space stag

in every life, he kills you. ii. in this one, his fists are twisted in the sheets, like even here he cannot let go of his body’s urge to fight against pleasure; his eyes, wild, violently blue, his mouth, chapped and busted, murmuring softly to you, pressing kisses to your jaw, eyelashes brushing your cheek, ”i’m sorry. don’t love me, please, please, don’t.”

it’s a prayer, to an unhearing god. you are found, years later, bleeding out, impossibly alone, impossibly alive, how are you alive, sobbing and trying to hold your body together;

“he left me like this,” you whisper, remembering when you were steady and wondering if you would ever stop shaking. “he left me to die,” and no one understands that he did this by trying to save your life.

iii.

in this one, he is calm, lying in your arms, bloodied, failing, looking at you with such love that the stars around you burn out and fizzle in the face of it.

you could not save him, despite everything, despite the red that drips from your lungs, and the bone-deep tiredness. you are quaking; he makes you shiver every time he looks at you, and your body knows this is the last time, and clenches down like it did every time he did something you would never forget.

he shows his teeth, stained red from where he swallowed your heart; from where you offered it to him on a silver platter.

not even that had saved him.

“i warned you,” he whispers, and laughs when your tears touch his face, wet and impermanent. “i warned you.”

he dies in your hold, and you shake hard enough that the life in you claws its way out, slowly,

it takes its time, weakening your bones and  silvering your hair on its way out.

iv. in this one, you only follow behind him, and watch him love the world, and he never knows the way you orbit him like a lost planet.

his hands are open but something holds you back from taking them; maybe it’s the destruction that follows him like a poltergeist, ripping things from him, laughing, how his shoulders settle with the weight of it.

you want to reach out, but his eyes are oversaturated skies, bloody and cobalt, and you are afraid that if you get too close, he will drag you down and drown you.

“don’t do it,” he tells you, a laugh in his voice, one night in lowlight, like it’s something to laugh about. his hand is tight around the bottle; a noose around a neck. “i’ll only break your heart,” and you cannot find it in yourself to laugh, snared; a rabbit in a trap.

you had tried so hard not to.

the rope tightens around your throat and choke back your words.

he never knows you love him, and somehow, this is the best and worst way he kills you. v.

the world has only ever known you as kind; but they did not know every you.

sometimes, when you lie alone in your bed (again) you wonder what he would think of you now. it’s been ten years. ten years, twelve weeks, fifteen hours, infinite nights of unwilling consciousness and tonight you are lying awake in bed and wondering if you will ever close your eyes and see anything besides the life that isn’t, the life that never would be.

you will never die first.

 the people look up starry-eyed and dumbstruck, and sees a figure ablaze. roaring gunfire, flawless precision. the earth in their chest, pumping like a heartbeat, and the rest of the worlds held tight to their back, casting their silhouette into planet-shaped wings, lifting them higher, higher, higher… gone. 

they don't hear the way their hero's bones creak with every broken-down motion to climb out of bed one more day. 

they don't taste the loneliness, in every movement, in every way a door closes behind them, in every soft twist of a fishtail reflected against the shadow of an empty bed.

they don't see the dead space.

how their savior looks out into the stars and screams and how no one can hear them, no matter how hard they cry no matter how much they want to unshoulder this burden, "take it from me," lays thick in a scar-roughened throat, but never pushes past, because no one can hear them anyway, but if they could… what if they could.

the human who loved the galaxy. the human who fought for us all. the human who should be dead. the human who sometimes wishes they were.

the people don't see the doubt, the way space doesn't offer an escape anymore, but a cage they willingly pace over and over because if they don't… what if they didn't. it's not even an option.

in monuments and great walls they will see the silhouette of an paragon, the shadow of a renegade soldier. a figure holding a weapon with eyes like death.

they will not see the quiet moments, the shared smiles and tears and blood. the way they knew how to cradle a cheek to comfort, to kiss, to speak, intently and quietly. how terrible their humor, how they couldn’t move gracefully if they weren’t killing.. how they loved. the freckle, just… there. just there.

they will become a legend to the people that come after them. after you. but you…you were there. and the years will pass, and the decades, and the people will forget, but you. 

 people will remember the way their last hope died to save them.

but you. you will remember how they lived. 

watching him die – kill himself – because he believes that it’s the best option, the only real option. and maybe it is. maybe saving the world is more important than the way you feel your heart drop in your chest. saving billions of innocents is more important than saving your guilty conscience – (for a short moment you wanted him to stay with you in a burning world if it meant just a few more seconds in his presence.) he would hate you for that so you just beg him to take you with him long after his body scatters into stars.

love is like this:

you are hanging off a bridge suspended on wires and across you is the world. across you is every stare from every mother, every helpless child, and you are a good man, so you are afraid because you love an atlas. one man is not worth the weight of the world. you know this is how your story ends.

love is like this:

not the absence of him, but the lack of presence: the way you turn to an empty room, a laugh dying on your mouth, and then dying altogether. the empty bed you shared for such a short time and somehow still smells like him. you should be hailed as heroes but the gold melts in your hands scalds your skin runs down your arms to every place he kissed you. a thousand medals are not as heavy as his corpse.

love is like this:

one man can weigh more than a galaxy. for every word that praises you you can only feel the oppressive lack of pride. they sing for you, every planet on every star, but it just sounds like you screaming his name. for every memorial there is a matching one in your chest; a drumline beat out by heartbeats, your ribcage a group of pallbearers, for every word he might’ve said.

love is like this:

in his situation you might’ve let the world die. maybe that makes you a bad man. maybe you loved him more. maybe that’s terrible. “don’t leave me behind,” but he does, and you have to be okay with that. “next time, wake me,” and he does, shrieking into consciousness with nightmares that carry his shadow.

you put his name on the wall and now you stay behind with him long after he burns out and leaves.

your hands shake and you call it weakness. trust is a faraway thing for anyone, even the ones you’ve known for years. you’re scared; of hurting, of being hurt.

he isn’t scared of anything, or so you thought once upon a time.

you’ve learned he’s scared of being alone, but nowadays what he seems the most scared of is losing you and that those aren’t necessarily the same things.

you don’t understand the way he clutches your hand the way he cradles your cheek looks at you like you didn’t rip him apart. like you somehow have power over him.

i’m sorry is a constant message in his hands, pressed against your own handing you water fingers sliding gently across yours.

you don’t understand and clearly he doesn’t either. but when he leans up, (he is shorter than you and you are always surprised) and cradles your face it doesn’t matter that you don’t understand. it doesn’t matter that there are things you’re both working out.

he presses his mouth to your damaged one and you have never been so afraid. but as the nervous moment leads to nervous laughter you think that maybe sometimes being afraid is okay.

as long as he’s with you, you know that being afraid and being in danger aren’t the same things anymore.

your white armor, streaked with a shade the color of his hair. white sheets, crisp and clean, with a pale body on top. white teeth, smiling at you, kind. he is so kind. the air around him, too, is white. he tells soft stories of warriors who came in peace. white knights, he says with respect and awe in his voice, and you know instinctively that he is not talking about you.

the world around you is black.

deception hangs around you like a cloak heavy, consuming, hot and burning. yet in he comes, barreling into your life, thoughtful and bright and slaying the night. he touches you, friendly, and then more, and the ink that has bathed you for years is for a brief moment dispelled. you are not a copy, because when he looks at you he sees a person. you want to protect him, and think perhaps that maybe the two of you are a pair, white and black, light and shadow. you fit together.

you have forgotten that the opposite of light isn’t shadow.

it is the dark.

and yet. he is not content to let you fall back into line and disappear. after all you’ve done after everything, he sees you, he reaches out and touches you, a burning white phantom, a ghost.

mine, he says, and pulls you into his brilliant light, and teaches you that black and white aren’t the only two colors.

blue eyes and a warm smile. hands like vices, powerful, strong, controlled. he moves like he's desperate, like maybe one too many times he's lost a lamb in the slaughter.

helpless, against nature too powerful for him to control, so he consumed it instead, made it a part of him. the sky is his eyes, thunderclouds and sunrise skies; his body is the form of trees, burnished brown and flecked with gold, fingertips the branches that reach up to stars that he can touch bring down to his tongue swallow and carry in his chest. it burns in him like a sun.

you're scared to touch him, this power and grace, so you don't.

you don't, until one day he looks at you like maybe he hasn't realized you've been wary. recognition, and salvation as he finds his disciple.

when he brings you to his sheets it's like a god revealing his pulse point. your fingers are the blade dragging over his body, teasing taunting his Heel, pressing enough to draw blood but not enough to hurt as he gasps against your mouth and closes his eyes, bares his throat.

ruin me, he whispers, and ruining is all he ever wanted all he ever thought he earned.

you don't ruin him. he is not just your god, after all, even if your worship is all he craves. instead you kiss his wrecked temple, a sacred place, and pray to him, one more time, one more time, for me.

no one knows the story of the lover of the savior and perhaps this is why; no one likes to believe that their gods have weaknesses but you watch him crucify himself desperate to protect not only the world but most of all most of all you.