Absolute Gravity

I knew death like an old friend. We knew each other almost intimately. Even though I'd never given in to it entirely, I'd always been just on the edge of it. We saw each other often enough to flirt, dance, and get to know one another before being forced apart. I knew death well enough to know what it felt like to long for it. Like a lover you got to know in fleeing moments but never had for your own. The more I flirted with death, the less of myself I became.

Less Johanna.

More Chaos.

I'd seen it come for the people I loved. I watched my friends die right before my eyes. I'd fought death. Trained most of my adult life to fight it off. I'd dug my fingers into open wounds and knew what it felt like to feel a punctured artery slipping between my fingers. I learned all the ways I could fight death in a career where it ran rampant. I'd watched it take friends, children, loved ones, and lovers. And somehow, we always just missed each other. It sent its most skilled killer after me, and even when he put a bullet in me, it didn't come. It didn't come even when I intended to meet it myself.

It only took pieces of me each time it came. Bit by bit, it took my innocence, my freedom, happiness, my mental well-being, and eventually my memories too. So I was nothing but a shell of a person who didn't know how to move forward and didn't know who I wanted to be and where I wanted to go. I moved along with life in whichever direction death put me in. And it brought me back to the man it had once sent to take me.

I may not have figured out who I wanted to be and where I wanted to go, but I figured out what made me tick. The future looked bleak, but it was still a future. There was still hope in it, even though I couldn't pinpoint exactly what I hoped for. I'd once wished for a chance to have a family and a stable future, but I'd lost it on the battlefield. I'd given up on ever having children or getting married. So even when I was given a second chance at life, I didn't embrace the opportunity. And when I did eventually find someone I loved enough to want to share my life with him, it still wasn't an option. It was a relationship built by circumstance, bonded by the shared experience of knowing and yearning for death.

I was used to having things taken from me. Used to having something close enough to touch but never embrace before it was ripped away. Peace, Death, Love. Those were all things I'd wanted once, things I got to feel for just a moment before they were gone again. I'd be forced back into the reality of my life and my situation—Chaos, Life, Heartache.

He knew death better than I did. In ways I never would. He'd died and come back to life so many times; he'd taken so many lives that I could sometimes see it hovering around him. Even in those brief moments of peace we'd been allowed to taste, I'd see it hanging over him in a dark cloud of nightmares and violence. He yearned for it more than I did. But for some reason, even if only for a moment, he'd wanted me more. It had been enough to chase the Darkness out of both of us for a time. To rekindle an ember of hope in my heart and to make me yearn for life and all the things I'd lost hope in.

But like all things I longed for, he was taken from me too. Over and over. First, when death returned for the weapon it created. Then again, when they came to reclaim the Chaos they'd set inside me. We always found each other again. Like two comets stuck in the same trajectory, constantly pulled back to one another by the force of our own gravity. He promised once that when we finally came together for good, it would be a force that was—simply—spectacular.

I still had hope for it. Even though there was something Dark inside me, ripping me apart and trying to consume me. I hoped that I'd see him again before death came for me a final time. I stopped thinking far enough ahead to hope for a long life or a family or anything else someone might look forward to in a future with someone they loved. At the very least, I wanted to see him again—one more time. I wanted to give him the goodbye we'd promised to never give, let him know that what we had was real and beautiful.

Death came for him first. It came for so many of them. And this time, it seemed like it didn't want to give them back.

I wished for it again. Hoped. Longed. But there was a Chaos in me that refused to let me go. So when it came, and I was willing to give in, when the blood from my body stained the water black, it spoke in my head, "No—I won't let you go."