Let's check in with Cloe in modern-day Athens - and also with one of her closest friends :) (the gif posted with this scene is of him!)
P.S. I hope you'll tune into the soundtrack, too! An instrumental of the lovely "How to Save a Life" - the title is totally perfect for this scene, as you will see... ;)
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Scene 9: Life and Death
A.D. 2015
Okay, so, that had been by far the least dignified night of her life.
Cloe cringed at the thought of what she must've looked like, sounded like, acted like while she'd been hammered. She just prayed that none of it was caught on camera. Waking up this morning in an unfamiliar hotel room, her first thought had been that she'd been checked into a temporary inn where the afterlife-managers retained dead souls who were too embarrassing to let into heaven. That notion had been her first clue that she was too hungover to function.
Well, that and the fact that, when Miss Primor had approached, Cloe had mistaken her silvery-haired head for a disco ball bizarrely filled with cooing pigeons.
She'd sworn in that moment that she was never doing shots again.
Charliese had been kind enough to walk Cloe back to her hostel, which would've been a perfect opportunity to get to know the mysterious lady a little better - as Cloe had been hoping to do for a while - if only her brain hadn't been in too much pain to carry on a conversation. Great. Once she'd gotten back to the Scholar & Journeyer's Inn and taken a cold shower, she'd been forced to face the day and get some work done.
She felt quite a lot better after a full day of research. A good thing, as she had a Skype call with her closest friend from college scheduled for this evening. So she was glad to be in a state to carry on a coherent conversation, at this point; it was always so nice chatting with Tom, and she couldn't wait to tell him all about her travel-writing escapades and everything.
But then again... then again, maybe she could wait, she thought to herself as she greeted his smiling face through the computer screen.
When she was trying to postpone thinking about the possibility that she could write the future - which she had been, for the past few days, because the mere thought of it scared the shit out of her - Tom's face was the one thing that she could not afford to see.
He was dying, damn it. He had been dying since soon after the day he was born. Such was the nature of his illness. Cloe knew that, with each passing day, the threat of death became more serious. His was the saddest, cruelest fate to ever fall upon a soul so pure, it'd always seemed to her, and she had always wished with all her heart that she could change it, that she could do something, anything, about it - and now...
She was barely brave enough to meet his gaze. Even across the world and in the form of little pixels on her monitor, the precious light inside his eyes shone clear and true, a heartbreakingly hopeful hue. At all seasons of Tom's life - though he lived ever in the shade of its winter - his eyes were the color of springtime, bright robin's egg blue.
Now what was she supposed to do? What the hell was she supposed to freaking do?? The answer should've been clear. She wished it were. But somehow it was not, to her. Whenever the thought or the sight of his smile filled her with the urge to put pen to paper, to decree that Ishmael Thomas Colbeck would never die, ever - or at least not till his death seemed fair to her - something would stay her hand. Surely part of it was Cloe's fear and hesitance at the notion of wielding such immense, unfathomable power. But was that all? What else was there...?
"Hey - you okay?" Tom's voice interrupted her intense session of silent inner turmoil. They had been talking about how the best pita in Greece compared to the best pizza in Italy, where his own travel-writing job had taken him last summer, when Cloe must have just zoned out all of a sudden.
She blinked, cleared her throat. "Yeah... yeah, sorry about that. Still recovering from that hangover I mentioned. Yay for shots."
He chuckled. "No worries. So yeah, the crust on this pie was just..."
"Tom?" Cloe heard herself blurt out of the blue. Uh oh. This was not going to end well. The words spilled out before she could contain them. "If - if I could save your life, would you want me to?"
He stared at her as if a flying pig had sprouted from her forehead.
She shifted in her seat. "I mean..." Shit, how should she put this?
Tom took it upon himself to break the painful pause that followed. "You mean, like, if you went into medicine instead of law and then-"
"No, I mean... like, philosophically speaking," she cut in, figuring that she could get away with this since they had both studied philosophy at Veriton. "We both took courses on free will and stuff, right? On the nature of life and death. All those fun topics in our favorite subject."
His light blue eyes narrowed quizzically. "Yeah..."
"So... so, just say I somehow had some sort of crazy power. Like, you know how philosophers love to pose ridiculous hypothetical scenarios to present a problem or to prove a point, or whatever. For argument's sake."
"But why would we want to... argue about this..."
"Oh, no, not for actual argument or anything, just - um..." Cloe sighed and struggled to stop figuratively shoving her foot in her stupid mouth. She was a terrible person. Seriously. She had just tried to philosophize with her best friend about the fragile, ill-fated thread of his life. There was no right way to frame this issue without confessing to him that the ridiculous scenario actually wasn't hypothetical at all.
But she was definitely not prepared to share this great, big secret with him. Not yet. Before admitting it to anyone other than her mother, who was pretty much an extension of herself anyway, Cloe knew that she needed to confront the truth and come to terms with it, in her own overwhelmed head.
She was all set to try to shift the conversation back to the innocent subject of pita versus pizza, as smoothly as she could possibly manage, when Tom spoke up again instead.
"If you're... asking whether I would want to live a longer life, when clearly nature intends otherwise," he spoke plainly, "then the answer is no. Whatever 'nature' even is - not something we ever learned in our philosophy classes - I would want it to run its course. Not to be altered, thwarted, by some other... hypothetical crazy force."
At that, it took every ounce of Cloe's strength to keep herself from breaking down and bawling like a baby. Great! So hypothetical crazy-superpowered person is supposed to just sit back and watch her dear friend die someday, probably tragically soon, knowing that she had the ability to stop it and... didn't. Which would feel a hell of a lot like killing him.
"So... want to discuss that?" Tom asked. "Philosophically speaking?"
Cloe shook her head, a dismissive shake full of self-hatred. "No, never mind - so sorry for bringing it up. I guess this hangover unleashed my inner Socrates, who happens to be an insensitive skunkbutt."
Skunkbutt? Like, what? This day was just a festival of fuck-ups...
Of course, Tom simply laughed one of his lovable laughs, as if the fucked up term was cute or funny or something, and carried on with the rest of the Skype conversation as if nothing was wrong. When really everything was wrong. And Cloe couldn't even talk to him about it. Not till she faced this freakish truth, this actual superpower, and figured out what to do. She supposed that it would have to be sometime soon.
But how could she ever begin to face, let alone to embrace, this ridiculous power? Even the thought of making one choice about one person's life had practically incapacitated her.
Lying wide awake in bed that night, Cloe found herself wishing for a moment that she had no control over anything. That she could spend her entire life just... falling. Surrendering herself completely, losing hold of this incomprehensible control over destiny, letting go of everything and just falling, falling into... into a bay of deep, dark blue.
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Any thoughts? Feels? :'(
P.S. I hope you picked up on the parallel here! Between Tom and the boy whose life Clotho saved in the ancient times (Scene 7.6)... In addition to similarities in characters and storylines, the color of the eyes is usually a clue, hehe ;)
Next scene, we'll catch up with Atropos in B.C....
** And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :) **