Your Soul is My Country Now

"Nothing changes you…I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character." - Michael Ondaatje

She probably should've thought things through before she hopped into a plane to chase after John Seed. But she had been too fucking angry to think straight, so furious, so...wrathful.

...Ah.

That bastard, she thinks as they parachute down more or less alongside each other, two wounded birds of prey falling slowly towards the ground. He's probably hanging there congratulating himself on how neatly I just proved his point for him.

He lands first, of course he does, and stands waiting for her as she comes sailing down. Her feet have barely touched the ground before he's on her. She gets a clear view of the cold fury in his eyes, his manic snarl, before everything goes black.

She comes to, trussed in parachute cord. Her head is pounding, and she is genuinely surprised that she's still alive.

He's crouched a little way away and, aside from his bleeding ear where she'd grazed him with a bullet intended entirely for his brain, he looks perfectly unharmed.

Figures.

He's looking away from her, towards twin columns of black smoke undulating towards the sky. Far enough away that she can't smell the acridness of the destruction. Their planes.

"I loved that plane." His voice is tactile, but as he turns to her his eyes flash with rent skin and broken bones.

Hers.

He's propped her against the trunk of a tree, and she struggles to sit more upright, latches on to the feel of rough bark digging into her back.

"Well you shouldn't have crashed it then, should you?"

His eyes burn, and the freshly tattooed Wrath on her chest flares in response to his rage as she doubles down on her taunting.

"I thought you were meant to be this amazing pilot?"

He grinds his teeth, clenches his fists, visibly restrains himself from breaking her nose, and she absently wonders why. She would've broken her nose if she were in his shoes.

"You flew straight into my plane, Deputy. What sort of fucked up kamikaze maneuver was that?"

She decides to give him the truth simply because she knows it will hurt him more.

"It was unintentional."

He stills entirely, and that is somehow more unsettling than his usual restless, volatile energy. She ploughs on regardless.

"I lost control. I'm not a pilot. I've no training beyond what Nick Rye taught me."

He remains still, so fucking unnervingly, perfectly still, and his voice is smooth, almost dulcet as he speaks. By now she knows him well enough to be very cautious, very afraid, when he's calm.

"Then why, pray tell, did you decide to jump into a plane and take to the skies?"

She meets his eyes, smiles lazily through the pain in her head.

"Because I really, really want to kill you, John Seed."

Ah, and now he hurtles into action, grabs her by the shoulders and slams her backwards. Her already injured head hits the trunk and pain explodes behind her eyes, a firework of noxious colours illuminating the darkness inside. The nausea is arguably worse though, and it's all she can do not to vomit all over his stupid fucking coat.

"Well. I hope you're happy with what you've achieved, Deputy." He thumps her head back again at the mention of her title, as if he just can't help his rage. She supposes he can't. Her teeth clack together on her tongue, and she anchors herself on the taste of her blood.

"Of course I'm not happy, Seed. You're still alive."

He digs his fingers into her collarbones at that, and vaguely she reflects on how much that hurts, and how she never knew it could. He's so good at finding sore spots, weak spots, and excavate them.

Both of the body and of the mind. Especially the mind.

"You might yet get your wish. We're off the map. I'm not entirely sure just where. You blew my navigational system early on. No weapons." The way his teeth flash sharp when he says weapons tells her that if he did she might no longer be here to give him lip. "No radio. No food. Only wilderness and the clothes on our back. And a very long walk. Happy?"

She doesn't feel happy. And she doesn't feel like walking. She feels like sliding down deep into the ground and rest her broken head. She wants to sink into the dirt with closed eyes and become tangled in roots, embraced by worms. Held by quiet decay. She wants to sleep, forever, and damn Hope County's eyes.

She's done.

"What the hell did you use to knock me out?" she asks, and squints against pain and vertigo when he harshly pulls her upright.

He smiles at her, and she thinks it's the very first time she's seen him emote anything genuine.

"This," he says and hold his fist up in front of her face. She struggles to focus on it, but can see his knuckles are bruised and grazed.

"And let me tell you something, Deputy," he continues. "It was glorious."

They've walked for what she's sure is hours in the sun, and he takes visible pleasure in how she keeps falling down. She finds it's not easy to walk rough terrain like this with her hands bound and tethered to his belt, her vision cloudy with pain, nausea churning in her gut.

She'd work on the knots, but she's too busy trying not to pass out from the concussion he's given her.

Oh, isn't he clever?

He seems to move with purpose though, as if he's got a plan. She supposes it's good that one of them does. He seems mostly unaffected by their situation, face keen, eyes sharp, movements fluid and sure. Hazily she thinks that she might have to revise her opinion of him. She'd thought him a crazy, sadistic coward, but he's clearly much more lethal and effective than that.

She never knew a head could hurt this bad.

"Seed. Seed! I'm going to need some water soon. That, or you'll end up dragging my unconscious body behind you." She stops, and squints at him. "And it's a real fancy belt and all, but I don't think it'll hold."

He turns to look at her, up and down, and snorts. "Don't bet on it, Deputy. How something so small and trifling can be such a nuisance is something I'll never fathom." He turns back round and keeps walking.

"I meant it about the water!"

Still walking he waves his arms around in an expansive, exaggerated gesture.

"See any around here?"

She staggers along behind him, wasting precious energy on curses and hate.

"Hey, asshole. We there yet?"

At this point they both know it's all worthless bravado. Her voice is coming out in a croak, and she's in excruciating pain, each thump of her heart shooting spikes of lava and ice into her temples.

She wishes her heart would simply cease to beat.

Eventually she falls on her knees, and she doesn't get back up. He turns to her with a raised brow, pulls hard on the tether, and she feels the parachute cord digging into her wrists.

"I'm not getting up again. Just leave me here. Or break my neck. I don't care."

He sighs dramatically, rolls his eyes. "Would that I could. But Joseph wants you alive, and to be Ato..."

Then it's white light slicing clean through her optic nerves.

"Deputy!"

She can feel the ground vibrating where she sits, a pained shuddering, the mortally wounded throes of an ancient beast. Then comes the wind, the shockwave.

The death.

"Deputy!"

Her vision starts working again, just as rocks and branches and dust and the surface of the world is peeled up and hurled her way.

And then, then she just stares. Stares at the cloud painting doom against blue sky. She never knew that explosions could look so beautiful from afar.

She just sits there, and watches it all end.

John gets right in her face then, obstructs her view of the cloud, and he slaps her hard. And even though the world is falling down around them he looks like he's still managed to pull some enjoyment from hurting her.

She touches her cheek, finally focuses on him.

"I think I know where we are! If you don't keep up I'll leave you behind!"

He shouts, she's sure, but artificial wind is tearing his words to shreds. She gets the gist though, hesitates for a second, then heaves herself upright just as the parachute cord between them goes taut with his running.

Her vision goes white twice more in their long flight.

Three bombs. Three.

She would weep, but she hasn't the tears or the time.

She hurtles straight into John's back where he's come to a stop, and she sees a hatch in the cliffside in front of them. For a second all her bearings go haywire, she thinks they're on Dutch's island, but just as quickly she knows they can't be. They're somewhere up in the mountains still, and she has no clue what this place is.

He wrenches the hatch open, and when she doesn't move fast enough he growls in frustration and fear, then heaves her up on his shoulder, unbalancing him. They fall through the hatch and down the ladder, John taking the brunt of the fall, but her head hits the wall of the chute several times on their way down.

She dry heaves helplessly on the floor once they hit the bottom. John, survival instinct not clouded by crippling pain, hurries back up the ladder and slams the hatch shut.

All she can think is how blessed the darkness is for her head. That's all that matters. She wants to float in black; she wants to never stand or walk or talk or smile or live again.

He lands back down on the floor right next to her and hits a light switch on the wall. Cold and sharp fluorescent light hits her, and she grits her teeth and rolls over on her back to squint up at him.

"Was that...is that what Joseph..."

He cuts her off with an inpatient snarl.

"Yes."

Her voice comes out small, and frightened, and accusatory.

"I thought you people said it wouldn't happen quite yet!"

"Well, my apologies!" he spits, blood pouring down his face, "but I guess Joseph's predictions were just a tiny little bit off."

He pulls a knife out of his greatcoat, flicks it open and bends down to slice through the cord tying her to him, then walks past her, moves forward into the dark space ahead.

"You said we didn't have any weapons!"

He shrugs as he walks.

"I lied. We don't. I do."

She knows that with such a severe head injury, one that has had several blows added to the original one during the course of the day, she really ought not sleep. She might not ever wake up again if she does. But she doesn't care. What does it matter? Doesn't seem like there is a world to wake up to anyway.

There's only him.

So she folds in on herself right where she lies, and she closes her eyes and she drifts on choppy waves of pain.

He lets her.

She awakes to ever more pain, and she is almost disappointed when her situation immediately comes back to her. She would have welcomed a few more seconds of confusion and oblivion before she has to face…this. Whatever this is.

She uses her teeth to undo the cord tied around her wrists, then stands with difficulty, realises that she's been resting against a reinforced door. John must have dragged her in here. She is grateful that he has his back to her so he doesn't see how she has to support herself against the wall to walk. He's by a small table, bent over wires and antennas and metal parts. A radio. A radio in parts. He seems content to completely ignore her, which is insulting, really, but she's also self-aware enough to acknowledge that right now she poses absolutely no threat to his wellbeing. She can barely stand, let alone do him any significant damage. He'd done a good job of making her docile.

For now, at least.

"What is this place?"

At first it doesn't seem like he wants to answer, but eventually he speaks, still with his back to her, voice indifferent and strangely distant.

"When we first came to Hope County we had a few of these made along the outer borders. They were meant as boltholes for people further out, or if one were caught short, during the Collapse. Crude in execution. Trial runs, if you will. As time went on, and we constructed the three large bunkers, these ones fell into disrepair. They haven't been maintained or inspected for a long time."

He doesn't move from his place as she shuffles around the small space. Of course. He'd already done this, taken inventory while she slept.

He already knows what she will find.

A sleeping alcove with four bunks.

A utilitarian bathroom, barely big enough to turn around in. She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Uneven pupils, snarled hair, cracked lips and a bruise the size of his clenched fist blooming on her left temple. It looks like he'd hit her just the once to knock her out, but he'd really made the blow count.

There's a storeroom, and it also houses the generator. It croaks and groans, but it works, along with whispering, hissing water pipes, sounding like spectres and spirits are trapped inside.

The main room, small, with the sofa, the table, some chairs. A kitchenette. A shelf full of books and magazines, which seems a strange whimsy, a flight of fancy not befitting the rest of this crypt made of concrete and metal and screams inside her head.

This place is barely large enough for two people. She's been awake for five minutes, and she's already feeling the claws of claustrophobia in her throat. A bolthole, indeed.

A grave, more like.

She loops back to the storeroom, let's her eyes travel among the shelves, tries to calculate, count, but her brain works wrong. It has to be working wrong, wounded and bruised as it is.

She weaves through waves of dizziness and fear to get back to him.

"How long…how long did Joseph say this would last for?"

"Seven years," he answers immediately, voice even and low, working away at the skeleton of the radio.

"There's food for perhaps one year. If we ration."

He turns to her squarely then, regards her without blinking.

"I know."

"Some ground rules, Deputy. Well, just the one, really."

She thinks maybe two or three days have passed, but she can't be sure. She's been mostly asleep, her head is still hurting with vicious stabs and thumps, but her thinking is clearer.

That is really a curse.

"What, Seed?"

He barely looks up from where he's still tangled in wires and radio parts. She's not sure he's slept at all.

"You do as I say. We prepared for the Collapse for more than a decade. All you've done is work against our efforts. In here, what I say goes. I know what I'm doing. You go against me, you're out on your impetuous, bony behind. Maybe I'll carve a few more sins into you first, for good measure."

She swallows everything she wants to say, and the words hurt all the way down, burn in her throat and her gut. She shrugs, and that's all the affirmation she's going to give him. She looks around her, at the dark, damp corners and drabness of her new home. Can feel the dread and the shadows creeping towards her over the rough floor.

"Can't we cheer this place up a bit?"

"I look like an interior designer to you?"

"Sure. You had dead crows nailed to the church for my Atonement. Quite the artistic statement. Somewhat overwrought, but then you're not exactly a subtle guy. That thing still not working?"

She nods at the radio, and his fist clenches around a cable.

"No. And I don't think it will."

He doesn't have to voice the rest. Without any means of communication they won't find out who lived, who died. Won't know what is happening, if anything or anyone is left.

So many people…

She can feel the mountain on top of on her, can feel limestone and flint and ore pressing against her temples, can feel the end of the world behind her eyes. Can feel soil filling her airways and oh god, is that funeral dirt in her lungs?

She struggles to regulate her breathing, and he looks up at her, seems to understand, seems to cherish the pain she's in, certainly enjoys pushing his dextrous fingers straight into all her wounds.

"Joseph tried to tell you. We all did. But you wouldn't listen, would you, Deputy?"

She runs for the bathroom, and she retches bile into the chrome toilet.

I'm not really one for words. I've never enjoyed writing, or expressing myself . But there's nothing but time down here, and I found a notebook and a pen in the storeroom. No doubt he would take them from me if he knew, vicious and wounded as he is, prone to lashing out, hungry for me to hurt as much as he hurts (I think I do, but I won't give him the satisfaction of knowing that). But I need something, something to help me track time, something to help me make sense. And this is it.

He paces.

Now when fixing the radio isn't distracting him anymore he's ever in motion, around and around the bunker he goes, and she thinks of caged predators and torn jugulars.

She wants to rattle him, bait him, poke him with sticks, and she doesn't care that she's trapped in the cage with him.

Anything to stop thinking. Anything not to dream.

"What is your real sin?" she asks from the sleep alcove. "Obviously, I see Sloth because you just can't button your shirt up to save your life, can you, but personally I don't think that's correct."

He grins over his shoulder at her, just a quick, sharp flash of canines in fluorescent light.

"It's all of them, Deputy," he says. "Now shut the fuck up and go to sleep."

She can't go to sleep. That's the problem. There are too many souls waiting to haunt her, and if she closes her eyes they will all be here.

"Do you think he's alive? Joseph?"

He stops with his pacing then, comes and stands in the entryway, a tense, rigid silhouette.

"I've no way of knowing, do I, stuck here with you. But he's got faith, and I've got faith in him. He's confident in his knowledge, his truth. I think he got himself and as many of the flock as he could muster to safety. No thanks to you."

He moves into the alcove while she is busy considering his use of present tense, stalks closer to her. She can see his face clearly in the light trickling in from the main room, can see the shadows in his eyes, the rage lining his cheeks.

"He used to say that you were the walking embodiment of sin, with your hair the colour of wrath and your eyes the colour of envy, and your soul…." He cuts himself off, then continues. "He said you were Hell. I only ever saw a girl. Still do. So small, so insignificant, yet such a lethal pest."

He's offering her a fight, holds it out to her. All she has to do is reach out and pluck it from his hands.

So she does.

"Faith, you say? Fucking faith. Fucking religion. Visions and prayers. What bullshit. Did his rosary make it all alright? Everything he did, everything you did? Your whole fucked up family? Did he slide a bead along for each death he caused? Is that why that thing never left his hand? A death instead of a Hail Mary."

She spits out the words and John accepts the thrown gauntlet with relish, she sees it in the way he moves closer to her, restrained, holding himself tightly wound. Looking for an opening, waiting for the right moment to strike.

"I love him. He found me. He saved me."

She sits up on the bunk. Lying down seems unadvisable right now.

"And what were you doing when he found you? You were doing some good for once, weren't you? But he pulled you away from all that. Now look at you."

He lowers himself to a crouch so that their eyes are level. His are sharp and cruel. She wonders how they can be so calculating and so feral at the very same time.

"So you've read it? The Book of Joseph?"

"Of course I have," she scoffs. "Would be stupid of me not to. The point is, there you were, redeveloping your childhood slum. Then Joseph shows up, and before long you've got your own torture room in bumfuck Montana. How thefuck is that for the greater good?"

He shifts a little where he sits on his haunches by her bunk

"We saved people."

"You assholes ever heard of free will? It's a thing. Let people decide if they want salvation or not."

"Joseph was right though. He was right about the Collapse. And he did save people."

She leans forward, ready to strike out. Heedless of danger, needs only to hurt him, needs to scratch gouges into his face with her words. Needs to see his blood flow. She wants to tear his belief right out of him and hurl it on the floor between them. Stamp on it. Spit on it.

"You don't know that though, do you? You don't know anything in here. You are deaf and blind and mute and buried in a hole. Perhaps all those people you carved sins into for salvation are dead. Perhaps everything you did, and Joseph did, was for nothing."

He laughs. He laughs with his head thrown back, and it's a hearty laugh, a genuine laugh, a laugh full of broken glass. The last time she heard a laugh like this was back in the church in Fall's End, and it came from him then too.

He reaches out with his hand, slides it along her neck. Wraps his fingers about it, but he doesn't squeeze, and she wishes he would.

It would feel more true.

"Oh, I don't think you understand, little Deputy. For all your bravado and wrath and bullets and death you are really just a naive child." He hisses out the last two words, turns them into grievous insults, disgusting things. He moves closer to her, she can feel his breath on her cheek and ear, can feel his fervour singeing her hair.

"You think I wanted to save them? Oh, that was all Joseph. I wanted the world to burn. I wished for it. It was irredeemable, Deputy, and full to the brim of evil and sin. I'm only sorry I didn't get to properly see it fall, sorry I couldn't hear the screams. Sorry I'm not with my brother. Sorry I'm trapped here with you."

She wonders how his heat can chill her so. She swears she can see her breath turn to frost in the air between them, even as his fingers and breath trace fire in the dark.

"You're a monster." She whispers it, and she can feel victory and will slide through her fingers like so much sand.

He smiles, and it's ugly.

"Have you kept count on your kills, Deputy? Because if I think if we tallied up, you'd certainly have me beat."

She wonders if she has ever met anyone as damaged and irredeemable as him.

Or her.

He hasn't spoken to me for weeks now – I've tried to count the days, I'm pretty sure I'm right – and I haven't spoken to him. Two people hating each other, stuck in each other's orbit, trapped in a tiny, dark grave.

I, I've started on the books, and it hurts, it hurt so much, to read about people and places outside of here. People and places that are likely gone, even if they were only ever make-believe.

That doesn't make any sense, does it? Nothing makes much sense. I should probably stay away from the books, it feels like they might make things worse.

But there is nothing else to do.

"Where's the knife?"

It seems appropriate that the first words spoken between them for what is surely eons are about an implement of torture and death. Her voice is husky, she hasn't used it for so long. He's on his back on the couch, looking languid and still and faraway, but by now she knows, has learnt, that he is ever alert and aware of her, of her movements down here. He doesn't look at her now, but answers all the same.

"On me."

His voice is deeper too, and she thinks that it must be unnatural for him, to stay silent for so long. Born orator that he is, a man used to wielding cadence and tone as weapons as surely as knives and guns. He stands from the couch, and she looks at him properly for the first time in a while.

He lost his sunglasses topside when the bombs hit, and his hair is falling in dark tendrils down his forehead. His beard is a bit longer, his cheekbones are sharper, and he's wearing a plain black tee from a stack in the storeroom. His noctilucent eyes flare as unnerving as ever, and really, she is starting to regret initiating this conversation.

But she is feeling so numb.

He pulls the knife out of the front pocket of his jeans now, flicks it open, and holds it up. It's not the knife she'd seen him use for Atonements, for flaying sins from people's bodies. This is a foldable hunting knife, handle of bone and blade of Damascus steel. She cuts her gaze on the wicked edge, and wonders if he's taken sins with this one, or just lives.

The way he caresses it with the pad of his thumb is mesmerising. Sensual and wrong.

So probably lives, then.

"Would you use it on me? Down here?"

His gaze finds hers then, straight on, and he smiles. His eyes crinkles at the corners and his teeth flash and it looks real.

"I want to, all the time."

She stands entirely still then, knows that if she backs up even just one step he'll never again let her regain that ground.

"I wanted to break you open, tear you to pieces, since the first time I saw you walking into the church. And then you went and turned into a golden, beautiful figurehead, didn't you? Young and noble and idealistic, yet such killing machine. Strange, don't you think? I want to open you up and look inside, see what's there. I want to mar you, write all over you."

He takes another step closer, steps into the weak circle of illumination from the overhead lamp. Stands right there in the light with her, like he's got a right, like he belongs there.

"So don't give me a reason to."

She stutters out a breath, holds her position, refuses to yield an inch, even though all she wants is to go hide.

But there is nowhere to hide from him down here.

"You are so fucking damaged, Seed, you make the other three look like beacons of normalcy. Apple pie and fucking vanilla. Why the hell are you doing what you do?"

He doesn't answer her question.

"Didn't you know? People are more beautiful broken. You more so than most."

Or, perhaps he does.

She needs to throw this around, injure him before he can injure her even more. She needs to level the scales and make it out of this just a little bit whole.

But his lunacy burns too bright for a place this small and dark; it blinds her, warps her aim.

"Why did you save me? Why didn't you leave me up there, let me to turn to ash?" is not at all the question she means to ask. But the words hang in the stale air between them now, they shimmer eerily in the light of his gaze.

"Because of Joseph. You heard him, down there by the river. I would be shut out of Eden unless you reached Atonement. You can't Atone if you're dead."

She starts laughing then, and a faraway part of her notes how hysterical and brittle and uncontrolled it is, how wild and loud.

John narrows his eyes, but says nothing, knife still held loosely in his hand.

"And where are you now, huh? Eden?! I'd say you're as far away from paradise as it's possible to get! I'd say that fucking gate shut right in your stupid face. It was all for nothing, and Joseph really did a number on you!"

She can't stop screaming, and laughing, oh but now she's crying, and what is the difference anyway?

The slap, when it comes, reverberates around the small space with a sick echo, and she welcomes the pain. She holds a hand to her burning cheek, and hiccups the last of her sobs away, stills, and looks him straight in the eye.

"You just can't stand being alone, can you?"

He doesn't answer, and she can see how tense his face is, how rigid and coiled every line of his body is, how tightly he holds himself in check. How much he wants to wrap his hands about her neck and squeeze until there are only atoms of her left.

But he doesn't.

Oh, he's delivered many blows, she's feeling faint from the blood loss, but this time, this time she dealt the killing one.

Victory doesn't taste sweet.

"We're both fucked, Seed."

Then she hits her bunk, and he hits the wall, repeatedly.

She hopes he breaks all his fingers.

Three months in, I think, and sometimes at night I could swear the spectres of my dead stare at me from the darkest corners. They silently beseech me, accuse me, how is it that I live while they died?

How are they to know that I'm barely alive?

It's comforting then, to have the sound of his breaths from across the room.

I wish it weren't.

He dominates. Pushes her around, tries to bend her until she breaks. Tries to wrap her around his will, and then leaves her be for such a long time that she almost bends back right.

Then he does it again, and she becomes ever more brittle.

And determined. She won't let his soul eat hers, won't let it come close enough to hers that they may compare the different shades of black.

But there's too much of him. The sheer energy of him gives her headaches, the way he veers from manic pacing and too-bright eyes to long silences and clenched teeth. It feels like whiplash.

When he gets too close to her it's like static in her hair.

"Could Joseph ever have reined you in?" she whispers one evening, like she's picking up a conversation with him from just a second ago, not just sorting through half finished thoughts in her head and voicing them out loud.

But he's used to talking in fragments by now, they both are, and he answers almost immediately.

"Tell you the truth, I don't know."

They've got only one light on, and his eyes lie in shadow. He's sitting on his bunk with his back against the wall, and she watches how the sins on his hands move as he loosely wraps his fingers about his knees. Avaritia. Luxuria.

Tristitia.

"But I'm not a monster."

She wishes he would care about the truth of that a bit more, but his voice is laconic and indifferent.

"You cut off people's skin and stapled it to walls!"

"Well, I needed an effective gimmick," he shrugs, and fuck it and damn her to the eternal flames of hell, but she huffs out a startled, genuine chuckle at that.

"You're quite insane."

He doesn't answer, and she realises that he's no longer looking at her face. She follows his line of vision, sees that he's studying her naked shoulder peeking out of the too large men's shirt she found.

She pulls the neckline right, and he smiles once, just a quick flash of teeth.

The generator is old, he says, and though I don't know a lot about these things I'm wont to agree with him. It makes noises no machines vital to our survival should.

So we try to keep the strain on it to a minimum. Keep the lights off more than on.

There are so many things in the darkness though, and now they can dance unhindered in the corner of my eyes. There are spectres looking at me from my blind spot, and there are whispers floating on the dank air.

It seems to bother him much less than it bothers me. Perhaps he's made his peace with all the people he has killed.

Apparently, I have not.

She often finds herself sitting with her back against the reinforced door, feeling how the hatch out there is calling her name.

Curious, when no one knows her name here. No one ever did, except the colleagues she came here with, and she supposes they are dead. If no one who actually knows her is left in the world, does she really exist? She can feel her identity becoming oil, separating from her, curling and flowing about her, but never again coming close enough for her to grasp.

She considers the fact that she might be losing touch with her sanity, but dismisses it. But then she would, would she not? Dismiss it?

"As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish, he'd go away."

She laughs. Perhaps the man who isn't here is guarding the ladder up to the hatch, because she never once opens the door, never tries to get out there and climb up it, even though she wants to.

And for him, he has nightmares.

And, when his face is warped with pain and fear and sleep. When he bites out "yes!" between his teeth, chews the word to pieces in his anguish, lets the sharp shards cut the inside of his mouth to ribbons.

Then she scoots quietly across the floor, sits next to his bunk in the darkness, lets her herself touch him, lets her hand drift slowly between his shoulder blades. Treasures the feeling of skin on skin. Draws pictures and hieroglyphs in his cold sweat.

Because he'll never know.

And when he's halfway between waking and sleep, when his eyes are unseeing and faraway ...then she allows her heart to break for him, just a bit, safely back over on her own bed.

The rest of the time she just fucking hates him.

They've had another dreadful argument, something about rations and and her not obeying him in all things.

She loses track.

Now they're in a corner each, skulking, sulking, and she drifts and travels inside her mind, tries to find bright things, beautiful things, to cling to.

"Across the mouth right in the middle of a word, you struck as hard as you could. And I saw how much you liked it. From almost bottomless ennui came violence warmed by love. And the wine spills, becomes pale Rorschach tests"

"I like that," he mumbles suddenly from inside the dark, surprising her. "Who's it by?"

"Some poet," she says and leans back on her bunk. There is nothing left to read now, there's nothing to do, and she is reduced to finding old lines and fragments in her brain. Pieces from songs, books, movies. Memories. But she is frightened that she'll move to live entirely inside her own head, knows she needs an anchor to keep her in the real world.

Difficult, when the only available option floats unmoored too. Almost impossible, when the real world is a hole in the ground.

"Pretty sure I slaughtered it. Remember it wrong. No matter. He's probably dead now. Along with all the rest. Poets and painters and artists...gone. Only horrible people, people like me and you, left."

Oh god, what the fuck is she going on about?

"Do you remember books you liked? Songs? From before?"

"No," he bites out. "I remember nothing."

She doesn't push him, because she's too tired. She slides all the way down on the bunk, and goes to sleep lulled by his angry breaths.

Six months, maybe seven, and I miss the night sky the most. The stars, the constellations. To dream myself beyond the Milky Way, way out there, all the way into outer space.

It's been many months since I saw the sky last. Perhaps I'll never see it again.

And I'm surprised how much I long for sounds that before I'd barely registered because they were always there: birdsong, car engines, children playing, the wind blowing through trees.

Background noise, white noise. Sounds that meant everything were more or less right with the world.

I wonder if those sounds are all dead. I wonder if there are birds left, or trees, or children.

Down here it can go days when the only sounds are my breaths and his, the whispers of the pipes, the grind of the generator.

Oh and he, he was not made for being trapped, this dark, horrid man with too much kinetic energy for his flesh and blood to contain. He suffers down here too, perhaps more so than me, and I find that the diminishing blue in his gaze is getting harder and harder to bear.

Perhaps because we mirror each other so well.

The tension ratchets, and it's inevitable that finally they come to real blows. He's been in one of his restless, manic moods, relentlessly prodding her, relentlessly cutting into her with words.

"'Hell', Joseph called you. Hel. Goddess of Death. Do you know how much blood you've got on your hands? Or did you never bother keeping track?"

"You are so much worse than me!"

She moves to stand from the couch, and he mirrors her, smoothly moves from the chair. They face each other across the floor, and he is visibly delighted with her reaction, with her anger.

"Well my methods, they might be a tad more, ah, elaborate, I'll give you that. But this is really a numbers game, my dear."

He circles his hand in front of his chest, executes a little mock bow, smiles with his mouth but not his eyes.

"And there you have me beat."

"That's never true, Seed."

"Shall we finally sit down and count? Oh, why bother? Your count would end in the hundreds, Deputy."

He raises his hand, starts to count off on tattooed fingers.

"How many from our flock did you gun down? Cut down? Mow down? Blow up? Canon fodder to you. Did you ever tally up?"

"How many people from the Resistance did you personally kill? How many Atonements went to far?"

Her voice is shrill, and he continues as if she hasn't spoken.

"And if you hadn't killed Jacob and flooded his bunker, more people could have been saved in the Collapse. That's on you too, Deputy."

Now it's her turn to laugh, and it sounds so incredibly broken to her own ears. Because he's right. But she needs to fire more bullets, throw more poison darts, to get away from the terrible truth in what he says.

"You want to know the truth? I enjoyed killing Jacob. It was more of a mercy killing, really. No one needed putting down quite as much as your brother. Well. Except maybe you."

His head snaps up, he bares his teeth and she remembers too late that he genuinely loved his brothers. Had loved Jacob. And now he moves towards her, and she can plainly see that there is murder, only murder in his eyes.

Oh, she's underestimated his capacity for violence and rage, and that is saying something, given how much of it she's witnessed first hand.

She turns and runs, and she can hear his guttural growl as he starts after her, and this is stupid, moronic, because there is nowhere to run to, and he's got her by her hair within seconds.

All she's accomplished is awakening all his prey instincts in far too small a space.

He slams her forward, hurls her head in the table, enough of a blow to take the edge of her fight.

"This ends now", he growls as he drags her towards the door with a hand around her neck, the other holding her wrists together. "I've been patient. I've decidedly not murdered you every time you've talked back, disobeyed me, questioned my authority..."

"Oh gee, thanks, how fucking magnanimous of you," she hisses as she struggles against his grip, but he moves her as easily as if she weighs nothing.

"…and I think it's time you learned your place, little Wrath."

She fights him when they reach the reinforced door, fights with everything she's got. Kicks and twists her body, tries to scratch and claw, tries to bite. Anything not to be thrown out there.

He slams her against the wall next to the door, holds her still with his entire body pressed against hers, one of his arms across her neck, ͏one hand in her hair. They pant wrath into each other's mouths, and she can feel his madness at the back of her throat. Wonders if he can taste hers too.

Then he laughs.

"How you fought just then, Deputy. Guess you don't want to die, do you?"

He sounds violently delighted, like he's just proved something vital, unearthed something profound.

His breath feels honest against her face, his eyes burn tracks across her forehead, cheeks, lips, throat.

And suddenly she notices how he's absently stroking the soft skin behind her ear with his thumb, how he looks down on her with eyes that have gone dark.

"You look so young when you're scared."

He's so close, so close, and she rips herself lose, terrified, because John Seed's hands on her skin is the most she has ever felt anything in her life.

He allows it.

And allows her to run back across the floor, into the storeroom and slam the door, but she can hear his low chuckle all the while.

We float ever more in a vacuum down here; I feel nothing again, and I'm starting to wonder if we didn't perish in the Collapse after all. Perhaps we are both far too stubborn to realise we're actually dead.

Last night I thought about smashing the bathroom mirror and using a shard to cut into myself. To see my blood, to feel something. Anything. Anything but the memory of his hands on my skin. It burned and ached and crawled.

And I want to feel it again.

She stands naked, looking at herself in the dusky bathroom mirror. She'd been barely an adult when she first came here, fresh out of training, still with some softness to her, still with some smiles. But Hope County has removed all that. Now she is made out of sharp lines, angles, plains. Big, wild eyes and transparent skin and unkempt curls. Scars, both inside and out. She runs her fingers along some of them, drags her nails across stomach and thighs and breasts and heart.

Bullet wounds, knife wounds, his wound.

Lightly she traces Wrath.

Shadows and scar tissue. That's all that's left of her.

Suddenly his face emerges in the mirror, comes out of the darkness behind her shoulder. He looks briefly startled, has not figured on her standing in here buck naked, before his usual mask evens out his features again. His eyes are a lavascape though, burning unbearably hot as he takes in all of her skin. Then he turns to leave again.

"John."

It's so rare that she calls him just by his given name and he stops, turns back. She meets his eyes in the mirror, indicates her body with a stroke of her hand. "I want you to."

He freezes entirely behind her, that eerie, predatory stillness of his, his nostrils flared, his lips curled. She continues on.

"Otherwise we're nothing but corpses haunting a crypt, refusing to accept we're dead. We need to do something to stop the rot. We have to do something to live."

He moves a step closer to her, eyes never leaving hers in the mirror. She can feel the warmth of him all along her back, but he doesn't touch her. He holds a hand up in front of the base of her throat, millimetres away, so close she can feel the heat, so close she can feel him crushing her larynx even though he is not.

"Say it," he growls.

She meets his blown eyes square in the mirror, tumbles into them. They are dark flames, they are nebulas in outer space. She'd been longing for that, hadn't she? Space.

"Yes," she whispers.

All air sucks out of the room as he slams her back into his chest by her throat, fingers clenching, refusing her almost all air. He bites her where neck meets shoulder, hard, breaks skin, and they both watch the slow trickle of blood in the mirror. It runs over her collarbone, down her breast. Hangs extended from her nipple, one single, crimson drop.

She thinks it's beautiful.

He leans down over her and takes her breast in his hand, pushes it upwards, towards his mouth. Flicks his tongue out, delicately takes the droplet of blood from her nipple.

The life of her, on his tongue.

He swallows it down, takes her deep inside of him.

Then he springs into true action, heaves her forward by her neck, bends her over the bathroom sink. Kicks her legs further apart, goes for his belt buckle.

"Bed!" she manages to grind out. He snarls in impatience but grabs her around her waist, drags her across the main room, into the sleeping alcove and over to his bunk. He throws her down on it, immediately follows and straddles her hips, his hand never leaving her throat. Needs to be the one in power of her pulse, her heartbeats.

She grabs at his arms, and yes, they've come full circle haven't they, since last they were like this on a dusty church floor.

"John! John, wait! Slow down. I've not...I've never..."

"What, Deputy?" he snarls as he starts unbuttoning his shirt with one hand.

"I've never done this before."

His fingers stop at the buttons.

"You mean…?"

She scowls. "Yes."

Every line of him is writ with violence and lust, now suddenly leashed, but only just. He leans forward over her, and she shivers at his beard scraping over her neck as his lips find the shell of her ear.

"Is it really true?" he whispers. "The ferocious little Deputy, killer of men, bringer of the End...a blushing virgin?"

"Go fuck yourself, Seed."

He leans back up again, smiles down at her. It's lazy and bloodthirsty and greedy, and something deep inside her writhes and tightens in response.

"Perhaps, given your, ah, inexperience it is understandable that you're not all that familiar with the mechanics of the act, but let me assure you...it's not me who will get fucked."

She doesn't answer, simply touches his waist, slides her hands up underneath his shirt. She doesn't know quite what she's doing, just knows that she needs to touch his skin. She journeys up his back, slides fingertips along scars and tattoos, the whole life of him written on skin.

And he, he drags lips and teeth down her throat, makes patterns on her, laughs at the marks and the goosebumps following his path.

"There are other ways to write on someone than with a knife," he says and sucks on the skin just above her heart, smiles at the bruise flaring, blossoming. She pulls him back up to her by his hair, finds his lips, and they kiss for the very first time. His beard scratches her and his eyes won't leave hers, and she meets his tongue and understands with sudden clarity why lust is considered such sin.

She wants to feel like this forever.

He sits back up, shucks his shirt, kicks off his jeans, and she thinks he's beautiful, lean, and so full of writings and warped mysteries and pain.

His fingers are gentle and harsh as they travel down, as they find her, and the tense creature living low down in her body feel ready to snap with strong fangs and torturous need. He slides along wetness and want, circles, toys, slides inside, tests, stretches.

She doesn't recognise the noises she makes as hers. But they are. She wants to choke down her begging. But she can't. She wants to touch him back.

He won't let her.

He nips at one nipple, then the other, and never lets up with his fingers. She arches as she thinks of those tattoos buried inside her, of the seven sins pressed against her centre.

"You're ready for me," he murmurs, and it's a statement, not a question. She nods regardless, frantic with need, with heat, with heavy ache. Then he takes himself in hand, and presses inside, ekes out a whole new space inside of her as he goes. He stops himself just after the breach, and looks down on her.

"Deputy," he rasps, and with strong fingers on her chin forces her to meet his eyes. "Look at me. Don't you dare look away when I take you."

She meets his eyes full on as he slides all the way home, impales her completely, and he smiles at her pained gasp.

She wraps her legs around his waist, pushes her heels into his back, cants her hips, tries to take him deeper still. Because yes, this, this is what she had been after, this throbbing pain, this undulating need, this possession.

Because she can't feel dead like this. Not when he pulses with life inside her, not when her blood sings and flows around him.

He leans down to kiss her again, slides his tongue inside her mouth and gulps down her breaths at the same time.

"You are mine. No one's been inside you but me, no one ever will. I'm the only one who will ever know what you feel like, deep down."

He thrusts once, sharply, means for it to hurt, and she whimpers, whines low in her throat, even as she spreads her thighs wider to take him more.

"Say it," he growls. "Say it."

"I'm yours. No one else can have me. Only you."

His smile grows wider, canines sharp, and his pupils are blown so big that his eyes look entirely black. A demonic entity above her, inside her, and it's too much, far too much, but she can't get enough.

"Move," she says. "I don't want you to be gentle."

"Oh don't worry," he says and bites her neck. "I don't intend to be." And he starts moving. Pistons his hips, snaps them just as savagely and intensely as he does everything else. She would slide along the blankets with his movements, but he holds her still for him by her neck. There's a sheen of sweat on both of them, and his voice is guttural as he increases his pace, slides all the way out and then in again, over and over.

"This is precious, Deputy, you underneath me, taking me so well. Giving yourself to me completely."

He puts his entire weight on her, slides a hand down between their bodies, finds her again, and with the other squeezes her throat, steals her breath and makes her feel weightless. Hovering between vulnerability and fire, her life between his fingers. She comes with that, it's unexpected, and she never knew that nerves could burn so hot, never knew that things could glow so white.

She wants him to live inside her forever.

His hips stutter, lose all smoothness to their movement, he pounds into her, it's flesh slapping against flesh and his harsh breaths, his hand never leaving her throat. Then he follows her, roars with his spend, high above her and inside her, and she thinks his fingerprints will be on her always.

He falls on top of her, loosens his fingers about her throat and pants his victory into her hair. She feels how it forms into a crown of barbed wire atop her curls. Then he rolls her to the side, still inside her, and they both look at the blood stain on the blanket.

"The most precious blood I've ever spilt," he says and kisses her, hard and deep.

All his.

He remains splayed on top of her afterwards, covers her entirely, weighs her down. Unwilling to have her move from underneath him. He looks down on her, wraps her curls around his fist, stretches her neck tight. Bares her throat to him, and speaks into the rushing susurrus of her jugular vein.

"I'm not going to stop doing this now. I don't think I can."

"I don't want you to," she says.

She means it.

He poses as a man of religion, of faith, but I know I sold my soul to the Devil last night.

"A little virgin. Few things surprise me, Deputy, but this does. Joseph would no doubt want to say something profound about Mary, but I think he'd be wrong."

His eyes flash with mordant mirth as she moves from his side, rolls off the bunk and stands.

"Lethal and innocent," he continues, always so happy with the sound of his own voice, "you're an iconoclast, you're a Jeanne d'Arc. You're a delicious contradiction, and you're mine."

"Well," he amends as he watches her walk naked across the floor, his spend drying on the inside of her thighs, his fingerprints in intricate garlands across her hips and chest, "perhaps not so innocent anymore."

He smiles as she only raises a brow at him, too exhausted to properly mouth back. She's barely slept for days, and now she has to live with having given him a new purpose.

"I had better things to do with my time, Seed." She bends to drink straight from the rusty kitchen tap, iron-tanged water soothing her abused throat, feeling his eyes on her exposed behind all the while. "Busy with my career," she continues, "no room for...what is it you cultist lot call it? Fornicating."

He snorts as he stands and stretches, unapologetic and glorious about his nudity, comfortable in his heavily decorated skin, and she turns and leans back against the counter to better take him in.

"And aren't you now delighted that instead of fucking and living, you spent so much time on a career that lead you into a hole in the ground?"

Oh, he lives for stab wounds, doesn't he?

She crosses her arms, feels her nipples contract as his gaze slides along her proffered breasts.

"Fucking and living, like you did before you came to Hope County with Joseph?"

"Like that."

"And was it worth it?"

He smiles, but his eyes are dusky, remote, and she tries so hard, wants so badly, to see splinters of a lost, frightened boy in there.

She really doesn't think she can.

"Sometimes I think so."

She pushes off the counter, walks back towards him, feel goose bumps raise with the way his eyes tear at her skin. She comes to a stop right in front of him, so close she can feel the breaths he takes inflating her lungs.

"Have you ever been truly happy?"

The answer is immediate and, she feels, involuntary. Slides out of his mouth like the darkest confession he could ever lose.

"No."

His voice is queer, and peculiar, and she thinks this might be what his honesty sounds like. But he immediately dissipates the moment where it hovers in the air between them, fragile and breakable, swats it away like at fireflies lighting up the night, pulls off all their wings with his demon smile. Runs his eyes slowly up and down her body with reaving intent, lingers on old bullet and stab wounds.

"Your scars are beautiful. Would you like some more?"

She gives up on trying to slide inside him, grabs at the relief he offers instead. Can't scold herself for taking the easy way down here.

"Yes," she whispers, and thinks her hair might catch on fire with his glee, with his want, with his need to tear souls apart.

He crooks a finger at her.

"Come here, Deputy."

And she comes.

I never knew that one's body could provide so much respite, never knew that true oblivion could be found in that perfect void between pleasure and pain. No gravity, no sound.

He's very keen to show me, teach me, and there is no doubt that I am in the hands of a master of this particular discipline. No doubt that I am a greedy little disciple desperate for distraction and peace.

I only hope we can untangle ourselves from each other if we ever get out of here.

She detests the cold showers more than she detests the tinned food. She will never get used to standing under icy water, scrubbing harsh lye soap into her skin and hair. For some stupid reason that more than anything makes her feel helpless, makes her rage, makes her think about crying in here where her tears would wash away before he can see.

It's the little things, because the big things would see her insane.

And she never cries. She clenches her fists and seethes instead.

He loves her emerging like that, like a feral, spitting cat, will wait for her outside and wrap her in a scratchy blanket then take her to bed. Warm her back up with his naked skin against hers.

They're there now, and she thinks it might be her favourite thing in this tiny world of theirs, him pretending to care for her.

He strokes a finger across her nose. "Your freckles are all faded now. You're like a little ghost."

She throws her leg across his waist, moves as close to him as she can get, enjoys his nipples pebbling when they touch her frigid skin. She bends downs and laps at them, leisurely, almost absentmindedly, as he draws his fingers down her arms. Enjoys his shudder.

"You're a different kind of wild. You shouldn't be trapped down here, should you? You should run free."

She's feeling strangely loose, like her mind isn't latching onto all its components right. Sees herself running alone across a world of embers and dust, so silent and grey.

"You should run with me, if we ever get out of here."

She wants to take the words back as soon as they leave her mouth, wants to claw them to pieces and shove them back down her throat and choke.

But it's too late.

He kisses her, a gentle slide of tongue inside her mouth, and that makes it worse.

"You think I might change. You think I might become something else. Something less...what I am. But that can never happen, Deputy."

"I believe you." And her voice hitches at that, just the slightest little stumble, but he seizes on it immediately, as he's always seized on any weakness of hers.

"Used to be that I enjoyed making your voice break like bone china. But I don't anymore."

She thinks it might be the most tender thing he's ever said to her.

After he falls asleep she lies awake by one small light and looks at him. Tries to decipher the secret language of his skin, burrow beneath the scars and the tattoos and understand.

But she doesn't think she ever can.

He's got her leaning naked over the bathroom sink, forcing her to meet his eyes in the mirror. He's buried deep inside her, as far as he can go, and he's moving in slow, even strokes.

All the better to cut in neat lines.

She sees how the blade flashes in the mirror as he carefully decorates the skin between her shoulder blades, and the sensation of lust and pain twists inside of her, a wonderful, tainted alchemy.

He finishes with a glinting flourish, throws the knife behind him, then grabs her hips hard with both hands and starts thrusting in earnest, so hard she thinks she might bruise herself on the porcelain. But she arches her back and urges him on, treasures his fingerprints on her skin, slides along the friction and oblivion, chases that singular feel of him.

She comes with a clenched whimper and he comes with a stifled shout, and just for one second everything, everything, is right.

He stays inside her for a while, eyes heavily lidded in the mirror as he strokes her sweaty curls from her forehead, kisses her neck.

She twists a little, trying to see her own back in the mirror, and he glides out of her, steps aside to let her admire his handiwork more easily.

Two letters, jagged and flowing at the same time: J.S.

She shakes her head, twitches her lips in an almost-smile.

"That's real subtle, Seed."

His wide grin at her in the mirror is unfettered and full of delight.

"No need for subtlety down here, Deputy. Or anywhere else, for that matter."

He moves closer to her again, runs his lips along the bloodied letters, and she feels faint with defiance and supplication.

Need.

"Have you ever been able to separate love from pain?"

He snorts, and his eyes glow blue with maliciousness and something else, something she can't name.

"You think this is love? I wouldn't know."

"I don't know either," she says and turns around and kisses her red off his lips, "but it's certainly pain."

If I have to have another ice cold shower, if I have to eat another plate of just plain rice…well. I'll scream? I'll tear my hair out?

It would serve nothing but to amuse John and arm him with even more ammunition against me. As if he needs it.

Our food stores are steadily dwindling. Seven years, he says. We've been here barely a year now and all we have left is rice and some odd tins. And if what I suspect is right…well, we'd need more soon.

We either risk everything by going topside before we should, or we die quietly down here. I guess at least we're already buried, the rest would be a mere formality.

What a dreadful mess this is.

She's sitting by the table, staring into the pitch black. Some nights he runs too hot to sleep next to, she supposes it's the hellfire just underneath his skin, and then she sits out here, because he would be furious if he woke up to find her in a bed other than his.

But she still wants to be close by, ready to draw a hand across his forehead if he stirs, ready to stroke his nightmares out of his head. At least for a little while.

Nothing she ever does to him has any permanence. Nothing can last. Not even down here, preserved and embalmed in this tomb.

Right now she likes sitting like this, in the dark. When he sleeps he retreats from underneath her skin, gives her space to commune in the language of her own body. It's whispering straight into her head.

Soon he will know. He owns all of her secrets by now.

Her head whips around as she hears the generator stutter, make noises that march like death. Then it grinds to a stop completely. Her fingers clench around her glass of water as she stares into the darkness, straight at the silence of her end.

...and the hellish beast inside the storeroom heaves back to life with strangled gurgles, stumbles, wretches, then purrs much like a wounded, dying cat.

Its apnoea is becoming ever more frightening, and there is nothing she can do.

Absently she picks shards of glass out of her bleeding hand, and resolves to spare him knowing about this.

"Do you know, I do remember something I read once. That I liked."

She'd been asleep, and is shaking dreams and confusion out of her hair. Their fitful habit of picking up strands of conversations interrupted long ago has honed her though, and soon she recalls what they spoke of, months past.

She reaches out to pull him closer, to kiss him, to drag her hands along his sides, and she doesn't want to think about how tender this feels. How she needs it.

"Tell me."

His eyes are far away as he tries to remember the words right, and he absently strokes across her back and down her buttocks, traces out strange maelstroms on her skin. Then he starts, his voice sibilant and jagged; a preacher's voice, a lawyer's voice.

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."

He looks at her, smiles a crooked half-smile.

"I can't remember the book. Just that I loved it, once."

The words are beautiful, as is his voice. Would that he had used his voice for good, back when there was a world, instead of twisted sermons, instead of insidious, meticulous destruction.

"Well," she says, suddenly needing to be cruel, "I'd say those bombs burned every fucking map line off the surface of the world. I guess you got what you wanted."

He's not one to back down, never was, and he grins. His voice is quiet and soft and cold, like snowfall.

"Quite, Deputy. If only we would live long enough to make this particular apocalypse count."

She can see it in his eyes, how he mourns not properly enjoying the fires, how he regrets not being able to safely play in the ashes left of the world. He ought to be the lord of his bunker, a shining, tainted herald of a new world, but he is here with her instead.

"How do you stand living inside your skin, your head?" she whispers, her voice smaller than his heart.

"I don't," he answers easily, face lined with glee and grief. "I leak, I seep through. First Joseph tried patching the cracks with religion. Now there's you, a broken idolatress. Amusing, don't you think?"

He doesn't deserve her sorrow. He has always been beyond absolution.

"Fuck you. Fuck you. Come inside me," she whispers. "Leave something that matters behind, for once. Make me your country, draw your maps on me."

She draws hers on him, with her nails into his back as he burns her clean to the ground.

The air is so much worse. It's funeral air, crypt air, I swear I can smell rotting lilies at night. He's noticed now too, how the generator is just barely alive.

At night, when he thinks I sleep, he whispers prayers straight into my ear. They might as well be funeral hymns. Except he needn't bother, because that fucking generator is doing it for him, choking on our requiem.

I'm surprised how little I want to die. There's the seed of something to live for now. And there's him. Perhaps he is animating me. Perhaps I am animating him in turn, because we both burn so bright when we touch.

But we won't burn long down here. There can be no fire without air.

The food is almost completely gone. The generator stopped for good earlier that morning, and now everything is lit with candlelight and dread.

They don't say anything; they don't really need to by now, not when they read each other so well by gesture and flash of eye and tightly restrained wrath.

Instead they quietly gather together what food they have left, roll up blankets, pack what could be useful out there.

"In the morning," he says, and she nods, once.

Then he takes her to bed.

If ever there would be a time for him to be gentle, this would be it. But he isn't, and she doesn't think she could bear it if he was.

Instead he seems intent on drawing on her, making patterns on her, and she lets him, in case there'll be nothing else of him left. Let him leave his manifesto, let him draw up his testament. Let him use her as his stone tablet, let him etch his commandments onto her.

It hurts better than anything she has ever felt.

Then he uses his tongue on her, soothes and gentles at the cuts, slides along the severe landscape of her. Stops at her belly, lingers, murmurs secrets into the skin there, speaks far too quietly for her to hear. For a second she freezes, fears, but he moves on, up to her breasts, her collarbone, her face. Kisses oaths and blood onto her lips, slips it all into her mouth. Drops offerings onto her tongue.

Then back down again. He makes this last, he makes her burn like a sermon, like Hell.

Just before he finally slides home, when he's got her begging and threatening to kill him dead, he speaks quietly into her suprasternal notch.

"Do you know, I think I could always read you now, even in the dark. Your skin is braille."

She likes that.

Then she lies splayed and soft on her back, looks quietly at him as he sits up and pulls her lower body high into his lap, hands large and hard on her hips. As he pushes inside her, as he can't tear his eyes away from where she swallows him whole. How he reemerges, glistening with them both, how he disappears back inside again. Her thighs clutching his waist, her hands clawing at her hair. Her blood flowing downward into her head when she is prostate and begging like this, making colours brighter and his raspy breaths echo like a cathedral choir in her ears. His back straight and proud, his neck thrown back. She paints a picture of all this, tucks it safely in her mind, so that she can take it out and look at it always.

"You are so very many things, aren't you? And all of them mine."

"Yes," she says. "Yes."

Then the church worship is over and it's just ferociousness and desperation, nothing artful, nothing refined. She doesn't think he's ever worked her body as hard as this. He's everywhere, breathes fire and want into her mouth, strokes possession down her back and sides, and thrusts so hard inside her that she will never stop feeling him deep in there. He pulls in and out of her soul, and she can feel the edges of it becoming threadbare and tattered with his movements, so ripped that it finally intertwines with his.

She wonders if she feels everything more because there is hardly any air.

It looks like he wants to tell her things afterwards, looks like secrets and confessions and questions are tumbling and sticking on his tongue.

But for once he doesn't say a thing. He holds her instead, one hand stroking slow, thoughtful patterns across her belly.

It's a blessing, really, this lack of words.

She sleeps without dreams.

They stand ready at the base of the ladder, right below the hatch.

He's in his coat, knife stuck into the waistband of his jeans. She's in a blanket crudely altered into a cloak. Old parachute cord ties them together by their waists, should it be hell out there, should it be ash storms and nothing else.

He finds her eyes, makes an elaborate gesture, and with it cleaves a fissure into her heart.

"After you."

She climbs up the ladder with him close behind. She stops right below the hatch, and he climbs onto the rung just below hers, envelops her with his arms, his hands next to hers where she clutches the top step. Breathes fire and pain and longing onto the back of her neck, moves her hair with his want.

And for the first time since this all started, since she came to Hope County and had everything stripped from her bones...she weeps. She can feel a tear running down her cheek, and it's such alien sensation, such cursed, coveted wetness.

She turns to face him, and oh the look in his eyes. It's the same look as when he's buried at his very deepest inside her, right up to the hilt.

"Do you know, Deputy, this might well be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

Slowly, so slowly, he reaches out, takes her tear on the tip of his finger, then draws the finger between his lips, gorges on her, eyes hooded as he meets her gaze.

Oh, all those times now they've shared an entire life in just a single glance.

"John, I..."

He shushes her with a finger against her lips, smiles a smile that the Devil would dance around.

"Not now."

He leans half forward as if he means to kiss her, and then appears to change his mind. Perhaps it would feel too final.

Instead he takes her hand.

"Are you ready, Deputy?"

She smiles at him, and she thinks that smile might be the bravest gift she's ever given anyone. Pity that he hardly deserves it.

"Yes," she says, and holds his hand far too hard, thinks that it would hurt more to lose him than it would to lose herself.

Fucking bastard.

Her body is as painted as his now, though, secret spells and rituals from their life in this place. She will always have those lines.

He reaches around her, opens the hatch, and they climb outside together.

Perhaps I loved him because there was no one else to love, and humans were not made to subsist on only hate. Perhaps I loved him because, underneath all our ugliness and among it too, we are much alike. Perhaps I loved him because he would accept nothing less. Perhaps I loved him because he forced it out of me, as he forced so much else.

But love him I did, as much as I was able, damaged and cruel and irredeemable and everything else that he is.

I'll see him again someday. I will.

I know I will.

He would not have it any other way.

Nor would I.

Deputy,

I'm writing this on the very last page in the hope that you won't see it for a good while. Yes, I've known about this little creative writing endeavour of yours all along. Yes, you are truly abysmal at hiding things. Did you really think I wouldn't know? I know every inch of you, inside and out. I've been everywhere, Deputy. You wear my marks on your body, you wear them on your soul.

And you are beautiful that way.

You should know, for the sake of confession, that you've left some on your very own marks on me. I wear them proudly, along with all the rest of my scars.

You sleep now, and tomorrow we leave this place. I haven't a clue what might transpire. We might die immediately, we might die after a while. We might live. We might lose each other, never to meet again.

Whatever happens, know that I am happy and content in the knowledge that you were only ever mine.

I've drawn my map on you. Your soul is my country now.

John

The "As I was going up the stairs..." poem is by William Hughes Mearns, though I used not his original version but the one used in 'Identity' (awesome, little-seen movie)

The "Across the mouth right in the middle of a word..." text is a song lyric, by Joakim Berg. I've done it grave injustice by translating it from Swedish, because Berg's prose is more or less untranslatable, such is his genius and his peculiar, otherworldly grasp of the Swedish language. I am a filthy philistine for even attempting it. But there you have it.

The passage that John recites to the Deputy is from Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, one of the most extraordinary books ever written. Its prose will cut straight into your heart, but you won't mind, because it's so incredibly beautiful. The heart, as Ondaatje says, is an organ of fire.