9:A_SOBRIETY_COME_TOO_LATE

There was a part of her which grew ever more vocal with each passing day, that wanted her to give up. Walking through the radiation, alone, even of her own accord, wasn't so ideal. She'd gotten too big of a head, overestimated her own body, underestimated the radiation. Here she was, slogging along to her next destination, while coughing up pink chunks she had to assume were the melting insides of her chest. How long would she be able to walk for? How long could she talk? Fight? How long until breathing became a chore too?

She didn't know.

Adelaide hefted the black box along with her. She'd pulled it apart and fashioned it to fit inside the casing of a briefcase, rather than the heavy box she'd been stuck dragging with her before, but it didn't help much. The damn thing was still too heavy, especially as her arms got weaker. She forced herself along down the road, waiting in the vain hope Forrest would answer the call. She hated how often he just didn't bother to answer even at their assigned times. She barely had a way of tracking the time but she was still trying.

Finally, a voice came through, though more broken up and harder to parse than before. "Lai...de? This you?" it asked, with a far worse delay than before. Adelaide waited, just to see if he'd say anything else. He didn't.

"Yeah, it's me," she answered, teeth chattering in the cold. The nuclear winter was really setting in now more so than ever before. The cold always had a bite, but now that bite was sinking through and freezing Adelaide, even under all the layers she'd cobbled together for herself in the wasteland. She wrapped her arms around herself. "Do you—"

"Good, I'm glad I could catch you," his voice came, once again delayed.

"Oh— sorry."

"Do I what?"

"..."

"'Laide?"

"I'm just waiting on the relay delay," she said, attempting to be short so it didn't take too long to get to him.

"It's getting worse," Forrest answered eventually. Adelaide seated herself on the roadside. There weren't any living trees left, and their leaves had been buried under the snow. She crouched awkwardly. If she sat down, she'd just end up wet and the cold would be only worse.

"I know."

"How close are you to where you're trying to go?"

Adelaide hesitated. "Not too far, but there's a few more stops before I can get there now. The entire area is a mess too. Hard to walk." After she was done speaking, she was left crouching awkwardly, and waiting for a response which would come all too slowly.

She'd never told Forrest where exactly she was going. She'd never even said it out loud to herself in passing. She had considered it far too taboo. To say the word would've solidified it too much, and this was not a journey that deserved the solidity of the spoken word. It was a journey which only deserved the solidity of a silent promise. A promise made and kept to herself. She stared down at the relay, as that though soon ebbed away and only left her in a dull, monotonous silence.

It felt strange waiting through the delay. Like watching someone slowly get further and further with little understanding as to how or why, but unlike that scenario, which could at least in some instances be related to circumstances out of anyone's control: Adelaide knew why. It was her own fault. Though not entirely familiar with the exact scientific terms or reasoning behind it, she could generally explain the reasoning for the issue without too much trouble. It was simply the consequence of the fact he was in space, and she was on Earth.

It wasn't some personal slight done against her by the universe itself trying to prove a point for some reason. Not that it mattered much. She still felt the same way regardless. Though, to her, the fact she still felt hurt over it felt like an issue with her reality. Like she was failing to understand something so very simple.

The divide did present a less easily explained loneliness. Because to her— Forrest was right here, in this small box, which she was carrying around without much trouble. Of the mental variety, anyway. The thing was still quite uncomfortably heavy. Sure, physically, he was far away, but he was right here. His voice was right there with her and she could still speak to him as much as she wanted. But Adelaide had realized it far too late— it wasn't enough.

Earth had become a deeply lonely place, and she had at some point become a deeply lonely person, like Jisako had once been. Her inner world and her outer world had merged into one and all she was left with was a sense of deep, unrelenting dread. The whole thing an exercise in discontent. She wondered for a moment how Forrest must've felt about it.

He hid most of his discontent and loneliness to the best of his ability. He was essentially a man who hid from the world like a turtle retreating into its shell and got away with it because he was good at it. As though he had sensed her thoughts drifting toward him— his voice spilled over the relay.

"Listen, 'Laide, there's some ships, they go up and down. They're going around in search for some military people and some tech we left on the surface. I'm saying— you could hop onto one. I could tell them to look for you— give you a drop point to go to and then it'll be exactly how you want it. They can take you up here— and yeah, we can deal with it. Radiation poisoning— you know how it is. We can rid out the symptoms and you'll be fine."

"You know I wouldn't agree to that."

"Can't you at least write down some of the drops that are near where you're going?" he insisted, desperation spilling into his voice. Adelaide winced somewhat. She'd been rather unsympathetic toward his pleading, and she hadn't thought about it very hard. If he'd been out there trying to die doing something... She doubted she'd have been any better about not meddling with his problems. She'd have fought tooth and nail to stop him too.

But Forrest wasn't Adelaide. He wouldn't do something so stupid like this. "It'd be nice. But I won't use the information. And I don't have anything to write it down on either. I had to leave the car behind. It's not working anymore." Her mouth moved awkwardly. Her tongue felt too fat in her mouth. Too thick to move correctly. It had swelled with thirst.

Adelaide glanced at the snow. If she put any of it in her mouth, it would certainly speed up her death by radiation. But...what did it matter? She scooped a handful, and placed the pieces in her mouth. It crunched between her teeth, and she shivered, drinking it in, waiting for Forrest's reply. She hoped her mouth wouldn't be too cold to open again.

"I'm sure you could find some way to remember— in a few days, one of the drop zones— it's near the old radio tower in the town you're headed straight for. It'll be perfect. You'll get there no problem anyway. And you can finish your work before joining me up here."

"I'll think about it."

"...It's still a no, isn't it?" Forrest asked.

Adelaide sighed. "Yes. It's still a no," she replied, simply. She shut her eyes briefly, waiting for his response through the relay. She paused. "How's the work on the station? Did they manage to sort everything out?" She pulled more of the snow into her hand. If she leaned her head downward, the snow would melt and warm up a bit in the front of her mouth, making swallowing less of a difficult task.

"I can't keep talking to you like this," Forrest declared.

"What?" Adelaide hadn't expected to take such a sharp tone when she asked. She hadn't meant to sound cruel or sharp, but she couldn't hide her rage. A desperate, lashing out type of anger at the thought of being abandoned. She froze up as soon as she realized though. It was the same anger that had driven her wife away from her, and she wanted nothing more than to see her bride again. She'd played herself. She'd fucked the situation. "Wait— no— I—" stammered Adelaide.

The relay delay, however, prevented her from being able to formulate anything before Forrest started to shut her down again. "I can't keep talking to someone who's so intent on dying. I can't sit and listen to how desperately you want to die over and over hidden behind pretty words like retribution or martyrdom and a pretty purpose," he said. "There's not a damn thing you or I can do to convince the other by this point, and I'm tired of trying. I did everything to try and convince you— but it didn't fucking work. And what am I supposed to do? Keep calling until you inevitably throw yourself away? I'm doing everything I can, and you're just... Determined to die." His tone became slowly more dejected the longer he spoke, before he finally, just about barely whispered, "So I'm not going to die trying to stop you."

Adelaide wanted to say something, but he simply cut the relay then and there. It let out a loud crack as it was shut down for a final time. She was left alone in the endless, stretching silence which dragged itself into the horizon and made the dawning of the sun completely meaningless to her. Adelaide hung her head, grabbing at her hair. She gripped it in fistfuls— tangling it between her fingers.

The trees seemed to close in on her, their dead, scorched, and frozen forms all coming together to trap her in a cage of wilderness. If Forrest had been here, somewhere she could chase after him, she would've chased. She would've— no. She realized she wouldn't have.

After all, what would she even say?

It would've been a lie to say she'd found some special reason to live just because he'd called her out. If he'd asked her to live just for the sake of it, well, she couldn't do that. She knew he cared about her, but that wasn't really reason enough to keep fighting to stay alive, was it? Maybe for some people. It wasn't in Adelaide's world. In any sane person's world, it should've been.

Adelaide had always been this way. Possessed by single mindedness and aggression when others refused to just go along with whatever she had been obsessing herself with doing. When Jisako was alive— it seemed to be an obsession with everything other than caring for her wife. Now that Jisako was gone— it was only repentance. What would it be now that Forrest was gone? Would she find some novel way to obsess over him, now? To push some other poor fool who entered her life right back out of it?

She let everything drop into the snow, sapped of energy and will. Of course it hit hard to be told that her closest friend had given up. That he couldn't keep dealing with what she was putting him through. Something that he'd given her opportunity time after time to stop doing, but which she insisted on despite the pleading— until he was gone. And it wasn't too dissimilar to how Jisako had once pleaded with her.

Can't you please look at me for a moment? Please, where are you going? Adelaide, please! Please stop leaving me behind! Her voice had sounded so strained and thin back then. Jisako wasn't used to being loud, but Adelaide had always pretended she couldn't hear her beloved bride— regardless of the situation.

Adelaide rolled onto her back in the snow. She'd never made snow angels as a child, and she didn't have the energy to now, either. But the thought came nonetheless. She gave her legs a lame sweep— as though to satisfy the ghost of some inner child that had died long ago.

What a pathetic sight this whole mess must be... Forty-six years old, half-heartedly making snow angels in a radioactive hell, obsessing over the fact her friend wasn't talking to her anymore. She might as well have been a teenager again. She'd felt just as robbed then, when she'd first realized what childhood was, and how she'd missed the train on it. It was the first time she'd ever felt truly bitter toward Sepheline. She'd been upset before then. But it was not until she was standing on the platform of the train station that would take her away from Sepheline forever that she truly understood it. A sudden realization for how so much of her suffering was traceable back to a singular culprit. To the bitter acts of the tree that had bore her as its fruit.

She waited there for quite a while— in the vain hopes he might come back. It wasn't any different to how she'd acted when Jisako said she was leaving. Adelaide had sat waiting on the front steps of their house the entire night, as though miraculously, her keeping her ass firmly planted to the step would cause her beleaguered wife to return to her. After too much thinking, she surrendered herself to the will of the universe and shut her eyes.

#

The town was barren of life— even the bones had been picked clean by what few scavengers had survived the nuclear strike. There wasn't much that was left lingering around anymore. What little had survived was either deep underground, in tiny, claustrophobic shelters, or high up in space, in tiny, claustrophobic ships. There wasn't much positive either way. That said, it wasn't like anyone should've expected better. The whole point of nuking the world was just to ruin it.

Sure, the justification was to win some war or other— to prove the value of one way of life over another, but in the end, it was more about destroying everything. Just ruining everything for everyone so no one could live well anymore, regardless of who won the war. After all, what point was there in lording over ash and debris? In Adelaide's mind, their only sensible use was a global suicide initiative. A final call saying, "no more of this, thank you" to the concept of the human race.

It would've been understandable to Adelaide. It seemed everyone was a little pessimistic about mankind.

Adelaide looked out over the skeletons— most of them were fresh. They hadn't died that long ago, they'd just been picked clean. Not that it made much of a difference. Either way, it was a land littered with the misery of dead bodies. The few that weren't feasted on by scavenger birds were ugly things. Charred and blistered over— close enough to the blast that they'd mostly been demolished.

She held the briefcase tight in her hand, even though there was no sign it would ever receive a signal again. She was tired. She didn't want to carry the damn thing around. It was heavy, and it was stupid to think Forrest might still contact her, but she wanted so desperately to hold onto some sort of hope. He'd said he'd never come back, but here it was again. That habit. Fucking everything up and then waiting on the porch again.

She continued into the town. "Come on out. I don't know your name, and there's no one I can sacrifice in your name... So just... Come out. I don't have time for this," she called into the cold world.

It was a hapless plea that didn't have much value, but she was desperate to make it anyway. To just get to the result without the need for jumping around and the glamour. She stood there still as stone, waiting for something to happen. She must've looked no less stupid now, tumbling around with a tie and a briefcase, as though she were about to clock into the office in the apocalypse. She was tired, and things hurt, and hope was hard. Besides, no one was left alive to laugh at her being a clown show of a human being anymore, so what did it matter?

Finally, her despair and apathy seemed to rouse something. Not within her, but within a demon lingering nearby. A man emerged from a nearby house, smiling at her. "You're making quite a fuss for being so lazy," he said. Unlike everyone and everything around him, he didn't look the slightest bit affected by the collapse of the world. He was carrying some healthy fat on his bones, with full, rosy cheeks, and skin clear. Not a single burn on him.

In fact, if she'd seen him on the street on any other day, she'd never have given him a second thought. But here, he was a symptom of something ghastly. He waved at her, smiling. "There's no need to look so obviously dejected if you're calling my company," he declared, with an amused tone of sorts.

Adelaide stared at him for a moment, before nodding. "I probably shouldn't look so depressed if I'm about to call on the help of Hell. It's unsightly, I'm sure."

"Very. Though I'm not the demon, just the conduit."

"It's fine, I'm sure the demon can still hear me, can't it?"

"Of course," he said. "You must be exhausted. Come in, come in."

Adelaide pushed herself in through the door. It was warmer inside, and the house was entirely unaffected too. There were still all the amenities of a typical house. A kitchen filled with a wealth of food, and a dining table with a feast sitting upon it. There were couches covered in beautiful lace and velvets— everything, indeed, was as it should've been. A perfectly normal house.

In fact, it almost felt like a fancier replica of her own home. Her home had been small, yes, but it had been beautiful. And when she looked at the couch, she could almost imagine Jisako there, laid down on the soft couch, unable to stay awake through late night television after a long day spent maintaining the house. Or she could imagine Forrest at the door, standing awkwardly stiff and speaking with a forced formality if Jisako were the one to answer the door.

Her heart screamed inside her chest. Because she could imagine Forrest on her couch too. When they'd been young, single, and living in crappy, cramped apartments where the smell of wet cabbage permeated every wall. They'd waste their evenings hanging around together, and one of them would knock out on the couch at some point. It hurt her heart to think about how they'd laugh off the rumours that sprung up around that. They'd laughed so much together at one point. They were so comfortable and easily amused.

It seemed only the aching of a distended heart was filling her mind now— too filled with blood to even pump correctly, and ready to burst at any second, only keeping itself together to cause her pain. A spiteful little parasite acting on her body as her mind had been acting on itself.

At one point, she'd known him, better than any other person on the planet. They'd been anchors in a vast sea of the unknown. But then he'd become very serious— left for the military. She'd become an exorcist, gotten married. They never lost contact, but something else must've died in the interim.

Adelaide couldn't be sure entirely what it was. But it was something that had held them together, and it was a bitter taste to realize that. The fact that she'd lost her beloved wife and her best friend in the same way. And she'd reacted the exact same to both instances. Waiting. Waiting they'd come back.

If she'd been a braver woman, she would've chased after Jisako that day. She would've apologized and held her wife close in her arms. Kept that beautiful woman safe in her embrace. If Adelaide had been a braver woman, there would've been no reason to die on Earth. But she was not brave. She was cruel, and stupid, and she was reaping what she'd sown.

She looked at the demon's conduit. "Why'd you make your deal?" she asked, in an almost friendly sounding tone.

"I wanted to survive," he replied. "I wanted things to go back to the way they were. So I have both things now."

"Is it really how things are if no one's here?"

"You're here."

"I'm a stranger to you."

"That can change. My name— not the demon's name, my name is Anane." He opened his arms as though he expected a hug. Adelaide did not hug him. She kept a polite distance, and his expression soured somewhat as he waited for her answer.

"Adelaide."

"See, we're a little more than strangers now." Anane tapped his heels against the ground, in a cutesy rhythm. The kind that Adelaide could imagine children using, alongside oddly morbid yet nonetheless commonplace rhymes.

Adelaide looked at the man. Anane, as he'd said his name was. She narrowed her eyes on his features, and he seemed to stand up just a bit straighter when he was being observed. She almost wanted to laugh at his reaction, but couldn't muster the energy. "And you think you'll make a family out of whoever comes stumbling by?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. I'll let fate play out," Anane replied. He smiled without any sense of the world around him. The poor fool seemed to be entirely unaware of how futile hope was. He was trapped in his own optimism that something would work out somehow. Through the power of a desire for it alone. "There's only so much I can control, only so much a demon can do."

"Right, right. You have a point," Adelaide replied, falling right back into the same old, dull, pleasing habit that she'd almost detested herself for having around Forrest. She wished she'd used it more. Used it enough to appease him so he kept speaking to her until she was dead. As they spoke, the sound of something whirring passed by overhead. She looked up in confusion, but of course, all Adelaide was met with was the ceiling. Solid as ever. She sighed at that. "What the hell was that?" she wondered, as though Anane would have the answer.

To her great surprise, the man did indeed actually have the answer. "You're lucky you came inside in time. If that ship saw you, they'd have taken you."

"I must be incredibly lucky indeed. No worse fate than that. Being taken into space."

"And probed," Anane replied.

"And probed," she echoed, dryly amused.

"It's controlled by the ones in charge of everything. The new world order. They'd destroy us if they got the chance, so we have to be vigilant."

"I can only imagine how vigilant we'll have to be for the rest of our lives."

Anane smiled at her. "Very— but they'll be good lives. Lives where nothing has to go well or be that hard either. Lives where all the hard work is maintained by our own demon."

"Were you waiting for me?"

"I was waiting for anyone."

Anane smiled at her, before moving to sit down on the couch. Adelaide continued to stare, but she wasn't able to get together her feelings about the whole situation. To just give up and settle down somewhere in the middle of nowhere with someone she didn't know, with the hope it would pan out in the end.

Hadn't that been what Jisako had done? What most women had to do? She almost openly snorted at the thought by its sheer absurdism. Adelaide sat down next to Anane. "Where are you from?" she asked. "What did you used to do?"

"There's no need to talk like that. What do I do? Well, I'm an accountant." He grinned. Anane's smile was uncomfortably stretched, and his skin had become blindingly pale. Every single mark on his face was clear and dark— like stains on a piece of paper. Though it was subtle, the demon had slowly worn away at his humanity to some extent. Even though he was still smiling, still clearly happy, it was fragile in some small way.

"Well, would you rather pretend nothing changed at all?" Adelaide asked.

"Of course. Close your eyes, I say. Just close your eyes, let me put my hands over them, and let me show you a better world we can live in. Come here, lean in." Anane continued to smile at her, tilting his head to the side.

Adelaide didn't think before she leaned her head in and let him cover her eyes. Anane smiled and pulled her to stand slowly, hands moving to lace over her eyes. The pair of them walked. Adelaide found it strange. She'd never been led around like this. She'd never had strong memories of a father, nor had she ever had a boyfriend. She'd never been touched very much by Forrest. In fact, he tried to stay away from her physically quite a bit after they'd grown out of childhood.

It was just him being the way he was. Forrest was an awkward person who was always a little nervous about how other people were judging him— and he'd been that way even since they'd met. It only got worse the older he grew. She was always keenly aware of his embarrassment about his best friend being a woman. He was bad at hiding it.

She was also keenly aware how he avoided her touch specifically to avoid seeming romantically involved with her. She'd always found that more uncomfortable. A keen reminder that there was a distance that nothing could ever gap between the both of them. A fundamental incompatibility of bodies and sexes that meant their friendship was always one under a weight of scrutiny.

She didn't know if she liked Anane's casual ease to touch her either, however. The whole thing felt weird and almost goofy. She kept her eyes closed as they walked, crossing her arms. "Move the case down, please," Anane complained when the briefcase bumped against his side.

"My apologies," Adelaide mumbled.

The pair of them walked along out the door.

Finally, Anane pulled his hands away from Adelaide's eyes. He smiled at her. It was the first thing she saw when her eyes opened. She hated that look in his eyes. Honestly, she didn't like anything about him. Anane, bright eyed and smiling, still reeked of darkness in his destructive soul. The demon was eating him alive like a starving monster. He wasn't better off than someone dying slowly of cancers born from the radiation floating around.

Adelaide looked at the world outside. The destruction, the devastation— all of it had so cleanly vanished from the Earth around her. It looked like a normal day, in a normal place. The sun was out. The grass on the ground was a clean green, yet to be burned to an ugly yellow by the sun. Of course, not everything was perfect, but there was a beauty and a simplicity to the world. A place that was so... right.

A delusion this beautiful must be a tool for torture, she thought to herself. She turned her head to the side, almost expecting to see Jisako, as she would've on most normal days in her life. And indeed, she did see Jisako. In the form of a restless, angry, damaged spirit. Bearing wounds and a desire for blood.

Jisako's ghost walked closer, with a confident, judging stride. She raised a brow. Spiders had grown into her skin— wriggling haplessly. Unable to escape their prison of flesh, they wriggled. They must have convinced themselves there was some way out and begun wriggling for the sake of it. And doing so desperately, in fact, utterly convinced they could change their fate. In other parts of Jisako's skin, which had grown thin, pale, and translucent, maggots could be seen moving around one another. They climbed their way out after chewing great holes in the skin. Her head, which had at one point been cut off, was reattached now, held on by nails and webbing.

To Adelaide, she was still the most beautiful sight in the world. Even when her mere presence caused the world to crumble around her. Adelaide ran forward, reaching for Jisako, leaving Anane standing dumbfounded and lost for what to do. Because unlike her— he couldn't see anything. There was no one there, and Adelaide realized far too late that she was chasing a shadow.

She fell to the ground, stumbling on one of the steps, desperately reaching out toward the ghost. But the ghost wouldn't look at her. Unflinchingly, when she was on the ground, she was below its judgement. Anane walked over slowly, to help her to her feet. "I know, it's exciting to see the world in a new light like this, but come on," he drawled, sighing. "Isn't this a bit much?"

"I saw something," Adelaide mumbled.

"Perhaps it was Krito," Anane replied. "He's the one letting the world be like this. Perhaps you saw a glimpse of him."

Adelaide lowered her head. "Yes... It must... Just have been Krito." She looked up at Anane, who was standing on the front step of a house, which looked far too nice. Through the window she could see that interior which had so entranced her earlier. The feast inside which had seemed so utterly perfect when she had walked in.

And as she stared at all of it, she had to wonder. Did Anane care that there were bones scattered on his front step when she'd arrived? Had he felt anything about the fact that the houses that made up his fake neighbourhood were all bombed out and gone? Did he care that the food was simply the manifestation of a demon? That it would never fill him, only give him tastes and smells and sights, and leave him to starve and suckle on the dry bosom of the Earth? Or worse, the demon itself, which could never feed him anyway?

She rose to her feet, slowly, taking his offered hand. The staring didn't stop even as Adelaide got to her feet. She thought again about the cross around her neck, with which she could tear into his. She closed her eyes. "It's a beautiful world," she declared.

"Yes, yes it is," Anane answered, assuming she'd made her choice.

#

Though it was false, though it was empty, though it was gainless, there was a certain bliss to resigning herself to the false normalcy for a few days. Adelaide knew full well she would be leaving and that she would be killing Anane on the way out. But in the time she did fall back and let herself believe in his delusion— it was nice to take a break. Forrest wasn't responding. Frankly, she'd basically given up on the thought he'd ever contact her again. She hadn't accepted it in her heart, but that was another story entirely. Her bloated heart, fit to burst like a bomb inside her chest, was of no business to her. If she deluded herself just enough, she could pretend she didn't feel it.

Anane was a delusional man through and through. He didn't need any of Adelaide's slow methodical attempts to lose touch with reality. He was far from in touch with it at the start. Adelaide held a suspicion that he had been the type to always believe in fantastical things, like out of touch conspiracies. After all, he had plenty of tinfoil hats to go around to confirm it for her.

Anane absolutely refused to talk about the real state of the world. He was much happier talking about any other subject. Though his most preferred ones were the easy ones. Things that had no need for thinking. He had no interest in anything more deep than asking about her favourite sandwiches or funny stories. Of course, he wanted to lead conversations. He wanted to control the house. If her story went somewhere he wasn't interested, he was quick to cut her off to speak about something else which interested him far more.

He also wanted to control any emotions within the house. When he was upset, he would make sure everything reeked of his anger with whatever he was upset by. When he was happy, he would make sure she had no peace without a smile. He was never sad, though. Most other emotions than the handful he considered permissible were shoved into a hidden corner to not be addressed.

If he caught her frowning on a day he expected positivity, he would be instantly firing off with assumptions about how or why she was upset. "There are some benefits to being alive," he would say, the moment she seemed mildly dissatisfied about something. "And I think, believing what I see and what I'm told is far easier than looking at whatever real ugly side there must be. So, now, tell me about the world. Tell me something beautiful."

She had simply been thinking about how she didn't quite like the smell of death which had managed to permeate even Anane's thorough delusion. Of course, feeling challenged by him— she chose to make up some more grave reason to be upset. So she could waste his time for bothering her.

"There were— are," she corrected, noticing his expression. Nothing could occur in the past in his world. Everything had to be in the right now. After Anane's expression settled, she continued, "sunflowers in my garden. They're large, and made almost entirely for my wife. I planted them. We considered planting fruit once."

"Why didn't you?"

"We tried. They tasted too bad to enjoy eating."

In a way, it wasn't very different from how Adelaide had been with Jisako. A part of her almost felt that this was more like penance than martyrdom ever could be. Though— with every headache, every nauseous episode, every time food came up with bits of blood stuck to it, it was a reminder. None of this was real, and she'd die either way. This could not be real penance. The misery of a continued life could not be her penance, because there was no way to continue living in a situation like this. The headaches had gotten rather bad. The radiation poisoning had become much worse.

From what she understood about her body, she knew that eventually, she would not be able to fight off infections. That scrapes and cuts would somehow kill her as her blood forgot how to stop spilling out to stain the world. So now, when the symptoms were all flowering across her, driving her further insane than she already was, she realized the sheer limits of time. She had so very little, that it hurt to think about.

Anane too had been showing how his time was running out, though he of course refused to acknowledge it. Adelaide had been eating from around the area— bits and scraps and supplies which were left and edible. Anane by contrast had been eating solely from the demon's feast. Though he hadn't gotten any thinner, he kept needing to sit there for longer, never satisfied. Constantly stuck gorging on food that could not actually fill his stomach.

As the days went on, his demeanour changed. Eventually, he was in a constant state of moodiness. He refused to eat anything Adelaide brought him, insisting on eating from the feast. But that wasn't real.

The moments of content they had were also not real. Because they were born of a false reality, whatever joy or goodness came from them— it simply could not have been. Any moment where she and Anane laughed together was pressed on the thinly veiled backdrop of a nuclear hellscape.

Adelaide couldn't help but notice that Jisako's ghost was never lingering around when things seemed good or happy. Though she didn't have much of the will to think on it too much. She didn't want to think why her bride wanted to only see her in miserable moments. She deserved it, after all.

In fact, she had realized most acutely how their reality was quickly crumbling apart, when Anane was seated on the window sill petting a cat. In reality, it was nothing more than a collection of bones wrapped up in the burnt remnants of a blanket. Anane smiled at her, told her to pet it, and she couldn't help but feel a hollow pit open in her stomach. She pet it for his sake. Pretended it was friendly. Pretended it reminded her of the cat she and Jisako had together. "Have together," she corrected, under his glare.

Despite his behaviour bothering her, she couldn't help but pity the fool.

She could turn the switch on and off. Looking at the world through his eyes, looking at the things the demon wanted her to see, and then pulling back out into reality. It was a bit like staring into an hourglass, with some preferred arrangement of grains in mind. It was an image in which everything individual grain was fleeting but there was almost a beauty hidden in the pointlessness of the exercise.

However, for him, the demon's reality was also the only reality.

She watched him sitting there, continuing to pet the 'cat'. She reached under her tie, before walking closer. "Anane," she called. "Can you come here? Cover your eyes and let me show you something of my mind?"

"Of course. Instantly. I would love to know what exists within your mind," he said. Adelaide hadn't told him much about herself. After all, he wanted to dominate discussions, so she would typically allow him. The result was that he spoke the most, and she was mainly there to be the audience to his greatness.

She didn't plan to show much of herself to him now. She wandered closer, putting a hand over both his eyes. Anane, to his credit, sat patiently, waiting to see what would come.

Adelaide tilted his head back slowly, watching his neck. His Adam's apple bobbed somewhat with every breath he took. His breaths were shallow— pained in a way which, despite being dulled by the demon, could not be completely hidden. Adelaide brought the cross up, near to her head, before she plunged it into his neck.

It was tougher than with the priest. She was stronger then. And the cross wasn't ever made for stabbing. It was dull— she might as well have been trying to cut this man open with a butter knife. Anane didn't have much of the will to fight back against her, at least. His arms were weak— he was eating nothing but dreams. He struggled, screamed— it all sounded like nonsense and babbling to Adelaide's ears. The man was weak.

Adelaide pulled the cross back, before she drove it in again. She pushed it in with the full weight of her rapidly weakening body. The blood spewed out in a nasty, mess of a flow. The illusions around them faltered. Anane's hand dropped the blanket filled with bones onto the ground. They spilled out in the same way his blood had spilled out of him.

Adelaide refused to pull her hand away from Anane's eyes. She knew they'd be full of hurt, anger, and betrayal. That there would be a sombreness as he came back to reality that she could not handle looking in the eye. She didn't want to look at that. It was easier to do the work of killing when it was impersonal. "Krito, with this blood sacrifice, reveal yourself to me."