An Adamant Attachment

Part Three

 
                      Years in the Future
  
     Hiram stood in the darkened home. His wing’s metallic membranes reflected the sheen of the moon as the building sunk into the olenchyme. That light revealed to his six veiled eyes the darkened spots on his wings, where cyan blood stained their blades. He looked at the floor to find the avian and tentacled serpentine nearly consumed. Only chunks of their flesh remained, like the landscape of a rocky coast after high tide.
     He recalled when he first arrived here. The door remained closed after three instances of him ringing the door chime. Realizing that no one was going to answer him, he slashed the entrance to pieces. When he entered, the occupants were huddled together at the center of their living room, an adjacent table occupied by playing cards signaling the unfortunate nature of Hiram’s timing. The avian and serpentine tried to urge the others to run away, but their obstinate desire to fight Hiram allowed him the crucial moments to close in. The avian tried to appear defiant before him, but as he raised a blade more than twice the length of her body, poised to cleave through her and her spouse, she could only turn around and throw herself over the serpentine to protect him. It worked, for a second. Hiram’s wing was dulled by her bones and muscle. The serpentine and his children watched in abject horror as a cornerstone of their family was split in half and offered to the olenchyme’s eager pseudopods with a lulling tongue.
     The serpentine roughly pushed the others away. He puffed up his chest and tried to rise to Hiram’s height, only to realize that the titan’s wing had already entered his throat, severed the carotid arteries within, and sliced through the cervical vertebrae behind it. His head tumbled to the floor after a luxurious fountain of indigo blood sprayed from—
     “What are you doing?”
     Hiram raised his head to observe his interrupter. Jean stood at the back exit of the home, cast in shadow aside from her glowing eyes and the glint of her long, hiltless estoc. When the quadruped child reached the destination of their escape, and the back door peeled open, they had been skewered on her blade. Jean slid their body off her blade and puppeteered it at the large insectoid as she toyed with them, all the way until she spilt their skull with a single chop of her hand.
     “Thinking.”
     “About dinner? I still think we’ve had red meat too much lately. How about pasta or sushi, something fancier.”
     “Pasta is … Wait, that’s not what I was thinking about!”
     “What’s wrong?”, Jean asked as she strode toward him, revealing a body slathered in green and orange blood.
     “Just … Can you explain again why we chose this house?”
     “Mm? Okay. We were walking through downtown after executing that moronic impersonator of mine.”
     “Right”
     “You were still upset because I killed more of her little cult than you did.”
     “I was upset because you wouldn’t shut up about it, but keep going.”
     Jean snickered, “Anyway, I proposed a bet where we could test who could rack up more kills, and here we are. I guess it was a tie though, so that sucks.”
     “But why this house?”
     “They were being loud in here; I thought there would be more of them,” she replied indignantly.
     “But they barely even fought back. It was completely pointless.”
     “You can pick the house next time if you’re going to keep shitting on my pick.”
     “I’m not—We didn’t get anything from killing these people!”
     Jean sighed and crossed her arms. “I thought that fifty years would put us past this.”
     “I-I don’t care that we attacked first, or that they were a family—”
     “Right, because the olenchyme’ll shit out replacements within the hour, someone else was just going to do it eventually anyway, and whatever other moral excuses you want to through at the issue before you accept that it just doesn’t matter either way.”
     “It’s just … it doesn’t sit right with me if there was no point to it. It was a petty bet without a winner. There was no challenge to killing them; it was effortless, but now all their impact on the world has been reduced to nothing.”
     “So?”
     “That’s a shame. That even these people’s killers didn’t want them dead, but they’re gone.”
     “Hm,” Jean uncrossed her arms, strode over to Hiram, and gently pulled his head to her level. “Don’t call those things out there ‘people’. They aren’t. You’re a person to me because I choose to consider you such. Just as I am to you. Everything out there is just shapes, noise, and mass until we make it more than that.” She rested her forehead on his. “And we make this have value. I love seeing you defeat these things. That makes me just as happy as cutting down these cretins myself. I thought you were the same way, but maybe I was mistaken.”
     Hiram studied her downcast face from six angles. He’d learned the subtle mechanisms of her featureless face over years of observation. Seeing her beauty sullied by vulnerability, for any reason, pained him more than anything else.
     “Of course I enjoy seeing you happy. I only wish we hadn’t wasted time with something that didn’t let either of us shine.”
     “…”
     “Also, I love you.”
     She laughed, “Why thank you. I love me too.”
     “We should have pasta. I found a place that makes that baked ziti stuff you were droning on about.”
     “Don’t you dare lie to me about this.”
     “I’m serious! They call it ‘cooked pasta tubes’ or something stupid like that.”
     Jean stuck her hands to the sky in prayer, skipping out to the street imitating worship the whole time. Hiram watched her, unable to keep a smile from his vertical mouth and unaware that the best years of their lives were behind them both.
   
                      Further Forward
  
     Hiram hoisted the tree, a thick oak tree twice his height, and set it into the hole. He used his tentacles to bury its roots in dirt, patting the soil down until it looked somewhat presentable.
     “I think we’re finished,” Jean commented from his side with her hands set on her hips.
     Hiram moved backward to examine his work. A dense forest surrounded them and the inorganic home that he and Jean had erected in the center of it. The whole environment was utterly alien to him, but Jean was constantly enamored by its ancient aesthetic.
     Jean had taken him around the world, contracting revisionists and stealing what survived the old world so she could build this diorama and fill it with the relics she loved.
     “Are you satisfied?”, he asked.
     “… Yes. It looks … like I pictured it to look.”
     Jean turned around and strode toward her new home, her talons clacking as she ascended the wooden porch.
     “What do you want to do later today? I heard there’s a guy in town who claims he’s going to build a tower even bigger than ‘Archangel’ Jean’s mountain. Seems he’s made good progress so far. Could be fun to go ‘inspect’ his work ourselves.”
     Jean stopped just short of entering the house. “N-No, not right now. Probably not today. I’m just going to sit for a bit. We can do something later.”
     She entered the front hallway and disappeared down one of its paths. Hiram stuck his neck inside, unable to enter himself. He peeked doth the turn she took and saw her sitting in the middle of her library, a stack of books on the table next to her. Jean. However, was empty-handed, simply resting her cheek on her fist.
     He watched her silently for several minutes until she finally picked up the book on top of the stack. As she opened it and began reading, he retracted his head, not wanting to disturb her with his concern. Once he fully removed his body from the house, Hiram retreated to the outer rim of the clearing. He curled up as if preparing for sleep but did not intend to. Instead, his purpose revolved around observation. His six eyes hawkishly watched the front door.
     Hours passed. The artificial blue sky turned to a sunset red. Hiram uncoiled himself and approached the door. He snuck his head inside like before. Jean was still in the library. The stack of books had disappeared back into the shelves. She sat on the ground, surrounded by a fresh selection of books laid in a circle, her chin resting on tented hands.
     “Are you okay?”, he asked quietly.
     “I’m just thinking,” she replied without looking up.
     “Oh no. Well, if you decide you want to do something fun instead, then—”
     “Hiram, please leave. I’ll be out soon.”
     “… Okay” He retracted his head from the room and left her alone. Hiram again curled up at the edge of the clearing, watching the door.
     Days went by. He checked on her periodically. She did not stay in the library, but she never left the house, always moving to a new room where she would linger forlornly for hours on end. Hiram tried to coax her out with different methods, tried to watch the house from different angles, yet the result remained the same. Eventually, he started to leave their mountain on his own. He did the things they normally did together and even killed the tower-builder he offered to slay with her. None of it had any effect on him. It just felt stale.
     On the eighth day, Hiram had had enough. He shoved his head through the door, snaking his neck up the stairs to Jean’s bedroom. It was well past noon, but she hadn’t left her bed. She swiveled to her feet when Hiram’s head reached the door.
     “What do you want?”
     “Are you fucking serious? Wh-What do you think?! You don’t leave the house. You barely do anything even in here. I’m not even sure you’re eating, and you refuse to talk to me!”
     “I …” Jean’s chest abruptly contracted, and she put her head in her hands. “I don’t know. I thought making this house and living in it would help me feel better, but it hasn’t. No matter how much I try to immerse myself in it, to enjoy things, it never works. I can only think about all the things I’ve done before. Those books, this house, everything here is just a different version of something I’ve done or seen before.”
     “You said you wanted this.”
     “I know I did! I-I thought that going backward would help when everything I do in the present is … suffocatingly pointless.”
     “We can find new things to do, more inventive than anything we’ve done to really get the pulses pumping. I know I’ve been against some of the more extreme things you wanted to try in the past but fuck that. You want to burn this whole city to the ground? I’m with you, anything it takes.”
     Jean sighed and leaned back on the bed with her feet still on the floor. “That won’t work. You’re suggesting that we do the same shit we always do but on a larger scale.”
     “Then what? You can’t keep sitting here.”
     Jean did not respond, continuing to lay in her bed. For the second time in their relationship, the first time occurring when they first met, Hiram looked at Jean with revulsion. This was ridiculous. She was the most powerful person on the planet, and she was letting herself languish like this.
     Hiram snaked a tentacle into the room. He wrapped it around Jean’s waist and began to drag her out of bed. She didn’t react. He was sure she would attack him for such a disrespectful action, at least ripping off a limb. Jean let him take her out of the room, even walking on her own in the direction he urged.
     He led her out of the house. She stared languidly at the deep forest. Hiram burned with frustration at how easily she let him drag her out of the place she’d holed herself up in for so long. He tossed her from the porch, letting her roughly hit and tumble along the grass.
     “Get up,” he commanded to her limp body. She complied, which angered him even more. “Why are you being like this? You’re not weak, Jean, stop acting like it.”
     “I don’t care about what you think, Hiram,” she said softly.
     “See? That should be the least of what you say to me. Beat me half to death, make me suffer for going against what you want. Don’t be this fragile.”
     Jean turned around to make full eye contact with Hiram. “That’s what you want? You want me to put this aside, so we can go out have fun again?”, she asked sincerely.
     “Yes, of course. I want you to be happy.”
     She paused, her tendril idly curling around her neck. “I understand, Hiram. I understand who you are and what you really want from me, even if you don’t … I’m going back inside. Stick around if I’m not too fragile for you.”
     Jean walked straight back into the house. Hiram seethed with indignant rage as she strolled past him. He had done everything for her, and all he wanted was to see her be happy. That is what he believed and would continue to believe over the years of isolation that Jean would undergo. She wouldn’t stay shut in forever, but through all of it, Hiram would always be there, patiently waiting for her to become the source of strength that he could no longer live without. 

「This is a work of fiction. Any references to real places, real people, or historical events are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.」

Copyright © 2021 Matthew Cammarano
All rights reserved.