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Does it always hurt that much?
In his dreams Elektra is in his bed. He can see her. He can see everything.
Her smile is slow and sweet, the kind of smile he’s sure she never wore when she was alive. Then again, how would he know? He never saw her face. The cruelty of this threatens to pull him from sleep, to bring him back to a world where she isn’t; but then she lifts his sheets and slides under the covers and nowhere else exists.
“Do you know what vigilante means?” She whispers. Her hair fans out over the pillowcase.
“Hero?” He takes a guess. “Criminal?” Tries to say the words like neither matter.
She shakes her head, wrapped in his satin sheets; the ones she bled in, the same color of the dirt they buried her in. “No, the origin, Matthew.” Her words curl around him, laugh sharp as a knife.
He goes to kiss her but she darts away.
“It comes from the Latin.” Her voice gets that charm school lilt, the one that says she knows something he doesn’t and she’s enjoying it. “Vigilo, vigilare, vigilavi...” the words sound foreign on her tongue, a dream language, soft and strange.
“You know, I went to Columbia too,” he reminds her.
She laughs. “And apparently didn’t take Latin.”
He goes to grab her waist, pull her to him, but she darts under the covers. His hands come back empty. For a moment, he's transfixed by the sight of his empty palms.
It doesn’t make sense. She was just there.
“It means watchful.” Her head pops up. All he can see is her face, sheets framing it like a veil.
“I took Greek."
His hands slide under the sheets again, searching for her. All he finds are soft folds of fabric.
“Watchful,” she repeats, ignoring him. There’s a glimmer in her eye. For a moment she looks so alive that he can’t imagine a world where she could ever die. “Vigilante means watchful. You’re blind.” Her smile is slow and sad and wicked all at once. “A little ironic, don’t you think?”
This time he laughs. “Actually, they did teach me what irony means at Columbia, and that’s not it.” He throws the sheets up, takes her by surprise. Nowhere to hide, now. They fly up, billowing, exposing the whole of the mattress...
There’s nothing there.
The fabric floats back down slowly, too slowly, edges fluttering. As it settles he makes out a shape beside him. A small, huddled form with familiar curves.
“You’re thinking of dramatic irony, Matthew,” Elektra purrs. That playful sound is so familiar he wants to drown in it.
He’s barely paying attention anymore, desperate to get his hands on her, pawing through the sheets to find some piece of her to hold on to. The words coming out of his mouth sound far away. “What’s dramatic irony, then?”
His fingernails tear strips in the fabric, leave long trails that bubble blood.
“Remember your Greek, Mathew.” Her voice comes to him as if it's underwater. “It’s in all the tragedies.”
“What is?” his voice is feverish, but he can’t find her, she isn’t there, isn’t anywhere. He can see her with his eyes but his hands close around air.
Hands land on his cheeks, turn him gently to look her in the eye.
“Dramatic irony,” she tells him, smile fond, “is when the audience knows something you don’t.”
And then she’s gone. His hands are empty. His bed is, too.
You’ve never been hard to find
The thing about being blind (aside from all the other things about being blind) is that your senses play a lot more tricks on you.
When you see by sound and smell and—whatever else he sees by, he’s not totally sure how it works, they don’t hand out instruction manuals for superpowers acquired by toxic chemical spills— but when you see by things you don’t totally understand, sometimes…sometimes, you see things you don’t totally understand.
Things you can’t understand.
Things that you will not understand.
He’s walking down Canal St. when it happens. The heart of Chinatown is bustling. The winter sun is bright. The smell of orchids and sandalwood floats on the air.
Two girls bump into his back. He’s stopped in the center of the sidewalk. He can hear their shopping bags rustling in annoyance, profanities muttered under their breathes, but it’s not the only sound. Something else. Something soft, strange. Something that doesn’t belong on a bustling sidewalk. A sound he’s heard before.
The swish of a satin skirt, split all the way up the side.
His blood quickens. He knows this feeling.
But she’s not here. He walks forward. The shop beside him is selling Chinese lanterns. He can feel the hum of their electricity behind the glass, can hear the perfectly manicured nails slowly trailing the smooth surface.
He turns the corner and it’s gone.
She was never there.
He’s alone.
There was a time when you trusted me
He goes to the grave.
Not because…
…just because.
It was just a dream. It was just a feeling. Still—he goes.
He’s not expecting to find anything. There won’t be anything. He’s pretty familiar with gravesites and exactly how many answers they offer for the bereaved. He hasn’t visited much because he knows there’s nothing here for him. None of the things he loved about Elektra could ever be buried.
But he’s wrong. There is something he loves here.
Foggy looks up at the sound of footsteps. “You should have told me," he says by way of greeting. One of his hands is touching the black granite gravestone, barely. In the other a bouquet of roses trails, nearly touches the ground.
Matt doesn’t know what to say. That seems to be the problem with him and Foggy, these days. Everything to say and no words to say it. They stand next to each other in silence.
“She hated roses.”
The bouquet is wilted, slightly frost bitten. He can tell by the way it sounds when it hits the icy ground.
“I know.” Foggy takes a step back. Matt half remembers the last time he saw the two of them, maybe the only time he saw them together, bickering in his dorm room. Foggy, cracking jokes about trust fund kids always getting their way. Elektra, smile that could cut glass, telling him if he's serious about social climbing he ought to be nicer to her.
“How did it happen?” Foggy asks the question like he doesn’t want to know the answer.
“Does it matter?” Matt responds to him the same way.
“It might.” He turns abruptly, “is this the way you’re going to go?”
Matt thinks of the rooftop and a hundred ninjas and an undead cult leader, “I think it’s highly unlikely—”
“No,” Foggy cuts him off, “I mean, here one day, gone the next? Me, totally unaware, until I run into some mutual acquaintance who brings up the news at a dinner party like it’s a conversation starter?”
“Foggy…”
“No, Matt!” His voice is too loud for a cemetery. “Don’t start with the ‘Foggy’ stuff!” He gives the word air quotes, mocking Matt’s grave tone. “You should have called me! I knew her! I knew you and her! You should’ve told me this! You should’ve…” All the air seems to go out of him suddenly. He slumps. “You should’ve done a lot of things.”
“Foggy…I’m sorry. It was—it was a very small…” he remembers the funeral, and immediately knows he can’t remember it, “…we didn’t exactly announce what happened. It was a small ceremony, a few weeks ago, right after it happened. We just—we wanted it done.”
“I would have come, if you’d told me,” Foggy says. “I would have been there. For her, and for you.”
He knows. Matt knows that, at least. Foggy will always be there. He’ll be standing beside Matt in their law office, at their trial, when the world around them starts to crumble, when the end of days begins. Foggy will be there when the bullets start to fly and the bad guys start to come looking, and that’s why he can’t be.
So, Matt doesn’t say anything at all.
They stand there, silent for a while. It starts to snow. There’s a fine powder on the ground before either of them bothers to move. Foggy starts to leave first, but he stops. Turns back. Wavers for a moment.
“You came here for something…”
It’s not a question. Foggy knows Matt’s long-held opinion on visiting with the dead.
“I just…wanted to make sure. I had a feeling. Something…I just wanted to make sure everything was alright.”
Foggy looks at him for a long moment like he’s deciding something. Matt can hear his heartbeat, tripping over itself.
“The ground.” Foggy says finally, “you said she was buried weeks ago.”
Matt nods, not understanding.
“That grave is fresh.”
I think the game’s just beginning
He’s not totally sure how he gets back to his apartment. His head is spinning, blood buzzing. Images are blooming up out of the darkness in his mind. Elektra, playing beneath his sheets, sunlight making the silk glow behind her. Frozen ground bubbling blood in long neat strips, like claw marks. The edge of a red dress vanishing around the corner of a shop with a window hung with Chinese lanterns. Two long, thin blades, like needles, grinding against one another, setting off sparks.
Elektra…
He hears her name like a whisper in his head. Knocks into his coffee table. Falls into the couch. Off balance, confused.
A fresh grave, with the dirt disturbed.
Elektra…
That voice is there and it speaks to him of impossible things, magic and fate and red thunder rolling over a black sky.
Elektra…
Children drained of blood and men who burn and burn and never die.
Elektra…
If he’s honest with himself, he never really believed she was mortal.
Elektra…
*
He bolts upright and instantly regrets it. For a moment his head swims. He can sense morning light flooding through the window, the apartment around him. It's a wreck. He didn’t even close his door all the way last night, when he came crashing through.
Why?
He’s in pain. He performs his usual checks on himself, but there are no tender spots, no broken ribs, no bleeding. The pain is all inside his head. The day before comes back to him in bits and pieces. He waits to remember the fight, the criminals, the weapons, but the images are disjointed, bright. A cab ride. Chinatown. Foggy. Snow falling…
A grave.
It isn't possible.
But…
He sees Elektra in that dress, darker than blood; a glass of mezcal in her hand, a smirk on her lips. The party around him going hazy at the edges. Lights shining in her dark eyes. The night they met.
Beautiful. More than beautiful. Impossible.
The first time he touched her, he was sure she couldn't be real.
He'd known it then, he knew it now. Things that were possible and Elektra…they didn’t belong to the same world.
His mind starts to thread together the moments, the thoughts, possible and impossible, the world he knows and the world beyond, srange half truths that begin to form a different sort of sense, some glimmer of truth he can grasp at through a veil…
And then the thoughts flee.
There’s a presence in his apartment.
It quickens the blood.
This is not the end