Burning Bridges (illusion 2)

Continued from "Burning Bridges (illusion 1)" .

Burning Bridges, Inhaling Smoke

“My name is Michael!”

I was not exactly looking at him but I knew that he turned around very quickly and that was all I needed to see. I bolted to my room and slammed the door behind me.

Immediately I dashed to the big wooden desk in the corner, where there was more paper. I pulled out another sheet with trembling hands, kicked the drawer shut, and collapsed on the bed. A pen had somehow found its way to my hand and I wrote:

Lucas, I can’t stay here anymore. I don’t know why I asked. I don’t know what I wanted you to say. Sorry.

Love, Michael.

I wanted to write that he was the closest thing to a friend I had ever had, that I was sometimes terrified of him, and a million other things, but as soon as I scribbled those few sentences I folded the paper and threw it on my pillow. He would find it there, I imagined, and… I did not know what he would do. That was the whole problem.

Running my fingers anxiously through my hair, I looked around. There was nothing I needed to take with me; all my own belongings were already on my person. Everything would be left exactly as it had been when I had come, and I would walk out the front door towards the sea and not look back. With a deep, shaky breath and the desire to get it over with as soon as possible, I leapt up and across the room and opened the bedroom door.

Lucas was standing there, waiting. I froze.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he said, fixing me with a cold, infinite stare. It was a look that scared me deep down, that was filled with such an absolute sense of ownership that I might as well have been an object instead of a person. When I told him my name I had wanted… Well, I had wanted to just tell him, not yell it and run to hide. But I had wanted him to tell me his, or say mine in his own voice, or anything other than look at me like that.

“I… I just…” No matter how I tried, I could not find any words.

“I told you about names,” he growled. “Did you think I’d just let you leave after that?”

I felt then like he hated me, and I just wanted to sink into the ground but there was nothing I could do. “I… You said… I-it only matters if God knows your name,” I whispered.

“And one other person,” he said darkly, taking a step forward. It made me realize that he was not yet in the room, was not actually cutting me off from escape. That was the first time he had ever left me that option.

I slammed the door in his face. It shut with a crash that jerked me out of my paralysis and I stumbled a few steps back. A second later a black snake as small around as my finger slid its head through the gap under the door and flicked its tongue at me.

Shaking all over, I ran to the window, opened it, lowered myself to the ground and ran.




It was a long time before I stopped running scared. The sun was rising then and I was coming to realize that I had gotten turned around somehow and had been going in the wrong direction, away from the sea.

Even then I could not summon enough thought to stop. An outcropping of rock was in my path and I did not lift my feet high enough to clear it; I fell. I lay on the ground for a moment, but no one was there to help me up. Shivering from the cold and breathing in huge gasps of air, I asked myself what I was doing.

Running. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on that thought. I was running. I could not stay with Lucas anymore because – I shuddered remembering the feel of his eyes on me, possessive and furious. A hollow feeling in my stomach was telling me that I had ruined everything, that there were too many things I had not taken the time to think about before acting; it was exactly how I felt after setting the fire that had lost me the place I had grown up in. I had to keep running because deep down I knew, with more certainty than I had ever had about the townspeople, that he would chase me. He had left me the opportunity to run but he was still a predator and I was prey; if I was running, he would chase.

The island. The place of refuge. It would be safe there. I pushed myself up and leaned against a tree. There was blood and dirt on my knees, but I ignored that. I had to keep running, this time in the right direction but giving the house a wide berth.

As soon as thought replaced panic, all the things I had learned from watching Lucas about moving through the forest came back to me naturally. The rising sun made it easy to find my way, and it became almost unnecessary to concentrate on what my body was doing. So I thought. For day after day until I again lost track of them, as cool forest sloped down into windy grassland and down to hot coastline, grabbing at any food and water I could as I went, I thought.

There was one night, cloudy and moonless, that I was forced to stop or risk hurting myself in the darkness. I had checked my watch just before the sun went down: it was around half past twelve. Sprawled down in the grass, still a few miles away from the hotter coastland, I folded my arms behind my head and stared up at the dark belly of the clouds. I could not sleep. The thoughts moving through my head while I ran never stopped, not even when my body did.

“He said,” I whispered out loud, closing my eyes. “He said that you have to protect your name. What does that mean?”

Your name is what you are, and once they know that…

I remembered the orphanage, when I had been surrounded by people that mostly ignored me. Being ignored was like being invisible, so I had always heard the adults talking about the other children – and sometimes, if I had been caught with matches recently, myself – but not known who they were. Why would I, when none of them would have anything to do with me? Then later I would connect the faces to the names, and… I opened my eyes. “I would remember what they got into trouble for,” I murmured. “That was all I knew about them, so that was all they were. That’s why names are important. Perception shapes reality. Lucas is just a part of who he is, only… he doesn’t want me to know the rest.”

God only owns the people he doesn’t like. Everyone else is free to do as they please.

I sat up, my thoughts and stomach churning.

‘And the Lord said to him, Where do you come from? And he said in answer, From wandering this way and that on the earth, and walking about on it.’

Even I, as terrible a student as I had been, could see what that meant. It made a bizarre sort of sense: an infamous man, the awa tea, the statue, the black snake sliding its head under the door…

Do you know who Kanaloa is to the missionaries’ god?

“The devil,” I breathed, and scowled. They were just different names for the same thing. “That’s – well – fuck. Why couldn’t he have just told me that? Fuck.”

I stood up and started moving again, even though it was still almost impossible to see. Every time I stubbed my toe on something I picked it up and threw it as hard as I could – sticks, stones, clumps of dirt, it did not matter what it was. There was no way to be sure I was even going in the right direction.

In a way I had been almost expecting it. Everything I needed to piece it together had been handed to me already. For days I had been seeing that look he had given me right after I had said it was all just mythology and felt like the answer was hanging right in front of me. Now that I had it I felt like an idiot, and that made me furious.

I stumbled into a hole and practically twisted my ankle. “You bastard!” I howled into the night, my face twisting at the pain. “You made it obvious on purpose. You just didn’t want to say it!”

But he had. My anger deflated abruptly and I sank to the ground, spent. In a thousand little ways that were not actually putting it into words, he had. He had shown me what he was, his abilities, his home, the statue of a man he had tried to make and failed, everything – and I had accepted it without question from the beginning as if all I had needed to know was that he was not like anyone I had ever met before or would ever meet again. But of course it wasn’t as simple as that.

It would not have done any good to have realized who he was right away; in fact, it probably would have made things very different. If I had only known his name and not who he really was, I would not have wanted to stay at all. Despite that, I started to feel a million times more than ever before that I had ruined everything.

I stayed there until the sun started to rise. As soon as I regained my sense of direction I looked back towards the east where some of the clouds had begun to thin. I could see patches of sky above the trees, and against those clear, gray patches I could see a black hawk circling in the distance, getting faintly closer. Something quivered in my stomach and brought a shaky smile to my face; at least I knew for sure that he was following, though he was still very far away.

He was Lucas to me and that was enough. Whatever the priests at the orphanage had told me about the devil they had been talking about a name, not a person. I had never listened to them much anyway, and was not about to start. If that made me mad, fine. I had suspected I was from the beginning anyway.

As a person, though, I was still afraid of him. There were still a lot of things I needed to think through before he caught me. I turned and continued running west; I knew he would follow.




I had almost reached the place of refuge. My hair was ragged and too long and plastered to my skull, and my eyes were bloodshot from the stinging salt. The water was shallow enough that I could stand, and that was merciful because I was quickly losing the energy to swim, but the swells still pushed me against the coarse rocks that broke the surface. That was what Lucas had meant by the beach being hard: I would crawl bleeding onto an island where no one was allowed to spill another’s blood.

The ocean drew back from the shore and the water reached my waist. From there I could run again, all the way out of the surf. Then I felt it: something strong wrapping tightly around my legs. I had to twist to see the black squid that was surging out of a crevice in the rocks, twining all his arms around my lower body and clinging with powerful suction cups that made spots on my skin ache. One side of his face was turned up towards me, and he stared at me with one dark, bottomless eye that made me feel as if I was going mad all over again. The next wave was powerful and caught me by surprise; I was choking on seawater as I fell over.

Once I had lost my balance he let go, not wanting me to drown, and the waves rolled me up the beach. Disoriented, I could not find my footing again. All I could do was cling to the rocks when the water pulled back and try to avoid smashing into them when it rushed forward again. I could barely catch my breath between waves, but I was not choking any more.

The only thing that really mattered, though, was getting to dry sand. All the running I had done was worth nothing until I could get away from the water because I knew, whatever I had decided for myself, that he was still angry. Finally I felt sand at my back and air on my face. The water only foamed up to my neck. Gasping and squinting under the glaring sun, I dragged myself, crablike, up the beach on my back. My watch fell from my sodden pants pocket and I grabbed for the chain, wiped sand from the casing with my thumb and inevitably flicked it open: the larger hands said it was thirty-four minutes past noon. The second hand was frozen at fifty-nine seconds.

Then there were hands on my shoulders, pinning me down in the wet sand, and knees on either side of my hips to keep me from twisting away. The watch fell uselessly from my hand and disappeared. His face was between me and the sun but his glare was just as burning. Water dripped down on me from his black hair and clothes. He was gasping for breath, too – I must have really made him push to catch up. The sound of our breathing almost covered the sound of the sea.

“What… in hell’s name… do you think you’re doing?” Lucas panted.

I stared at him for a moment, blinking away saltwater. The desire to intimidate me with those infinite black eyes was written plainly in his face. And why not? It was what he had always done. Despite my resolve, I quavered. “Just… running.”

He bared his teeth, like the wild thing he was. “You thought you could run from me?” The water ran up my legs and he was pressing me into the sand because I was not answering. He brought his face very close to mine. “You wanted to know what I think of you? You’re an idiot,” he growled. A strange look that I was starting to recognize flickered in his eyes, somewhere in the blackness. “You shouldn’t have wanted to stay! Don’t you know it was changing you?”

“I’m still me,” I whispered.

“You know what I mean.” He glared down at me. “Your skin was lighter before—”

“That was the sun,” I said. I tried to make my voice as loud as I could. The words came out as a croak, but were somehow enough to cut him off.

“It was because you were following me. Doing the things I did.” The look flickered in and out again. “You got hurt,” he added angrily.

“But you helped me, and I got better…” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and said again, “I got better…”

Lucas scowled. His hands tightened painfully on my shoulders and pushed me down, grinding the scrapes and cuts on my bare back into the wet sand. “Why did you want to stay?” he demanded.

“Lucas,” I gasped. Maybe if I had not been so tired I could have kept myself from starting to cry from the pain, but the tears were hardly distinguishable from the seawater. “You’re hurting me…”

“That’s what I do,” he snapped, and then he put his full weight on me, driving the sand and salt even further into my wounds. “Is this what you wanted?”

I gasped again. “Lucas…” My chest was so constricted that I was having trouble breathing.

He put his mouth very close to my ear. With his shadow gone the sun blinded me from its place in the clear sky, and between that and a breeze my face and arms were drying quickly, leaving my skin feeling cracked and raw. “You asked the most damned obvious question,” he hissed at me. “Do you think I wanted to be alone in that house? To be the keeper of that damned statue? The way you talk about yourself and tend to that timepiece, you should be able to understand. But you don’t. And why should I have to spell it out for you? If you don’t, you can’t be made to.”

“But,” I said helplessly, “I want to…”

I might as well have said nothing; he just raised his voice and spoke over mine. “You wanted to die in that fire. Maybe I should’ve let you. I would’ve, if I’d known you would be angry at me for it!”

By the time he finished he was shouting into my ear, making me cringe. “Wasn’t angry… You just weren’t… weren’t doing anything,” I mumbled, not expecting him to hear.

But he did. He pulled back slightly and looked down at me again, frowning. The pressure eased and I could breathe a little more freely. “What the hell are you talking about?” he snapped.

I took a deep breath, blinked to clear my eyes and head. It would have been easier if I had gotten to dry sand, where he could not touch me. This is what I needed the extra time for, to sort out what I was going to say, but everything had gotten jumbled around in my head the moment he gained the upper hand. “You didn’t ever,” I began, then swallowed hard. That was not right, that was not the way to start. I tried again. “I could never tell if you really wanted me there or not—”

“If I didn’t want you there,” he interrupted harshly, “you wouldn’t have been there at all.”

It was all jumbled up again; he was not going to give me time to just come out and say it all at once and get it over with, so I stopped trying. “You never acted like it,” I protested.

“Why should I have to?” he shot back.

“Why should I have to stay the same?”

The look flashed in his eyes again. “You don’t want to be like me,” he said.

Hearing that left me feeling as if bile was rising in the back of my throat. All that running, days and days of it, and he was still back at that, still dancing around it, not wanting to say it out loud. My arms were held to my sides by his knees so I could not shove him away like I wanted to, but my hands clenched into fists. I yelled as loud as I could right into his face, screwing my eyes up with effort. “Don’t say that like I don’t know who you are!”

He did not move. In the long, terrible silence I could hear my heart crashing above the hammering of the ocean. I imagined that his was doing the same. “You do?” he finally asked. It was very quiet; I could barely hear him.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” I answered simply.

“You don’t.”

My breath hitched because, in my mind, there was no way I could not.

“If you did, you wouldn’t…” He trailed off, watching me closely. That was the look, the one that said he was prepared to shrink back into somewhere deep inside himself at the next word. Hell, he expected to. It was all over his face.

“What, be speaking to you?” I said, a little angry that he did not take me at my word. “Why would that make a difference—”

Lucas picked me up by the shoulders and slammed me back down into the sand, knocking all the air out of my lungs. “It makes all the difference, you damn bastard!”

I choked and coughed, then recovered and yelled back at him with everything I had. “Make up your mind! Did you want me to figure it out or not?”

“Shut up,” he roared, squeezing my shoulders and pressing me down painfully.

“Did you want me to or not,” I yelled, barely even noticing. “Did you want me there or not! See, this is the problem, I can never tell! And… and you don’t even know, but you don’t want to find out, and that’s why we’re not getting anywhere!”

“I said shut up!”

I glared up at him, meeting his gaze with defiance for the first time since we had met. “Do you want me or not?”

“Shut—”

“Answer the damn question,” I shrieked.

“Yes,” he roared back.

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

“I can’t do anything!”

My throat was starting to hurt as much as the rest of my body, but I was still half-screaming at him. “Tell me what you want me to do! You want me to be terrified? I am, half the time. I can’t help it, you’re a fucking scary guy! You really want me to shut up and leave you alone? Fine! Tell me to one more time and I will. Hell, turn me over and make me swallow sand until I choke, because like you said I’m definitely not against dying!”

“That’s not how it works,” he growled. “You – normal people – you aren’t supposed to want to be with me!”

“Bullshit! Just because you’re Lucifer—” he snarled at that and I knew I had gotten it right “—doesn’t mean I don’t… doesn’t mean anything.” The strength and desire to yell had been slowly seeping out of me, and my voice dropped back to its normal level. “Look, I’m named after an archangel but that doesn’t mean I am one. I’m an arsonist! People died because of me, I don’t even know how many. I may not be as bad as you but it’s not like you’re ruining me.”

In response he let himself fall unsupported on top of me and stared at me pointedly from less than an inch away. “I’m not helping,” he said. I could feel his breath on my cheek, where the water had dried a long time ago.

Again it became very, very difficult for me to catch my breath. “No, you’re… you’re not,” I gasped. “But I don’t… really mind.”

A feral growl rumbled from deep inside his throat; he was so close that I could feel it as well as hear it. “Why not?”

I wanted to ask why he could not just believe me, but I could not get that much out. I could barely breathe. “Don’t know,” I whispered.

My mind was a little hazy, and I felt sure he knew that. Still, he scowled and pressed down even more as if trying to squeeze more words out of me. “Answer the question!”

“Ahh!” I bit my lip, perhaps harder than I should have but I could not really feel it. My eyelids slid down of their own volition. “You’re not… scary all the time,” I managed. To my relief, he eased up a little. I let my eyes remain closed and kept talking, not really knowing where I was going. “You’re mysterious. You have… all the answers, even if you never tell them to me…”

Lucas propped himself up on his elbows; I could feel his hands move and his arms settle somewhere on either side of my head.

“You gave me a place,” I continued, “and you didn’t think I should stay but you wanted me to anyway. I wasn’t a—” it took me a second to find a word for it “—an obligation to you.”

There was a brief pause. “That’s it?” he said incredulously.

I opened my eyes and met his gaze. “No,” I told him. “I’m bad at saying it, that’s all. You cared about me more than anybody I can remember, so I care about you. That’s just what it is.”

He stared at me for a moment. “What if I didn’t?”

If I still had the energy I would have shrugged, but I did not. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I thought you did, that’s enough.”

That look was in his eyes again. He bared his teeth slightly. “That doesn’t make any sense,” he snapped, and drew back a hand and hit me across the face. It was not a very hard blow. His arm fell back to the sand and he looked down at me as if he did not know what to do next. “Why don’t you make any sense?”

I did not know what to say to that; it seemed like we were slowing down, coming to a resting point after all that had been said. The distance between us was irrelevant, as if we had both forgotten that there was more space in the world for us to occupy. Somewhere, distantly, the surf was still foaming over my legs. Instead of replying, I coughed.

“You’re bleeding.”

Confused, I blinked up at him. “What?”

He stared down at me. “Your lip,” he clarified.

“Oh.” I licked my lip, thinking vaguely that I must have done that earlier when I bit it. Or maybe he had done that when he hit me. I did not really care either way. “Doesn’t hurt,” I mumbled.

Lucas sighed, a bleak and tired sound that seemed to go on longer than it should. He relaxed again, but moved over a bit so that he was only partly on top of me. His left shoulder matched up with my right. “You don’t make any sense,” he said. With another sigh he let his head rest on the damp sand; out of the corner of my eye I thought I could see hair falling into his face, but I was not sure because the sun was in my eyes again and I had to squint.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I tried to assure him. “Don’t even feel it.”

“Does anything ever hurt you?” he mumbled into the sand. At first I was not sure if he was actually speaking to me, but then he lifted his head and fixed me with a sharp, rather sideways look. “Well?” he demanded. “Answer.”

I thought for a moment, very seriously. “People leaving me alone,” I said. “Everything else I can live with.”

He stared at me a moment, then dropped his head. But he was still watching me.

“I could live with you,” I continued. “I decided that for sure somewhere along the way, while I was swimming, but… I guess I didn’t know how to stop.”

His black eyes were resting on my cheek and neck; I could feel that. It had become familiar. “It would just be more arguments,” he said.

Both of us were too tired to dance around the obvious right then, so I figured he had to say it. That was another time when I would have shrugged, but I was still pinned and I still did not have the energy. “Better than nothing,” I replied simply.

There were another few moments of silence, then: “You have blood on your lip.”

I licked it away again. “I know.”

We stayed like that for a long time. Both of us had come a long way, in every sense, and exhaustion kept us from moving. I drifted off for a while, then woke up as the sun was close to setting and shifted a little. Or tried to.

“Lucas?” My throat was dry, so it came out hoarse.

“What?” he answered, sounding wide awake and no different than he ever was.

“Could you let me up please? I can’t feel my legs. Or my arms…”

“Oh.” Gently and a little stiffly, he pushed himself up and sat beside me, then helped me do the same. Our eyes met. “Michael,” he said suddenly, sounding a little uncertain. As if he were testing it out.

I wobbled a little, slumping against him but craning my head to keep his gaze. “Hmm?” Without having to think about it, I slipped my hand into his.

He hesitated. “Nothing. Just… to say it.”

I smiled at him. There was blood on my face and back, I had lost my watch, and I knew – we both did – that we were not done yet.

We watched the sun fall into the sea with a blaze of fire.




Well, I haven't looked at this for a while... I forgot how much I love these guys. Maybe that means I will write more about them. There are definitly some things bouncing around my (and their) heads, but it might be another while. We shall see.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!