Stay With Me Through All Of Time :: [Zion + Denali // JB]

nightmares teach
more than dreaming does

When he blinks away the dark, Denali is crouched over him, her red hair a curtain keeping the Lyons siblings a secret from the world. It’s comforting. He begins counting her freckles because they are infinite and maybe an unending task will allow him to stay in this moment forever. Even as her tears splatter against his cheeks, he doesn’t stop counting. Repressed memories and confusion compete for territory in the back of his mind, but —

Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.

“I love you,” she says, fingers smoothing down her brother’s mussed up hair, all cowlicks and bedhead. The two of them might as well be twins, hearts bound so closely that Zion can still hear her even when she doesn’t say anything else. Her silence says: I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. Her silence says this for each one of her freckles that know no end.

Fifty-two. Fifty-three. Fifty-four.

“Everyone else was already in to see you, but you weren’t awake yet. Everyone loves you, Zi.” Their parents were first because no parent knows patience when their child’s life is on the line. Then came Seville wearing a picturesque face of sadness to hide the terrible secret of her relief at being able to sit silently in this room, not having to lie to her unconscious, death row brother because she can’t feel this. Not even a little. After that went Tallulah and Peregrine, one pair of arms hugging Zion close while the other set tried and tried to shake him awake — equal parts empathetic and resentful. Their combined efforts accomplished nothing. When the twins’ time for attempted goodbyes was up, little Rio went in with enviable composure, unmatched by anyone else. She laid belly-down on the floor beside him, whispering fairy tale charms into Zion’s ears and casting blessings of protection onto his closed eyelids. There was nothing silly about it. Hope is often the purest form of desperation. “We all love you so much.”

Denali insisted on being the last to see him — at first because she wasn’t ready, distraught and quaking, but then because she was holding out for Rio’s magic to wake him. Of course it would. Not being able to speak with her brother one last time might have killed her on the spot and even now her heart lacks confidence that she’ll make it through this. There is a part of her terrified that Zion will die right here, right now in her arms like so many birds and dragonflies and rabbits before him. There is another part of her that hopes for it. (Wouldn’t that be better?) Maybe she would have smothered him in his sleep to spare him if he hadn’t opened his eyes exactly when he did. Maybe she still should.

Ninety-nine. One hundred. One hundred and one.

“I should have volunteered to go with you,” her voice tears itself apart, falling out of her mouth in shredded pieces that turn to dust in the air. Words about things that should have happened, but didn’t, aren’t good for anything. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. She means it and the thing that hurts the most is that Zion wishes she would have. He would give anything to take her with him, as selfish as that is. They would both die, but they wouldn’t die alone. “But you fell like it was already over and I forgot how to speak and then it was too late. Oh my god, Zi. What are we gonna do?” Because even now it’s still we.

Two hundred. Three hundred. A thousand.

It's raining from her eyes and everything is backwards because her eyes have always been the earth that grounds him and now they are clouded over as the grass and trees within her open up and storm upwards into the atmosphere. He is still floating, a breath away from being lost in outer space. Ten million. Seven billion three hundred and two. Infinity and infinity and infinity. Panicked, Zion’s hand snaps out to grab his sister’s, desperate to stay here on earth with her; terrified of being lost in a graveyard of perished stars. “I love you,” they repeat at each other with matched voices broken into incoherence. It’s the only thing either of them can think to say that means anything anymore, the only thing worth the effort.

When the peacekeepers come, it takes six of them to break the sobbing siblings apart: two to hold Zion down and four to rip Denali away as she kicks, claws, and bites in a feral attempt to protect her second heart that lives outside of her own body and within his. Nothing can be changed now. There is only the memory of her freckles to comfort him — infinity and infinity and infinity. If only the darkness of being untethered weren’t infinite too.