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It was dark. It was dark and he was scared, bile in his throat and that too-tense-to-shake ache in his limbs. A blink of green, a pause, then a blink of green again. A phone charger – not over then, not the inner darkness in and down and forever. Just night. Just night, in his own bed, in his side of their bed, in their shitty flat in their shitty town, and under the mountain of blankets to his left was Heyoka, and if he shook her shoulder she would wake up and sleepily grumble at him for waking her up and everything would be all right.
He was already reaching out when he realised – he remembered – dead and cold and blood – he mustn’t wake her up. Not again, not like this. If things got too bad, she would wake up anyway. But if he had to ask Heyoka if everything was all right, then he couldn’t make them all right for himself. And he wanted to try.
He quietly slipped out of bed and crept, barefoot, into the kitchen. He tied his hair back, he picked up the broom leaning against the wall, held it in both his hands, and started moving. He remembered the lilt of Starless’s voice as she told him how to move, her coarse hands correcting his posture. It’s been years since then if it even happened, but the movements still came easy, and while the broom’s handle was nothing like the sword of Sigmr Chk, it fit his hands well. He ran through a simple drill, slashing, feinting, stabbing, taking care to make no more noise than the fall of his footsteps, although he knew Heyoka was a sound sleeper, and that unless he managed to break the lamp with an overhead strike (again), she would only turn over in her sleep with a muffled complaint. Once he was finished, he put the mop back where it was, and like every time he wasn’t sure, he thought back.
Nadia was dead. Nadia was dead dead dead dead dead stop. Not that far back. Back to Starless who taught him how to fight, her steady hands, the relentless force of her patience. Back to Cho, who was a friend, and even if she wasn’t real, she was a good friend, and remembering her made him remember how to be a friend. So he took a deep breath and thought of Cho with her arm around Mindi, both of them smiling, scarred and alive. He exhaled, inhaled, and thought of Tonbo who was free and brave and queen of her own land, and even if she wasn’t real, she ruled. He thought of Fuuka who saw the insides of his head and had nothing but compassion for what she found there, no matter how dark, no matter how dead. Fuuka even spoke to the undying righteous anger of the Orbkiller. Crazy as it sounded, Kano felt a bit safer knowing there had been a horde of vengeful unfrozen women in his head, and he was almost sorry that they were gone – but at least they took James Valentine Beethoven with them. Well, the small bloody chunks that were left of him. And he thought of the Grey World, a whole world full of gods and monsters and creatures that was alive because of him. A world that was alive because he had saved it, or world that was alive because he imagined it. He never knew which one was the truth. But it was good to think about having a whole world to himself, and having another world that wasn’t his but that he could live in, a world that was sometimes really terrible but also it had Heyoka in it, and it had some other people who were not too terrible but not as not-terrible as Heyoka. He didn’t always like it, but he had already decided he was going to live in it. He meant it, and he had told Heyoka so. Some nights were like this one, some nights he wasn’t sure he could keep doing it. But it was better than it used to be.
Even on bad days, he was better than when he woke up in a world more colourless than grey with all the doors and boxes in him thrown open and all the ghosts gone so he had to know that whatever was still there was all him. Better than the long months when he didn’t utter a world and laid in his bed in his room under constant supervision, not wanting to live but too uninterested in anything to do anything about it. Dr Di had given him a handful of crayons and asked him to draw her a picture. He still remembers the weight of the crayons in his hands and colours behind his eyelids and how the first thing he felt in weeks was a spiteful joy thinking that if she was dumb enough to try that art therapy shit on him then he would give her a picture she won’t forget and his hands had flown over the paper and when the picture was ready it told a story, a story he maybe didn’t want to tell, not even to himself, a story mostly in red, and when she looked at it all Dr Di said was ‘Thank you.’ It took weeks for him to realise that maybe she was less full of shit than he had thought, and more full of pretty good advice. It took weeks for him to sit down and tell her everything that he could, and try to breathe through the parts he still couldn’t speak about. It was months before he could stand in front of the white coats at his hearing, and didn’t even try to make eye contact, but made sure his voice was audible when he said ‘I want to draw stuff, and live, I guess’. He was let out with a prescription and a tiny state-appointed flat and a small box of cheap but decent pencils, a parting gift from Dr Di.
He then he got a shitty postcard from a shitty town in the middle of fucking nowhere, asking if he was out already, signed lots of love, Heyoka. And then he found out that Heyoka was somehow, somehow still alive, somehow still there, still as warm and kind and safe and kind of an asshole as she always has been. For the first few days he was too surprised to even cry, he went through phone calls and travel arrangements with a numb sort of detachment. But when he got off the Greyhound bus and Heyoka pulled him into a careful, angular hug, he suddenly couldn’t stop. He couldn’t speak. He wasn’t sure he wanted Heyoka to touch him, but he knew he didn’t want her to let go, so he stood there in Heyoka’s arms in the middle of the bus station with tears steaming down his face until someone bumped into him and he tried to punch them and Heyoka had to drag him away.
He knew it was arrogant and presumptuous and downright batshit crazy, but he couldn’t help thinking that Heyoka was there because for once he did something all right. He must have done something, someone must have done something, because things didn’t just turn out all right on their own. His life wasn’t something he was thankful for, but when he thought about it, Heyoka’s definitely was. So he mumbled a thank-you every time he passed a tree, he bowed when a fox came nosing around the neighbourhood bins, and he was very careful letting spiders out of the flat. He hadn’t met a dragon yet, but would be sure to be very polite to it if he ever did.
He remembered not wanting to live, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to now. But he had the strength of a whole world behind him when he tried to make a place for himself in this other world. He wasn’t a Champion anymore if he had ever been one, but he maybe he could still try and save small splinters of the world around him. He would just start with himself, and work his way outwards. He had all the time in the world, and all he had to do was get through the days.
He imagined the next day – he would get up, take his pills with a glass of water, allow himself the luxury of making a disgusted face in the mirror, wake up Heyoka, eat a hurried breakfast together before she had to get on the bus to her shitty job washing mugs in a shitty hipster café. He would go grocery shopping for the two of them and for Mrs Curtis next door whose joints were too bad to make the walk, maybe sit with her while she made overly crumbly cookies and rambled about her good-for-nothing ex-husband. He would run a few errands, or go sketching in the park, or go home and hide in the cool dark of the bathroom. It depended on the day. And then Heyoka would come home, tired and smelling of syrupy coffee, and put a bag of day-old pastries on the table. They would have dinner together, getting into a rambling and completely pointless argument about the ideal consistency of mac and cheese, then abandon it to sit on the couch and watch something stupid and shitty on the TV. Maybe they would cuddle, Kano sitting half in Heyoka’s lap with her arms wrapped around him. Maybe she would shoo him to the other end of the couch and get started on sewing another dress to sell online. Kano would put his legs into Heyoka’s lap anyway, and play silly games on his phone. Then he would get to go to sleep with Heyoka in the bed beside him, and then the next day he’d get to do it all over again, and then someday he would probably get a dog, and Heyoka’s dressmaking thing would kick in, and everything would be all right, and nobody would die, and then, and then…
But right now all he wanted to do was go back to sleep, or at least go back to the bed warmed by Heyoka’s body, despite the fact that ewww she drooled on the pillow again. She stirred slightly as he crawled back under the blankets, and fisted a hand into his long hair. He internally grumbled about not being able to leave, but he did not really want to. He wanted to lie there, curled into her body in the too-small bed while incredibly far away a world was free from plagues and cures, while around him a world was full of plagues and cures and warm-yellow streetlights and too-loud cars roaring on the highway too close to their shitty flat in a shitty town in the middle of fucking nowhere.