therightbastard

I only just remembered who this was inspired by; Two women I loved once, both of whom were experts at taking the Damage on. All I'll say is neither of them had green eyes.

A ROSARY OF SHELLS

The beach was painted in shades of old tarnished silver; sand and sun and sea reduced to dull shades of gray on that cold November dawn. The boy woke alone to a wash of pale sunlight, in a tent strewn with bedrolls, patched rucksacks, and old wool blankets. The blankets smelled like the girl he was traveling with, like dust and old roses, a touch of hot summer sun. The tent itself was filled with an underlying tang of recent sweat, a fading memory of the night before. The boy rose from the tent, into the morning's cold light, and stumbled through the sand towards the burned-out circle of their fire pit. Gazing out over the beach, he allowed his hands to begin the familiar ritual of brewing coffee over an old propane stove in a smoke-stained aluminum pot.

The sun was a dull chrome smudge hanging numbly in the gull-grey skies above the Monterey coastline that morning. The absence of the gulls themselves was advertised by the beach's silence; the only sounds to be heard came from the sea as it rushed at the sand, only to withdraw, time and time again. As the battered pot above the propane burner began to steam, the boy looked across the dunes to the beach below, where the girl stood at the edge of the ocean. He watched her as she stood alone on the empty shore, gazing out over the slate-colored waves that came crashing down endlessly on the beach, an endless expanse of sand the precise shade of bone; old bones long since ground to dust. She stood barefoot at the boundary of sea and sky, wearing hacked green army fatigues that hung down barely past the curve of her calves. Her back was bare, and her auburn dreadlocks hung down to the center of her shoulder blades, to precisely the place on her back that she complained that she could never reach; By night, the boy has learned that when he scratches her back precisely in that spot, she will growl and purr deep in her throat like a lioness, and lie still beneath his hand, lazy-eyed in the smoldering heat of their camp's fire.

The deep, natural red of the girl's hair is the only remnant of the last night's fire to be seen. It is, in fact, the only shred of color to be seen along the length of the beach at all. The girl's hair draws his eye back to her again and again as he sits, his arms resting on his knees, twisting a sea-bleached length of driftwood absent-mindedly into the sand. Next to him, the mud-brown coffee boils in its pot, its steam rising to disappear against the steel grey sky. Down at the waterline, he watches as the girl turns, giving her back to the sea, and bends to retrieve her shirt from the beach. She begins the long walk towards him, pulling her shirt on as she approaches. As she pulls the loose, soft fabric over her eyes, the boy steals one last glance at her. He always prefers to look at her when she is unaware of his attention; the girl moves like the dancer she had once been, and she still has a dancer's self-consciousness; a constant quality of awareness of other's perceptions that affects and infuses every movement. Sometimes it seems that all of her actions are influenced by her knowledge of an audience, even when it's only an audience of one; her movements are influenced by the viewer in the way that the tides are influenced by the moon; her sensuality is an unconscious seduction, but a calculated one, all the same. He has learned to appreciate the rare moments when she is truly, casually, forgetful of herself. At any given moment, the girl is attractive, but it's only when she forgets herself that she becomes truly beautiful.

So he watches, stealing the last seconds of her; he admires the grace of her stride as she crosses the dunes. As the faded black t-shirt slips over her head, and falls past her breasts, his eyes wander over the smoothness of her belly, where it descends into the ragged waist of her worn, salt-stained fatigues. He admires the sway of her hips as she walks along the sand; caught adrift in memories of the night before, and the nights before that, it takes him a moment to realize that the girl has stopped walking, and his eyes travel up her body again to her face, where one dark green eye gleams out at him from a tangle of crimson dreads. She pulls the shirt the rest of the way over her head, and grins slyly at him as she approaches. One slender eyebrow arches delicately as tilts her head to smell the air, and her smile deepens.

"Mmm. Coffee. Thanks, sugar."

Her voice moves like the rest of her, a sultry combination of rough and smooth, a subtle Texan drawl flowing like a deep, slow river beneath her words. She tumbles casually to the sand beside him, crossing her legs tailor-fashion, and brushes the sand off of her feet before slipping them into a pair of battered German tanker boots.

"You're welcome. 'Black as night, bitter as sin'." He passes her one of their two dented steel cups, and pours to fill his own. "The way you like it."

"Just the way I like it." She agrees. Her grin flashes into being again, as she reaches across the sand to tousle his hair. "You can stay." The grin fades to a soft smile as she shifts her body across the sand to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the boy. The boy faces outwards, gazing at the ocean; he's learned over their time together that the girl prefers not to be looked at when they are near each other. Her first promise to him had been to only ever speak the truth, but she had also told him that the real truth, the truth that really mattered, was something she could only speak of when she was alone. And it had turned out to be true, in its own way; over the weeks they had spent together, she had told him secrets that he somehow knew she had told no one else. And when she shared herself with him, she wove her secrets into their conversations as if she was talking to herself, her eyes locked ahead of them, seeing only the endless stretch of black asphalt that rolled out into the dark horizon of the southwestern sky, as if she was still alone in the darkness of her ancient car, driving down a long, black river leading to the end of the world.

He had learned things about the girl as they drove together through the East Texas night; things which had made him hers, and made her his, in ways that he had never believed one person could belong to another. That was when he learned to steal the truth of her in snapshots; his history of her was a photo album of stolen pictures; her face lit by the aquarium glow of the Charger's dashboard lights; her features silhouetted against the New Mexican sunset; the rising sun making her face an empty shadow in the Arizona dawn. And throughout, her voice recited a litany of haunted memories. She repeated her history like a child's bedtime prayers in her soft, velvet drawl as the miles ticked slowly by; her words were the constant, fluid soundtrack that flowed between the still portraits of her face, pictures taken in the mind's eye of a boy falling calmly and inexorably in love, as the two of them, boy and girl, flew alone and together through the rolling desert nights.

Sometimes, when she spoke of the highway she called it 'Lethe'. And that was when he began to understand where and how their journey was meant to end.

The rolling black hills of the boy's memories lightened, faded. The hot, dark New Mexico mesas overcome by the crashing waves of the iron-voiced ocean of now. As the waves roll in, he rests his chin on her shoulder, burying his face in the warmth of her neck. As he slips one hand through the auburn ropes of her hair, brass clinks against brass, with a sound like pennies bouncing down a cold stone stair.

And he opens the first door.

"What were you thinking, when you were standing there?"

The girl pauses, and looks away from him, towards the strip of deserted, empty beach that stretches, eventually, to San Francisco, and Portland, and Seattle beyond.

"I was thinking about the sea." Her voice was and distant, almost childlike. "I always dreamed about it, but I've never seen it. Not in my whole life." Her voice softens, and she turns to look at him shyly, hugging her knees. "I was looking out on all of that water, stretching out so far and so deep, and I was thinking of all the fish, and the whales, and the crabs beneath it. So many living things, living their life, never knowing you, never knowing me."

Her wild green eyes flash then, and she turns her head away. Her voice became as cold as the waves pounding the empty beach.

"And it made me hate them. It made me want to swim out to that old oil rig with that spanner I've got up in Angelina's trunk, and spill all the oil in the world into the ocean, it made me want to kill everything that would dare try to live in this world without knowing that I finally found you."

Still looking away from him, she pulls a single, braided strand out of the thick, soft pile of her hair. Her fingers trace its length, stopping once, twice, five times at the brass shells woven into the braid.

Like rosary beads.

The boy lets the silence build. There is never a second chance for moments like these, the turning points on which futures balance. The truth has to be faced. This moment, this potential, this now is both precious and dangerous. But then, the truth always is.

And he comes to the second door.

"Sweet lies, lover. Sweet, lies."

Five words, five shells. Synchronicity.

Like rosary beads.

Like prayers.

And then he waits. Everything balances on her now, the future balanced like a coin standing on its edge. The girl makes no sound, but he can feel her tension, a decision hanging in the balance.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace...

"And you swore you would never lie." He says, with precisely measured scorn.

In the boy's defense, his cruelty is both intentional and necessary. He and the girl had been pushed together by fate, a drifter and a driver chance met on a Texas highway. Both of them drifting with unknown destinations, their destinies undefined. Each of their options reduced to a handful, by decisions made before they had ever met. And the girl's fate was not a choice that she herself had made, but would merely be the final scene in a tragedy written in violence by a pack of wolves outside of an East Texas roadhouse on a storm-torn night weeks before. Her destiny was not his choice and not hers, but only he was left to witness and script it's end. The truth can sometimes be cruelty, but cruelty is sometimes necessary, and the only time for truth is always now.

He owns her as she owns him, but sometimes, owning your lover means owning their pain. To keep her, all he has to do is risk killing her, by refusing to allow her to forget.

So he breathes.

Finally, after a long, silent minute, he turns his head, and the girl is gone. Only her footsteps on the sand behind him let him know that he isn't alone on the empty beach, as he hears her enter their tent.

Seconds pass, off in the far distance, a single gull screams. The coffee in its metal cup cools slowly in his hands.

A minute, or hour pass. He can't be sure. Time has stopped, the coin still balanced on its edge. One copper penny, five brass shells. Finally, he hears the shifting of the sand as she returns. The beach is silent and still; the waves themselves seem to have ceased their rush and pull; there is only now. The choices they have been left with were never what they would have chosen, but in order to own each other, they must own the choices left to them by others.

The girl stands behind him.

The coin stands on its edge.

Five words. Five shells. One girl crying on a dark, cold night; one bullet resting in a dark, cold chamber.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace...

The boy feels a cold pressure on the back of his neck, and the weight of something as solid and ugly as hate presses softly against the skin above his spine. The metallic click that sounds like nothing else fills his ears with the sound of potential futures.

One short, one long.

He stays still and calm. He watches the waves as they roll inexorably up onto the beach.

The silence stretches on for one minute, or an hour. He does not count the waves as they crest and crash and slowly rush their way up the distant sand. They are all the same wave, they always have been, and they always will be. Each wave is one, and the one wave is forever.

The boy breathes. The waves roll in.

One wave, one breath, and the girl's slow breathing, above and behind him. He understands her more with each passing moment; he knows now, finally, that the girl has been drawing the same breath over and over again since before he met her. Since that bloody night in Texas, and perhaps before. He knows her now, here at the edge of life and death, and only now does he grasp how little he understood her before joining her here.

One shell, one hope.

She tosses her head, and the sound of brass bells ring as the empty shells in her hair click against each other with the sound of locks tumbling closed.

"I killed five men with this gun, sugar." She said in a voice colder and greyer than the sea. Deader than the sky. "I killed five men, and then I ran. I've run a thousand miles, and now there's nothing but the cold grey sea. I don't got no where else to run to. So tell me, boy, why don't I just kill you?"

The boy takes a single breath. A moment ago it was hers, now it is his; in the next moment it will be no one's.

"Rachelle Lee Harper?"

A pause.

The solid weight of the end of everything rests like a headstone against the base of his skull, as he opens the third and final door.

"I'd like a cigarette, if you don't mind."

Another pause.

"Fuck you." In a whisper.

A moment later the girl's smooth, bronzed hand places a cigarette between his fingers. A moment later it returns again, holding a tarnished, ancient U.S.M.C. Zippo lighter. He automatically notes the smooth white scars along her forearm. Thirteen that stand out enough to be seen, and countless others, faded with time; he's counted them while she slept, like a boy counting sheep, tracing them with his fingers as the hours crept slowly past.

The hand disappears. The gun's barrel never moves.

He draws harsh smoke in to his lungs, and exhales slowly. His words are steady, measured, and calm. "You won't pull the trigger, Rachelle. You won't pull the trigger because you're looking for the end of the world." He watches the burning coal at the tip of the cigarette, wondering if that single speck of fire will live on beyond his death. It doesn't matter. He'll win or lose her now. This moment is quite literally, the only thing that's real. Unless she sees the exit he has for her, he'll lose her whether he lives or dies, and to live without her, with the knowledge of his failure, would just be a slower, harder way to die. "You thought you'd find it where the road ended, that once you finished running, you'd have nowhere left to go." Another drag of the cigarette, as he listens to the truth of her, and of him, flow from a place inside himself he had forgotten existed.

"Your world ended that night, Rachelle. And ever since then you haven't understood why the rest of you didn't die right along with the part of you that did." He looks up at the sky, watches as a single distant gull wings its way towards the beach.

He imagines that he can smell her tears beneath the salt tang of the sea air. He imagines he can feel their heat on the back of his neck. It's only his imagination. Dead girls don't cry, and the girl he's been traveling beside for weeks has been dead all along. Smiling, laughing, joking, but dead inside and waiting to die.

To drink the waters of Lethe from the barrel of a gun.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace...

He probably really is in no danger. The Colt Python is loaded with the last of a handful of shells, slid into the revolver's cylinder by trembling, bloody hands on a thundering, tearing night outside of Austin. The girl owns (and is owned by) that final shell in ways the boy hopes never to be owned by anything, except, perhaps, her. So in reality, the boy is in no real danger. All he really has to lose is the only thing he has found in life that has ever mattered to him.

Her.

The gun's barrel doesn't move. It is the pivot point on which their reality is balanced.

Her hand slides through his hair, as if to tousle it again. Instead, it grips it tightly, the restraining hand of an executioner. "You're going to die one day too, sugar. I" Her voice hitches in her throat, and the pistol's barrel pushed harder against the base of his skull "you might as well get it out of the way now. I might as well just pull the fucking trigger. At least that way I get to decide when you leave."

One searing tear burns slowly down the back of his neck

And behind the third door, he found her. One broken girl hiding in a cold, dark chamber.

And with that he knows they've won. Although she may not know it, their fate has unfolded from a single dying point into an infinitely open future. The pain doesn't end here, but now it genuinely begins, and by beginning, it begins to end.

Hail Mary, Full of Grace. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

He closes his eyes and breathes. He smells her, like dust and roses, and a touch of Texas sun. When he opens his eyes, the gun is gone. The sky itself seems to breathe as the ocean pulls back from the beach. The boy moves slowly onto his knees, and turns to face her. Her eyes are holding in her tears, and he's never seen eyes so bright and green in his life.

"It's hard to worry about dying one day when every day of your life is spent dying."

And with that, she breaks, standing above him, alone as the highest wave of that days tide breaks on the beach. He watches her tears, as they roll down her cheeks, and knows they aren't yet done. They have a thousand miles left to go, heading south all the way down Baja, to the end of the world. And until they arrive, the revolver will still be resting between them in the car, loaded with a single shell. Once they arrive, the girl will have to make the choice she never would have chosen for herself, the final choice of a girl who was never really running away, but who wouldn't accept what it was she was running towards.

One bullet, one gun. One day and a night's drive to the end of the world.

But when she makes that choice, it would be him holding her, and the both of them beneath a bright and burning sun.