#how the time flies...

you push your mouth against mine i want to tell you you have come to the wounded for healing.

You don't know. 

You don't know any of it.

The pain lodged in the marrow of her bones. The sharp current of those jagged blue veins, like runes carved into her skin. The smoke that rose from her flesh that night. She wants to ask, do you know what it is to lie in your own blood like something already dead? Do you know what it feels like to know your body will never be familiar to you again?  

She can still taste it: the sound of the explosion. Like a burst of acrid flavor. Senses melted into senses. Sound became a bullet. Flesh became paper, to be burned into embers. The man who was and was not Vander, a mass of something irreversible. She could remember the cigarette she was smoking—the last thing her left hand ever held. The images ripple and fade into each other in her memory now, like blood in water: staining, coloring, filth. The cigarette, the ashes. The ashes from the cigarette, the ash coating her face. The blood from Vander's body, the blood pounding in her head. Fragments of bone. A broken tooth, skittering across the floor and stopping at her feet. Time pools. Time trembles. Time drops. Five, four, three, two, one. 

Bam. 

The beautiful arc her body made. She had always prided herself on her agility. As a child, her mother said her long legs were made for dancing. She would dance with her mother around the kitchen table, her little brother clapping, keeping time. The smoke rising to the ceiling from her father's cigar. Smoke rising in the warehouse from the forges. Clap, clap, clap, keep to the tempo, clap, clap, clap, watch your feet, clap, clap, clap, chin up Sevika, clap, clap, clap, nicely done. 

Pushing Silco to the side. He gives way like a reed. She is something made of air. She is strong and formless like the wind. She will stop the world with her arm. She is invincible. 

And then the split-second terror. The moment she realized—too late—what she had done. Her arm outstretched, her body in space, watching the light hurtle towards her. The anticipation of pain before the moment of impact. The nerve-tight recoil of her limbs. Sevika does not feel afraid. Never did, never will. But the heartbeat before it hit her. The moment between the rise and fall. That terror will stay at the center of her memory, an insect of weakness trapped in amber. 

(Does she remember it really? Or is her mind playing tricks again?)

No; she won't tell you any of it. Not the blinding light that dazzled her eyes and made her see dancing spots for weeks after. Not the crash in her brain as she hit the ground, as if the explosion had somehow been reborn in her head. Not the scorching of her arm, a pain so unthinkable she could only stand apart from it, bewildered, dazed, looking on as if it were all happening to someone else. Not the fusing of her skin, the crackle of hot energy, the sick foreign smell of burned flesh. 

And she won't tell you about the rain. She won't tell you why she hates the smell of petrichor. She won't tell you why it turns her stomach when she hears the sound of thunder. She will keep these things beneath the surface of her skin, like the current of Hextech, that hated electricity in her blood. 

like you, i am imperfect flesh, and my experience of violence has made me no less likely to harm you.

You breathe next to her. 

Sevika touches you, softly. She does this sometimes when she wakes up in the middle of the night to find you asleep, your body barely touching hers, your hand slightly outstretched as if reaching for her unconsciously—as if you're scared she'll slip away. She touches your throat to feel your pulse, and listens to you breathe in and out. 

Now her fingers ghost over your face. You look out of place in her bed, like a creature from another world, or another time. You are fragile yet unbreakable. Your cheekbone is like the curve of an empty clay bowl. She imagines that with the slightest pressure there would be a blossoming of cracks spreading out from the indent of her fingertip, your skin might fragment itself and fade away, to reveal—what? 

These days, you ask her about pain. As if the riddles of her body are questions you need to answer for her. As if by being conscious of her flesh and blood you are saving yourself from oblivion. It is as if you want to cocoon yourself in her, spill into her, wrap yourself in the muscle and sinew and make her new. If she knew how, she would let you in. 

But she is all teeth now. She is the memory of open wounds. 

When she commissioned her first limb she deliberately chose the harshest model in Smeech's shop. The one with an infinity of gears and strange tubes, the one with razor points for fingers. She wanted something that looked like how the absence felt. No sharp metal would ever replace the violence of her strength. 

But the arm can be a rebirth. At least, this is what she tells herself. To give up the flesh arm in exchange for the mech one—it is a worthy bargain, it is a death of her former self, it is a release of her past. She likes the sound it makes when it cleaves into human flesh. She likes the jolt of power it sends through her body. She likes the hissing of the hydraulic pumps as the Shimmer courses through the tubes. She likes to see the ghastly fear in her opponent's face when she rips off the cloak and reveals the metal claws. 

See? She wants to say, triumphant. The loss of her arm did not make her weak. It made her stronger than ever.  

And if she cannot protect the vulnerable, she can at least dispatch the dangerous.  

Silco talks of the base violence necessary for change. She believes it, clings to this last dogma, as a dying man clings to the fraying rope that keeps him from falling into the abyss. It is what keeps her going, day after day, fight after fight. It is what keeps her from letting her mother's face flash across her mind, the sick dread in the bottom of her heart when she thinks of how her mother might feel to see what her soft-spoken daughter has become. It is what keeps her desperate fears at bay, those snarling dogs at the edge of her consciousness: the fear of losing you, the same way she lost everyone else. She keeps going. It's all she can do. To stop is to die. 

She keeps going even when the dreams collapse, when she realizes that Silco had not wanted her to be the hand of Zaun; he had only wanted her to be the hand of Shimmer. She keeps going even when she realizes that he had commissioned Singed to enhance the arm, to make her a blazing symbol of violence—not, as she thought, to intimidate Topside; no. To intimidate the Undercity, to protect his own skin. His and Jinx's. That strange, thin-voiced girl, whose blue hair was constantly flicking at the corners of Sevika's vision, a test on her tight-strung patience. She keeps going even when she feels the Shimmer eroding her body, the come-down worse than the high, when her body aches so acutely she can barely stand, when the exhaustion burns through her as a flame burns through a cigarette.   

But she doesn't know what to do with the rage. This hopeless, blind rage when she fights, when she is sent out to silence Silco's opponents. She sees these thieves, these people on the margins just like herself, their pathetic precarious grips on life, and she hates them, she hates them, because they are alive and her brother is not; they are alive when her family has been torn apart, they are alive when so many have died. And she remembers a time when she would not have felt this blind hatred toward her own people. She knows her anger is misdirected, a hungry caged creature. And then she hates them even more. And then she hates herself. 

And at times she even hates you. When she takes your tenderness for charity, when your patience with her feels like condescension. She wants to see you shrink. The first time she closed the metal fingers around your throat, when the points of those claws pierced your clay skin and drew out the blood like tears from the eyes of Janna, she made sure to look into your face, to search for the fear. The hatred due to her. 

There was none. You stared back, and your eyes were pure. Even as they watered from the pain, even as the tears dropped down your face. 

When she released you at last you crumpled, but did not cower. 

Fear me, her heart wails. Fear me like everyone else does. Fear me, loathe me—this ugly survivor. 

The fight drains her, every day, but she won't admit it. Dream after dream, she slogs through them in the pitch-dark of night. Drinks to keep them at arm's reach. Dreams of the night on the bridge. Back when things were harder, but simpler. Back when everyone was on the same side. Back when she, Sevika, had been somebody whole. 

She remembers the bodies after the uprising. Body after body after body in the rubble. Vander told her to stay home. Vander said she wasn't ready. Vander thought she was just another dumb youth in love with glory, unable to handle the clean-up after the fight. 

To prove him wrong, she followed them out. 

Picked up the fragments of human remains. A hand blown off by an enforcer's gun. Bracelet still attached to the wrist. She watched as they carried out a man whose stomach had been split open, the coils of his intestines springing from the cavity of his core like stuffing from a pillow. She watched as an old woman, stooped with age and labor, wailed for hours over the body of her son. 

It was that night she knew. Rag dolls, that's what they were to the Topsiders. Nothing but voiceless objects to be blown apart and left scattered. 

Not even insects were trampled with such cruel completeness. 

Not even animals were slaughtered with such zeal. 

history is doomed to repeat itself colonization and rape are written on my bones.

It hurts most when you hold her. 

When the fights reach their climax, when you hit her back, and then she swings, and you swing, and the blood needs to dance across the wall before you grab her, before you pin her arm to her side, and you hold her so tight she forgets to inhale. 

She spits the words she knows will hurt you: she tells you you're nothing more than a dog, a bitch from the wrong side of the river, a child of a whore, a child of a beggar, a thing without a name; that you are alone and will always be alone, that you chase love like water through a sieve, that you are worthless, useless, weak, that you stay because you've got nowhere else to go. 

You hold her till she wears herself out, till she doesn't even have the strength to push you away. 

She feels her age most in these moments, with a sick sort of irony, a woman at the end of a lifetime of aimless violence, who still couldn't do anything more than punch the walls, who still let her anger fill her till she choked. It makes her half-mad with fury when she sees the numbness in your eyes. You know the fight will not end, that it will regrow and renew itself like a multiplication of malignant cells, and yet you are the age that she was when she still believed the fight could be won. 

Stand up, she wants to tell you. You want to live your life on your knees? You want to spit on the graves of the people who died fighting? 

But she knows it is not because you are scared that you don't fight. It is because you have been born into the broken-down tiredness that she sees bending the backs of people who walk the streets. It is because you have seen unspeakable things before you were even able to speak. It is because you are a child of the violence that she once worshipped. 

You had seen the enforcers beat your father in his own house. You had seen them drag your mother out by her hair. You had seen them snatch your brother from the streets, never to be seen again. You had seen them burst the head of your sister. You had seen them break into the house of your uncle. You had seen them storm the shop of your aunt. When they had raped the fissures of their precious metal and oils, when they had burned the records of Zaunite lives, when they had trampled Zaunite dreams under their feet, when they had ripped the children from their mothers' arms, when they had taken the air and clean water and sunlight, when there was nothing left to take, still they took. You had seen them, you had seen them, you had seen them. 

So you don't listen to Silco's talk of freedom. You don't listen to talk at all. 

You tell Sevika, there is nothing the big men can do; they were never able to do anything. They will take and take from the people and when the fire comes, they are the first to run. 

The thing, you tell her, is to look after ourselves and each other. 

There is no cause, Sevika. No cause. 

The fuck did I lose my arm for then? She hates how petty the words sound, how peevish, even to her. Tastes the selfishness like something spoiled in her mouth, sour and rank. The fuck did I lose my brother for? My mother? My father? Were they all for nothing? Their deaths mean nothing? Bodies dropped in the river never existed at all, did they? 

For all Sevika's strength, her height, her broad raw energy, it is you who scares her. When you speak of yourself with such casual, indifferent self-loathing it sends a chill down her spine. You do not think about death the way she does. You think your life is no more significant than the body of the cat in the alley you found one night, its starved flanks drenched with the rain, matted with blood. Sometimes she watches you move through the rooms and wonders if you know you are real, a human being of flesh and blood. Your voice sometimes drifts away from you, like you were born split in two parts that will never, never reconcile, as long as you live. 

She knows you have suffered unimaginable losses, too. You were never at the bridge, you had never witnessed the fights, but you were crushed beneath the Topside boots just the same as she. 

She can't figure you out—are you simply naïve? Or is there a hidden reserve of vernal strength deep inside you, far out of her reach, that you tap into time and time again to give you the courage to look into her wild, Shimmer-shot eyes—and still see her? To want to stay, to want to look after her? 

Sometimes as you hold her in the fights, in the peak of violence, in the barely-furnished room, as she shouts, as her tiredness begins to overwhelm her, you begin to call out her name, over and over. Sevika! Sevika! Sevika! Your voice rings like a nightmare in the air. Your voice brings her back. And then all she wants to do is fall on your shoulder and weep. She wants to close her eyes and not wake up. Asking forgiveness is a language she could never afford to learn to speak. 

Oh god, she thinks. Oh god, what have I become? I can't see myself anymore. 

i want to tell you i am trying. like you, i have come to the wounded for healing.

The first time she was in Stillwater they kept her in a windowless room for seventy-eight hours and beat her until she would tell them where Vander had hidden the rebels. 

She was twenty-four, young enough back then to make a martyr out of everyone's suffering but her own. 

It wasn't the bodily pain that remained with her, all these years. Physical pain is like the tide; it ebbs and flows and leaves its desperate dragging marks but with the rise of the moon it will smooth out into the steady march of being, she will bear the scars and feel the lingering ghosts of the assault on her body for the rest of her life, but violence is tangible; violence can be met with violence. 

No; it's the room that stays with her. That dark, cold, subterranean room. The silence so thick and oppressive it felt like being held underwater. Drowning would have been more merciful. She could hear every little sound, without a crack through which her consciousness could escape: the wet crunch of her broken teeth, the scrape of cement on her skin, the breath rattling in her throat. At one point all she could do was lie curled on the ground saying mercy mercy mercy over and over, not quite understanding her own words. 

And it is why she cannot bear to be touched now. And when those four concrete walls return to her at night, those gloved hands holding mallets, clubs, belts, chains—it makes her yell out, cry mercy in a voice you have never heard from her in the waking hours, a voice that makes you sick to the core, that makes you sob even as you try to stay calm for her. 

The city holds countless nightmares like these. The air is thick with ghosts and old screams. You can hear them as you stand at the edge of the roof of the apartment you share with Sevika and watch the ocean of neon lights, flickering and buzzing like the enormous wings of insects, emitting a hollow light to carve a space into the hole you live in. 

Sevika does not know this: you do fight. 

You, too, are filled with that old familiar rage. You, too, are stained by the spilled blood. Your body is lined with cracks where it had been broken to pieces and glued clumsily together again. You are never completely whole. There are pieces of you lost to mines, lost to bullet holes, lost to the gaps between prison bars. These gaping wounds in your people's flesh that the Topsiders call progress. 

When Sevika speaks to you, when she says your name, you feel like a shattered mirror. Every shard reflects a jagged side of you, and you don't know which one to show her. Every time she looks into your eyes it feels like she is searching you, trying to read you, and when you prove illegible you can see the hopelessness come over her. 

You want to tell her, I see you. It's enough. One day, you will see me too. 

I see you, and you are enough. I see you, and I can begin to see me too.

we are two scars pressed together, trying to give birth to new skins.

When a body is stripped of its humanity, what does the body become? 

When it is fragmented, tossed to the whims of gunpowder and fire and starvation and the signed orders of a distant Council high, high above the people's heads—is it still a body? Is it still human? 

There are times, between the fights and nightmares, brief clear moments—when Sevika can feel herself disappear. She will look at a shipment record to Topside, or a note from a Chem-Baron to Silco, or a map of the fissures: these ephemeral pieces of the enterprise, as fragile as a human skull. 

And she wonders if something in her has been lost, something vital, an organ of feeling. 

And she fears that it was not in fact stolen from her; she fears it is something she had let slip through her fingers. 

The question is, when was it lost? When did this part of her die? 

Had she died with her brother, the day she lost him in the cave-in? 

Or had she died with her mother, listening to the last words she said to her, the last time she heard her name on her mother's lips? 

Or had she died in the moment her father cursed at her for the first time, her father, who had always been a gentle man, whose soft voice she had inherited, having turned half-mad with desperation and grief, and cursed the day she was born? 

Or had she died in the interrogation room in Stillwater, had her soul fled through her lips as the enforcers' boots had torn her skin and crushed her ribs? 

Or perhaps it had been in the explosion, the blaze that took her arm, that threw her body off-center, as if with her flesh and blood limb she had also parted from her own essence. 

Or maybe… Maybe she is still here. Maybe she is not disappearing. There are other moments. Rarer moments. Like when she sits with you in the apartment and you have brought a record home from some second hand shop, and you put on the music and let the strange sounds fill the room. And you tell her to dance, and she says I don't dance. So you tell her to sing, and she says I don't sing. And the two of you will go back and forth while the record plays in the background, until you say something that makes her let out a short bark of a laugh. 

And it gives you the courage to tell her one of those unexpected sweet things she has learned to both dread and hope for. One time you said to her: you know, when you, when you smile like that… That's when I can see Zaun's future. 

She never knows what to say when you tell her things like this. She'll clench her jaw, turn her face away, grunt or change the subject. She doesn't want you to see how badly she wants to believe you. Not the nonsense about her smile—but the possibility of you seeing Zaun's future. That this dream she's been chasing, a dream equal parts vengeance and hope, is something you might be chasing too. Something you believe is within reach. 

Sometimes, she has a vision of a place she might share with you: a place where there is no smell of smoke and rain, no gloved hands and masked faces in a windowless room, no blue flash to blind her, no bodies torn apart by enforcers' bullets, no prisons to lock a person away forever, no blood on her hands, no broken bones, no hollow stomachs, no deadened eyes, no fear, no loathing, no unending fight. 

A place with open air, with open sea, with open light. 

She might find her brother in a room with the windows thrown open to let in the breeze, laughing, clapping, keeping time. 

She might find her mother with the lines at the corners of her beautiful eyes, whose face she begins to resemble more and more as she ages: Chin up Sevika. Nicely done. 

She might find her father the way she remembered him before everything was lost—he will not be sick, he will not be bent and broken from labor, he will not blame her for failing to protect her brother, he will not hate her for not dying in her mother's place. He will be smoking his favorite cigar in the room. 

And on the beach outside, where there is open air and open sea, where her body is hers, and no one can take it from her, she will meet you. She will call your name, and you will answer in a voice as clear and round as the moon.