He doesn’t know that she’s there.
He has no way of knowing. He cannot See like she could. Can. He can feel, she thinks, sometimes. Because he will straighten like he did, when she brushed her fingers over the crest of his rounded cheek. Grow into the touch, like a sunflower stretches into the light. Now he doesn’t move, but she thumbs over those dotted freckles anyway, blurring the line between where they touch.
“It’s not fair that you left me behind,” Will says, and it is the deadness of his voice more than the content of his sentence that makes her cry. “I hate it here.”
“You don’t,” Cass whispers, futilely. Even if he could hear her, the words don’t come from her torn throat. They get drowned in the blood, dripping down her neck. “You don’t, asteraki. You don’t.”
He doesn’t say more but there are goosebumps where her phantom fingers press — try to press — into him. His eyes are dull. She remembers Diana comparing them to electricity, once. The color wasn’t right — Will’s eyes are a darker blue, and anyway electricity is yellow if it is anything at all — but all of his buzzes, like live wire, blurring with the force if his vibrating, and his bright round eyes most of all. They are hard to look at. Dizzying. Like the churn of your stomach in the second hour of a road trip, when the speed of the car really settles in your animal body. Too much, almost.
His eyes are blue like mold, now. Like something that has been still so long it’s been left to rot.
“Get up,” she whispers, stained lips brushing at the final sound. The air does not move. No breath follows. “C’mon, babydoll.” She swallows her sob. “Like Leia, when she lost Han. More to do. More to do.”
In a good world this would work. In a good word Will’s lips would quirk, as they always do, as they always did, when they indulged him. When they begrudgingly admitted to paying attention to the dozens of times he talked, to the endless time he dragged them through a screening. When they sighed and nodded to show their understanding, when they made a reference. He would light up especially, brighter than his worn, store-brand sneakers, if someone made the comparison, between him and the brave, diplomat princess. The same awed glow that would come into his eyes every time she shouted on screen, words her greatest strength and impulsive action her shining asset, making each of them melt as he watched them train, watched them heal. Will was fascinated by heroism, when he was little. Worked and worked towards it.
Heroics are all about hope, he would say, if anyone let him. That’s at the center of it. That’s the whole point, that’s the reason the Empire couldn’t last. They tried to crush hope.
“Pandora,” Cass whispers, or prays. She drifts so she is wrapped around her baby brother, clutching until her freezing limbs sink into him, until he shivers. Blinks. “Pandora, lady of Hope.” She chokes on her words. She doesn’t know how to ask. She doesn’t know how she would begin to ask for it — for the tiny whisper at the bottom of an endless jar, after everything else has been flattened around you. Burned. Shattered. Drowned, buried.
She would not have hope, twelve bodies later.
Cass swallows.
She would not even try.
“You have to,” she says harshly, sound echoing in her mind. She squeezes, and this time Will stirs, pulls slightly, drowsily, off the wall. “You — don’t get an option. I mean it, Will Solace. Get up.”
She had five years with him and she was never mean one time. Not snapping, not scolding, not even pushing. Will didn’t respond to it, she knew, and besides that she could never bear it. Never bear to be her sharp, drawling mother. Never bear to watch him flinch at Mr. D’s mutterings. Will is soft, like desert clay. Cracking. He is molded easily, but heat makes him shatter. She could never bear to raise her voice at him, to watch the flood in those electric eyes.
But the desperation rises up like anger, and she was twenty-three, when she died. Not even.
She never recovered all the pieces of her.
She pulls away and he shivers again and she forces herself in front of him, squeezes his soft chin. He inhales like he feels it, the sharp coldness of her fingers, and his eyes search wildly, side to side, and she squeezes harder, yells louder.
“I will never forgive you!” And her own voice cracks, around the crevice of her throat. “If you — let this kill you! If you join us! Do you hear me, Will, I mean it! Never!”
“I can’t do this by myself,” he says desperately, croaking, and he could not and can not See but he is not stupid and Cass is not gentle, not anymore. Not after five years of fracturing. Not after bleeding out on arena sands, roaring crowds chanting for her mangled flesh. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t —”
“You will.” The lights of the cabin surge, and she does not know which one of them is at fault, does not care. “You Will, you, Will, you have the will. The Will.”
She is descending, like she does, like she did, when her eyes flashed green, when her bones began to shake. Words bubble out of her and spill from her teeth and clash into each other, twisting into air, into molecules, into jumbled smokey masses of nothing, of everything, of burning books and whispering tree branches. She no longer knows what she means. Will is crying. But he is bowing his head into her, and he can’t feel her, not really, and she can’t touch him, not really, but she drifts up, anyway, and rests his forehead on her sternum, sliding her hands through his hair. And she scratches at his scalp, as she used to, and he weeps into her torn shirt.
“I’m scared,” he admits, voice very, very small, and she folds forward on reflex, pressing her lips to the back of his skull. Bent over him, almost, like the Virgin over the Son’s body. Like Pluto’s chest pressed to Proserpina’s struggling shoulders. Like the Father and Adam, reaching across heavens. She strains for him.
“Do it scared,” she whispers, and hears her voice, this time, the raspy prophecy voice that burst out of her sometimes. “By the skies, son of Sun, persist.”
He stills under her hold. Breathes, for a while. The sky turns gold, turns red. The empty cabin cools.
“Okay,” he whispers, eventually. His tightening hands drift through her, and she shivers. “Okay.”
She swallows, and squeezes until the air absorbs the last of her.
