Enough

There is a man that I know 

For seventeen years, he never spoke 

Guess he had nothing to say 

He opened his mouth on Judgement Day 

I listened with all of my might 

But was scared by the look in his eyes 

Like he'd already lost the fight 

And there was no hope ever in sight 

No hope in the air 

No hope in the water 

Not even for me 

Your last serving daughter

-

"We always owe each other something.”

She heard Wandering Eye’s voice echoing softly in the space around, between, inside herself, and knew in some small part of this shifting amalgam that was Collie and yet was no longer Collie… that she had died. In silent reflection on the words as she drifted, he was right. We always owe each other something.

“You keep me more balanced than I realized.” 

Roscoe, this time. His voice from the night prior, soft in the deep hours of night as it transitioned to morning. The part of her that could still long for things longed to be back there, in that Moment. It was a brief desire, though, soon swept away into the abyss that her particles occupied as they drifted through the overflowing emptiness of the mortis.

“You want to hurt them? Take me instead.”

Her own voice, now. What was once herself. An iteration of Collie that had passed now. An exhausted defender just trying to prevent the deaths of more of her friends this trade. Honey, Ash. Honey, who had never wronged her and who was kind in conversation. Honey, who called her Sunflower and was always quick with a smile. And then Ash. Ash, who had saved the iteration of herself that existed in that Moment from certain demise just earlier that day. Ash, who stood with her against a hoard of flaming zed of her own volition, and had saved them all. 

Ash, who she was too late to save. 

The one she owed most, and had failed to repay. 

Collie closed her eyes, eyes she did not have in this place, and drifted. 

-

No hope in the air 

No hope in the water 

Not even for me 

Your last serving daughter 

Why fear death, be scared of living 

Our hearts are small and ever thinning 

There is no hope ever of winning 

Oh, why fear death, be scared of living 

-

After what could have been moments or an eternity, Collie opened her eyes. She took in her surroundings, near-forgotten, but painfully familiar. She looked across the arena and saw what she knew she would see - a bloodied, emaciated, softly glowing body wielding a shaky knife back at her. The other’s face was blurred, as they always were. There had been so many before them that the faces had simply melted into one another in an endless cycle of death. 

She looked down at herself to see a similar appearance. Saw the crumbling rags that served as clothes on her body. Saw the tattoos marking her flesh as an itemized product. Saw the rusted knife in her hand, already wet with the blood of other Irons. Another iteration of herself. A smaller, younger, skinnier, desperate iteration just trying to claw her way out of Hell. 

It made sense, in hindsight. To return here of all places. Was everything else just a dream? A sad hallucination of a Moment she might one day live, when in reality she had been here, still fighting for her life in these dark and bloodied pits? The thought made her want to sob, to drag the jagged knife across her own throat. Yet she stood, blank, staring at the thing in her hand and unable to act upon the impulse. 

The figure across from her lunged, and she fell into step as she had done tens of hundreds of times before. She dodged the jab and retaliated with a swift kick to the side of her opponent’s knee. The crunch in her ears let her know that she had landed a clean blow, and the howl of pain that followed corroborated it. The figure, whose face she still could not clarify, turned towards her in a panic. She sidestepped the desperate swing of their knife and drove her own blade into their heart. 

This was the part she despised most. The gasp. The gurgle. The deep and final death-rattle of someone who knew they had made a fatal error, who knew that they would soon pass into the hell that was the grave, perhaps for the last time. The sound she had heard more than any other sound in all of her iterations, all of her existence. She withdrew the knife and stepped back, avoiding the weight of the other as they fell against her. 

The body collapsed onto the tainted soil, soaked through with the deep red of numerous similar fights. Her opponent’s face crystallized as their body settled into the dirt, and Collie froze. 

Ash’s eyes stared blankly back at her as her blood seeped into the soil. Collie choked, and lurched forward, her hand already manifesting the Light of Hedon to save the other woman - but it was too late.

She was always too late. 

She fell forward into nothing, and drifted.

-

I have seen men provoked 

And I have seen lives revoked 

And I looked at my life and I choked 

From there no more ever I spoke

-

“You’re never quite quick enough, are you?” 

This time the voice was not one, but many. Singular, and orchestral. Different each time it spoke. A voice that came from all directions, whose tone and cadence shifted like the sands of the Dune Sea. A voice that was not a voice. It was one she had heard before, in other lives, other selves, other trips through the Mortis that left her soul fractured but her body born anew. 

She drifted. 

“Always just a little too late… a little too slow. Too late to save her. Too late to save any of them, really. You’re just not… enough.” 

It was right, and that would have infuriated her at any other junction. If she were able to feel anger in this state, she would. It was a truth that she hated, but a truth nonetheless. She was always just shy of where she needed to be, what she needed to be, just not enough for what was required of her. 

She saw Ash bleeding out again in her mind’s eye. Could not close the eyes that she did not have in order to block the image out. Collie saw Ash’s lifeblood spilling out onto the floor of that gods-forsaken cabin while Jack’s cronies mocked them all over her dying body. Then it was Roscoe bleeding out on the ground. Then Lyra. The figure shifted and changed, becoming Tim, Lyah, Gus. All bleeding out. All dying. All dead. 

She was not good enough to save any of them. She couldn’t even save herself from the executioner’s ax in her back. Being here at all was a testament to that. Collie felt the killing blow with razor sharp clarity.

The face of the corpse on the ground was her own, then. 

She felt a bubble of hot iron-tasting liquid well in her throat and drip from her lips, touched a hand to her chest and watched it come back slick with blood. 

“Tsk. Just not quite enough for yourself. Or for them. But you know...you are still very good,” The voice near-purred, velvety in its abject wrongness, “very good for me.”

As her eyes closed and her own lifeblood drained out on the floor, Collie thought tiredly that somehow even the pits would have been better than this. 

-

I can't give up that quick 

My life is a candle and a wick 

You can put it out, but you can't break it down 

In the end we are waiting to be lit

-

 “Oh, no. Collie, no.” Her eyes opened again and strained against the light. She was in an unfamiliar place now, a home of sorts. A home that was… wrong, somehow. It was filled with the soft glow of morning light coming in through the windows. An older woman who was also somehow Wrong stood regarding her from across the kitchen table where Collie was seated. When she blinked, the house was decaying, decrepit, falling apart at the seams. The walls were made of a rotted, fleshy material that could support no reasonable house, and the floorboards broke through in places to reveal the horrible abyss below. She blinked again, and it was simply a home. 

It went on that way for some time. Collie was distantly aware of voices in her vicinity, but she couldn’t pinpoint what they were saying. It was as if she were hearing them from underwater, and all she could do was sit in her chair and watch as the house shifted from warm and welcoming to decrepit and decayed.

“I can’t stay here. I can’t do that to her, or my family.” 

This time she heard the voice clearly. It came from her left, and Collie turned to see Ash. The fiery-haired woman was staring at the other woman by the window, her voice shaky but resolute. Stay? No, she was right. They could not stay here. Was that even an option? 

The Wrong woman looked between them both and smiled softly. 

She looked at Collie, and the smile turned up at the edge into a smirk. The air around them got warmer by degrees. 

“No, you cannot stay here. I need you,” She said pointedly while holding Collie’s gaze, “To continue your good work up there for me.” 

“And you,” She spoke again, regarding Ash this time, with a voice that shifted like sand as the warmth crept ever upward in the space, “My home is always open to you.” 

Heat crept up Collie’s leg, and she looked down to see that the floorboards had caught fire. It consumed the rotten shell of the house faster than any natural fire could have spread, but as she looked across the space between them and caught Ash’s eye, neither of them cried out. 

Ironic, Collie thought, with the vague awareness of her actual mind that was slowly beginning to knit itself back together in earnest, that they would find themselves in the fire together again today. She reached a hand out to the other woman, who grasped it firmly as their bodies were engulfed in the flames. 

-

A friend is a friend forever 

And a good one will never leave, never 

But you've never been south of what blows off your mouth 

You will never understand, ever

-

Collie opens her eyes again. She was beginning to tire of this pattern, this constant rolling wheel of conjured scenes in the eternity of the grave. She sighs, and takes in her surroundings. 

This time she sees nothing but burning desert. The Dune Sea, or something like it. Her hand is still firmly clasped around Ash’s, who stands next to her blinking against the setting sun. Ahead of them, in the distance, an obelisk stretches towards the sky. They begin to walk towards it in unison. Miles close in mere seconds as they approach the monolith, and each of them witnesses a different side of the structure. She cannot make out what the glyphs of the left wall say to Ash, but the right wall shimmers in the heat of the day and she can make out words in the mirage. 

‘YOU HAVE TO BE GOOD ENOUGH’ 

She blinks, the sun glaring hard into her eyes off the side of the structure, her eyes feeling over-sensitive to the blinding light, and her heart beats a heavy thud as she hears a voice in the distance. She recognizes the voice, but can’t make out what it’s saying. Lyra…? 

Another voice, distant again. Something about finding a light?

She looks back up at the monolith, and the message has changed. 

‘YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH’

Collie reflects on this. Ash seems to do the same next to her, with whatever message the other woman had been given. The words were right, in a way. There was one thing that she had always been good at. One thing that she had been trained to do, and do well, from the time she could wield a rusted knife. There was something that she was shaped and molded to do and something that she had been running from for a very long time. 

But what was the point of running? If you’re good at something, should you not pursue it? 

Collie thinks on this, the logic worming its way into her consciousness. 

She was very good at one thing. 

-

You speak minds handed down to you 

By the lies, handed down by your truth 

And your angels that dance at your will 

Will mask your scrambling youth 

I forgave you your shortcomings 

And ignored your childish behaviour 

Laid a kiss on your head 

And before I left said, 

"Stay away from fleeting favour"

-

Good enough.

She had been trying so hard to be something that she was not, to fight against the nature inside of her and the training that she had been put through to be something else. A defender? A protector? A saviour? 

No, Collie was none of those things. Not in the way that she had attempted. She was an attack dog, made for preemptive defense through killing. And she was good at it. 

As the sea melted away and the dark night of the Lone Star settled over her, through the singing of cicadas that came into focus, Collie figured that would have to be enough. 

She owed it to them to be enough.

And we always owe each other something. 

-

Pick up your rope, Lord, sling it to me 

If we are to battle, I must not be weak 

And give us your strength, world, and your food, and your water 

Oh, I am your saviour, your last serving daughter 

There's hope in the air 

There's hope in the water 

But sadly not me 

Your last serving daughter