When Simon wakes up again, his head is pounding and he’s lost the feeling in both of his hands. He can see them, thrown out across the mattress. It doesn’t seem to be frostbite, but the skin is jet black at the fingers, melting in speckles into the familiar, discolored blue. The room roars around them, as if Betty and him huddle inside the body of some furious god.
Why did he ever grow his nails out like this in the first place? It does create an interesting illusion. The arm extending out before him, the one tied at the left side of the bed, loses sensation at the elbow, but he conjures a will and then watches his hand unfurl, his fingers stretching out in all directions. One shining, ebony claw has been tipped. Its pixels are all at war - everything’s are. He can feel them eating eachother up inside him.
The pain is back. He must not hide it well. The rushing of the air outside slides itself from under his ear and his head falls to the mattress to the sight of her shadow rounding the end of the bed - her body in front of the snowy television screen the eye of the storm that he will never re-enter. Betty comes back with more painkillers cupped over his mouth until he opens it. While she unscrews the cap of her flask, he gets it out.
“What happened?”
“Bad dream?” Her voice is as clear as the sky. He can just see it, a strange, trapezoidal hole like a mail slot, put another tape in, Simon. Let’s cap this off. Hey, screw a documentary, those Blair Witch bitches cried all the wolves for you. They’ll be slipping your own snuff film onto the library shelves. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “You’re right. We have to stay together. You know, I think you made the right choice at the end of the day, Syoma. ‘Til death do us part, huh?”
She starts laughing, a drunkish giggle he has lost the ability to find cute, only finding it within himself to laugh back. They’ve made it halfway. The edge of her veil spins in the breeze, tickles his forehead. She takes a deep breath, her next words fast and leveled.
“I just don't think I can do it to you. It doesn’t keep you safe. I want to keep you safe.”
The static silence. Her face has fallen. She is biting her nails again, each one a color he’s never seen before.
“Betty, I-I think I have amnesia back to…at least…I don’t-'' Simon is trying his best to turn away from the T.V. screen. “Sorry, can you untie-” A clap of pain only comparable to a handful of razorblades piercing him from the inside, all in a row down his chest. His phantom rib is the only bone that doesn’t hurt. It feels safe and warm in her grasp.
“Shh.” Betty’s hand is on his head. It smells so sweet. He takes a deep breath, waits until the white-haired, avian thing who is certainly not a little Icelandic boy anymore, that has been perched over the T.V. with its heels hooked around the edge of the coffee table, goes back to playing with the static. He tries his best to speak only loud enough for Betty to hear.
“Please don’t listen if I start talking like that again, alright?”
“I won’t.” Her voice is distant, slurring, her face too far up over him, the motion of her arm jostling him. Something streaks across his forehead. She is untying, tying something, taking her damp hand off his head to work at it. It is on his other side. He has not looked its way. I deserve whatever you could do, so just do it. Eat me, I can’t solve you.
You piece of shit, you think you deserve to die? Even if the crown would let you? Here’s your precious goddamn light at the end of the tunnel, and you will trip and fall back into its embrace every time you try running away.
No, no, no, please, what about Betty? Betty can still save him, Betty, please, I can’t solve you. You have to do it, I want you to. While there’s still something left, there has to be something left between him and me worth saving. Just stay with me.
Well, there’s obviously nothing left, and, nevertheless, Betty’s smarter than you are. You didn’t account for that. On his left side, she is still stroking his head, it might as well be her tongue against him. She's an albatross, a noose, a right hand cupping a perfect, reflective pool of blackberry juice, a hole - the holes of his palms on the bus that night that Simon knew she mistook for bizarre needle marks, right there, the same disappearing, violet lines in skin tensile as petals days after amputation. She is everything. She has dethroned him. Renounced him. Fallen from orbit.
“Hey…hey…you see it?” It is one of her last riddles. Her finger thrust out over the tangle of them, to the end of the red stain. “It’s the end of the portal.” And maybe it is.
Simon’s tongue has fallen numb, weighed down by the same poison welling up in her mouth, caught on the skin slung in the well of his collarbones, a tidepool, whirling. So like it was before, the easing grip, the timeline twisting. She tried to tell him. It gets tighter every time, the lines between death and life, reality and fantasy now frayed and knotted.
When he reawakes, she is gone, like the blink of an eye she is gone, and everything is wrong again. Compelled, suddenly, to survival, he tries to get his legs under him, all he feels are ribbons. It comes out in a buck, nothing more, the mattress weighed down beside him, as if there were another body there.
“Princess?"
The mouth of the tunnel lies open at his back, bleeding, the last exit from his red room quickly sewing itself shut, the pain so airtight, such a pressure on his mind that it draws out more laughter. Betty's silhouette in the hallway, which has once again gone lavender and cold. One arm cut off behind the bathroom door, swinging back with the crescent moon dangling at her ankles.
The needle-claws of stars and suns at his back harness him like a dog. He lurches against it, and it swings him backwards again - and they are too far apart. Betty’s paper doll silhouette, white star, in the doorway, at the wall. She is still in her books, looking for a spell to cure him. To Simon’s horror, she seems to have settled on one, letting it fall at her side as she starts to cross the room. Rolling out from the pages, bouncing on the threshold is his correcting pen.
“I have led away the darkness by my might. I have bound up the eye…I have carried off the crown. I have come to lighten the darkness, I have overthrown the destroyers.”
Coming forth with the crown now from behind the T.V. screen, his body on fire. By the time he finds his voice again, she has already stepped up onto the edge of the mattress. “I have hidden myself with you, oh never-setting stars. I have adored those who are in the darkness. I have made to stand those who hid their faces.”
“Princess, please, you have to hurry, it's starting to close-”
She is twirling it, her blade, her bottle of antifreeze, her bloody knife, the adze, the ruby in its head glinting in the same second the one between her eyes does, the one at her hip. “It's going to close on us. I-I knew you could do it, but now we have to get out- '' But it isn’t really her, anymore. Her eyes have been fully opened. The other hand, the crown. Looking down at it, softly, twisting it to catch the light off the snow. Falling to her knees, drawing closer, she’s going to pluck out his eyes, she’s going to tear out his brain like he did to Betty or she’s -
Tossing the adze, his key, his desperate deux ex machina, in a flick of the wrist across his paralyzed legs.
“You have to close it, don’t let him back through! Either of us! I-I can't do it again!”
That isn’t how this works. The princess knows this as well as he does, and when the words leave his mouth, hers tears open, slow, but below the depths of her thawing eyes, it’s more a smile of love and relief than it is bloodthirst. Maybe she didn’t know, but she does, now.
“I'm sorry. I tried. This is the safest I can keep you.”
The princess is lowering her hands over his head, the one intact ruby, and he is petrified, staring into her eyes, which are brighter than stars now, brighter than the sun. Her skin flickering, pale, in the static glow. Her breath cinnamon.
“One day, it will have to set you loose. On that day, you run until you find me. Whatever I am, if I am anything and if you have legs to run.” She twists, the portal darkening, crawling, her hair slicing the room as she whirls around. “I have to hurry.”
She is arching across him and taking it up the adze. Dragging herself closer, smiling, kisses him on the mouth, sealing it shut, then raises the blade to his eyes. She presents her thesis’ conclusion to him only, in one perfect, plagiarized sentence. The blade swinging back, the king shuts his eyes against the white haze, knowing what comes next without sight, already tasting the night air, the chill that comes when he wakes in the rain on a top step, right where everything stays.
And yet, here he wakes, right where he had fallen asleep, still tied in place. It was written across the bedroom mirror.
I see the gods, the eye of Horus hath consumed me!