Chapter 58
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
MASON
Four Weeks After
Micah’s house was dark. I didn’t turn on any lights.
My feet carried me upstairs on autopilot, my soul craving some way of being close to him. I’ll never be close with him again. I’ll never be able to talk to him. I’ll never touch him again. For now, I would touch steel and pray that it got me close enough to keep from breaking tonight.
I pulled open the drawer in his bathroom, took out the box of razor blades, then sat down on the floor. The lump in my throat grew, my eyes stinging, sobs getting caught in my chest as I tried to swallow them down. Fuck.
Kill.
There wasn’t hesitation in my hands as I took out a blade and made a single clean cut down the center of my forearm, then did the same thing on my other arm.
Blood and ichor spilled over my skin, warm and thick.
The pain was there, searing through my nerves, but too far below the surface for me to hold as tight as I wanted to.
Nothing would ever hurt as badly as watching his body burn.
But if I didn’t focus my eyes, I could almost pretend my arms were his arms.
These lacerations were carved by his careful hands.
He was here, with me, in this dark bathroom. Sitting on the floor, not speaking because he didn’t like to speak about the things that hurt him, but still here.
Any rational person would think it’d been the other way around, that I’d been the one to put Micah onto the high of pain, but that wasn’t the truth.
Most angels that thought about Thrausians as danger-seeking also subconsciously thought of how it felt to suffocate, and thought we were chasing pain, but we weren’t.
Suffocation wasn’t pain for me. It was ecstasy.
It didn’t hurt at all. Drowning myself was a hedonistic act.
I’d never chased pain until Micah. Even in Heaven, he spilled his own blood.
It was hard to describe how incredibly rare an act that was.
I’d never heard of an angel purposefully hurting themselves the way he did, but there was so much beauty in it.
I never knew exactly why. It was just a need for him, a way to spill his thoughts from his mind without having to speak them aloud to anyone.
On Earth, more angels developed this weird relationship with pain, but Micah had always been like this.
I don’t think he really knew why, but it’d always been there. A way for him to get out of his head when he needed it.
I could remember the first time I’d seen it like it was yesterday. He was so beautiful, slicing the same line into his thigh over and over, both of us watching it heal. He did it to me, too. I understood then only a small amount why he liked it. I understood completely now.
Every single night since he’d died, I dreamed about him.
It was agony.
Dreams that he’d never actually died, that this had all been some misunderstanding, and I was so relieved to learn it wasn’t true. Dreams where I knew he was going to die, and I wanted to stop it, but I could never get there in time. Dreams of us still in Heaven.
He consumed every inch of my unconscious mind.
I hated it.
I needed it.
My dreams were the only place I still saw his face—and only ever his face. But sometimes it was replaced with the last image of his face I’d seen. The fire consuming him.
Red flames stealing him from me.
I waited until my skin closed itself most of the way, then sliced it open again. Healing was a lot slower on Earth than it was in Heaven. The pain lasted longer here. But never quite long enough.
━━━━━
“You have to help me,” Dakota sobbed, tears pouring down her face, her hands grabbing my biceps. Wild desperation shone in her glassy eyes as her fingernails dug into my skin. She was shaking.
“I can’t help you, Dakota.”
The fractures, the instability, were too much for her. I almost wanted her to quit trying to keep me together, to just let me fucking die. But every time my mind broke itself apart, my desire to self destruct swallowing all rational thought, Dakota was there pulling me out. She wouldn’t let go.
She wouldn’t stop trying.
I hated it.
I couldn’t let her spend the rest of her life trying to save me.
“You have to try!” she cried. I looked away from her, my throat getting tight. “Mason, please. You have to try. I can’t do this on my own. I need you! I’m not going to be okay without you!”
“How the fuck do you still not understand?” I snapped, my eyes shooting back to hers.
“This isn’t something I can get over, something I can learn to control, something that we can work through.
There is something physically fucking wrong in my brain and neither of us will ever be able to fix it! Ever.”
She swallowed, visibly afraid of me now. Her lower lip wobbled but she didn’t let go of my arms. I couldn’t stand the defiant look in her eye. It made me fucking sick to my stomach, because somehow, she still thought I was fixable.
I stepped away, out of her grasp.
Everyone I’d ever known in my entire life hated this part of me, but what they failed to realize was that I hated it a million times more.
When the darkness in my brain started showing up for the first time when I was a child, I wanted to crack open my skull and carve it out with a blade.
I’d been so scared of it, so terrified of what was coming.
The sickness came from inside of me.
There was no traumatic event causing it.
Nothing I could learn to deal with.
No way to cure it.
This instability was wrapped into every strand of my DNA, the darkness ingrained deep in all the grooves of my brain.
And that was the horrific, unavoidable truth.
Micah tried to help me outrun it, outlive the death I should’ve died a long time ago, but he was gone now.
Dakota wasn’t as strong as he was, and I still broke him in the end. She didn’t stand a chance.
Every minute she stayed beside me, I became another thing she had to survive.
Forever.
I can’t keep existing like this.
“Do you get that?” I questioned harshly, starting to pace.
My skin was too tight.
I couldn’t think straight.
Every wall seemed to lean closer.
Dakota was silent, her eyes closed and her chest spasming on breaths that never fully came.
My apartment was still a disaster around us, shattered glass lining the edges of the hallway, broken furniture sitting useless, jagged lines of smoke burned into the walls.
Neither of us cleaned it. Neither of us got new furniture.
Neither of us could do anything to keep our lives on some sort of track.
Dakota was supposed to be going to classes now, but I wasn’t sure if she’d been doing that.
I should’ve encouraged her, helped her. But I didn’t want to.
I wanted to go back in time and sacrifice myself instead of watching him do it. That was the only thing I wanted to do.
She won’t ever stop trying to save me.
I know exactly where that leads.
Because Micah spent years trying to save me, too.
My pulse climbed so high it hurt.
I needed out.
I can’t do this anymore.
Not this conversation.
Not this apartment.
Not this grief.
Not this body.
Not myself.
“I’m leaving,” I said. Dakota started crying harder again, even though she’d known this was coming. We didn’t spend much time together now. Not meaningful time, anyway.
All I did was leave.
All she did was stay, waiting for me to come back.
I knew it hurt her.
But I needed a way out.
I left without another word, numb to everything except the void in my chest where Micah should’ve been.
I got in my car, shifting into gear and pulling out onto the road too fast. My brain didn’t need to send conscious signals to my body telling me where to go. There was only one place that’d ever called me.
Wheels crunched over gravel when I arrived, the endless ocean in front of me, the horizon a blur between sea and sky.
It looked exactly the same as it had the day I first opened my eyes on Earth.
I was the only thing that had changed.
When I’d seen Micah for the first time in two decades, he’d told me I hadn’t changed.
I’d believed him then. It’d been true then.
But now, I was nothing more than a shell concealing a storm stronger than I even wanted to attempt navigating anymore, a void of grief and suffering.
I’d thought Micah leaving me was the greatest pain I would ever feel.
It wasn’t.
The pain of his death was unfathomable in a way I hadn’t been prepared for.
I got out of the car.
The wind carried the sharp scent of salt and wet stone, filling my lungs with its familiarity.
It was unmoved by the grief I’d brought here.
The water reflected almost no light beneath the overcast sky.
Every shade between black and silver painted the waves, all of it tinted with blue.
Gunmetal. Steel. The shade of Micah’s irises.
Everything existed in the rolling waves, the crashing foam on the beach, the endless pull of the tide.
I left my shoes and shirt in the car, then allowed my wings to carry me above the tumultuous surface. No one was watching. No one was here to witness my agony.
Once, I’d struck the ocean hard enough to split it around me. Plummeting out of a storming sky, my hand slick with rain, his hand slipping away from mine, wind tearing us apart, dropping me into the waves and him into the trees.
This time, I slipped beneath the surface without so much as a ripple.
I’d carried this ocean inside of me for decades, and I would return to it now.
Just for a little while.
Just until I can feel something other than hurt.
Micah needed blades, needed pain, but I needed this.
I dove down beneath the waves into the frigid water, pulling with my arms and kicking with my feet, going down. Deeper and deeper. Disappearing into the depths, leaving the broken surface behind.
Invisible currents surrounded me, wrapping my body with pressure, threading through my feathers, pressing in against my skull and my lungs, but I ignored them. I just crawled deeper.
The farther I sank, the quieter everything became. The crash and roar of the waves dissolved into a heavy stillness that settled over me like a weighted blanket, a sea-soaked weight clinging to my soul.
I let myself drift the last several feet.
My feet found the seafloor with a muted thud, stirring clouds of sand that curled lazily around my ankles before disappearing into the dark.
I folded myself onto the ocean floor, allowing the pressure to settle over every aching inch of me, immense enough that it felt almost comforting.
There was nothing else here. Just the endless weight of the sea bearing down on my body.
All the air had been pushed out of my lungs, and I laid at the bottom of the ocean, where light didn’t reach me at all.
I could stay here.
It was the first time since Micah died that the world had been quiet enough for me to hear my own heart, beating slowly.
Maybe I stay here until it stops completely.
I wondered whether Micah had felt this alone.
That thought hollowed me out.
He’d died by himself while Dakota fought for her life in the sky, and I carried her up to Heaven. He’d burned his own body so I wouldn’t have to. I wished he hadn’t. I wished I’d gotten a chance to see him one last time, even in the form of a corpse.
In my head, I was counting. Counting the minutes and counting the seconds. Keeping track of how long I’d been down here. Maybe to keep myself on the safe side of my limit.
Maybe to push past it.
The first time I’d crashed into this ocean, I’d resurfaced right away, my muscles aching and my thoughts panicked. I’d needed to make sure he was okay.
This time, I wasn’t sure I was meant to resurface.
I’d let the ocean keep me this time.
Maybe that should’ve happened at the start. Then I would’ve never fucked all this up.
I kept counting minutes as the darkness swallowed whatever was left of me.
Five minutes turned to ten. Ten turned to fifteen.
And then twenty.
Twenty one minutes and fifty two seconds…
Fifty three…
Fifty four…
Fifty five…
I was far too deep to ever make it back to the surface before my time ran out.
For most of my life, I’d treated this number like scripture. The only certainty I’d ever been given inside a body that refused to tell me when it was dying, a body that craved my final moments.
This number, scribbled by Micah onto a scrap of paper long before either of us had known what we would become.
The seconds kept ticking on.
Twenty one minutes and fifty nine seconds…