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You wake up and your brother is dead.
It feels like the punchline to a bad joke you never heard the setup of. You wake up and your brother is dead. Laugh track, applause, like those old sitcoms Rem used to show you and Knives.
Knives who is dead. Knives who carried you to safety. Knives who grew an apple tree out of nothing, turned the land around the house so fertile that the farmer and his son who have tended your wounds and who watched your brother die would never suffer a bad harvest, not ever again, not so long as they cared for it well.
You wake up and your brother is dead. You know he’s dead even before you are told. You can feel it. Phantom pains, like your arm — but it’s your soul.
You scare them, the farmer and his son, by screaming — but you don’t know what else to do, you woke up and your brother was dead. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for days now, feverish and hazy with pain, waking only long enough to introduce yourself, long enough to answer what happened to you with ask Knives, long enough to feel Knives carding his fingers through your hair.
Long enough to think, just for a moment, just maybe, that it’s all going to be all right.
You scream. Of course you scream. You wake up and your brother is dead, half your soul wrenched loose from the other (you call it your soul because that’s what is is, but it feels like someone’s pulled a fistful of your guts out through your mouth) and you cry out like a wounded animal about it, and the foundations of the house shakes with it, the temperature bolts up by fifteen degrees, you’re terrifying, you’ll always be terrifying, and now you’re terrifying and alone.
They forgive you.
You stand under the tree and you hold your gun in the one hand you have left.
Your brother is dead. The farmer’s son told you what he did. Your brother killed himself. He waited until you were asleep.
He carried you here, to safety, entrusted you to humans, and now he’s dead.
You woke up and he was dead.
You put your gun down at the base of the tree. You touch the bark. You think about your brother, think about Wolfwood, about Rem, about the thin threads of gold left in your hair.
What goes well with apples?
…you’re not ready yet.
You feel the longing, deep down, the ache of it, the scream at the base of your soul for things to just stop, but for once, for once, you’re not ready to pack yourself up and walk into the dark.
Maybe you should be crying. Your brother’s dead.
But you don’t. You touch the bark of Knives’ tree, pick up your gun, and go back inside.
Your brother is dead. Wolfwood is dead. Rem is dead. No one lives forever.
Not even you.