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You live in the town. You trample the cranky neighbor’s crops because it’s funny; you play chess with your friend on the bench outside in the sun; you visit the old lady who loves her flowers way too much.
This isn’t home. You look at the sun filtering through the wheat fields; this isn’t home. You look at your friend helping someone carry their goods; this isn’t home. You look in every well-loved mug and dish, you look at the soft corners of framed photos and the worn, round paths that take you everywhere you can go in this place; this isn’t home.
You think to yourself, this will never be your home. Yet you struggle to leave; you argue with your friend about it; you sink your heels and point out everything that could go wrong.
You end up following him. Someone has to keep him from dying, from launching himself over a cliff because some strange man in the woods told him to. Someone has to be reasonable.
So you fight him every step of the way. Your life, his life, they aren’t worth the paranoia of being watched, followed; they aren’t worth trudging through unforgiving snow under a black tarp of a sky.
And maybe you’re bitter. Maybe the hollowness in your chest that you wish you could rip out isn’t just your self-preservation, but a lack of the flames that seem to propel your friend in his search. Reasonably, you should care enough about the town; you should care enough about the townspeople, people you’ve seen every day for years, to do this. You want to care enough; you want to feel that fire take up its place in the hearth of your heart; you want so badly like you always have, and it’s never enough.
You can’t. This isn’t home to you. Push comes to shove; soaked beyond your bones and standing at the bottom of a gaping ravine, something breaks and you leave him behind. The silence of it all howls through your ears.
Going back is a process driven by some sputtering flame of anger; you convince yourself it sweeps away the hollowness you hated so much. You shed the accursed thick coat, the constant cold weathering your face; you arrive at the town and—
this was the place you lived. You used to trample the neighbor’s crops because it was funny. (who was the one laughing alongside you?) You played chess with your friend on the bench outside in the sun. (it’s raining now and when you try to remember how he looked thinking about his next move, all you get is a smudged visage of the past.) You used to visit the old lady who loved her flowers way too much. (who went with you to visit her? who helped water her flowers?)
This has never been home. You bob aimlessly through the darkened streets, find yourself sitting by the rotting chessboard.
(he paused the chess game to go help. you sat there and watched.)
No, not this time.
You nearly fall on your face as you stumble into a run, letting the hook sunken into your heart yank you along. Not this time, not this time, not this time; rain peppers your face, each sting a prayer. Please be alive, please be there, wait for me. Rain turns to snow; the air thins until you have to grab onto it with two hands and drag it down to your lungs to breathe properly; the cold crawls into your skin only to evaporate from the fever roaring in your bones.
Light at the bottom of that gaping ravine. You lower yourself down, ignoring how it feels like your fingers will slip off with every rung. Please be alive, please be there, wait for me. A half-built ladder, ending abruptly. Your heart lurches. Please be alive, please. He has to be in the cave with the light you just saw. He has to. You push away the thoughts of a green coat drifting downstream. He has to be in the cave.
When you see the fire still burning and the person sitting behind it, the fever screams to a crescendo in your ears. Words tumble out of your mouth; you can’t hear what you’re saying, but it doesn’t matter, because good heavens, he’s alive, he’s here, he—
doesn’t want to see you. His voice filters slowly through your mind as your hearing returns to you, laced with quiet fury. He doesn’t want you here.
You begin to realize how cold you are. How your pants are caked with frost gradually melting into equally cold rivulets of water creeping into your boots. How your fingers ache before the heat of the fire. How the words filtering through your mind are, somehow, colder than anything else.
But you came all this way to do something, so you apologize, and you let him be angry. He calls you selfish, and he’s right. What you called self-preservation was just the coward’s moniker for it. There’s the fever in your chest, still burning, and you know now that this is worth more than your pitiful life. It doesn’t matter that you still can’t grasp where this fever came from; it’s there and the hollowness isn’t.
You let the fever carry you across the barren mountains the next day. It pulls a request from your mouth and a promise from your friend’s. He’ll bring the totem back, no matter what. He promises that.
The two of you stop before the snow slopes down into the valley where the beam comes from. Your heart races; the fever wants you to move, to keep going, never stop; you brush aside your friend’s scramble for a plan or some sort. Maybe this is a mad descent, but your blood is singing and if your face wasn’t freezing you’d be baring your teeth in a grin. You’ve never felt like this, throwing yourself against fate’s ropes, testing their slack, moving without a second thought.
It’s too easy, and you know it. The totem hovers on a simple pedestal, nothing surrounding it but its own gentle glow. Yet you persuade your friend to take it, to fold its light into the palms of his hands, because he was the one who first wanted to come this far. He should be the one to complete the story.
It’s too easy, and you know it. You don’t move when weapons that promise death are pointed at you; you just tell your friend to go. This is how it should be. Your life for the totem. (why? you push the question aside.)
When he flees, carrying the totem, you feel only relief. All is right in the world.
They don’t kill you. Sometimes you wonder if being alive, sitting in this strange ship, is a better fate than death. You wonder how the town is doing now; your friend will have returned the totem by now. You wonder, briefly, if they miss you. If they even remember you, you who did nothing for them. The days pass in a haze of white walls, white snow, and black-suited guards watching you as if you’ll bother escaping.
They ask if your friend will come back, an hour before you’ll be gone forever. They’re not asking you, but you know he won’t. Not because he promised—promises can be broken. He won’t come back because it isn’t worth it. The goal was always the totem, the town, his town, his home. Not your life, not his life.
Five minutes before you leave, he comes back. You stare in disbelief, hoping the green of his jacket is some hallucinated afterimage, some ghost come to haunt you one last time. But he’s talking and you’re telling him to leave, please just leave, and he isn’t going.
You don’t understand. None of this is worth his life, his heart, who he is to everyone. He has a place to go back to; he has people who need him. He can’t be here, half-hunched against the snow, staring down death for you, the totem in his hands.
He tells you you’ll thank him later, he promises. (like he didn’t just break one to come back.) His eyes are full of that stupid, bullheaded determination that got him here in the first place.
But you aren’t worth the totem. You aren’t worth seeing him bleed out on the snow. You aren’t worth the way he looks at you.
You find yourself smiling at him. Close-lipped, small, because if you do anything else you don’t know if you’ll be able to stop yourself from crumbling into pieces. The wood of the bow is warm underneath your fingers. You’ve memorized the whorls swirling across the surface by now.
“No, you’ll thank me.”
Drawing the bow back is a simple movement. The arrow flies straight, arcs over the ship leader’s shoulder, strikes true.
There’s a small sound as he’s knocked a step back from the impact, and nothing more. Not even a blink.
The leader seems almost amused as a panel slides down before you, cutting off the outside world, partitioning you from your friend. The ship begins to vibrate. You stand there gripping the bow like a lifeline.
(why? why did you do all of that? why is it that when he’s involved, your mind and body bend in a singular direction?)
A countdown. The world flashes around you.
(all of the questions, all of the times you asked yourself why and pushed it aside, coalescing and crashing down. the fever climbs. why is there a fever in your heart?)
Seconds left. Your eyes drag themselves to look out beyond the glass panel—
Oh. Oh.
There’s a delicate line of snowflakes dotting his eyelashes. Growing on the fur of his coat. The totem and its glow pulse in his unmoving hand. His eyes, full of care, are fixed to one spot, to your face.
Your home stands on the quartz stairs, looking up at you.
Your nails dig into your palm, a chokehold around the bow; maybe this pathetic pain will crowd out the liquid fire streaming down your face. The smile you pinned to your face wavers, widens uncontrollably into some bared snarl, crumples into nothingness. So this was the fever; this was the why; this was everything.
Your home, your heart. A cycle of goodbyes never said.
But what is a home, if not something beloved you leave behind?