Chapter Thirty

The weather in Hillborough was always so indiscriminate. It was the middle of April, but snow was falling outside. It wasn’t light either�"the ground was covered halfway to Fay’s knee in hardened, blisteringly cold sheets of the stuff, just soft enough that Fay’s feet sunk to the bottom with each step but rigid enough that it felt like razor blades against her skin every time she pulled her leg out and back in. Even so, the snow being blown into the right side of her face felt soft; burning, and then numbing, like a flame.

                Coming into the house, she tore off the hat and jacket she was wearing. For most of the time she was on the run, she had cut her long hair straight across her neck and put a winter hat over it to hide the purple dye that she never had the means to wash off. A ski mask covered her face and most recognizable tattoos, but that was ripped off too when she stepped into the doorway and out of the storm. It wasn’t just her wanting to be theatrical. She needed to be herself when she saw Edward for the last time. It was going to be the last time. It needed to be.

When she saw the story about her mother being played in the television display of a hardware store, she had naturally assumed that he wanted to draw her to the house he killed her in. When she saw the swarm of policemen, she knew that wasn’t it. Instead, it was so close to another house that had been abandoned that she was positive he was inside.

                She remembered visiting the house briefly. Whoever lived inside was busted for hoarding GHB months back and had been surrounded by police tape since. Now the police tape was torn down near the front and the door was wide open. Her finger was on the trigger of a revolver when she stepped through the doorway.

                When they finally saw each other, they were too shocked to aim their weapons. For the first few seconds after locking eyes with each other, they were bare in front of one another. For that moment, they had forgotten everything the other had done and were nothing but overcome with joy that they had finally found each other. Fay couldn’t think of what she had done to reduce Edward Montgomery to the thin, pale husk of a person that stood on the other side of the room near the opening to a hallway where all of his traps probably hid. He wore just sweatpants and a hoodie that had been caked with mud on the back. Dirt hid in the wrinkles of his face that hadn’t been bruised and battered by the snow. His hair was long and only tipped with blond, while his beard came out in paint-splatter patches. The irises of his eyes were almost grey.

                Meanwhile, Fay was a wreck. Deep, red scratches on her face and arms were there as reminders of when she attempted tearing her tattoos off in a narcotic-induced fit. Instead of her normal fix, she had to settle for whatever drugs she could find, and because of that, her body was trembling and one of her eyes only opened halfway. On the street, she always wore a Spartan jacket that she killed someone for, figuring that the risk was worth anyone who didn’t hear that she left the gang still being afraid. When she stepped through the doorway, she folded it up so that the emblem on the back was hidden and slung it over her shoulder. She just wore a dirt-caked tank top and jeans. She was decrepit enough that her skin sagged over her cheekbones and the outline of her ribcage was visible under the top.

                But he was still Ed and she was still Fay, and they had reduced each other to what the other was looking at. That sudden realization inflated their arms with blood and raised their guns. From opposite ends of the room, they could see down the barrels of each others’ guns, but neither of them shot.

                “You didn’t have to kill my mom,” Fay said, having to try multiple times on each word. She was barely standing up, and the muscles in her jaw triggered the sharp poking from inside her stomach.

                “Yes I did.” Edward wasn’t doing better than she was. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know why he wasn’t shooting. He was too busy being ecstatic about finally seeing her destroyed, depraved face. The slightest sound would have drowned out his voice, but the room was completely silent. “Do you remember growing up together?”

                The muscles of Fay’s cheek jerked, trying to smile. Lack of energy stopped them. She shook her head, still not moving her gun. “We thought things were so complicated, but we had no idea. Say you kill me here�"what will you do after?”

                “I don’t know,” he croaked, saying nothing except what trickled from his mind onto his tongue. “I really don’t know. You?”

                “I don’t know either.” What she did, she did out of impulse. She leaned down and put her gun on the ground. The click on tile echoed around the silence for an eon. Instead of putting her hands up, she only started moving towards him, the muzzle of his weapon growing larger with each stride. She was too numb to feel herself moving. It felt like she was floating.

                Edward’s gun slowly made its way down. By the time she was standing in front of him, it was by his side, swinging back and forth.

                “You told me that I was nothing without you,” she said. “You’re right. I don’t know what I am if I’m not the bane of your existence. I don’t know if I’m ready to find out.”

                “I met Pluto in the Southside diner,” Edward said back, his voice starting to crack. By the time he finished the sentence, he was nearly incomprehensible. “He said the same thing that Aries told me a while ago, and I think it’s true.”

                “What’s that?”

                “I’m nothing without you. When I came to see you that day in your house, I was about to drop out of law school. Then, I saw you�"the only person left that I loved�"in pieces because of the Spartans. I didn’t want them to ruin the life of anyone else. When you joined them, I was completely sure that I had failed, and the rest of my life was spent making up for that.”

                His fingers went limp enough that his gun dropped with an explosive clatter on the floor. He thought that sound was going to spur Fay into action�"that she was going to wrap her fingers around his neck at the sound of his vulnerability. Instead, she only winced at the sound and stayed still.

                “We destroyed each other,” Fay said, her voice being shattered by the tears running down her cheeks.

                Edward shook his head. “Everything has consequences. You terrorized this city. You had me convicted for murder. You blew up my father’s grave. You kidnapped Scott.”

                “And if I was in the same situation, I’d do it all over again because you’ve done just as much to me. We just can’t stop ruining each others’ life.”

                “After this, we’ll have to learn how to stop.”

                “Well, one of us will.”

                They both acted at once. Edward threw his fist into Fay’s chest and darted down to grab his gun, but Fay jumped on him, knocking his knees out from underneath him. He fell onto his back, the gun hitting Fay’s knee and sliding even farther away across the floor. She jammed her other knee into his stomach and brought her fist down onto his mouth with all the weight of her body.

                He didn’t have much strength left, but it was enough to strike the side of her face with the base of his fist hard enough to knock her off of him. She fell onto her side, just within arm’s reach of the gun on the floor. The jacket that had been on her shoulder had been tossed across the room. Just as he knew she would, she grabbed the gun and swung it around. She fired before she could see, shooting into the wall where he had been standing. The waves in the infrastructure radiated out and shook the floor. He had run away and down the hallway.

                You little b*****d, she thought.

                She followed after him, her gun raised and screaming his name. Coming into the first doorway she found, he lunged at her. She only saw a blur of grey before firing. Only one gunshot sounded before the gun emptied, and that bullet landed just under his arm with a sharp, wet noise.

                With one hand, he held her against the wall by the throat. With the other, he struck her in the nose with his fist. The second time, blood spurted. The warm red splattered onto his knuckles with the third.

                Pain suddenly ran up his leg as her foot connected with it. He was off balance just long enough for her to throw both of them off the wall. She grasped his head in her hand so that her palm was against his forehead and her fingers were about to shatter through his temple. With a shriek of effort, she smashed the back of his head backwards against the wall.

                You die tonight, he thought.

                He lay on the ground, clutching his shoulder. His world began to swirl together, all of the colour and shape melting into itself to create a grey fog. He couldn’t feel anything other than the bullet wedged in his flesh. Each muscle he accidentally flexed in the wrong way was like a white electric shock. If he was screaming, he couldn’t feel it. He looked up and all he saw among the grey was Fay. She only appeared as a white haze standing in front of him, but it was still so tantalizingly her. She had her hands clasped over the shattered fragments of bone that floated in the flesh of her nose. The damage radiated through her face, making her jaw feel like it was vibrating off of her skull.

                She wanted it to stop�"only to stop the pain�"but if it had been him that asked her to stop killing him, she wouldn’t have listened. Instead, she blasted herself off the ground at him and knocked him into the room on his side. The metal of the doorway hit him across the shoulder blades, making him cry out. He was laying face-down in a bedroom, clawing at the carpet to help him stand up.

                He jumped to his feet. At the sight of her, he threw his arm into her chest. She made a sound as if the air in her lungs had blown through a hole in her ribcage. Another hit in the face with his good arm knocked her to the ground.

There was a white, ornate ceramic vase the length of his forearm on the nightstand near the bed. Edward’s body acted quicker than his mind did. As Fay began to get up, he swung the vase across her face, smashing it into pieces and forcing her back on the floor with long red streaks across her cheek where the shards had flown. She heard the shattering noise and had what seemed like a few seconds to prepare before she felt the weight and blood making the surface of her flesh feel like lava.

                She saw Edward’s foot when she turned her head. She couldn’t escape his first kick, which landed near the bottom of her ribcage, but the next one was interrupted. A razor-edged half of the vase was still intact, next to her on the ground, sparkling through the mist in her eyes. She grabbed it and swung. The first swing only left a shallow cut along his leg. A second try lodged itself right above his ankle, making him fall forwards onto his front.

                She stood. With a wet, muffled crack, she put the heel of her shoe into the palm of his left hand and stepped forward quickly enough to feel his wrist splintering under her. His body contracted and jerked under her, but he didn’t scream and she didn’t move. After that, he felt fire exploding from the flesh on his back, but he couldn’t guess what was happening for the first few seconds.

                He dug at the ground with his fists thinking that somehow, he would sink into the ground and away from the pain. She had knelt down with her knee on top of him and was stabbing the ceramic shard into his back. Maybe if it was longer, it would have killed him. Instead, it just pierced his body and scraped against his ribs. He screamed and writhed, and the edges cut into the inside of her hand, but she kept going. It was perfect. For everything she had done to him, she had never been there to see his face and hear his screams. He had seen her suffer so much, but she couldn’t remember seeing him in pain, and it just seemed unfair. It was just a way that he could claim that he was better than her, and that was unacceptable. Now, for each sound that trickled from his mouth, the things she did to ruin his life flashed in front of her eyes. The gasping, bloody mess beneath her was what had been missing, and it felt too good to finally see. It could’ve gone on forever and she would be happy. His clothes tore and blood seeped out into a red pool. It went on and on, but through it, he never stopped thinking, why doesn’t she just kill me?

                Finally, she stopped for less than a second, just because her fingers were slipping, but it lessened the burning just enough to give Edward the strength to prop himself up on his right hand and slide himself out from under her.

                He picked up whatever it was that was next to him�"a small wooden stool on the floor�"and slammed it onto her back as she tried getting to her feet. The shard she held was flung to the side and smashed Again, she tried to stand up, but he hit her chin with the toe of his shoe and sent her falling backwards.

                What was in arm’s reach? A long screwdriver with a wooden handle was lying on the table on the other side of the room and he ran for it. As he moved, the room spun and blood flushed around his body like a fly trying to escape a box. He would’ve fallen over if it wasn’t for the screwdriver, which was the only thing that didn’t wave back and forth in front of him. With an outstretched arm that looked shorter than it was, he grabbed it.

                When he turned around, Fay was standing and stepping toward him. He couldn’t feel his hands, but he felt the twitch when he tackled her backwards and buried the metal of the screwdriver in her shoulder.

                With his damaged arm, he pinned her against the wall. With the other, he drove his weapon in deeper, eliciting a scream from her that doubled his haze. He let go of the screwdriver only to strike her across the face with his fist.

                There�"that was the Fay he wanted to see. As he hit her over and over, she whimpered and cried, powerless to do anything else. Her eyes begged him to stop. Afraid, in pain�"it wasn’t a sight that he had seen much, but when he did, he savored it. He wasn’t with her when he blew her boyfriend to pieces or killed her mother. He didn’t see her lose her gang and wander around the streets looking for food. This is what she looked like, he thought, wedging the image into his mind to fill in the gaps. Finally, it was a full picture, and it flushed him with enough strength to keep standing and caving her face in. Even as he hit her though, he could have put his hands on her throat and killed her, or maybe snapped her neck. He didn’t, and she noticed.

                She tried kicking in his feet, but he didn’t budge. Finally, she had built up the strength in her arm to throw him off of her and onto the ground.

                As quickly as she could, she reached over and ripped the screwdriver out of her shoulder, blood spewing from the gash. She held the red metal towards him, but didn’t move. If she wasn’t leaning against the wall, she would fall over and wouldn’t be able to get up until it was too late.

                He held one of the vase shards in his hand and pointed it at her, but he wasn’t moving either. He just stared at her with wetness in his eyes, and her eyes locked onto his. She remembered that look. She remembered him, and it imbued her with the trust he had earned in the whole first half of her life by staying by her side and the whole second half by never leaving�"enough to think it was alright to slide down the wall and sit on the ground to let tears pour from her face through the blood. Almost at the same time, he dropped the shard and let his knees buckle, keeling over onto his side. Using each muscle hurt too much. His eyes screwed shut, but the heaving of his chest stopped her from thinking he was dead. Neither of them moved. Neither of them had the strength to throttle the other. All they could do was stare at each other.

Seconds turned into minutes, and the two stayed next to each other, clutching their wounds and opening the gates to let tears flow. Fay heard Ed breathing, and she inhaled and exhaled in time. Focusing on something made staying conscious easier. It felt like an hour before one of them spoke. Neither of them wanted to, but they knew they’d have to. Edward was the one to make the sacrifice first.

                “Why aren’t you killing me?” he asked, barely speaking. His lips didn’t move and he didn’t open his eyes, but he knew she was still sitting there, listening. If she wasn’t, it was alright.

                She tried shaking her head, but she couldn’t move. All she managed was the few flickers of her tongue and the breath that she used to whisper, “I don’t know.”

                Minutes kept ticking by. Edward’s eyes had opened just wide enough for himself to see. His attention darted between his own body and Fay’s. He felt light enough to float into the air. Blood had pooled up around him from the gashes in his back and the bullet in his side. He was horrifying. Once, he was happy, and the person who had reduced him to this was right in front of him, but the vitriol that should have been there was extinguished when he looked at her. Her face was so caked in red that it didn’t look human. Her body was a punctured sack of bone and flesh that walked the line between crying for a hospital and a closed casket. He remembered her being happy too, and the person to blame for her decline was him. He wasn’t sorry for her, but he didn’t want to hurt her. He felt nothing but his own pain.

                Both of them heard the front door opening, but neither said anything. They both came to the same conclusion. They weren’t in charge of their own fates anymore, which meant that they didn’t have to care. Before anyone else entered the room, the two gave in and let themselves fall until their senses dissipated. After that, there was nothing.