wrapped {inside} a diamond ring :: kolt

there is a five-finger scar above my breast
there is an orchestra on my neck
shaped like your pulse
from all the nights you held me the way
you only hold something slipping

When I was a stupid little boy, only six years old and still blind to the true horrors of the world, I watched my mother break. Even though I hadn’t known the cause at the time, the effects were seared into my mind for years to come, the tears streaming over the elegant planes of her cheeks, the empty blue void of eyes that had once held all of life’s vitality, the sobs she tried to hide and the bittersweet gentleness of the hand that brushed my hair back from my face when I’d asked her what was wrong. You wouldn’t understand, Kae. I hope you never understand. A few hours after that, she was gone, hiding in eternal sleep from the pain of a world that had shifted on its axis. I’d always thought she was a fool for ever loving my father, but the one thing in this world that I have learned of love is that it makes all of us blind to our own self-betterment, a kind of selfless suicide that kills in the sweetest of ways. I found her body, tears still wet on her skin, and the only thing I could bring myself to think was that she looked like she’d found peace. And she was beautiful.

When I was a stupid little boy, only sixteen years old with the true horrors of the world beginning to grow quietly in my veins, I watched my father break. There was something beautiful in it that sang an eerie harmony in time with the freshest of the bruises aching dully on my skin, a song that sounded like justice as I watched that first cough that gave way to a bloom of purest scarlet. Most kids had imagined monsters in their closets. I had a very real one that sat in the living room with a bottle of Jack in one hand and a belt in the other. I felt like one of the heroes of legend as my monster sank to his knees, retching up his life all over the living room floor (the stains never quite came out. I look at them sometimes when I falter. They still make me feel strong). After the cocktail of drain cleaner and whiskey had hemorrhaged his eyes and sinuses but before his lungs gave out, he begged. He apologized, swore he’d be better, sobbed for absolution. With sticky crimson spreading in a puddle around my shoes and the millionth black eye darkening on my face, I laughed. And there, in the blood-soaked fluorescence of a creaky house that had never been home, in that victorious cataclysm of destruction with death held so carefully in my hands, I was God. And it was beautiful.

When I was a stupid little boy, only nineteen years old and the embodiment of the true horrors of the world incarnate, I broke. All my life, people have always thought that there was something wrong with me because I found something beautiful in death, an electric thrill at holding the fragile thread of life between my fingers and pulling it until it snapped. Hi, I’m Kaelen Dempsey, and I’m so poisonous that I kill everything I touch. I push limits and break hearts and destroy lives because in the end it’s the only thing I’m really good at, and I’ve learned to embrace it because there’s just something so pretty about pain that I can never resist it for long. I’m a walking travesty, a recipe for disaster with ice under my skin and arsenic in my veins, pumped by the shriveled black thing that was meant to be a heart once upon a time. I tear the world down piece by piece because it’s fun, because there’s an intricate puzzle to be solved when it comes to figuring out what it takes to make someone break. It took a not-so-secret affair for my mother. It took a little extra something in his nightcap for my father. It took one word for me.

And I wonder if he thinks I’m beautiful.

I drift out of the world for a few beats in time, don’t notice the searing touch of his hand on mine, don’t notice Aurora backing quietly out the front door like my ruination isn’t something she wants to see (you’re not fooling anyone, little girl. You’re a Dempsey and no matter how hard we try to hide from it, at the end of the day we all drink downfalls and breathe agony; death is our lifeblood and destruction our heartbeat). Everything in me is suspended in one endless, mute scream of why, why, why, a stabbing flash of misery searing in my chest until I want to dissolve, to curl into myself and become my pain, because agony this excruciating is surely the closest to beautiful I will ever be. I can hear a fragile splintering sound that’s louder than the boom of a cannon in my ears, but I’m not sure if it’s the floorboards creaking beneath my weight or the sound of my blackened, diseased heart shattering into a million pieces, flying off into the void to sow more carnage than they ever could have reaped in one place.

When the world swims back into focus, there’s something moist and hateful biting at the backs of my eyes, my gaze fixed on the floor. After Kiera I swore, I solemnly vowed that there would be no more tears because I no longer had a place for them – tears were for the weak, for mundane, ordinary creatures like the one that Colt had turned me into, and they were not the luxury of a fallen god clawing his way back up to the plane of divinity – and so the icy will that still lingers beneath all the horrifyingly human pain wracking my soul makes me blink them back, my stare fixated on the old, lingering discoloration that I hadn’t noticed I was kneeling in the middle of until now.

My fingers press against the worn bloodstains, seeking something I’ve always found in them until now. Give me strength, I will them, trying to leech some of the cold from the wooden surface and cycle it through my veins. Help it stop hurting. But my father’s ghost is having far too much fun watching me finally come crashing back to Earth, and I find nothing in the rusty smears but memories of slurred taunts and undiscerning fists.

No one’s ever gonna love you, you little shit, the phantom whisper smells like whiskey and feels like a hand closed unmercifully around my windpipe. Your Mama hated you so much she went and killed herself to get away from you. No one wants you, Kaelen. You’re too fucked up. No one wants nothin’ as damaged as you.

Guess the old man was right about one thing.

It hurts, realizing that the horrible truth I spent my whole life running from came back to find me anyway. I ripped out my capacity to love and locked it away so long ago, because I’d always lived in fear of this moment, of the affirmation of something I’d always known. Even if I was capable of finding something in this world to love, there was nothing in this world that was capable of loving me. Colt tried. Bless his well-intentioned little heart, he tried. He rolled around on rumpled sheets and tied his tongue in pretty bows with mine, traced the lines of my veins with his fingertips in the deep of the night when I pretended to be asleep, held my hand against the drumbeat behind his sternum and promised me Always, but even his most valiant efforts could never make me worthy of something as undeniably, wonderfully, hatefully human as love. He knows that. That’s why when I ripped out the shriveled remains of my heart and offered them to him wrapped up in a silken bow of forever, he said no.

No one wants you, Kaelen. You’re too fucked up. No one wants nothin’ as damaged as you.

I know, Dad. I know.

I don’t ask why, don’t request a justification that I could recite as well as any poem. I don’t cry, don’t ask him to reconsider, and that’s possibly the most selfless thing I’ve ever done. Colt must know by now that there’s nothing left of me but ice and poison, knows that both of those things are too volatile to tie himself to forever. I can’t blame him for keeping the distance that I was too greedy to accept. I don’t break loudly, internalizing it all to one tiny sob that could be mistaken for a cough. This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. The ring burns all the more fiercely as I slip it back into my pocket in a smooth, careful motion, rising slowly back to my feet with an impassive face. “Okay. Want to go get something to eat?”

You can only hear the sound of my soul screaming if you pay very close attention.

there are six states
pressed like stubborn flowers
between the last time i kissed you and today
but you still feel like a sound
caught in my throat

you only know what i want you to
i know everything you don't want me to
your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine
you think your dreams are the same as mine
i don't love you, but i always will

"Kae… I-"

Don't. Don't try to sew me back together with pretty promises and fragile whispers when you're going to rip me apart all over again the next time your eyes meet mine. As someone who's spent my life making a side hobby of sadism and drinking the agony of the ages like it's mother's milk, I would have never expected that Colt would be capable of cruelty. But life is ripe in excruciating twists of irony, too many of them blooming from the tips of my own fingers and wrapped around my tongue, and the velveteen sound of his unspoken apology is nothing short of cruel. "You go ahead. I'm not… I… I can't."

Every stuttered almost-word that shimmers in the musty air twists in-between my ribs and burrows down to the most raw, vulnerable part of me, their half-formed intentions as sharp as any blade. It's the soft press of his lips against my winter-chapped knuckles that undoes me, though, prompting an explosion of conflicting ideals in my head that I can't rationalize. He touches me like he loves me, and I can't make sense of it. The world I live in has no gray areas, no middle grounds of blended motivation. Love and rejection are mutually exclusive, polar ends of a spectrum that can never meet, and it's so cruel, him having the nerve to let love linger on his lips when all of mine is bleeding from my pores and staining the night in a violent, cataclysmic smear of shattered ruin. In a fragmented, futile bid for self preservation, I pull my hand away because the contact burns, a fiery lip-print searing right through the last of the icy armor coating my limbs and charring the flesh underneath. Colt turns around and retreats to the kitchen, looking hurt.

That's right, run away. Go hide where you don't have to see it. Does watching me fall apart make you uncomfortable, my love?

He's got me in his gravity (has had me there from day one), a helpless moon revolving around the untraceable something in his eyes and no longer capable of forging my own path through the stars. I follow him without meaning to, without wanting to, every logical thought screaming that the best way to deal with hurt is to run from it, not step willingly into its embrace. My mother had this habit, too, this penchant for clinging to things that would only kill her in the end. As much as I've vowed to never become my parents, I haven't done that good of a job. Colt is huddled into a corner, looking like he's the one in pain here.

And out of nowhere, the anger explodes.

It's blissful, in a way, the white-hot fury devouring all of the gut-wrenching pain in favor of a better kind of burn, one I know that I can channel into a force of pure destruction. After all, that's the only thing I'm good for. We've seen where my attempts to be a creature of love have landed me. I've lived my life with napalm in my veins, flitting my fingers over candle-flames and wondering when I'm finally going to explode and take the world along with me. The ability to hurt people is the most fearsome power there is, and I wield it with so much skill that the whole universe trembles in my wake.

God knows I've hurt Colt before. The frightening (or maybe beautiful) thing is that I tried with everything I had in me to not hurt him, to keep the monster in my bones from sinking its claws into him, and even then I still managed to warp his soul into something fragile and unstable. Now? Now I want to hurt him. Only when he hurts as much as I do will he have the right to sit there looking like a victim. My destruction has a hierarchy. When I try to protect someone, I hurt them. When I try to hurt someone, I utterly annihilate them.

With my razored tongue and poisoned words, I'm going to tear him apart.

"Where the fuck do you get off?" I hiss, deadly-quiet and venomous, the color rising in my cheeks. "You don't get to sit there and play the tortured hero, Colt. You've got no goddamn right."

It occurs to me in the one small area of my mind retaining its composure that Colt has never seen me truly angry. I'm always angry in my own cold, detached sort of way, a hatred for the world that ebbs and flows like the tide, but this is something else entirely. This is a tsunami, roaring against the linings of my veins and playing out in the rage-tremors that skitter up and down my limbs. There's mayhem sitting just beneath my skin, enough to punch a hole in the fabric of the universe at the suggestion of a single spark, and it's all aimed right at the drumbeat in his ribcage that used to be my salvation.

"You think I don't know what this is? What I am to you? I tried to ignore it, but in the end you will always be the same affirmation-seeking, self-pitying, insecure little boy." Each word explodes like a death-spray from a shotgun, and I watch him carefully in anticipation of seeing the impact. These are the weakest parts of him, the ones I've known all along from whispered stories and frantic glances he thought I didn't see. I usually don't call Colt on his shit because I love him to the point that I rationalize his flaws and make him an idol of perfection in my mind, but now the gloves are off, and he has never understood the meaning of the word merciless until now. "You like being necessary because you've spent your whole life being disposable to people. You want the security of knowing that someone's always going to come running back, so when you find someone that loves you, you cut them loose just to watch them falter without you. You get off on the fact that I need you. Well, I'm fucking tired of being the kicked puppy still coming back to you begging for more, Colt, so go work out your issues by messing with someone else's head."

It's a bold move, sweeping my queen onto the board with the simple hope of knocking out a few pawns. He's perfectly capable of calling my bluff, of knowing that no matter how many times I swear I'm done, I will always, always come back. People never understand it, how we work. There are so many things we don't know that outweigh the things we do. I know that his favorite color is blue, I know the inflections behind every desperate little sound muffled into the junction of my neck and shoulder in the dead of night, I know the pathways of his veins like my own private highway. I don't know if his mother was kind, I don't know if he got enough to eat growing up, I don't even know his middle name. We knew that we loved each other in the same way that a salmon knows to swim upstream. It's a visceral, inherent, undeniable thing woven into the fabric of our souls, but when we try to justify it, there's no history in our minds to back it up. We've been a doomed endeavor from the start. "Do you know... you don't know what it took for me to even think about this, and then just... 'no.' One word. And then you act like we're still giddy teenagers in love and everything's just fine. It's not! We're not okay! I'M NOT OKAY, AND YOU'RE LOVING WATCHING IT."

I can count the times in my life that I've actually shouted on one hand. I work best in the quiet threat of impending doom, icy immobility and knowing smirk-smiles that promise worst. But he's ripped me wide open, shattered the floodgates on a whole reservoir of all the things I don't know but wish I could, and a few insecurities of my own (I am an expert at spotting people's flaws, and even better at finding my own flaws in other people). The hurt is back, deep and consuming and bottomless, because this is the culmination of a year's worth of tearing myself apart and trying to rebuild. I gave and gave and gave, and the only thing I have to show for it is the shards of a doomed romance slicing through my paper flesh and making me bleed love until I hear my heart stop beating. "I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING I COULD GIVE AND THEN SOME, SO WHAT ABOUT THAT ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH?! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!"

That's the one question that arcs over all the others. The answer won't give me peace, because I know it won't be anything as comforting as you, Kaelen, I want you. But maybe it will give me some measure of closure, enough that I can let the wounds scab over and start carving bricks of ice to rebuild my crumbled walls.

That's all I have left to hope for.

i wish you'd hold me when i turn my back
the less i give, the more i get back
your hands can heal, your hands can bruise
i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you
i don't love you, but i always will

no, i don't believe you
when you say "don't come around here no more"
i won't remind you, you said we wouldn't be apart
no, i don't believe you when you say you don't need me anymore
so don't pretend to not love me at all

By the time all the aching rage has worked its way out of my body, I feel weak, shaking and spent like I've just sprinted to the top of a mountain only to see a whole range stretched out before me. My throat burns from the screaming, a charred, crisp feeling that reminds me of the remains of a forest after a wildfire. Distantly, I wonder if Ella is leaning out the window of the shack in my back yard that's been her and Auggie's home for years, a raised eyebrow and a faint question of whether she should come over to see what all the noise is about. I really hope she doesn't. One person seeing the weakest parts of me is enough.

Colt's fingers press against the thin surface of my sweater, ghosting, barely-there. It's like there's some sort of screen between us, a barrier that warps the sadness in his smile into something that looks almost cruel. But I can still feel the warmth of his hand radiating through the fabric, can still find that something in his eyes that I always look for when my grip on reality starts to slip. When I fell in love with him, I told myself he was perfect. "I was waiting, for you to finally see me. I was waiting for you to understand what I am."

I have learned to never search for perfection, because you will never find it and the journey hurts. It took finding imperfection to make me realize that it was what I'd wanted all along. And as Colt rattles off a list of his flaws, it's like each suddenly clear word is lifting another layer of the veil between us, alerting me too-late to the fault lines in every endeavor I ever made.

Baby, no. You don't have to be perfect. I want your stutters and your clumsiness and your lopsided smiles. I want our stupid fights and your bullheaded stubbornness and how you make me want to tear my hair out sometimes. I want the scratchiness of your voice first thing in the morning, the way you steal the covers at night. I want the burn of snappish irritation in my veins and our words cutting like knives (because the touches after are like satin and the satisfaction is more than worth the pain). I want the way you sing too loudly in the shower and your awkward jokes and your fingers wrapped up in mine under the desk in the back row of History class. I don't want you to be perfect. I just want you. You're more beautiful than perfection could ever hope to be.

I'm about to tell him as much when he says the one thing that could ever truly annihilate me, the secret, nameless terror that I hadn't really known was haunting me for the past year. "You're exactly right. I enjoy playing games with people. I was just using you. You've finally figured it out."

To say that I break wouldn't be an accurate description. I can't. I can't break because there's nothing left. My soul turns into a vacuum, everything hissing out through the cracks and crushing anything that remains behind into oblivion. I broke when I lost my mother. I broke when I lost Kiera. But both of those times there were pieces left to pick up. I have lost Colt, and the prospect of rebuilding is like trying to build a city out of dust. To break implies having the ability to repair. That's not the case here. Now, it's not so much breaking as it is ceasing to exist.

Is this what I was like before? Did I really walk around through my life as nothing but a void, bereft of anything, empty and cold? God, how did I ever live like this? The answer is, of course, that I didn't. I wasn't really alive before I loved Colt, and now in one fell swoop he has snatched the oxygen from my lungs, stolen my spark of life and made me back into the ghost I was before him.

The irony isn't lost on me. This is what I'd planned to do to him the first day I ever met him, to string him along and then shatter his heart into pretty pieces. But somewhere along the way I got careless, I lost my grip, I fell in love, and now a year later the tables have finally turned. I suddenly feel as if I'm standing across from a chess master who's obliterated me with my own strategy. I never saw it coming. Not from him. And to think that this is what it all comes down to, that in the end I was the one being used as a pawn on someone else's board, that everything we ever had was a lie…

To say that it destroys me isn't even close.

"I don't want a thing from you, Dempsey, not a damned thing. Just get out of my sight." Oh, but I've taught him well. I've never seen his eyes so cold, his face so impassive, everything about him so bereft of expression, and the idea that maybe I've stolen some of his spark too wrecks me more than it comforts me. I kept telling myself that maybe we'd be lucky, that maybe my poison caress wouldn't end up stealing Colt's sunshine in the end. But this is what I turned him into, something as cold and ruthless as I used to be. Or maybe he was like that all along. Maybe he was just a better actor than I could ever hope to be, painting on his starlight-smiles and calculating every stumble until I was the one who fell right into the trap of his arms. The way his voice is smooth and cool like a wisp of satin, entirely stutter-free, makes me wonder. How much of the Colt Hanlon I fell hopelessly in love with is a fabrication? How much of it was the spider-spun lies of a boy who finally did the impossible and beat me at my own game? Was any of it real at all?

I feel like I've woken up from some sort of lucid fever-dream, a vicious nausea flipping around in my gut until the inside of my mouth tastes sharp and metallic. Did I fall in love with a work of fiction? Maybe this is Colt. Maybe he's as much of a cold bastard as I used to be, maybe even more of one - after all, here I stand playing the fool in all of this. In the end, maybe he was the one who really deserved his divinity. But it can't be. It can't.

A million miles away, I feel my head shaking, a stupid smile on my face as trails of liquid fire sear over my skin. "You don't… you don't mean that. You said…"

Without really thinking, I press my hand against the seashell surface of his sweater-clad ribs, searching for the steady beat there that will remind us both of our one-word vows in the bottomless darkness of Thirteen all those ages ago. For the first time ever, I can't find it. It's as if Colt's heart has died along with the version of him I thought I knew, his promise dying with it. But still, my head keeps shaking slowly, refuting it all. Denial is the first stage of grief.

Every touch…

I enjoy playing games with people.

Every kiss…

I was just using you.

Always…

I don't want a thing from you, Dempsey, not a damned thing.

It was all just a page in someone else's story.

I fucked up, somewhere in this Greek tragedy of a love. I thought I had something, really, finally had something, and the giddy rush of it blinded me to the massive cliff I was running towards. Now I'm over the edge, hurtling down, down, down, hitting the ground, shattering to pieces on the jagged rocks below. I should be dead. I feel dead. I wish I were dead. But my stubborn heart beats on like a cannon in my ears, searing him into every inch of me, burning his name into the marrow of my bones. If I could, I’d tell people like Dahlia and Cora and all the countless notches in my bedpost that came before and after them that I finally understand, I finally get it, what it’s like to be consumed entirely by someone and then left to wither.

I'm sorry. I am so sorry. I didn't know. How could I have known?

The next words are ones I've heard before from more than one person, choked out on a ragged sob that holds something beyond betrayal and the weight of a wasted love. "I trusted you. I fucking trusted you."

But what makes me laugh, high-pitched and hysterical even as the tears stream town my face (I don't want to laugh. I want to scream. I want to claw away at all this numbness sitting in my veins until I can feel again. But there's an emptiness in that part of my soul, and laughter is all I can muster. Something is better than nothing.) is that the perfection I told myself I had found was the fatal flaw that sealed our doom. With every moment of tenderness I allowed myself, every touch, every kiss, he was only slipping further and further away from me.

And that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

i don't mind it, i still don't mind at all
it's like one of those bad dreams where you can't wake up
looks like you've given up, you've had enough, but i want more
no, i won't stop, 'cause i just know you'll come around
...right?

so i hit my low, but little did i know
that would not be the end from the holland road
well i rose and i rose
and i paid less tithe to your callous mind
and i wished you well as you cut me down

"You...you're sounding like me, Dempsey. What, cat got your tongue?" he says, and I am too lost to tell if he's mocking me or not. I've never seen Colt mock anyone. At least, not my Colt, and if everything that he says is true, then Colt hasn't been my Colt for a long time, if he ever was at all. How do you rationalize falling in love with a mirage? He's all too real now, all cold fury and sharp amusement, the cabinet groaning in protest when he slams the door and rounds on me. "Or did you just get stupid, from being so close to me? You're such a child, believing in something like 'trust'. It doesn't exist, you can't trust anyone, asshole."

Each word hits me like a physical blow, my spine curling inwards in a futile effort to protect me from the verbal attacks that he aims so carefully. Of course Colt knows where my weaknesses are. He's the only one who knows; the only one I ever let close enough to discover them. And he is right. He is so right. I was stupid, I was a child, I was all those lesser things I swore I'd never be, all for the weakness of letting myself love him, letting myself trust him. It's a warped sort of comedy, that Colt would remember the rules of the world while I forgot them, would remember that people simply can't be trusted. We're all destructive creatures, and I've got more destructive potential than all the world combined. Trusting him was handing over the controls to an atom bomb, believing he wouldn't push the red button.

Well, there goes the countdown.

"You caused this. This was your fault, you corrupted me, you made me this way, you destroyed what I was. You always wreck everything, Kaelen. Why did you do it to me? I used to be okay. You did this, and do you want to know the truth?" Oh, love, I know. Of course I know. I tried to tell you, didn't I? I whispered all those nights ago as your fingers traced the map of my veins that I wasn't good for you. I told you that I'd destroy you, and you laughed, said I was a drama queen and pulled my lips back to yours with your magnet touch and a smile that made me think that maybe you were right. I told you.

There's simultaneous comfort and misery in the knowledge that I was the one that stole Colt's sunshine, that at least the boy I met in the hallway was real. He wasn't a dream after all. I've just turned him into a nightmare. The truth of every word spat at me from across the kitchen both crushes me and liberates me, hissing through my ears until I'm a heap of conflicted ideals, fragile as spun glass and waiting patiently for the final blow that will break me into a hurricane of flying shards.

"I hate you."

So this is what dying is like. A feeling of falling, of the world dropping out from underneath you and plunging into the abyss. It doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe that's because I knew it was coming, knew that this was the killing strike he'd been working up to. Of course he hates me. I stole the very essence of who he was; of course he hates me. I just wish realizing it didn't feel so removed, so stilted and distant, like I'm watching myself crumble away to nothing on the silvery movie-screen of my own memory. I hate it. The last remaining essence of me, the Kaelen who was a fighter, who demanded to have control of his life in no hands but his own positively wails at me to do something, anything other than stand here in calm acceptance as Colt rips me to shreds and smiles over the pieces. I want to collapse, to scream, to deny it with everything I have in me, but all I can do is stand there with an absent sort of smile on my face. There's too much truth in his words for me to bother denying them.

"As you should," I nod, only vaguely noticing the way my insides are caving in, collapsing on themselves until there's nothing beneath my skin but a fragile skeleton and the illusion of a former strength holding me aloft. "But do you know the funny part? Or maybe it's the sad part, I don't know. I was never all that good at feelings before you. But the funny part, or maybe the sad part, is…"

His skin is every bit as cold as mine when I press my palm experimentally against his cheek, wondering how long it will take for him to push me away and finally discard his toy for good after I've leaned in feather-light and ghosted my lips across his forehead. "Is that I still love you. I always will. And I'm so, so sorry that I did this to you. I hope you find some way to…"

To what? To be happy again? To simply recover from my poison touch in a way that no one's ever done before? To move on? At that thought, the most sickening sort of almost-vision skates across the surface of my mind. Colt, moving on. Colt, smiling and laughing with someone else, a faceless stranger that still manages to remind me more than a little bit of Wheaton and all the covert glances he thought I didn't see. Colt, wearing someone else's ring. Colt, finding white picket fences and simple happiness with someone else. Colt, waking up on late Sunday mornings in someone else's arms, rolling over, grinning lazily, languid kisses pressed to someone else's neck, I love you, I love you, good morning, I love you. Colt, growing old and gray with someone who isn't me, someone who will be bright and whole and not-so-broken, who will smile and hold his hand, promise him that he will always be beautiful.

The way he always will be to me.

The worst part, the part that makes me ache down to the sub-structure of my cells is that I want that for him. I really, really do. I want him to have what I could never be good enough to give him. Because the Colt that tripped into me in the hallway a million lifetimes ago, the Colt that laughed at himself and played guitar between classes and sang until I thought my heart would burst? He deserves it.

"I wish you the best. I do. And I'm a long damn way from the best."

No one ever told me that being selfless would hurt this much. My mother told me once that if you love something, you must set it free. If it comes back, then it was always yours. If it doesn't, then it was never yours in the first place. Colt was never mine, and even though I thought there was nothing left of me to hurt, that realization roars through every vessel of my body, exploding along my synapses and rendering me into nothing but a pure manifestation of agony. He was right. I was stupid. I was so, so stupid to think that there could ever be an exception, and we both paid the price for it. The difference is that he can walk away, can go find that faceless stranger from my daydream-vision, go find his great perhaps and live his life as if I'd never been in it at all.

And me? What will I do? How am I to cope with the scars on my heart, to simply start over fresh? It's not possible. After him, I can never be the person I used to be. But should I try? There's the war, and then what? Again, my mind shimmers with almost-prophecies, visions of myself going down a road that might lead to some form of closure. Me, winning this thing, protecting Ella and my family and the only people left that ever mattered. Me, writing a letter back to Lyss in Thirteen, telling her how sorry I am for everything, sending it with Ghost when he leaves. Me, going on a blood-rampage the likes of which this District, no, the world has never seen, taking down any unfortunate soul with the bad luck to be in my way. Me, walking to Peacekeeping HQ with my wrists held out in front of me for the handcuffs and an unquenchable smile on my face. Me, puttering around the Capitol for the rest of my life with no tongue, never able to say another poisoned word, never able to lure boys like Colt Hanlon into the sinful trap of my arms again.

Or maybe they'll kill me. That would be nice, too.

When did I become so weak, to think that death would be preferable to loss? I lost myself in his eyes too long ago for me to be able to find who I was again. That's his now, that broken, stunted, blackened ruin of a heart. He can do with it what he wishes. Maybe keep it as a trophy, to remind himself that he isn't quite so powerless in the world. All I have left is who I am, and Colt has managed to destroy that as well.

I feel hobbled, crippled, like I'm trying to stand on two broken legs, trying to breathe with crushed lungs, trying to live with a heart that's no longer beating. He hates me. He has every right to hate me. I love him. That's something I never had any right to do. Looking at him hurts, throbs sharply through me like the napalm in my veins has finally ignited. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what will finally destroy me, starting off the chain reaction that will burn me up and take everything else along with me. Congratulations, Colt Hanlon, you've lit the fuse on a walking apocalypse. Now go find your Happily Ever After and get the hell away from the blast zone.

It used to be that whenever I felt off-balance, like the world was tilting on its axis and about to send me plunging over the edge, I would run to Colt. But I can't, not this time. His arms are no longer open for me, his comfort no longer mine to claim for myself. That bundle of starshine smiles and easy laughter I met in the sterile halls of Thirteen is gone. He’s gone. I can't go to him anymore.

And so I turn gracefully on my heel and walk out the door, because there is nowhere else for me to go.

I've forgotten a jacket, forgotten a scarf. The wind should feel like a razor blade through my thin sweater. I feel nothing. The snow should burn-freeze at the patches of my exposed skin. I feel nothing. He’s gone. We've gone our separate ways, but not before we destroyed each other, like some part of me always knew we would. Well. I knew somewhere in the core of me that I'd destroy him. I can't say I ever imagined him ripping my heart out and crushing it to a bloody pulp with a knife-edged smile. Even the God of Discord couldn't forsee his creation falling so far.

Drawing in a shaking, unsteady breath, I walk down the creaky stairs and into the night, where I am destined to walk alone until the world falls to dust beneath my fingertips. Where I am a god, where I can draw the gossamer-spun line between life and death, my gaze scraping over the rows of ramshackle houses, flickering candles in windows, the cries of hungry children in the dark.

Where I can be feared, because I know now that I will never be loved.

but i'll still believe, though there's cracks, you'll see
when i'm on my knees i'll still believe
and when i've hit the ground
neither lost nor found
if you'll believe in me, i'll still believe