Act III Scene XXIV #2
“You were starving,” he says with a humorless laugh. “And subsequently poisoned by that mark, which just sped up the progression and probably damaged the bond between your role and—” He doesn’t say it. Between my role and the monster that plays it.
Sil’s most resilient Player. I frown at the thought.
“And then you paraded into the Playhouse, deathly unwell from so many years away, and all you wanted to do was leave again. You didn’t know half your lines.
Then, for you to insist on keeping that mark!
” He throws his head back, looking exhausted, and I remember all his desperate attempts—not to train me for a competition but to bring me back to myself.
While I fought him every step of the way.
“And when you finally did let me burn it off, you just hated me more.” He raises an eyebrow at me. “I thought we were making progress until you showed up to my dressing room with that arrow aimed at me. Which you were not supposed to do, by the way.”
I grin back. There’s something oddly comforting about it, a small relief. That even if so much of it was supposed to be scripted, we weren’t. Jude leans back onto the ledge, the dimming torchlight casting his hair in summery shades of auburn, crosses his arms, and finally seems to relax a little.
“Why didn’t you just tell me by that point?” I ask, leaning onto the ledge beside him until our sleeves brush.
He laughs weakly. “I almost did. About a hundred times, I wanted to tell you. But a fourth wall can’t be unbroken.
Once we know, we know.” He adjusts his rings, like he’s looking for a distraction from the thought.
“You taking me out of the Playhouse was never supposed to happen. It pushed me so far off script, my memory started slipping out of place. My costume. Everything.”
Dread slices through my chest as I realize what I did.
He hadn’t even been able to recall my name.
“I’m sorry,” I say, not sure that I am. My favorite parts of Jude have never been planned moments in a crafted storyline.
They’ve been whispered words in the dark, stolen looks backstage between scenes, sly attempts to outsmart each other in the margins of a script we were given no choice in.
I’m tired of the two of us being bound to one man’s grand narrative. I imagine the entire world is.
But as I notice a new nick splitting between my thumb and index finger, a rip in my costume and a consequence of this conversation—I’m not sure we have much choice.
Jude’s eyes follow mine to the damage, softening.
“It’s horrible knowing, Riven. It’s lonely, not to mention dangerous.
” He reaches for my hand where it rests on the ledge, examining delicate skin where my costume has begun to fray like he’s afraid of making it worse.
“I didn’t want this to happen to you, too.
” With a sort of carefulness entirely at odds with the character he should be playing right now, he presses my palm to his chest, and I can’t help but note the familiar rhythm of his heart, a pulse that sounds more like music when I think about it.
He pushes up my sleeve, the warmth of his fingers lingering where the flesh has already begun to peel away. His face falls. “And it is anyway.”
Fear gathers in a lump in my throat, but I swallow it down. He’s right. It has. Even if the worst of the damage can be hidden behind a high neckline, the deterioration has started to spread in small, thin scrapes. I doubt Sil will always be able to fix this with makeup.
At some point, Riven—everything I am—will fade to make way for someone new.
Some old part of me wants to stomp and scream that it isn’t fair. But I think I’ve done enough screaming into the void about unfairness to last me into the next lifetime. Maybe sometimes things are just unfair.
That doesn’t mean I’m done fighting.
I draw back, and words cut loose from my mouth that I’m definitely not supposed to say, but I mean all the same. “I don’t want you to go,” I utter, and mean it, all my anger crumbling.
Jude plucks a piece of ivy from the column beside us, absently rubs it between his index finger and thumb. “I’m not going anywhere. You’ll see me again, with a new face. A new name. A new role. And I’m sure you’ll drive me to my wits’ end then, too.”
A new piece of ivy grows in place of the broken one almost immediately, like the old leaf was never there.
“I won’t know it’s you,” I counter, and I hate the way my heart lurches when I speak. His fourth wall will be rebuilt. And after Riven, mine will be, too. Still in this cycle, still in this cage. “And you won’t know.”
He holds the ivy over the ledge, and we watch it float down together.
“I’d know you with any face and by any name, Riven.
” His golden eyes meet mine, and his words wrap around me like a familiar blanket.
“Any voice, no matter how cutting. Through any gaze, no matter how loathing. I would know your touch through a closed curtain and the sound of your step when the last spotlight has gone out. I have known you at the beginning of each performance, and I will bow with you at the brink of every finale.”
Finale. That word seems to wedge itself between us, a rift driving us further apart.
I pull in a breath, an easier one, lighter, and lift my gaze from where it’s stalled on the flecks of gold peeling off my hands—from flesh that’s ephemeral—to watch the light in Jude’s eyes, which isn’t.
He and I may be sewn with the same eternal thread, but it still comes unraveled at the end of each show. We’re running out of time.
A thought hovers at the edges of my mind—that slash of lipstick written across Jude’s mirror. I thought a fan must have written it. If not in this one, then in the next.
Not a fan’s handwriting, and not his. Mine. I grin. “If not in this one—”
“Then in the next. I do love it when you leave me notes,” he confirms with a smile.
“And I say that calls for a toast!” Jude wanders across the terrace to the table, full with our abandoned chalices.
He plucks two and fills them with what’s left of the wine, returning with less than half a cup between us and shoving the greater of the two into my hands.
“To the godsdamned finale?” he asks, raising his cup, a glimmer in his eye.
That word again. Finale. It rings melancholy in the air as I meet his gaze and raise my chalice. “To the godsdamned finale.”