she got the haircutting sheers. In the beginning of the day’s light, she cut her hair to her earlobes, carelessly, a little haphazardly. It laid strangely awkwardly and lopsidedly against the back of her neck. She shook it once, twice, laughed. There was a small part of her, the tiniest, that tore, like old skin shedding away. Because, for once, she felt the change in her life, because suddenly she was sure that her body was growing, and she had made it different. She made her life different, even if it was just her hair, and it had happened right in front of her.
But now she just looks at him as the moonlight comes in chalky across his face and all she can say is, “Yeah. I cut it. But, it’ll grow back. Which is great, right?”
He nods his head, smiling. Reaching out, his fingers tangle through her hair and he pulls her closer to him. When their lips meet, she smiles against his mouth.
And the night falls on her, his hands around the middle of her waist, she thinks about the night and how it must always end things. She thinks of the endless nights that she might have awoken too, and then she savors this second where she knows the night will end. How she has not gone peacefully into the night. She has raged against it and seen it for what it is: only a time that will pass.
A time that will pass with his hand in her hair, his mouth against hers, the years passing them until the final night will come. And then she will meet it with peace, because she has had the whole extent of her life unrolled behind her to know that it was hers and no one else’s. All of what she did, it was only dictated by her own self.
But of course, she knows there will be no stories about this because in the end, it is a quiet life that she will lead. It holds the grandest and saddest kind of romance but they can’t write stories about wrinkles and nosebleeds and raising children. But no matter. Bella Swan will stay in her own life.
And her life, and his warm grasp, and the breeze that lights the air, all of that is enough. It’s enough.
Three | Community | Jeff Winger & Annie Edison
Okay. So it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but then again, nothing ever does. Especially not in Greendale.
And Jeff Winger doesn’t do screaming. Or blood. Or babies. But it’s happening now, here in the study room, and he doesn’t know really why they can’t go to the hospital, but it has something to do with Chang’s fear of white vans, spark plugs, and the fact that Shirley doesn’t think they’re gonna make it because, “this baby coming now, Jeff Winger, you sonuvabitch, GET. THIS. THING. OUT. OF. ME!”
The fact is that he’s terrified, and Shirley’s hand is tightly in his, perhaps cutting off vital artery flow. But it’s happening, this baby is coming, and Jeff Winger hasn’t realized in this moment what that means. Really means. Because right now, there is something inside of him that is rising like a panic attack, like the swell of a wave, about to spill out of him. He doesn’t even care about the sweat necklacing the collar of his shirt and that Shirley’s spit is on his face and that for some reason, he has become the one who is guiding this whole birth thing in general. Which, of course, makes no sense, because he is Jeff Winger, man of expensive suits, and flawless hair, and of perfect elocution skills. And he’s the one guiding this? Well, that’s not completely right. Because there is her hand on Shirley’s back, interlaced with his fingers, and her nails are etched in his skin. Not the way he thinks about sometimes, in the way that invades his dreams in sweat-filled nights, but in the way that says, Hold on, hold on, we’re holding this together.
It occurs to him that at some point it started being about them holding the bottom of this ship. Of course, it was always him and Britta keeping this thing afloat, really. She is here too, her hand on Shirley’s knee and telling her to breathe, just breathe!. They hold it together like a pair of camp counselors, making sure that no one gets pushed in the pool and that band-aids are applied appropriately. But somewhere along the way, there came this girl with her eyes and cardigan and her ideals and she’s just as pushy as he is, and just as mean, and she’s screaming in Shirley’s face right now, “PUUUUUUUUSHHH! Show a little chutzpah, Shirley!”
Suddenly, he realizes what it is, why they can’t be in the hospital and there’s blood and water and sweat covering every inch of him. It comes to him quickly in a second that feels like it’s coming in slow motion: the battery in his car is dead and everyone else parked too far away, and the baby is coming much too quickly. And it’s Greendale, and apparently the hospital is sick of fake ER calls from Leonard who keeps calling screaming into the receiver, “Send HELP. Zombies everywhere! Psssttt!” So, the hospital isn’t coming. And so, here comes the baby, much too quickly and a whole week early. And he can’t drive them from his spot in the teacher’s parking spot because Chang ran the battery down by listening to the entire Hall and Oates anthology one night when he kicked him out because he ate all the cheese and also turned his Snuggie into a loincloth. So, the hospital isn’t coming.
But maybe part of this, this part that feels like a big shift inside of the person of Jeff Winger, is because right before all of this, before he walked into the study room, Annie tells him, “City College wants me next semester, Jeff. I mean, what can I do? When they want me? I mean, does anyone want me? I have to go. It’s for the best.”
For once, he feels like a part of him is both breaking and mending, and he’s not sure what it is, because skin is tearing, both Shirley’s and his own. He can actually hear it and feel it. Her nails, against his own, the hot hot blood running down his hand and Britta gasping and saying breathily that it’ll, “Be okay, Shirley!” and Troy crying a little and saying, “Mom always said that it was like a hiccup! That’s a bad hiccup!” and Abed filming it and Annie yelling right in Shirley’s ear, “CHUTZPAH!!!!”
And he hates to be that guy, because it’s that guy who Jeff Winger hates with a passion that burns deep in his bones. That guy who cries at weddings because he’s genuinely moved by the flowers and dresses and love and crap, that guy who likes poetry and gets up early for sunrises and goes home early just to see their significant other, that guy. But right now, there’s a baby coming into the world, and in one way it’s kind of... gross because the baby is coming and it’s covered in this goo and blood and crap and it’s totally weird. But. But, he can’t help it, because for some reason he realizes that he hasn’t let many people in this little strange heart of his, and fewer that he has fallen in love with, and suddenly he is aware that there’s about to be another person coming quite forcefully and without warning into his heart. And that person might be pink and making a sound like a dying cat and too small to actually be a human being in his mind, but his heart feels like it’s breaking in half.
Somehow Chang has boiled some hot water and is bringing it in a large water cooler that has the words “GREENDALEGAY BASKETBALL TEAM” written across it, and someone has managed to scramble up some blankets from the Organized Nap 101 classroom and it’s a baby. Britta’s handing the baby to Shirley while receiving very systematic and medically-sound advice from Abed. Somewhere, he can hear the Dean crying. Weeping, actually. But the minutes now seem so tired and slow and like he’s underwater. He realizes somewhere along the line that he is coated in blood and he’s telling Abed that they need to call a doctor (“A real one, Abed. Do not get Professor Garrity no matter how excellent his doctor acting skills are!”)
He wants to wash his hands, he wants to wash his whole body, but something inside of him feels like quicksand. Like he’s stuck in one place and there’s nothing he can do about it. Britta’s trembling like a small poodle, and is simultaneously trying to act like she is in control and comfort Troy who weeping about, “The lies, Mother! So many lies!”
And it’s pretty chaotic, but something keeps him anchored there on the floor, kneeling beside Shirley, propping her back in a sitting position. He doesn’t know what it is for a few mere seconds until her realizes it’s her hand, still digging into his own.
He turns, looks at her. Her usually perfectly brushed hair is askew, scarcrowed in every which way. He mascara is running in small crooked rivers on her face, and he realizes that she’s crying, her tears falling into her smiling, laughing face.
And then something happens, something that stops his heart in his chest. A real sort of stop, a pause in his insides. Shirley turns, hands the baby to Annie, who hesitates before letting go of his hand and receiving the small bright pink… thing into her arms. She’s holding it, and she parts the fabric away from the face and he can see the baby, and the two of them – Annie with her opened breathless mouth and the suddenly quiet baby – makes something in his eyes swell and blur.
He tells himself, no no no nononono, but it’s too late, especially when she looks up at him and says, in this dreamy voice, “Here, you hold her.” And he can’t stop it, because the next thing he knows, there’s a baby in his arm, still wet and kind of slimy but quiet, so quiet and large-eyed.
He’s been told about these kinds of things. Like, in church when he was kid. He thinks maybe it was in church, but he wasn’t really listening ever. Maybe it wasn’t church, maybe it was literature in high school (which, he reasons, are pretty much the same thing). But he has heard of these moments. Epiphanies. The moment the light switch goes off in your head. He always thought maybe it was the moment your sanity goes, the moment when you really do want to end it all. But he was wrong, he knows that now. He now knows that it’s the moment that your life, as tangled and strange and complex as it might seem, is really quite simple. Everything is really easy and what you want and what you need seem to become one in a simple, easy moment.
Her voice is soft and surprised when she says, “You’re… crying. Jeff. Are you… okay?”
He looks up, sees her there with the same kind of blood over her face and fingers and there on the top of her hand is the same half-moon scars that are on his own hand. He realizes how good that is, the imprint the two of them have put on each other.
She cocks her head, but she’s smiling a little when she says, “Oh, Jeff. You’re crying.”
The baby reaches for his face is a jerky motion, and he laughs before looking at her. In this moment, her face tear-stained and her lips swollen and her hair a nest, and he thinks about how she looks the most beautiful he’s ever seen her right now and how, “You can’t, Annie. You just can’t.”
And really, she shouldn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s sure that he sounds like an idiot. But for some reason, she bites her lips. A lone tear goes down her cheek and she just nods, says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
In this moment, what can he do but kiss her? She tastes salty and metallic with a hint of the wax from her chapstick, but what can he do but kiss her? The group doesn’t even blink, because in this moment he realizes that a little part of Jeff Winger isn’t going anywhere. It’s stuck here, and when they part and she looks at him and laughs a small sweet laugh, the baby swats him in the face, and it all makes sense, somehow, all of them, Annie and baby, too.
Four | Lost | James “Sawyer” Ford & Juliet Burke
These are the papers they will one day set on fire.
The ones, golden in their death, that show a true life.
But, meanwhile, see the burning dew of that jungle
See: the golden curls of a doctor-woman, holding –
ever holding onto a past and an empty womb
and the hands stiff and born anew in layers of blood.
And see: him, calloused-hand, good child of a bitter blood
rolling, oil-slicked, from the cleanly cut center of plane-fire
frowning, watching everything ash into the ocean’s womb
See: his finger always trigger ready, forever wrestling with a life
of fearing that Daddy’s cold heart was rebirthed and holding
him captive, an animal that folds into the darkness of this jungle.
Both, hands ever ready for a fight, taking the jungle
In a vise-grip with all fingers dipped deep in the blood
of: a childhood, the death spread over their veins while holding
tightly to a present that crumbles like something once on fire.
both, trying desperately to keep fighting for some kind of life
that they do not know, for a life still warm in the womb
and not quite ready for birth, for a love still warm in the womb
that they reach for in the dark-haired twins of this jungle
(Like magnets, swerving to the same, then opposite sort of life)
before realizing deep inside aorta, vein, skin, the same blood
that pulls him to her, a surprise, a domestic sort of fire
crawling inside him and suddenly what’s holding
him isn’t a self-preserving core – it’s her hands holding
him that keep him stable while his assurance that a broken womb
can’t be her fault, and his words that she can’t put out every fire
is enough to keep her with him in a quiet life in the jungle,
under a thatched roof with the smooth drull of his warm blood
against hers in the milk nights of a sweet together-life.
But let them construct narratives of a ferocious life
one that shadows the sweet years of smooth-skinned holding.
Of mercenaries and woman-doctors, both coated in the blood
of those who were lost and reborn in the island’s womb.
Let them tell the tales of monsters, villains, of a jungle
That opened its mouth with the smoke of a great fire.
But to show their life is to start back to the womb
where a woman holding a man walks into the jungle
and into the blood of a new birth: their death, a new kind of fire.
Five | Fringe | Walter Bishop & Peter Bishop
He can see the seams, the ones that pull at him everyday. They are fraying, loose and being pulled in every direction. He feels the universe in his hands, he feels it under his feet. Crumbling, like sand drying.
Many years ago, the other boy, the one that really was his, asked, “What is death like, Dad? Does it feel at all?”
And, of course, at the time, he should have answered him directly, because the boy was ready to take death into his small, moist palms and claim it for his own. But that wouldn’t be case, he thought. It was a fever-induced thought, he deduced. He dismissed the question, waved his hand and said, “That is a feeling you needn’t worry about, son. It’s a feeling you should worry about when you’re much older than me. Much older.”
Much older, and here he was, a version of that boy. Much older. And he wants to tell him now, tell him what dying feels like. Because he’s faced that feeling, knows it well, knows it like the thrum of his own pulse inside his chest.
The feeling: like the washing of blood from a head. Like the floor under your feet swept away like dust. Like every part of you on fire, tearing asunder. Perhaps not death when it happens to you, but when the one you loves dies. He knows that feeling very well, knows what it’s like to stare into the fabric of your life and see it unraveling like a spool being rewound.
And even though it’s not his boy, not really, not by some sort of rule that he can figure out, he can’t release him. It’s not his right, he knows that. He knows all about rights, what you can change and what you can’t. Because he has broken all those rules and because of he has, the universe is transforming into a reflection of his very life. But still, he can’t release him, and he knows he’s selfish and ruining everything.
But still. He remembers teaching him algebra on the kitchen table. He remember walks through the parks, describing to a very small boy the fauna that – given an apocalyptic event – could be eaten. Remembers the swirl of his fingerprint, halving an apple with him for a lazy Saturday snack, a pet frog (the boy’s first experience with death, never knowing of his own), showing him the delicate wings of moth who had trapped itself in their porch light. He can remember it all, and even though it’s not really his boy, well.
But now that boy is older and not at all a boy. He can see the smooth angle of his jaw, the flashing eyes of his mother, the one that was never his wife. Still, he cannot unclench his fist and so he finds himself reeling him in, unconsciously and without real reason.
What does death feel like?
Oh, it feels. He feels every second he thinks he just might lose him, for real this time. There is no going back, not now.
He catches him, one night, asleep at the lab, head resting against the wall and for a second he realizes, this can’t last forever. None of it can. And it hurts, but there’s something inside of him that he’s given this boy and he doesn’t think he can get it back. If he goes to the other side, it will be gone and he will never have it back.
“Stay,” he whispers to the night air surrounding the two of them. He reaches, cautiously, and touches the crown of his head, which is shorn short. He has a birthmark on the side of his scalp, which the other did not have, and it takes him aback. He is selfish he knows, for he has had two, he knows that now, but still. It’s irreversible. There’s nothing he can do, because his whole heart, his whole being is in this person next to him. “Stay,” he whispers and it sounds like a prayer, to something, someone.
The boy opens his eyes, and he sees the man. They both stare at each other for a second. The world is splitting at its seams and the universe will soon implode but now it is only the two of them and the sleepy quiet around them.
The boy smiles that half-smile of his and says, “Of course. I’m home. Of course, I’m staying.”
He sees the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t matter now, because he can see clearly the memory of a young boy running past him down a sidewalk laughing, many years ago, all the while the smile on his face saying, Only so far, Dad. I’ll only be far enough away, but you’ll always be able to see me, always able to reach me.
Multi-Fandom [Harry Potter, Twilight, Community, Lost, Fringe], harry/hermione, jacob/bella, jeff/annie, sawyer/juliet, walter & peter
He sees the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t matter now, because he can see clearly the memory of a young boy running past him down a sidewalk laughing, many years ago, all the while the smile on his face saying, Only so far, Dad. I’ll only be far enough away, but you’ll always be able to see me, always able to reach me.
(Or 5 People That Decided To Stay and That Made All the Difference)
One | Harry Potter | Harry Potter & Hermione Granger
He finds that both of their sweaters are covered in red hair, his longer than hers. But the same shade, the same texture, tangling the same way over zippers, knotting over buttons.
They have met here, in the small of his living room, for “drinks, catching up, general mayham,” as she calls it when she calls in on the muggle telephone. In the background, he hears Ron belch loudly and they both laugh loudly until their laughter peters out in the end with a sigh.
The fact is that after the war this is what they are left with – the distance that separates them is strange and uninteresting and full of things that before never seemed large and important, but now they are. Like taxes, and politics, and red hair.
She pulls a rather long strand out of the knit of his sweater and says, with a sardonic smile, “So, you know of the Weasleys as well?” Holding the hair out far away from her, she releases it like it has rather offended her.
He watches her do this, and in the middle of him, he feels a sort of despair so deep it aches like a bruise. Not because she wipes her hands on the leg of her jeans and then frowns up at him before asking, “When did you say that Ginny is coming home, Harry?” but rather because he sees in her face something he can’t erase: this war he dragged her into, the war in every freckle in her face, in the tiny lines around her mouth when she frowns at him, the way her eyes squint at him as if she is studying him. The way she studies everything, it’s the way she has to be because she is a child of the Great War, the war over the boy who lived, the war over Harry James Potter, the war over him.
And the fact is, although everyone paid a price, Hermione Granger paid the highest, because this world was not her own. The thought that she could have walked away at any given moment, could have wiped her hands and gone back to a life of private muggle schools, a life where she had her own bedroom and a computer and normal boyfriend, a world that didn’t involve death or magic or Harry Potter, that thought keeps him awake at night more than any other.
He asks her once is she ever finds her parents, and she says, “Hm. What good would that do? Charms don’t work like that, Harry. I reversed their memory. You can’t be playing with people’s minds like that. They never had a daughter and that’s how it always will be.” She had been braiding her still unruly hair and she was doing it with such mathematical accuracy, he swore that she was doing another homework assignment, trying to figure out another Potions or Charms assignment. “I’m no one’s daughter now.” And when she had looked up at him after saying that, he saw that she was putting on her brave face, the one where she turned the edges of her mouth and lifted her left eyebrow like she was being sarcastic, like she was bulletproof. But right before that, right before the moment she put on that face, he saw in her eyes the moment of breaking. Hermione Granger, he knew, had this part inside of her that was wounded, that part of her he can never heal he is sure, and this fact, that fact that he had something to do with the breaking of the strong, the ineffable, the Hermione Granger who never once faltered when asked, “Will you go?” that Hermione Granger he has wounded and hurt and he can’t heal her – it was all in that one brief millisecond in her face, in her eyes.
And that millisecond, that keeps him awake more at night than the blood that he finds himself drowning in. Keeps him awake longer than: the look of Sirius’s face right before the veil closed behind him, the rumbly bass voice of Albus Dumbledore, the long sweet smile of Dobby. The fact that he broke something in the person who meant the most to him, O God.
He will sit up in the night, tip-toeing to the kitchen quietly so that Ginny cannot hear him and stare out the window into the moon and say to it, “I have made an orphan of you, Hermione Granger.” He had done the very thing that his greatest enemy did. He has made an orphan of the innocent.
But now she is standing there, in his house, and she is holding her coat that is covered in red hair. When she looks at him, she raises an eyebrow, and says, “Do I have something on my face?”
He shakes his head, stares at her long and hard, squinting his eyes. Right now, he wants to say something. Because after the war, this is the thing that keeps him awake: the living things that must carry on rather than the ones that died and now live in a different way than the living have to now. In ways, the dead are luckier. In many ways, he envies them.
And it’s like she can read him, can read every thought in his brain. She has that ability, has always had that ability, even since she strode into his train compartment with her school robes and frizzy head of hair and asked about a frog and repaired his glasses with a snotty swish of her wand. Already, even from that moment, he had that deep feeling inside of him that this girl, this awkward girl with large teeth, knew him. There was no hiding. There’s no hiding right now either, and she reads him and immediately she’s got that other face on, that Hermione face that means serious things, means determination, and no surrender.
“Harry,” she says, holding her head up a little higher. “Are you okay? Are you having those nightmares again?” She moves towards him effortlessly, like they are opposite ends of a magnet and she moves towards him almost instinctively, subconsciously. They have moved towards each other like this for much of their lives though, he thinks, and so he doesn’t even blink as her hands reach his forearms and hold him firmly in place as if she could ground him.
Ground him like she always has. When his world was moving too fast, when he felt like the ground was liquid and his feet would be enveloped in it all, she would reach out and hold him steady. And it hits him all of a sudden that this is it, that without her, all might have been lost. That the boy who lived wouldn’t have lived without the girl who lived. The bravest girl of the war. The girl who orphaned herself for the orphan Harry Potter.
Both of them, orphaned by and for the world they weren’t raised into.
It dawns on him there, as he sees her holding him with that look on her face that says, “I am here, Harry James Potter. I am here. Again,” that family is something you choose and this is his family. Right here, right now, holding her smooth dry palms against the pale skin of his arms, she didn’t have to choose him, that she could have walked away with clean hands at any given moment.
So he can’t help but ask lowly, so quiet that he’s not sure if he said it. Maybe he just thought it, he doesn’t know. So he says it again, “Hermione, why did you...”
“I heard you the first time,” she says snappily, as if she was thoroughly irritated. “I heard you. And I don’t want to hear that ever again, Harry Potter. Not ever. Because the point isn’t why or how but the point is that I came into this with my full mind. And I, I am smart. I am a smart girl, and I knew the second I saw the broken glasses on your face and the lightening scar on your forehead, I knew instantly that there was no turning back.” She shakes her head and part of him shakes too, and he feels it all down to his bones. But he doesn’t know if he can believe her, not really, because Harry Potter has been lied to for most his life and even though he knows that of anyone, he should trust her, there’s a part of him that’s guarded still.
And then she does something that shocks him, but at the same time is like someone has awoke him. She slaps him, right in the face, and when he looks at her in shock, she snaps, “I don’t care if that hurt. Because you, Harry Potter, you hurt me when you doubt.” She moves her hand from her chest to his, “Especially when you doubt this. Because sometimes a person just knows. And I knew every second of my life what I was doing. Even before you came into it. I knew that I would have to choose. I chose to go to Hogwarts. I chose to make friends with you Harry Potter. I chose to stand my stand in the war. And I choose...” she stops, looks him dead in the eye. Her throat is clenched and he knows that she holding his breath, that her lungs are tight in her chest.
For a second, he’s afraid she might finish with, I chose to get away from you, from the nightmares, from the unruly hair of you, Harry Potter.
But then she moves closer to him and her face is next to his and she says, “I chose to stay right here. Next to you. No matter what. I choose you Harry. I choose you.”
And suddenly her slightly parted lips and the bridge of freckles on her nose and her smell of soap and shampoo are all he can contain in this moment.
So he chooses to press him lips to hers, and for a second he forgets about the red hair tangling through his collar, and he forgets about the blood covering his hands from the war, and he forgets that after this moment they will laugh and joke about all of this, but for this second, it’s him and his best choice, his Hermione Granger, who chose him, who chose her.
Two | Twilight | Jacob Black & Isabella Swan
This is the part they will not write about. She knows this, and tells herself that they will write her a different story. She is brushing her hair in the early buttermilk morning light and she has slept the night before. She knows that people will not believe this. They will believe that she cannot die, that she wouldn’t pass on the opportunity to become more than flesh and blood. The world is obsessed with their own demise and she knows that they will not write the stories about how Isabella Swan passed up the chance to be forever beautiful, to be forever a child, to be forever.
But she did, but it will never be what people think it is. Because maybe she will age and maybe her hair will turn gray and course her skin will fall and her health will fail, but she’ll still have something inside her that burns bright and long and it can’t be taken from her even when her body is old and creaky.
She, Isabella Swan, didn’t always feel this way. She remembers cool nights and the press of his even colder skin and amber eyes and whispers of I love you I love you iloveyou.
And of course he meant that. It was never his fault, not for anything. She blames him for nothing, not for the heartbreak or the decisions she was forced to make in the ripeness of youth. The fact is, her mind was different back then. She accepts that she had to go through what she did because it changed her. Forever. It was the greatest thing to happen to her.
She regrets none of her choices. Because they are her choices.
There is one more though, one of those people who come into a life and rearrange things and you need them to, in the beginning, in order to show you back to how you are. Like they know you better than you possibly could ever, and their hand is one to hold at the disaster scene.
And he, he’s the one who did, who sparked the first fire and now it’s deep inside of her. Like wine in the core, burning slow and warm. His voice telling her, “You wouldn’t be Bella anymore. You wouldn’t exist.” She realizes that he’s right when she hears him, because she realizes that in a way she would have to die to become this other thing. She doesn’t know what she would become. It would have been something in a different world. She imagines that things would be split inside her like the space where universes part, like where threads in a seam finally unravel.
It was him though that kept her from unraveling. His golden thick lips against hers, she saw her life, her real life rolling out in front of her like a road unfurling on the horizon. Her hands, strong from work, holding his for years and years and the middle of her aching from the black-haired children running through all of her veins. But the fact is that this is not the choice that she suspects romantics will want to hear: that the real world, the one that hurts and hates and loves, the one that doesn’t show any pity for age and where you are as fragile as a hangnail, anything can take you out, this would be the life she would choose.
But he teaches her something, and this, when she learns it, she knows she can never walk away from it. He teaches her that the greatest romance is the one where you stay where you are. Right there. The world will revolve around the sun and you will go with it and it’s alright, alright to go for the ride. And the greatest romance will be the one who stands with you and lets the world age you, and ages with you and loves you wrinkled and fatter and wiser and sicker and they don’t care because they love you, unchanged. Just you. And that’s who he wants.
“Stay Bella,” he whisper to her the night she came to his door when she had released one part of her story and ran towards the other. He held her to his searing skin and her head rested in the space between his ribs. “Stay Bella. Stay how you are. That’s all I ask. Stay Bella.”
The thing is that he isn’t asking her to stay with him. It was never about him. He holds her tightly in his wide arms and his face is against her forehead and when his eyelashes brush against her skin they are dewy with tears and she knows that when she told him, “He’s gone, Jacob. I mean, we realized what it was. What we were. And it can’t be we anymore when I have this other person inside of me that if I go with him, it will shrivel and fade and disintegrate. So I had to. I had to release him. It’s for the best, for the both of us. And Jacob, I saw us. And the life that is waiting.” She might have be asked too much of him now that she looks back at that moment on his front porch the night after. The night of. In many ways, the first night of her life. Their life. Because suddenly her life and his seemed so intertwined they are the same, so what could she do? She sees no other option. And he wasn’t mad, but she still wonders if she was unfair to throw him into her life so suddenly and so intensely.
He doesn’t complain. Even tonight as the moon is full and bright as cream in the sky, as he rides up to her house in his puttering old truck, he smiles at her through his front windshield. She leans against the frame of her front door. She is wearing a dress that her mother loaned her. The night air is damp and certainly chilly so she holds her sweater closer to her body, and thinks of her mother against her skin. He rolls down his window and says to her across the width of the front lawn, “Hey there, hot stuff. How’d you get better looking since the last time I saw you?”
She rolls her eyes and he winks, laughing. The straight line of his white teeth against the sweet brown of his skin marks her inside, like a notch that marks another moment amongst the living.
Honestly, she’s not sure what they’re doing, going out at night to dances at the La Push Reservation, where the old pack stands around looking again like sweet, awkward seventeen year-olds. She’s not sure what they do every weekend when they go out to the ocean and smoke cigars with Paul, who has started to look fat and is balding around the edges of her scalp. They listen to Alan Toussant and Leon Russell, and Paul tells them, “I’m gonna learn how to play a piano. Damn. I’m gonna do that before I die.” And she thinks, there’s an end. And that’s what makes it worth something, she thinks. That’s what makes his warm hand against the small of her back wonderful and strange. That’s what makes the first time where she takes him to her bedroom and his hands are shaking and his broad shoulders are stooped and he’s just trembling when she presses her pale skin against his, her lips meeting his slow and hotly, that’s what makes it perfect in its clumsiness, in its sweat and pain and almost unbearable bliss that made all of that special. Because at any second it could be taken away completely.
She treads clumsily across the lawn, unsure in her high heels. He laughs, says, “You look like a stomping rhino in them heels.” And she laughs and pouts, and soon both of them are laughing, even when he asks her if she wants him to get the door and she shakes her head and says, “Oh, don’t be stupid. I can get my own door.” And he lets her shove it open before plopping down beside him.
The two of them are laughing, grinning stupidly at each other. Then suddenly their laughter fades, like a note still floating through the air. She looks at him and smiles and he smirks backs.
He reaches out, moves a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’ve cut it,” he murmurs. “You’ve cut your hair.” His voice is low and his eyes move across her face like he is tracing her out of the air.
He’s right, she did cut her hair. Earlier that day, she went down to the kitchen, before her father woke in the early mists of morning, and she got the haircutting sheers. In the beginning of the day’s light, she cut her hair to her earlobes, carelessly, a little haphazardly. It laid strangely awkwardly and lopsidedly against the back of her neck. She shook it once, twice, laughed. There was a small part of her, the tiniest, that tore, like old skin shedding away. Because, for once, she felt the change in her life, because suddenly she was sure that her body was growing, and she had made it different. She made her life different, even if it was just her hair, and it had happened right in front of her.
But now she just looks at him as the moonlight comes in chalky across his face and all she can say is, “Yeah. I cut it. But, it’ll grow back. Which is great, right?”
He nods his head, smiling. Reaching out, his fingers tangle through her hair and he pulls her closer to him. When their lips meet, she smiles against his mouth.
And the night falls on her, his hands around the middle of her waist, she thinks about the night and how it must always end things. She thinks of the endless nights that she might have awoken too, and then she savors this second where she knows the night will end. How she has not gone peacefully into the night. She has raged against it and seen it for what it is: only a time that will pass.
A time that will pass with his hand in her hair, his mouth against hers, the years passing them until the final night will come. And then she will meet it with peace, because she has had the whole extent of her life unrolled behind her to know that it was hers and no one else’s. All of what she did, it was only dictated by her own self.
But of course, she knows there will be no stories about this because in the end, it is a quiet life that she will lead. It holds the grandest and saddest kind of romance but they can’t write stories about wrinkles and nosebleeds and raising children. But no matter. Bella Swan will stay in her own life.
And her life, and his warm grasp, and the breeze that lights the air, all of that is enough. It’s enough.
Three | Community | Jeff Winger & Annie Edison
Okay. So it wasn’t supposed to happen like this, but then again, nothing ever does. Especially not in Greendale.
And Jeff Winger doesn’t do screaming. Or blood. Or babies. But it’s happening now, here in the study room, and he doesn’t know really why they can’t go to the hospital, but it has something to do with Chang’s fear of white vans, spark plugs, and the fact that Shirley doesn’t think they’re gonna make it because, “this baby coming now, Jeff Winger, you sonuvabitch, GET. THIS. THING. OUT. OF. ME!”
The fact is that he’s terrified, and Shirley’s hand is tightly in his, perhaps cutting off vital artery flow. But it’s happening, this baby is coming, and Jeff Winger hasn’t realized in this moment what that means. Really means. Because right now, there is something inside of him that is rising like a panic attack, like the swell of a wave, about to spill out of him. He doesn’t even care about the sweat necklacing the collar of his shirt and that Shirley’s spit is on his face and that for some reason, he has become the one who is guiding this whole birth thing in general. Which, of course, makes no sense, because he is Jeff Winger, man of expensive suits, and flawless hair, and of perfect elocution skills. And he’s the one guiding this? Well, that’s not completely right. Because there is her hand on Shirley’s back, interlaced with his fingers, and her nails are etched in his skin. Not the way he thinks about sometimes, in the way that invades his dreams in sweat-filled nights, but in the way that says, Hold on, hold on, we’re holding this together.
It occurs to him that at some point it started being about them holding the bottom of this ship. Of course, it was always him and Britta keeping this thing afloat, really. She is here too, her hand on Shirley’s knee and telling her to breathe, just breathe!. They hold it together like a pair of camp counselors, making sure that no one gets pushed in the pool and that band-aids are applied appropriately. But somewhere along the way, there came this girl with her eyes and cardigan and her ideals and she’s just as pushy as he is, and just as mean, and she’s screaming in Shirley’s face right now, “PUUUUUUUUSHHH! Show a little chutzpah, Shirley!”
Suddenly, he realizes what it is, why they can’t be in the hospital and there’s blood and water and sweat covering every inch of him. It comes to him quickly in a second that feels like it’s coming in slow motion: the battery in his car is dead and everyone else parked too far away, and the baby is coming much too quickly. And it’s Greendale, and apparently the hospital is sick of fake ER calls from Leonard who keeps calling screaming into the receiver, “Send HELP. Zombies everywhere! Psssttt!” So, the hospital isn’t coming. And so, here comes the baby, much too quickly and a whole week early. And he can’t drive them from his spot in the teacher’s parking spot because Chang ran the battery down by listening to the entire Hall and Oates anthology one night when he kicked him out because he ate all the cheese and also turned his Snuggie into a loincloth. So, the hospital isn’t coming.
But maybe part of this, this part that feels like a big shift inside of the person of Jeff Winger, is because right before all of this, before he walked into the study room, Annie tells him, “City College wants me next semester, Jeff. I mean, what can I do? When they want me? I mean, does anyone want me? I have to go. It’s for the best.”
For once, he feels like a part of him is both breaking and mending, and he’s not sure what it is, because skin is tearing, both Shirley’s and his own. He can actually hear it and feel it. Her nails, against his own, the hot hot blood running down his hand and Britta gasping and saying breathily that it’ll, “Be okay, Shirley!” and Troy crying a little and saying, “Mom always said that it was like a hiccup! That’s a bad hiccup!” and Abed filming it and Annie yelling right in Shirley’s ear, “CHUTZPAH!!!!”
And he hates to be that guy, because it’s that guy who Jeff Winger hates with a passion that burns deep in his bones. That guy who cries at weddings because he’s genuinely moved by the flowers and dresses and love and crap, that guy who likes poetry and gets up early for sunrises and goes home early just to see their significant other, that guy. But right now, there’s a baby coming into the world, and in one way it’s kind of... gross because the baby is coming and it’s covered in this goo and blood and crap and it’s totally weird. But. But, he can’t help it, because for some reason he realizes that he hasn’t let many people in this little strange heart of his, and fewer that he has fallen in love with, and suddenly he is aware that there’s about to be another person coming quite forcefully and without warning into his heart. And that person might be pink and making a sound like a dying cat and too small to actually be a human being in his mind, but his heart feels like it’s breaking in half.
Somehow Chang has boiled some hot water and is bringing it in a large water cooler that has the words “GREENDALE
He wants to wash his hands, he wants to wash his whole body, but something inside of him feels like quicksand. Like he’s stuck in one place and there’s nothing he can do about it. Britta’s trembling like a small poodle, and is simultaneously trying to act like she is in control and comfort Troy who weeping about, “The lies, Mother! So many lies!”
And it’s pretty chaotic, but something keeps him anchored there on the floor, kneeling beside Shirley, propping her back in a sitting position. He doesn’t know what it is for a few mere seconds until her realizes it’s her hand, still digging into his own.
He turns, looks at her. Her usually perfectly brushed hair is askew, scarcrowed in every which way. He mascara is running in small crooked rivers on her face, and he realizes that she’s crying, her tears falling into her smiling, laughing face.
And then something happens, something that stops his heart in his chest. A real sort of stop, a pause in his insides. Shirley turns, hands the baby to Annie, who hesitates before letting go of his hand and receiving the small bright pink… thing into her arms. She’s holding it, and she parts the fabric away from the face and he can see the baby, and the two of them – Annie with her opened breathless mouth and the suddenly quiet baby – makes something in his eyes swell and blur.
He tells himself, no no no nononono, but it’s too late, especially when she looks up at him and says, in this dreamy voice, “Here, you hold her.” And he can’t stop it, because the next thing he knows, there’s a baby in his arm, still wet and kind of slimy but quiet, so quiet and large-eyed.
He’s been told about these kinds of things. Like, in church when he was kid. He thinks maybe it was in church, but he wasn’t really listening ever. Maybe it wasn’t church, maybe it was literature in high school (which, he reasons, are pretty much the same thing). But he has heard of these moments. Epiphanies. The moment the light switch goes off in your head. He always thought maybe it was the moment your sanity goes, the moment when you really do want to end it all. But he was wrong, he knows that now. He now knows that it’s the moment that your life, as tangled and strange and complex as it might seem, is really quite simple. Everything is really easy and what you want and what you need seem to become one in a simple, easy moment.
Her voice is soft and surprised when she says, “You’re… crying. Jeff. Are you… okay?”
He looks up, sees her there with the same kind of blood over her face and fingers and there on the top of her hand is the same half-moon scars that are on his own hand. He realizes how good that is, the imprint the two of them have put on each other.
She cocks her head, but she’s smiling a little when she says, “Oh, Jeff. You’re crying.”
The baby reaches for his face is a jerky motion, and he laughs before looking at her. In this moment, her face tear-stained and her lips swollen and her hair a nest, and he thinks about how she looks the most beautiful he’s ever seen her right now and how, “You can’t, Annie. You just can’t.”
And really, she shouldn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s sure that he sounds like an idiot. But for some reason, she bites her lips. A lone tear goes down her cheek and she just nods, says, “I’m not going anywhere.”
In this moment, what can he do but kiss her? She tastes salty and metallic with a hint of the wax from her chapstick, but what can he do but kiss her? The group doesn’t even blink, because in this moment he realizes that a little part of Jeff Winger isn’t going anywhere. It’s stuck here, and when they part and she looks at him and laughs a small sweet laugh, the baby swats him in the face, and it all makes sense, somehow, all of them, Annie and baby, too.
Four | Lost | James “Sawyer” Ford & Juliet Burke
These are the papers they will one day set on fire.
The ones, golden in their death, that show a true life.
But, meanwhile, see the burning dew of that jungle
See: the golden curls of a doctor-woman, holding –
ever holding onto a past and an empty womb
and the hands stiff and born anew in layers of blood.
And see: him, calloused-hand, good child of a bitter blood
rolling, oil-slicked, from the cleanly cut center of plane-fire
frowning, watching everything ash into the ocean’s womb
See: his finger always trigger ready, forever wrestling with a life
of fearing that Daddy’s cold heart was rebirthed and holding
him captive, an animal that folds into the darkness of this jungle.
Both, hands ever ready for a fight, taking the jungle
In a vise-grip with all fingers dipped deep in the blood
of: a childhood, the death spread over their veins while holding
tightly to a present that crumbles like something once on fire.
both, trying desperately to keep fighting for some kind of life
that they do not know, for a life still warm in the womb
and not quite ready for birth, for a love still warm in the womb
that they reach for in the dark-haired twins of this jungle
(Like magnets, swerving to the same, then opposite sort of life)
before realizing deep inside aorta, vein, skin, the same blood
that pulls him to her, a surprise, a domestic sort of fire
crawling inside him and suddenly what’s holding
him isn’t a self-preserving core – it’s her hands holding
him that keep him stable while his assurance that a broken womb
can’t be her fault, and his words that she can’t put out every fire
is enough to keep her with him in a quiet life in the jungle,
under a thatched roof with the smooth drull of his warm blood
against hers in the milk nights of a sweet together-life.
But let them construct narratives of a ferocious life
one that shadows the sweet years of smooth-skinned holding.
Of mercenaries and woman-doctors, both coated in the blood
of those who were lost and reborn in the island’s womb.
Let them tell the tales of monsters, villains, of a jungle
That opened its mouth with the smoke of a great fire.
But to show their life is to start back to the womb
where a woman holding a man walks into the jungle
and into the blood of a new birth: their death, a new kind of fire.
Five | Fringe | Walter Bishop & Peter Bishop
He can see the seams, the ones that pull at him everyday. They are fraying, loose and being pulled in every direction. He feels the universe in his hands, he feels it under his feet. Crumbling, like sand drying.
Many years ago, the other boy, the one that really was his, asked, “What is death like, Dad? Does it feel at all?”
And, of course, at the time, he should have answered him directly, because the boy was ready to take death into his small, moist palms and claim it for his own. But that wouldn’t be case, he thought. It was a fever-induced thought, he deduced. He dismissed the question, waved his hand and said, “That is a feeling you needn’t worry about, son. It’s a feeling you should worry about when you’re much older than me. Much older.”
Much older, and here he was, a version of that boy. Much older. And he wants to tell him now, tell him what dying feels like. Because he’s faced that feeling, knows it well, knows it like the thrum of his own pulse inside his chest.
The feeling: like the washing of blood from a head. Like the floor under your feet swept away like dust. Like every part of you on fire, tearing asunder. Perhaps not death when it happens to you, but when the one you loves dies. He knows that feeling very well, knows what it’s like to stare into the fabric of your life and see it unraveling like a spool being rewound.
And even though it’s not his boy, not really, not by some sort of rule that he can figure out, he can’t release him. It’s not his right, he knows that. He knows all about rights, what you can change and what you can’t. Because he has broken all those rules and because of he has, the universe is transforming into a reflection of his very life. But still, he can’t release him, and he knows he’s selfish and ruining everything.
But still. He remembers teaching him algebra on the kitchen table. He remember walks through the parks, describing to a very small boy the fauna that – given an apocalyptic event – could be eaten. Remembers the swirl of his fingerprint, halving an apple with him for a lazy Saturday snack, a pet frog (the boy’s first experience with death, never knowing of his own), showing him the delicate wings of moth who had trapped itself in their porch light. He can remember it all, and even though it’s not really his boy, well.
But now that boy is older and not at all a boy. He can see the smooth angle of his jaw, the flashing eyes of his mother, the one that was never his wife. Still, he cannot unclench his fist and so he finds himself reeling him in, unconsciously and without real reason.
What does death feel like?
Oh, it feels. He feels every second he thinks he just might lose him, for real this time. There is no going back, not now.
He catches him, one night, asleep at the lab, head resting against the wall and for a second he realizes, this can’t last forever. None of it can. And it hurts, but there’s something inside of him that he’s given this boy and he doesn’t think he can get it back. If he goes to the other side, it will be gone and he will never have it back.
“Stay,” he whispers to the night air surrounding the two of them. He reaches, cautiously, and touches the crown of his head, which is shorn short. He has a birthmark on the side of his scalp, which the other did not have, and it takes him aback. He is selfish he knows, for he has had two, he knows that now, but still. It’s irreversible. There’s nothing he can do, because his whole heart, his whole being is in this person next to him. “Stay,” he whispers and it sounds like a prayer, to something, someone.
The boy opens his eyes, and he sees the man. They both stare at each other for a second. The world is splitting at its seams and the universe will soon implode but now it is only the two of them and the sleepy quiet around them.
The boy smiles that half-smile of his and says, “Of course. I’m home. Of course, I’m staying.”
He sees the beginning of the end, but it doesn’t matter now, because he can see clearly the memory of a young boy running past him down a sidewalk laughing, many years ago, all the while the smile on his face saying, Only so far, Dad. I’ll only be far enough away, but you’ll always be able to see me, always able to reach me.