4.56: It Wasn't Supposed To Go This Way

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Things didn’t go this way. We went through dangerous stuff all the time, charging into certain death, doing dangerous magical experiments, we were trying to save the world, and Max had… what? Drowned in a well? No, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t how our lives worked.

“We were bound to run out of luck sometime,” Kylie said, staring at the cup of tea in her hands. We were back in our room, having been ushered out of the hospital by… someone with the surname Acanthos… before the rest of the family came in to see their son. The woman who’d shooed us out hadn’t really introduced herself, or cared who we were. She just didn’t want us in the way.

“Hmm,” I said. But I couldn’t accept that. We didn’t run out of luck. We beat the odds, pulled through by the skin of our teeth. I knew our lives were dangerous, I knew we’d risked death again and again, but… had I really known that? Had I ever really believed that we wouldn’t make it out?

I mustn’t have ever believed it, because here we were, one of us hadn’t made it out. And I just couldn’t believe it. Even in the thick of danger, in the moments that I had been dead certain that one of us would definitely die, facing my own reflection under the tooth fairy’s castle or holding a seizing Kylie in my arms or watching Max cave in the tunnel underneath us and tell us to swim, I’d never really envisioned a life after, a time in which our death had come and gone and now the world was just… continuing. The idea of our trio being past tense.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Max had built the tool, and gone in search of the secrets, and he’d picked up a new spell, a new prophecy that could see things we couldn’t – he wasn’t supposed to do all that and then immediately die! What was the point of all that, the library talk and the new spell and everything, if he was just going to die before using it? That didn’t make any sense! He was supposed to get out, and use the spell to help us save the world! To finish breaking his soul and his body like Fionnrath’s Destiny had told him to do! He was supposed to finish school with his new spell, or lose it and muddle his way through without a spell and see if they ever caught on before he graduated. He was supposed to find some way to stop Kylie and me from having to go to Fionnrath, and he was supposed to date Melissa and, I don’t know, maybe get married someday or maybe break up in some dramatic fashion that I was going to have to play middle man in or something. He was supposed to save the world for us and then be a hero or go to jail forever or be a cool scientist or whatever, depending on how saving the world shook out. He was supposed to tell his family to shove it. He wasn’t supposed to actually die. Not with such a long to do list.

Not while leaving us behind. It wasn’t fair.

“He’s your first, isn’t he?” Kylie asked.

“Huh?”

“The first you’ve lost.”

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Does it get easier?”

“No. But it stops being everything. After awhile.”

I nodded. I thought about the last time we’d had with Max, down in that tunnel. He’d been out of his mind on prophecy, so really the last time I’d seen him fully present as Max had been – oh, shit. It had been that fight where I’d accused him of not caring about Kylie and told him to get over killing someone. That had been the last conversation we’d had where we were both fully present. I’d never apologised, and now I never could.

And down in the tunnels… it wasn’t fair, that we hadn’t known that it would be the last time we’d see each other. It felt like we should have known something like that. Like we should’ve had a chance to, I dunno, say goodbye, or whatever. Two people in that little adventure had had prophecies, and we –

I thought about Max down there, gifted with the power of some kind of foresight, insisting that he couldn’t leave the ‘library’. Telling me he’d miscalculated, but that we should keep trying anyway, that we could do it, that we had Destiny on our side. Smiling sadly in that final dead-ended tunnel, rubbing at his eyes… tears? Telling us, “I love you both,” and dropping us into the water.

“Do you think he knew?” I asked.

“What?”

“At the end. Fionnrath’s Destiny didn’t prophesy, so there must have been no way to save him. And he could see the future too, at that point. Do you think he knew that he was never getting out of that ‘library’?”

“I don’t know,” Kylie groaned. “Does it matter, at this point?”

“I suppose not.”

I glanced at Max’s bed. The bedcurtains were closed, just how he’d left them, so I couldn’t see anything, for which I was grateful. I knew from a few snatches of overheard conversation that the janitors, ever efficient, had already secured his personal effects for his family, and I didn’t want to see empty space where Max’s stuff was supposed to be.

My eyes lingered on the little panel next to his bed, where a student could claim it. It showed that the bed was now unclaimed, belonging to no one. I looked away.

It was late. We were both exhausted. I went to bed, and slept dreamlessly until my alarm woke me up the next morning, reminding me that I had classes.

So I.

I just.

I went to my classes.

I got up, and took a shower, and put on some nice robes that weren’t torn and stained with filthy wellwater and a dead man’s blood, and I went to my classes. I didn’t even do too badly in my classes. I mean, I wasn’t on form, but I successfully translated phrases to and from Ido for Instuktanto Ahuja, and I did some maths equations, and when Saina asked me how I was holding up in potioncrafting I didn’t even cry a little bit while I shrugged.

Maybe I was a sociopath. I should look into the diagnostic criteria for that, maybe ask Dr Peterson about it. ‘Abandons friends to drown to death in a well and then goes to class the next day like nothing happened’ probably wasn’t explicitly listed in the DSM, but it couldn’t possibly be a good sign. Yeah, that must be it. There must be something wrong with me, or maybe I was just a bad person. A good person wouldn’t be doing this.

“Do you want to hang out later?” Saina asked.

Yes, desperately. But I glanced at her two bodyguards and politely refused. The idea of discussing Max in front of Miss Muscletank and her Mad Scientist Sidekick made me feel sick.

I didn’t need to talk to anyone anyway. I could just do the thing where I pushed the feelings down so I couldn’t feel them any more. I’d had an entire childhood’s worth of practice at it. I was probably already doing it; that sick, hollow feeling in my chest, like something had been neatly cut out and left bruised walls all around it, was probably my imagination. I couldn’t actually be feeling bad, because if I was, why the fuck did I go to class? Who does that?

Kylie wasn’t around when I finished with my classes. Probably off doing whatever grieving people were supposed to do. I should go somewhere too, not just sit in my room, but… where? To do what?

Potions. I was behind on orders for sleeping draughts. I booked a workshop last minute (my favourite one was already taken) and got to work, but I couldn’t remember the ingredients properly. I’d made this potion literally dozens of times and I was having to look up ingredients. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling as I tried to harvest the stamens from white lilies picked under a full moon; after the third time I cut my finger, I decided that it was time to give up. I threw the bloody knife into the sink with rather more force than necessary, took several deep breaths, unclenched my fists, and got to methodically cleaning the workshop. Strictly speaking, I only needed to clean up my own mess for the next person, but once I ran out of tools to clean and put away I just sort of kept going. Two hours later, I’d documented the workshop equipment and supplies (sometimes people broke stuff and didn’t report it, so the equipment lists were always a bit inaccurate) and scrubbed all the benches, and was in the process of mopping the floor when I remembered that this wasn’t actually my job. Surely I had something better that I could be doing. What, though? Homework? Now??

Well. There was one thing that needed to be done. Something that only I could do.

I went out to our phone reception mountain and pulled my mobie out of hiding. It wouldn’t work for much longer, I knew. Max had paid for them, and his accounts (or whatever) were presumably closed now, meaning they’d be shut off at the end of the billing cycle. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and dialled Melissa’s number.

We weren’t supposed to use the phones to make calls. On the anonymous roaming service we were using, international phone calls to Australia cost a lot, enough that the costs could be noticed by Max’s family if done too often. But with Max… but with the accounts shut down and everything, that no longer maatered. And I sure as fuck wasn’t going to have this conversation via text.

“Hello?” came Melissa’s voice. I could hear cutlery and her parents in the background. She was having dinner. I was interrupting fucking dinner with this.

Should I hang up? Call back? No. No, I needed to get this done, and there wasn’t going to be a good time to do it. I took another deep breath. Let it out slowly.

“Hey, Liss,” I said. “It’s me. I, um. I have some really bad news.”