Everything is peaceful here. The woods are silent, the sky is clear, the moon is bright. There's not a soul to stir here save for ours. We are alone here, united here, in this remnant of the violent past which so starkly contrasts the tranquility that blankets it now.
"Let's go inside."
I lead us around to the side of the fortress, to a fissure in one of the standing walls. I make a grand gesture and bow toward the crack.
"Your grand entrance, Your Majesty."
He bares his teeth in a grimace. "I don't know about that one, Leila."
"What?" I ask, going to the crack and sticking my foot through. "We can fit. No problem."
"Can we?"
With a sucked in stomach and strategically angled shoulders, I squeeze my way into the darkness of the decrepit fortress. My eyes take but a second to adjust. The place is bare except for the floor sprinkled with dirt, dead leaves, and crawling vines. Something moves in the shadowy corner. A possum hobbles around, sniffing the time-blackened stones.
"Leila," Zakai's annoyed tone carries through the dark. "Help."
I look back to see him hanging sideways through the wall, the jagged stones of the fissure jutting into his naval like the teeth of a monster making him its victim.
"Told you so," he mumbles as I come to his aid. I ignore his gloating, but only because he gets to at the expense of his own misfortune.
"Here. Give me this. And this." I take his arms and brace them on each of my shoulders. "Deep breath in."
As soon as he inhales, I seize him around the chest and give a great heave, one foot braced and pushing against the wall. When the wall releases him, we both go tumbling to the dusty ground.
"Ow, shit," he groans sharply.
"Ow? You're saying ow?" I push him off of me where he'd landed with his chest in my face, effectively rolling him onto his back like a sack of sand.
We get up slowly, pebbles and dirt falling off of us as we do. We dust ourselves off, Zakai brushing off my back and I his. After we're clean, I lead him further into the dark, around a leaning pillar and through a sagging archway, to a sloping pile of crushed stones lit by the moonlight shining through the hole in the floor above it. We climb up the pile, take hold of the floor above, and pull ourselves up to the second story where one of the walls are completely gone, giving an open view of the landscape around us.
"Pretty neat, huh?" I like this place. I like that it's hidden and lonely, that I'm the only one that's laid any claim on it, no matter how soft a claim it is. It reminds me of somewhere else.
"It's otherworldly," he says absently, gazing out over the autumnal treetops that go on until a distant hill breaks into the horizon to block what's behind it from view.
I look out over it as well, content in every way I could be. Despite the recent stress, there are so many good things. I have Lattie and Nanni, a family. I have Heisenbühl, a place where I belong despite not. I have my best friend back after five years of living without him after spending every inseparable day and night with him.
I have my best friend back. I have Zakai. I have his scent and his presence and his beautifully, strangely familiar appearance. I have his voice and his signature smile and his irreplaceably cherished memories.
What are the fucking chances of that? his grateful, disbelieving question floats through my head.
I reach for his hand. It bumps into mine halfway between us: he was reaching for me, too.
"Do you remember the day I left?"
"I don't want to." I really, truly don't want to. Of all of the pain I've ever felt, Zakai's departure sits alone at the top. I broke that day, and I carried my pieces around with me until I arrived in Heisenbühl to make the first attempt at gluing them back together.
"My chest was raw," Zakai says. "They thought I was seasick. I didn't even notice the sea."
"I stayed in the woods for four days before they found me," I say. "They started another round of tests when they brought me back."
Zakai pulls me into him, into a hug I've never felt before because this body is different than the one I knew and wrestled and slept beside. I go willingly. It feels natural, just like laying my head on his solid, smooth chest does, in the defined groove of his sternum. My silent tears soak into his heather gray shirt. His soak into my auburn dyed hair.
"Never again," I murmur into his chest.
His embrace is firm and all encompassing. His arms are rigid and protective. I move back because that's not something I want. I don't want comfort or protection or anything else I haven't had. The equilibrium is balanced in its absence and I have no wish to upset it.
Our embrace dissolves, but his hands stay holding my elbows. I look into his teary green eyes. They're red rimmed, dilated, and... coming closer. He's coming closer, tilting his head, leaning down...
"Hey, hey, hey!" My hands shoot out to meet his torso, elbows locking to banish him to arm's length.
"Fuck, I'm so sorry, Leila." He backs away immediately, surrendering his hands from any contact. "I—I don't know what that was. I don't know what I'm doing anymore."
"You're just—It's just the shock, right?" Immediately I offer a reason, an explanation for the unexplainable because I can't live with any other. My ears and face are on fire and my own heartbeat deafens me.
He shakes his head as though to gain his bearings. The disbelief of what he's just done is written all over his colorless face, but something else is present there too, in his wide, alerted eyes.
Fear.
"Ever since we met up on that bridge, I've felt... weird, and unlike myself. There's so many weird feelings and thoughts and I don't know what to do with them. I think I'm going crazy."
I've felt weird as well. But whereas I've been floating in a dreamlike state, untrusting of reality, Zakai has apparently been struggling in a different way in addition to that. Maybe that's the one advantage the hectic events of late have given me: a distraction from any charged, confused thoughts that come with the shock of our reunion.
"Five years is a long time," I say, searching his face from where he stands at a distance now, surveying over all of the ways he's changed in that time, "Most friends don't go that long without seeing each other. And most don't again if they do. It's a shock to the system and now there's all of these powerful emotions that are being tangled and misinterpreted. That's all it is. We just have to get used to each other again. We have to adjust to the fact that each of us exist again outside of our own memories."
He nods his head, disoriented but determined. "That makes sense. That's the only thing that makes sense."
"Right," I agree, flexing my jittery hands at my sides, "So we're fine."
"We're fine," Zakai repeats, a hopeful chant. "We're fine."
"We should probably be getting back now. I should check on the McNamaras."
"Speaking of getting back, I need to check in with my pack. The others who are out roaming. Every two weeks we have to make sure nobody has died or anything."
This sends a jolt though every nerve I possess. "You're leaving?"
"No! I mean yes, but no! I'm coming back." His laugh is laced with pain. "God, who do you think I am? What promise did we just make? No more luck. I'm not leaving. We're never doing that shit again."
I laugh, but there's no pain in mine. It's disgustingly high pitched and joyous, hysterical with relief. It infects him, too, and he starts laughing with me. In the process, we banish the distance we'd so frantically created moments ago.
"Fine." I nudge him with my fist as our laughter dies down. He nudges back, a beaming smile. "Go on, then."
"Not to sound weird again, but I don't think I can." He's holding my wrist absentmindedly: the security system we'd instinctually, unspokenly developed when we were ten. One of us would hold the other's wrist as a comfort object, an insurance of allegiance. Us against them. Us against the world.
I smile softly at him, a blossom of warmth in my chest. "You still don't trust reality," I observe through a whisper.
There's a fear in him, a hesitation that I can only assume is that of him leaving and me not being here upon his return. Of me being a hallucination, a dream so fickle to vanishing.
Or maybe those are just my fears, not his.
He holds my wrist tighter.
"Your memory started to feel like my imagination," he says, and I know exactly what he means.
I take hold of his free wrist, doubling up on our security system.
"Meet me at these ruins when you come back. Let's say... at the height of the moon."
-
I formally apologize to anyone who suffered second-hand embarrassment from that rejected kiss. It cringed me too.
FYI, the update schedule is changing since you all know I can't keep up with it 🙈. There will always be at least one chapter posted a week. Two chapters a week are possible but I can only commit to one with any ounce of confidence because school and work are keeping me busy.
Thank you so very much for reading!
🍂